This morning, I gave up. Sure, there was the darkened sky and the rain streaked windows. I wrote about those things, but I had nowhere to go with them. They didn’t remind me of a childhood memory. They didn’t call about some magical imagery. Dark clouds, rain streaks, both pitter and patter. “Attention without feeling is only a report.”
I was reading a poem by Robert Hass that wasn’t at all like a poem. It was in the form of a letter, “Not Going to New York: A Letter”. In the poem he references how looking out of a plane window at the snow on the the arroyos on the east side of the Sierras reminds him of his grandmother. One line later he writes about how in the house on Jackson Street he is the figure against the wall in Bonnard’s The Breakfast Room. I assumed it was a painting – it’s in the Brooklyn Museum. I looked it up and understood exactly what he was saying and who he was in that moment on Jackson Street.
What stopped me in my tracks was Hass’s attention to detail coupled with his expanse of experience. I can’t remember a single painting I’ve seen up close – at least not that way. I’ve seen lots of paintings in museums, but my mind would never connect them with a childhood memory. I’ve never placed myself in a painting. Reading this poem has me convinced that I’ve lived most of my life either not paying attention or paying the wrong type of attention: fleeting, in the moment attention as opposed to deep, close attention in which we build mental connections. Suddenly, I felt as though I had made a grave and irreversible mistake by not paying attention all these years. I began to wonder where I’ve been or if I should have been taking notes.
Maybe that’s the poem I’m meant to write. How the only story I can possibly write is full of holes and missing memories. An apology to my older self or a piece of advice to my younger self – pay attention to this, you might need it some day.