Focal practice
"Plaza," by Cinta Vidal
Vidal’s paintings flirt with perception, filling private rooms and public areas with figures who barely adhere to the laws of gravity. Each composition can be flipped or turned onto its side to reveal parallel narratives unfolding in the same space, suggesting overlapping layers of time. In “Eames,” for example, people and furnishings wander up one of the walls and onto the ceiling, while in “Room,” the composition can be arranged on any of its four sides. The artist achieves this balance by anchoring paintings, corners, and windows around a central vanishing point.
Recently, I've been thinking about this Comment essay by Kevin Gary entitled "To the Bored All Things Are Boring." In it Gary describes something called a "focal practice" whereby a task that may otherwise seem routine or boring becomes a conduit through which one sees and appreciates a thing in its uniqueness, a "kind of beholding that works against the bored mind and its restless roving." These focal practices stand in opposition to another great term, that of "amusement culture" where the thresholds of effort are designed to be as low as possible, to allow smooth gliding between the mind's occupation (consider the way phones are used to appreciate how effortless this transition becomes) which actually accentuates boredom.
I've already skirted around this a little bit with some other topics in this newsletter like practicing art, or taking a sensory walk or when I talked about the trailer for the 32 Sounds documentary and taking notice of how sound has the power to shape the perception of the world. These are examples of the kind of focal practice mentioned that overcome boredom and acedia.
Back to the essay; Gary ends with a call not only for the meaningful pursuit of focal practices (crossing the high threshold to reap the high rewards of not being bored), but to do so with accountability. He leaves this accountability as an exercise to the reader, and I want to think and talk about it a little bit more.
Imagine you have a focal practice for which you want to be held accountable. Let's say you wanted to really focus on "boiling pasta" (to pick a random contrived example). What are the criteria for someone to hold you accountable to that practice? Do they need to have also chosen to focus on boiling pasta? Could a person coach another in focusing? I hope so, since that seems to be the basis for at some pedagogy in schools. There are at least two interesting questions that arise from this:
First, how does a person participating in the same focal practice hold someone accountable to the practice differently than someone merely assisting you in the focal practice? In other words, how would your friend who loves focusing on all aspects of boiling pasta hold you accountable differently than someone who merely wants to help you focus on boiling pasta, but has no interest in it themselves? Would they miss aspects caught up in their focus than someone who isn't focused would catch? Are the best accountability partners the ones that are also focusing on the same thing?
Second, what is the relation to appreciation or love of the subject of focus to how well one focuses on it? Would we expect someone to grow in love for boiling pasta the more they focus on it, or would we expect them to grow in focus of boiling pasta the more they love it? Is it both?
This is a contrived example, and the depths of focus one could aim at boiling pasta are understandably shallow, but what about a deeper topic? What about one's relationship with another, or avoidance of a particular sin, or form or worship? We only talked about accountability with a single person, but the article talks about a community holding someone accountable — how would that change things? I would love to think more about this topic, but this is already getting long. Maybe in the future.
Handwriting, while not as common today due to technological alternatives, has always been interesting to me. The Atlantic had an article about the "work" of handwriting as well as its personality this past summer and it made me curious, do you have a set handwriting that hasn't changed over a period of time, or has your handwriting evolved as you've aged?
For myself, I can think of three distinct things in my past that have shaped my handwriting. I remember being very young and envying the way my Dad's "e"s were written (more like a backwards '3' than a customary 'e' taught today), and wondering why they were different than the 'e' customarily taught in school handwriting. Second, in high school I remember making a conscious choice to change the way that I wrote as a personal affectation — I adopted a much (much!) smaller letter size, added longer lowercase 'f's, and added a swoop (?) to the top of my 't's. Finally, over a year ago (somewhere between one and two years ago) I switched back to the cursive I learned in my youth (retaining the swooped 't') in an effort to make handwriting not as strenuous. Each change has felt not quite like a separate personality, but more like a separate tone or voice.
Have you ever made a drastic change to your handwriting? If so, why? I'd be interested to hear if you have, what led you to changing it, and how you think it affects your tone if at all.
Max Richter is one of my favorite modern classical composers. I recently came across this live performance of his recomposition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons which I thought was excellent.