The brimming cup

One of the lost pleasures of life with a daily newspaper is the serendipity of encountering the random article, item, or photograph that offered something you'd never thought of or knew anything about, but which, encountering it, gave you a sudden moment of insight, compassion, even wisdom into human suffering or triumph. Paging through a metro paper fifty years ago, such small epiphanies would wash up like sea glass from the vast ocean of life, little treasures in the tidal pools of the day's noise and news. 

The great strewn beach of today is social media, bringer of dross and detritus, fake quotes and fake news, political extremism and animal videos. Occasionally, scrolling through the milling crowd of friends and "friends," advertisements and trolls, something unexpected pops up and stops you in your tracks.

This is what happened with the photograph above. It rolled into view on Facebook late on Thanksgiving evening, posted by one a circle of local friends that grows more diffuse by the year. It appeared with this message, in its entirety: "At the National Portrait Gallery." Having been offered, apparently, apropos of nothing, the photo attracted only one comment, asking if it was by the distinguished African-American photographer Gordon Parks. Came the reply, "No idea. No information."

This arbitrariness, this haphazard disengagement from how things fit into the great mosaic we think of as reality, is the essence of Facebook and digital technology generally. It may be the biggest shift in communications practice on my lifetime, one that raises lots of philosophical and cultural questions, some more interesting than others. When I started as a reporter in the 1970s, everything that ended up in the newspaper had first to pass through a door marked Of Use.  To be sure, there were many variables that made information "fit to print," as many as there were constituencies with skin in the game. In the halls of the old school, however, these variables all moved in the same general direction, toward one common public discourse. It was a discourse heavily mediated by the princes of power and money, which is always true, but the newspaper bundles also landed on the sidewalk where we, the masses in our roles as consumers and citizens, went about our daily lives. 

In those days, many matters coexisted between the same covers, because newspapers and magazines had lots of white space to fill between their copious ads and plenty of money to hire reporters and photographers to fill it. Beyond the central chronicle of American empire and capitalist striving, there was enough room in those thick publications for an array of misfits and rebels, odd prophets and pavement geniuses who occupied the fringes of relevance and were good for a dose of whimsey, subversion, even the occasional authentic revelation. 

Such voices have mostly disappeared from the mainstream press today. They don't get enough clicks to justify their seat on the bus. Instead, they endure, often in weirdly altered form, in the messy cosmos of Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok accounts, each a separate universe obeying the imperatives of its own private forces. Facebook alone has approximately two-and-a-half billion accounts, and every one is a law unto itself.

In such a world, things exist in a state of perpetual randomness, no more fit to the common purpose than honesty is to Donald Trump. Social media is the perfect manifestation of Camus' existential absurdity, a world with no inherent value or purpose from which the individual can make meaning, and where the suicide he wrote of as our sole philosophical problem becomes a question of canceling one's account. 

We have no wish to cut that cord, so remain as gleaners at the landfill of the online world. Knowing we are up to our necks in rubbish does not keep us from our daily rounds. We scroll in hope and in faith, believing there are treasures to be found. Perhaps it will be some pearl of great price or, failing that, enough of a prize to keep things interesting. 

Which brings me back to the photograph. To post, as my FB friend did, an image with neither  context nor explanation is to feast at a table of wholly private significance. Such a meal feels no need to be understood, or even to understand itself. It takes its enthusiasms for granted and offers them as gifts to the world. Such offerings have a splendor as boundless as the sky. I knew a woman who lived by the code that "the sky is always beautiful." The question depended entirely on what you brought to your perception. How many times can a man look up before he sees?

This was the ideal image to cap a day devoted to the good work of giving thanks. Plucked from its own history, the photograph cannot tell us anything about the occasion it records. Neither its form or content offers any chronicle, narrative, or tale beyond itself. It wants only to hold our attention with its presence long enough to commend the defiance and dignity it portrays. It draws from a bottomless well of being and offers up a brimming cup.

~

The year is 1948. The man holding the sign is labor unionist and civil rights activist Asa Philip Randolph. In 1925, Randolph formed the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the country's first successful Black labor union. Here, he's leading a civil disobedience campaign to desegregate the nation's armed forces. The words on the picket sign evoke a sonnet by Jamaican poet Claude McKay (1889-1948), in answer to lynchings associated with the 1919 "Red Summer" of terrorist attacks on black communities across the U.S. Randolph went on to organize the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.  The photographer is Sy Kattleson, a member of New York's famed Photo League, and about whom it was said, "[his] weakness—if it can be called that—is his respect for the strangers he photographs."  

Sy Kattleson, Henry Wallace Rally, 1948