On Paying Attention

My week with Susan and Marina

A woman at the post office cut me in line, her cat meowing in its carrier that still had the tags on it. The cat was beautiful; it was hard not to admire its luxurious fur through the mesh window it was looking at before it cried out from all the jostling around caused by her owner marching in front of me, parcel in her hand, thick, acrylic nails text away, readjusting the strap of the bag so many times I couldn’t tell if my eye was twitching.

MRZOVOLJAN! Cranky, bitter, saturnine, gloomy, dark; Mama and I laughed about this on Facetime when I called her this morning and we discovered this is what I am, the Croatian word for cranky that seems to not exist and either of our vocabularies, and now it is blinking across the top of the checkout window, flashing, bright lights to remind me that my mood this morning is souring, curdling slowly, exacerbated by this woman who so clearly doesn’t care. What the fuck! I say in my head. Someone taps my shoulder behind. Breathe, they say. Pay attention.

In Spring 2021 I bought myself Sontag Benjamin Moser’s biographical work on the life of journalist and writer Susan Sontag. It was a present to myself after finishing my undergraduate, a secret artifact I lugged overseas and have sat comfortably two-thirds of the way through, taking it from its coveted position on the top of my bookshelf every few months to see what happens next, to add a little more of Susan’s life into mine.

I remember confronting the chunky book at Strand Bookstore, the corner of the East Village I seemed to circle around constantly in those days, finding Susan’s coy smile at her desk, looking away from the camera with a cigarette in hand, mesmerising, jarring, intimidating, everything. I looked at her and she looked at me, I admired her poise and noticed where I felt gangly and awkward, making sense of the days-old breakup and new reality that hadn’t quite hit me yet that I was moving somewhere that wasn’t New York, all while looking at her on the front cover. In an instant, I knew I had to have it. Ever since then, she’s following me around.

It started when I started to notice her sitting at the opposite corner of our sofa, eyeing me from her newspaper. She liked this about me, the creature of habit I was, unrelenting from my reading position until I felt it was time to start the day. You know, you really need to get it together, she said to me just last week while I was sitting on my phone instead of reading the book next to me. I haven’t been able to maintain the same ritual, the same commitment to myself as I did in those last years of the 2010s and into the 2020s, but she understands. Pay attention, she says again, as we both turn back to our books.

I didn’t expect her to want to come to London with me but before I knew it she was stretched out in the row across from me, marvelling at how empty the plane was. We hung out as I wobbled through my first few weeks, picking blazers to pair with jeans that weren’t quite as baggy as you find them now, shoes narrower, hair longer. Maybe a big chop would be good! Frees the mind, was something I said in passing as we walked for groceries at the King Street Lidl in Hammersmith, and soon enough she had scissors in one hand and a styling brush in the other. Her presence was comforting, warming, I loved feeling her glow as we walked around bookshops and talked about everything; love, the world, what art could mean in a time of crisis as it felt more and more prevalent in my life.

The relationship that we’ve built together comes from years of understanding and listening, but we in reality, we have never spoken, Susan and I, not in the literal sense. She occupies a space in my life that is slightly more than the floater hanging around my left eye, waving around from time to time to remind me it is there, straddling a line between friend and idol but without all of the baggage. Her work over the years, ingested feverishly on trains and planes or while sat on my couch watching her interviews, has taught me more about myself and my thoughts than anything algorithmic or aiming to serve as an antidote for wading critical thinking skills. As people we gravitate towards things - artists, writers, species of flowers, shades of colours - things that make sense and ultimately make us and our existence make sense, small minutiae that make life worth living, even when it is London and it has rained for what has felt like a year, and will continue to rain until it doesn’t. Susan’s attitude towards paying attention and brutal honesty have brought a new clarity to my life. “Attention is vitality” she says as she sips coffee at my local cafe. It’s as if she’s known all along what I’ve needed.

The other day I walked from Borough to Shoreditch, not far, in the grand scheme, but walks in London still feel like one of those unheard of things, oh, you’re going to walk there, why walk, walking in London? It was one of those walks that really is just one satisfyingly long straight line and rather than subjecting myself to the shrieks and sharp turns of the tube I walked along my big fat straight line, skipping across the bridge and occasionally veering slightly to one side to maintain my northbound snake-like shape. The air was both warm and cold, eventually settling into a muddy middle ground, the eyes of pedestrians and passersby some of the brightest things on the street between dim lampposts. A double-decker bus halted to a stop in front of me with the sign PRIVATE PARTY set as its destination, the laughing, singing, gentle swaying and dancing with feathery boas wrapped around necks and glittery tops adorning bodies were hard not to admire. I looked at them and they looked at me and we exchanged a smile and a little wave as the light changed and I crossed in front of the bus to continue on. Where is there time, on a Monday night of all nights! I thought, running late for dinner, questioning why I would walk when the convenience of public transport was there, how could I move faster, be faster, propel myself ahead to the restaurant and then home and then to days in the future, when will I be ahead? But the time is in front of me, the time to pay attention is now. I am running late for dinner, yes, but running, walking and enjoying the weight of my feet against the concrete, the swishes of my coat and my hair bouncing, tucked neatly behind my ears. If I take in these moments, these ones right in my peripheral, what will become of me? I pay attention, I offer something else other than a first glance, I feed something greater than myself.

But it is not just paying attention for the sake of one self. It is a noticing of what is happening in the world around us, and taking stock of what our attention can do. In going down a rabbit hole of Sontag’s writings late one night I read select words of her from a collection of writers that have shared condolences and perceptions in the days after 9/11, much before I could read or write myself. So clear are her words towards the disconnect about America’s reality versus what we think it is, delusions about things being okay when they weren’t, sentiments that feel as though they could be written today about the many things we see in the news each day. Presence is more than an exercise of self-care; it is being alive and questioning what we do next, even if it is uncomfortable. It is a surrender towards the process itself of presence whilst willingly building that awareness within oneself. Reading and engaging with the work of Susan Sontag, both in real life and through these daydreams I’ve been having, has turned me more towards the process of paying attention, how all along I have been dying to pay attention but haven’t known how.

Have you met my friend Marina? Susan says as we stuff our faces with halloumi and falafel wraps in Deptford. I am on a break from a recording session and I can breathe, my schedule has shifted and rather than running across South and East London for the next 4 hours in a fit of anxiety. We have finished early and are breaking for lunch; there is time to walk, to talk, to feel the cold air in my nostrils as I inhale. You might like her, she says, and hands me her book.

Marina Abramović is someone I have long been fascinated with, having heard her name in the murmurings of my career and seeing her work in person for the first time at the Royal Academy of Arts, taken aback by its vulnerability and openness. Funnily enough, I tell her, I almost saw her live a few months ago at a show she was doing in Manchester, but I had another gig and thought I should do that instead. Was it worth it? Susan asks, her head cocked as she goes to take another bite. I ponder this immediately and don’t know what to say.

In the days that followed my recording Marina and I became tied at the hip. Her story was so fascinating; I found myself walking into walls just to keep up with her, though her modality walking through the walls themselves seemed to suit her better. We move between English and something Sebro-Croatian, exchanging stories of complicated Balkan families and musing on the value of art, and here again I find myself talking about the concept of presence. In reading Marina’s words about the evolvement of her practice, the idea of letting go comes back again and again, an individual commitment to transcending the self, opting for a collective presence, of being there, wherever ‘there’ may be, even if it is just you, even if no one else knows you are there with them. And then it hit me how her and Susan met, over the course of her move to New York, too shy to ask her to meet, and later at her 2002 exhibition The House With the Ocean View, where Susan left a note saying, I like your work, let’s hang out, on a napkin, leading to nearly daily visits to one another for 4 years.

I never expected this joining together of Susan and Marina in my mind, two women I have loved and respected for years, having such a beautiful friendship, but it makes sense, the meeting of two worlds to overlap into one, the value of such a bond in one’s lifetime, if only brief. They agree that a trio is not a conversation and I agree, and I am fascinated in watching them interact, and seeing my positions become concrete in our interactions.

Though beginning to fade away, their presence in my life this week has been nothing short of special. I am reminded of being a kid and discovering a good book for a first time, so attached to the movements of the characters, the feeling of the book sticking with me for longer than the act of reading it. Susan and Marina resemble this within my practice, people I come back to for advice again and again, encouraging me to both let go and pay attention.