08 January 2012
Patchwork Writing: In the company of Jane & Co.
)Published on January 8th, 2012 @ 07:06:54 am, using 2342 words, 465 views
Jane drops in on me every now and again like any good fictional character that once made an impression. Noah Baumbach’s Jane and her sudden drunken clarity. Zeroing in on individual words with a magnifying glass and inevitably failing to wrap her head around them. The beauty of Jane to me has always been in her attempting the seldom-tried, taking time out to look, finding that she just doesn’t know and actually savoring that moment.
There’s also her willingness and readiness to criticize, others and herself. The fact she recognizes the preciousness of time enough to offer symbolic amounts to her listeners (a quarter here, 50¢ there…) when she feels she’s wasted their time by being less than interesting.
There’s her cute-as-a-button inability to come up, in a timely manner, with comebacks worthy of being uttered. And then sharing those that occur to her long after they’re appropriate.
But the thing about Jane, the one thing I always go back to really, is her being plagued by “those times,” what she calls “those times…” You know… when words sound weird to her?
I’ve had my share of “those times,” both before and after Jane. They were my (unlabeled) moments, before I saw fit to call them “Jane moments,” which seemed only right since she made them universal to me. It’s quite a pleasant shock to have a particular idiosyncrasy you nursed as your own suddenly turn quote-unquote universal. A common link between yourself and other people.
We are constantly immersed in language - in the particular language we get to use on a daily basis - for language is everywhere, in the books we read, in the thoughts and conversations we have, in the songs we listen to, often in the very mugs we drink from. The words that comprise that language are always closer to us than the actions, people, objects, situations, experiences we use them to describe. Closer as in standing directly between us and whatever we need their help in communicating, at our beck and call, requiring no assessment or consideration, as familiar to us as our own bodies, a constant we can safely take for granted. It’s a rare thing to be able to extricate oneself from such a tightly woven tapestry, such a remarkable collection of essentials to daily life, but it does happen. It’s quite an uncommon moment but entirely possible and it seeks you out, never the other way around. A momentary return to square one, as something outside yourself goes about uprooting everything previously established, removing your shortcuts one by one, installing selected features of amnesia in your brain and ultimately setting you on a course towards reacquainting yourself with things that are normally too close to behold.
Square ONE. Looking at a single randomly chosen pixel when you’re used to the whole 5MB image. Looking at a forest and zooming in on a single leaf, looking at a piece of clothing and zeroing in on one of the near microscopic holes created by the weaving of four fibers. We rarely go in for the lowest common detail, for the individual ant going about its business, and language is much too vast, indispensable and habitual to be any different.
“The question dropped on your plate"… The task at hand, if you will: to get to the bottom of how what is, came to be. Jane (Kicking and Screaming) and her quirky squinty-eyed repetition of her own name. Struggling to make sense of words like dog and cantaloupe. Celine’s mental pictures of the bit of red in a lover’s beard that never fades from her memory, even a decade later. Kim Krizan and her keen understanding of language and communication as an ocean between people we optimistically strive to bridge. Amélie’s whimsical investigation of another’s obsession with mysterious and repetitively discarded photo booth images. Holden Caufield and his treasuring of another Jane’s quirk… All little things… All instances of seeing the often neglected.
‘She wouldn’t move any of her kings. What she’d do, when she’d get a king, she wouldn’t move it. She’d just leave it in the back row. She’d get them all lined up in the back row. Then she’d never use them. She just liked the way they looked when they were all in the back row.’
Stradlater didn’t say anything. That kind of stuff doesn’t interest most people.
(The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger)
These people (whether real or fictional, whether figments of someone’s imagination or reflections of someone’s essence) get to me in a way most people simply don’t, which is probably just as well since appeal, indifference and repulsion have their respective allotments in everyone’s experience and ultimately help define the people we become. In fact, very few things get to me like finding a kindred spirit (again, real or fictional.) No way to ever see them coming, kindred spirits have a way of materializing when you least expect them in the shape of a person you’ll immediately see as special by way of a quirk, a particular trait or partiality, a favorite author, a brand new yet familiar arrangement of words… and hit you with the lovely feeling of commonality, which takes a bit of your sense of individuality but patches up the remaining void with a sense of belonging. Trading your illusion of uniqueness in for the bigger illusion of normalcy. Exchanging, on your behalf, one illusion for another.
Jane ponders, “These little things people have as pets called dogs… Dogs… Cantaloupe. We eat… cantaloupe.” Where did it all come from? This mountain of details labeling every inch of our experience. All of these lowest common details that make up a whole world we’ve gotten used to to the point of paying it no mind. It can be extremely uncomfortable, staring at these lowest common details. As uncomfortable as staring at a pixel - individually meaningless. Uncomfortable since we have been trained to look and recognize, to bypass questioning in favor of creating habits. Of speeding up instead of slowing down.
The prospect of slowing down, the mere mention of slowing down always leads me straight to this:
AUGGIE: You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.
PAUL: What do you mean?
AUGGIE: I mean, you’re going too fast. You’re hardly even looking at the pictures.
PAUL: But they’re all the same.
AUGGIE: They’re all the same, but each one is different from every other one. You’ve got your bright mornings and your dark mornings. You’ve got your summer light and your autumn light. You’ve got your weekdays and your weekends. You’ve got your people in overcoats and galoshes, and you’ve got your people in shorts and T-shirts. Sometimes the same people, sometimes different ones. And sometimes the different ones become the same, and the same ones disappear. The earth revolves around the sun, and every day the light from the sun hits the earth at a different angle.
PAUL: Slow down, huh?
AUGGIE: Yeah, that’s what I’d recommend. You know how it is. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, time creeps on its petty pace.
(Smoke - Screenplay by Paul Auster)
Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) understood the need and made room in his life for just this kind of contemplating. His chosen outlet or so-called project, a scrapbook of snapshots taken of the same New York City corner every single day at the exact same time. His way of formatting some of the little things about the world we take for granted in such a way as to foster reflection, facilitate and encourage seeing what we train ourselves not to waste time on.
Paul (William Hurt) heeds the advice, slows down as Auggie suggests and eventually gets it. Finds by sheer chance, something that makes the exercise personal and meaningful to him. A little thing. The image of his late wife captured by Auggie’s camera in one of those thousands of mornings.
Little things roam the earth, invisible for the most part, yet always ready to anchor us for brief periods to the vicinity of possibilities which might otherwise go unnoticed and unexperienced.
Also by Auster…
Such is the way of the world: one step at a time, one word and then the next. There are certain things that Blue cannot possibly know at this point. For knowledge comes slowly…
(The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster)
That same kernel of love for the lowest common details, for the little things, for everything that goes unacknowledged can be found at the heart of what Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz does on his chosen corner of the world. Fostering reflection. Encouraging thoughtful examination of the very elements we so often overlook in favor of a streamlined existence. It is, undeniably, the sensible way to go, the practical way to deal with the relentless, unending flux of wave-like events we are dealt on a daily basis. And yet somehow there’s still room for square one moments, for the kind of lucidity that will beg the unusual questions, invite the uncommon thoughts, press the pause button and allow us a moment to do the undoable or at least the seldom-tried.
Vik Muniz rescues significance from a wide range of materials (among them chocolate, sugar, toys, diamonds, and most recently, garbage) to recreate iconic, instantly recognizable images that in turn, invite us to “reinvent our way of looking.”
I distinctly remember taking an involuntarily choreographed approach to looking at each photograph from his 2009 exhibit in Rio, as though the choreography had been drilled into me, as though I’d rehearsed it to exhaustion. I’d look from a distance, recognize the image (made famous years, decades, centuries earlier) and then come as close as I had to in order to identify the material. And only then was I satisfied.
Normally people are satisfied with the view from a distance but by the very nature of his work, Vik Muniz makes it impossible to skip that closer look.
*** Digression Alert ***
Anthony Minghella wrote in his adaptation of The English Patient:
You can’t explore from the air, Maddox. If you could explore from the air, life would be very simple.
“Look Closer,” the American Beauty tagline recommended before we even set foot on the screening room.
Once inside, we were treated to the contemplation of a dancing plastic bag. Another little thing suddenly brought to life, suddenly allowed purpose, suddenly seen as more than just.
As documented in Waste Land (2010) an Academy Award nominated documentary that followed Muniz to Jardim Gramacho (the biggest landfill in Latin America) he managed to point a magnifying glass in Jane fashion at not only the garbage used as raw material in his latest venture but also the people employed in picking it.
“There is a whole world of things that you don’t give the slightest importance to.” ("Há um mundo de coisas para as quais você não dá a menor importância.") Things doomed to be discarded. Things we fail to look at and take in, things we assign a sole purpose to, and once that purpose is fulfilled, discard without much consideration. Individual words, individual pixels, individual ants, individual rolling chestnuts, individual people… garbage pickers… one Julie Gianni.
David Aames (Vanilla Sky) eventually had his moment of lucidity. Eventually got it that overlooking little things not only could but did lead to the direst of consequences. His unacknowledged little thing, a girl by the name of Julie Gianni, who sadly worked her way into that category of things not seen, used and subsequently discarded.
Her purpose consensually reduced to sex, her face reduced to the observation-turned-title of “saddest girl to ever hold a martini,” her true intentions kept secret and thus misread, her steps guided by the wrong reasons. The wrong means towards the desired end, an offer of casual sex mismatched with an expectation of love.
Little things can make us or break us. They can be the potential building blocks that will eventually constitute the foundation of whatever it is we set out to build (the very blocks we’ll eventually take for granted), just as they can be the one thing we’ll obsess over until the original intention is too seriously delayed and massive to be achievable. Dwelling on the distance from here to there can paralyze you before the first step, just as focusing on a detail can be the thing to motivate you to get to the finish line. Little things are at once simple enough yet tricky to grasp.
The little things we employ in building, the individual brick, the individual word, the individual in an overcrowded world… they must be considered from a place of balance. A balance struck somewhere between the forest and the veins on a leaf, somewhere between the big picture and a random pixel, somewhere between our selfish wants and the feelings of others.
When you are the lowest common detail, as Julie found herself to be, the exercise of zooming in on little things turns potentially painful. Finding that you yourself are the little thing gone unnoticed robs you of the sense of having a rightful place in the scheme of things.
There’s no going wrong in squinting, taking time out to see, diving headfirst into Square One moments or Jane moments, whatever you wish to call them. There’s no going wrong in slowing down, paying attention, zooming in to the brink of not seeing. The very brink which is likely to take you full circle and actually improve your way of seeing. Absolutely no going wrong in reveling in the seldom-tried, in what the world might label as weird. Or little.
Little things will always, if we let them, work their magic and redirect our awareness to everything we tacitly agree to keep dormant. Our creative eye, our best attempts at uniqueness, our sense of adventure and wonder.
Morcheeba - Blood like Lemonade
This post is the creative work of Iris Watts Hirideyo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Little things, Jane, Kicking and Screaming, zoom, Before Sunset, Celine, Waking Life, Kim Krizan, Amélie, Smoke, Paul Auster, Auggie Wren, slow down, Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caufield, Vik Muniz, Wasteland, Vanilla Sky, Julie Gianni, American Beauty
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