The Benefit: When in Doubt Part I

I always lean towards the benefit of the doubt.

Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world.

Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, 1975.¹Mulvey, L. (1975) ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16(3), pp. 6–18.

I am here because I am curious, want to have a conversation, want to share what I know and find. I want to interact with the human form in its surroundings. How are we backed up against a wall? What am I not seeing?

I return to my purpose, aware of what is exchanging, wondering with our dialogue. Wondering how needs are met when perspectives are this spectacularly tangential. A promise of return after the mission is fulfilled – and not before. Each step is meticulously planned, a map of routes through theories and places, inside novels and diaries, speaking with friends and colleagues about their experiences of what I have encountered. The only thing left to chance is the encounters, the atmosphere, the specifics of basic needs that are sometimes available but not guaranteed. I am looking inside for the prepersonal, the feeling under the skin, the knowing belly-gut²I am borrowing, in part, from Patti Smith’s poem Babalouge..

Nothing is lost but you yourself, wandering in a terrain where even the most familiar places aren’t quite themselves and open to the impossible.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, 2006³Solnit, R. (2006) A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Canongate Books. pp. 115

I have/am not lost, though I am in league with Rebecca Solnit – a person I have not met I feel nonetheless acquainted with. She has been friends with friends Bay Area, New York, for a time. I keep seeing her posts reposted on the bastion of GenX friends from college, followed by their parents: Facebook. The human face, it is all so familiar. Somehow that matters, the location, the connections. It provides a kind of companionship, both in acquaintance and mission. I don’t find this when I encounter those not in the network of FLINTA artists/thinkers/activists concerned with the agency of our Folx – facing the unsurmountable impossible. Who am I to trust with this most precious knowledge?

When I recognise what is not found, I generally invite folx along to my safe spaces: walking paths, pubs, or open fields⁴festivals, commons, meadows. We are aware of our lives functioning, the agency of now where we are free, at least in many parts of the Global North/’ the West’, the Anglo/European/America’s that has found the language, and its limits, to describe what we can do (with awareness to what we can’t). I am constantly aware of the ‘things’ we encounter along the way, directing us from one place to another. I am aware of all of it in a flash of a moment, unfiltered and unarraigned⁵Arraigned, not arranged. Confinement, not placement. I am aware of what can and cannot be seen, what can be felt just as equally – all senses on full alert.

I would also argue that Virginia Woolf captures how ordinary it all is. We live ordinary lives, yet to some, they are extraordinary⁷I have a great anecdote about meeting some folx on a tour of Charleston, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grants home – but some things must be saved for another chapter, another place.

I/we/you am/are aware there are others along the way, each with their perspectives and awareness. Their senses that they may or may not tune into. Also, I/we/you may not be aware of other ‘things’. I am aware that I am instrumentalising, borrowing (stealing?) Sara Ahmed’s words, weaving them directly into my story. Those words, her words, so perfectly fit into the conversation, as if we were speaking directly to each/Other. I/we/you could not say it any differently, any better or worse. Why not let the girl speak for herself?

I always lean towards the benefit of the doubt.