Unpredictable Patterns #31: Mary Oliver and attention as prayer
Simone Weil, attention, prayer, the possibility of community and the role of time in desire (Summer Note no 4).
Dear reader,
August is here, and summer moves slower, with more care. The show is over, and now we live in the moment after the concert, where the performance is over but the notes still linger in the room, and then in us. It is a good time to practice our powers of attention, and concentration. We will start with a poem from Mary Oliver, a poet I discovered thanks to a colleague. I find her poems intensely visual, they are poems of the eye, but where sight has been cleared of all the mental debris that usually comes between us and the world and the gaze is naked, open. And in this week’s poem she explores the connection between that gaze and our language in a way that I found fascinating.
Prayer and attention
We start with the poem:
Praying
It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.
The title opens up the connection we want to explore in this note - between attention and prayer. There is, incidentally, another, much longer, poem by Oliver that almost seems a companion to this one - where Oliver suggest a whole theory of attention in the title: ”The Real Prayers Are Not The Words, But the Attention that Comes First”. But the poem we are focusing on here captures the aspects more succinctly, I think.
Oliver here, and in that other poem, connects - knowingly or not - with the thinking of Simone Weil, who in her essay ”Attention and Will” says:
”Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
This connection between Weil and Oliver is rich and fascinating, but before we get to explore that connection we should set the stage a bit. Why should we be interested in attention?
The concept of attention is quickly moving into the mainstream for anyone interested in the philosophy and politics of technology as well. From Herbert Simon’s early observation that attention is the ultimate scarce good, to the many books first lauding, then lamenting the attention economy, attention has become a central concept in the logic of the information society.
Rony Yuria, a former colleague, has written a brilliant essay on attention and human rights, suggesting that attention is much more central to the way our societies evolve than we may previously have allowed for. Her essay - I hope she publishes it - explores questions of property in attention and the role of agency in how we pay our attention - and here is where I find a connection back to Oliver’s poem - and the question of how we should think about attention overall.
The language games of attention are complicated. The images they suggest as models for understanding how attention works range from us directing attention much as we would direct a flashlight’s beam of light, to attention as a currency, where we pay attention to this or that. But they also suggest that attention is not a unilateral concept - we speak of someone being able to hold our attention - almost as if they held our hand or, perhaps, water in cupped hands for us. We even speak of attention being captured - like a bird in a cage.
A quick search in Google N-gram reveals how attention has become much more of a commodity - at least in our language - over time. Where ”directing attention” seems to be a constant, the change in ”pay attention” is quite significant - and predates any technology revolutions of course.
In fact, if you look at how the words ”information” and ”attention” change in our corpus of literature, they shift in the 1920s. Before that attention was more common, and then it shifted and changed - but something interesting is happening today - the curves are converging again, and fast. The same thing holds for ”attention” and ”data” with the crossing point in the 1940s.
Our concepts and our language changes long before our societies do, in complex ways. Attention is a concept that has become more, and not less, complex over time and that is why it is so helpful to look into Oliver’s poem and Weil’s essay here - the connection between attention and prayer is an extreme that can show us the concept from a new angle.
Oliver’s poem reaches the silence of prayer through language, chosen carefully and without any aim to impress, as we pay attention to the world around us. As we pay attention not just to the beautiful things around us, but the weeds, the stones - we may be able to find, in language, the codes and keys to a greater silence - where another voice may speak.
Attention here is pure dialogue. It focuses on the world and in doing so connects to something else, creates a space in which we can become more than ourselves or come into the presence of something else. And we do not need to accept any of the religious connotations here, we can simply note that attention here is the key to reach beyond the surface of our consciousness into layers below or above ourselves.
Weil seems to disagree - for her attention and religion seem tightly coupled, and she also finds them tightly coupled to humanity’s creative ability. She writes:
”Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. The amount of creative genius in any period is strictly in proportion to the amount of extreme attention and thus of authentic religion at that period.”
But when we look into her philosophy of religion we find something else: she considers religion a way to reach beyond the confines of the ego, and to find a way out of the labyrinth of the self. The connection between creativity and attention thus comes from the need the artist has to reach beyond themselves to create anything of lasting value or interest.
Without attention, then, we lose the ability to pray - to create - and to escape ourselves.
The same notion can be sensed in Oliver’s poem - the attention paid to the rocks, as it flows into language, reveals a path away from ourselves into the contemplation of a world much larger than ourselves, a silence, a space where we may, finally, hear the voice of another.
A doorway - not just into a silence, but a doorway that allows us to escape our narrow selves.
If we lose the ability to direct our own attention or pay it in ways that we command, we are - then - condemned to sink deeper and deeper into our own egos and into narrow individuality as it is nervously expressed in raging Feed. What we lose is the ability to rise above ourselves and create a community - which is ironic, since we think that social media is social, a connection between individuals — but the way our attention is treated and captured means that any real connection is dwarfed by the expansion of our egos into networks of shadows of other people. Where they all relate to us, and we cannot relate to something else; an asocial artifact of self.
Most social networks lack a third point of connection outside ourselves - we are the suns around which everyone else circle as planets, and this re-arrangement of the world into self-centric relative networks is fueled by the way our attention is directed back to ourselves in comparison with everyone else. At least that is the pessimistic view - but there are other possibilities here too. We could imagine networks and communities organized around attention paid to something else, to something outside of us. And that also exists! Among the most powerful and positive communities online we find the local community networks or patient networks where people are paying attention together to something other than themselves.
Technology can do that too — and the key, again, may lie in the question of agency.
Oliver’s poem is not just an observation, it is an exhortation: just pay attention and choose how you do it. It is up to you. You decide if you use your attention to arrange language into a space where you can step outside of yourself, or if you use it to lock yourself into yourself. Indeed - attention can never just be observation. Oliver writes:
“Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.”
Weil is also clear on this point:
”Attention is bound up with desire. Not with the will but with desire — or more exactly, consent. We liberate energy in ourselves, but it constantly reattaches itself. How are we to liberate it entirely? We have to desire that it should be done in us — to desire it truly — simply to desire it, not to try to accomplish it. For every attempt in that direction is vain and has to be dearly paid for. In such a work all that I call ‘I’ has to be passive. Attention alone — that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears — is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it on to that which cannot be conceived. ”
Do not pay attention to yourself, just because you desire it. Instead pay full attention to other things - the small stones - and find a way out of yourself. Weil continues:
”When a struggle goes on between the will attached to some obligation and a bad desire, there is a wearing away of the energy attached to good. We have to endure the biting of the desire passively, as we do a suffering which brings home to us our wretchedness, and we have to keep our attention turned towards the good. Then the quality of our energy is raised to a higher degree. We must steal away the energy from our desires by taking away from them their temporal orientation. ”
Here the question of attention and agency become purely existential, but there is a key in here that is interesting. Weil says we have to steal energy away from our desires by taking away from ”their temporal orientation”. If we want to think about attention and how we pay it, then time - in the sense of rhythm and relative time - is the best tool we have. We can choose to simply observe how often we update our feeds, how often we log into certain apps and change that. Change how you spend your time and you change how you pay attention, and how you give in to your desires — far from simple, but at least possible?
Oliver and Weil suggest that the question about attention is more than a question about economics and user interface design. It has existential nuances. This may all seem too pretentious and high-falutin’ for it to be taken seriously - should we really connect social media with existential, religious issues and the striving to let go of the ego? But consider that you are a being made of the time you spend and the attention you pay - and that you are a part of everything around you. Is it then so absurd to think - at least occasionally - about unmixed attention as - prayer?
And you do not need to be religious to do so, at all. Oliver’s poem is ingenious in this way - she only suggests that if you pay attention not to the ”I” but beyond it, well, then another voice may speak into the silence you craft. A connection to someone else, to others around you.
The possibility of community and polity are premised on exactly that ability to hear the other’s voice. Attention paid more conscientiously is the pre-condition of our society to endure and help us connect to others.
Thank you for reading,
Nicklas