Church Times: Art review: In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World (Fitzrovia Chapel, London W1)

My latest exhibition review for Church Times is on In Attendance: Paying Attention in a Fragile World at Fitzrovia Chapel:

'It draws on the chapel’s heritage as a place of sanctuary and reflection by encouraging visitors to explore attention not as rigid focus, but as a receptive and dynamic engagement with the world, inspired by the philosophy of Simone Weil.

Weil wrote: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” Ellen McGrath Smith has noted that invoking “the spiritual writing of Simone Weil”, including that assertion, broadens the possibility for poetry, as it also does for art, as prayer, regardless of content, since all such acts are acts of “acute mindfulness”. David Miller finds an earlier source for such ideas in Nicolas Malebranche, who said that attention “is the natural prayer of the soul”.

Weil, he suggests, echoed this, consciously or not, in her similar assertion.'

Other of my pieces for Church Times can be found here. My writing for ArtWay can be found here. My pieces for Artlyst are here, those for Seen & Unseen are here, and those for Art+Christianity are here.

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Joni Mitchell - Both Sides Now.

Poets paying attention to prayer

I've written a lot on the theme of paying attention equating to prayer. See, for example, my series of posts entitled 'Seeing is Receiving: The art of contemplation' or my talk on 'Paying attention through art.'

I've recently come across W.H. Auden and David Miller saying essentially the same things:

W. H. Auden once said: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer.”

He also said, "I think what is important is to teach ... the technique of prayer. That is, the technique of paying attention and of forgetting oneself ..."

"To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention - on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God ..."

David Miller expands on this in the notes of his Introduction to 'The Alchemist's Mind':

'“Attentiveness is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (Simone Weil, quoted in Jacques Cabaud, Simone Weil: A Fellowship in Love, NY: Channel Press, 1964, p 251). (The phrase occurs in a letter to the poet Joë Bousquet.) If the philosopher Nicholas Malebranche said that attention “is the natural prayer of the soul”, Weil echoed this, consciously or not, when she wrote that “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love”. (Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, London/NY: Routledge, 2002, p 117. The Malebranche quotation is known to many of us, and certainly to me, from Paul Celan’s famous speech “The Meridian” (1960), in: Celan, Collected Prose, tr Rosmarie Waldrop, NY: Routledge, 2003, p 50.) (No space here for going into Weil’s fierce critique of the imagination in relation to her espousal of attention.) See my essay “Robert Lax’s 21 pages”, op cit, where I speak of attention or attentiveness in relation to a contemplative or meditative approach. Attention is what persists, obdurately, and penetrates and uncovers... disinterestedly, and by staying with its subject, rather than by some act of force. Attention is faithful to what it attends to. It aspires to a form of lucidity, no matter how complex (and without ignoring this complexity or trying to falsely simplify it). It is an absorption into things, but a thoughtful one.'

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Arvo Pärt - Annum Per Annum.