"Bird"-ing

Good ideas from some (mysterious) masters of attention. Plus The Heard

Smithsonian Institution Archives, Acc. 11-007, Box 014, Image No. MNH-3403

The New Yorker recently published an ambitious and sprawling article on the subject of attention. Some of it — the cultural “battle for attention," the advertiser- and technology-led “attention economy,” and so on — is interesting, but maybe familiar. So today I want to share a few bits from the piece that I found original, fascinating, and useful.

The article picks up steam when we’re introduced to D. Graham Burnett, a historian of science at Princeton and co-editor of collection of scholarly essays on attention, currently at work on “a history of the scientific study of attention.” Eventually we learn that Burnett is associated with a “supposedly a secret international fellowship” called the Order of the Third Bird.¹ The article explains the group’s m.o.:

Participants in the Order would converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art for half an hour, and vanish, their twee-seeming feat of attention complete.

That, of course, got my attention.

The article’s author, Nathan Heller, ends up getting pretty good access to participants in the ostensibly secretive Order. Among other things, he gets a breakdown of the its principal ritual, which is a little more complicated than 30 minutes of staring; the “action” is actually has five parts.

I’ll summarize, quoting Heller and one of his sources.

1. Encounter. Participants arrive at a pre-chosen site (like a museum), wander, and settle on a work to consider — “usually it is the most desparate-looking work in sight.” (They are “supposed to find it by paying attention.”) This lasts seven minutes.

2. Attending. Next, participants line up in a side-by-side “phalanx” in front of the work, and silently attend to it for seven minutes. No judgments, or interpretations — just attention.

3. Negation. For the next seven minutes, participants step away from the work and “try to clear the object from their minds. Some lie down; some close their eyes.”

4. Realizing. Participants reassemble their phalanx and consider the work again. “A good way to think of Realizing is the question: What does the work need ?” Maybe it needs something specific, like a different location. But maybe it needs something more abstract or poetic like “children climbing on it” or “for you to hear its song.” Again: seven minutes.

5. Colloquy. Finally, participants disperse and “find somewhere quiet to sit, and write down your experience of the four phases.” Then, “a short while later,” everyone gathers in a cafe or some such and “take turns describing what they went through, distractions and all.”

Several Bird members emphasize that this shared conclusion is crucial — and it does sound like a good class or work-group exercise. Depending on how this is carried out, and how many people are involved, it could quite easily attract attention, and the article describes several overtly performative instances. And that’s not for everybody.

But it’s easy to think of ways to tweak and vary the exercise (like focusing on things other than art works). For instance, Burnett and others have also devised “a walk-by form” of the practice: “Attending happens on the approach to the work; Negation is the instant of reaching it; and Realization happens over the shoulder, while walking away.” I imagine you could dream up your own iterations.

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(I’m leaving out a lot. The Order has all kinds of theatrical trappings and precious vocabulary that all sound fun; there’s a semi-scholarly and quasi-artistic element to the practice, and I’m sure the playful secrecy is part of the attraction. I may revisit some of that in the future. But it’s a lot to explain, and right now I just wanted to tell you about the stuff you can actually try!)

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Later, the article mentions the Bird-adjacent Strother School of Radical Attention and The Friends of Attention, which conduct workshops in schools and the like; I’d never heard of either, but they sound great! Again, a lot more to explore in the future. For now, here’s how Heller recounts one of the Strother exercises:

We sat in a big circle of chairs; daylight streamed through a set of floor-to-ceiling windows.

“In a moment, what I’m going to do is invite you to choose some spot in this room that you can focus your eyes on,” [program director Peter] Schmidt said. “Then I’m going to invite you, keeping your eyes fixed, to notice something at the edge of your vision.”

He waited ten seconds while we did the exercise, then rang a bell.

“To recap, you had your eyes fixed on some point, and then some other part of you was moving throughout your field of vision,” he said. “The question here is: What was that part of you? What moved?”

Attention, of course.

That seems like the place to end for today.

• Here’s the link to that New Yorker article again.

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THE HEARD

Sharing one randomly overheard song that I’ve enjoyed lately: Little unexpected bursts of delightful music are definitely things I savor.

Caught this on KCRW the other night — and added it to the Talkover 2024 playlist:

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HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND!

• As always, I value your feedback (suggestions, critiques, positive reinforcement, constructive insults, etc.), as well as your tips or stories or personal noticing rituals, things we need a word for, and of course your icebreakers: consumed@robwalker.net. Or use the comments.

And thanks for reading …
rw

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1. Here’s a related op-ed (gift link) co-written by Burnett on attention, including one inspired by Geroges Perec — who also inspired one of the prompts in the TAoN book!