I have just noticed three interesting words.
When I started writing this morning, I wrote to myself, “Today is a day for writing.” My heart arced around this intention, and tensed itself in anticipation of this creative work.
It took me time to start writing, as it always does. Three hours, in this case. A morning workout, a friend’s dog I am taking care of, breakfast—I had to attend to all of these first.
As I sat down and got started, it quickly became clear to me what I was really meant to write about: Attention. And as I noticed this, I noticed the three words, all resonant with “attention”. They have been lurking in my writing. Do you notice them?
It took me a bit myself. "Tensed" is when I first caught it. In case you missed it, it was here:
My heart arced around this intention, and tensed itself in anticipation of this creative work.
And when I noticed "tensed", I then noticed "intention". Yet another attention-spirited word.
Tension, at-tension. In-tention, at-tention.
And even as I was by now aware of the surreptitious presence of attention, I unconsciously dropped yet another attention-spirited word, "attend", as I mused on the distractions of my workout and dog-sitting and breakfast. “Attend” is probably the most obvious relative to “attention” yet, yet it is still distant enough to sneak under my radar, however instantaneously.
And now we have a mystery on our hands, ladies and gentlemen.
For I have just noticed three interesting words. These words sound related to this word, attention, which has been much on my mind this morning. We have "tension", we have "intention", we have "attending".
Which are etymological truths, and which are false cognates?
What poetry might we hear, deep in the history of this word, “attention”, through these other words?
Let’s go on a little philological journey together, shall we?
Is attention a “being at tension”?
We are so often adrift in a sea of spatiotemporal impressions that can (and do) carry us away. We are so frequently prey to distraction, to the lure of the next dopamine hit offered to us by our devices. We so rarely get a respite from the storm of content and stimulation that spins our brain like dynamos on the daily.
Is attention a tensing-ourselves against such distractions? A holding-our-ground so we don’t get washed away?
Try to navigate our hyper-stimulated, ADHD-generating internet culture without falling prey to an attentional annihilation. The only way to do it is to exercise a vigilance, a tension, isn’t it? To be continuously on your guard, continuously watching yourself, resisting the temptation to click on something you know is dumb, but you so want to click anyway.
Tension and attention. It feels like there is a fundamental, physical, phenomenal relationship between these things. Think about how physically engaged one looks when one is paying attention. Imagine someone deeply absorbed in their work. They are sitting up stock straight, eyes wide open, unblinking, the whole body alert and set to the task, their eyes intent.
While watching my friend’s dog, I’ve learned that a dog will tense up as tight as a statue when they find a chicken bone on a city street. A dog's attention is nothing if not a tension. Her sole object, the object of her attention, she clenches tightly in her jaws. She is solely with that bone. She clenches a bone with her teeth as we clench a thought in our minds, as we clench a mystery we have yet to crack open into digested knowledge.
We, too, would suck out the marrow from our mental bones, leave them picked over and cleaned, neatly stacked like finished books whose knowledge is now ours.
We, too, have our attentions that are a deep state of tension, a holding-to, a being-with, a having-nothing-else-in-mind-but-this.
If attention is a tension, it’s the best kind of tension. A tension that keeps you in shape, keeps you pushing harder, keeps you engaged, keeps you from danger.
Is attention an outward manifestation of inner in-tentionality? An "at-" instead of an "in-"? What is the -tentionality common to the two of them?
Ah, you can already feel this resonance between these words, "attention" and "intention", can't you, friends?
They are like two bells which peal side-by-side in alternating fashion, complementing each other's timbres but appearing to come from different distances, perhaps different acoustical planes entirely.
(Actually listen to them, dear readers. If you're here, pay attention. Listen to “intention”, listen to “attention”. Otherwise why bother to read my words? Do you have an obligation to me? Forget it, forget me. Do you have this publication as part of your regular reading diet, a diet you just have to get through to move onto your next task for the day? Repudiate your interest in this publication, cross this article off your list, tear up the list itself! End your endless spinning in the whirlpool of the content ocean, if only for a moment! This wouldn't be a piece about attention without an appropriate cri de coeur: stand for your attention, that most besieged of our human capacities. Fight for it, for fighting is the only way freedom is won, even (maybe especially) freedom of the mental kind.)
And yet, “attention” and “intention”—it's so hard to say something of the resonance between these two! Here's the best I can muster:
"Attention is intentional seeing."
"Intention is attentional being."
Beautiful sentiments! But how do we talk about these words without falling into circularities? Like the lovely pealing of the bells, these statements perhaps glorify without elucidating.
Let’s try again. At-tention. In-tention. Listen to these bells pealing! To listen means: hear the way attention is a vector, a line connecting you (your mind, your eyes, your fingers and arms and nerves typing on a keyboard) to the object of attention (a thought, an emotion, a question, a conflict, a story). Feel the line. What does it feel like to connect your attention to the thing your attention attends-to? What relationship forms in this connection?
Is not your attention (radically!) the connection, the relationship itself? What other connection do you have with this thing, except your attention to it?
What else can or could bridge the divide between you and the world? Attention, only, solely.
To have a relationship—to a thing, to a person, to an idea—is to pay attention to it.
To love is to pay attention to.
To create is to pay attention to.
To think is to pay attention to.
This is why I ask you to slow down. To read this at a pace that might be slower than what you’re used to. You need to go slowly to hear what attention is trying to say. You need to go slowly to even preserve your attention in the first place.
If at-tention is a vector drawn between you and the outside, attended-to thing, in-tentionality is a vector drawn between you and yourself. In-tention is the insiding of the -tention.
This is not simply an attention towards ourselves—mark this well. There is such a thing as attention towards ourselves. But in such a relationship, we relate to ourselves as a thing that must be attended-to, as the object of our attentions as opposed to the subjective root of them. We attend to our physical needs—we get enough sleep, we exercise, we eat well. We attend to our emotional and intellectual needs—read a book, meditate, see a friend. We take care of ourselves as physical bodies and mortal minds, in other words.
In-tentionality, on the other hand, is what it is to be one who takes care. It is taking-care as a state of being. And in this respect, my all-too-tidy earlier formulation—"Intention is attentional being"—actually seems to speak the truth.
For intention is a taking-care, and a taking-care is a paying-attention, an attending-to others and the world. To be attentive is to care-for, as is being intentional.
Attention and intention are therefore two sides of the same coin. Quite beautiful, no?
Is attention an attending-to, an attendance?
We have a rationalist-western grammatical bias towards privileging the abstract-conceptual noun (“attention”) over other parts of speech, whether verb (“attend”), adjective (“attentive”), or concrete-specific noun (“attendence”). In the hierarchy of rational thought, the abstract-conceptual trumps all others.
And yet etymology—which is almost universally a bottom-up, organic process (what Martin Heidegger calls a poesis, a poetical unfolding)—almost always finds its root in the concrete-specific or the active-verbal.
What does this mean? Well if attention is etymologically related to an attendance, an attending-to, and/or an attendant, then "attention", that abstract-conceptual noun of ours that gets studied by behavioral psychologists and epistemological philosophers, is actually an outgrowth of something much more organic and everyday—the act of attendance.
To attend is to show up. One shows up and one pays attention. Attendance is that which we do as youths in our classrooms. We're there to be present, to learn, to grow as human beings.
An attendance is also an act of service. An attendant is one who pays attention deeply to the needs of whoever they serve.
We think of our attention as an abstracted perceptual process. As moderns, we strip our language of all the rich meaning that underlies it, rationalize and scientize everything. Attention is reduced to a correspondence: you, here, object, there, attention between them.
I even relied on a similar correspondence, in describing at-tention as a line or vector connecting you to the world. But attention is far more motivated than that. You don't come to the world as an abstract rationality that sees the world in pure tones and sterile categories. There is no formal, straightforward correspondence that takes place in this vector of attention, tying you bloodlessly to the object of your attention. The world is, rather, smudged, messy, complicated. Attention, too, is thick with complexity: we attend because we love, we attend because we hate, we attend because we need, we attend because we feel.
Rarely do we attend simply because we see, simply because we mentally process, and yet that's how the rationalist philosophers would have us think. Maybe it’s how social media would have us think, what television and the internet would have us think, in the midst of our world simultaneously rich of data, fact, and information and poor of wisdom, understanding, and meaning.
**
I wrote all of what preceded this before actually looking up the history of this word, attention. I only now, upon the writing of this paragraph, am consulting an etymological dictionary to solve our mystery, now fully unpacked and explored, the exposition laid.
I hope you’ve stayed on the edge of your seats, dear readers. All that remains is to know if it was Colonel Mustard with the pipe in the kitchen, or Mrs. White with the gun in the study.
So which of these etymologies actually speak truth?
(My gut wrenches a little as I look them up. Is it possible that all of what I just wrote was off the mark, that the etymologies would take us down a completely different path?)
Which of these etymologies actually speak truth?
All of them, as it turns out.
Attention. From the Latin, ad-tendere. Ad = to, tendere = stretch.
(To stretch—beautiful, beautiful!)
Intention, from the Latin. In = towards, tendere = stretch, tend.
(To "tend" comes from the same root. To "tend" is to support something by helping it to grow, to stretch..)
And "tension" also comes from the stretching, the tendere.
(Not to mention "tender", which is what you are after too much stretching—or what you are when you are paying deep, loving attention.)
And, naturally, “attending-to” comes very much from the same root—adtendere. So to say “attend” and “attend to” is very much the verb form of attention. We have lost that direct connection, but in regaining it we can re-hear how much attentive care there truly is in attention.
So, my philological instincts aren't half bad after all! I'll thank my Heideggerian education for this.
What unfolded over our exploration together turns out to be spot on, except for this one wonderful elaboration: it is stretching that takes all of this in, unifies at a common etymological root.
I have used a rather dry, instrumentalist, geometer's term to describe the experience of attention and intention, "a vector" that points outwards or points inwards. But that abstract vector now needs to be imbued with a rich and thick physical phenomenology: the vector is actually a stretching. Your attention stretches to meet what it attends to. Your intention brings you into an attitude of care, wherein you are properly ready to stretch yourself to what is outside you.
Too many words maybe, let’s make it simpler: Attention is a stretching, intention is a readiness to stretch.
Let’s stand for that, let’s stand within that. Let’s let our attention stretch us, let’s let our intentionality bring us consistently into a state of attention and care.
And to hell with the marketized language we use here: "paying attention". It's a late-stage phrase that makes attention into a commodity, a stuff you put in the bank.
But at the same time, it’s a bit unavoidable, isn’t it? So don’t think of it in the market sense of a “payment”. Think of the “paying” instead as what you do when you "pay out a rope"—letting it reach its destination a little bit at a time, but with deliberation and care (intention).
The rope is meant to lead you somewhere. And it will, if you pay it out with due intentionality.
All the same, let’s return to our statements before. I think they sound better when we remove our language of “paying” entirely:
To love is to attend to.
To create is to attend to.
To think is to attend to.
**
17th century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz believed the world was fundamentally non-relational. Since God is omniscient, he must already see the full arc of our fate. Therefore, nothing about our relationships with each other actually means anything. We all go through the world as clockwork monads with our own internal scripts predetermined by an omniscient God, our relationality a mere illusion.
Emmanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason restored to us a world of relations, but predicated them on our own human capacities. The relations we observe in the world, such as those of space and time, are a product solely of our own particular capacity of human observation. We come to the world with our view of the world, and thereby make our world, our common world.
It is by dint of our attention, in other words, that we not only relate to the world, but exist in a world wherein relation is possible—a world we thereby create as our own. A world our attention creates, rather, for our attention is prior to "us". We only see our “us”-ness once we’re already paying attention.
The world includes "us", includes the myriad selves that make up the “us”, includes you yourself and I myself.
Our attention creates the world, and it is within the world that each of us are to be found—wherein we find ourselves.
Lose your attention, and you lose yourself.
So, exercise your attention, friends. Or, rather, attend to. Attention always has an object of care. Attend to what’s really important in your life, all of what is worthy of care.
To live is to attend to your own life.
♥
JG
There's nothing about this writing, that I don't love. Beautiful, and provoking.
Speaking of "provocation" I'd like to offer a perspective, in the spirit of "iron sharpens iron" rather than "disagreeing."
"Since God is omniscient, he must already see the full arc of our fate."
Does "omniscience" REALLY translate to determinism ???
How bored would God be, spectating at a football match, already knowing the result ?
And does Kant solve this, by taking God out of the equation ? "Emmanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason restored to us a world of relations, but predicated them on our own human capacities."
My perspective is, we don't have "free will" and nothing is pre determined.
Both notions, when really looked at, are limiting.
What life is, is even BETTER. Both omniscience AND free will, simultaneously.
Unlimited possibility. ANYTHING is infinitely possible.
And we are inextricably, mysteriously locked in that dance, of spontaneous co-creation, with the cosmos.
Dr Iain McGilcrist speaks of it in this video beautifully. From 56 min up to on the hour.
https://youtu.be/e90hUwFvB94?si=rGIYSoskAuvDhxqm
You might also like this video...."God hasn't got a clue WTF is going on either" :)
At one hour 3 mins. https://youtu.be/Wi1U7Cw4XV0?si=KzgkOqfORMVU2e6F
If God KNEW WTF is going on.....how would that be any fun ????
We are always giving attention. It just depends on what. And whether we are intentional about our attention. Or accidental.
Love this, JG.