Bifocal vision - when the streets seem familiar and strange, memory-filled and yet foreign

 

County seat of Clinton County (MI), St. Johns (pop. 7000) with fire station mural of 1st responders.

Visiting a place once inhabited for decades after the space of several years, twin visions fill the imagination as memories superimpose the present-day sights and sounds. A few familiar friends and acquaintances add to this bifocal vision: seeing things no longer there but also seeing what is currently in view. Dozens of times I walked or biked past this building before any public art covered it. So I can see it in my mind's eye and also see it today.

Summing up the different experience of a place when you live there versus pass through as a spectator, tourist, or audience member, the local resident wakes up and conducts the business of daily life. He or she considers the grid of streets, the cultural landscape of landmarks and well-known events (seasonal cycles and one-time occurrences, too), and the social terrain (who is connected to whom, which paths offer least versus most resistance to organizing, collaborating, and getting things accomplished) as the field of play; a backdrop to the drama and stories of one's days and trail of decisions. But things are different for the outsider just observing the surfaces or intermittently paying attention to details but otherwise distracted by one's own preoccupations and pending matters of one's own home ground. For the visitor, only the tangible characteristics come into brief focus (buildings, sensory impressions, stories gleaned from readings or local guides or acquaintances residing in that place). All of the daily minutia passes unnoticed. In other words, local people traverse the local sea of meanings to make their lives thrive. All of the surroundings have consequence and value and comparisons to be made. All the surroundings are familiar; the opposite of exotic and strange. But outside people cross the local sea of meanings mostly unaware and uncaring about what lurks beneath the waves, what hazards are well known, and without the local lore that makes things interesting and memorable.

Jumping the elements of Proper Nouns (persons, places, things/events), a similar bifocal distinction occurs. Whereas a person you know well is three-dimensional and is part of many contexts and conversations and memories, a stranger seems only two-dimensional (lacking personal familiarity to the observer). Likewise of an annual event or a one-time occurrence: locals fit it into their quilt of many meanings, memories, and relationships, but outsiders lack these many personal interactions. Using the distinction of know (static: facts, data) versus know (relational: to people, places, software, tools, procedures/processes). The local person knows things in the relational sense of the word. The outsider knows things about the place, people, and things.

But when you are both filled with local lore, memories, relationships AND you are coming back as an outsider, having made daily living experiences for 10 years elsewhere, then the experience is double-layered: both insider and outsider at the same time. In anthropological terms, you have drifted to the middle position between familiar and exotic, between de-exoticized vision and de-familiarized/strangeness, being BOTH active participant and passive observer.

By extension, a similar familiarization process occurs when getting to know a rental car - at first strange, but eventually easily operated and familiar; ditto of a new piece of software (or app); ditto of the encounter of a new genre of food, music, or literature/film. 

In all of these parallel illustrations of the natural/normal/accustomed/automatic versus the strange/unfamiliar/awkward, a person's relationship to the new thing progresses, step by step so that what began as ungainly and static and lifeless can eventually become fluent and an organic extension of one's own body and mind.

The advice to a person traveling to a new place, entering into a new personal interaction, or learning from a new experience is to aspire to the middle position that is bifocal: able to see both the new AND the familiar, to be an outside observer AND an active player in the arena of activity. That way you have the best of both visions: local and outsider, always ready to expand what people say and do when you enlarge the conversation by drawing on your dual perspective.