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Boredom and Creativity: Take Time to be Bored

The subject of boredom is one of my hobby horses. I’ve written about it before (HERE and HERE, for example). I do not allow my children to use the word ‘bored’ in reference to themselves. I do not say it myself. And anyone in general who says it in my presence will likely get some sort of cross examination thrown their way. Boredom, says me, is like spiritual and intellectual self-mutilation. In addition to that, it also a big middle finger at pretty much everything that has ever been made in all of creation. But I digress.

I was listening to Studio 360 on NPR yesterday (a regular Sunday habit of mine during drive time) and heard an interesting discussion on the topic of boredom. During said interview, Manoush Zomorodi was sharing some ideas and research on the relation of boredom to creative work. It’s always nice to hear others backing up your own opinions… Anyhow, she was making the point that research points to the fact that most creative work flows out of what modern Americans would tend to call boredom. Without the time to daydream, to sit alone and think, to take stock of life and goals, to build imaginary castles and characters, we are cutting ourselves off from any great work that we might perform. And what is the major culprit of our shrinking time for daydreaming? You guessed it. Technology.

Great parent that I am, I immediately turned off the radio and made my kids (and myself) sit in silence for half an hour. Maybe they’ll thank me later (sarcasm intended). Well, they weren’t exactly in silence. They actually know how to play games and have conversations. They even know how to amuse themselves. It’s a lost art for adults much of the time.

When I posted on boredom a while back, a commenter shared a Blaise Pascal quote: “All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.” A bit hyperbolic, but he makes a good point.

It’s an interesting discussion, so, by all means, check it out HERE.

Of Starry Pixels

The Wise Men of old beheld a star,
Named and ordained
Light years of old.
They divined a birth.

The years of faces buried in tomes
Of great lore, mystic meditation,
And in skies of wonder,
Led to epiphany.

Behold! A new heavens and a new earth.

And we, in this brave new world,
Do seek our enlightenment,
As we too, with faces buried
In skies of wonder,

Of starry pixels,
Dotted across the expanse
Of black screens
Of plasma and plastic,

Behold the new heavens.

Should we look up
For a moment,
We would lose sight
Of our cosmos, our creation,

Our flesh made word;
Disincarnate; reality made virtual,
Heavens made space,
Space made cyber.

Behold the new earth.

Bring your gifts from afar
And rejoice in the constellations
Of individuals networked,
In ethereal formations,

Of thumbs up and thumbs down –
Those five fingered
Keepers of orthodoxy.
But where do they point?

To heaven or hell?

Technology and the Loss of Depth

Maggie Jackson quotes Sven Birkerts:

Inundated by perspectives, by lateral vistas of information that stretch endlessly in every direction, we no longer accept the possibility of assembling a complete picture…We are experiencing in our time a loss of depth – a loss, that is, of the very paradigm of depth.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 42

If you stretch the ocean out far enough it eventually becomes shallow. If that is what we are doing via technology, it should be no surprise that our thinking should follow suit. Cue Portlandia’s portrayal of the Hipster version of depth HERE.

Technology as Spiritual Medium

Now we weave in and out of a vast array of relationships, dancing across multiple spaces of connection, seemingly freed from the limits of body and earth. Attention becomes ethereal in a world of multiplicity. No longer do boundaries matter.

Along with simultaneity, cyberspace’s precursor was the realm of spiritualism, the nineteenth-century movement to communicate with the dead…

Now exploratory forays into unseen worlds are burgeoning into a determined desire to increasingly inhabit new dimensions…We spend increasing portions of our lives in alluring netherworlds that we have constructed ourselves…Are we perfecting ‘wired love,’ upgrading ourselves, grasping for transcendence on earth through our screens?…

Whether via mediums or cyber-games, past and current technologies share a stubborn certainty that utopian ideals of connection are within reach of explorers of these other realms.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, pp. 35-36

These quotes are basically a snippet. She fills in the argument with several examples to try to prove the point.

Those familiar with C.S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man is a good example) will have seen this point before – the connection of technology and ‘applied science’ to magic or spiritualism. Usually when I have thought of technology as a ‘medium,’ I have had Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘medium’ in mind. Maggie Jackson loads up the word with even more meaning. She has the same type of medium in mind as King Saul when he visited the witch at Endor (1 Sam. 28).

The issue here, as with most of what I’ve found so far in Jackson’s book, is that we need to wake up and open our eyes. It is not that technology is inherently evil; rather, the issue is that we need to realize that there are subtle, tacit elements at work that we tend to be unconscious of. A good illustration of that is a stanza from The Lonely Island’s song I Threw It On the Ground:

At the farmer’s market with my so called girlfriend
She hands me her cell phone, says it’s my dad
Man, this ain’t my dad!
This is a cell phone!

I threw it on the ground!
What, you think I’m stupid?
I’m not a part of your system
My dad’s not a phone!
DUH!

It’s common sense, but we do tend to forget about mediation, we really do pick up a phone and think it somehow has become the actual person that we are talking to.

“The Glittering Screen of the Night Sky”

I want to begin a series of posts on this book (linked below) with one of my favorite quotes so far:

Networks. Think of them as the ever-shifting constellations of relationships we inhabit on earth and in the ‘glittering screen of the night sky.’

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, p. 53

The picture of a black computer screen as ‘the night sky’ struck me. Let me rip it out of context and follow a rabbit-trail.

Indeed, for many, a black screen is the closest one will get to looking at a night sky; and the flickering pixels serve as substitutes for the stars. There is a new astronomy for laypeople: the planets are websites, the constellations are networks. What is the sun? You tell me.

Some might say that this is a wonderful development. We don’t even have to go outside.

I do believe I feel a poem coming on this one.

Clocks and Crucifixes

Boers quotes Jim Forest:

It is a pity we have stripped so many walls of their crucifixes and put up so many clocks in their place. We are surely more punctual than our ancestors, but we are spiritually poorer. Contemplating a crucifix, many of our forebears had a different idea of how to make use of time. A crucifix may not tell the hour, but it offers crucial advice about what to do with the moment we are living in.

-Arthur Boers, Living Into Focus, p. 141

I am not a big fan of crucifixes, but the point is well taken. Perhaps one could see this as a take on the idea of Deuteronomy 6:8-9 about God’s Law:

You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The cross can shape your heart and life without being on your wall, but your mind must never stray very far from it – hence the necessity of regularly reading the Scriptures and attending to the means of grace in general. And remember, he’s not on the cross anymore: he’s wearing the crown.