Pay Attention!

Dearest reader:

Do you remember "Walking & Falling" by Laurie Anderson? You can find it on the album Big Science, if you've forgotten. And I hope you will want to remember by the time you finish reading this letter to you.

It's a song I've been interested in for some time — since I was in college, since the century before the one in which I write today — and that I think informs, and may in fact have sparked, my attention to the activity of language. Her lyrics don't deal with speech or its organs, but do deal with the minutae — the unconscious minutae, that is — of quotidean action, in this case, walking. Her analysis of the mechanisms of walking deal in paradox. Furthermore, it suggests faith, not of a religious nature (though this may in fact inform her account), but of a more material variety:

You're walking. And you don't always realize it
but you're always falling,
With each step, you fall forward slightly.
And then you catch yourself from falling.
Over and over, you're falling.
And then catching yourself from falling.
And this is how you can be walking and falling
at the same time.

The simple act of walking, something most of us do without reflection, turns out to involve rescue, and defiance of gravity.

What's at stake in this — and I know that's what you want me to tell you, now — is attention, which is, for me, one of the primary goals of poetry. Not mere awareness; attention is more careful. And not research — though attention doesn't preclude, or reject, a scholarly approach, and is in fact the basis for good examples thereof — but rather the heightening of awareness of the relation between self and world, where world can refer to the material around us (in the most literal sense of the world material), and/or the social orders that shape our consciousness.

If awareness is fundamental to critique, it is also key to concern, which is, in turn, the basis for ethics. And awareness of activity in particular reminds us that the world is not static. It is not adequately described with nouns, but with verbs.





[P.S. — If Anderson's emphasis on the body's action fascinates you as it does me, look also at Kenneth Goldsmith's Fidget. Or listen to it here.]