0. Confession
It took me far too many years to notice something obvious:
In any room where someone “speaks” and someone “listens”,
it is not the one on stage who holds the room.
It is the one who hasn’t yet looked away.
And another thing:
sometimes that “one” is me.
That’s not a compliment. It’s a diagnosis.
I. Lecture, Fly, and One Neck Holding the Room
Concrete walls. Neon. A woman in her sixties at the mic.
The topic is as exciting as a damp rag.
The content died twenty years ago;
she’s just carrying its corpse from classroom to classroom.
And yet the room listens.
Not because it’s interesting.
Because: hierarchy, grading, habit, fear.
I’m sitting somewhere in the middle.
My hand pretends to take notes; my mind left long ago.
And then I catch a strange sensation:
she isn’t speaking, she is maintaining a performance, like an actress,
but the whole thing is hanging on my attention.
I test it: I drop out internally.
Look away, loosen the focus.
Almost immediately: fidgeting, chairs, paper, rustling, notebooks, phones.
The group stops being an “audience” and turns back into random bodies killing time.
Then: a small noise behind me.
A girl leans in and whispers:
— Fly.
I turn around for half a second.
The lecturer breaks.
She stumbles on a word, then stops.
The irritation is pure, lab-grade:
the exact flavour you get when you read to a child,
they’re listening, listening — and suddenly they aren’t,
and you don’t know whether you’re angry at them, yourself, or the text.
She pretends nothing happened.
But I know that micro-freeze.
Her system lost its anchor.
After the lecture she snaps, half-joking, half-angry:
“What kind of group is this, getting distracted by a fly?”
As if the problem was the insect, not the fact that the entire structure of her authority
was hanging from one thin thread of borrowed attention.
And in my head, almost under my breath, a question appears:
Why does one flicker of my attention collapse her authority?
The answer is simple and indecent:
in that room, the attention did not belong to her.
She owned the body, the podium, the microphone, the syllabus.
But the field vector was sitting in my chair.
II. Who Owns Attention and Who Is Fed by It
Official story:
– attention is my “resource”;
– I decide where to direct it;
– if someone “holds attention”, they’re charismatic, powerful, gifted.
That’s a fairy tale for managers.
In reality:
the one on stage is more dependent on attention than any infant on a parent.
They exist as long as someone is looking.
The higher the status, the stronger the dependency.
Politician, preacher, lecturer, guru, coach, “helping” writer, influencer —
they all hang from the same thin thread:
there is at least one person in the room still willing to stay and not look away.
The moment that one person drops out,
everyone else simply stops pretending.
III. Attention Is Not a Beam, It’s a Stage
We’re sold attention as a flashlight:
“direct your beam”,
“focus”,
“manage your concentration”.
But attention is not a beam.
It’s a fabric.
That fabric stretches between the one who speaks and the one who listens,
like a stage curtain between set and audience.
As long as it’s taut, the “performance” exists.
When it sags, all you see is a tired person reciting memorised lines.
The woman at the lectern was hanging on my fabric.
She believed she was “holding the hall”.
In fact, I was holding the hall by still agreeing to be a witness.
When I turned for the fly, the fabric tore.
Her body felt it instantly.
She snapped, the way any adult snaps when the child stops listening mid-sentence.
IV. Attention as Mercy — and as Violence
Elsewhere I’ve written that mercy is not an idea, but a practice of staying:
not turning away, not rushing, not moralising;
you either remain next to someone’s pain, or you don’t.
Attention is the same form of mercy, stripped of halos.
When you sit with someone who is falling apart
and you simply don’t leave,
don’t explain, don’t brighten things up, don’t “fix”,
that is merciful attention.
But when you’re in a lecture hall, a church, a session, a webinar,
and you’re being demanded to not look away:
“watch”, “listen”, “stay tuned”,
your attention is being turned into fuel.
Your presence becomes a battery pack.
There’s a crude, almost animal version of the same thing on the street.
A man yells “hey, gorgeous” or something worse. It looks like a compliment, a joke, a throwaway line.
But what he’s really testing is leash-length of your attention.
If you look, smile, flinch, speed up, freeze — any micro-response will do — he gets what he came for: proof he can tug on your field from a distance.
If you don’t respond at all, the script often flips into insult or aggression: “what, too good for me?”, “bitch”, eye-rolling, mockery.
That spike of hostility isn’t about you. It’s withdrawal rage. The animal body expected a hit of attention and didn’t get it.
This is the same economy as the lecture hall, just without academic clothing: one nervous system trying to secure a little local kingdom by hijacking the gaze of whoever passes.
Street harassment isn’t really about bodies at all. It dresses up as desire, humour, dominance, but its true object is your attention as a public commodity. The moment you accept the frame — justify, explain, feel ashamed, replay the scene later in your head — your own gaze turns against you. You start watching yourself from outside, as if through his eyes. That’s the most effective form of objectification: not when someone reduces you to a body, but when they teach you to monitor yourself from the position of their imagined gaze.
There’s another layer to this that has nothing to do with “modesty” or “fashion” and everything to do with how visible the gaze is.
Maybe the real drama is not in the veil itself, but in who gets to hide their eyes.
A face covering can be read a thousand ways, but so can a pair of oversized sunglasses with blacked-out lenses. Both do the same thing: they break the circuit of mutual seeing. You can’t tell where the other person is looking, or whether they’re looking at all. Your own attention has nothing to lock onto, so it turns inward and starts watching itself instead.
Predators know this intuitively. The “hunter’s gaze” is almost never wide-open; it’s narrowed, slit, triangulated. Physiognomy has always picked up on this: eyes pulled into sharp angles, lids lowered, the look coming not as a field but as a weaponised line. The less of the eye you see, the more of your own attention gets pulled in to fill in the missing information. You start doing free labour for their desire or aggression, imagining what that hidden look might mean.
Sunglasses, veils, squinting, looking from under the brow — they operate on the same principle: I see you, you don’t see how I see you. That asymmetry is the core of attention-power. It doesn’t matter whether the costume is religious, glamorous, or casual; what matters is who is allowed to keep their gaze opaque while everyone else stands fully lit.
Now the contrast is clearer: the child’s eyes are completely exposed, nothing hidden; the lecturer is fully lit on stage but her real gaze is shielded by the role; the street harasser hides his look behind jokes and squinting. Three costumes, one question: who is allowed to look without being seen looking?
And you start doing what I did in that hall:
you hold up the architecture of someone else’s authority with your own focus,
until your legs go numb, your neck locks,
and somewhere inside a quiet saboteur whispers:
And if I stop listening right now — what exactly collapses?
V. Hell Begins With “You’re Not Worse”
Comparison is always a reallocation of attention.
You’re no longer seen as “you”.
You’re seen as “you relative to them / to the norm / to the scale”.
The moment comparison enters,
your own attention is hijacked and pulled onto one track:
“Where am I on the line?”
I once formulated it like this:
Hell begins with the phrase “You’re not worse”.
Because that phrase smuggles a measuring stick straight into your breathing.
You’re supposed to be grateful,
while your entire perception quietly swaps out “I exist” for “I rank”.
You’re no longer here;
you’re now a dot on somebody else’s scale.
It’s the cheapest way to control attention:
no charisma, no depth needed,
just launch a comparison — and people’s gaze hooks onto “better/worse”.
They stop seeing, start measuring.
VI. The Little Prince, the Fox, and the Same Power
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry understood this better than most modern psychologists.
The scene with the Fox is not about “sweet friendship” or “responsibility”.
It’s a lesson in quality of attention.
The Little Prince asks one question and stays.
He doesn’t fill the silence with himself.
He doesn’t prove how sensitive, spiritual, deep he is.
He just endures his own question in the presence of another being.
It’s the same power that was working in that lecture hall,
just flipped:
there, attention was glued to the lecturer to keep the show from collapsing;
here, it’s directed toward another so they can even emerge.
In both cases the decisive thing is:
who stays.
The difference: the Prince has no agenda to control.
He does what almost no one can do:
he refuses to replace the Fox’s question with his own answer.
VII. The Child as a Cruel God of Attention
Another scene.
An infant.
Massive serious eyes.
He looks at you — no, through you.
That gaze has no baby talk, no admiration, no social polish.
He wants nothing.
He just sees: skin, tension, micro-shivers.
If you don’t escape into performance — “funny face”, “cute voice”, “role of mom/auntie/carer” —
and instead stay in that raw line of sight,
you suddenly realise:
you’ve just been seen not as a mask, but as a being.
That’s the same experiment as with the lecturer, just inverted:
here it’s not you holding the field,
it’s you being held.
You are the stage.
You are the screen.
And every scrap of pretense, every borrowed posture,
your entire social exoskeleton
starts crunching under that look.
A child’s gaze is the purest form of attention:
it has no concept of “status”, “expertise”, “role”.
It only knows: there is life / there is no life.
That’s why adults are so scared of a child’s direct stare
and so calm under a lecturer’s.
The lecturer demands recognition of her role.
The child demands presence.
VIII. Attention as a ∅ in the Middle
In another piece I wrote about the “anomaly” Derrida never quite named:
a zero-sign at the centre, ∅, that keeps meaning open by refusing to be filled.
Attention works the same way:
– As long as there is a figure in the centre
(lecturer, guru, author, therapist, parent),
your attention becomes scaffolding for that figure.
– When the centre is empty,
attention stops being food and becomes medium:
a space where anything might happen — question, meeting, miracle, rupture, silence.
That’s why texts in the tone of “How I Can Help You” feel so poisonous.
They commit an illegal privatization of the centre.
The author stands where God would be and offers you a contract:
Maybe this should have been the moment of total revelation — the “whole meaning.”
But honesty doesn’t mean emptying the vault in one night.
It means stopping exactly where the thread ends today,
before the voice starts lying from exhaustion.
Shaharazad knew this: you tell just enough to stay alive until morning.
The modern version calls it a series, a newsletter, a following —
but it’s the same instinct: hold the field open, don’t let the story die.
So if you’re still here, this isn’t closure.
It’s only proof that attention, when held without violence,
can outlive the night.
In the rooms you move through, are you really “just there” — or have you been the hidden battery all along?