As my Good Letters colleague Jeffrey Overstreet did recently with his two-part post, “Something that I’m Supposed to Be,” one can adapt a longer talk into a blog post. In Jeffrey’s case, the talk was his plenary one at last year’s Glen Workshop, an occasion just as unforgettable in person as its recent written counterpart was memorable here on the blog.

With this year’s Glen Workshop West fast approaching—I’ll be teaching the Screenwriting/Playwriting seminar for a second time—I thought I would do something of the reverse and use this space on the blog to begin the meditations and preparations for my own upcoming plenary talk.

Last year my talk was all but prepared at this point, even five weeks out from the start of the workshop.

This year? Well, suffice it to say that with everything on my plate at the moment and a summer no less heavy with its demands than with its humidity, I’ve had to request a brief hiatus from the blog.

The theme for this year’s workshop is “Acts of Attention: Art as Discovery.” It’s a theme that calls for as much reflection right now, here, today and every day, as it does five weeks from now in Santa Fe. As the Glen brochure puts it:

“The poet Richard Wilbur once said, ‘The world’s fullness is not made but found.’ Yet in a fast-paced culture, it is all too easy to miss the fullness and beauty that surround us, to be distracted by the virtual and instant. What happens to the soul when it is isolated from the world as it is? Can art, something that is “made,” refocus our attention on the mystery and complexity of reality? How can art itself be a loving act of attention, one that returns us to a fuller sense of the world we inhabit?”

Look up the word attention in a dictionary and its more surface meanings don’t seem to help much with the Glen theme:

at·ten·tion (n.)
1 a : the act or state of applying the mind to something b : a condition of readiness for such attention involving especially a selective narrowing or focusing of consciousness and receptivity
2: OBSERVATION, NOTICE; especially : consideration with a view to action.

Look up the word’s etymology, however, and there is revelation to be had:

attend (v.)
c.1300, “to direct one’s mind or energies,” from O.Fr. atendre (12c., Mod.Fr. attendre) “to expect, wait for, pay attention,” and directly from L. attendere “give heed to,” lit. “to stretch toward,” from ad- “to” (see ad-) + tendere “stretch” (see tenet). The notion is of “stretching” one’s mind toward something. Sense of “take care of, wait upon” is from early 14c. Meaning “to pay attention” is early 15c.; that of “to be in attendance” is mid-15c.

Now we’re on to something. Quickly and curiously, my mind goes to the eschatological underpinnings that “to expect, wait for” suggest in the word’s root form at the head of the entry.

But even more so do I feel something like a breakthrough when I subsequently come to the notion of “stretching” inherent in the word.

Attention as a form of ‘“stretching” one’s mind toward something?’ Yes.

Because despite the old adage that “attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul,” I find it rather to be something that often requires a good deal of vigilance and intentionality—much like prayer itself.

I know what Nicolas Malebranche, the seventeenth-century French priest responsible for the adage, was getting at when he coined it, as I have surely experienced those moments of sensory and spiritual harmony.

But with all the competing claims upon our attention at any given moment, I have experienced tenfold those moments where present-minded attentiveness and prayer are to be fought for because only “the violent bear it away.”

The meaning of attention in its military context? “A position assumed by a soldier with heels together, body erect, arms at the sides, and eyes to the front.”

We can go deeper still into the idiomatic wisdom of language and common parlance: “to pay attention,” we say, rarely noting there is a cost and transaction implied therein.

If attention is a form of currency, how poor am I so much of the time.

So the discoveries to be born of attention, as this year’s Glen Workshop theme would have those who attend it consider, begin right inside the very word itself.

For a people themselves rooted in the Word, that seems like a good place to start.