Self-blessing sometimes requires an external catalysing gesture of attention

Evidence

But this is not, in the end, what the poem asserts. While it is true that “everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing,” it is ALSO the case that, we are told, “sometimes it is necessary / to reteach a thing its loveliness.” … The world flowers, and the world flowers on account of its native graces; and yet, sometimes, it is indeed necessary to “reteach a thing its loveliness.” It is this that Saint Francis effects in the poem, as he lays his hand on the big, sad, ill-fated pig, and in that gesture causes the beautiful work of self-blessing to begin to work inside the “long, perfect loveliness of sow.” The gesture is the catalyst of an inner unfolding—a kind of strong spring sun that makes the buds uncoil into their full and open offering. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 471

Categorization

• SEED: The crucial synthetic claim of the chapter: internal flowering and external catalysis are not contradictory. An essay angle on how care models must reconcile ‘growth from within’ with ‘someone must reteach us.’
• XREF: Echoes the ‘reteach a thing its loveliness’ dynamic with nursing and caregiving as a model of restoration of one’s own attentional capacities — and parallels the editor’s recorded taste claim about small acts of decorum toward corpses outweighing practical logic. — connects to: Touch mediates self and Other by uniting what it also keeps distinct — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 351