andrea leigh.

to the ordinary man. or woman.

dedication from the practice of everyday life by michel de certeau:

to a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. in invoking here at the outset of my narratives the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity, i inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. what are we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of history to license to us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate to him the writing that one formerly offered in praise of the gods or the inspiring muses?

this anonymous hero is very ancient. he (or she) is the murmuring voice of societies. in all ages, he comes before texts. he does not expect representations. he squats now at the center of our scientific stages. the floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. the increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic details - parts taken for the whole. slowly the representatives that formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. we witness the advent of the number. it comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. it is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heros who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.

the next american metropolis.

beneath the rationales, facts, examples and guidelines is a simple ethos. this ethos provides a specific aesthetic of place - scaled to the human body, timed to a stride, patterned to ceremony, and bonded to nature. it is an aesthetic grounded in the notion that space is not an infinite grid, that time is not relentlessly progressive, that pattern is not formally mechanical, and that boundaries are not limits.

peter calthorpe

how am i not myself?

they are not meant to be self-help books but a few of the texts i've read for school have been just that. self-identity and modernity. the fall of public man. flesh and stone. giddens and sennett talk about the elevation of the individual and the increase of narcissism in society. whether it be conversation or consumption everything reveals something about my identity. says something about who i am. about my individual self.

sometimes i feel that my personality is a product of modernity.

why it automatically has to be a negative thing i don't know. maybe i'm blaming modernity for my faults. for my selfishness. but certain passages and arguments have helped me make sense of, well, me.

a couple of weeks ago some friends and i were looking up our enneagram types. let me preface this by saying i think personality types are socially constructed categories that do not exist in the really real world (whatever and wherever that is) and do not reflect the infinite range or dynamic nature of personalities that do exist. i digress.

with that said i am a four. an individualist. and it seems they (whoever they is) don't have many positive things to say about us. which also might be a symptom of our personality. we are self-aware, self-conscious, self-indulgent, wallow in self-pity, unsure about and protective of self-image. we feel we are different from everyone else. we are special. and obsessed with our identity. and being true to it once we find it. as if it were out there in the material world waiting to be found. or stumbled upon.

sometimes i feel that my personality is a product of modernity.

there are many events and shifts that caused public man to fall. that have weakened social bonds between neighbors. that have disconnected us from our environment. we have turned our gaze inward. averting our eyes from one another. and when we do connect with someone else it must be meaningful. meaning it must revel something about our selves. this is not entirely bad. but we shouldn't assume it is more desirable either.

our selves are not out there to be found or discovered. we are created by interacting with others. family. friends. classmates. co-workers. neighbors. strangers. and some would say god or spirit or energy. we do not find ourselves. we create ourselves and are created. and not in a vacuum. in community. whether intentionally or not.

although type four insists on being different, which at times causes them to withdraw from others as if to prove the point, they desire to connect. to be known and understood. to be found by someone who will embrace their differentness. both the good and the bad. however this connection is still about their self.

maybe the four needs to give up the quest for personality that sennett describes. maybe instead of seeking the other to embrace their differentness they simply need to embrace the other. instead of connecting with the other in order to find their self maybe they just need to connect. and in connecting create and be created.

los angeles.

almost a year i wrote this on the couch in kate's basement in victoria on vancouver island:

i feel at home the same as elsewhere. strangely familiar. i feel at home the same as in the air. not here nor there, yet. surrounded by strangers sharing a leg of the journey. paths briefly crossing. i love my home. my city. even if i have tended to wander. and wonder what life would be like, what i would be like, elsewhere. but no where has felt as familiar and strange. there's nowhere else i want to be. or come back to over and over again.

i have felt these sentiments for a while now. like a stranger at home in a way. a silent observer. a flâneur. disengaged but enchanted.

some go to find themselves in the city. to feel separate and distinct from others. individual. autonomous. some go to lose themselves. to be no one. to be part of the crowd. the collective. the we. the us.

i dislike most of los angeles. but these are the reasons why i want to be there, i think. to be alone and surrounded. isolated and subsumed. to be known to my self and discovered by others.

someone who i respect moved his family to the other side of the world. this is how he described being elsewhere:

to have my life saved is to connect to other people. i'm at a time where that's all i've got. new relationships where i'm trying to reach out and connect and experience life. in the absence of what has been known for the sake of what is being discovered. sometimes what is known is the wilderness.

i may have said i feel like an outsider at home. i may have been a bit dramatic. but i do sometimes. i am known well by some. but not fully. i feel like parts of my self are scattered around with different friends in different cities. they hold memories that do not exist here at home.

it is silly to think i would be better understood elsewhere. that i would be more myself elsewhere. i know this. the grass is greener they say. maybe it's not greener. it's just a different kind of grass. maybe it takes leaving home to understand how you have been known there. and no one elsewhere will understand that part of you.

maybe i just miss a part of my self i haven't seen in a while.

we are prisoners of our judgment.

are people guilty forever? this question was posed in the holocaust class i sat in on this past spring. but it stayed with me. and it's something i've pondered in my own life.

recently i learned that someone who used to be special to me did some very hurtful things, not only to me but a mutual friend as well. is he always guilty? is he the same person who did those things? i don't know. but i have to believe that people can change. because if he can't change, then i can't change. after a few days, and the reality of what he did began to settle, i remembered that i was guilty of the same crimes.

how easily we forget wrongs we've committed. how easily we remember wrongs done to us.

when i say that if he had told me what he had done i would have understood, i mean it. because i did it too. and if he is guilty forever, then so am i.

there is a chance that he has not changed. in that case, he still doesn't have to remain guilty. there is forgiveness. even if he is the same person, i can change. i can forgive. he can be forgiven. not guilty.

in an article i stumbled upon a few weeks ago called we are prisoners of our judgment the author states 'every label we cast diminishes our capacity to be compassionate, to be free, to be alive, and to be loving. it is not possible to live fully in the moment while also harboring judgments, either old or new. when i judge you, i have attached myself to what is false in you insisting that it is who you are. i am missing your deepest essence, which is love.'

so no. he is not guilty. he was guilty. but now he is forgiven. and in forgiving him maybe i'm one step closer to forgiving myself.