Clifford Symposium “A Discipline of Looking”

A Discipline of Looking
Tim Lilburn, Professor at the University of Victoria

What do we do when we walk into a meadow or forest? Let’s suppose we are there for no particular purpose. We aren’t doing research, looking for food or rushing to an appointment. Though we are moving, we are idle, without intention. This is a crucially important moment – for us and for the world we move through. The old monks called such a space of time otium sanctum, holy leisure, and in it, our selves are being shaped, sustained, groomed, while the world is being rescued from a kind of alienation and an aesthetic state of unindividuated lumpiness. If all goes well, we are practicing a discipline of looking. Wasting time is an extremely important undertaking. Pablo Neruda said it was the poet’s fundamental work. Thus the practice of poetry is a slightly criminal activity. Your own looking in a state of leisurely, floating contemplative attention is also a deliciously transgressive – and procreative – act, which labors under no plan to be creative or helpful to yourself or the world. Seeing while in this state ideally can mark the appearance of shining specificity – that maple, that reed.