I want to pick up where I left off last week before I move on. A few weeks back, when I sketched out the future trajectory of this writing project, I wrote that I saw Odell and Robin Wall Kimmerer as connected to each other with respect to the power of attention. Elaborating that connection is going to take some time, as the insights in Kimmerer are somewhat diffuse, and I didn’t take particularly good notes as I was reading it. Nevertheless, I think it is important, so I will certainly be taking my time to process Kimmerer’s insights. And of course, it should be noted that Odell explicitly refers to Kimmerer as an inspiration, so I’m confident that teasing this connection out will be fruitful. And I will certainly be coming back to Odell more than just today—I had forgotten how important How to Do Nothing was for me actually, and I think it will be well worth revisiting to summarize chapter by chapter so that I always have the material on hand.
Another note on process: this project will not be complete by the end of the calendar year. I may well get caught all the way up on my notes and annotations, but I think what I am working on here is something more extensive. This is perhaps all the more true because I still have a sizeable stack of books that I haven’t even got around to yet that I believe will be essential readings on this path. I was reminded this week that the reason I started doing any of this in the first place was to teach myself what I was reading so that I could master the material and be able to recall it fluidly in conversation. To that end, an arbitrary deadline is as much of an impediment as anything else, just another backdoor for Resistance to enter through. Speaking of, I have been reading and re-reading the War of Art by Steven Pressfield, especially in moments when I am feeling anxious or uncertain about my path, professionally or otherwise. It’s a helpful book in so many ways, and one that I will certainly write more about in the future, but for now, the thing that is giving me the most is his advice about “going pro” as the only way to beat resistance. To “go pro” means to commit to doing the work, day in and day out (or in my case, Monday evening after Monday evening), to commit to mastering the technique of the craft, to do the work in the face of fear, to keep going even when things are difficult and rewards are few. Going pro is the opposite of being an amateur: “you don’t hear [the amateur] bitching, “This fucking trilogy is killing me!” Instead, he doesn’t write his trilogy at all.”
So, while I am happy that I sat myself down last week to write even when I wasn’t feeling very good. And I managed a modest output, but ultimately, I wasn’t satisfied. In some regards, that’s to be expected. We can’t always be at the top of our game, but we must keep at it regardless.
To finish up what I started with Odell for now: one key thing about attention is that it involves effort, will, and intention. This is even baked into the etymology of the word, which derives from a Latin root meaning “to stretch toward.” Borrowing from William James, Odell defines attention as “the ability to hold something before the mind.” We can also think of concentrating or paying attention as a form of mind-body alignment, that is, to be oriented fully toward some particular thing or another. Paying attention to one thing means not paying attention to other things, and constantly beating back distractions that take our attention away from that thing.
As we all know, this is easier said than done. Our awareness tends toward the momentary, fragmented, and fleeting. Early psychological experiments demonstrated that the natural tendency of our attention is to wander, to flit from thing to thing, often despite our conscious will. Moreover, it appears that our attention is drawn toward novelty above all else. Thus, to maintain attention on one object at length, we must constantly attempt to find a way back to it. Anyone who has practiced a form of breath meditation will know exactly what kind of struggle this can be. In the case of many external objects, however, the ability to “find the way back” involves noticing something new about the object of focus, rather than simply returning to the breath as in meditation. (Although it could be argued that detecting a new aspect of the sensation of breath may be an effective technique in that realm!)
The broader implications of this struggle over our attention are that sustained attention involves some degree of intention. It is a voluntary act that we must undertake, a series of decisions that we willfully make to return again and again to the object of our focus. To counteract the “spontaneous drift of thought” requires volition, to train our attention on the object of our focus again and again, if we are ever to get to the point where we can hold an idea or object before us until it fills our minds completely. As it turns out, much of the rest of Odell’s book consists of explorations of the ways that art can help us train our attention, to shake us out of our habitual peripatetic attentive habits. But that’s a story for another time. For now, the important point is that Odell sees the deepening of our attention as essential to fully accessing our human experience in and of the world. But it’s also more than that.
Connecting back to the question of refusal in place and standing apart that I discussed last week, the reason why this is important is because the withdrawal of our attention is something we can only do if we choose to do so. This withdrawal isn’t a once-and-done kind of quitting, but rather a sustained and ongoing retraining and deepening of our attention. It is not enough to refuse to pay attention to some things and not others, but rather we must invest our attention into something of our choosing, and thereby “enlarge and proliferate it, [improving] its acuity.”
As she writes:
“We need to be able to think across different time scales when the mediascape would have us think in twenty-four-hour (or shorter) cycles, to pause for consideration when clickbait would have us click, to risk unpopularity by searching for context when our Facebook feed is an outpouring of unchecked outrage and scapegoating, to closely study the ways that media and advertising play upon our emotions, to understand the algorithmic versions of ourselves that such forces have learned to manipulate, and to know when we are being guilted, threatened, and gaslighted into reactions that come not from will and reflection but from fear and anxiety.” (93)
Thus, deepening our attention—and changing what we pay attention to and what we choose to not mind at all—in a very real way alters our lived reality. When we pay attention differently, we begin to move and act in ways that we didn’t before. In this respect, paying attention is a creative and generative act, one that renders into existence a different world. And the key of course, is to do this together!
Returning to the idea of an individual “paying attention” as one in which body and mind are aligned in their concentration upon an idea or object, Odell argues that the same is true at the collective level. That is, insofar as it takes mind-body alignment for an individual to concentrate and act intentionally, a movement cannot “move” without alignment between its members. Such alignment could take many forms of course, but the most durable and effective form of alignment involves a group of individuals choosing collectively to “pay intense attention the same things and to each other” (81).
The stakes of this argument are high. The reason why Odell is so important to me, and also more broadly is because of this connection between the individual and the collective. As she writes, the opposite of attention is distraction; living constantly distracted is not only unpleasant; living without intentional thought or willful action is not only impoverished; living constantly distracted in a time such as ours is in fact a matter of life-and-death, insofar as our circumstances demand effective collective action.
So, altogether, the full point, as succinctly as I can state it for now: if we are going to be able to address the political and ecological crises that face us in the 21st century, we need to retrain and deepen our ability to pay attention as individuals so that we can more effectively engage in collective action. If we remain distracted, our individual lives will remain unpleasant and impoverished, and collectively we may perish in the face of otherwise avertable catastrophes. Whatever else you might think about Odell’s suggestions about how to live our lives—and believe me, members of the reading group I did on this book had some Thoughts about the viability of withdrawing our attention from social media as a political strategy—I think this is an idea worth taking seriously.