pay attention

My heart has felt heavy and swollen lately — last weekend the news of more American massacres made me so sad I couldn’t finish putting this newsletter together — but I want to share some thoughts about an idea that, recently, has given me comfort.

There’s a scene in the movie “Lady Bird” I think about all the time, in which the titular character, played by Saoirse Ronan, is getting feedback on her college admissions essay from one of the nuns who runs her Catholic high school.

“It’s clear that you love Sacramento,” the nun tells Lady Bird.

Lady Bird is taken aback; she does not think she loves Sacramento and would very much like to leave. “I guess I pay attention,” she says.

“Isn’t attention a form of love?” the nun responds.

It had been a long time since an idea — that attention is a form of love, even if you’re paying attention to something or someone you do not understand you love — resonated with me so strongly, and I immediately wanted to think more about it.

“Lady Bird’s” director, Greta Gerwig, has said in interviews that the exchange was inspired by the ideas of the French religious philosopher and activist Simone Weil. Weil is a strange historical figure – a pacifist who nevertheless fought in the Spanish Civil War; a Marxist and trade unionist whose encounters with religious ecstasy led her to Catholicism but who was never baptized because she wanted to allow her love to be more expansive than any single religious tradition would allow; a member of the French Resistance who may have starved herself to death in the UK by limiting herself to the amount of food she imagined the French were allowed under the Nazi occupation – and I find her fascinating and appealing, even if, as Susan Sontag noted, very few people would want her life or wish it on a loved one.

I don’t relate to Weil exactly, but she wrote a lot, in extremely relatable ways, about love and attention, which she famously described in her notebooks as “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

In her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” Weil lays out her case for how valuable the practice of paying attention is, both to connecting to her God but also to other people, and how hard that is — so much harder, for example, than working at a job you don’t like.

“There is something in our soul which has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue,” she writes. “This something is much more closely connected with evil than is the flesh. That is why every time that we really concentrate our attention, we destroy the evil in ourselves.”

She describes paying attention as both a quieting of the self and a receptiveness to truly accept what’s around you. The most compelling thing about this idea, to me, is her argument that entering such a state not only opens you up to God (who, as a reader of Weil, you may or not believe in) but also to other people.

“The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’” she writes. “It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled ‘unfortunate,’ but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.”

So how do you do that? How do you get to the state where you can empty yourself and bring into yourself whatever it is you’re paying attention to? How can we be truly that generous? Weil’s answer turned out to feel very familiar.

“Attention,” she writes in that essay, “is detaching oneself from oneself and returning to oneself, just as one breathes in and breathes out.”

As I’ve recently begun to understand, that’s also maybe what we’d call meditation.

I’ve just begun to meditate regularly, and the thing so far that I’ve found especially rewarding about it is how the practice has helped me think about what and whom I’m paying attention to, and why, and why that attention is meaningful.

“What you notice is who you are, maybe,” the novelist Dana Spiotta (if you haven’t read her work, you really should) told the New York Times a few years ago. I’ve had that quotation pinned above my desk since I read it; the idea helps me focus my mind and think about who I want to be.

Now, I’m a true beginner and I know there are probably many of you out there who know much more about various meditative practices than I do, so I apologize in advance that many of my thoughts are undoubtedly only partially formed or partially informed. (Email me and tell me where I’ve messed up!)

I used to be very skeptical about meditation, for similar (but not precisely the same) reasons why I continue to be skeptical about prayer. For a while in my early 20s I went to a yoga studio mostly because it was on the same block as my apartment, but I eventually abandoned it because I hated how much they wanted me to make my brain blank. I like my active brain! I cherish my brain, always trying to figure something out. Why would I want to stop that process?

A week or so ago, the writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner (whom I’m obsessed with, in that I find her wild productivity and her openness to the strangeness of the world we live in awesome in the original sense of the word) published an essay which, broadly speaking, expresses skepticism of a movement that keeps asking women to blank out their brains.

Brodesser-Akner describes sitting in a yoga class, listening to her teacher tell her to disregard her thoughts “like clouds passing by in the chyron of my brain, nothing to be addressed or absorbed.” Brodesser-Akner, instead, wonders “what [her teacher] would do if she knew I had no intention of stopping my thoughts. I wonder what she would do if she knew about my thoughts about my thoughts—how I was thinking these thoughts about thoughts when they were supposed to be drifting away like clouds.

“I think if she knew,” Brodesser-Akner concludes, “the roof would blow off this entire purple studio.”

That line is fascinating because Brodesser-Akner clearly does not trust her yoga teacher’s calmness enough to believe that the yoga teacher would be calm enough to accept Brodesser-Ackner’s lack of calmness. That’s maybe the heart of the argument — that level of calm can’t be real, or at least is not productive.

“The thing I don’t do is try to control when and where the ideas come,” she writes. “What would happen if I was in a yoga class and allowed the idea for my next novel to pass like a cloud? Or if I ignored the pang when I was supposed to be on my morning walk that told me the answers to the ending of a story were coming, if only I would sit and receive them?”

Reading that, I got a bit defensive, mostly because even though I love my new meditation practice, I recognized her feeling. When I have a good thought, I don’t want it to pass; I want to write it down.

But that passage was one of many that, as I read her essay, led me more and more to think that — even as Brodesser-Akner is rebelling against this new-ish affluent-class insistence that calming the mind and doing one thing at a time and being fully present at any given moment instead of being distracted by all of the other million things the world requires of you so that you can be the world’s ideal (productive, rich) woman — she’s actually really good at paying attention, which is what I’ve found most rewarding about taking time to meditate.

In other words: when she hears the sound in herself that alerts her to the ending of a story, she listens to it. It seems like she pays attention to a lot of other things, too.

“Sometimes I feel sun on my face for the first time in the spring. Or I notice that the dogwood tree has bloomed,” she writes. “Sometimes I watch my 11-year-old read, his eyes blinking every few minutes. I do this on my schedule. I do not preempt anything else for it. Sometimes, if a moment is great, I will stay in it. At other times, I will plan for better moments. I insist on the point of view that I’m not broken. That the thoughts are there to tell me how to live my life. That I can’t tame them. That I can’t be tamed.”

That’s how I feel when I meditate, at least as a beginner — that noticing how my thoughts are changing, noting my observations about how the people I love blink their eyes (and I can give you detailed notes about the ways the people I love blink their eyes) — those are there for me to notice, to learn from, to tell me how to live my life, to explain to me why I shouldn’t be tamed, and why the people around me shouldn’t be tamed either. I don’t need to necessarily erase those thoughts; I need to pay attention to them, to figure out which ones are real and which ones are born of panic, to realize what the lessons are.

Even Brodesser-Akner’s description of how she feels like she’s failing — “sometimes I hold my 8-year-old’s hand up to my face while he’s watching TV and I note that the baby pudge of it is nearly gone and I wonder if I was truly there for all of it” — feels like a genuine act of paying attention to her own passions and to the people she loves. I don’t think she’s failing at being mindful; I suspect she’s been more successful at it, from the start, than many of the people she knows who are telling her to slow down.

As I was beginning to get more serious about meditating daily, I listened to an interview that Vox’s Ezra Klein did with Richard J. Davidson, a professor and the founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Davidson recently co-authored a book with Daniel Goleman called “Altered Traits” about the science of meditation, about what effects on the brain research has shown meditation can have, what effects are maybe myths, and what researchers still don’t understand.

Davidson and Goleman describe studies of a type of meditation known as loving-kindness. The meditator, they describe broadly, focuses on their own right to safety, to love, to kindness, and then one by one they expand that notion to include other people in their lives, then the strangers around them, and then everyone in the world.

Incidentally, that’s exactly the same progressions of feelings that’s induced by MDMA (or ecstasy or molly or whatever the kids are calling it now), which Jia Tolentino writes in her new essay collection “Trick Mirror” is where she found grace and surrender after she became disillusioned with American evangelical Christianity. (Here’s an excerpt of the essay published in the New Yorker.) “The attainment of chemical ecstasy — empathogenesis — occurs in stages,” Tolentino notes. “The drug first places the attention on the self, stripping away the user’s inhibitions. Second, it prompts the user to recognize and value the emotional state of others. Finally, it makes the user’s well-being feel inseparable from the well-being of the group.”

That sequence of feelings interests me because it suggests that — unlike using meditation to be a better worker or the Highly Regimented Woman that Brodesser-Akner does not care to be — getting to that meditative state or inducing chemical ecstasy might have a broader moral component. But we don’t really think of that value of attention broadly the same way we, for example, teach children that they need to share and be kind.

Goleman and Davidson write that brain research suggests there are three kind of empathy: cognitive empathy, which lets us understand how another person thinks; emotional empathy, which lets us feel their feelings with them; and empathetic concern, which generates in us love for someone else as they’re suffering.

The two scientists argue that cognitive and emotional empathy aren’t enough to truly produce compassion. Merely observing someone’s suffering and feeling bad alongside them sometimes then causes us to turn away.

“[I]f what we feel upsets us, all too often our next response means we tune out, which helps us feel better but blocks compassionate action,” Davidson and Goleman write.

You can see someone else’s pain and empathize, let it make you feel bad too, and avert your eyes so you don’t hurt as much. That is empathy, and I think many people who see something bad and feel sad about it consider themselves empathetic, compassionate people. But are they really seeing that other person, really paying attention to their pain? How would we know?

Davidson and Goleman write about a German study of loving-kindness meditation that showed that when volunteers watched videos of graphic suffering after eight hours of the meditation practice, their brain activated negative circuits for emotional empathy. They felt the pain.

When the volunteers were instructed to empathize with the sufferers, they activated parts of the brain that work when we feel pain ourselves. But when the volunteers were told to think about their compassion for the sufferers, a totally different set of brain circuits lit up — those similar to parental love for children. Their impulse was not to begin feeling pain themselves and turn away; instead their impulse was to try to help. They felt empathetic concern.

“Such positive regard for a victim of suffering means we can confront and deal with their difficulty,” they write. “This allows us to move along that spectrum from noticing what’s going on to the payoff, actually helping them.”

This, then, is research-backed support for Weil’s arguments about the benefits of attention.

“Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them attention,” Weil writes in her essay about study and attention to God. “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough....Only he who is capable of attention can do this.”

So that’s where I’m trying to go with my meditations — improve my capacity for that kind of attention, not settling for warmth of heart or mere empathy — even if I have a long way to go.

After the shootings last weekend, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave a speech that was in part a direct address to those who have been radicalized by hate, misogyny, and white supremacy. “I know there is a mother waiting for you. I know it. I know there’s a teacher waiting for you, saying, ‘What happened to my kid?’ ‘What happened to my friend?’” she said. “And we will always be here and hold space for you to come back. We will love you back. You’re not too far gone.”

On this weekend’s episode of the podcast Lovett or Leave It, Lovett asked the writer and activist Laurie Penny what she thought of AOC’s idea, given Penny’s study of how young men are radicalized online.

“I think there is value in offering people a dignified bridge,” Penny replied. “And it is very smart what AOC is doing there, but it can’t be the only answer.”

That love needs to go hand in hand with accountability, Penny argued.

“Your have to have both,” she said. “You have to have the combination of somebody saying, if you want to step back into decency and common sense then we’ll be here, we’ll let you do that, but we also have to have the people saying this behavior is not acceptable; you get one chance.”

That point — that we need not just to love people but actually help them, hold them accountable — strikes me as the most important part of real attention. It seems to me that’s the difference between emotional empathy and empathetic concern — being moved to act, to help someone suffering before they hurt other people. How many of these shooters spiraled out because no one was paying enough attention to where they were going and so never helped bring them back from the brink? When we give everyone easy access to assault rifles, is that just a way of turning our heads away from why it is people want them and to how people are hurt by them, by pretending those bad feelings don’t exist? We’ve been seeing these kids’ suffering — their spirals into their toxic white masculinity — and we’ve turned our heads, letting them get worse, and then when they inflict their anger onto other, totally innocent people, we turn our heads again.

Loving people, and using that love to see the violent hateful path they’re falling down and then doing something to help pull them back; loving people, and using that love to really help and care for victims of this kind of violence and prevent it from happening again — that’s what real attention is, what real empathetic concern can do.

This is obviously a very complicated idea; in no way would I argue that people should feel love for other people who don’t believe they have a right to exist in this country or on this earth. But I do think if, collectively, we focused our attention more on where sources of suffering really are, we’d head some of the problems off at the gate.

Toni Morrison’s death hit me really hard this week, even though it seems to me that hers is the best kind of death, one that happens after you’ve lived a long, incredibly joyous and generous life. One of the things I thought about a lot is how much Morrison spoke and wrote about how hard it is to pay attention to people, to love them, how much contemplation — meditation, perhaps — it takes.

“You do not deserve love regardless if the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn — by practice and careful contemplation — the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it,” she wrote in “Paradise.” “And if you are a good and diligent enough student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma.”

Another quotation that circulated this week was from an interview she did with the Paris Review in 1993, about how she works, how she wrote her novels in scraps of time while raising children herself.

“Sometimes something that I was having some trouble with falls into place, a word sequence, say, so I’ve written on scraps of paper, in hotels on hotel stationary, in automobiles,” she said. “If it arrives you know. If you know it really has come, then you have to put it down.”

She sounds like Taffy Brodesser-Akner — maybe not calm and meditative and regimented, but open, receptive, observant.

Morrison is one of the world’s best examples of the power of paying attention, both its interpersonal power and its world-historical power. So much of the outpouring of grief I read after Morrison died was from people who felt so seen by her, when so much of the world never bothers to see them beyond shallow stereotypes. Her art didn’t just force people to look at other people’s experiences; she never stopped prodding people to also turn their empathy and attention into compassionate action.

“I tell my students, ‘When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free someone else,” Morrison told Oprah magazine in 2003. “If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.”

Morrison is also one of the world’s best examples of deploying that attention not just in her art but, it seemed, to create all kinds of change in the world around her. “I think of Morrison as a writer who changed your place in this world, even if you’ve never read her,” the writer Alexander Chee tweeted on Tuesday. “Through her books but also her friendships, her editing work, her teaching. She made room for you, whether you knew it or not. But it was better, is better, to know it.”

Know it; pay attention; do something.

Tell me why you want to read

My friend Al Kamalizad (a rad photographer and illustrator whose work you should check out) asked for “something that takes me into the inner life of another human, and/or makes me think differently about assumptions big or small — political, societal, perceptual, interpersonal, spacial (!?).” He told me he wanted it to be relatively plot-driven, a book that fosters a general sense of wonder about how the plot will turn out. And he wants to enjoy the language.

Well, as it happens, pretty much all of the work of Toni Morrison I’ve ever read fits that description. I’ll recommend two for Al to start: “The Bluest Eye” and “Sula.”

I first read “The Bluest Eye” when I was in elementary school for some reason; it was way, way above my emotional maturity and reading levels and I don’t think I fully understood some of the disturbing elements of the plot until I came back to it much later. Most of the appreciations of Morrison and for the main character of “The Bluest Eye,” Pecola Breedlove, have rightly been written by the people Morrison was writing for, black people, and specifically black women. (This one from Rebecca Carroll is especially moving.) For me, it was a foundational and new reading experience in a different way: it may have been the first time I immersed myself in a book that wasn’t written for me at all — an experience everyone should have, especially if you’re the type of (white, male) person who could go through life and never have to — and in the mind of a character who was being damaged by things that I took completely for granted. I didn’t quite comprehend the horror of all of the things that happened to Pecola, but I do remember being profoundly upset by the idea that Pecola thought the only way out was to make herself to look more like me, that I am protected from some of these things just by accident of birth and this other girl was not.

In his remembrance of Morrison, Hilton Als tells an anecdote about Morrison realizing her protective hovering of her children while they sleep was actually creeping her kids out. “Here she would burst out with a laugh that mocked the very idea of self-perception, let alone self-dramatization: they would always be knocked down by someone else’s reality,” Als writes. That’s I think the lesson I learned early from “The Bluest Eye,” that my perception in the world is tightly blinkered and easily knocked down (as well it should be).

As Als also notes, in “Sula” it’s really only women’s voices who matter, who are speaking to the reader. The fraught friendship of Sula and Nel, and the way they each battled or succumbed to what their community expected of them, is depicted with such urgency and immediacy — you know these women’s brains, and how each of them shape the way the other one sees the world.

In his essay about Morrison, the novelist Marlon James wrote that “Sula” taught him how to live — “and did so with just three words. Show? to who? In the novel, the still living Nel had just asked the dying Sula what she had to show for all this fearless, high-cost living that she was so annoyingly proud of. I remember jumping into the story at that point as well, moving from reader to eavesdropper because I had reached the end of myself and I too wanted an answer. But Sula said, show? To who? and until then I had no idea that I mattered. It never occurred to me that I was worth anything, and that the only person qualified to judge that worth was my own damn self. That there was no who, to show to.”

As for plot-driven — I coincidentally just picked up a used copy of “Sula” a few weeks ago, not knowing how soon I’d be thinking more about its author; I just wanted to re-read it to figure out how the plot works; it moves forward with a propulsive, strange grace.

All of Morrison’s work may challenge your perceptual (and perhaps spacial!) assumptions, too — the ease with which Morrison mingles the voice of ghosts and the voices of the living and the voices of the living which you might not be fully able to trust makes me feel like that flexibility of perception is one of the great reasons to read novels, to see the layers of things.

Bonus recommendations: Here’s Toni Morrison with a very good summation of the idea of motherwork I wrote about a few weeks ago, with the added analysis that if we were better about taking care of children as a community, it would bring justice to communities of women who’ve had their fertility forcibly regulated throughout history.

And if you’re still thinking about why we need a hot blonde Disney villain, may I direct you to this profile of Ivanka Trump? There’s one recollection of how Ivanka behaved in high school that I think clarifies a lot about how these women become so harmfully oblivious: “The issue, others say, was she thought only about … herself. That’s the No. 1 thing friends from her past say about her: She isn’t a “mean person” or a “bad person” but is simply afflicted with the same disease of narcissism as her father. She is the movie projector and the screen.” As long as the pretty girl smiles as she pillages the country, as long as she isn’t rude, she’s fine. We let women like Ivanka get away with destructive narcissism and give them a pass because they aren’t “mean.” We have to stop doing that.

Thank you for reading. As always, thanks for bearing with me as I figure this thing out, for the first-draftiness of it, and also for forgiving all the typos that I miss because I write quickly and with no editor. And also as always, if you like this kind of dispatch from my brain and know someone else who might, too, please do share it. You can subscribe here.