The idea of attention need not be masculine

My experience of attention is that I am unaware of being attentive in a way that the angler isn’t. The harvests of attention accrue without our knowledge or cooperation. Attention is not a 90-minute football game or a two-hour movie. Yes, I am arguing against the heightening of attention — it is exhausting, unrewarding, and hierarchical, for we have decided that certain things and moments are worth more attention than others.

Attention derives from “attend”. Dhyan, the Hindi equivalent of “attention”, comes from “dhi”, meaning “to think”. Dhyan is also “meditation”, a word that has become both pop and puritanical in our time, one that demands discipline, mindfulness, single-mindedness, a hermit-like censoriousness of one’s thoughts. How are we to meditate in a world whose nature is to distract and disturb? Francis Bacon’s definition of the essay as “dispersed meditations” allows us to see that the history of literary forms is simultaneously a history of human attention. It was also Bacon who famously said that some books were meant to be eaten, some chewed, and some digested — he is suggesting not different genres of books, as we are made to believe, as much as he is the contingencies of form to varying demands of attention.

Dispersed meditations — it is closest to our experience of being attentive in installments. What it also allows — in fact, encourages — are distraction and divagation, both as necessary to creativity as an imagined single-minded focus. Note the phonemic similarity between “wonder” and “wander” — it is only natural that you will wander to experience wonder. What I mean to say is that wonder, like wandering, is not a function of linearity. Our idea of attention, particularly in pedagogy, with its disciplinarian impulse, is perhaps too masculine, even patriarchal. That is why it affects us, annoys us, when our students, instead of looking at us, as if we were the eye of the fish on whom Arjuna should focus his aim, stare at laptops in front of them, as they sneak into chat boxes on their phones. We take this personally, that we’ve failed in holding their attention, that our lectures don’t have the glue that binds them to their cell phones or the OTT screen. Our language reflects this — we accuse others of “divided attention”; such a model of attention imagines it like a glass of water, not a drop of which should drip outside our mouths. We use the same noun for “life” and “attention”, as if they were the same thing — lifespan and attention span. Courses are now designed with the intuitive traffic of “low attention span” playing on the minds of teachers; young humans, raised on the speed of the internet, seem to have lost the ability to read more than a few thousand words. Student reading lists are being engineered to indulge that lack, even as publishers are happy to back 700-page novels while withdrawing their support for the poem and the single-essay book, genres appropriate to the attention deficit that seems to characterise the present moment in history.

But this is not a completely new moment in the history of the shrinking of attention. About a 100 years ago, the modernists felt compelled to move from epical time to the time-impulse of the lyric, condensing a lifetime into a day, responding, as they were, to the World Wars, so that Hilda Doolittle, who wrote fragmentary epics herself, said that the epic would no longer be a feasible form that would be able to hold this fragmentary consciousness.

As our brains supposedly “rot” — as the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year leads us to believe — from looking at our phones, looking but not really seeing, a state of inattentive attention, we wait for the emergence of sophisticated genres. The reel, which has had our brains reeling for a few years now, is inimical to dhyan — it is not a haiku, after all.

Roy is a poet and author