What is Ordinary Life, Now?

I’ve spent the last year writing essays about mainly still life, and thinking about things like its intersection with ordinary life. I’ve thought about attention being akin to prayer, and wondered about what it is to depict humble things, real things. I’ve thought about every day photography projects, and about dailiness, the quotidian. I’ve read a ton of books on still life, and I’ve worked on my photography practice. I’ve read the Andrew Epstein book, Attention Equals Life. I am a fan of what we would ordinarily call the ordinary life.

But what is ordinary life, now? Life seems anything but ordinary right now and our attention has been shattered. At the same time, we are all smack-dab focussed on the ordinary life. Our attention on everyday details is almost overwhelming. Our sharing of the details of our everyday life is exhausting to try to keep up with. It’s also pretty freaking wonderful. I mean wow! I’m seriously in awe. I think I love the bread makers the best. Not kidding. Serious admiration. I have been encouraging people to #groundyourselfwithaneverydayproject so feel free to join in on that hashtag. (Long tho it is).

In the Epstein book, he quotes Laurie Langbauer who says “attention to the everyday is important because it is there that we can see how society works given that everyday life is one medium through which capitalism establishes itself.” Epstein says, “…everyday life poetics makes clear the risks of inattentiveness to the quotidian: not only do we miss out on noticing and understanding perhaps the most crucial and valuable sphere of human experience, but we may also remain oblivious to the ways in which our lives are governed by politics, ideology, power dynamics, and other forces.”

Another thing that I’ve been thinking about this past year is ordinary life vs celebrity life, and obviously this has been a pressure cooker of revelation in this category. COMPLETELY FASCINATING. And at times horrifying, but also: FASCINATING. What is it to be relatable? Or real?

The thing is that the so-called “ordinary” people are the ones carrying us right now. Maybe Springsteen’s song, Queen of the Supermarket, might have been mocked more than is remotely fair, but should be resurrected right about now imho. Corny? Don’t care. The man was onto things.

On a personal note, I’ve been temporarily laid off from my job. We’re lucky in Canada as we have things to apply for, and I’m confident that I’ll be back at the library ‘ere long. Of course my partner is an artist, and I don’t even want to talk about how uncertain the art world is right now. We’ll get through. We always have. But it’s going to be, shall we say, interesting??

In my last post I mentioned the Anne Bogart book again, What’s the Story. Essential reading as far as I’m concerned right now — for creatives, but also for anyone interested in storytelling. And we’re all in this rather massive story right now aren’t we?

There is a chapter, “Heat” which was written after 9/11 but seems to work for right now. Let me quote a bit from it, but please seek out the book, if this speaks to you.

She says, “In challenging times, spectacle takes the back seat in favour of the human need for intimacy and exchange.” What one craves at these terrible times is “aliveness.” We crave “realness” and “authentic encounters.” I think this is why I like that Patrick Stewart is reading Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jennifer Ehle is reading Pride and Prejudice: these things align with where they’ve been, who they are. Their offerings seem real and authentic.

Bogart says:

“I crave aliveness. I want to be challenged and feel present, participatory and part of the conversation. I long for adventure and the charged atmosphere of stimulating encounters. But what is aliveness really? What constitutes a real meeting beyond the habitual co-existence with others or the mediated relationships of social networking? When does an authentic encounter begin?”

So of course this is a book about theatre, but also so much more. The creative moment, the human connection in the arts.

She talks about the Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski and his manifesto “Holiday.”

He wants to “transcend the separation between audience and actors. Rather than spectacle, he was interested in the potential for human co-presence…”

The word, “holiday,” Bogart notes, is “a translation of the Polish “swieto.” Rather than vacation or time off work, “swieto” refers to the notion of the exceptional, the holy, the sacred or special. Perhaps, closer to “holy day.”” Grotowski’s vision is one of “collective effervescence.” Is it possible to think of the time right now in some ways as holy or sacred? Where can we locate our “collective effervescence?”

So maybe I’m taking all of this off in wild directions, but these are clearly extra-ordinary times. Those of us who are ordinary, and who work with everyday ordinary people in our usual jobs, well, we have always been both ordinary and not. And while it’s going to take a long while after this to make sense of things, if we even can make sense of things, it feels like to me that the truth is going to reside in the ordinary. In the ordinary lives, the ordinary moments, the authentic encounters, and in the attention to the everyday.

What will our everyday lives say, in Epstein’s words, about “politics, ideology, power dynamics, and other forces?” Is this where the most profound truths will be found in the future?

I do not know. There is so much that we can’t know right now. Yes, we have numbers, and yes, we know what we have to do to flatten the curve. What will this end up saying about humans? About connections? About how our society really works? About who is valued and who is not and why?

The above photo is the BTS look at the previous ones. It feels important, more than ever, just to show these small truths. How things look from further back. How this kind of perspective too, is a kind of beauty.

April 6, 2022