Lingering in the World
Reconceptualizing attention through the metaphor of touch can deepen our experience of it—not just as a sharpening of vision, but as an immersion in that to which we attend.
By Asher Gelzer-Govatos
As someone who teaches college students for a living while also raising five small children, I spend a lot of time thinking about attention—frequently more time thinking about it than actually achieving it. How do I get my students to lock in during discussion so they can drill down into the intricacies of a text without the distractions of their phones, or the latest drama in their friend groups? Can I yank my children’s noses out of their books and get them to focus instead on finishing their chores? How, amidst the swirling chaos of my life, can I carve out time for the slow, careful thought my research requires? So I stitch together little attention hacks. On campus, I collect my students’ smart devices at the start of each class, and more broadly try to model the type of patient, subtle work literary analysis requires. At home, I cajole repeatedly, with varying degrees of calm, to get my children back on track. And when research time finally comes, I lock myself in a room, sans all screens, in an attempt to squeeze the most value out of my time.
When I stop long enough to examine my expressions of attention, though, I can’t help feeling a sense of emptiness behind them. It feels like there is—or maybe there should be—some deeper potential that I’m missing. This absence crystallized for me recently when, in an effort to increase my productivity, I read Cal Newport’s acclaimed Deep Work, a sort of manual for nudging your way to greater attention. I took away a lot of helpful practical suggestions from Newport’s methods for achieving focus, but his framing of attention as just another life hack left me dissatisfied. Throughout the book, Newport claims neutrality regarding any underlying moral or ethical justifications for sustained focus; rather, he merely suggests “deep work” as a way to level up in the workplace while also optimizing our personal satisfaction. While such a noncommittal attitude toward the ethics of attention might be sound strategy for pulling in as many readers as possible, treating attention as simply one tool in the box for the aspiring junior executive risks cheapening it.
Indeed, instrumentalizing attention in this way creates something of a paradox: when we detach attention from its moral component, we lose something of the essence of the act itself. The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch saw this when, expanding on ideas she found in the writings of Simone Weil, she argued that attention is “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” Note those two critical components: justice and love. Attention requires not merely blocking out externals to narrow in on a single object; it demands that we begin to understand the object of our gaze as it exists in itself—rather than any idealized fantasy we might entertain of it—drawing a true picture of it in our minds while also cherishing its existence.
As helpful as Murdoch’s account of attention is for helping us avoid the pitfalls of detached attention, I find myself wanting to go beyond what she says. The more I think about attention, the less convinced I am that the primary metaphor by which we tend to speak of attention, that of seeing things, is an adequate one. Our most common synonym for attention, “focus,” suggests this underlying metaphor of vision. Attention is something we give to an external object by training our focus upon it. When we lose focus, in this account, our mind’s eye blurs; regaining attention requires sharpening our gaze on that external object. What the vision-based conception of attention lacks, however, is an account of how attention might make us draw nearer to the objects of our focus, such that we absorb something of them into ourselves, and are in turn absorbed into them.
When we move quickly through the world, merely looking at it, we begin to lose our sense of at-homeness. Lingering lets us slowly absorb the world around us, enabling a deeper sense of communion.
With that in mind, I have been trying recently to train myself away from thinking about attention via metaphors of vision and toward utilizing those of touch. The knowledge gained by touch is less instantaneous than that of vision—it may take several seconds to recognize the burning sensation brought about by touching a boiling pot, or to absorb the wetness of dewfall into our skin—but that very delay brings us closer to the objects we observe. The philosopher Byung-Chul Han speaks of the repetition of human rituals enabling what he calls “lingering” in the world, a delay that brings about true connection. When we move quickly through the world, merely looking at it, we begin to lose our sense of at-homeness. Lingering lets us slowly absorb the world around us, enabling a deeper sense of communion.
Put another way, we might seek to return to the original meaning of “focus”: in Latin the word refers to the hearth, that object that centers a home around itself. Rather than trying to regain attention by wrenching our eyes back toward some favored object, what if we began to practice attention as a form of lingering long enough to feel at home?
I know of no better guide to reorient ourselves to the haptic lingering of attention than the American nature poet Robinson Jeffers, who famously built himself a house of stone on the California coast in order to escape human society and join more fully the natural world. There’s a lot to say about Jeffers, a complex man with views that ranged from the charmingly eccentric to the genuinely off-putting. Whatever his flaws and foibles, however, he saw more clearly than most that the frantic pace of contemporary life cuts us off at the roots, stifling our ability to linger—in nature, to be sure, but also in our own thoughts. For Jeffers, nature shows itself most fully in its own lingering; his is not the nature of fading flowers and seasonal change, but the long duration of sea cliffs and steady rivers.
Though Jeffers’s legacy rests largely on his long narrative poems such as Give Your Heart to the Hawks, my favorite poem of his is the deceptively simple sonnet “Return.” In it, Jeffers contemplates the sight of Pico Blanco mountain looming over his beloved central coast. As he does so, he turns his gaze back on himself and his fellow humans. “A little too abstract, a little too wise/It is time for us to kiss the earth again,” the poem begins. Already at its inception, the poem subtly juxtaposes the distancing effects of sight—abstraction and theoretical mastery—with the intimate touch involved in kissing the earth. Jeffers goes on to long for the touch of “the lovely Sur rivers,” promising that he will “dip my arms in them up to the shoulders.” Attention here takes the form of a sinking down into things, a dipping up to the shoulders that, while it threatens to engulf him entirely, also frees him from his self-conscious thought. I love this figuring of attention as immersion. Like sinking into an easy chair, our mind can feel the weight of real attention pulling us into that which we wish to concentrate on. If you have ever tried to dip your arm in water up to the shoulder, you know that the maneuver takes real skill and subtle finagling; it’s not an instantaneous plunge, but a careful descent. So too with attention: we should not rapaciously grasp the object of our focus, but slowly negotiate a deep, mutual contact.
The end result of attention as immersion should be a gradual process of exchange with the world around us, as what we love absorbs into our character in significant ways.
Jeffers goes on to make explicit the opposition between touch–knowledge and sight–knowledge: “I will touch things and things and no more thoughts/Which breed like mouthless May-flies darkening the skies.” Here the thing-ness of the world around him crowds out the quickly multiplying thoughts that threaten to darken his mind’s eye. Thoughts appear pernicious in “Return” because they work to paralyze the individual, preventing true communion with the outside world. By contrast, the repeated deep touch of “things” in the world allows us to give those other objects their true due, in justice and in love. In another poem, “Sign-Post,” Jeffers encourages his reader to “Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity,” since “What we love, we grow to it, we share its nature.” The end result of attention as immersion should be a gradual process of exchange with the world around us, as what we love absorbs into our character in significant ways.
“Return” manages a neat little trick with respect to the reader’s attention: not only does Jeffers sketch a vision of attention rooted in immersion, he guides the reader toward that sense of attention via his poetic technique, which forces the reader to slow down amid the thickness of the poetic line. Even a simple line like “I will touch things and things and no more thoughts” contains two elements which cause the reader to balk: the strange repetition “things and things,” which feels so odd that it looks at first glance like a typo, and the almost agrammatical “and no more thoughts,” which leaves the reader puzzling over whether the thoughts have reached their limit in space or time. Jeffers also uses alliteration and consonance throughout the poem to make the reader pause. While some instances of alliteration and consonance accelerate a poem’s pace, Jeffers’s use here gums up the reader’s eye and voice: reading aloud a line like “Let the rich life run to the roots again” almost feels like wading through molasses, or the muddy banks of the Sur rivers. Even at a compact fourteen lines, “Return” demands the sort of attention that lingers if it is to be appreciated in its richness.
Jeffers, for all his insights, falls short as a guide himself; like Virgil, he leads me a certain way along the path of attention, but falters before reaching the final vision. For one thing, Jeffers views nature through a sort of Nietzschean or Spencerian lens of brutal competition—not for nothing does he take the hawk and the sea cliff as his preeminent symbols. Furthermore, Jeffers’s vision has no room for the human within it. After all, he coined the term “inhumanism” to describe his own approach to life. The first thought I quoted above from “Sign-Post” ends in a much bleaker place than the fragment I selected would suggest: “Lean on the silent rock until you feel its divinity/Make your veins cold.” Elsewhere in that same poem he advises the reader to “turn right away from humanity” and “Climb the great ladder out of the pit of yourself and man.” While Jeffers grasps an important method of attention that we have forgotten, the ends of that attention do not make room for the dignity of human life.
Where one curmudgeonly poet fails, perhaps another can succeed. No less enamored of the hard spaces in nature, nor any less skeptical of human failings, than Jeffers, the Welsh poet–priest R.S. Thomas tread much of the same thematic ground as his Californian counterpart, but did so in such a way as to create space for Christian meditation. His poem “Sea-watching” reflects on a curious change that comes over the poet as he tries to pay attention to the ocean. At the poem’s beginning, Thomas notes that he comes constantly to watch the waters, searching for some meaning but finding none, despite the fact that he has “Daily… let my eye rest on them.” Thomas identifies the central problem of his watching with a beguiling poetic tautology: “Ah, but a rare bird is/rare. It is when one is not looking… that it comes.” He then begins to cinch together the act of attention with the act of prayer, suggesting that “You must wear your eyes out,/As others their knees.” Though to this point Thomas has equated attention with vision (that very trap I keep trying to escape!) his next turn moves us toward the tactile: “I became the hermit/of the rocks, habited with the wind/and the mist.” Becoming enveloped in the environment, he experiences a sinking down similar to that found in deep states of prayer; by the end of the poem, he suggests that it is no longer possible to distinguish between his watching and his praying.
While Auden suggests that any act of attention might be akin to prayer, I think he would maintain that it is in actual prayer itself that we achieve the highest form of attention.
In his lecture “Culture and Leisure,” the poet W.H. Auden, like Murdoch drawing on the work of Simone Weil, makes the direct connection between attention and prayer that Thomas hints at in “Sea-watching.” “Whenever,” says Auden, “a person so concentrates his attention on a subject—be it a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the Living God—that he completely forgets himself and everything else, he is praying.” Such forgetfulness of self comes when we abandon the mastery of visual apprehension for a sinking down into that which is outside us. While Auden suggests that any act of attention might be akin to prayer, I think he would maintain that it is in actual prayer itself that we achieve the highest form of attention. Not the sweaty prayer of the eighth-grader at middle school youth group, eyes peeking open to gauge his peers’ reactions, nor again the hasty orison thrown up seconds before a big exam; but the slow, deliberate prayer of contemplation. As the poetic techniques of Jeffers and Thomas suggest, repetition matters in this sort of prayer, because the person engaged in prayer seeks to move ever deeper into that which is prayed. Structured prayers like the rosary or the Jesus prayer are not (at least in their proper function) magical incantations, but mental edifices that invite the person praying to wander further into their architecture. Likewise, the use of knots or beads as aid to prayer helps move the mind beyond the bare fact of words and into a state of deeper concentration.
So as I struggle to build attention in my life, I find myself drawn to that conjunction of nature and prayer that elicits my attention on a deeper level. I have started, whenever possible, walking to and from my office, a trek which takes about an hour. Enmeshed in a city, I try to choose streets canopied by huge Louisiana oaks, and I am fortunate enough to walk along a lake for much of my route. When I set out, I begin by letting my mind wander and reset, a sort of warm-up for my attention. Then I sink into a time of meditative prayer. Though I am still very much a beginner at this sort of thing, at times I can almost feel the brush of a rare bird’s wings against my skin.
Asher Gelzer-Govatos is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ogden Honors College at Louisiana State University. His writing has appeared in outlets such as The Week, The Lamp, and The Hedgehog Review.
