Sustained attention reveals that the nonhuman world precedes and exceeds human-built reality

Evidence

Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along. Between, under, and amid all these things wound this entity that was older than I was, older than Cupertino. It represented a kind of primordial movement, even if its course had been altered by engineering in the nineteenth century. Long before cars drove from Whole Foods to the Apple campus, the creek moved water from Table Mountain to the San Francisco Bay. It continues to do this just as it always has, and whether I or any other humans care to notice. But when we do notice, like all things we give our sustained attention to, the creek begins to reveal its significance. Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it is not there to be productive; it is not there as an amenity. It is witness to a watershed that precedes us. In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence. — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 436

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Jane Jacobs’ concept of the city as an ecosystem, and to the idea of infrastructure as living system from the reader’s own ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay. — connects to: Directed attention does not weaken world-consciousness but relegates the world to ground — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 881; Attention, not technology, is what reveals the middle-scale world — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 66
• ADDENDUM: The creek as living infrastructure not ‘placed there to be productive’ directly complements the reader’s essay on trees as worldbuilding infrastructure — this is the natural-versus-manufactured-material counterpart.
• DEFINE: This is a concrete instance of attention as the faculty by which a world is ‘rendered’ — the creek’s significance emerges only under sustained attention.