So yeah. For a little background, there’s some reading I did at Uni called the ‘Uncanniness of the Everyday’ (Stanley Cavell maybe? NOt great referencing here…I’m using a memory from a time I was probably smoking quite a lot of weed whilst attempting to grasp complex theories of existence….oh to be at Uni again…although to be honest…that’s a good description of most of my life….in a way) for a lecture I had with roughly the same title.
The key point that sticks in my head was the idea that everyday things could become Uncanny, that strange feeling where objectivity slips into your world view and you realise that everything you see is more than a little absurd. The example the lecturer used was of sitting in your car, parked in traffic, waiting silently to get to work, and as the rain falls on the wind shield; noticing for a brief moment, that you’re wrapped in fabric, sitting in a box of metal that moves because of chemical processes you only just understand. That’s not all, but your surrounded by other people doing the same, waiting, and frustrating (each other and themselves) all because they are anxious to get to a specific brick building and push some matter around. That’s all it all is too…just pushing matter from one place to the next.
It’s weird innit. Life.
Anyway, I’ve always had these moments (I’m sure most of us who think do..and most of us think), and sometimes they hit you hard even if they’re only brief. Today got me, I was walking to work, looking at some birds, and noticing the way they always seem to know where each other are. Thought process led to eyes on side of heads, and how that would look weird, but at the same time…if you were a bird, you’d be used to it. In the same way that we look at a thing from two slightly different angles and adapt it into one ‘3d’ image, the birds must take two pictures from totally skewed angles and so see much more of all around them, as one continuous image. This led onto thinking about evolution and monkeys (Orang Utans had already been on my mind today) and the ways animals learn things. Horses walking and whatnot. Then I was thinking about learning to walk…and then I was thinking about how it takes kids ages, and to an extent it always looks like they only do it to imitate other humans. And we’re pretty much the only things that walk like we do all the time. And it’s an oddly unbalanced thing, even if it is quite fast and mobile…we’re all walking around. All of us…look at all those people. Doing this thing that we learnt from our families and friends before we even really understood what that meant.
We saw something we recognised and mimicked it. And now we’re all walking.
Not exactly ground breaking, but it briefly knocked me for six.
It’s like you suddenly step back from your eyes…almost like an out of body experience, only out of the whole world.Looking down at how weird it is.
And that’s just walking.
Life is a constant mystery for people like me.
(Idiots, that is.)
Enjoy your walking folks.
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yeah i often have these moments. tends to happen on public transport. “what the HELL are we all doing sat here in a big metal tube on wheels, in carpet-burny seats, looking straight ahead, all at more or less the same things, or at the floor, in such ridiculously close proximity with one another all heading in the same direction yet not aknowledging each other one bit” heck, not that I want to.
or on a train station, or in queues. sometimes in queues i find it quite hard not to giggle because of it and hope that when i ask for a small packet of cutters choice i dont just burst.
i think it too about houses. if you look at a row of houses then you don’t tend to automatically think of all the people in them and how close they are to one another and about the fact that we are all human.
we sit in front of screens or listening to music or reading a book, when we’re a couple of meters away from some other human being who’s probably doing something similar unless they’re into kinky sex, where they might have their partner strapped ot the wall or somethiung, but i digress. we’re just blobs in boxes ignoring each other.. none of what i have just said made much sense but it distracted me sufficiently.
thanks for making me smile - the hard moments seem a little more tolerable when one steps back and realizes the absurdity of it all.
The last time I was like that, I think it was to do with wondering what the purpose of eyebrows was.
[...] My other moments of clarity that existed in these few seconds were almost precisely that which Alabaster Crippens refers to in this post. [...]