Giving Attention and World Peace

 

One night last weekend, I was sitting in the living room, which was lit only by the Christmas tree, some lights among the Santas on the mantle, and my task light, listening to Handel's Messiah and hand piecing a sunflower block, when something in my brain exploded, connecting giving attention and world peace in the most unlikely, but perhaps the most meaningful way.  Let me try to trace my thinking.

First, there was my last blog post which encouraged you, during this time of global violence and instability, during a time when "brain rot" is the Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year, to think about where you gave your attention.  Don McKay brought this reframing to me when he was editing Visible Cities, and it changes the whole economy.  We "pay" attention like we pay our bills or pay for a coffee--a little casually, a little unthinkingly.  But if we "give" attention, we realize that our attention is a gift--both to ourselves and to the particulars of the world we are attending to.

At the same time, I was reading two entirely disparate books that had attention at their centres. One was Matt Haig's The Life Impossible, in which the 72-year-old retired school teacher and widow, Grace Winter, travels to the island of Ibiza to check out a house she has apparently inherited from an old friend.  I should say that when Grace became a widow, she lost the single thing in life to which she gave her attention.  This was because she casually refused to drive her son to the local shops on a rainy day, her attention being elsewhere, and his bicycle collided with a bus. Grieving a child's death is one of the most difficult things parents are called on to do, and I don't think we can criticize anyone for the way in which they navigate a loss that is both emotional and existential.  What has the universe become that it can take away a child? Its indifference, if not its malignity, is manifest.  Grace's strategy is to make her world smaller and smaller, dividing it into manageable chunks, by paying attention to as little as possible, unspooling her days watching anodyne, bland TV. 

Like Matt Haig's wildly popular The Midnight Library, The Life Impossible involves supernatural events that are really metaphors for life's challenges and opportunities.  While scuba diving in order to investigate the death of the friend who willed Grace her house, she is touched by a supernatural light that sometimes springs from the ocean and gives people extraordinary powers. Grace knows what people are thinking, has access to bits and pieces of their past, understands the agitation of lobsters in a tank and manages to break it from a distance, forces a seriously unpleasant man complaining about food at a restaurant to plunge his fork repeatedly into his thigh.  For Grace--probably for anyone waking up from a "seizure" while scuba diving--these powers are deeply disturbing.  The world becomes too much, demanding too much of her attention.  But she manages to focus it on a developer who wants to destroy part of Ibiza with a hotel and spa, saving the landscape and the species he'd like to eradicate from the island, from his insanely destructive plans.  Giving attention where she thinks it will be useful, she manages to tame it but also to unleash its ethical power. 

Simone Weil, who is apparently having another moment, couldn't be more different from Grace.  While I am revising my novel, Home in Storm Weather, I am re-reading Weil and scholarship on Weil because one of my characters, a history student, is working on an honours paper about the French philosopher.