Being Seen - May 6 2022

 

Being Seen

May 6 2022

At what point

does where you live

become big enough

you're longer seen?

Not the big metropolis

where who isn’t anonymous.

And not your little home town,

where strangers get the side-eye

and people talk.

Perhaps a bedroom community

commuter suburb

of ticky-tack lots.

Or an ambitious small town

civic boosters call a city

but clearly is not.

This invisibility

can be both comforting

and cold.

No one wondering what you're up to.

No one nodding disapprovingly.

No one even noticing.

Where you can ghost through busy streets,

negotiate sidewalks

where no one steps aside,

slip into booths

in noisy restaurants

and hide in plain sight.

But how nice

to be recognized.

Passers-by waving

through the windows of their cars.

Shopkeepers

calling you by name.

People

who know your people

as well as you know theirs,

because there aren’t many secrets

in a town as small town as this.

Then escape

for a weekend away

to the big city fleshpots

and garish neon dives,

where no one will bother you

or even care.

Where you can be someone else;

play pretend

experiment

let yourself go,

without being judged

or even remembered.

Or, for the first time ever

actually be yourself,

instead of who, your whole life

you've been expected to be.

When the real you

can’t risk being seen.

Again, something I just read in Garrison Keillor's column set me off. Here it is:

I live in New York because I love anonymity. If I lived here in Wabash, among my own people whom I love, I’d feel people staring at me, thinking, “Divorced. Twice. Left the Brethren. Used to drink a lot. And he wrote that stupid column about Roe v. Wade.” I walk around in New York, unself-conscious, enjoying odd accents, Asian faces, Orthodox schoolboys, confused tourists.

I think most of us feel this push/pull between comforting and cold. I'm a very private person, and like not being scrutinized, kept track of. But there is also a lovely warm feeling to being accepted, a part of a community, cared for.

I think people in big cities actually get to have both. Because big cities are not homogeneous monoliths. They are composed a small neighbourhoods and unique communities. You can have the best of both worlds, if you want.

I imagine this poem would be most meaningful to someone with a double life or threatening secret. Perhaps a gay person in a small intolerant town. A bigamist! Or just a creative and ambitious person who can't find like-minded people in the conservative complacent little place they were raised.

Perhaps this trade-off is easier to negotiate the older you get. When you're more sure of yourself. More comfortable in your own skin. Less susceptible to others' opinions, needy for external validation. And when people are more willing to overlook your idiosyncrasies. Because old people are permitted to be eccentric! So you can stay, after all: enjoy the feeling of belonging, while still feeling free to be yourself.

My thanks to the blues/folk singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds for ticky-tack, borrowed from this memorable line as it appears in her classic song Little Boxes:

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes made of ticky tacky

Little boxes on the hillside

Little boxes all the same…