A tale of the infraordinary

Habit, necessity, and even common sense encourage us to notice some things while ignoring others, in all situations, whether trivial or newsworthy. History and daily life are similarly marked by the notable occurrence, while the greater reality recedes  unrecorded into oblivion. We tend to know what happened near Hastings in 1066, but not in 1065 or 1067; or what happened in New York on the 11th September 2001, though not on the 10th or 12th of that terrible month. “Ordinary” years and days are forgotten yet, numerically at least, they are more significant. We celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, but not less well defined multiples of time passing. The same thing applies elsewhere: we mostly observe our bodies only when they hurt or malfunction, not when they behave as expected. We see sheep in the field, while being less likely to notice the field; we hear the jet roaring overhead, but not the ambient sound of an average afternoon. The disaster or the revolution attract our attention, while the near miss, the ambient status quo, and the non-event are … non-events. No surprise there.

One way or another we learn to distinguish figure from ground, to highlight and to overlook, although in a statistical sense it may be the background situation, rather than the sudden happening, that provides a more reliable guide to how things are. The fields remain while the sheep come and go; the plane is far away now, but the air endures.  We note changes, shocks, discontinuities, paradigm shifts, boundaries, beginnings, ends, and tend to disregard what goes on all the time. There are many reasons for this, but among them are a concern for practicality and for our sanity. If we declined to draw out prominences it would be much harder to make sense of anything.

There are, of course, several well-known ways into the deliberate “reverse marking” of passing events, into the foregrounding of the habitually mundane and  recessive. There are, for example, the compulsive life-loggers, whose exhaustive and gadget-enhanced diaries record their every input, pulse, spasm, excretion and secretion; then there are the reports of those happy souls who sit in city squares  jotting down every feral fox trajectory, every take-off and landing of manky pigeons, every transit of white vans or of the Number 77 bus, every stir of wind and drift of leaves or litter, all the aircraft noises and car alarms, and the movements of that annoying little man who keeps pacing up and down outside Caffè Nero. Other than via such contrived procedures, the day to day banality so easily passes us by. A world we have lost even as we inhabit it. If we ever think of it at all, it’s likely to be after it has gone. “What was that funny little shop next to the newsagent’s ?”

One tool we use intuitively for deciding what is important to us, is language – so it’s “us” rather than “them”, “inside” rather than “outside”, “pet” rather than “pest”, a focus on features that are wanted rather than on those that are not. Words can be implicitly judgemental: grass growing on a lawn is grass; grass growing on a flowerbed is a weed. Weeds are not good. A daisy or a buttercup on a lawn is a weed; elsewhere it may attain the status of a “wild flower”. The same species; different perceptions, different valuations.

Perhaps because of the unusually mild and protracted Spring this year, all local forms of fauna seem to have been doing well, from weeds, via snowdrops, daffodils and tulips, to tree blossom. When I was little, daisies were the prototype lawn intruder, in the same way that sparrows were the default suburban bird; both have seemingly declined in recent years, but now appear to be making a comeback. I hope so. It was while the missus and I were walking by our local pond yesterday that we were astonished at the density of daisies on the surrounding grassy areas. So astonishingly so – almost resembling a covering of hail - that we took photos. I’d never thought of photographing daisies before.

Our walk took us to a disused railway line that has been made into a linear “green way”, and besides daisies we soon began to notice buttercups, dandelions, forget-me-nots, cowslips, nettles, and poppies, all of which we photographed as though they were “sights” on a tourist trail, as though they were the botanically exotic rather than the run-of-the-mill endotic inhabitants of suburban wasteland. As our walk continued across an informal common and alongside rough land adjacent to a building site we began to notice more and more species, the names of which, shamefully,  we were ignorant. More pictures, and we sensed that something slightly strange had happened. For one thing, we felt happier.

Gradually, and unexpectedly, we found ourselves focusing on smaller and smaller plants, whose existence we had never suspected. We had never seen them before because we had never thought to look. For anyone familiar with and fond of wild flowers this will no doubt read as a pathetic kind of admission by an ignorant “townie”, but I believe it’s a process that has much wider applicability. Observation, learning to see, noticing detail, and initial detail leading to more detailed detail. (Where, presumably, lies God, or the other fella).

What was formerly “ground” was now “figure”; we had unconsciously up-ended the habitual gestalt – pretentious though it is to say that. The closer we looked, the more there was to see. What had always been – at least since childhood – an assumption of an irrelevant background to more pressing concerns, had suddenly become a subject of extraordinary visual interest. I imagine psychosis and psychedelic substances can produce similar effects, as can mystical or religious experiences, but this was natural and healthy. Triggered in the first instance by an unusual prevalence of daisies, our habitual subjective perceptual attitudes had been subverted. 

“Boring had become the new interesting”, we noted, resorting to jokey journalistic cliché. Which is as it has always been, without the fancy language, and as it should be. If only there was a way of applying the theory to airport departure lounges.