Monday, April 9, 2012

A Few Kind Words for Tedium


It is a Saturday, late afternoon, and I sit with my decompression burrito after the prison writing workshops. I try not to spill salsa on my prison pants. They are the only pants I own that the Arizona Department of Correction’s State Prison, Tucson Complex, will allow inside the yard, through the fence topped with concertina wire, past the drug sniffing dogs. I don’t like them. They are stiff khakis, not my usual blue jeans, not the comfortable cotton of leisure and laid back living of Tucson.

After the grime and cracked plastic, the overuse and overcrowding of the prison, I need to sit and think and make the transition back. It is quiet enough to sit and listen to the inmate’s voices before they get washed away in the incessant noise of streaming entertainment that is part of twenty-first century living.

Those voices fade soon after the bus ride to the gate, the passing through the sally port, the music-filled car commute back into the “free world.” There is so much noise out here that I have to listen hard to remember what they said, how they said it, and let those voices settle into my mind before I can forget them.

There is J., the San Francisco heroin addict who writes sonnets and villanelles, and M. the armed robber making sense out of his gangster past in bilingual free verse, and W. the skinhead and spiritual philosopher who struggles with finding telling details to ground his abstract musings. Each of them has a story, has a voice that rises out of, and recognizes, the disaster of his life.

Many of them write better than my students at the university. Sons and daughters of privilege, the students often can’t find time to read required material, much less expend effort arranging words that will best express a thought.

In the prison, even the tables we use in the writing class have begun to delaminate and the stubs of pencils and cheap pens the inmates use to write infuriate their large hands. The need for finesse plus too much power equals frustration.

I have the rest of the day. Time. The inmates say they have too much time. Maybe that is why the writing is often so good, why the learning curve is so steep, why the improvement can be so dramatic. Boredom, mixed with some fear, violence, and avoiding trouble, to be sure, but boredom and a quiet tedium pervade the place. They have fewer distractions – no cell phones, computers, I pods, very little television. Their lives slow-cook in routine, deprivation.

Tedium, paired with opportunities like the writing workshops, can be the catalyst for writing. Maybe the two together are necessary. When focus and opportunity intersect, a chemical reaction between the two can join hunch with expression. Here is what I see:  if the intention, opportunity, practice, and support are combined with reflection and collaboration even semi literate writers can produce art. A corollary to this is that absorbing work like writing can be an antidote for anxiety, medicine for despair.

Any art requires discipline and surrender. Steady effort, focus, and work, I find, are out of style, and in short supply. I forget that writing requires commitment as well as inspiration. I want to pay attention, have made the choice to attend to the work, but need reminders to do so.

I think about my own opportunities – laptop at the ready, printers, copy machines, projectors, the amount of information at my command on line and in the library – and notice that, rather than write, I opt for email or surfing the web for the best deals on whatever I feel I need at the time. Small talk, consumption, and sound-bites litter my days. I produce little because I am free to be perpetually distracted. I choose it.

Maybe this craving for distraction is a human trait; maybe it is a fatal flaw. Maybe we need to learn to listen again for those voices, that way of thinking that arises from a need to pay attention and to consider ways to say what needs to be said, to solve problems, even if doing so feels slow, a little tedious, and uncomfortable.

3 comments:

  1. so beautiful, Erec! I'm so glad you started a blog. I don't know what one is either, but I hear all the cool kids have them these days.
    Anyway, I kinda wish I could run into in the Modern Language Blg to distract you a little from the quiet. As it is, I loved reading this, and I'm so moved by what you do!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I admit, distractions derail me longer than I like, much longer. Though ultimately, the grist churning in the mind, those bits of "story", rub so raw that the mental script must be penned.

    It touches me deep to read your work.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So I'm going to add my voice to the throng and say that I am so glad you have a blog, and that I am slowly making my through what you've posted already and relish how good the writing is.

    Thanks for sharing it with us.

    ReplyDelete