It’s spring now, officially, and the days are stretching long. I’ve entered the final weeks of this pregnancy, kicking off the limbo phase of waiting for our daughter’s arrival. Labor might begin tomorrow or in another four weeks. This in-between period feels suspended, in a pleasant way, and also a little agonizing.
Recently I’ve been thinking about vision and how what we choose to look at shapes what we love.
Over coffee last week, a friend and I talked about writing and calling and finding satisfaction in the work itself, no matter what the end product turns out to be (if anything). My friend said something that I’ve been rolling around in my mind. I think God takes pleasure in poets and writers, he said, because they look closely at what God has made: the natural world, their own souls, and the souls of others. I like the idea of God designing us to look closely and to tell about what we see. I like thinking about how God might take pleasure in our acts of close attention. And not just our attention to the eye-catching elements, either, but to the whole sweep of the world—ordinary and painful parts too.
Most of the time my attention functions like a power boat. It buzzes along the water’s surface, skipping across troughs and crests, bumping unseeingly along at top speed. Writing is a gift to me because it cuts the engine. The noise of the motor evaporates and the boat slows and suddenly I’m bobbing quietly, able to gaze down into clear depths. To look closely, and to tell about it.
I finished Leslie Jamison’s new memoir Splinters a few weeks ago. (Blazing and brilliant, but what else did I expect.) One of the ideas she circles in the book is artistic attention, and how mothering shapes her writing practice. She pushes back against the idea that distraction can only fragment one’s ability to look closely. Yes, caring for small children tends to pull attention out of that deep, sustained state. But these distractions also hold potential. They tear open a seam that didn’t exist before, where new ideas can form:
“Where had I absorbed the notion that distraction only compromises attention—rather than, say, pivoting or deepening it? Sometimes your mind leaps away and when it comes back, it notices more keenly. Sometimes distraction sparks observation like a rough surface striking a match into flame. My daughter distracted me from the rest of the world, but she also made me even hungrier for it.”
Now I’m trying to notice when, or if, my moments of fragmented attention spark something beyond frustration. Jamison’s memoir has me hoping, again, that work and motherhood are “forces that could feed rather than starve each other,” and that fragments might create their own form.)
My friend Cat’s (gorgeous, wise, galvanizing) book, The Mother Artist, comes out in a few weeks. YAY CAT! In a chapter on vision, she argues that the world needs art made my mothers and caregivers because their vision has been shaped—and humanized—by attending to small, vulnerable people. Mothers who spend hours a day looking closely at their children offer the world a different way of seeing. Maternal attention, Cat writes, “enriches artistic vision and lavishes upon all who engage with their work the gift of a humanized gaze.”
And later: “Our vision of the world is shaped by what we see. What an artist sees, therefore, shapes the world that she shows to others in her work.”
This reminds me that I have a duty to look closely at the world in front of me, and not just at the pieces that are easy or pleasing to behold. To love the world as it really is means seeing it comprehensively. Selective attention produces a thin and manufactured kind of art. Part of the responsibility of writing or creating anything is to point out that which is difficult to behold. There’s love in this inclusive way of seeing. There’s love in not looking away.
“If we practice a discipline of loving contemplation in our most intimate relationships,” Cat wonders, “will our vision be trained to regard all people through the eyes of love?”
Speaking of what we give our attention to, I’m bringing you some odds and ends (digital and analog both) that I’ve noticed and enjoyed lately.
Here’s my recent tally of good things, plus a bonus writing prompt:
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