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, though, scrolling through the cacophony of friends and "friends," advertisers and trolls, something unexpected will pop up and stop you in your tracks.

This is what happened with the photograph above. It scrolled into view on Facebook late on Thanksgiving evening, posted by one a circle of friends that grows more scattered 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 the image was by the famous African-American photographer Gordon Parks. 'No idea. No information,' came the reply.

This perfunctory disengagement with reality is the essence of Facebook. More, even, than digital technology, it strikes me as the biggest shift in communications since I started as a reporter in the late 1970s. Then, everything that ended up in the newspaper had first to pass through a door marked Of Use.  There were many variables that made information "fit to print," as many as there were constituencies with skin in the game, but in the halls of the old school these variables moved in one general direction, toward a common understanding of public discourse. Then, as now, it was a discourse heavily mediated by the palaces of power and towers of corporate money. But the newspaper bundles also landed on the sidewalk, where we, the working masses in our harlequin garb of consumers and citizens, went about our daily lives. 

In fact, a great many interests could all be served, more or less, because newspapers and magazines had lots of white space between their copious advertisements, and plenty of money to hire workers to fill it. Between the main reports on American empire and capitalist hegemony, there was room in those thick publications for voices that were quirky or edgy, that occupied the fringes of relevance, that were good for a dose of whimsey, subversion, even the occasional quotidian revelation. 

Such voices have disappeared from mainstream journalism today. Instead, they are found, often in weirdly altered form, in the cosmos of social media. Each Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok account exists as a separate galaxy, obeying the imperatives of its private gravitational 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 decency or honesty is to Donald Trump. Social media is the perfect manifestation of Camus' existential absurdity, a world with no inherent value or purpose in which each individual makes his or her own meaning. Here, the suicide Camus wrote of  is a matter of canceling your account. 

Till that day comes, we're all gleaners on the garbage dump of the online world. Knowing we are up to our necks in trash does not keep us from coming here to dive for pearls. We come out of hope and out of faith, believing there are treasures to be found. Perhaps it will be a pearl of great price; failing that, the rewards are just enough to keep things interesting. 

Which brings me back to the photograph. To post, as my FB friend did, an image with neither  explanation or context is to sing the praises for a wholly secret significance. Such praise feels no urge to understand itself, or to be understood. It takes its enthusiasms for granted and offers them as gifts to others. Such free-range offerings have a beauty all their own, a generosity as open as the sky. I knew a woman who liked to say, "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 the sky?

This was the ideal image to cap a day devoted to the ennobling work of giving thanks. Plucked from its own history, the photograph cannot tell us anything about the universe of experience it records. Its form and content offer no narrative. It wants only to hold our gaze with its strength, defiance, dignity and capacious possibility. It drinks from the large, embracing well of being, and offers the brimming cup to us.

~

The year is 1948. The man holding the sign is labor unionist and civil rights activist Asa Philip Randolph. In 1925, Randolph organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American labor union. Here, he is leading a civil disobedience campaign to desegregate the nation's armed forces. In 1963, Randolph led the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. The quotation is adapted from 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. The photographer is Sy Kattleson, 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
http://sykattelson.com/