AmbientAttentionYogaConclusions
From UoWiki
To a degree, vert de-education or defamiliarisation IS possible. Ignoring the verts in tunnels and on escalators gets steadily easier. It gradually becomes just a trick of focusing the gaze on the people in front of you, and hard-wiring in the instinctive recoil every time you glance at one.
In terms of AAY practice, though, I don't think there's any single solution to boycotting the verts, more a toolkit of tactics. A mixture of willpower, avoidance and displacement therapy. Some are below
- Look at the people in front of you whilst repeating the mantra 'This person is real'
- Study the textures of walls, floors, ceilings wherever they're vert-less
- Keep your gaze on a single person whilst turning a corner where there's a danger of confrontation with a giant vert
- Ends of platforms tend to have less verts
- Stand in the vestibules of carriages, not in the aisles, as they have fewer verts
- Take a book to read (free papers are full of verts).
The thing that startled me most was that when, at the end of the seven-day experiment, I looked up at the verts, I couldn't read them. Verts are so pervasive that it becomes reflexive to translate the agglomeration of context, colour, image and text into a coherent whole. It's assumed that someone is trying to sell/persuade us to think/change our attitude towards something - that's what billboards are for. It's very rare to hear criticism of the existence of verts, whatever we may think of their content. Their presence, codes, styling etc (see the FacultyForTheInterpretationOfImages) are discourses we (at least, city-dwellers are forced to) accept as normal and unavoidable. So interpreting them becomes second nature.
But I looked (okay, I didn't try that hard to interpret them) and found I'd lost the vert-interpretive reflex. It was like looking at visual chaos, an alien semiotic code. I'd have had to work to interpret them, they no longer just jumped straight through my eyes and into my consciousness. And this leads me to speculate that perhaps a carapace of willed ignorance is a better defence than blinkers. If you can unlearn the ability to interpret vert-images, then perhaps they'll pass you by, a little like people who avoid a task by refusing to learn how to do it.
Boycott! Boycott! It is possible! Free your consciousness for everything else!
What this also makes me think of is the way most city-dwellers quietly (and with varying degrees of embarrassment or guilt) avert their eyes every time they see a beggar or other instance of suffering. The instinct seems to be to recoil, to avoid getting involved, in case the whole polyphony of suffering souls suddenly should suddenly become intolerably loud and render urban life impossible.
This instinctive recoil is not unlike the internal mechanism that forgets to do things 'accidentally on purpose' when the individual doesn't really want to do them. It's a ZenOfWon't tactic, refusal rather than combative engagement. After a week of AAY, it feels as though I'm beginning to experience a similar recoil-reaction to verts - disgust, averted eyes, irritation, feeling that they are obscene, that sights like that shouldn't be shoved under everyone's nose, wanting to forget the experience as soon as possible.
What I wonder is: would recoil-retraining like that free up more attention/sympathy/headspace for giving a shit about the less fortunate, or does it just add to the things I avoid looking at when travelling through the city? I'll let you know after a year of practice.
Incidentally, on the subject of the id and other subterranea, a number of comparisons emerged between AAY and smoking.
For me, the question that remains unanswered is how to address the overwhelmingness of other people without a cocoon of 'page-divert' semiotics to refer us away from the present and into our desires.
Send any thoughts to Mary at arrantNOscoundrel@hotSPAMmail.com.
