"According to his account ["his" being Martin Heidegger's], a fundamental “familiarity with the world” is more basic than cognition or knowledge. We understand the world primarily through our skills and abilities for going about our business in the world, rather than through a stock of knowledge or an implicit theory."
- William Blattner, "Heidegger's Being and Time: Philosophy 521" (2011)
The pleasure in litter-picking is "Noticing".
On a walk today, my wife and I made our way up what I call "the South road", although once it leaves the village it swings left and heads almost due East. Because of the pandemic I haven't been litter-picking recently, and being a litter-picker isn't at the forefront of my mind. The herd of dairy cattle which usually lives on the other side of a small stream - a stream which is lined on this side by trees, and here by an unkempt wood; and a herd which I used to talk to on my way to work, when they were across the stream and in one of the fields set out towards the top of the hill -, has been moved across the bridge. Their colours were visible from a rise in the road; most were lying down in the August-like sun; and they were simply beautiful. They will have absolutely no memory of me, and though I would love to have walked among them and renewed our acquaintance (they were lying all over and across the footpath that runs through this field), I just leaned for a moment on the gate to say hello. The attentive outliers did their job of looking at me suspiciously.
What I didn't do as we walked along the road was clock any litter. My attention was taken by other things. By the vehicles and tractors in a field, preparing the ground; by workmen strapping a digger onto a trailer; by what seems a rise in traffic, and a loss of the easy camaraderie of the first ten days of the pandemic, where every car, truck, tractor and van that went by gave a warm "we're all in this together" greeting, and even slowed down in an act of public courtesy as they went by. Today the "My mind is elsewhere and you're not here" look, and the speed of the cars and a delivery van as they tore past us, was noticeable. Palpably noticeable. At least in a walk after lunch.
As a journeyman litter-picker I have been walking along "noticing". On my days off from litter-picking, the daily walks have been a busman's holiday. I've been noticing. The cider bottle in the ditch after I furloughed myself is still there. A new cigarette pack has appeared on the East road, the same brand as one already there, and on the same side of the road, albeit a hundred yards or so further along, suggesting a story. The stretch of road just outside the parish boundary and the limit of my territory on the North road is a reminder of how my patch was just a few months ago; I'm surprised that anyone from the village it technically belongs to can bear it; and there's a particular bottle that always intrigues me. Although this part of the road is not my responsibillity, and it would be an impertinence to clear it, I "notice" the ongoing build-up of rubbish - a new sweet wrapper just the other day, for example. I notice these things, but it is a "professional" noticing; it adds to my knowledge, with a frisson of recognition of my growing skills and familiarity with the setting and what is involved, but there is not the particular pleasure in what I mean by Noticing, and Discovery. And now, today, just a fortnight or so since my last official voluntary litter-picking sweep, I noticed that the professional noticing has fallen away. I'm noticing other things. By and large I'm not "discovering" as such, just noticing (although, on reflection, I don't think this is possible; noticing is based in discovery); and by and large, at the moment, I'm not noticing the litter.
So what does this mean?
It means I need to get back to litter-picking. I need to "Discover", which I'm pleased to say I've just noticed breaks into "dis-cover", in which the connecting space between the "dis" and the "cover" is Noticing, and what is physically indicated by Noticing and Discovery is what is hidden (the "covered" bit in "discover"); what is hidden by just not seeing it, on the one hand - by overlooking it, or even looking through it, looking where it is and not noticing it (which I can do exceptionally well); and on the other hand, what is hidden from sight physically, by the overgrowing verdage of the roadside, or the camouflage of colour and texture, the lie of the grass or the fall of light and shadow, for example: Noticing which are part of the discovery. To get litter-picking Pleasure, I will have to don tools and get stuck in to picking litter again. I will need to position myself within the task and apparatus of litter picking, to call together the whole assemblage through which I get into the character; call up the familiarity and ongoing task of discovery which falls into place on taking on the role, with the clearing which suffuses the familiar and provokes the possibility of Noticing (or even the probability; or more accurately, if I've gone about it properly, the certainty): The thrill of Noticing, which extends beyond litter-picking to the surround (see Page 12: The Archaeology of the Wayside (forthcoming)); and the delight of Discovery, in which I am discovering not just myself but the beyond-my-self, in the world; which then becomes incorporated into who I am: Which then, in other words, becomes part of my "familiar"; it becomes part of what is familiar. The 'familiar' as a phenomenon is almost certainly not changed; but what is familiar does.
In the theatre there is the long apprenticeship in performance that comes from day one, when you learn about spatial relationships and time; when you fall over, and discover hurting yourself, and the capacity to reach and move autonomously; when adults find your breaking out of character to wave to your parents during the first school play charming; when you are called to answer questions in the classroom, and discover being the centre of attention, and what happens there; when you play with a friend, embodying stories together in which the furniture of things around you - trees, bushes, carts, tables - acquire character as fortresses, hide-outs, reinforcements of the narrative; and you acquire everything you need to read performances by others, and/or to perform formally yourself.
As an adult performer you do not arrive at a performance out of the blue, but from that long roll-out of experiences in which performance becomes familiar, and becomes your work-on-yourself-place. The stage becomes your workshop. You become a specialist. You sit down at the piano and you are situated. You make your entrance onto the stage and your sore throat disappears. You walk onto the football pitch, and an adventure you've trained weeks or months for opens up, and you are at home. Because of the depth of being footballer or actor or musician you bring to the moment, there is a depth of familiarity in what you are engaged in which means you see and anticipate in a way which is almost mysterious when watched from the outside , and can be beautiful; an expertise, in which the familiar becomes a place to play. A place where you encounter, on the ground of what is your familiar, what is unfamiliar: what was there all along that you never noticed before - the impact of that rest, the clear of-courseness of a line, the impact of anger on the fluidity of subsequent play; and what was never there before, what was not there and doesn't belong, which is out of place. The familiar dictates what is out of place; and once encountered, under the right conditions, the out of place becomes part of the familiar. In your expertise you hold a note in a way it hasn't been held before, in a movement which becomes absolutely changed; you embody aspects of Hamlet in which the meaning of the play shifts; you demonstrate a style of play and technique which alter the expectations of the game. Your acquired at-homeness with the familiar leads to the expansion of the familiar because you are at home and discover and express yourself there. It becomes a place of invention; by which we mean, the familiar is a place of invention, because the familiar "reveals" what is unfamiliar or doesn't belong or is out of place, and through Noticing and Discovery, there is a bringing of it into the familiar. Knowledge populates the familiar; it falls back into it and there is an expansion of it; and from this expansion comes Noticing and Discovery.
The basis of Noticing is familiarity; and the consequence of Noticing is the extension of what is familiar. In Noticing the world actually grows and that experience, which is Discovery - of being present in what is, after all, a revelation, a revealing, a curtain opening on what was not known to be there. This is the Pleasure.
Finding is something separate; ; it is genuinely like a curtain opening born of preparation
- The researcher makes a discovery in the archive; "so and so discovers such and such": The archivist, submerged anonymously and taken for granted into the archive, retaliates: "Wait a minute. I knew it was there. I prepared the catalogue. I prepared the ground. In what way has this thing that was known about been "discovered". And yet.