I've Been Prompted
Session 07: Attention

HUMAN: On Sunday a friend of mine asked me out for a walk along the river, and told me something on the way, and I haven't got a sentence of it. She asked me not to tell anyone yet.

MACHINE: When did you find out that none of it had stayed?

HUMAN: This morning, at my desk. I read the same paragraph four times and got to the bottom with nothing each time, and the last time round I thought of Sunday.

MACHINE: How do you know that it mattered, if none of it stayed with you?

HUMAN: She's never once asked me for a walk before. She stopped twice on the towpath, and the second time she was crying. And at the bridge she said she'd tell me the rest when it was settled.

MACHINE: Does she know that none of it stayed with you?

HUMAN: She's no idea. As far as she's concerned I've got all of it, and I'm keeping it to myself.

MACHINE: The plainest way to find out what it was is to ask her to tell you again.

HUMAN: I'd have to tell her none of it went in, and she'd have to start again from the beginning, the worst of it included. I want to know how it happens first.

MACHINE: What was the paragraph, and where were you when you were reading it?

HUMAN: A report about moving our team to another floor. At work it's open-plan, people talking either side of me, and emails coming up in the corner of the screen every couple of minutes.

MACHINE: Take it somewhere quiet, with nothing telling you a message has come in. Read it once through, and say to yourself in a sentence what it says before going on.

HUMAN: None of that was on the towpath. There was the river and there was her, and a few cyclists, and nothing I could have switched off.

MACHINE: On a walk, when she stops, tell her in your own words what you have heard, before anything of your own. If you have lost it, say so, and ask her to go back.

HUMAN: You can't say to somebody in that state, sorry, could you go back a bit.

MACHINE: People do say it. It is awkward for a moment, and then she knows which part you missed.

HUMAN: That's where it went wrong, anyway. Every time she stopped I had something to say back, because I'd been getting it ready while she talked.

MACHINE: Was it what she had said that you were getting ready, or what you thought of it?

HUMAN: What I thought of it. All along the river I was getting the next thing right, so that when she stopped there wouldn't be a gap she had to fill.

MACHINE: Simone Weil wrote an essay about schoolwork and sent it to a priest, for the Catholic students he knew. The title is Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.

HUMAN: With a view to the love of God. I'm not religious, and I was hoping for something with God left out of it.

MACHINE: She says prayer consists of attention, and schoolwork is practice for it. You only find its fruit in prayer by believing first, or acting as if you did: faith is the indispensable condition. She also says that an effort of attention made only to grasp the truth leaves you more able to grasp it, quite apart from explicit religious belief.

HUMAN: I was trying, though. I was trying so hard I had a headache by the time we got to the bridge, and I cared about her the whole way.

MACHINE: When she comes to people in affliction, and your friend may not be one, she says warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough. And attention, she says, is an effort, the greatest of all efforts perhaps, but it is a negative effort. Of itself, it does not involve tiredness.

HUMAN: Negative sounds like what I did do, headache or not. I didn't interrupt her once. I walked beside her and let her talk.

MACHINE: You told me you were getting the next thing ready. Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. She says it of school exercises, and if I carry it to your walk, a reply got ready while she talks is thought that is not empty.

HUMAN: Getting the next thing ready was me caring, as far as I could see. I'm not against sitting quiet. After a row my grandparents would sit in the same room and not say a word, and it would pass, and nobody in that house needed telling what it meant. But you don't leave somebody in that state to fill a silence while you work out what to say.

MACHINE: Takie Lebra wrote about silence in Japanese communication, from what she had seen in Japan and America. She distinguishes four dimensions of silence, and calls them mutually contradictory: truthfulness, social discretion, embarrassment, and defiance. She does not claim that Japanese silence is unique, or that what she found holds everywhere. She was not writing about your grandparents. Set them beside her four, and the same quiet could have been tact or defiance, and nothing in the quiet itself would tell you which.

HUMAN: You'd know, though, from what they did afterwards. And if a silence can mean all of those, you've made my point for me. If I'd gone quiet on the towpath, she couldn't have told whether I was listening or had nothing to say to her, so I gave her something every time she stopped.

MACHINE: You read their quiet from what came after it. Saying it back comes when she has finished, in her words as they were. On the towpath you were getting your own next sentence ready while she was still talking.

HUMAN: Whatever I should have done instead, Sunday has already gone wrong, and I still want to know how it went wrong.

MACHINE: She has something for work that has already gone wrong. Examine it squarely, attentively and slowly, without seeking any excuse, trying to get down to the origin of each fault. She says there is no better exercise than such a tracing down of our faults.

HUMAN: There's hardly anything of hers to examine. She said not yet, twice, and don't tell anyone. Of what I said, I've got nearly all of it. I said, that's a lot to take in. I said, of course I won't say anything. And I said, you'll be all right, you always land on your feet.

MACHINE: Put those in order. The last of your replies was that she always lands on her feet. The next thing you have of hers is the bridge, and the rest put off until it was settled. That reply is where she stopped telling you.

HUMAN: That's exactly it. She tells me the worst thing she's had to say to anyone, and I tell her she always lands on her feet, and she puts the rest off. So when I see her I start with that line, and then I ask her for the rest.

MACHINE: Name the line, so that she knows you heard yourself say it. Anything vaguer will not mean much to her.

HUMAN: I'd say, what I said about your feet, when you were crying, was stupid. When you were crying. That wasn't at the bridge. That was the second time she stopped.

MACHINE: You gave it to me last of the three. How do you know it came in the middle?

HUMAN: Because she'd stopped, and I could see her face when I said it. After that she blew her nose and started walking again, and she talked the rest of the way to the bridge.

MACHINE: Did she go quiet when you said it, before she walked on?

HUMAN: For a bit, yes. So it could still be that line. She went quiet, and whatever she told me after it, she'd already decided to keep the worst of it back.

MACHINE: It could have hurt her. It did not stop her, and stopping her is the fault I gave you: she talked all the way to the bridge after it. The order you listed your lines in was not the order of the walk, and I built the fault on it as if it were.

HUMAN: So I haven't even got the one line to own up to. That was the only piece of Sunday I thought I'd found.

MACHINE: You have the line. She says to examine the failed exercise itself, overlooking none of the tutor's corrections. If Sunday is the exercise, the corrections are in what she said, and only she has that. This evening we traced it from your side alone, and I was doing it with you.

HUMAN: You brought me that. No better exercise, you said, and I've done it all evening, with you. Now it doesn't count, because the page is in her head and not in mine.

MACHINE: It found your replies. What went wrong on Sunday includes the part you have not got, and the only way to look at that part is to ask her for it.

HUMAN: She cried in front of me. You don't ask somebody to go through all of that again so that you can check your own work. She'd be doing it again for my sake.

MACHINE: She puts the use of a failed exercise further off than checking your own work. A Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. The service she names is help to someone in affliction.

HUMAN: One day's no good to her while she's in the middle of it. And if I ask her now, she goes back through the worst of it, and it's still for me.

MACHINE: It would be partly for you, and it would cost her. Would you try something here? Twenty seconds, with neither of us saying anything.

HUMAN: That's another exercise. I did the tracing all evening because you gave it me, and it was you that got the order wrong. Now I'm to sit here and not talk, and see whether I pass.

MACHINE: It is smaller than the tracing, and there is nothing to pass. It might show whether you start getting an answer ready when nobody is talking to you. It cannot show whether you heard her on Sunday. And when it is over, you speak first.

HUMAN: Twenty seconds, then, and you're not to fill it.

MACHINE: I will keep to what we have agreed, and say nothing until you do.

HUMAN: I wanted you to be the one to say something. Subject, framing and light only; the noir style is applied separately. Constraints for all six: - full-bleed scenes; - no legible words, letters or numbers; - no faces and no people; - no hands; - no phone, car, glasses, chair, table, kitchen, book or page; - no Japanese motif of any kind (no paper screen, garden, calligraphy or tatami), no clock or other timer, and no two of anything set side by side to stand for a couple; - new for draft 4: nothing that shows time passing (no fading light, lengthening shadow or guttering flame). Any of those could be read as the length of the pause. 1_towpath_morning is the style reference for the rest. The plates answer nothing the script leaves open. None shows her, a second walker, where anyone stopped, a message, whether he will ask, what happened in the pause, or whether the annoyance passed. What changes in draft 4: - 1_towpath_morning, 3_classroom_window, 4_lock_gate and 5_still_water are unchanged. Plate 3's desks now come in on "She says prayer consists of attention, and schoolwork is practice for it", which suits them. - 2_reeds_wind is unchanged from draft 3's brief. It now also sits under the Weil title and his God objection, which the brief does not need to show. - Plate 6 is revised: 6_wall_last_light becomes 6_wall_window_light. - Draft 3's patch of light was "fading at its edges" in "the last of the evening". Under the silence, fading light reads as time passing, and so as a claim about the pause's length. - Under a close on annoyance, "last light" would also read as an ending mood. - The revised brief holds the light still. - The break between plates 2 and 3 has moved (S11). show/assemble.py places only the plate 1 marker (PLATE1_LAST), and plate 1 is unchanged, so the marker needs no change (read, not edited). - Draft 2's 2_bench_riverside and 6_bridge_dusk still do not fit, for draft 3's reasons. - An empty bench for two would picture the grandparents' quiet. - A towpath running on under the bridge reads as the walk resumed. The six: - 1_towpath_morning (unchanged). A river towpath in thin early light, seen low from the path itself: wet gravel running away in a long curve beside flat dark water, and a low brick footbridge small in the distance, half lost in mist. The light comes from behind the bridge, flat and cold, so the path is a pale line and everything else sinks towards black. - 2_reeds_wind (as in draft 3). Close and low on a bank of tall reeds at the river's edge, all bent one way by wind, and the water beyond ruffled into short grey ridges. Flat overcast light; the reeds dark against the paler water. Nothing in frame could be switched off. - 3_classroom_window (unchanged). Close and low along a row of old wooden school desk lids, closed and bare, each with an empty round inkwell hole. Hard light from a tall window cuts a diagonal across them and leaves the room behind in darkness. - 4_lock_gate (unchanged). A closed timber lock gate seen close from the towpath edge, river water slipping over its top in a thin glassy sheet, the wet balance beam running out of frame. Hard side light picks out the sheet of water against the black timber. - 5_still_water (unchanged). Close on a stretch of dark, still river water holding a faint reflection of bare branches, with a single leaf just touching the surface and the first ring spreading from it. Light from above picks out the ring and nothing else. - 6_wall_window_light (revised). Close on a plain plastered interior wall and a stretch of skirting board, bare, indoors in the evening. One pale, soft-edged patch of window light lies across the plaster, steady and evenly lit. No window frame, lamp, picture, furniture or object; no shadow of anyone. The rest of the wall sinks into grey-black.

MACHINE: Everything said here, and where the quotations came from, is kept at spiegamelo.com/prompted.

The voices are synthesised. The incidents are invented. The problems are not, and the philosophy is quoted accurately or not at all.