Redtree Times

BlueMoonWatch– At Little Gems, West End Gallery

I wonder whether there will ever be enough tranquility under modern circum­stances to allow our contemporary Wordsworth to recollect anything. I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

— Saul Bellow, Paris Review interview, 1966

In yesterday’s post, I listed a number of ways in which I, like most of us, am limited. Looking over the list later, I realized that I had left off one very important limitation:

A finite span of attention.

Distraction comes much too easily to me. My mind often shoots from one shiny object to the next. It can be any number of things, some important and some trivial beyond belief.

It ends up often feeling like a chaotic whirlwind of distractions with bits of news, things to be done, worries, tidbits of trivia, old song lyrics, movie lines, passages from literature, reruns of old memories, details from favorite paintings, exterior sounds that nag at the edge of my consciousness, and on and on and on. Ad infinitum.

Except…

Except for those times when I am painting and everything closes off and my attention is, like Saul Bellow says above, arrested in the midst of distraction. Whatever is playing in the background is suddenly unheard and unseen. I become unaware whether it is sunny, cloudy, raining or snowing outside the large picture window just several feet away.

The whirlwind pauses and there is stillness. The only thing I see and respond to is what is in front of me. My next move. My next stroke. The constant weighing and balancing of the colors and forms which keep shifting until I feel at some point as though I am in among them.

It’s as close to a meditative state as I can imagine.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen every time I stand before the easel or at the table. My finite attention span and the endless world of distraction are worthy and tenacious opponents.

But when it does happen, for that brief instant there is all encompassing calmness. It might be the eye of the storm or even infinity or eternity for all I know.

But I can’t worry about what it is or isn’t.

I can just calmly accept it with gratitude.

Now get the heck out of here– you’re distracting me.