BOREDOM

Abstract

1 1 6 Y B O R E D O M M A R I A N N E B O R U C H I like it when boredom is forgiving, passing out of itself for a moment. A rather bland afternoon mid-June, for instance. Which could have been yesterday, when the Future Farmers of America kids came flooding the campus where I teach, emptied now because classes are out. Suddenly hundreds of dark blue jackets everywhere, gold FFA letters on them, and later three high school girls on a break from whatever the Future Farmers have gathered here to do, wildly giggling between bursts of not-quite-words. I saw them walking near the university through the so-called village with its trinket shops, its fast food and beer joints, past Von’s, the best bookstore in the Midwest. Maybe the girls should have been back at one of the Student Union conference rooms, taking notes, alert to a new pesticide’s murderous wonders. Sure they were playing hooky, their jackets at an angle almost jaunty. One can hope. Nothing must be more out of sync in the current culture for teenagers than Future Farmers of America. But I have to say I love their oddity, the dull stamped-in serious sameness of the jacket, its ungendered attempt at an outcome, a place. Those girls, neverthe- 1 1 7 R less, seemed specifically themselves, whoever that was or may be, come such a future. At that moment, they were loudly amused, each at a di√erent key and duration. They kept walking and laughing. How this connects to poetry I don’t know yet. But let’s be clear: boredom knows a lot. There’s solace in that, thick as syrup. It knows the end before whatever happens gets under way, so cool about all but not everything. There’s a little leftover spill. To be honest, I’m an expert on boredom, though perhaps not the kind so sure of itself. Evidence: I survived grade school. Most of us do. Think of the near decade passed in those places. So little remembered, though there’s clear proof something happened: one writes a sentence, after all; one can read what others write. Both are triumphs, mysterious and not exactly small. In my case, a horde of baby boomers at St. Eugene’s School, some fifty of us filled each class, a single overwrought or o≈cious nun to wrangle us in. Weeks and years in those rooms like weather, a vast cloud that darkened yard to street to playground, a few steps, a door, boredom washing over as others stood and recited or went to the blackboard to diagram subject past verb to object and beware the dangling modifier. So many of us. One could hide there. For those who came much later: the time-out chair. Minutes into more minutes and maybe a lifetime-so-far sends you to sit and stare. I want you to think about what you’ve done. So goes a voice several feet higher as you look straight ahead, right into the poem. It’s never what you’ve done. And guilt? Boredom erases as secretly as the poem erases: you name it – intention, the self, what one should be doing. A relief and a leveling to be in that corner where the world pretty much forgets you. The radiator droning on. We were orderly in our classroom, needle-quiet. Nothing for it but to go solitary and inward – where else? – and the imaginative life begins. Praise boredom, crucial backdrop and trigger. It must be said that boredom is a luxury. Who could be bored in a village – your village – shelled by insurgents or government troops? Is that flippant to say? Boredom says it. 1 1 8 B O R U C H Y Other things unspeakable – a tsunami, a fire, a flood, a tornado. Their aftermath’s lower grade of panic, the making-do, the endless hard stretch suddenly ahead, platitudes repeated ad nauseam until your eyeballs roll back: boredom winnows through. You’re a sieve for it, then a vessel. You rest briefly in its rootless...