A Few Kind Words for Tedium

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 on Wilmot will allow inside the yard, and I wear them through the gate 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.

After the grime and cracked plastic, the overuse and overcrowding of the prison, I need to sit and think and make the transition back. Here at my favorite taco joint, my re-entry after the writing workshops, 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.

 Soon enough I will be home in front of the TV, the computer, the cell phone, the MP3 players and other toys that live on my attention.

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 as well or 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 the inmates use to write infuriate their large hands. The need for finesse plus too much power equals frustration.

It is Saturday and I have the rest of the day. Time. The inmates say they have too much time. Maybe that is why the writing is so good. 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. Their lives slow-cook in routine, deprivation, and, if it is given to them, the opportunity for reflection. Tedium paired with opportunities like the writing workshops, can be the catalyst for reflection, for a hard look at one’s direction. Maybe the two together are necessary.

I think about my own opportunities – the laptop at the ready, the 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. Tedium is something to avoid.  We need now to listen again for the desperate voices, the ones that to learn to speak what needs to be said, to solve problems, even if doing so feels slow and tedious.