july 6 - exercises in attention
reflections on chapter 4 of how to do nothing by jenny odell, which is where i borrowed this title from
On Saturday, July 4th, Erin and I spent the evening on Matt’s rooftop on the Upper West Side, the three of us eating our way through the massive feast he had cooked for us and talking about everything from the best type of soybean paste to use in doenjang jjigae to the questionable morality of emailing Amazon for replacements for items you’ve already received to the emotional turmoil that comes with edging nearer to thirty. When the conversation turned to our childhoods I mentioned that when I was younger I used to fantasize about going to boarding school because of the Enid Blyton books I loved growing up, in response to which Erin observed, “You fantasized about a lot of things you read about in books when you were a kid, like meatloaf, and eggplants.”
I blinked at her in surprise before I laughed. The meatloaf and eggplants were references to other conversations we had had in passing, two out of hundreds of conversations from two out of the hundred days we’ve spent in quarantine, conversations so trivial that I would never have expected her to remember the details of them. This is the kind of person Erin is though, the kind of person who pays attention to the things you say and remembers them. At the very start of quarantine I’d mentioned needing to buy a new journal soon because I had almost finished my current one; a month later, a day or two before my birthday, a new Moleskine arrived on our doorstep, buried in a box of Hot Cheetos. (The gift was from several friends but she was the one who’d suggested the Moleskine.) And two weeks ago I observed her attentiveness on a deeper plane, when we were walking to Jon’s apartment to see him and Amy while they were back in New York for a day. It was particularly hot outside and I was in a hurry to see our friends, so I was walking fast and not paying much attention to my surroundings. I got to the corner of 47th and stopped when I realized Erin wasn’t next to me anymore; I turned around to see her some ten paces back, gently offering the spare reusable grocery bag she was carrying to an elderly woman who was struggling with an armful of disparate bundles and whom I hadn’t even registered in my field of vision. I doubled back to join her and help her put the items into the bag; the woman thanked Erin for her kindness while I silently marveled at her attentiveness and my own attentional blindness.
These things (i.e. phrases like “attentional blindness”) have been on my mind recently because this week I read chapter four of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, which is titled “Exercises in Attention” and which journeys through a series of thoughtful meditations on what it means to deepen our attention, and why we should actively seek to do so. It’s hard to sum up a chapter that contains so much insight and wisdom, but the broad strokes of Odell’s explorations of attention are something like this:
The act of actual looking is a skill and a conscious decision that people rarely practice; there is a lot to see if only you are willing and able to see it (to borrow from the artist David Hockney, whose Cubism-inspired photography and video art pieces can teach us a lot about the process of looking);
When we actively pay attention to our surroundings and push ourselves to “leave behind the coordinates of what we usually notice,” we orient ourselves toward things outside of ourselves, seeing people, places, and things not as instruments for our own use but as existing fully in their own right and in their own mystery, “irreducible and absolutely equal to us”;
Breaking the habits of our own inattention requires consistent, successive effort and discipline;
What we pay attention to (and what we do not) “renders our reality in a very serious sense,” transforming “a bird” into a towhee (or in my case, most recently, a blue jay), and allowing us to render new realities where we can meet each other in more meaningful ways.
All of this has had the (intended) effect of making me think more about the act of attention in my own life, the things I see and hear as I walk down my street, how much I view things and people as objects that hold use for me rather than as beings equal to me in their own unfathomable existence, how the things I pay attention to shape the reality that I live in and dictate my actions. To my mind these seem like worthwhile exercises to do anywhere but especially necessary in a place like New York, where a thousand things compete for your attention at any given time and where transience inheres in everything, from food trends to billboards to personal fame and success to relationships.
Before going over to Matt’s place on Saturday, I attended another Black Lives Matter protest, led by Unite NY. Saturday’s march was a call, on a holiday that celebrates American independence and freedom, to question what it means to be American, and face up to the inequality and injustice sewn into the fabric of this country’s history. Throughout this protest, too, the question of attention rose to the surface. A Black activist spoke into the megaphone before we started marching, addressing the non-Black protestors present. “Our voices don’t get heard. We’ve been screaming for years but they don’t listen to us. Your voices are heard; your voices are what will help us finally bring about change. We are asking you to speak up! Use your voice!”
It was a call to action for non-Black allies to speak up and cry out for change in solidarity with the Black community, but it was also yet another sobering reminder of the answer to the question: Who do we (and who do we not) pay attention to in America?
There’s a direct parallel we can draw between our attentional blindness and broader forms of bias such as racial bias, as Odell points out in her chapter (and as demonstrated in psychological experiments such as those run by the Prejudice Lab, whose work she cites). The first real-world example that comes to mind outside of the things she discusses in her book is the statistic that Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women. The reasons behind this disparity are complex and include things like lack of access and socioeconomic factors, but the biggest underlying problem is that Black women are routinely undervalued and their symptoms and concerns often dismissed without being taken seriously. And so we ask ourselves that question again: Who do we (and who do we not) pay attention to within the American healthcare system?
The good thing is that it is possible to learn how to deepen our attention and recognize our biases, but doing so requires concerted effort. On #BlackoutTuesday on June 2, my Instagram feed was flooded with images and posts and videos expressing outrage about racism and police brutality, sharing calls to action, linking to anti-racism educational resources. The campaign was an effective way of capturing everyone’s attention and directing it at a singular issue. But that was just one day. In the past month since then, I’ve realized how short my own natural attention span is, how easy it is to go back to posting “normal” things from my everyday life online, how much effort it takes to continue to pay attention (which includes remembering that my ability to be forgetful is yet another indicator of my non-Black privilege). Odell spells out the tension I’ve been wrestling with over the past month, explaining that “there is no such thing as voluntary sustained attention. Instead, what passes for sustained attention is actually a series of successive efforts to bring attention back to the same thing, considering it again and again with unwavering consistency.” I see a very literal embodiment of this in Instagram Stories, which are designed to be ephemeral, and which consequently require us to keep posting new content, over and over again, in order to keep our collective attention sustained on the same thing. Like I said, this takes effort. I’m learning not to take for granted the emotional labour that goes into information sharing and educating on social media, and I’m grateful for the people I follow online—both friends and public figures—who take on that labour consistently. Theirs is the example I look to in the daily work of deepening my attention (ironically, within the very realm of the “attention economy”), and their efforts a reminder that the work is not only doable but necessary. And this is what I hope for all of us, that we keep posting, and sharing, and reading, and engaging, and donating, and petitioning, and protesting, and marching, that we keep making successive efforts to bring our attention back to the same thing, back to the epidemic of racism and police brutality in this country, forcing ourselves and those around us to consider these things again and again with unwavering consistency until something at last changes within ourselves and within the system.
—
Before I started reading Odell’s book, my primary reference for thinking about the act of attention was a scene from Lady Bird (2017), one of my favourite scenes in the movie:
I love this scene because of how simply and beautifully it illustrates how much love and attention are bound up in each other. It sounds very obvious, right? You can’t truly love someone or someplace without paying any attention to them. Of course you can’t. But when you begin to understand just how rare and conscious a skill it is, as Odell points out, to actually look—then maybe it seems less obvious and more of a miracle that any of us actually get to experience giving and receiving love in our lifetimes at all.
I don’t know how to neatly fit Lady Bird’s meditation on attention into Odell’s exploration of it, but I don’t think I need to. I see the two as existing in a dialogue with each other, though I can’t articulate that very clearly. What I do know is that our attention is one of our most precious resources and that the work of deepening it is worthwhile, because, as Odell says, what we pay attention to—and what we don’t—renders our whole reality. It’s this deep attention that enables us to become more thoughtful friends, to see and help the elderly woman struggling on the street, to learn from and lift up the voices of the oppressed, to take meaningful political action, and to truly observe and participate in the neighbourhoods we are lucky enough to call our homes on this earth.
WHAT I WATCHED THIS WEEK
I watched all of the new Baby-Sitters Club series on Netflix in one day (Friday), and I cried at least three times while watching it. That should tell you all you need to know about my esteem of this newest adaptation, and if Ann M. Martin’s books meant anything to you as a kid, you will probably find much to delight in here.
INTERNET THINGS
Every Fourth of July somebody on Twitter resurfaces the video of “The Great San Diego Fireworks Fail of 2012,” which saw a computer glitch setting off 18 minutes’ worth of meticulously planned pyrotechnics in one massive 30-second explosion, and every Fourth of July I laugh hysterically watching it. I have seen nothing to compare with this spectacle; it is like an act of God, if you could laugh hysterically at an act of God without being immediately struck down for blasphemy.
Thrillist did an incredible oral history on the debacle in 2015; reading it is almost as good as watching the video.
WHAT I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO
My mum’s (belated) birthday gift is supposed to arrive in the next few days. I can’t wait for her to see it. I think she will love it. (Will report back.)