Yesterday, I used the word “thereness” to express how I look at the world photographically, but that’s a retrospective notion – in the moment of decision, the feeling is best captured by “hereness” – here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.
I’ve noticed this before, whenever I’ve walked through familiar places with a camera in hand; somehow, the world makes itself manifest in a different light that way. But a photo walk with others doing the same adds yet another dimension: the rhythm becomes corporate, a pooling of a liturgy of attention that’s more than idiosyncratic.
And that pooling is most like an Orthodox liturgy: here and there, a shared focus, with just enough time and space for personal devotion on the peripheries. And just like in worship, you can’t really do it once and have it all figured out.
So many of us in our various diasporas have been reflecting on what it means to be “here” or “there” over the past few months; the false borders enforced between us have been blown apart by both the horrors of genocide and the wonderous love of solidarity.
I had started to read about the very idea of “hereness” as diasporic praxis a mere weeks before this fateful new chapter in world history began in October: hereness, or doikayt (דאָיִקייט), a Yiddish concept rooted in Bundist politics speaking to a particular people and history, but now resonating with me in ways that all of us caught between two worlds can possibly relate to:
“‘No, my beloved! You cannot leave this place. One must struggle where one is … struggle until the end,’ the Lord of the Universe told the Good One.” (Chaim Zhitlowsky)
In my circles, we talk a lot about being “providentially placed,” but in all honesty, something inside me has always chafed against that idea, because it somehow rings conservative, if not defeatist. But the genealogy of Yiddish “hereness” offers a completely different theology: it insists on “this” place but does so to demand “a different here, a different now.”
This place is where we belong because we are how this place becomes.
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At one point, one of the vendors asked us if we were from Seattle: “you look like a bunch of tourists,” she laughed, watching us pointing our cameras at the pedestrian and the mundane. This made me smile; nothing makes most people I know more pissed off than being accused of being a tourist!
But the funny thing about that is how the mask of not being “from here” allows for a kind of presence “right here” that doesn’t always happen naturally, both internally, as one rushes from one thing to the next to get on with one’s day, but also externally: when one looks like an outsider, people will tend to turn an inattentive eye to one’s interest in their day to day, probably chuckling on the inside about one’s being “a tourist.”
This is oddly freeing photographically. Ethically? I still think about that all the time.