The Length of a Breath

On ambition and attention, music videos and prestige cinema, poetic controversies and the pleasures of peek-a-boo.

I used

to break up

sentences like

this.

But I’m retired from poetry, so I don’t do that anymore. But I still feel the push-pull that makes poetry so consistently difficult and occasionally rewarding. Poetry’s an ambitious form. It wants to do big things in a small space. It wants eternity. It wants to transcend time. The clock, however, is ticking. The reader is getting restless.

The reader started out restless or else they wouldn’t have opened up a book of poems. They want something important, and they want it now.

How do you do so much in so little space? William Blake assumed that readers had the same attention span he did for secret, epic verse histories of the universe. They mostly didn’t. We remember his epigrams, his quips and his short lyrics.

Ambition and attention

This tension between high ambitions and limited attention shows in the question of how long a poetic line should be.

Walt Whitman liked long lines, the length of a breath, and Allen Ginsberg followed suit. The long lines addressed the tension by creating a sense of rhetorical acceleration, building up a head of steam in a genial, conversational way, and then using that momentum to propel a prophetic and grandiose tone. Emily Dickinson liked smaller lines, where each word balances like a boulder in a cairn. Her shorter lines depended on the idiosyncratic qualities of words, and the compounding idiosyncrasies as they met each other and shone light into the reader’s own experiences.

Both approaches work, but with effects so different that it seems crazy to drop them all under the single heading of poetry.

Mtv

People argue about attention spans. They’ve been saying attention spans are getting shorter since I was a kid.

Music videos were a big deal back then, which were supposedly degrading the attention span of my generation. They ran 3-7 minutes apiece, which was, in hindsight, too long. Only occasionally would you get something like Thriller that could hold your attention the whole way through. If you go back watch a few videos, you’ll notice a lot of repetition and filler just to get to the three-minute mark.

Grownups felt about music videos the way people of my generation feel about TikTok videos.

But the short form makes sense for the content. Most young people don’t have much to say, but they don’t want to be left out. Shorter forms let them get in, look good, do their thing, and get out before anyone realizes, oh, that’s all there is to it.

Oscar bait

The prestige drama film, on the other hand, keeps getting longer.

The technique is, if you can’t be good, to be long. This shows up in other forms, especially books. The effect is to stick the viewer with a strong sense of sunk costs, so they can’t badmouth the film without admitting they’ve badly squandered their time. The hope is to win an award, and turn the movie into homework in the years ahead.

This bad-faith artistry is doing more to suffocate cinema than superhero movies.

The sweeping hand

When I was very young, my mother worked weekends in a travel agency in the back of Filene’s department store in the Worcester Galleria. My father would take me out for McDonalds and some errands those days, and sometimes drop me in the travel-agency waiting room until my mother was done for the day.

One day, I was sitting there, waiting. I was maybe five years old. A big circular clock presided over the beige-tan room. As I watched the sweeping second hand, it occurred to me that it was never any exact time. By the time you realized it was 2:30 and five seconds, it was already a few seconds later.

It was a maddening problem. But what was the problem? Was it the fluid movement of the second hand blurring the increments of time? Was it that I couldn’t think fast enough? Was it an obsessively long attention span making me so uneasy? Or was the problem time?

Forty-odd years later, time is still a problem. But that was the first occasion I remember taking a cosmological question personally. Then as now, I couldn’t shake the impression that I was being deliberately fucked with.

How long is now?

As I found out in the Filene’s travel-agency waiting room that afternoon, you can never be right about what time it is. You’re can anticipate the second ahead. But then you’re lying when you start to say what time it is. Or you’re being honest, and you’re wrong about the time by the time you’re done saying it.

The solutions to the problem of now are workarounds. You can break time down to milliseconds and trust the stopwatch to do all the telling. Or you can go the other way, and expand the increment. You can say it’s the afternoon, and be right for a few hours. You can say it’s the 21st century and be right for a few decades. Neither satisfies the initial impulse.

Measuring cups

Choosing the right increment of time is a matter of social convention. A minute is the increment of most social spans of attention. It’s usually how you count being early or late. But the preferred increment can be as short as a hundredth of a second, primarily in sports. Decades tend to be the correct increment when referring to a career or a prison sentence.

In history, a social science, the increment can be as short as an hour and as long as a millennium. In science - an overwhelmingly social endeavor - it can be as long as several billion years or as short as Planck time.

Doorway effect

Personal attention, on the other hand, is parceled out according to private experience. Something breaks up our time, usually a change of scenery. Trying to place a years-old memory, I’ll ask myself where I was living at the time, where I was working.

On a minute-to-minute basis, time also breaks up this way. There’s a documented phenomenon where a person’s mind resets every time they pass through a doorway. It reorients according to the new space, and often forgets what it was doing just before. Why was I in the kitchen again?

For a few years, I lived in an apartment where I had to pass through five doorways to get from the bedroom to the sidewalk. I wonder how much more purpose my life might have had in those years if it had only been one or two doorways.

But there’s more than one kind of doorway. The phenomenon also occurs when going from one window to another on a computer or a phone screen. That adds up to a lot of resets between wondering about the weather and finding out.

Obsession and sensation

Attention span also depends on the heart. Every day, there’s news of a terrible event in a distant land. It doesn’t always register. Every week, people come in and out of our lives, never to be thought of again.

But there are events that linger for a lifetime. We savor them, or are haunted by them, or struggle to understand them. There are people we’ll never forget. You’re still thinking about that?

The boundless increment

Time is difficult to think about in a satisfactory way. One of the biggest contradictions is between eternity and the present moment.

You could argue that only the present moment is the only thing that exists, with the past and future being purely imaginary within the moment (see April’s “Incompleteness”). You could argue that all of time is a four-dimensional stationary object that we three-dimensional creatures experience as unfolding, but only because of our limitations.

Is eternity a twinkle in the eye of the present moment? Is the present moment a detail in the massive and baroque architecture of the entirety of eternity?

In a recent essay, the inimitable Sam Kriss debated St. Augustine’s view of time, which seems to oscillate between each position. Scholars debate what Augustine actually thought. But what if Augustine was referring to something that’s hard to imagine, which is the attention span of G-d.

When we imagine omniscience, we think of it in terms of space, of seeing everywhere at once. But applied to time, omniscience would be an unbroken moment, experienced both simultaneously and in order. It would be a vast and continuous attention span.

The terrain of the page

The written word contributes to this confusion about eternity and the present moment. A page of text is a fixed object in space. But it can only be read and understood sequentially, letter by letter and word by word, often with many breaks and distractions, digressions and reveries along the way.

Communicating in written words is tricky. The page is never truly blank. The page is a jungle. Everything distracts from everything else. Everything amplifies everything else. Everything distorts everything else.

One important thing a writer does is to tell the reader how to read the words on the page. This can be a narrative, or as a series of bullet points, or as an accumulating argument, or as a delicate, nested doll of subtle meanings.

Prolonging attention

Getting back to poetry, the epic and lyric forms are designed to be memorized and held entirely within the mind all at once. Now derided as rote memorization, people regarded this ability as a kind of practical magic well into the Renaissance, with practitioners holding massive amounts of information in their interior mansions. It was an attempt to, like G-d, hold the entire world in one’s own mind.

As early as Plato’s day, people complained that this magic was being devalued and even destroyed by literacy. It’s only been undermined further in the iPhone age.

Call-backs, choruses and refrains

The chorus of a song after a long verse just feels good. The comedian who ties a joke late in their act to an earlier joke always gets a big laugh, even if the later joke isn’t funny on its own. The realization that the butler did it is effective because he’s been there all along and you totally forgot about him.

It’s a game of hide-and-seek, peek-a-boo. It’s hackneyed. But when you can distract the listener long enough and take them so far from shore that they truly do forget, then the remembering is always powerful.

Why does it work so reliably, and so well? It may be the ever-familiar-but-ever-strange narrative structure of incarnation, death and reincarnation. It may be that we’re always walking through doorways and any familiar face is a happy surprise.

Or the form may work because it embraces the faultiness of human attention and allows capital-T Time to maintain its mysterious, murderous dominance

over our lives,

while we get our kicks

in one of its

blind spots.

Selected bibliography

Sam Kriss’ essay Eternity

My essay Incompleteness