The Question of the Commonplace
When plainness is the point
This is a filler post.
One of the influences for these types of posts is what’s called a commonplace book. Commonplace books have been around since antiquity and function like some combination of a diary, scrapbook, and catch-all for the variety of ideas, impressions, and inspiration you happen to stumble across at any given moment. In other words, a commonplace book is whatever you want it to be — and maybe it’s just a fancy term for a journal or, God forbid, a blog — but its purpose is to collect your thoughts without worrying about whether those thoughts add up to anything.
As you might expect, this kind of tool is especially useful for writers. Not only can a commonplace book help gather source material, it also fosters a habit of gathering, and even more importantly, a habit of noticing.1 Any given entry may have obvious significance the day you jot it down, or maybe there’s no clear significance at all, something just caught your attention: a quote or an image or your own half-formed thought or phrase. As with any set of data, it’s a game of inputs and outputs. The point is to resist the urge to analyze and just log it.
In other words, commonplace books allow noticing to take place over time. But at a more fundamental level, the premise of the commonplace book is that, contrary to our obsession with big things, thinking big and scaling up and organizing all life according to maximalist, totalizing ideologies, reality always starts with small things, even apparently random things. A quantum physicist is happy to tell you what happens at the level of the subatomic, but he’ll go insane, perhaps already has gone insane, trying to explain why. By all appearances, it is seemingly just random. Is it? Who knows? Dependent as he is on optical instruments, the physicist, too, sees through a glass darkly.
Baudelaire says something similar to the above here:
There are people in this world, even the world of artists, who go to the Louvre, pass, swiftly, before a host of paintings, full of interest though of a lower order, without giving them a glance, and plant themselves in reverie before a Titian or a Raphael, one of those popularized by the art of the engraver; then depart, satisfied, more than one saying ‘I know my Louvre,’ just as there are others who once having read Bossuet and Racine think they comprehend the history of literature.
Happily, righters of wrongs, critics, amateurs, the curious, appear from time to time to affirm that Raphael is not everything, Racine is not everything, that the minor poets contain things which are good, solid, pleasurable; and finally that however much we admire beauty in general, as expressed by the classical poets and artists, we are no less wrong in neglecting specific beauty, the beauty of circumstance and the play of manners.
Finally I think Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew offers its own kind of argument for the commonplace, both in form and content.
There’s a lot to say about this movie, and more than I can get into here, but here’s a few words from the Wikipedia entry:
Given Pasolini’s well-known reputation as an atheist, a homosexual, and a Marxist, the reverential nature of the film came as a surprise.
I bet!
Filmed on-location in Southern Italy, most of the actors are non-professionals, including the unibrowed teenager playing Jesus. The dialogue is a word-for-word reading of the Gospel in Italian. Roger Ebert described the film as a retelling of the life of Christ “as if a documentarian on a low budget had been following him from birth.” In short, while the era’s familiar sword-and-sandal epics strove for heroic grandiosity, Pasolini recognized that the story of Jesus could only be told using the exact opposite approach.
Still one element of the movie, the music, is worth calling out, with selections ranging from Bach to Odetta.
The song played immediately after the miracle here is “Gloria” from the Missa Luba, a Congolese version of the Latin Mass. Here’s the full version:
Noticing: that increasingly rare skill in our so-called attention economy in which people are categorized as Consumers or Creators and appraised according to their relative market value.
But what is the market value of a Noticer? What even is a Noticer? If he is what I think he is, his market value is nothing. And if that’s the case — if he can’t be transmogrified into money — then in some sense the Noticer isn’t anything at all. He doesn’t really exist. Hence why he goes unnoticed.
Love it