The tenderness of faces in a world that hardens us
petals on a wet, black bough
Hello Friends
This is the scene I woke up to last week when I opened the curtains of my 10th floor room in the Wandsworth Travelodge (which is as glamorous as it sounds). The wide view across London was quite a change from my usual morning view. When I opened the window I could hear the quiet hum of the city traffic, and birdsong, and the clatter, whine and rumble of bin men collecting rubbish in the terraces below. As leaned on the sill sipping my first tea of the day, I watched people making their way along the streeets to the Tube station and bus routes as they headed off to work, kids walking to school, cyclists and double-decker buses waiting at the lights then rushing onwards. The city hummed and whirred and pulsed beneath me like a gigantic organism and I felt like a just one more little corpuscle readying to flow through its channels for another day.
I’m just back home in Orkney from a full week of travelling and cities, Cambridge, London, Edinburgh, meetings, conversations, buses, trains, boats, taxis and planes, and lots and lots of art exhibitions.
You might think a country mouse like me would find being in the city an overwhelming press of noise and rush and crowds. Indeed, I set out with some reluctance and trepidation, home-body that I am these days. But in fact, with the old familiarity of city living stripped away from me by years of island life, I found the experience newly strange and oddly moving.
People, people everywhere, so many tender faces, speaking so many languages, with so many belief systems, dress codes, dreams and loves, all going about their own busy days, all somehow flowing around and past one another, doing all the work it takes to keep this whole show going, all the collaborative industriousness of a busy city.
I’m not naive. I know the precarious struggle so many face in the city, the crippling rents and stagnant wages and crime, the technology that increasingly mediates every once-human transaction. It’s hard, and it hardens us all.
But I also noticed the small adjustments people made to accommodate one another in crowded spaces, the quiet glances of acknowledgement, the murmured apologies and half-smiles, the huddle a group of us formed on the station platform to collectively work out a new route when our train was cancelled and no staff appeared to advise, the help spontaeously offered with cumbersome buggies at steps and doorways, the homeless man sleeping deeply, upright in his seat on the Victoria line, that nobody disturbed, how most people are just doing their best to get along with each other, to get by. Really, how remarkable a big city is! What a gigantic collaborative miracle!
I’ve spent a lot of time on trains this last week. Nearly everybody had their eyes locked into their smartphone. But I found their absorption in their screens gave me ample opportunity to look at them, to look at their tired, soft, preoccupied faces and to feel something hardened in me begin to soften. The last line of Ezra Pound’s brief poem In a Station of the Metro came to mind, when he describes the faces in the crowd around him as “petals on a wet, black bough”, delicate, vulnerable, beautiful.
So did the words of the writer Marilynne Robinson in her contribution to “The World Split Open: Great Authors on How and Why We Write”:
We explain others to ourselves without reference to what were once called their souls, to their solitary and singular participation in this mystery of being. We are not much in awe of one another these days.
No, we are not much in awe of one another these days. Even in a city of millions, behind each and every passing face lies all the depth and mystery and suffering and joy and love and rage of a human life.
But I will leave the last words to Kae Tempest, who says it all so beautifully, so compassionately here:
The Life Raft Co-Creating Community
Our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom relanches this week after last week’s hiatus. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join.
That’s all for this week!
Sam
"What a gigantic collaborative miracle!"
Henry David Thoreau, and probably others, too, said: It's not what you look at, but what you see.
Thank you for reminding us, through your vision, that we are submersed in a miracle.
Face up to see everyone with faces down, still noticing the glimmers of quiet community determined to peek out.
I'm no longer in London, but that's a beautiful picture and I recognise it from past times.