PARADOX
When I teach about activism in the classroom, there are learners who assume things about that word. By the time the class is done, many learners come to realize that their early assumptions about that word are incomplete. And that the pursuit to become less incomplete requires the embracing of paradox, contradictions, and irony.
I recently listened to an interview of author D. Graham Burnett on the Ezra Klein podcast. In this interview, Burnett references a book titled The Attention Economy, where authors Thomas Davenport and John Beck offer definitions of attention that are contradictory and paradoxical and true.
The first definition: Attention is what triggers and catalyzes awareness into action.
The second definition: Attention is waiting. What kind of waiting? Infinite waiting. The kind that author Bernard Stiegler describes as waiting on the disclosure of the long webs of connectedness that are in the object and are mirroring the rich long webs of connectedness within each self.
Onto these paradoxical definitions is an image that Burnett overlays, which is a scene created by American author Henry James in his novel, Wings of a Dove, where a dying woman is trying to gain the attention of a busy doctor whose practice and knowledge could hold the solution to her ailments. In this scene, the doctor places an exquisitely clear, clean, empty crystal glass on a table that is between the doctor and the dying woman. This overlay recognizes both definitions of attention as 1) the thing that could trigger action and 2) the thing that waits and hopes. To borrow from ecologist Gordon Hempton as cited by Jenny Odell in How to Do Nothing, an empty glass (or silence) doesn’t contain the absence of something but rather, the presence of everything.
ATTENTION & ACTIVISM
What happens when we exchange the word attention with activism? Is activism the loud thing that triggers action? Or is activism the quiet thing that waits and listens and understands and connects? Can it be both?
Or to reverse engineer such questions, is there any point to hurling demands? Is there any point to infinitely wait for connection? Megan Phelps-Roper, former member of the Westboro Baptist Church who was raised to hurl loudly, found her offramp to peace not by a counter protester who was louder than her, but a person who was willing to show up, wait, listen, and mirror.
MAJESTIC MOUNTAINS & AUGUSTE RODIN
I recently saw a film about the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 that crashed in the Andes mountains in 1972. The narrator describes how the mountains were at once beautiful and horrific in their ability to destroy their lives not by coming after them but by majestically being.
This point about the mountains reminds me of French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) whose life I have been learning about in the essay about Rodin by Rainer Maria Rilke, who describes Rodin as a quiet, practiced man with infinite patience. Rilke beckons us to feel the complexity of what Rodin must have felt as he discovered the mountain that he would need to climb as he found that the majestic stone would be his medium:
Rodin had now discovered the fundamental element of his art; as it were, the germ of his world. It was the surface, ... of which everything must rise ... the subject-matter of his art, the thing for which he laboured, for which he suffered and for which he was awake.
Rodin would not be distracted by subject matters other than the body "in which life was greater, more cruel and more restless."
If I close my eyes, I can see the clean, empty crystal glass. I can see that it exists between me and the things I care about in the world. I wonder if I am ready to labor, suffer, and be awake to fill it. I wonder if I am already filling it as I live through the piercing paradoxes of a life that is more beautiful, more cruel, and more restless than I could ever have imagined.
