by Guy Claxton
In this process of attentive resonance, knowledge does not become the object of explicit thought; rather it implicitly dissolves itself in a gathering sense of the situation as a whole. There is an apocryphal story of a venerable factory boiler that broke down one day, and of the old man who was called to fix it. He wandered around among its convoluted pipework, humming quietly to himself and occasionally putting his ear to a valve or a joint, and then pulled a hammer out of his toolbag and banged hard on one small obscure corner. The boiler heaved a deep sigh and rumbled into life again. The old man sent in a bill for £300, which the manager thought excessive, so he sent it back with a request that it be itemised. When it came back, the old man had written:
for tapping with hammer: 50p
for knowing where to tap: £299.50p.
Similarly, the painter J. M. Whistler, at the trial of John Ruskin, was asked by the judge how he dared ask £350 for a ‘Nocturne’ that had taken him only a few hours to paint. Whistler replied that the fee was not for the painting, but for ‘the knowledge of a lifetime’.
In the late nineteenth century, three new professions came into being that explicitly relied on the ability to read clues: the authentication of artworks, police detection, and psychoanalysis. In the mid-1870s, Giovanni Morelli developed a method for discriminating original paintings from copies and fakes, based not on overall composition or draughtsmanship but on the execution of such tiny details as earlobes and fingernails. He argued that it was precisely in these unimportant details, when both the ‘master’ and the copyist were ‘off guard’, that differences of technique would manifest themselves most clearly. As with a casual signature, rather than a self-conscious script, it was in these inadvertent trivia that personality would reveal itself – but only to the eye which understood this to be the case. Like the hunter, one had to be alert to the presence of meaning in the scraps and marginalia.
Morelli directly influenced the development of the ‘science’ of detection, which was to be dramatised by the emerging writers of detective fiction, such as Gaboriau in France in the late 1870s, and, a little later, most famously, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. Gaboriau, in one of his ‘Monsieur Lecoq’ adventures, contrasts the novel approach of the detective Lecoq with the ‘antiquated practice’ of the old policeman Gevrol, ‘who stops at appearances, and therefore does not succeed in seeing anything’.2 While in the Sherlock Holmes story called ‘The Cardboard Box’, which begins with the mysterious arrival, at the home of ‘an innocent maiden lady’, of a box containing two severed ears, Holmes literally ‘morellises’. Dr Watson reports: ‘Holmes paused, and I was surprised, on glancing round, to see that he was staring with singular intentness at the lady’s profile.’ And Holmes later explains:
You are aware, Watson, that there is no part of the body which varies so much as the human ear . . . I had, therefore, examined the ears in the box with the eyes of an expert, and had carefully noted their anatomical peculiarities. Imagine my surprise then, when, on looking at Miss Cushing, I perceived that her ear corresponded exactly with the female ear which I had just inspected . . . I saw at once the enormous importance of the observation. It was evident that the victim was a blood relation, and probably a very close one.3
Sigmund Freud too was influenced, in his developing formulation of the psychoanalytic method, by Morelli, and quite possibly by Conan Doyle as well. Freud is recorded as speaking of his fascination with the Sherlock Holmes stories to one of his patients (the so-called ‘wolf-man’). Certainly he had become intrigued by the techniques of Morelli at least ten years before he began to develop his ideas about psychoanalysis in print. In a retrospective essay, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, published in 1914, Freud writes of this influence thus:
Long before I had any opportunity of hearing about psychoanalysis, I learnt that a Russian art-connoisseur, Ivan Lermolieff [a pseudonym of Morelli’s], [was] showing how to distinguish copies from originals . . . by insisting that attention should be diverted from the general impression and main features of a picture, and he laid stress on the significance of minor details . . . which every artist executes in his own characteristic way . . . It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis. It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish heap, as it were, of our observations.4 (Emphasis added)
It is interesting to observe, in this context, the changing approach to medical diagnosis over the course of the last two hundred years. The process of detection and identification of disease these days is often devoid of this leisurely resonance of attentive observation with the working knowledge of a lifetime’s experience. The modern general practitioner makes a succession of snap decisions as to either the nature of the disorder with which she is confronted, or what further objective, ‘scientific’ tests to order. She is now so rushed, and so enchanted (as we all are) by technology, and technological ways of thinking, that she generally prefers to trust a read-out from a machine over a considered clinical judgement. An instrument gives us ‘real knowledge’ about the patient, whereas the poor doctor on her own can offer nothing more substantial than an ‘opinion’. Reliance on informed intuition seems increasingly ‘subjective’, risky and old-fashioned. As medical historian Stanley Reiser says:
Without realising what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence . . . only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence . . . He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis, he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists; he also relinquishes control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgement.5 (Emphasis added)
Yet throughout the history of medicine, the doctor has functioned more like the tracker or the detective than a technician. And even today there are striking examples of this attentive, resonant intuition at work. There is the much-retailed account of the day the Dalai Lama’s personal physician, Yeshi Dhonden, visited Yale Medical School, for example. He gave a demonstration to the assembled group of sceptical Western doctors of traditional Tibetan medical diagnosis by examining a woman patient with an undisclosed illness. On approaching the woman’s bed, Yeshi Dhonden asked her no questions, but simply gazed at her for a minute or so before taking her hand and feeling for her pulse. Richard Selzer was one of the physicians present:
In a moment he has found the spot, and for the next half-hour he remains thus, suspended above the patient like some exotic golden bird with folded wings, holding the pulse of the woman beneath his fingers, cradling her hand in his. All the power of the man seems to have been drawn down into this one purpose. It is palpation of the pulse raised to the state of ritual . . . his fingertips receiving the voice of her sick body through the rhythm and throb she offers at her wrist. All at once I am envious – not of him, not of Yeshi Dhonden for his gift of beauty and holiness, but of her. I want to be held like that, touched so, received. And I know that I, who have palpated a hundred thousand pulses, have not felt a single one.
Finally Yeshi Dhonden laid the woman’s hand down. He turned to a bowl containing a sample of her urine, stirred it vigorously, and inhaled the odour deeply three times. His examination was over. He had still not uttered a single word. His diagnosis, whatever it was, would be based solely on his protracted attention to the appearance, the feel and the smell of the woman’s sick body. Back in the conference room Yeshi Dhonden, through his young interpreter, delivered his verdict in curiously poetic terms. ‘Between the chambers of the heart, long, long before she was born, a wind had come and blown open a deep gate that must never be opened. Through it charge the full waters of her river, as the mountain stream cascades in the springtime, battering, knocking loose the land, and f
looding her breath.’ Finally the woman’s consultant disclosed his diagnosis: ‘congenital heart disease: interventricular septal defect with resultant heart failure’. Unless he was very lucky, or had been secretly primed, we may conclude, with the originally sceptical Selzer, that Yeshi Dhonden was ‘listening to the sounds of the body to which the rest of us are deaf’. Having stilled his mind through the practice of meditation, he looks, listens, feels and smells without thinking, without trying to make any sense, allowing all his sensory impressions to seep at their own speed into the furthest corners of his vast, largely inarticulate storehouse of knowledge, and to deliver back to him, in consciousness, images and figures that make sense of the whole.6
This kind of detection comes into its own under certain conditions. It needs a problem that can be clearly formulated – how long since the horses passed?; who planted the bomb?; what is causing the fever? – but to which the answer is not obvious. It requires ‘clues’: pieces of information whose significance, or even presence, is not immediately apparent. It works with a mind that has a rich database of potentially relevant information, much of which is tacit or experiential rather than articulated. And this kind of detection requires a particular mental mode in which details can be dwelt upon, at first without knowing what their meaning may be, so that slow ripples of activation in the brain may uncover any significant connections there may be. Without this patient rumination, the clue, the problem and the database will not come into the fruitful conjunction that reveals the ways in which they are related.
The successful detective trains her awareness on the outside world, in order to find meaning in the minutiae of experience. The second fruitful way of paying attention is similar, except awareness is now directed inward, towards the subtle activities and promptings of one’s own body. The ability to ‘listen to the body’ is very useful in gaining insight into a whole variety of personal puzzles and predicaments. This ability has been dubbed focusing by the American psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. Back in the 1960s, Gendlin and colleagues at the University of Chicago were involved in large-scale research project designed to discover why it was that some people undergoing psychotherapy made good progress while others did not, no matter who the therapist was or what she did. After analysing thousands of hours of tape-recorded sessions, Gendlin uncovered the magic ingredient, which could be picked up even in the first one or two sessions, and which would predict whether the client would make progress or not. It was not anything to do with the school or the technique of the therapist, nor, apparently, with the content of what was talked about. It was the clients’ spontaneous tendency to relate to their experience in a certain way. If they did, they would make progress; if they did not, they wouldn’t.7
The successful clients were those who spontaneously tended to stop talking from time to time; to cease deliberately thinking, analysing, explaining and theorising, and to sit silently while, it seemed, they paid attention to an internal process that could not yet be clearly articulated. They were listening to something inside themselves that they did not yet have words for. They acted as if they were waiting for something rather nebulous to take form, and groping for exactly the right way of expressing it. Often this period of silent receptivity would last for around thirty seconds; sometimes much longer. And when they did speak, struggling to give voice to what it was they had dimly sensed, they spoke as though their dawning understanding was new, fresh and tentative – quite different from the tired old recitation of grievance or guilt which frequently preceded it.
Gendlin called this hazy shadow which they were attending to, and allowing slowly to come to fruition, a felt sense, and it was quite different both from a string of thoughts and from the experience of a particular emotion or feeling. It seemed to be the inner ground out of which thoughts, images and feelings would emerge if they were given time and unpremeditated attention. It appeared that many people lacked the ability, and perhaps the patience, to allow things to unfold in this way. Instead they would, in their haste for an answer, pre-empt this process of evolution, creating a depiction of the problem which told them nothing new, and which gave no sense of progress or relief.
Gendlin discovered that the felt sense will form not in the head, but in the centre of the body, somewhere between the throat and the stomach. The awareness is physical and when it has been allowed to form, has been heard, and accurately captured in a phrase or an image, there is a corresponding physical sense of release and relaxation. It is as if some inarticulate part of the person, almost like a distressed child, feels understood, and has responded with a sigh of relief: ‘Yes. That’s exactly how it is. You understand. Thank you.’ When this ‘felt shift’ happens, then the previous feeling of blockage eases, and by going back again patiently to the felt sense, people find that it is ready to tell them something further; to unfold a little more.
In focusing one takes an issue to consider, asks oneself ‘What is this whole thing about?’, and then shuts up. Over the course of half a minute or so, by holding awareness in the body, a physical sense of ‘the whole thing’ begins to form in a way that, at first, is unsegmented, and therefore inarticulable. The normal d-mode-dominated tendency to leap to conclusions, to construct a clear and plausible narrative as quickly as possible, is reversed. Answers from d-mode, which tend to come quickly and with a veneer of ‘this-is-obviously-the-way-it-is’ certainty, are ignored.8 You know you are doing ‘focusing’ right, according to Gendlin, when you are not sure if you are doing it right – because you cannot yet say what is there. ‘The body is wiser than all our concepts’, he says, ‘for it totals them all and much more. It totals all the circumstances we sense. We get this totalling if we let a felt sense form in inward space.9
Because this ‘way of knowing’ had not previously been identified as one of the main active ingredients in successful therapy, many therapists were unaware of the need to cultivate the client’s ability in this regard. Yet, Gendlin discovered, once it was recognised it could be ‘taught’ quite directly. Anybody, with practice, could learn how to do it, and could benefit from it, not just in dealing with the kinds of problem that took people into therapy in the first place, but in a whole variety of situations in everyday life. To begin with, focusing feels strange, because it really is a different way of knowing from the one with which people are most familiar. As with a medical student learning to read X-rays, it takes time to ‘see’ what is there, and to stabilise these unfamiliar, shadowy objects of attention. But the tentative, exploratory ‘feel’ of focusing soon becomes unmistakeable. In one session in which I took part, the focuser said: ‘I feel kind of scared, but I don’t know what of. Inside it’s like an animal that’s totally alert, ears pricked . . . It’s like something’s coming, and some part of me has picked it up and is getting ready for it, but “I” don’t know what it is yet.’ It is this sense of the imminence of meaning not yet revealed that characterises focusing. The fruit of the felt sense is often an image or an evocative phrase, rather than a fully fledged story – such as the image quoted above of a startled animal, sensing danger, or the unknown, but not yet able to identify it. The first form that the emerging meaning takes is often poetic or symbolic, rather than literal and transparent.
Focusing is not, of course, a new discovery (though turning it into a technology certainly fits with the Promethean spirit of the age). It is very akin, for example, to the Japanese concept of kufti, which D. T. Suzuki in Zen and Japanese Culture describes as:
not just thinking with the head, but the state when the whole body is involved in and applied to the solving of a problem . . . It is the intellect that raises a question, but it is not the intellect that answers it . . . The Japanese often talk about ‘asking the abdomen’, or ‘thinking with the abdomen’, or ‘seeing or hearing with the abdomen’. The abdomen, which includes the whole system of viscera, symbolises the totality of one’s personality . . . Psychologically speaking, [kufu] is to bring out what is stored in the unconscious, and let it work i
tself out quite independently of any kind of interfering consciousness . . . One may say, this is literally groping in the dark, there is nothing definite indicated, we are entirely lost in the maze.10
It may also have been Gendlin’s ‘felt sense’ which was referred to as thymos by the classical Greeks. Located in the phrenes, again the central part of the body – lungs, diaphragm, abdomen – thymos is that part of a person which ‘advises him on his course of action, it puts words into his mouth . . . He can converse with it, or with his “heart” or his “belly”, almost as man to man . . . For Homeric man the thymos tends not to be felt as part of the self: it commonly appears as an independent inner voice.’11 It appears that, in other cultures and other times, ‘thinking with the abdomen’ was a routine and familiar way of knowing. It is only in our contemporary European d-mode culture, dominated by the idea that thinking is the quick, conscious, controlled, cerebral manipulation of information, that the ability to think with the body has to be isolated, repackaged and taught as a novel kind of skill.
With focusing one has, as with detection, a predetermined agenda – a problem to solve or clarify – and the process of dwelling on the details is therefore circumscribed and channelled by a purpose. There is openness and patience, but there is also a background monitoring of progress and relevance. However, the third way of paying attention I want to consider, poetic sensibility, has the ability to reset or create our agenda; to uncover issues and reveal concerns, perhaps in unexpected quarters, or surprising ways. By allowing ourselves to become absorbed in some present experience without any sense of seeking or grasping at all, we can be reminded of aspects of life that may have been eclipsed by more urgent business, and of ways of knowing and seeing that are, perhaps, more intimate and less egocentric. As we gaze out to sea or up at a cloudless sky, listen to the sound of goat-bells across a valley or to a Beethoven quartet, we may sense something that lies beyond the preoccupations of daily life. We feel perhaps a kind of obscure wistfulness, a bitter-sweet nostalgia for some more natural, more simple facet of our own nature that has been neglected.12
