In praise & pursuit of attention
Dear friend,
Salaam & hello! Peace and good tidings your way. Thank you for joining this praiseletter, for inhabiting the thou I angle my thoughts toward. Thank you for letting me address you. I originally wrote to you back in Dec 2021 via tinyletter, then I tried out letterdrop, and now I’ve finally migrated over to Substack.
I'm thinking today of these lines from "Beauty" by Solmaz Sharif:
"My life can pass like this
Waiting for beauty
Tomorrow—I say
A life is a thing you have to start"
Are you, like me, passing hour after hour hoping for some kind of life to arrive? I don't want to admit to you how frequently I refresh my email & peer into my mailbox, hoping for a poem acceptance / an opportunity / a "thought of you—" to appear. I don't want to admit to you that all my life, I have waited for my life—to begin, to flourish, to fix me, to take me where it wills. But a life is a thing you have to start.
I am starting with this first letter to you, a commitment to sow the seeds for a virtual garden (not to be confused with the fascinating concept of the digital garden). I am starting my life by speaking first instead of waiting to be spoken to.
Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast, begins most interviews with a question about the spiritual or religious background of her guests. I love the vulnerability this practice invites. In the spirit of sharing, here's a bit about what I believe:
God is beautiful and so loves beauty
What is beautiful is not pretty, is often anything but
The material world—brutal, lustrous—is a bridge to some kind of sublime After
Two angels sit on my shoulders and take note of all my deeds
Jinns live in trees (yes, superstitions count!)
Recently, I've been reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell, an Oakland-based writer and artist. Odell walks us through the necessity of disengaging from the attention economy and capitalist definitions of productivity. And I use walk intentionally here: in the introduction, she describes the book as something to meander through, "less a lecture than an invitation to take a walk."
We're invited throughout the book to think of attention as something we wield, a muscle we can practice honing, focusing, redirecting. Attention is prayer. Attention is a practice. Yesterday, I picked up my phone 73 times. What am I paying attention to? How insidious this language—that my brain metabolizes attention as currency, that my being in the world is understood in transactional terms. I don't want to pay attention anymore. I am in pursuit of ways of cultivating attention. Of sustaining attention.
Odell has given me a vocabulary I lacked for the spaces I feel most capable of honing my attention, spaces like libraries and public gardens. She calls these attention sustaining architectures: spaces that are labyrinthine and meant to be wandered, that don't urge you forward toward an exit but instead pull you in deeper. I have mixed feelings about museums, but I can't deny that I'm drawn to them. A few weeks ago, I visited New York to see the Etel Adnan exhibit at the Guggenheim museum. The Guggenheim is a museum that feels uniquely inviting to me in a way many others don't, and I understand now that this is because it was designed to be one such attention sustaining architecture. It is essentially a spiraling ramp, not quite a maze so much as a winding road.
The architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, was the father of organic architecture, a theory & practice in which architectural design is seamlessly integrated with its surroundings—the building "grows out of the landscape as naturally as a plant." Wright intended for visitors to the Guggenheim to take the elevator to the top, and slowly make their way down the sloping ramp. The open rotunda allows for a visitor to see not only the art from multiple levels and viewpoints but other visitors throughout the museum. At any given moment, I could lean over the railing and locate my friends—a lime green sweater glimpsed three "floors" down, a salmon coat one level above me—all of us moving in slow orbit beneath the skylight.
The Guggenheim is an experience more than it is a building—it's as much about movement as it is about standing before a work of art. It's a space designed with contemplation, and curiosity, and attention in mind.
What can I call this curated space now but a prayer? Praise be to the architect who disliked Manhattan yet gifted it the Guggenheim. Praise be to this letter which required such focus that I didn't reach for my phone once. Praise be to you, friend, reader, for granting me the pleasure (the gift!) of your attention.
I hope to write to you bi-monthly, and always begin and end in praise of something. To that end, here are a couple of resources that I've read/appreciated/benefitted from recently:
in praise of Interdependence
in praise of Process
in praise of Failure
yours always in gratitude,
Sarah Ghazal Ali