We want the document of ourselves

On the solipsism of the front-facing camera

A NOTE FROM M.G.

I hope you’ll read this short essay I wrote for you. I reserve an indeterminate amount of time for reflections such as this, and I do not want that time to be spent in vain. I believe in words and I believe in reading and I think we have an opportunity to participate in something special together if you spend the time with me here. Thank you for subscribing to Miscellanea, which perhaps should be named something else entirely. Well — not ‘Something Else Entirely’ — though that’s not the worst name I can think of. My point is that the trajectory and meaning and purpose of this newsletter is becoming more clear to me and that maybe the name should reflect that? I don’t know: Miscellanea is so conveniently catch-all. Eh. I’ll let you read the essay now.

Me, early aughts

Filler-lipped heart-pursed airpod-girl, turning to her side for candid smart phone selfies out front the coffee shop. The hotshot passing points at her Jordans and lends his approval — I can’t hear him through the window, but I can hear him through the window: Low booming voice lowered more to meet the injections where they’re at. He is gone now, and she sticks out her leg, looking down to recall which kicks she wore today.

Now arriving, the face of an actor in a role you don’t trust. In a black Adidas track jacket and with two opalescent orange-immune-juice-booster-shooters, he sits down next to her. In a gesture of health and prosperity he shakes and shoots his own, the exhaust of innumerable shots he’s shot before, a quick and fluid arc, up and back down: a fountain of tangerine youth, sprayed, splayed, and swallowed.

She’s laughing at him now; a forced smile. Yet soon the artifice wears away like the big hole in her blue jeans and both their bodies relax. Faces more human emerge and they sip on their take away coffees — the status symbol and grounding force that they are: Places to go, people to see.

Myself not immune from said superficialities, I wonder of these rituals and the posturing that accompanies them. It seems to me that we all want to be seen. But it seems to me, too, that we don’t want to be seen: a selfie we project unawareness that we’re taking, we want the document of ourselves.

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I’ve been pondering lately the role of individualism, questioning it and turning it over in my hands. Does it act more to help us or to hurt us? And therein lies another answer: us. If you are to think and question in terms of a people, more than a person — if you are concerned at all with some collective or community, you must admit to yourself that individualism does not concern itself whatsoever with the group, the larger ‘us’.

The ever-present mirror of our front-facing cameras are a symptom of a larger idea, of course, that we should be taking the time to document ourselves. There are only so many people that can fit in an image created at an arms-length from a face; solipsism is baked into the design of the lens.

Have you ever taken a group selfie in this way, stretching your arm out as if an arm can actually stretch? Even at its greatest distance, yourself the largest subject? Friends and family are strewn across the background, smaller and smaller still.

I’d be the last to discount the rare and true benefit of insular activities; of contemplation of the self. But still it must be said that it is altogether lacking.

Which brings us back, finally, to the role of this camera and the selfies it generates. Their end-use being, of course, a post or a story or a message for others. For even in wanting the document of ourselves, and even in the posturing we perform for the camera, we do long more for the ‘document’ to be seen by others. This, to me, is an unusual and redeeming aspect of the front-facing lens: its propensity to ultimately facilitate contact, its blatant hope for connection.

Can we begin to see beyond the binaries we impose on the things of our lives? There’s a favorite social-media-show (?) of mine called SubwayTakes, in which the host,

Kareem Rahma

, asks the takes of his guests and responds with his assertion: 100% agree or 100% disagree, which is funny and acts as a segue to a larger conversation about said take. It’s a delightfully modern – and in my view beautiful – way to start conversations both trivial and consequential.

May we begin to see that thinking is not static, that contact makes it fluid, and that we, a collective, are more than the sum of our ideas and conflicts. May the artifice wear away, may our bodies relax, and may we create community.

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Rebecca Solnit writes early in her book on the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster:

“… just as many machines reset themselves to their original settings after a power outage, […] we revert to something we already know how to do. The possibility of paradise is already within us as a default setting.”

REBECCA SOLNIT, A PARADISE BUILT IN HELL

I love this concept of a noble default setting in community — as she notedly remarks it is within ‘us’, which I take to be not us as individuals, but us as a group of people together. It is this exact utopian togetherness that is so vital to remember, in our minds and our bodies, when we set out to affect the world in all of our miniature ways, to have conversations that move the needle and not the goalposts, and to foster some sense of communal likeness.

In the midst of all our places to go and people to see, and maybe in holding to these hopeful ideals, we can begin to gain some ground on the hustle of it all and find a layer deeper then — a plane on which we are more alike than dissimilar and a world in which our differences are minute and less consequential than we’d believed: a beautiful, expansive, communal plane of existence that we usually reserve for our guest lists and media bubbles. A life liberated as an open invite, an optimist’s knife to our pervasive babbling.