Notes on Attention

I commented today on the subject of attention on another of my sites (Ghulf Genes), but the topic has wider implications. As my daughter commented on that site, “This is a subject we could discuss for an entire day and not exhaust.” Too true.

In Ghulf Genes I make the point to that paying attention and getting it are mirror images of one another—because to pay attention to X is to make X more real, lifting it from the flux of sensations. But if X is another person, the attention itself causes that person to feel more real as well. In human communications, those who bestow attention also seek it. I noted there that we have a certain innate need for attention. But why is that? Why do we need the world’s confirmation for our being when, face it, we already know that we are. We have self-awareness.

I can illustrate this need using writing and publishing as a cluster. Many people yearn to be writers, engage in the activity, indeed get very good at it. But until some publisher accepts their manuscript and puts it out for sale in stores, they don’t really think that they qualify. What happens in actuality is that some publisher’s reader makes the judgment that this work would probably sell enough copies to cover costs and make a profit. The next layer up agrees. The decisions process, in most cases, boils down to this in today’s market. Nor was it any different in Jane Austen’s day, for instance, which we can discover easily by reading her biography. Here is a case of a person seeking authentication, but the authentication itself is just another commercial transaction. Strange. Now, to be sure, after the book is published, the yearning changes. The writer now wants sales or favorable critical reviews—and the more prominent the critic, the better. And so it goes. Eventually unhappiness may set in because no one seems interested in making the movie…

Even when published some people eventually discover that attention from others isn’t enough. If the writer meets enough readers in the flesh, he or she will soon be sobered. It’s not the reader any more—it is the right kind of reader. And I could go on in this vein discussing endless radians extending from this, or any other, subject that centers on achievement, recognition, and reward.

We seek attention, it seems to me, because we feel some lack, a kind of existential loneliness. And it isn’t satisfied by friends and family. We discount such attentions. After all they are—you know, friends, family. What else did we expect? We want the love of strangers. We long for fame. Not too close up, though, thank you. Not the paparazzi, not people chasing our car or crowding our front yard and strewing their damned litter all over. No. Something … somehow …more….

Attention seeking therefore, beyond the homely sort that we actually need in daily life, may be a sign of another and deeper urge to develop inwardly. And the aim of that development, ultimately, is to be above such things as fame, visibility, celebrity, popularity, and fortune. If viewed in the context of attention, the phenomenal success of such developments as Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, for that matter, would appear to be due to a lack of something, not due a plentitude. Something to ponder. The aim of personal development may very well lead into a kind of silence where relating to others, or not, because a genuine option, not an itch, an urge, or even a necessity that ultimately distracts us from genuine growth. In advanced spiritual circles—the Sufis are a good example—limiting attention needs to the minimum is advised. Why? Because the object is to get beyond the dimension in which we find ourselves. We must reduce distractions to a minimum so that we can hear, intuit, and perceive the subtle. That too may be a kind of attention seeking, but of another kind—with possibly much more potent consequences.