The gift of attentive love

The humidity is nearly visible in its thickness. Sand sticks to my toes as I walk the foamy line of limp waves lapping Casuarina Beach. Here is the ship-shaped outcrop my brother, Ben, and I used to climb. Surrounded by swelling eight metre tides, we’d pretend to sail the high seas. Up ahead is the arched Rapid Creek bridge that mad friends would jump off, tempting crocodiles who lurked in the murky brine. Tomorrow, we will head once more out to the waterfalls and plunge pools of Litchfield National Park. We used to go there to splash away the sticky heat with my friend, L. Tolmer Falls was our favourite, but Wangi was less of a walk through the searing scrub. I can still see us in our lurid 90’s shorts and hyper-colour T-shirts, cavorting down to the pandanus-fringed water under the white sun.

The past is not reclaimable, but being in the same spaces makes it feel closer, the spacetime gap narrowed ever so slightly. I feel it every time I return to Darwin, like I have now, to visit Mum and Dad. Three thousand kilometres north as the crow flies from where I now live, from where 95% of Australia’s population lives, every place up here has a memory, some so embedded in my psyche that I can almost see the ghosts of past scenes playing over settings. It fades a little when I go away.   

I return home. Two years after this trip, my parents are finally packing up to move away from Darwin and back “down south.” I never believed they really would. It can be a wrench leaving a place, cutting off that clearer view through time, and Mum has struggled at times with the idea of leaving Ben behind. But I thought that was overly sentimental. He’s not actually there, I counselled from afar for what felt like the hundredth time.

So, I am shocked by the visceral sense of disconnect I feel when they drive the Land Cruiser out of town for the last time, nearly 34 years to the day we had arrived as a young family. The worldline through Darwin is severed, and it feels freshly ripped from my mind and chest. Ben is up there all on his own. Despite my roiling insides, I presented to the Thursday meeting with my normal face and cadence. I cooked dinner calmly, spoke to friends, even while my chest and skull felt they might rupture. Again. Repeatedly, I am putting on this charade, hiding the despair that often threatens to choke me. So much about ourselves is hidden.   

A few months later, L visited Darwin and sent me a message:

“Just went to visit Ben. Took him a rock from Wangi, a gum nut from Tolma, a rock from Berry Springs, coral and a shell from Cas beach and a small packet of throw downs from cracker night.”

And she’d attached a picture of the items carefully arranged around his headstone.

I rarely see her anymore. Our lives have diverged, space and time between us. But she’d remembered me, remembered us, across this gulf. She had taken her physical presence to what remained of my brother’s physical presence in an act of attentive remembering and care. It felt a great gift. No one remaining in my day-to-day life other than my parents knew Ben. Sometimes, it feels like he didn't exist outside my head.

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” famously wrote Simone Weil. A French nearly-Catholic mystic whose body of short-form writing was largely published posthumously, including in the book Waiting for God, Weil focused intensely on the concept of attention, convinced careful attention was the “substance” of love of God and of neighbour. To bestow such attention, especially on someone who is suffering, is “very rare and difficult,” wrote Weil. It requires us to relinquish our ego and allow that there are other “centers” in this universe, others with internal worlds as powerful as our own.

I find Weil hard to read, often aphoristic and seemingly contradictory, but am compelled by some of her arguments, and this is one of them. Real attention is rare and difficult. How often do we feel unseen, especially in our suffering? How hard is it to see others as beings with wells of feeling and ineffable experiential marks etched on their souls as deep as in ourselves?

Mum’s face crumples suddenly into tears, and I am somewhat taken aback. I know, of course, she has lost a son and can deduce how this might feel. But there was little inkling in her outward persona of this deep grief moments ago, and its source feels unmoored from reality even now. “Being seems to us less and less concentrated the farther it is removed from us,” wrote Weil, and I can’t help wondering: does Mum really feel as anguished as I feel when I cry like that? My shameful musings should really induce more sympathy for my old friend K. The day Ben died, I had shown up to my regular training at the climbing wall, needing normality. On relating my grief with a dull voice and eyes I’m sure were hollow, K responded with, “yeah, I’ve had a difficult day too; work is hard at the moment.” I have barely spoken to her since. Aside from the separation of space and time, we are separated by our frequent inability to properly see one another, to—in Weil’s parlance—pay attention to another.

In highlighting this separation, Weil echoes Dostoevsky’s always incisive Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov who bemoaned that “another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I.” But Weil insists we can know, at least in part, if we pay attention. Paying attention, for Weil, manifested as immersing herself in the experience of others to better understand them. She sought out and listened to people outside the privileged circle she was born into. She ate no more food than soldiers were rationed at the World War II front and consigned herself to menial, exhausting and anonymous factory work for a year. This was her way of living her attention, of affirming and attempting to understand the experience of her neighbour, thus humanising them and loving them.

“Love your neighbour as yourself.” Familiar, and thus prone to becoming impotent, Weil encourages us to look at it with fresh eyes. “Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough,” she warns. Love, for Weil, starts with attention. It is when the good Samaritan “stops and turns his attention toward” the “little piece of flesh… bleeding beside a ditch” that his expression of love begins. For Weil then, to love your neighbour as yourself means seeing them—as you see yourself—as a “center” of human experience. Stop and act. The Good Samaritan stopped and saw the beaten traveller and then tended to his health. My childhood friend looked up from her day-to-day life long enough to notice our family’s new separation and sadness then saw a way to act in compassionate love, if only for a moment.

If it’s hard to attentively love even those who are emotionally or physically close to us, it’s even harder, by Weil’s reckoning, to love those further away. I think on this often. Our attention is not infinite. The refugee on my screen evokes my pity, a first step on the way to attentive love. But I don’t know their depths. I don’t feel their lost livelihood or dehumanising invisibility in displacement camps as they become mere pawns in geopolitical rifts. I don’t see either the relentless trampling of their hope by leaders who exert their power without seeing the humans under their feet. I can’t understand their cultural experiences. And, however much attention I try to give them, I will never know. Compassion fatigue in the modern world is real, and empathy always remains an imperfect link between limited persons. It is hard to love those far away in space and time.

Yet, I still find Ivan Karamazov’s opposite view more compelling. “One can really love only those who are far away,” he claims. “The people it is impossible to love are precisely those near to one.” As soon as a neighbour comes close, his love dissolves because “I smell bad, or have a stupid expression on my face, or because I once trod on his toes.” For Ivan, lumpen humanity gets in the way of deeply seeing someone else's suffering and loving them in it.

But perhaps Ivan and Weil aren’t as different as it first appears. “Contempt is the contrary of attention,” wrote Weil. And Ivan sees correctly that contempt or dismissiveness easily bubble up towards our imperfect neighbour when he is nearby and thus those imperfections are inevitably visible. To prevent that contempt we must, he argues, keep our neighbour at a distance. But in doing so, Ivan proffers a distant, abstract love. Weil instead wants us to look beyond this contempt, to, via attention, see our neighbour as “exactly like us,” warts and all.

Attention, Weil highlights, humanises the afflicted and, like the good Samaritan, gives “existence to a being other than himself” out of the “anonymous flesh lying inert by the roadside.” Attention is thus a creative act of love. Yet “God alone has this power” of creation. Dostoevsky’s Ivan therefore stops here: “Christ-like love for men is a miracle impossible on earth. He [Christ] was God. But we are not gods.” However, Weil, while agreeing that attentive love is a “miracle,” insists it is possible via “God, present in us.” We are capable of attentive love, argues Weil, but only because God works through us. “It is God in us who loves them” even, or especially, when we do not “think explicitly of God.”

I am thankful for the miracle of God’s love being revealed via human attentive love. The glimpses of transcendence in my life have always been evoked more strongly by human love than any direct experience of God. I am no mystic.