On Being Seen
In a post 12000 years ago titled 20 Pieces of Advice for Writers, I quoted Akiko Busch from her book How To Disappear. I had to go back and check it to make sure I wouldn’t be writing the same blog post all over again, but what happens is I write a lot of blog posts in my head, and just can’t remember if I got them down or not sometimes. Let’s be real, the last 7 or 8 months have really done some loopy stuff to our perception of time and well, everything! And it’s also had me (probably all of us) reading things all over again in a new light. It feels like to me that every old book is new again! There are all new readings to be done, contextualizing old thoughts with this new reality. You know, what holds up now? What seems a bit blah or irrelevant or just not for this moment?
Things taste different now, even, don’t they? In my cover photo (if you’re in the newsletter you might wish to read this in the browser), I have photographed a diet coke and cheese Ritz Crackers. Which are sometimes the only thing I feel like consuming. They’re the things that make me feel better when a lot of other things don’t.
And reading is like that too? Some things go down well. Other things maybe we’ll just save them until later. But How To Disappear is working for me right now.
Let’s start with this passage:
“Happiness depends on many things, but how things come and go plays an enormous part. Being seen, recognized, and acknowledged is essential to human experience; social visibility is vital to our happiness, and when it diminishes, we suffer. We all want to be recognized. The gaze is vital to human connection. It makes sense that the words one uses in a romantic relationship are “We are seeing each other.” Or when we say good-bye, “See you,” meaning you are seen and will be seen again These are givens — we live to see and be seen.”
And reading this, obviously, is really relevant right now when we are all literally covering our faces with masks on a daily basis. There is a certain fun freedom with wearing a mask. No more fake smiling! No need for perfect lipstick application! No more hearing, “you should smile more!”
Here’s a funny thing though. Wearing a mask, I’ve lately been told that I look like Phoebe from Friends a number of times. Which, well, I don’t. (I wish!!) But also: I’m wearing a mask? Lol. So what’s interesting about that to me though is that people have the need to fill in, to recognize, to associate. I mean, I am still going to take the Phoebe thing as a compliment, because, well, she’s awesome.
But the whole thing gets me thinking about how really deadening it can be to just encounter masked faces all day. At the end of a work day when we’re leaving the building and pulling off our masks, it is such a DELIGHT to see the faces of my co-workers faces. Like, I miss them so much!
There is literally disappearing and then figuratively disappearing though, obviously. I’m always torn between, hey look everyone it’s me over here, and also trying to fade into the woodwork. Or just really, constantly negotiating these two modes. As a writer working in a library, you can imagine my dilemma. But yes, mainly, I just want to do my job anonymously. In the Busch book, she talks about another book by David Zweig titled Invisibles: Celebrating the Unsung Heroes of the Workplace in which he “itemizes the ways in which people can do good and acquire profound personal satisfaction without the slightest need for personal promotion.” These are people who are happy to just do excellent work without needing to be in the spotlight in any way.
Busch reminds us of the line by Wallace Stevens and how the poet is “the priest of the invisible.” And also of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “The Art of Disappearing” where she advises, when recognized in a grocery store, to “nod briefly and become a cabbage.” Or, “Walk around feeling like a leaf. / Know you could tumble at any second. / Then decide what to do with your time.”
Maybe the secret to disappearing, or becoming content with being unseen is as it always was. James Burns, an episcopal minister is quoted by Busch: “first learn to love yourself. Then forget about it and learn to love the world.”
Women have a different relationship, too, to invisibility, especially when it pertains to aging. Ayelet Waldman talks about turning 50: “I have a big personality, and I have a certain level of professional competence, and I’m used to being taken seriously professionally. And suddenly, it’s like I vanished from the room. And I have to yell so much louder to be seen…I just want to walk down the street and have someone notice that I exist.”
In the Teju Cole book that I’ve recently talked about here, Blind Spot, he says, “In the 1920s, Russian film workshops would write scripts, set up scenes, and direct and act them out; but, due to shortages of celluloid, there would be no film in the cameral reel. Perhaps these are some of the greatest films ever made.”
He goes on: “More than the work itself, its form, its genre, its existence in tangible form, what interests me is the secret channel that connects the work to other work. Tarkovsky calls it “poetry,” this link that allows different kinds of excellence to understand one another.”
Cole says, “When I make a work, no matter how small, no matter how doomed to be forgotten, only its poetic possibility interests me, those moments in which it escapes into some new being.”
So this all has application to the creative life. But also, to life? I have often thought that anything that applies to the creative life also applies to life-life. Yes?
Our interactions are small, now. You can hardly see them. And sometimes we disappear. It feels like a lot of the work we’re doing behind our masks isn’t noted. But also, perhaps, it’s there and will be felt long after. It’s moving into the ether the way poetry does.
When it comes to writing a thing, or making a still life, I’m often thinking of the line by the artist Jasper Johns: “Take something. Change it. Change it again.” We’re looking for the poetic possibility, in art and in life. We’re trying some things out, then turning them a few degrees, shifting this here, and then that. We’re adding this and taking out that.
The simplest interactions now are layered with complex meanings, the sediment and swirl of recent and long past encounters. And at the same time our fears are dancing with our hopes, our exhaustion is mingling with our exhilaration, our hardships and our disappointments are anyone’s guess, and it’s all a smoky haze that no one is capturing on celluloid. We want to appear and to disappear, simultaneously. The poetry of the ordinary is muddier and deeper in places. We’re in the shallows at the same time as we are deep in the historical moment. It ain’t easy, being a leaf. It ain’t easy being poetry in a non-fiction town. It ain’t easy being an actor in a movie with no script.
The first step babies, is to show yourself some love.
