Sunday 30 December 2007

Pic of the day: "My soul becomes richer." Kagami from Lucky*Star is talking about her precious light novels (a form of literature that in Japan lies between comics and actual books) as compared to the manga which her friend Konata prefers. But at least both of them are able to draw some joy on their own rather than depending on someone else to make it all alright.

Attention is milk

I mean that almost literally, just not quite. Obviously attention is not a white fluid. But it is secreted by the mother to nourish her baby, and then a lot of people keep drinking it for the rest of their lives, just from different sources.

For less brainy mammals, milk is pretty much all that is needed. Not so with apes, dolphins and us. Especially dolphins and us. If you don't enmesh a baby in attention, it will stop growing, get sickly and die even if you give it all the milk it needs. Infants need a lot of attention. They must be touched, talked to, they must see moving living faces. The ability to recognize a face develops very early (though the ability to tell them apart comes only after 6-9 months).

In humans, body and soul (or psyche) are not just tightly connected, not just interwoven, they are inseparable in life. Each influences the other. And the human baby, being born very early, is more helpless than most. It needs help to nourish its body, and it needs help to nourish its soul.

The human baby cannot process the food that exists around it in nature. The mother must do that, and then she feeds the baby through her milk. The baby has a digestive tract specialized for milk, and only later does it become able to process other foods, a little at a time. Likewise the human baby cannot process beauty, truth, virtue, purpose or meaning. All its little unfinished brain can process in that direction is attention. The mother must produce this attention that keeps the unfinished soul assured that it is real, that it exists. Even negative attention manages that, but it is a dubious diet compared to love. I guess most infants get a bit of each, though hopefully most of the positive kind.

Attention makes us feel real. It is no surprise that we keep craving this throughout childhood and into adult age. So desperate can even grown people be for attention that they will harm themselves or others just to get attention. Many quarrels and scenes are simply staged theatrics to get attention, although this may not even be clear to those involved. Conversely, the frantic dating many people engage in is also a way to get attention. Dates are very attention-intensive, and ideally both parts get away from it with their attention need filled. But often you will see that some are basically selling themselves for attention, trying to bargain with sexual favors, in part or in full. There are also many other acts of desperation that the human mind may give in to, in order to be confirmed as real through the attention of others.

But must it be so? I should probably not be the one to shout the loudest: It can be argued that the theist religions (those that have a personal deity) basically channel an unseen attention to the believer. "God sees you" may be scary, but it is infinitely less scary than "Nobody cares whether you exist." Is the divine attention then a pious illusion, a daydream to make life bearable? I think anyone who has both daydreamed and had religious experiences will find that notion ridiculous. If it is fake, it must at least be elevated to the status of hallucination, for it is if anything an experience more real than our own memories. But because if its subjective status, it may not be available to all, or (more likely) not immediately. Besides, some people just don't like gods, but they still don't think of themselves as simply a walking slab of meat. What about them?

I agree with James Redfield that being able to sense the beauty around us is a sign of awakening to a higher life. Furthermore I agree with Robert W. Godwin that beauty really exists. While the standards of beauty vary (especially with levels of civilization), is is not so that we can just randomly decide that from now on this object will be beautiful. A scene in nature, or a work of art, has beauty beyond our control. At most we can open or close our souls to that beauty. And even if we open ourselves to the beauty of a place or an object or a piece of music, we do not deplete it. If anything, perhaps we add to it. There are masterworks of art that have been admired for generations now, and the beauty just keeps flowing, as if there is an endless reservoir somewhere outside our mundane creation. And as it flows into the world, beauty lifts us from a barbarian mode of life to something higher, more meaningful, more purposeful if all goes well. And like the gentle face we saw on our first day, it assures us that there is something real in the world, and we are part of that.

Being a knowledge person, I may find it just as easy to process truth as beauty. Your mileage may vary. There is certainly a lot of truth to find, and unless you practice some very shallow postmodern deconstruction, you should be able to feel it calling out to you. Even people who insist that they have no soul, that they only speak because the electrons in their brains move them to do so, will fight with tooth and claw for what they perceive to be truth. Others are inspired by virtue, be it sacrifice or heroic valor. You will notice that a lot of popular culture such as novels and movies deal with this topic. People are drawn to these sources of "realness", just like they were drawn to attention: To feed the soul, whatever now that is. But my guess is that to the raw beginner, beauty may well be the easiest of them to get started with. It is like a stained glass window through which the light from a more real world shines into ours, giving it substance beyond mere matter.

That I can only speak of these things in metaphors does not mean they are any less real. Rather it means that we learn language while we are still in a simpler, childlike mode of operation, while our brains can only support a mind that looks at concrete things. On the contrary, the world of forms and objects is always in flux, but far more durable are truth, beauty and virtue. Thus the legends live on long after the body of form has returned to dust, and so also do great works of art and insights that are gained for the benefit of generations that will follow.

In the bodily realm, milk is still a big part of my diet. I am led to believe that a human could subsist through life solely on milk products. But of course we would not want to do that. It would be boring, at the very least. Hopefully you or someone you know will find these words an encouragement toward a varied diet for the soul as well. One in which the other food groups come into play: Beauty, Truth and Virtue as the most basic. As an added bonus, whenever someone breaks out of the loop of attention hunting, they gain some ability to feed those around them... to make life on Earth a little richer for us all.