Sedienta de ojos

This came in the mail yesterday, but I didn't have a chance to open it until late this afternoon. I was waiting by the cart (containing the new portable air conditioner!) in Costco and about to have a seizure from staring at the same bright moving images on the several dozen TV screens of different sizes I was facing. I turned away abruptly and started digging through my purse for my phone so I could Twitter something smart-assy about being in Costco and the sizes of TV screens expanding in direct proportion to American roads and my own American ass when I saw the book in there.

Before the intro, before the table of contents or dedication, Michel de Certeau begins this incredible work, indeed begins it before the pages are even numbered, making impossible a proper cite.

"To the ordinary man.
To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets" Or, as the front cover image suggests, driving in countless thousands on traffic-jammed highways.

DeCerteau continues his introduction of the "anonymous hero" and his/her(?) being subject/object of study:

"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 continuous and flexible mass, woven tight with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as the become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one."

Yet, this morning, walking between classes, I wanted glimpses into the everyday life of those who make up the parts of that flexible mass who were walking around and past me. And I wanted to see what makes them different, what makes them them. A hundred people, or maybe even more were on the same part of campus I was, moving toward their next occurrences. And it was hot. And, thirsting for a connection not necessarily reciprocal, I looked as much into their eyes as I could. Driving home in traffic later, I heard a song called "Poker face". I realize that I believe that even when we think we have them, something always shows. Or tells. If we're lucky, it won't be what we're trying to hide. Today in looking for those connections, I wasn't trying to look through windows to the souls of my fellow passers-by to see some deep secret hidden pain or joy. And the flooding of those everyday life expressions into my eyes was transfusive and the rest of the afternoon has been a floating of energy and calm.