If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention

If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You’re Not Paying Attention

Metadata

Author: The Convivial Society
Full Title: If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You’re Not Paying Attention
Category: #articles

Highlights

As the art historian Jennifer Roberts argued several years ago, “Just because something is available instantly to vision does not mean that it is available instantly to consciousness.” Or, as she also puts it, just because you have looked at something doesn’t mean that you have seen it. Seeing, in this sense, is a form of knowledge arising from a way of being that brings a greater measure of the fullness of reality to consciousness. According to Roberts, achieving this kind of knowledge and quality of experience requires “time and strategic patience,” which is a form of “immersive attention.”
In her view, the story we’ve been told about disenchantment already conditions us against the attention that we must necessarily bring to the world in order to perceive its enchanted quality. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think more than the story of disenchantment is at work here, but she is right to observe that we are trapped in a vicious circle. Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate. And this experience in turn reinforces the disinclination to attend to the world with appropriate patience and care. Looking and failing to see, we mistakenly conclude there was nothing to see.
What is there to do, then, except to look again, and with care, almost as a matter of faith, although a faith encouraged by each fleeting encounter with beauty we have been graced to experience. To stare awkwardly at things in the world until they cease to be mere things. To risk the appearance of foolishness by being prepared to believe that world might yet be enchanted. Or, better yet, to play with the notion that we might cast our attention into the world in the spirit of casting a spell. We may very well conjure up surprising depths of experience, awaken long dormant desires, and rekindle our wonder in the process. What that will avail, only time would tell.