Spacetime and the Body of Attention
Since getting involved with the Gurdjieff Work this year, I've been thinking a lot about attention, how time passes relative to it, and the role of the body therein.
There's a beautiful part from a book which I recently quoted — Pyotr Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous — where the author describes walking through St. Petersburg at night, sensing an activating interplay between himself and his surroundings, and its role in what George Gurdjieff called self-remembering. This is preceded by some sections which I find similarly beautiful and profound.
…I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the sensation of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood. They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I and in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one’s head, when one hears one’s own voice and sees and observes oneself from the outside.
[ . . . ] I had always been astonished at the weakness and insufficiency of our memory. So many things disappear. For some reason or other the chief absurdity of life for me consisted in this. Why experience so much in order to forget it afterwards? Besides there was something degrading in this. A man feels something which seems to him very big, he thinks he will never forget it; one or two years pass by — and nothing remains of it. It now became clear to me why this was so and why it could not be otherwise. If our memory really keeps alive only moments of self-remembering, it is clear why our memory is so poor.
All these were realizations of the first days. Later, when I began to learn to divide attention, I saw that self-remembering gave wonderful sensations which, in a natural way, that is, by themselves, come to us only very seldom and in exceptional conditions. Thus, for instance, at that time I used very much to like to wander through St. Petersburg at night and to “sense” the houses and the streets. St. Petersburg is full of these strange sensations. Houses, especially old ones, were quite alive, I all but spoke to them. There was no “imagination” in it. I did not think of anything, I simply walked along while trying to remember myself and looked about; the sensations came by themselves.
This last paragraph reminded me very strongly of the night walks I used to take around Boston, and how whatever I felt on those walks magnified during the height of pandemic hysteria, when people were afraid to go outside at all, when nocturnal routes I had grown so accustomed to transformed into a new and quieter world, undulating with an exquisite melancholy — mine for the taking, as it were.
Ouspensky goes on to write of a day where he was walking along a bridge to a main street and, despite his best efforts to keep a hold on his attention, “awakening” two hours later, far away from a tobacco shop he had stopped by.
The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep.
At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my flat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. I wrote two letters. Then again I went out of the house. I walked on the left side of the Nevsky up to the Gostinoy Dvor intending to go to the Offitzerskaya. Then I had changed my mind as it was getting late. I had taken an izvostchik [a cab] and was driving to the Kavalergardskaya to my printers. And on the way while driving along the Tavricheskaya I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. — And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself.
About a month ago, I was walking to an appointment from a parking spot on a street. When I was done and had exited the building, I realized that I had no sense of having walked from my car to the hospital — no sense of that passage of distance or time, and no sense of even my thoughts from then. It was as if I’d teleported from my parking spot to the building. So I made a decision: that I would mark each stage of that walk back by use of "landmarks", like a grate on the ground, or a tree, or a sign, and by deliberate actions, like looking from right to left. When I returned to the car, I could feel that distance and time — and then some sense of having existed through that span as a perceptive body. Even as I write this today, I can recall the impromptu sequence I used to experientially divide that walk into a series of moments.
Far before my involvement with the Work, and throughout my time spent in Boston, I had long believed that a distinguishing feature of its best architecture — and, by extension, a distinguishing feature of other cities — was that it compelled attention. Years later, I remember very few of the names of streets which I walked or biked down countless times; but I can recall the organization of the sidewalks and the sequences of buildings, and how I would pass through them. This was why I found the Back Bay area particularly enjoyable, and why I rarely spent any time around, for example, the Seaport District. It’s also why I would’ve been fairly useless at giving directions to a lost visitor without relying on landmarks.
I say that the best architecture compels attention — but, obviously, that compulsion isn’t a given. We can give our attention only as much as we are aware of something. The dynamic relationship I feel between myself and the built world is perhaps, on some level, “intuitive”, but it’s also informed by whatever amount of formal and historical literacy I possess. Moreover, as Ouspensky suggests in his own words, our being compelled to a special sort of attentiveness usually occurs only in response to a type of novelty, trauma, or initiation — and cultivating attention outside of those events requires observational discipline. As I wrote in another essay:
The fate of most buildings, in terms of our subjective experience of them, is to be ambient things we walk past or through. Ironically, the closer we are to these things, the more unaware we may become of their particularities. Time regularizes, normalizes, immunizes. That bedroom in your new apartment will never again feel the way it does during that first week or two. As with parts of our body, we tend to take note of a local building only if it is experiencing distress or maintenance.
What do I mean by “attention”, though? Surely there are all sorts of junk which command eyes to stare upon it. It seems to me just as wrong to presume that this word must have the same meaning in all cases as it would be to say that a cactus and tree, both being “plants”, must then be identical. I think that we can only understand attention through quantitative and qualitative gradations, and in terms of how it either assists or conflicts with our ambitions. Gurdjieff said, “A permanent idea of good and evil can be formed in man only in connection with a permanent aim and a permanent understanding. If a man understands that he is asleep and if he wishes to awake, then everything that helps him to awake will be good and everything that hinders him, everything that prolongs his sleep, will be evil.”
“Attention”, as a word, is formed from ad — "toward” — and tendere — "stretch.” When we attend to something by giving it attention, we stretch something of ourselves towards that focal point; and, as the body is a site of energies, to give something our attention is to give it some part of our energy. The more consistently we direct our energy in one way or another, the more our body becomes attuned to focusing on that direction. This is how we become involved with magnetic relationships. Think of how you might come to a stop at an intersection, while driving, and automatically reach for your phone to — do what? — escape from the apparently uneventful moment. That is a magnetic relationship.
I find it interesting, and troubling, to think about all of this specifically within the context of the Internet and videogames. Both offer things to do; but, maybe more than that, they offer places to go. Usually we talk about these activities in terms of virtual activities . . . but not really about where we have gone, and certainly almost never about what the body has done during these times. There’s a passage by Rudolf Steiner, somewhere among one of his countless essays, where he describes dreaming as the spirit existing absent the other usual sensory functions. I wonder how we might describe what typically occurs with the spirit when the body turns passive, ocularity becomes near-exclusive, and our vicarious occupancy is digital.
Earlier on, when using the Internet was a more involved, frictional process — think of all of the requirements dial-up necessitated! — it was a little easier to regard the time spent there as a discrete activity, concomitant with the notion of logging on, and all that imagery of being sucked through a computer monitor into Cyberspace. Today, the notions of being “online” or “offline” are largely strictly metaphorical, and often relate to a kind of toxicity which is built up through extended internet usage. To be “terminally online” is to be in a distorted state, only temporarily cured by “logging [fucking] off.” Otherwise, Internet access is something we take for granted as a perpetual extension of our body, with the hand and the device it holds as a receiver.
In retrospective evaluations of the introduction of the steam locomotive and railway system, one can find descriptions of this new technology as destroying both time and space because of its rapidity, and how that rapidity compresses the landscape into a series of mere distances. This example seems quaint to us now, given all of the subsequent technological accelerations, but I think the basic phenomenon it describes remains relevant. To precisely describe my own engagement with these newer technologies requires a level and amount of observation I currently lack; but I do find that — especially with the Internet — there is a general omission of the body that I experience, and a consequent flattening of time.
This is an omission I don't really experience with other technologies which might be described as vicarious or simulative. Ostensibly, the Internet or a videogame involve more active input than a movie or TV show, at least because your hands are involved with some sort of movement — albeit movement that, with enough familiarity, becomes automatic. You reach for the keys on a keyboard just as knowingly as you execute an action with a videogame controller. The darker side of this automatic functioning emerges when you, for example, type in the URL of a site you’re already browsing; or when you realize that, over the course of playing a videogame, you’ve assumed an uncomfortable and rigid posture. For me, “mistakes” like these suggest a hypnotic effect muddling the mind-body dynamic.
By making an implicit comparison between, let’s say, a computer and a book, I’m not embedding an absolute negative judgment about our own modern technology. The picture of technology has ever been one of new utilities set right beside new dangers. Still, I do think that perennialist perspectives, today usually supplemented with memes about age-old complaints (“See? Things have always been the same!”), tend to enforce an observational passivity which refuses to consider how radically different our 21st-century lives, as densely embodied intelligences, are when compared to just a hundred years ago. A dialectical-materialist viewpoint categorically misses this embodied aspect, since it only deals with quantitative abstractions.
Naturally, there are comparisons which are difficult, if not nearly impossible, for (most of?) us to make. For example: how is the contemporary body affected by the countless invisible influences of our technological systems, as compared to times prior to the advent of radio waves? Aside from the irritating effects of social media, might we generally exist in a more agitated state because the body is more persistently and variously irradiated by external energetic forces? Could these forces be interfering with other more “natural” ones? I don’t know. I doubt you do! Partly for this reason, I can’t, for example, dismiss potential links between electromagnetic exposure and carcinogenicity. It would be a supreme arrogance to believe that we more or less understand the totality of the possible physical effects of powerful and ever-evolving technologies which have existed for mere decades.
Corey Anton, known for his academic work on media ecology and communication theory, recently shared a talk wherein (among many other things) he delineates the recency and radicality of the “on” button.
“On” buttons are really weird, historically. [. . .] “On” buttons have created a world of bystanders, onlookers, people on the sidelines, who are able to get services, entertainments, and labor at the push of a button. It basically created this demand for ease and convenience — the demand for frictionless existence. Frictionless life substitutes is part of the age of suber-abundance.
Various stories have been told of this or that person, some of them members of high society, coming to Gurdjieff in the hopes of attaining enlightenment, only to find a man who put them to work by digging a ditch or relocating a pile of rocks — seemingly the exact opposite of a master guiding initiates through sacred practices separate from the mundane world. Here, and elsewhere, I think we find an alternative to Anton’s description of a “frictionless existence”: activities wherein self-observation and attention are attuned by working with one’s body among community.
We then might also discern a great blind-spot of modern psychology and psychotherapy — that these domains presume that pretty much all work on oneself can be done with the intellect. This desubstantiation of the body has only become more prevalent since countless therapists have transitioned to doing a bulk of remote work with clientele. Again: “new utilities set right beside new dangers.”
Remember those “Try not to cum” ads on porn sites? Extend that to the entire Internet. How often is our self-control being challenged? and how often are we losing? The online experience, I think, is increasingly taking the shape of a struggle between the desire to retain the body and the desire for its dissolution — its reduction to a series of sensory impressions — and this struggle is manifesting as a sociocultural division of sentiment which can be easily weaponized, in either direction, by political legislation (see, for instance, the current tug of war over TikTok). Porn sites are hardly the only places where countless bodies abdicate agency for substitutes. Is there that much of a difference between “gooning” and consuming two-hours’ worth of political catastrophism on Twitter before going to sleep? Both are total wastes of time and libido, and both are activities one does not choose but, instead, automatically — mechanically — engages in.
I think we might also be able to observe ties between the ostensible dissolution of gender, or sex, and alienation from the body, regarded as an arbitrary imposition to be tweaked as one might tweak a videogame avatar. The very designation of “non-binary” suggests that one is neither here nor there. Well — where are they? Perhaps within the no-place of utopia; but, of course, we have no actual instances of utopia. An essay from 2019, entitled “Masculinity, anime, and gender dysphoria”, comes to mind for me here, partly because the aspirational bodies it describes have no material basis. The anime/videogame girl represents a purely intellectual relationship to the body. It’s unsurprising that there is some appreciable overlap of transgender culture and VTuber culture, since the VTuber avatar is the best current representation of the gross motor body dissolved into a frictionless digital ideal.
Since the industrial revolution, the usual sequence of events for novel technology has been some discordant division of reception (Anton, for example, makes note of guilds protesting electric lighting); its eventual, progressively wide-scale implementation; and the evaporation of the former anxieties (a clear counter-example to this would be nuclear weaponry; so disastrous was this technology that, to this day, the very idea of nuclear energy is regarded with trepidation). This trend has, along with typical overestimations of our own volition, primed us to regard technology as a force which serves us. More concerted investigations, however, tend to show the opposite; or that, at the least, the human-technological relationship is symbiotic. Each standardization forces a concomitant “conforming to convenience.” How much conforming, though? and in what fashion? If it is true that our National Highway System is a remarkable achievement of facilitating distant travel, it’s equally true that majority of the U.S., local and non-local, has been made inaccessible to anyone without a motor vehicle. So much about life has to be organized around car usage, despite the car’s continual advertisement as a portal to individualistic liberation.
When certain technologies automatize certain acts and functions, and once those technologies become sufficiently integrated into enough aspects of civilization as to become mundane matters of fact — functionally invisible — I think that we become similarly newly automatized. Given this suspiciously intense push for generative A.I. — a push with implications far, far more radical than the laying off of concept artists or the question of how to evaluate college essays —, I find it impossible not to wonder how this next stage of automatizing various aspects of daily life will affect each of us as a social body already prone to “losing ourselves” to mechanical behavior. While we still remain within that first stage of divided reception, we are probably on the precipice of the next stage, the transition to which the bulk of humanity usually has had no say. The best that most of us can do will be to pay attention.