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Cohen, Samuel, and Joan Didion. “On Keeping a Notebook.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, Available from: VitalSource Bookshelf, (6th Edition). Macmillan Higher Education, 2019, pp. 118–126. Coping is a process that requires attention. I am grateful to Nature that short bursts of attention are all that it requires to develop coping habits. Coping connects parts of our brain that would otherwise ruminate independently, doubling effort, or more, until the mind has been pushed so far that it has nothing left to implement the repairs. When we discover the fallboard on a grand piano is stuck open, the keys exposed to dust and the ragged claws of curious cats, if it is an old piano with a simple hinge the solution is oil and elbow grease, but if it is a modern piano with a ‘slow-close’ mechanism, we must gradually lubricate the pressurized spring designed to ease the fallboard into place. Technology designed to simplify and protect needs more effort to correct. How difficult to sit in a pub and not notice the sports on the television, or worse, to only notice the television. How unsatisfying to hear your best friend yelling through the noise, unable to listen well enough to respond to much of what they say. The danger of a busy highway after a luxurious meal that lasted an hour longer than it should have because you and your friend both struggled to follow each other’s conversation, dangerous because the roadside has been cluttered with billboards that have evolved in the twentieth century from stoic, pale, immobile paintings into flashing lights that scroll high-definition images and text. Was it always unreasonable to look at one thing and expect my mind to linger on it? Realistic only for a moment, in my mind, objects connected by emotion instead of memory, which is how I have learned to cope with my boundless love of noise, unconstrained, obnoxiously in my face yet only for a moment. ADD and ADHD offers us social, cultural, and economically adaptive advantages, though this is not a popular belief among psychiatrists. They don’t realize that medication may discriminate against those of us who have these different abilities, perhaps even undermining our potential competitive advantage over those with the favored ability to focus. Humans treat other people who are different as deficient and have done so for centuries, millennia, and likely as far back as the early hominins that lived in Africa and Asia several million years ago. We have reconstructed that in their time an extremely divided attention might help someone who needed to avoid predators. In safer, modern times, though, these advantages have become less adaptive to our disruptive environments. As our homes connect to the many buzzing, popping, blinking, beeping, vibrating, singing, and speaking devices, we lose many of the momentary meditations that occurred not so long ago when we switched from one daily activity to the next. Just a few hundred years ago, the pace to cook a meal was mediated by the speed to collect water from a pump outdoors and ingredients from the garden before returning to the kitchen to complete the task. These actions could not occur simultaneously in one room as they do today. For decades, our electronic entertainment devices required that we reach out to the machine and turn a dial to change the channel or adjust the volume. The phone cord – a line of wire connecting the speaker and receiver to the base – required that we stand nearby and limit our private offline activities to what could be accomplished in physical proximity to the phone. Those resilient daily activities constrained our focus in neatly organized stacks of tasks, end-to-end, that varied as much as a few musical notes on a page of music. Being incapable of arranging tasks, noticing only the disconnections between them, plans obliterated just by thinking about them. Never finishing anything really sucks. Knowing that the world was vulcanized by technology to be convenient, but not for me. I have always wanted to keep a notebook, have tried so many times, but I have never been troubled by my total failure to accomplish that task because I could feel the impossibility of focus that I had learned and refined at church as a child, at so many family meals which I finished first then sat not listening to the much older adults’ conversation during, and long after they were finished too. Writing about her notebook duty, Joan Didion described it in her essay On Keeping a Notebook as, “a difficult point to admit. We are brought up in the ethic that others, any others, all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves; taught to be diffident, just this side of self-effacing” (Didion, 1968). At home as a young boy, the motivation to succeed was primary among the adults. Admitting to my constant daily failure to pay attention, and to my failure to keep in mind what had happened to me – that day, an hour ago, a few instants – could be impossible, but I was lucky to have an ally, even one who could not understand. Managing my attention deficit required me to learn to focus on one activity at a time. Being an English teacher, my mother decided to sharpen my attentiveness with books. Every morning, we sat on the living room couch to read for an hour or few, me with a finger tracing the progress of the story from line to line, though even that was not enough to eliminate the frustrating problem of mistakenly re-reading the start of the last line of text that had I just finished. My ADD made lines of prose dance on the page, an irregular and jagged motion like the keys on a piano keyboard forming the panoply of chords in a concerto, my mind making clusters of words swell, sway, then vacillate like the notes on sheet music. Sometimes I noticed that the word clusters in my mind were phrases that repeated: as if I had subconsciously seen the entire page in one glimpse or the entire chapter in one thought. Nature has prioritized my experience of the many above the one. Connections were much easier for me, compared to most of the people I knew. Adapting the information at hand using a strong intuition for guessing, I could surmise answers that seemed impossible. Examples abound, but one of my favorite memories was answering my grandmother’s question that she asked her neighbor, about how far it was to a store just across the state line in New York. I thought about it for a second or less then blurted out “18 miles” which turned out to be correct. First, we would follow the main road, Kinderkamack, to the old McDonald’s restaurant – a dining institution older than fast food and literally filled to the rafters with old military equipment from the World Wars and earlier – until we reached a bend in the road near the reservoir, which would be in our way. McDonald’s was a once-in-a-lifetime memory for me – in anticipation, reminding myself of my uncle’s fable, how he was brave at my age and ordered the double cheeseburger, not knowing that a single was a double in that restaurant – and while we were there I absorbed the sight of hundreds of bombs, guns, and other “implements of destruction” as my mother would call them as an inside joke about our own little Thanksgiving tradition – listening to Alice’s Restaurant Massacre all morning before we headed to my grandparents’ house. I was about six or seven when I made my 18-mile guess to my grandmother, who bet me a GI Joe figure that I was incorrect. After the reservoir, we would drive a bit farther through a town that I believed had the most archetypically rural main street in the world – the fantasy of a boy growing up in the most densely populated suburban county in the country. I remembered how she took me there when she needed to buy fabric, or thread, something sewing-related I’m sure, even if the detail escapes me. I could picture it all in my mind in an instant, faster than simultaneously, I would learn to describe it much later in life. But, it was the famous duration of that Thanksgiving song – the inside joke with my mom, whose parents did not approve of her hippie music – that confirmed the mileage enough for me to blurt it. 18-minutes long, the song was, as I had heard on a recording by the artist Arlo Guthrie, supposing that his song was what Nixon deleted from his tapes of the Oval Office because it was the same, notorious duration. The guess was correct. It wasn’t my guess though, because it was just a prediction synthesized by the simultaneous intersection of all those thoughts. This is not an argument against medication but an argument in favor of living with the difficult, genetic accidents that enable our superpowers and disrupt our social harmony. We might expect from daily life a gift without strings but that is not the way of Nature. Like words represent ideas inside a sentence, our bits of biology intersect to select emotional responses and physical actions with a rigorous randomness that can be appreciated only after they have happened. I worry that we are losing a requisite human skill: learning to cope. Humans have earned our adaptability by experiencing conflict then managing it. This process can be difficult, at least, and impossible at worst. Should we be grateful that adaptability has been disconnected from survival? With less competition to survive, what is the benefit? When technology usurps control of our daily activities and reduces our level of effort to conveniences and distractions, our minds are freer to wander. If the freedom to wander leads to a more intricate sensory experience, it is also a basis for the process of coping. In their summary of a literature review about coping research, the American Psychological Association claims that “promoting patients’ use of positive coping strategies is a first-line treatment with a strong potential for helping patients develop and maintain the skills they need to live meaningful and fulfilling lives” (APA, 2020) The article’s title begins “Skills Versus Pills…” and goes on to explain the differences between Behavioral Health treatments and what is known as “usual care” with medication-based approaches. When I was first diagnosed as a young boy with ADD in the 1970s, daily doses of lithium were the approved treatment. I’m grateful to my mother that she saw the diagnosis as an opportunity for me to learn how to adapt to my predicament, yet I also acknowledge that her response was a denial of responsibility for the cigarettes and drugs that she needed while separating from her husband and filing for divorce during the first few months of pregnancy. Lithium proved to have too many horrible side effects to persist as a treatment, all of which I was spared by her decision. Instead, she freehanded my recovery using the painstaking process of close reading. In Milton’s epic story about Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, Paradise Lost, Satan in serpent form entices the first human female to consider his proposal that she taste the sweet, forbidden fruit on the Tree of Knowledge. As he leads her to the tree, Milton describes how the tangled serpent “made intricate seem straight, to mischief sweet. Hope elevates, joy brightens…” (Book 9, lines 632-633). I read that for the first time as a first-grader who had read almost every other book in the house and so, was forced to choose between Milton and Melville. I remember the next day, burning off energy by walking around and around the outside of my babysitter’s house singing those few words myself, reveling in the sharp T-sounds, but also marveling at the poet’s description of my life experience. By pointing at the page with my finger, I straightened the oscillating lines of the prose. By trying to cope with my easily distracted mind, I learned to filter my busy senses into meaningful intersections, high hopes, and joy. Learning to cope with my ADD diagnosis while I was in elementary school lifted the lid on the piano for me so that I could build my own metaphor for what was happening in my mind. The struggle to unload the obnoxious noise was a minor distraction from the actual struggle to be attentive and learn, to be curious long enough to be attentive, and thus learn how to be curious. It was like Didion’s struggle to capture her memories that she describes as “my approach to daily life ranges from the grossly negligent to the merely absent, and on those few occasions when I have tried dutifully to record a day’s events, boredom has so overcome me that the results are mysterious at best” (Didion, 1968). This daily life activity of the attentively deficient epitomizes the struggle to cope that can be a challenge, if not impossible, for so many minds. I believe the secret of coping requires some of the sweet mischief that Milton embodied in the apprehensible form of the Devil as a serpent, as observed by Eve and the omniscient narrator. It is a challenge to the prescribed condition. Intricacy was undone and straightened into lines like strings inside a piano. The strings in an open piano may be struck by any number of objects in the world, randomness constrained only by the immediate environment. But when we learn to play the instrument, like how we learn to cope, we connect random experience to measured music. References:
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AuthorStudent of Education, English, and Learning Technology at UMN. Archives
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