I liked this new article from
Alva Noë at NPR's 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog. He examines the nature of boredom in terms of detachment, and how that can play itself int he arts and education. Becoming detached through boredom is an opportunity . . . .
Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images
Watching the grass grow
Dr. Taub, one of the characters in Fox's television show House, has infant twins. He loves them and wants to care for them. The problem is: he finds spending time with them unbearably boring.
Their
books put him to sleep. He finds it awkward and unnatural to engage in
their play. Taub feels inadequate as a father. I have felt the same way
at times.
It's great to be with your
kids, especially while you do something else. (My infant daughter sleeps
besides me as I type this.) Judging by all the mothers paying more
attention to their smart phones than their children while sitting on
park benches, this is probably not an unusual phenomenon.
I went to a screening of Tarkovsky's film Stalker at the New School in Manhattan last week. There was a panel discussion and Geoff Dyer, whose new book is about Stalker,
warned those in the audience who hadn't seen the film that they ran the
risk of getting bored. The movie was very slow, very little happened.
He ventured that they'd be less bored if they knew right at the start
that this film was no Bourne Identity. It has a totally
different kind of pacing. We could eliminate boredom, or at least
mitigate it, Dyer seemed to suggest, by adjusting our expectations at
the outset.
So, what is boredom, anyway?
It
is a state of discomfort, to be sure. It's a state in which we find
ourselves uninterested, perhaps because we are disinterested and
detached.
One might say that boredom is
the besetting sin of art — in all its varieties: performance,
painting, sculpture, film, writing, etc — but also of the lecture hall
and the class room. My 10-year-old son is bored in school. What more
withering criticism of his teachers could one find? And indeed,
describing a movie or book or theatrical performance as boring is about
as damning as it gets.
If you stop to
think about it, though, the link between art and formal education, on
the one hand, and boredom, on the other, may be, if not exactly
unavoidable, then, to a certain degree, inevitable.
Consider
that what all of these — performance, writing, teaching, etc. — have in
common is the structure of detachment. Pupils sit and listen to a
teacher. Audiences pay to watch and scrutinize, but they must keep quiet
and sit in the dark. Visitors to the gallery can look, and think, but
not touch. These events are structured by detachment. That's where they
begin. And so, from the very start, they are always on the verge of
boredom. Boredom is the baseline from which they can, at most, strive to
deviate.
Some artists, writers and
teachers see boredom as the enemy; they battle it the way fire fighters
battle a blaze. In their effort to deviate from the baseline, from
boredom, they engage the audience. They try to pull down the
wall separating them from the kids, or audience, or visiting public. At
its best, they do this by, in effect, putting on display a thing of
value — knowledge, a story, a sculpture, a painting, whatever — while
also providing the tools the audience needs to understand it.
For
instance, a piece of music may begin by introducing a theme, thus
giving the audience the resources to know what to pay attention to as
the theme is developed in the sequel. This strategy also runs some
pretty high risks. At the end of the day, the sort of engagement
provided by art is only ersatz. You don't really know or really care
about Romeo and Juliet, or the Stalker and his clients, or Jason Bourne.
Indeed,
at its worse, the impulse to deny boredom finds its expression in mere
stagecraft and manipulation, in the willingness to pander and entertain.
We find this tendency at work even in education, where teachers are
increasingly pressured to think of their students as, in effect,
products, whose performance specifications are being molded, rather than
people with minds of their own.
There
is another approach to boredom in the arts, one that is, perhaps, more
common in the avant-garde. If boredom stems from detachment, and if some
measure of detachment is unavoidable in art (and in life), than getting
bored is not just an irritating state, it's an opportunity.
This seems to be how Tarkovsky thought about Stalker.
When the studio supporting the film asked him to think more of the
audience and pick up the pace, he responded by slowing things down even
more. He was trying to be boring.
Or
take the case of John Cage. I understand he was invited to give an
important series of lectures at Harvard toward the end of his life. As I
understand, he produced his three lectures by randomly mixing words
from a few different books of note — one of them was Wittgenstein's Tractatus,
I believe — and he then simply read these aloud. Eventually his
audience had dwindled to two or three people. He'd been very, very
boring. But by affording his listeners maximal detachment — there were
no ideas to get, no plot to follow, no meaning to perceive — he had
afforded them a different kind of freedom, to think, to let the mind
wander, or to contemplate what was happening.
Detachment may be unavoidable in the arts. It is not unavoidable in life (even if conflicts about our attachments may be).
I
think Dr. Taub ended up getting it just right. He realized that he can
spend time with his kids not by watching them or trying to be one of
them, but by doing his own thing with them. So he read the girls
articles about the NFL. His enthusiasm was contagious. They couldn't
understand anyway. They all had a good time. Taub stopped being bored by
his kids when he stopped looking, perceiving, watching and thinking,
and figured out how to just hang out with them.
You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.
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