The Base Camp

Learning how to pay attention

I have started one more project. Why? Writing is a way for me to clarify to myself what I’m already doing, and to deepen and expand what that activity is. Writing means putting your thoughts and feelings on display, and when done with a reflective attitude it becomes an act of meditative attention and honest reflection. In this regard, it can also be a means of undoing what I’m already doing, or might do in the future, as it reveals the knot of habits we call perception. Writing, then, is a kind of attention, and attention, at least some of the time, is a kind of writing. The one train’s the other.

In other words, we write to transform our perception of what we’re doing, and to give articulation to the pull of an ambient feeling, an articulation that if done well can ornament experience in the medium of words. Writing in this sense isn’t mere representation, but invocation, a means of bringing new things into view. At root, writing is similar to meditation, examinations of conscience, dialectical conversation, or therapy. You just are how your writing is, and there’s valuable information there, if you know how to look for it. These entries are about that process, but not only that.

Writing is revelatory because it’s a craft that makes demands on you, if you take the training it offers seriously. What are the demands? Writing demands that you become different, that you train your attention onto your subject matter, on the one hand, and that you relax that same attention, on the other. Writing is relaxed focus. Reading is much the same. Think honestly to yourself about the number of times you are able, really able, to conjure the resources needed to carefully attend to the text you’re reading. The act is difficult because close reading is downstream of close attending, and close attending is a mode of skillful perceiving that needs training.

But what’s happening here?

The focused consciousness of attention lets the object of your attention unfold into greater detail. Reading is one example, but think also of viewing a painting, an oak tree, or a sunset. The scene unfolds with the time of day, the quality of the season, or the arc of the weather. But it also unfolds with the quality of your attention. The shape of your attention is there, with the scene, giving space for it to unfold. In fact, the scene is your attention in concert with the phenomena present to your awareness. What does that mean? It means the timber of your own awareness participates in the revelation of detail, nuance, and understanding that you experience.

Attention and perception are not brute facts of physiology, they are skills you shape with your own activity, and both operate through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, but also through your reasoning mind, your emotions, and your conscience.

Writing has long been my central craft, but running The Side View (TSV) has taught me that working in audio, video, and print offers similar opportunities for creating transformations in perception, transformations that then feedback into the craft of creating the varied objects that I want to share with the public at large. I still have much to learn about these arts, and I want to investigate that process of learning here, mixing the philosophical and meditative aspects of writing with the practicalities of creating the conversations, articles, journals, and videos that TSV produces.

My private hope is to gain clarity about what I’m doing, to keep myself accountable by writing in public, and to simply reflect on the journey so far. My public hope is that these notes and entries can serve as a form of practical advice for other people who are navigating the world of new and old media creation, giving voice to what I suspect are common feelings and scenarios among those of who us are charting a different path. We will no doubt travel down many dead ends, but if we map them together and share them widely, the unfilled edges of the map will slowly come into view.

You can expect at least one entry from me every Friday. I will pull resources from my experiences creating TSV’s media offerings, including thoughts on editing, recording, funding, researching, designing, and distributing the artifacts we produce. I’ll also share a little bit about the experience of writing my book on askēsis and perception (forthcoming with Revelore Press), as well as assorted other philosophical musings. I’m calling this Substack The Base Camp because it’ll be my place to return to at the end of the week to collect my thoughts and share them with you all.

I look forward to discovering where we can go.

– Adam