Embrace The Ordinary
Commonplace Newsletter #005
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‘It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give to the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me.’
~James Joyce
If these newsletters were to have a mission statement it would be something like the above quotation. Yes, I have called this The Commonplace Newsletter for a reason, because as well as drawing from my own personal Commonplace I also believe that commonplace/ordinary/quotidian things are important. Vitally so. They are what life is made of.
Painting: George Shaw
This is not a popular message. Largely because it is hard to sell people consumer goods off the back of it.
Advertising, as well all know, is predicated on the idea of a better tomorrow, on the idea that you are one purchase away from ‘happiness’ - a weasel word that becomes murkier the more that it is diluted by misuse.
But of course tomorrow never arrives. The consumer keeps running on the Hedonic Treadmill and his footsteps power the machine that we call the economy.
See, for all the mindfulness apps and meditation retreats, for all of the inelegant Carpe Diem tattoos and posts about being ‘present’, for most of the time we are all off somewhere else. Because the grease that keeps the treadmill gears runnings smooth is escapism, whether it be drugs, alcohol, sex, shopping, travel, pornography, Netflix or our old friend Twitter.
And the cure for escapism is to embrace ordinariness, that cousin of boredom. If you accept that you can’t escape, then you stop doing stultifying escapist acts. (Or using neutral things in an escapist manner). And if you stop doing these things, you paradoxically rise above this dreaded everydayness.
Transcendence comes via immersion.
Allow me to explain...
The Ordinary Canon
A theme that I hammer home again and again (and that I will continue to hammer home forever more) is that people should read fiction, particularly those classics from the Canon which call to them.
Again, this is not a particularly popular message. I suspect I am fighting an uphill battle against the intellectual PTSD that comes from years of being made to close-read Measure for Measure and the like, close-read them at a glacial pace while the sun tauntingly shone outside the classroom window and the moulded plastic chairs made your young spine age.
But I’ll persist because I’m right.
One thing that great fiction does is capture detail, and in capturing detail it heightens your real life experience of the phenomenon in question.
You read a just-right description of birds in flight or rain-slick suburban streets and suddenly you find that your evening walks transform. You read the interior thoughts or an unexceptional man going about his unexceptional business and you feel less alone. You read the cringe-inducingly accurate dialogue of a marriage falling apart and you start cutting your spouse a little more slack and begin attempting to be a more attentive listener.
Through such recognition life becomes re-enchanted, little by little.
By contrast, lowest-common-denominator blockbuster films have a disenchanting effect. How many meaningless, unrelatable, decontextualised on-screen murders have I seen in my life time. Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? More? This surely must have a dulling effect.
Now we could argue all day about what art is for, and it is such a monumental and fundamental part of humanity that I doubt we would barely touch on a satisfactory answer, let alone a comprehensive one. Things of such stature are ends-in-themselves and to theorise about them is to miss the point.
But I stand by the enchantment hypothesis. At least as a facet.