Notes on Attention

‘Attention,’ writes Simone Weil, ‘consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object … waiting [en attente], not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.’ The original French emphasises the way attending and waiting overlay one another. What is the effect of this intense self-negating act of attention? It is the ethical valorisation of the other: ‘The actions that follow are just the automatic effect of this moment of attention. The attention is creative. But at the moment when it is engaged it is a renunciation. This is true, at least, if it is pure. The man accepts to be diminished by concentrating on an expenditure of energy, which will not extend his own power but will only give existence to a being other than himself, who will exist independently of him.’ She concludes that ‘Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’

This phrase might pass by as sonorous but not particularly arresting – prayer is something we do not theorise often these days – until it is read in the context of our contemporary, Kathleen Jamie, whose memoir, ‘Fever’, returns it to us renewed and powerful. Jamie begins, disconcertingly, with a beautiful and detailed description of cobwebs, before commenting, ‘In the bedroom in the house behind me, my husband was ill and rapidly becoming worse.’ Soon he is in hospital with life-threatening pneumonia. She presents the journey to hospital and the process of her husband being assessed by doctors; Jamie precisely notes every detail. The style is detached but the effect is curiously replete with love. Towards the end she recalls being asked by a friend ‘Whom do you pray to?’ and continues, ‘I carried this question around with me for a while. Really I carried it around until Phil was so ill, then berated myself for not praying. Could I explain to Phil that - though there was a time, maybe 24 hours, when I genuinely believed his life to be in danger - I had not prayed? But I had noticed, more than noticed, the cobwebs, and the shoaling light, and the way the doctor listened, and the flecked tweed of her skirt, and the speckled bird and the sickle-cell man’s slim feet. Isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?’ Attention comes to seem almost magically restorative as an act of prayer might be. It arrests the busy egoism of the mind, empties the internal and replaces it with the outside, with reality. The ethical effect of waiting and of attention is to allow another to exist. We renounce ourselves, in the sense of our ideas about things and people, in order to allow the outside into our minds.

A beautiful description of this ethical dimension of attention comes from a careful reader of Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch: ‘What is needful is inner space, in which other things can lodge and move and be considered; we withdraw into ourselves and let other things be. … We might think here of spatio-temporal rhythm; a good person might be recognised by his rhythm. An obsessed egoist, almost everyone sometimes, destroys the space and air about him and is uncomfortable to be with. We have a sense of the ‘space’ of others. An unselfish person enlarges the space and the world, we are calmed and composed by his presence.’ It is worth noting that we can all be the ‘obsessed egoist’ who eats up the world around them, including any human others who happen to come too close. In this condition, the other is invisible, camouflaged behind a thicket of our own tangled projections. We might add that to be with a person whose rhythm enlarges and calms the world is relatively rare. Perhaps most of the time we are lodged somewhere in between, in the to and fro of conversation, where listening and speaking are commonly imperfect. The Zen writer Katsuki Sekida points out that pure attention cannot be attained simply by willing it to be so: ‘In zazen we effect it not by a simple change of mental attitude, but by hard discipline of body and mind.’ The self-renunciation Weil recommends is perhaps only the prize of a life’s pained ascetic contemplation.

Though the West has arguably failed to crystalize a spiritual practice around this notion, there is a situation in which such space is a necessity and which is designed to allow it to occur. From its inception, psychoanalysis has focused on types of waiting and forms of attention not dissimilar to those described by Weil, designed to allow otherness to exist beyond our projections. The moral aim, however, is somewhat different; here the specific intention is the bringing into consciousness of unconscious mental experience. Freud offered the following advice to doctors who considered offering psychoanalysis: ‘The technique ... consists simply in not directing one's notice to anything in particular and in maintaining the same ‘evenly suspended attention’ (as I have called it) in the face of all that one hears. In this way ... we avoid a danger which is inseparable from the exercise of deliberate attention. For as soon as anyone deliberately concentrates his attention to a certain degree, he begins to select from the material before him; one point will be fixed in his mind with particular clearness and some other will be correspondingly disregarded, and in making this selection he will be following his expectations or inclinations. This, however, is precisely what must not be done. In making the selection, if he follows his expectations he is in danger of never finding anything but what he already knows; and if he follows his inclinations he will certainly falsify what he may perceive. It must not be forgotten that the things one hears are for the most part things whose meaning is only recognized later on. ... He should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his 'unconscious memory.' The doctor must put himself in a position to make use of everything he is told for the purposes of interpretation and of recognizing the concealed unconscious material without substituting a censorship of his own for the selection that the patient has forgone.’ Just as Weil recommends suspending our knowledge in the act of attention, Freud recommends not employing ‘deliberate’ attention, which has a filtering effect. The Freudian consulting room is a space designed for the purposes of a special form of attention in order to become attuned to a quiet voice; there is only one expert present in the room: the unconscious. Though this comes from within, it is not something accessible through willed self-reflection, at least not in any conventional sense. It can only be accessed by being listened to by another in the right way. The analysand opens herself to the flood of memories, dreams and associations that her mind brings forth, while the analyst listens in such a manner that the unconscious is revealed. Many psychoanalysts after Freud have tried to explain or re-conceptualise his idea of ‘evenly-suspended attention’ but the one who is most influential, and also the one who comes closest to Weil’s stringent criteria for attention, is the English analyst, Wilfred Bion. In his enormously influential late paper ‘Notes on Memory and Desire’ he comments: ‘The psychoanalyst should aim at achieving a state of mind so that at every session he feels he has not seen the patient before. If he feels he has, he is treating the wrong patient. This procedure is extremely penetrating. Therefore the psychoanalyst must aim at a steady exclusion of memory and desire and not be too disturbed if the results appear alarming at first.’ Bion’s attitude to analysis intersects with Weil on attention in that to avoid memory (the past) and desire (the future) is to wait: attention and waiting are the same thing. I do not take literally the injunction to forget what you know of the patient; instead the point is to abandon the narrative which you have made of those instances and be alert to the ways in which a new memory or insight can make an entirely new constellation or understanding.