As far as I know, there's no word in English for the combination of loneliness, liberation, and disorienting sense of an adjusted perspective that one can feel when stepping away and looking back, from a distance, at a group to which one nominally belongs. Presumably some existentially fraught Eastern European tongue - Slovak, perhaps, after the rather sad 1993 attainment of countryhood? - has coined a word for the condition. But in this blog post I'll have to do without a convenient, economical summary of my topic.Here's what I have in mind. Today, at the little Roland Park library nursery rhyme group that Cleo and I been attending for more than a year now, Cleo suddenly grew a little tired of the song that I and the other 8 adults were singing: ironically, enough, The More We Get Together. So she simply stood up and walked off to another section of the large room - a section that featured a large rocking chair that was clearly more exciting than our plodding, methodical incantation. But, after a few moments of exploring the chair, she looked back towards us, with a sense of both curiosity and mild transgression on her face.
I knew, I think, what she was feeling. In my file of essays-to-be-written, I have one set of notes dedicated to moments in art and literature that detail a sudden cut away, to a distant view of the subject at hand. The best example I know of occurs in James Cameron's Titanic, during the long, cold sequence in which the ship breaks apart and sinks. For most of a half hour, we closely follow the actions of dozens of individuals, in tight, swamped settings. And then, suddenly, we're offered a distant view, from about a half mile off, of what seems to be a tiny, illuminated boat lost in the vast night. It is a remarkable moment: an intense tragedy becomes a momentary incident on the huge plane of the sea.
There are other examples of the tendency, as well. In Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube," and important piece of modernist criticism, he opens with an imagined, distant view of the modernist tradition, as though seen from space. And, more playfully, at the 10-minute mark of The Flying Guillotine, a martial arts movie, a long fight sequence is punctuated, at one point, by a middle-distance view from inside a rock wall: the efforts of the combatants reduced to mere abstract motion.
Is that, more or less, what Cleo saw, as she watched and listened from, as it were, offstage? Did we simply look small, and insignificant, to her, as we chanted our children's songs? Or did she feel some of the sense of adventure that I feel when I step away from the utterly familiar, and see it as anew?
I knew, I think, what she was feeling. In my file of essays-to-be-written, I have one set of notes dedicated to moments in art and literature that detail a sudden cut away, to a distant view of the subject at hand. The best example I know of occurs in James Cameron's Titanic, during the long, cold sequence in which the ship breaks apart and sinks. For most of a half hour, we closely follow the actions of dozens of individuals, in tight, swamped settings. And then, suddenly, we're offered a distant view, from about a half mile off, of what seems to be a tiny, illuminated boat lost in the vast night. It is a remarkable moment: an intense tragedy becomes a momentary incident on the huge plane of the sea.
There are other examples of the tendency, as well. In Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube," and important piece of modernist criticism, he opens with an imagined, distant view of the modernist tradition, as though seen from space. And, more playfully, at the 10-minute mark of The Flying Guillotine, a martial arts movie, a long fight sequence is punctuated, at one point, by a middle-distance view from inside a rock wall: the efforts of the combatants reduced to mere abstract motion.
Is that, more or less, what Cleo saw, as she watched and listened from, as it were, offstage? Did we simply look small, and insignificant, to her, as we chanted our children's songs? Or did she feel some of the sense of adventure that I feel when I step away from the utterly familiar, and see it as anew?
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