– Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document 3, 1973–79, perspex units, white card, sugar paper, crayon –
In one National Geographic presentation on migration, gazelles run across the screen as the narrator says something like, migration is life. Movement, multitasking, scanning the horizon for prey or for predators–even as they eat or sleep–is animal life.
We recently traveled to Chicago, and our son was especially interested in the “L” system. As we walked to the train, I shared with him that city life involves a lot of flexibility. A young man immediately made my point.
Inexplicably, the young man decided to stop and take a call midway up the stairs leading to the train, reducing two lanes of pedestrian traffic to one. If he had cared to notice, he would have seen that people were building up behind him, unable to pass without colliding with the people walking freely down the stairs in the opposite direction.
A lady passed the young man before turning around to stare at him violently, as if to scream “WTF?!” in the young man’s face. He did not notice her.
We were next. We passed quickly and quietly around the young man. However, the man walking behind us, struggling to carry many bags, let himself be heard: “Bro! What the fuck are you doing?! Take your fucking call at the top of the stairs—you’re blocking everyone from the station!”
We laughed. We kept moving, eventually boarding the Brown Line.
When we exited at Sedgwick and started walking back to our hotel, we noticed a group of teenagers entering the crosswalk early. A passing white truck almost hit them. The driver of the truck stopped just past the intersection, and he yelled, “Are you ok?!”—and in a way that clearly conveyed that he thought the young men were not ok, as in not mentally well.
The young men got it. They yelled back, even more mockingly, “Are you ok?!” And this went on until one of the young men made a gun with his fingers and the sounds pop, pop, pop before saying to the man in his white truck, “You better get moving.”
Inflexibility, getting stuck in the moment, is the (potential) death of you. We kept moving.
Ben Rhodes recently argued, “Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.” What Rhodes calls “short-termism” is not exactly a lack of movement. “We are all living in the disorienting present,” Rhodes writes, “swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound.”
For Rhodes, distraction is a type of stuckness “in . . . currents we don’t control,” the movement of other people’s, (in Rhodes’s article, Trump’s), desire.
I see it the other way around. Distraction is the solution to presentism.
We tend to think that the opposite of distraction is attention. But attention is a form of distraction.
As we walked around Chicago, I often reminded my son to “pay attention.” I meant for him to focus less on the objects of his desire, the cute Labubu in the store window, my mother at the jewelry counter, getting to the bathroom or on/off the elevator, and to attend to the world around him, to the people and cars moving toward him and to details, like what floor the elevator had stopped on.
The meaning of “pay attention,” to pay attention its due, was dramatically revealed when my son accidentally hit an old woman’s cain with his foot, nearly sending her to the ground. He didn’t notice her cain because he was focused on an object of his desire.
Staying focused is a form of traction rather than a form of attention, a type of distraction. Animals tend to die when they are focused, when they are not paying attention, when they are attracted to the delicious grass, the person with a nice gyatt, the phone call, the teenagers in the crosswalk, and so on.
I was walking around Brussels when I noticed an attractive young man and his friends standing on the sidewalk. He noticed my loud stare (I know, a bad habit!), and he smiled before asking me something innocent. Before I knew it, he had tripped me and stole my wallet (talk about being caught in currents!). For whatever reason, when I asked him to give my wallet back–he obliged (perhaps he was just practicing to rob people or he though it unethical to rob gay men or he noticed my wallet was empty or he had made his point about staring, about traction . . . )!
I learn the hard way. When I first moved to Chicago, I owned a car (I know dad, you owned a car!)–and I quickly learned why city folk fervently pray for parking spaces. In this instance, my prayers were not answered, and I decided to park in a prohibited space.
I reasoned that it would only take me sixtyish seconds to use the bank’s ATM. On that day, I learned that it takes less than a minute to have your car towed. The upside of this is experience (one of 2 dramatic times I got towed in Chicago. The second time, keyed and covered in syrup[!], the car was towed to a 103rd street!) is that I got to explore lower, lower Wacker Drive, the location where a few scenes of Dark Knight and Transformers: Age of Extinction were filmed–and of one of the city’s impound lots.
Traction costs a lot, too.
The question now arises: should we always resist traction for the pragmatics of distraction? Or, if collective life requires the suspension of one’s own desire, is there a time to forsake attention for the pleasures of traction or focus?
In the rural Idaho town where I grew up, it was not uncommon for farmers to pull off the side of the road, one truck on each side, and talk for a good while. On many early mornings my dad joins a group of men at the local gas station to talk about only God knows (I surely don’t want to know!).
In the country, one is not often punished for this kind of decadence. No one dies for focusing on friends or neighbors–and no one gets their car towed for parking incorrectly or even unwisely.
I thought of this on our recent visit to New York City (if you have not seen the musicals Operation Mincemeat or Death Becomes Her [so, so much better than the movie!], you must! Go now!). We were walking along the edge of Times Square, and I noticed a man on the ground, in a position that suggested he was sleeping. “Tourist-looking” people were sitting on the bench near him, looking unconcerned.
Even though his position on the ground caused me concern, I irrationally assumed others would have already taken action if the man was not well. I kept moving.
I should have stopped; I should have focused on the man, if even just long enough inquire about his well-being or to ask someone else to do so.
Rural Studies research makes the valuable point that rural spaces exist in cities. The reverse is also true: city spaces exist in rural towns.
The division between the city and the country can be translated as city = space that requires distraction (i.e., vigilance, forward think, reality principle) while rural = space that allows for the indulgence of traction (i.e., talking to strangers, walking in the street, and so on).
Collective life, of whatever size, requires an ethics or practice of distraction. Yet, if our collective life is just, it will make space for individual pleasures, space for stopping, caring, helping, loving, creating, spontaneity-ing, moments discomfiting, focusing–in a word, pleasuring–possible.
I grant that we must pay attention to live together; we must keep on the move, facing multiple directions at once. If living together is what we really want, we must pay attention its due. Yet, we seem to “know” that collective life is not always what we really want. We seem to “know” that life is not always worth its due.
Hence the relief of letting go, of finding ourselves temporarily “dropped back into the immense design of things” (Willa Cather). It feels good to give into our anti-social impulses–and justice allows it, for a time.
Traction isn’t free. Nonetheless, we more often than not experience the cost of it as worth every dime. Thus, making America distracted again is an urgent political task.
