Attentiveness, Meaning & David Foster Wallace
“Everybody is telling a Story of My Life to themselves all the time”, Margaret Atwood observed rightly. Adult or child, no one ever really stops believing themselves to be the centre of a story; the reference point of all things. This, in itself, is hardly a new phenomenon. What is new is our hyperawareness of the fact. The awareness by no means terminates our little performances, It only heightens it, makes it more complex and ourselves more self-critical. (Think ‘Inside’ by Bo Burnham.)
Indeed these private dramas and narratives we create for ourselves are a double-edged sword. At its best, it can be a tool to find meaning, give us purpose, apotheosize the beauty of every thought and experience. At its worst it can make one deeply self-involved, unperceiving; existing in a panopticon designed by and entrapping oneself.
This is where the redemptive quality of art comes in. If the immediacy of life corrupts one into self-centred performativity, then the moments where we turn to art – those that transport us out of our little bubble of petty frustrations – redeem us out of them. Or at least that is what David Foster Wallace’s extraordinarily wise and mordantly delivered commencement speech, ‘This Is Water’, did for me.
This speech was my first brush with Wallace, having rather arrogantly dismissed him at first as one of the literary gods I could afford to miss out on.
Listening to it for the first time produced the two following results:
It persuaded me, more effectively than anyone else, that I NEEDED to read Infinite Jest.
It gave me the unshakeable sense that I had discovered what was perhaps the most accurate verbal expression of everything I believed in.
Ever since then I keep coming back to it, particularly whenever I start feeling what Wallace terms as the “constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”
It is incredibly difficult to keep the so-called virtues of kindness and compassion in mind, let alone make a conscious attempt to practice them. Not only because they sound so deplorably unsexy but because they require effort and an uncomfortable amount of introspection. And it is this short-sightedness which Wallace directly admonishes against –
“If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then (…) it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.”
Because meaning is not a static goal: a one-time achievement. It is acquired through the unending, deeply undramatic process of paying attention. All the philosophies and the sciences and the grand accomplishments of the human race are rooted in attention. So is love and faith and whatever makes day-to-day life bearable. Attention is the seed which bears the fruit of meaning.
Something about Wallace’s espousal of attention is reminiscent of that great spirit of the 20th century, Simone Weil, and her magnificent assertion,
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.
Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”
Or Susan Sontag’s exhortation,
“Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.”
And what is Mary Oliver’s sublimation of the same sentiment,
“Attention Is the beginning of devotion.”
Hence one turns to the Wallaces and the Weils, the bards of the world and human soul. One turns to them like a vagrant turning to its compass, having lost all sense of his whereabouts after a violent sandstorm. One turns to the shadow of past knowledge for succour and clarity; to remind oneself, This is water, This is water.