On Attention
Attention is a drug; one that we were all weaned on as infants. From the moment we were born, we were doted on. Attentively watched over. During this time, our needs were prioritised and attended to with an urgency befitting a tyrant. This is the source of Freud’s image of the infant as an aggressive egomaniac. Following Freud, Camille Paglia calls children, ‘monsters of unbridled egotism and will’. ‘We carry that daemonic will within us forever’. The trouble is, of course, that our novelty and helplessness eventually wears off. That affectionate and protective attention, which is all that we have ever known at that point, diminishes. Our devoted guardians are inevitably distracted by other concerns — perhaps even another baby (draped in a ‘coat of many colours’). We spend the rest of our lives subconsciously chasing this halcyon state. Every subsequent revival — every nostos (homecoming) — is based on this pre-mnemonic nostalgia. Bring back ‘the good old days’.
Our longing for attention is so crucial to us, we confuse it with love. Bell Hooks, for instance, begins her book, All About Love, conflating love with parental attention:
I was my father’s first daughter. At the moment of my birth, I was looked upon with loving kindness, cherished and made to feel wanted on this earth and in my home. To this day I cannot remember when that feeling of being loved left me. I just know that one day I was no longer precious. Those who had initially loved me well turned away. The absence of their recognition and regard pierced my heart and left me with a feeling of brokenheartedness so profound I was spellbound.
Grief and sadness overwhelmed me. I did not know what I had done wrong. And nothing I tried made it right. No other connection healed the hurt of that first abandonment, that first banishment from love’s paradise. For years I lived my life suspended, trapped by the past, unable to move into the future. Like every wounded child I just wanted to turn back time and be in that paradise again, in that moment of remembered rapture where I felt loved, where I felt a sense of belonging
This ‘first abandonment’ is lapsarian; a ‘banishment from love’s paradise’. In Marlowe’s Faustus, the fallen Mephistopheles says hell is reserved for those who have known heaven: ‘Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed/ In one self place; for where we are is hell,/ And where hell is, must we ever be’. Hell is anywhere that is not heaven. When we were ‘looked upon with loving kindness’, we were unwittingly in Eden. Now, we are in purgatory, ‘unable to move into the future’.
Also in this passage is the suggestion that love diminishes in relation to ‘recognition and regard’ — which ironically diminishes love itself. In most cases, the parent’s attention is diverted, but their love remains. The inability to distinguish attention and love is one of the great causes of conflict in relationships. During the honeymoon stage, lovers look at each other with adoration and desire. The eyes narrow, the pupils dilate. We feel that familiar ‘sense of belonging’. But as attention begins to taper, we are brought back to that ‘first abandonment’. This is why most relationships last between 3 and 5 months. The level of attention we crave is unsustainable. At the expense of long-term love, we move on to seek our fix elsewhere.
Even our invented deities, in their faultless perfection, require attention in the form of worship. The Abrahamic god says “acknowledge no other”. This is the very first commandment. In Islam, you become a Muslim by repeating the Shahada, the first half of which is: ‘I bear witness that none deserves worship except God’.
In Neil Gaimon’s American Gods, attention is what sustains the deities; thus the ‘old gods’ (the polytheistic gods of antiquity) suffer in desuetude, while the ‘new gods’ (like ‘Technical Boy’, the god of technology’ and ‘Media’, the goddess of pop culture) thrive.
You would think, with how highly we esteem attention, that we would be far more particular in where we put it. In actuality, we waste our attention — predominantly on inanimate pixels that gain nothing in the exchange. What we should be doing is giving a person the gift of attention. In Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening, she calls this ‘the experience of being experienced’. And this is not something that is reserved exclusively for someone new. The phrase ‘love at first sight’ is apt. It is often interpreted as “falling for someone immediately”, but it can also refer to that feeling you get when that person you are accustomed to appears, briefly, unfamiliar. It is like you are seeing them for the first time. There is renewed novelty. They may not have even changed at all. It is your eyes that have changed. You see them with brand new eyes; hence, love at first sight. This is what undivided attention can do. It is not synonymous with love, but it can, in some circumstances, rekindle it*.
*There is a Zick Rubin study that found that long-term couples who were deeply in love looked at each other 75% of the time, versus the average, which is around half of that.
