Attention Equals Life

Desert tracks: a loader, my dog, my shoe, and a track that has me perplexed--looks like five toe pads but missing the heel depression I'd associate with a bear. Also, my dog is huge, and this track is bigger than his. Perhaps a big kitty cat with an extra toe pad? If you know what it is, email me.

Some time during life in Berkeley (early 2000s), I read Wallace Stegner for the first time (and yes, I know he's recently fallen from grace and fashion under charges of plagerism for Angle of Repose but his influence on me stands). Wooed and wowed, I moved on to Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey. Lost in the urban, I yearned for the wild and the pastoral. I wanted to be one of Stegner's "stickers," a person that stays put, or, like Berry, a person who intimately knows a place and cares for it, content to walk the hedgerow for the upteenth time with attentive eyes. Simultaneously, I sought a more wild or primitive experience, a nature prepared to punish inattention: the rattlesnake strike for a careless step, the panicky feeling after descending into a unexplored slot canyon and pulling the rope, a snow bridge giving way over the hidden crevasse. Two sensibilities, equally attractive, intensely felt, yet merely imagined. I was neither, at least not fully.

In the intervening period, I tested both. I wandered the West, living in my car or long-distance bikepacking or backpacking, tasting a bit of the Big Buffet. I settled for a time back in North Dakota, establishing an organic community supported agriculture farm on rented land and trying to find some place to buy so I could start a 30, 40, maybe 50-year love affair with one particular place. Is it because I was born on the prairie, in the space between the pastoral and the wilderness of my literary heroes (and not just these Berkeley reads but early on, books being a first love), is this why I cannot really be anywhere that I am? That I continually imagine myself to be other than I am?

During a stint in Laramie, WY in about 2018, I was introduced to some poets (great, more books, more imaginings . . .) known or representative of "the poetics of everday life." Again, many of these poets have fallen out of fashion or been criticized for enacting and privileging the "male gaze," or simply objectifying the subjects gazed upon, and for other infractions I don't want to get into here. What I personally gleaned from them was their emphasis on and practice of attention to the everyday. James Schuyler, for example, wrote poems about what he saw as he watched the street from his window. What comes through is the elusiveness of the everyday: even when paying close attention, much is missed, meanings are taken for granted, knowledge is supplied rather than perceived. In addition to the poetry, I read Andrew Epstein's Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford, 2017), perhaps one of the best (and most practically influential) academic critical theory books I've enjoyed in my lifetime. I can liken this insight to finding a doctor who artfully diagnoses and prescribes treatment for a chronic affliction: pay attention.

In April 2022, I moved to the high desert in New Mexico, wildly in love with this place. I plan to "stick" here for my remaining days. It's important that I make this admission: I'm not any good at paying attention. I have my moments, but mostly, I'm lost in nonsense. My place is surrounded by few neighbors, miles of sandy roads and washes, perfect for long walks. Early on, I walked, deep in my thoughts, which is something I enjoy. A very close call with a rattlesnake pulled me into the here and now: I live in a place where nature will punish this sort of inattention. Even with that adrenaline rush, in no time, I fell back into my old habit of being elsewhere rather than actually paying attention.

At my ripe old age, it's time to learn to pay attention.

I'm beginning a yearlong daily practice in attention, to learn to see with new eyes, sharp eyes, what is here. I've had enough of my distracted brain, so interested in browsing the internet and learning new things, but unable to focus and attend. I yearn to "re-member" myself to nature, not as a being with dominion or who must travel to some idea of wilderness but who is always and already nature. I'll log the lessons here, what these first infantile efforts look like. If you are reading this, maybe you'd like to do your own version wherever you are. My conviction is simple: attention equals life. I do want to live.