Concentration

A neighbor has decided to have his house prepped for a new paint job this month, so for the foreseeable future the “music” of several electric hand sanders will compete in my head with the piece I’m trying to compose.

Yesterday the noise was unrelenting, a kind of persistent, high pitched whine, like what you’d imagine an attack by a squad of World War II fighter planes would sound like.

I try to “filter it out,” but it’s not easy. Sometimes the strange counterpoint of the two machines is distracting enough to pull me away from my own musical ideas. My concentration is right now so fragile that just about anything can upset it.

I try not to indulge my annoyance, thinking instead of what it must be for the two Hispanic workers who have to operate those sanders forty hours a week and probably send 75% of their earnings home to their families in Guatemala or Honduras.

Instead I drift off into a reverie about the very subject that’s challenging me—concentration.

The power to concentrate is a gift. I believe that being able to sustain it is largely the result of self-confidence. If you doubt the power of your intellect or doubt the quality or value of what you are doing you are much less willing to “stay with it.” You’ll find that what you’re doing is a chore, a painful, grinding obligation. In these circumstances concentrating is a task, an unpleasant struggle that actually, physically hurts. There’s always a part of you that is begging for relief, ready to jump ship at the slightest prompt, cut yourself loose from the humiliating confrontation of your pitifully weak brain with the intractable material you’re trying to manipulate and create meaning out of.

Alternatively, when you’re “on,” when you’ve found the groove, concentration ceases to be a matter of pain, ceases to be something you wish to avoid at all costs. Instead you’ll experience its opposite, a state of pleasure in the brain, like a sustained presence of endorphins.

During those rare moments when everything is clicking, I’ll find myself so absorbed in my concentration that I’m furious that I even have to get up to go to the bathroom. At that point, even the sound of a relentless electric sander can’t penetrate the trance. But oh, how precious and how rare those times are!

Adorno, speculating on Beethoven’s deafness and exceptional powers of concentration, intimates that the deafness was not entirely a pathological condition but also an elective one, and he mentions Romain Rolland’s linking of Beethoven’s deafness with his “immense inner concentration, his incessant auditory seeking and grasping.”

Adorno even muses “It is conceivable that Beethoven actually WANTED to go deaf—because he had already had a taste of the sensuous side of music as it is blared from loudspeakers today.”

The grisly story is apparently true that only hours after Beethoven died a surgeon probed and extracted his inner ear in an attempt to locate the source of his deafness.

A certain Doctor Marage, after analyzing these post-mortem findings wrote “‘The cause of Beethoven’s deafness seems to me to lie in a congestion of blood in the inner ear of the auditory centers, caused by overstrain of the organ through excessive concentration, and in the pitiless inevitability of thought…”

This prompts Adorno to quote Julius Bahle, apparently a German psychologist, who brings it all to the meta-level by saying “According to this diagnosis, therefore, Beethoven had sacrificed himself on the altar of deafness in order ‘to draw nearer than others to God, and from that vantage point to spread the divine radiance among mankind.’”

But I digress. It’s nearly ten a.m. and the electric sanders next door have yet to commence their searing wail. Maybe today’s a day off. Or maybe their job is done.

Either way there’s no avoiding the task ahead for me. There will be a thousand potential distractions, digital or otherwise. Time to take a deep breath, withdraw from the social network (the grandest, most elaborate concentration-buster of all) and force those neurons into order.