2002-07-25 - 7:05 p.m.
The Divine Shock of the Ordinary. I wish I had been the one to think of this phrase. It haunts me. I just read it in a magazine, used to describe the work of a photographer who took pictures that look a lot like the ones in our family album. "Ordinary" people, doing ordinary things. Ironically, any subject, surrounded in space and respect, and called "art" .....for whatever reason, suddenly becomes interesting. But the real reason we are intrigued is: there is no such thing as an ordinary person.... there are only people we have made assumptions about and therefore never bothered to really see.
Sometimes I watch people in a public place and challenge myself to suspend all judgement, to just see each person who walks by as the manifestation of a uniquely perfect individual. It is one of the most difficult things to do. Because we are socially trained to be judgemental, to look at people and find a descriptor. We think one person looks "handsome" while another is "homely." One person looks "interesting," another one looks "boring." No words are adequate to describe the universe that is contained in a human being. All we are seeing is icebergs really, just a tiny tip of all the complicated stories and emotions and compromises and fears that make us human.
I have an obsession with old photographs, ephemora, and the odd details of everyday life. Ordinary stuff. But so much more interesting to me than the official version of things. Sometimes I get down my box of old photos and just look at the details: clothes, shoes, street signs, cars. Almost all of the people in these pictures are strangers to me. Some of the pictures came from flea markets, and some were among my Grandmother's things, unlabeled so nobody knew who they were, and therefore valueless to the family. And once a friend just gave me a big envelope marked "pictures nobody wants." Some of them are dated, and a few have comments, but the significance is long lost, and probably the photographers as well.
I want to know about people in their ordinariness. I want to know what kind of shoes this little girl is wearing in this photo marked "1947 Bronx NY" and who made her scooter. Did this young man in WWI uniform make it home to marry the girl he is posing with so proudly? Were these high school girls in unzipped galoushes the trend setters of their day? The idea that I treasure evidence of some anonymous person's life hints at something more, perhaps only that we can never really know the true purpose and value of anything we do.
I used to spend a lot of energy on trying to be unique, stand out from the crowd. Which is laughable, because... who is the crowd? Trying to be unique is practically out national pastime. Big business has discovered so many ways to manipulate and exploit this need, and convince us that in order to be "different" we must purchase an ever-changing selection of consumer goods. The whole concept of "daring to be different" is kind of a cosmic joke at best, and at worst a major stumbling block in the path to becomming an authentic person.
There is something profound in the ordinary facts and circumstances of our lives. Something sacred about real human communication, or maybe just a moment of real insight, that still challenges the blindness of our society.
Daring to be ordinary.....
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