How to Do Nothing

by Jenny Odell

  Most of us have experienced changes in rendering: you notice something once (or someone points it out to you) and then begin noticing it everywhere. As a simplistic example, my attention now “renders” to me a world more full of birds than before I was an avid bird-watcher. Visitors to the de Young had their attention remapped by David Hockney to include small details, rich colors, and kaleidoscopic arrangement; the John Cage performance remapped my attention to include sound beyond melodic music. When the pattern of your attention has changed, you render your reality differently. You begin to move and act in a different kind of world.

  I have already described the moment in which I discovered the ground. But I have not yet described what followed, which was a complete re-rendering of my reality. As I disengaged the map of my attention from the destructive news cycle and rhetoric of productivity, I began to build another one based on that of the more-than-human community, simply through patterns of noticing. At first this meant choosing certain things to look at; I also pored over guides and used the California Academy of Science’s app, iNaturalist, to identify species of plants I had walked right by my entire life. As a result, more and more actors appeared in my reality: after birds, there were trees, then different kinds of trees, then the bugs that lived in them. I began to notice animal communities, plant communities, animal-plant communities; mountain ranges, fault lines, watersheds. It was a familiar feeling of disorientation, realized in a different arena. Once again, I was met with the uncanny knowledge that these had all been here before, yet they had been invisible to me in previous renderings of my reality.

  * * *

  —

  IN ESSENCE, WHAT I was encountering without yet knowing the name for it was bioregionalism. Similar to many indigenous cultures’ relationships to land, bioregionalism is first and foremost based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors. More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem. (Asked where he was from, Peter Berg, an early proponent of bioregionalism, used to answer, “I am from the confluence of the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River and San Francisco Bay, of the Shasta bioregion, of the North Pacific Rim of the Pacific Basin of the Planet Earth.”28) In these ways, bioregionalism is not just a science, but a model for community.

  As I came to know my bioregion, I found myself increasingly identifying with a totemic complex of fellow inhabitants: Western fence lizards, California towhees, gray pines, manzanita, thimble-berries, giant sequoias, poison oak. When I travel, I no longer feel like I’ve arrived until I have “met” the local bioregion by walking around, observing what grows there, and learning something about the indigenous history of that place (which, in all too many places, is the last record of people engaging in any meaningful way with the bioregion). Interestingly, my experience suggests that while it initially takes effort to notice something new, over time a change happens that is irreversible. Redwoods, oaks, and blackberry shrubs will never be “a bunch of green.” A towhee will never simply be “a bird” to me again, even if I wanted it to be. And it follows that this place can no longer be any place.

  * * *

  —

  A YEAR AND a half ago I came across an aerial map of Rancho Rinconada, the Cupertino neighborhood I grew up in, as it was being built in the 1950s. Looking back and forth between the photo and Google Maps, I was able to figure out which street was which and thus pinpoint my house, otherwise indistinguishable amid the rows of tiny faux-Eichler bungalows. But there was one odd, wiggly road that didn’t seem to correspond to anything, that is, until I realized that it was not a road but Saratoga Creek. When I thought about it, I did remember seeing a creek running past the neighborhood swimming pool, but I hadn’t known it had a name. In my memory, it was just “the creek”; it didn’t come from anywhere in particular, nor was it going anywhere.

  I zoomed out on Google Maps and saw yet another creek, winding past the school where I went to kindergarten. Again I searched my memory, where it showed up only once. When I was five, the creek was the place that you couldn’t get your ball back from if it went over the fence at the edge of the schoolyard. I barely remembered looking through that fence at its tangled and mysterious green depths and the strange pillowy cement bags that made up its banks. Back then, it merely represented the unknown, like an unruly foil to the manicured school grounds behind me. That is the only time that Calabazas Creek had surfaced to the level of my consciousness; all the other times I must have looked at the creek or walked or driven past it, it was like the unseen stimuli in Arien Mack and Irvin Rock’s vision experiments—seen but not noticed.

  Recognizing the creek unfolded a whole topography of what I had not noticed. Where was Calabazas Creek going? The Bay, obviously, but I had never made that connection in my mind. Where was it coming from? Table Mountain, something I had looked at every day but only now learned the name of! I’d complained about Cupertino being so flat; what if I had known that that was because, for millions of years, that entire part of the Bay Area was an inland sea, and after that marshland? How was it possible for me to know the names of cities like Los Gatos, Saratoga, and Almaden, but not notice that they lay in a distinct curve—a curve defined by the nearby mountains, Loma Prieta, Mount Umunhum, Mount McPherson? How could I have not noticed the shape of the place I lived?

  Last year I told my friend Josh about (re)noticing Calabazas Creek. He lives in Oakland but had grown up, in near me Sunnyvale, and he, too, had buried memories of a creek. Josh’s creek was fenced off and had a trapezoidal concrete bottom, looking more like a piece of infrastructure than a natural element as it passed unnoticed through the neighborhood. At some point, Josh and I realized we were talking about the same creek—he had lived downstream from me.

  In December 2017 we drove to Cupertino and shimmied through a gate in a chain-link fence affixed with a sign reading EMERGENCY ACCESS TO CREEK. (“What if the emergency is curiosity?” I wondered aloud.) The first thing I saw was the exact tableau I hadn’t seen since I was five: a tangle of green around those cement bags, which I now knew were for flood control. It hadn’t yet rained much and we were at the end of a six-year drought, so the creek bed was dry enough to use as a trail. We walked over riprap, a mixture of conglomerate stone that included bits of brick building surreally carved by water into organic-looking rock shapes. Above us were the trees I now knew the names of—valley oak and bay laurel—mixed in with some surprises, like an entire hillside of rogue prickly pear cacti escaped from someone’s backyard.

  From the creek bed, we looked up and out at a Bank of America building, a strange and alienating angle on the familiar. We saw the backs of wooden fences around homes, some of whose inhabitants might never have been down here. Approaching a tunnel under Stevens Creek Boulevard, the road that both the Vallco Fashion Park and the Cupertino Crossroads shopping center are on, we found a dark gallery of graffiti. Had we continued into the tunnel, we would have ended up in total darkness underneath something called Main Street Cupertino, ironically one of Cupertino’s newest shopping centers. Further on, we would have emerged from the tunnel into the grounds of Apple’s new “spaceship” campus.

  Nothing is so simultaneously familiar and alien as that which has been present all along. Between, under, and amid all these things wound this entity that was older than I was, older than Cupertino. It represented a kind of primordial movement, even if its course had been altered by engineering in the nineteenth century. Long before cars drove from Whole Foods to the Apple campus, the creek moved water from Table Mountain to the San Francisco Bay. It continues to do this just as it always has, and whether I or any other humans care to notice. But when we do notice, like all things we give our sustained attention to, the creek begins to reveal its significance. Unlike the manufactured Main Street Cupertino, it is not there because someone put it there; it is
not there to be productive; it is not there as an amenity. It is witness to a watershed that precedes us. In that sense, the creek is a reminder that we do not live in a simulation—a streamlined world of products, results, experiences, reviews—but rather on a giant rock whose other life-forms operate according to an ancient, oozing, almost chthonic logic. Snaking through the midst of the banal everyday is a deep weirdness, a world of flowerings, decompositions, and seepages, of a million crawling things, of spores and lacy fungal filaments, of minerals reacting and things being eaten away—all just on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  It would not have been the same if I had gone to Calabazas Creek alone. The moment that Josh and I combined the fragments in our memories into the same body of water, the creek came not just to individual attention but to collective attention. It became part of a shared reality, a reference point outside of each of us. Picking our way over the riprap in this sunken, otherwise-unnoticed pathway—attending to the creek with the presence of our bodies—we were also rendering a version of the world in which the creek does appear, alongside its tributaries and its mountain and all the things growing and swimming within it.

  Realities are, after all, inhabitable. If we can render a new reality together—with attention—perhaps we can meet each other there.

  Chapter 5

  Ecology of Strangers

  There are more things in mind, in the imagination, than “you” can keep track of—thoughts, memories, images, angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of mind, the unconscious, are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams from dream to dream.

  –GARY SNYDER, THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD1

  On a lazy Saturday at the end of 2017, I was walking from the Rose Garden to Piedmont Grocery, a route I’ve taken hundreds of times. As I crested the hill, I saw a young woman walking her dog in the opposite direction. We were just about to pass each other when she stopped and fell to the ground—luckily in a patch of grass in front of a church—and started having a seizure. I don’t remember the order of events immediately following that. I do know that I dialed 911 and yelled “help” loud enough that people in the apartment building across the street came out, and that I somehow summoned the presence of mind to give the dispatcher the cross street and describe the circumstances. Initially, the woman’s eyes were open and looking directly at me, returning my gaze without seeing. It was as surreal as it was terrifying. Before others arrived, on that otherwise empty street, I felt completely responsible to this person I had never seen before a few minutes ago.

  When she came to, the woman was suspicious of me and the people from the apartment building who had brought water; I learned that people who have seizures can be confused and even belligerent as they regain consciousness. For her, we had come out of nowhere. While the paramedics gently questioned her, I sat nearby and held on to her dog’s leash; I felt responsible to the dog, too, who was clearly distressed. Eventually the people from the apartment building went back inside, and I stayed to answer questions because I was the only person who had seen what had happened. It became clear that (probably because we looked the same age) the paramedics assumed I was her friend and that we had been walking together. No, I said, I was just a passerby. At this, one of the paramedics thanked me for staying, implying that this was an inconvenience. But that other world—in which I had been walking to the grocery store to buy things for dinner—was so remote that I could barely remember what I was supposed to have been doing.

  When everything seemed to be taken care of, at least as much as it was going to be at that moment, I continued down the hill with shaky knees. I stopped in a parklet next to Glen Echo Creek to collect myself. This, too, was a familiar scene, but now everything in it appeared in stark contrast—a contrast not between anything in the scene, but between the scene itself and the possibility of its nonexistence (or rather, my nonexistence). Just as earthquakes remind us that we live on floating plates, once I’d been confronted with the fragility of another person’s life, I was momentarily unable to see anything as given.

  When I finally did get to the grocery store, I walked the aisles with a thousand-yard stare, struggling to remember what I’d come to buy. All around me were people calmly going about their business, trying to choose among a wide selection of cereals, picking through the apples, contemplating the eggs. But for the moment, I couldn’t inhabit that scale of decision-making. All I could see was that all of us here were alive, and that was a miracle. I thought of a print by Hallie Bateman that my boyfriend had bought and which was hanging nonchalantly in our apartment. It was a drawing of a street scene with words scattered across the sidewalk, buildings, and sky, reading: We’re all here together, AND WE DON’T KNOW WHY.

  * * *

  —

  A GROCERY STORE full of strangers has a similar effect in David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, titled “This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.” Wallace gives the students what is basically a brutal description of adult life, in which you find yourself at the “hideously, fluorescently lit” grocery store full of annoying people after a long day of work and a horrible traffic jam. In that moment, you have a choice of how to perceive the situation and the people in it. As it turns out, that choice is basically one of attention:

  if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?2

  This makes room for the possibility, in Wallace’s examples, that the guy in the Hummer who just cut you off is maybe trying to rush a child to the hospital—“and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am—it is actually I who am in his way.” Or that the woman in front of you in line who just screamed at you is maybe not usually like this; maybe she’s going through a rough time. Whether this is actually true isn’t the point. Just considering the possibility makes room for the lived realities of other people, whose depths are the same as your own. This is a marked departure from the self-centered “default setting,” whose only option is to see people as inert beings who are in the way:

  But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.3

  That Wallace frames this as a choice, one made against the “default setting,” speaks to the relationship between discipline, will, and attention that I outlined in the last chapter. If we’re to truly encounter anything outside of ourselves (transcending Buber’s I-It relationship), we have to want it.

  This encounter is something I often think about when I take the bus through downtown Oakland to my studio, at the water’s edge and the end of the line. For many people, myself included, public transportation is the last non-transactional space in which we are regularly thrown together with a diverse set of strangers, all of whom have different destinations for different reasons. Strangers have a reality to me on the bus that they cannot have on the freeway, simply because we’ve agreed to be in an enclosed space in which we are subject to each other’s actions. Because we share an understanding that we all need to get where we’re going, for the most part people act respectfully, literally making space for others when necessary.

  Last week, after a meeting, I took the F streetcar from Civic Center to the Ferry Building in San Francisco. It’s a notoriously slow, crowded, and halting route, especially in the middle
of the day. This pace, added to my window seat, gave me a chance to look at the many faces of the people on Market Street with the same alienation as the slow scroll of Hockney’s Yorkshire Landscapes. Once I accepted the fact that each face I looked at (and I tried to look at each of them) was associated with an entire life—of birth, of childhood, of dreams and disappointments, of a universe of anxieties, hopes, grudges, and regrets totally distinct from mine—this slow scene became almost impossibly absorbing. As Hockney said: “There’s a lot to look at.” Even though I’ve lived in a city most of my adult life, in that moment I was floored by the density of life experience folded into a single city street.

  In his Philosophy of the Encounter, as a contrast to what constitutes an actual society, Louis Althusser outlines the way in which true society requires some kind of spatial constraint. He contrasts the urban with Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idealized “natural state,” a kind of primeval forest where people move unseen and encounter rarely happens. Describing this natural state, Althusser invokes the paintings of “the other Rousseau” (Henri Rousseau, the artist), “whose paintings show us isolated individuals who have no relations to each other wandering out: individuals without encounters.” In order to construct a society in which encounters can begin to happen, Althusser writes, people must be “forced to have encounters that last: forced by a force superior to them.” To create a society, he replaces the image of the forest with that of an island. It’s this “island” of forced encounter that I’m reminded of when I think about the bus, or the city more generally. Spatial proximity has everything to do with it, since the urban experience is a state of tension maintained against the instinct to disperse: