Paying Attention: A Review of Srikanth Reddy’s Unsignificant. Wave Books, 2024. 96 pages. 

In a letter to her friend Joë Bousquet, the philosopher Simone Weil wrote: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” while elsewhere, she writes, “Attention taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

Reading Srikanth Reddy’s recent collection of essays, Unsignificant (Wave Press, 2024), I often found myself thinking often of Weil’s work, and in particular, her beautiful, often opaque writings on attention.“More often than not, as any analyst will tell you,” Reddy begins the titular opening essay, “the background is as important as the foreground in looking at things.” From this opening line, we are given a guiding philosophy of sorts that informs Reddy’s approach to looking at art, whether it be the paintings of Rembrandt, Cy Twombly, or Bruegel, or the poetry of Emily Dickinson or Gertrude Stein.

Reflecting upon his preoccupation with the “background” in a work of art, and the apparent dearth of books on the subject, Reddy poses the following questions “What is a background? Is it just a figure suffering from low self-esteem? What are we missing when we disregard those unassuming little figures—birds, clouds, unmanned military drones —in the offing? Can paying attention to what’s going on in the background make you a better person?” Like Weil, Reddy is interested in the ethical implications of our attention, i.e. that there are always ethical ramifications when we choose to pay attention to one thing over another.

In the three wide-ranging, yet tightly controlled essays that comprise this collection, Reddy considers the implications of the way we focus our attention towards works of art. The collection provides a series of case studies in generous, attentive engagement with art. Reddy is especially interested in which aspects of a work of art compel our attention, the division between foreground and background, and how certain works of art subvert our expectations by drawing our attention from the foreground and towards the oft-overlooked margins.

In this vein, it is telling that the first work of art Reddy invites us to closely examine is W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts,” itself an ekphrastic account of the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The poem, written in 1938, in the aftermath of Auden’s first-hand experience of the horrors of the Sino-Japanese War, is, in Reddy’s reading, a poem about human suffering. He writes, “‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is not so much a poem about a particular painting as it is a meditation on the suffering that goes unnoticed in the background of ordinary experience.”

What follows is the collection’s first, delicate, approachable exercises in ekphrasis: Reddy “looks” at Auden’s poem which itself “looks” at a painting, namely Bruegel’s Landscape With The Fall of Icarus. Auden’s poem isolates its attention on the solitary figure of the ploughman, noting “how everything”, including the ploughman, turns away from the “disaster” that is Icarus’s plunge into the sea. The ploughman turns away because for him it is not “an important failure”—meaning one that impacts him directly. Auden’s poem is interested in the painting’s economy of attention, and namely what it has to say about the larger world’s failure, in Reddy’s words, “to register the suffering of others.”

Reddy is an enviably nimble explicator of both visual art and poetry, and in the case study of the Auden poem/Bruegel painting nesting doll, he moves our gaze smoothly, seamlessly, between painting and poem, as if adjusting a long telescopic lens. He is an ideal art historian for poets. Perhaps owing to the fact that these essays originated as a series of lectures, his conversational tone and the complete lack of pretense to his prose, serve him well, here and elsewhere in the collection, as he moves on to tackle more obtuse, less literal material.

In part two of the second essay, “Like A Very Strange Likeness And Pink,” he provides a close reading of Gertrude Stein’s disorienting 1923 poem, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” Destabilizing the very notion of representation and the genre of portraiture, Stein’s nominal portrait of her close friend Picasso, as Reddy goes on to demonstrate, rapidly disintegrates into a scattered series of disparate associations and images, stretching our concept of likeness and representation to its limits. As Reddy puts it, “Stein’s experiments in resemblance show us how different things are not unlike.”

Perhaps the most wide-ranging piece in the collection is the final essay on “wonder.” Here he acknowledges the slipperiness of his subject: “wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair.” Whether Reddy succeeds, in this last essay, in achieving his goal of bringing us a bit closer to “wonder itself” is up for debate. As an emotion or experience, wonder, is slippery, and highly subjective. But I can attest that the way in which Reddy attempts to locate wonder within poetry, namely in the examples he discusses such of shield of Achilles in the Iliad and the erasure poems of Ronald Johnson, is compelling and entertaining. One reads these essays, not necessarily for the satisfaction one takes in watching Reddy pin down his subject, like a lapidarist netting a butterfly, but for the joy and vivacity Reddy clearly takes in getting there: the confident, associative leaps he makes from Achilles’ shield, that “impossible object” in the Iliad, to Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the brilliant, evocative absences of Ronald Johnson’s erasure poems made from Milton’s epic.

“Pure, intuitive attention,” Weil wrote, “is the only source of perfectly beautiful art, and truly original and brilliant scientific discovery, of philosophy which really aspires to wisdom and of true, practical love of one’s neighbor.” Weil’s theory of intuitive attention has much in common with the practice of attentive viewing and aesthetic engagement Reddy performs across the essays of Unsignificant.

Thinking of Weil, while reading these essays, and especially the last essay, I couldn’t help but think of the kind of sustained, open minded engagement with art Reddy practices as a form of prayer. Perhaps it is exactly through the kind of intuitive, prayerful attention that Weil describes and that Reddy demonstrates in these essays—a paying attention to what is often overlooked, to the trivial, the quotidian, the marginal—that is what allows us to open ourselves up to the possibility of wonder.

Thomas Mar Wee is a writer and poet living in Brooklyn. Their poetry was awarded a University & College Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Their writing has appeared in Document Journal, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hero, Spittoon Monthly, Suspect Journal, and elsewhere. They currently are pursuing an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College.