Radical attention is a mutual remembering that restores a thing’s innate loveliness

Evidence

In a beautiful poem entitled “Saint Francis and the Sow,” the American poet Galway Kinnell imagines an encounter between the legendary animal-loving saint and a somewhat-the-worse-for-wear fat pig, lying in a stinking sty and nursing a squirm of muddy piglets. There isn’t much action in the poem. All that happens is that the saint comes over and puts his hand on the sow’s head. That’s it, really. Except, somehow, this small gesture is depicted, in the poem, as effecting some sort of nameless current of vitalizing glory that tingles all through the scene—a current that runs through the body of the broken animal, through her brood, and, by extension, through the world itself. The current is described as a “remembering” (of the sow, by the sow) of…SOW! “Sowness” is what is recalled, and made magnificent, in this act of touch that is also an act of mutual recollection. The sow, and the saint, and we, the readers, become inward, for a moment, with “the long, perfect loveliness of sow,” as the final line of the poem puts it. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 467

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• SEED: An essay angle: attention defined as mutual recollection rather than observation — contrasting the model of attention as a one-directional cognitive resource capture with this relational, recalling model.

Related

• Attention is the mechanism by which we reteach things their loveliness (similarity 0.84)