Attention and love

Thoughts in progress

For every one of these blogs I write, there’s three dozen I don’t. One I’ve been sitting on all year was provisionally titled “Attention is love”, a title that I came to loathe.

One of many reasons I don’t get around to writing these things is that I hate sounding didactic, and yet my writing style, I think, defaults to the didactic. And a declarative statement like that is a terrible trellis to hang anything less than didactic on.

But there’s something there.

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Elizabeth Knox’s 2013 book Wake begins, as one might expect from the “zombie assault” genre, with a zombie assault. It’s well-written and chaotic and terrifying.

It’s what comes next that’s most deeply interesting to me, and has stuck with me for eleven years. (I still know, physically, where I was when I read it - in a hut in New Caledonia. Long story.)

Post-assault, the survivors gather and recuperate, and treat each other. And this process, an arguably dull one that involves lots of making sure that sheets are cleaned regularly and dressings are changed and meals are made and hands are washed and people are generally looked after, receives as much authorial attention as the mayhem we’ve signed up for.

What I think Knox is saying - and might well have said in public, for all I can remember (I saw her at a few events in 2014 related to this book) - is that this is the important stuff. We might survive an attack with weapons and ingenuity and stealth and cool traps, but we won’t survive in the long run without caring for each other and paying attention to the basics.

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I have been very self-absorbed lately, partially as a general tendency to burrow into my special interests, partially as a desire to capitalise on the surprising success of my weird film about gut microbes during a time of unemployment, and more than partially as armour. These are terrible times, and I think we delude ourselves if we think they are uniquely thus, but there’s no question that there’s a lot of bad shit that is happening and going to continue to happen in (Palestine/America/Aotearoa/Ukraine/Lebanon/Burkina Faso/insert whatever community you’re connected to here).

It is easy to drown in the service of “paying attention to what’s going on in the world”, a trait inscribed in many of our brains in our youth when it meant watching a morning newspaper and a half-hour evening news broadcast, and which now means a 24-hour information firehose.

And so I built a firewall, because what will happen will happen, and did my bit and voted, and otherwise kept my emotional well-being at arm’s length from the worst.

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There are many reasons I regret not participating in the hīkoi in Auckland yesterday protesting the treaty bill, but the biggest one is this: I didn’t know I could.

I knew protests were going on across the country, I knew that it was a cause I deeply believe in, and I just didn’t clock participation as an option.

I wasn’t paying attention.

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My thesis today, at the risk of being didactic: attention is an instrument of love.

I mean love in all its many forms, from romantic to friendship to community-building. And I mean attention as a finite resource that can be spent in only so many ways.

I have friends and acquaintances who are pouring their hearts into these efforts in so many different directions, and the hīkoi that so many in my circle attended yesterday is just one example. In a time where many digital communities have collapsed, for instance, David Farrier has done an excellent job building a caring community with Webworm, and yet I spend almost zero time there because of attention overwhelm and because of general frustration with Substack that could be probably addressed if I spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how I can best use it.

There are infinitely more meaningful ways to spend our attention than we have time to, and first comes the life-raft rule. Make sure your oxygen mask is on before helping others. None of this is meant as a guilt trip, because I hate guilt trips and they’re a terrible way to build community and belonging, which is what all humans need and what we desperately need more of right now.

And this is also true: not everything has to sound meaningful to be meaningful. spending some time watching a terrible movie on a couch with a couple friends is also a meaningful use of attention, because those friends may just need the comfort of sharing joy with others and of belonging, and because turning off your brain will help you recharge for when it’s needed the most.

If there’s a missionary component to my ramblings, it’s this: America is now run by an attention-hungry monster who is uniquely talented at capturing said attention. Every day something attention-grabbing will happen. It may be malevolent, it may be absurd, it may be mind-boggingly stupid, and there’s a good chance it will be all three at once, another of his unique talents.

As much as you can, spite him. Give him as little attention as humanly possible, and do the same to those who aspire to his throne, to his likeness, to his ways. Because if you’re paying attention to them, you’re not using attention as an instrument of love.

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A closing thought. My American friend Kyle Bruckmann, whose music features prominently in Gut Instinct, had an album come out late last week. It’s called negligiblism, it is recommended to lovers of strange sounds, and he heralded its release thusly, with words that have helped carry me for a week now:

helluva week to release an album, hmm? and yet here we are, and here it is. Maybe the best I can offer is a renewed take on the initially mostly oblique poeticky & smartalecky title: a fervent belief in incremental, allegedly insignificant actions, undertaken in real time & within community (however fringey), assertively, maybe even joyfully, daily, forever.

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Now reading: Carl Shuker, The Royal Free

Now listening: Dave Schoepke, Sun Will Follow

Now watching: Home Education