The Riddle of The Ordinary
Ozick, Cynthia
The Riddle of The Ordinary Cynthia Ozick Though we all claim to be monotheists, there is one rather ordinary way in which we are all also dualists: we all divide the world into the...
...The Mosaic vision concerning all this is uncompromisingly pure and impatient with self-deception...
...God is alone...
...But the striving is always toward the Creator Himself, the struggle is always toward the winnowing-out of every mediating surrogate...
...There is a blessing on witnessing lightning, falling stars, great mountains and deserts: "Blessed are You . . . who fashioned Creat i o n . " The sound of thunder has its praise, and the sight of the sea, and a r a i n b o w ; beautiful animals are praised, and trees in their first blossoming of the year or for their beauty alone, and the new moon, and new clothing, and sexual delight...
...Great passions may give us this quickened sense of life...
...some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest...
...God is not any part of Nature, or in any part of Nature...
...in art and song...
...for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' s a k e ." And like a Zen master who seizes on the data of life only to transcend them, he announces: "Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the e n d ." What in this view, which once more has the allegiance of the Zeitgeist what is Art...
...What is an idol...
...There is God is not any part of Nature, or in any part of Nature...
...Art, he tells us, turns away from the divine p r e f e r e n c e , and finishes out a life in empty remorse...
...In the first place, by making itself so noticeable it is around us all the time the Ordinary has got itself in a bad fix with us: we hardly ever notice it...
...I call Pater an idolater because he is one...
...The Prophets enjoined backsliders to renew themselves through the Mosaic idea, and the Mosaic idea is from then to now, and has survived unmodified: " T a k e heed to yourselves, that your heart be not deceived, and ye turn aside, and serve other gods, and worship t h e m . " (Deut...
...One hundred times: but Ordinariness is more frequent than that, Ordinariness crowds the day, we swim in the sense of our dailiness...
...We are all under sentence of d e a t h , " he writes, " . . . we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more...
...is, the easier it is: " e a s y " in the sense that we can almost always recognize it...
...The Creator is not contained in His own Creation...
...This is undoubtedly the most natural division the mind is subject toplain and fancy, simple and recondite, commonplace and awesome, usual and unusual, credible and incredible, quotidian and intrusive, natural and unnatural, regular and irregular, boring and rhapsodic, secular and sacred, profane and holy: however the distinction is characterized, there is no human being who does not, in his own everydayness, feel the difference between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary...
...Our choice, according to Yeats, is the choice between pursuing the life of Deed, where acts have consequences, where the fruit of experience is more gratifying than the experience itself, and pursuing the life of Art, which signifies the celebration of shape and mood...
...and it might be said that in this handful of remarkable lines Yeats condemned his own passions and his own will...
...So, in general, Jewish thought balks at taking the metaphor for the essence, at taking the block of wood as a symbol or representation or mediator for God, despite the fact that the wood and its worshiper stand for everything worthy of celebration: the tree grew in its loveliness, the carver came and fashioned it into a pleasing form, the woman is alert to holiness...
...We want to do it, we rejoice to do it, above all we are commanded to do itbut there is always the easy, the sweet, the beckoning, the lenient, the interesting lure of the Instead Of: the wood of the tree instead of God, the rapturebringing horizon instead of God, the work of art instead of God, the passion for history instead of God, philosophy and history of philosophy instead of God, the State instead of God, the shrine instead of God, the sage instead of God, the order of the universe instead of God, the prophet instead of God...
...The Extraordinary sets its own terms for its reception, and its terms are inescapable...
...and this is the point on which Jews are famously stiffnecked nothing but the C r e a t o r , no substitute and no mediator...
...I understand," said the child, " h ow they wanted to bow down to this cat...
...Of course the Extraordinary can sometimes be a changeling, and can make its appearance in the cradle of the Ordinary...
...The ExtraordiThe Ordinary, simply by being so ordinary, tends to make us ignorant or neglectful...
...The Ordinary lets us live out our humanity: it doesn't scare us, it doesn't excite us, it doesn't distract us it brings us the safe return of the school bus every day, it lets us eat one meal after another, put one foot in front of the other...
...Here art and philosophy meet with a quizzical harmony unusual between contenders...
...11:16) This perception has never been superseded...
...Anything that we call an end in itself, and yet is not God Himself...
...With David the King we say: "All that is in the heaven and the earth is t h i n e , " meaning that it is all there for our wonder and our praise...
...The sight of a sage brings a blessing for the creation of human wisdom, the sight of a disfigured person praises a Creator who varies the form of His creatures...
...Here art and philosophy meet with a quizzical harmony unusual between contenders...
...B e one of those upon whom nothing is l o s t , " Henry James advised...
...Anything that is instead of God...
...in the end the sum of the life of Art is nothing...
...For our only chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time...
...I feel the s a m e ." And then she said a Hebrew word: "HON forbidden the great hallowed No which tumbles down the centuries from Sinai, the No that can be said only after the world is no longer taken for granted, the No that can rise up only out of the abundant celebrations and blessings of Yes, Yes, Yes, the shower of Yeses that praise fragrant oils, and wine, and sex, and scholars, and thunder, and new clothes, and falling stars, and washing your hands before eating...
...nary does not let you shrug your shoulders and walk away...
...Only be sure it is passion that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness . . . Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for art's sake, has most...
...I bring you a Hebrew melody to refute them with...
...Come back with me now to Pater: " T h e service of p h i l o s o p h y , " he writes, "of speculative culture, toward the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it into sharp and eager observation...
...If we are enjoined to live in the condition of noticing all things or, to put it more extremely but more exactly, in the condition of awe how can we keep ourselves from sliding off from awe at God's creation to worship of God's creation...
...The child of a friend of mine was taken to the Egyptian galleries of the museum...
...The ironies here are multitudinous, for no one ever belonged more to the mansion of Art than Yeats himself...
...And when the meal is done, a thanksgiving is said for the whole of it, and table-songs are sung with exultation...
...Here is a Talmudic saying: "Whoever makes a profane use of God's gifts which means partaking of any worldly joy without thanking God for it commits a theft against G o d . " And a Talmudic dispute is recorded concerning which is the more important Scriptural utterance: loving your neighbor as yourself, or the idea that we are all the children of Adam...
...And this is the chief vein and deepest point concerning the Ordinary: that it does deserve our gratitude...
...But there is a way in which the Yeats poem, though it praises Deed over Image, though it sees the human being as a creature to be judged by his acts rather than how well he has made something there is a way in which this poem is after all not a Hebrew melody...
...since the poem is only eight lines long I would like to give over the whole of it...
...Comparison confers relief more often than gratitude, and the gratitude that comes out of reflection on the extraordinary misfortune of others is misbegotten...
...For the sake of the honing of consciousness, for the sake of becoming sensitive, at every moment, to every moment, for the sake of making life as superlatively polished as the most sublime work of art, we ought to notice the Ordinary...
...Or the day's vanity, the night's remorse...
...It is pointless to contemplate, only for the sake of feeling gratitude, the bitter, vicious, crippled, drugged, diseased, deformed, despoiled, or corrupted lives that burst against their own mortality in hospitals, madhouses, prisons, all those horrendous lives chained to poverty and its variegated spawn in the long, bleak wastes on the outer margins of Ordinariness, mired in the dread of a f e r o c i o u s E x t r a o r d i n a r i n e s s that slouches in insatiably every morning and never departs even in sleep contemplating this, gratitude for our own Ordinariness does not come easily, and has its demeaning price...
...Now there are similar comments in Jewish sources, especially in Chassidism, which dwell compassionately on the nobility of the striving for God, no matter through what means...
...The aestheticians the great Experiences can be refuted...
...In a glass case stood the figure of a cat resplendent in the perfection of its artfulness longnecked, gracile, cryptic, authoritative, b e a u t i f u l , s p i r i t u a l , autonomous, complete in itself...
...The Jewish understanding of the Ordinary is in some ways very close to Pater, and again very far from Yeats, who would punish the "perfection of the work" with an empty destiny...
...when something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skull by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude...
...All worship goes up to God, who is the source of wors h i p ." These are important words...
...The world and its provisions, in short, are observed in the two meanings of " o b s e r v e . " Creation is both noticed and felt to be sanctified...
...Everything is minutely paid attention to, and then ceremoniously praised...
...Notice...
...This huge and unending shower of blessings on our scenes and habitations, on all the life that occupies the planet, on every plant and animal, and on every natural manifestation, serves us doubly: in the first place, what you are taught to praise you will not maim or exploit or destroy...
...This too is easy: by paying attention to it...
...and yet there is a blessing for every separate experience of the Ordinary...
...And just here is the danger I spoke of before, the danger Yeats darkly apprehended the deepest danger our human brains are subject to...
...It begins by discriminating between life interpreted as doing beautiful things or having beautiful things: The Choice The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life, or of the work...
...In luck or out the toil has left its mark: That old perplexity an empty purse...
...and that is one answer, the answer of what would appear to be the supreme aesthetician...
...It is making the Ordinary into the Extraordinary...
...And what is expected is not often thought of as a gift...
...So there are blessings to rejoice in on smelling sweet woods or barks, fragrant plants, fruits, spices, or oils...
...There is no Instead Of...
...The difference, the reason it matters, is a signal and shattering one: the difference is what keeps us from being idolaters...
...It is called " T h e Choice...
...The Extraordinary is easy...
...Morally and metaphysically, what are our obligations to the Ordinary...
...The Jew has this in common with the artist: he means nothing to be lost on him, he brings all his mind and senses to bear on noticing the Ordinary, he is equally alert to Image and Experience, nothing that passes before him is taken for granted, everything is exalted...
...God isnotanyman, or in any man...
...In the second place, the categories and impulses of Art become the property of the simplest soul: because it is all the handiwork of the Creator, everything Ordinary is seen to be Extraordinary...
...Cynthia Ozick, this month's contributor, is the author of THE PAGAN RABBI AND OTHER STORIES...
...It is not true, as we so often hear, that Judaism is a developmental religion, that there is a progression upward from Moses to the Prophets...
...But still the wood does not mean God...
...The sage who has the final word chooses thechildrenof-Adam thesis, because, he explains, our common creatureliness includes the necessity of love...
...some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us for that moment o n l y . " And now here at last is Pater's most celebrated phrase, so famous that it has often been burlesqued: " T o burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in l i f e ." But all this is astonishing...
...Saying "Experience itself is the e n d " is the very opposite of blessing the Creator as the source of all experience...
...A Buddhist sage once rebuked a person who excoriated an idolater: " D o you think it makes any difference to G o d , " he asked, "whether this old woman gives reverence to a block of wood...
...But these celebrations through noticing are not self-centered and do not stop at humanity, but encompass every form of life and non-life...
...No one since the Greek sculptors and artisans has expressed this sense more powerfully than Walter Pater, that eloquent Victorian whose obsession with attaining the intensest sensations possible casts a familiar light out toward the century that followed him...
...The Ordinary, simply by being so ordinary, tends to make us ignorant or neglectful...
...but it will never declare that the price of Art, Beauty, Experience, Pleasure, Exaltation is a "raging in the d a r k " or a loss of the "heavenly mansion...
...Jewish life is crammed with such blessings blessings that take note of every sight, sound, and smell, every rising up and lying down, every morsel brought to the mouth, every act of cleansing...
...The Extraordinary is so powerful that it commands from us a redundancy, a repetition of itself: it seizes us so undividedly, it declares itself so dazzlingly or killingly, it is so deafening with its Look...
...But by and large the difference between special times and ordinary moments is perfectly clear, and we are never in any doubt about which are the extraordinary ones...
...they offer the most significant challenge to purist monotheism that has ever been stated...
...Ordinariness can be defined as a b r e a t h i n g - s p a c e : the breathing-space between getting born and dying, p e r h a p s ; or else the breathing-space between rapture and r a p t u r e ; or- more usually, the breathing-space between one disaster and the next...
...It is the impairment of the distinction between the Ordinary and the Extraordinary...
...Anything that is allowed to come between ourselves and God...
...But the Ordinary is a much harder case...
...It is instead of God...
...Do you think God will ignore anyone's desire to find Him, no matter where, and through whatever means...
...When we praise nature or man or any experience or work of man, we are w o r s h i p i n g the Creator, and the Creator alone...
...Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face...
...The Jewish perception of how the world is constituted also tells us that we are to go in the way of Commandment rather than symbol, goodness rather than sensation...
...the Creator is incarnate in nothing, and is free of any image or imagining...
...the tree, the carver, the woman who is alert to holiness are all together a loveliness and a reason to rejoice in the world...
...Here is a story...
...God is not any man, or in any man...
...and so is every aesthetician who sees the work of art as an end in itself...
...When he breaks his bread, he will bless God for having "brought forth bread from the e a r t h . " Each kind of food is similarly praised in turn, and every fruit in its season is praised for having renewed itself in the cycle of the seasons...
...in short, it is equal to the earth's provisions, it grants us life, continuity, the leisure to recognize who and what we are, and who and what our fellows are, these creatures who live out their everydayness side by side with us in their own unextraordinary ways...
...James's words, but the impulse that drives them is the same as the one which enjoins the observant Jew (the word "observant" is exact) to bless the moments of this world at least one hundred times a day...
...That is what we mean when we utter the ultimate Idea which is the pinnacle of the Mosaic revolution in human perception: God is One...
...From the stone to the human being, creatureliness is extolled...
...They tell us that the Ordinary is not merely, when contemplated with i n t e n s i t y , the E x t r a o r d i n a r y , but more, much more than that that the Ordinary is also the divine...
...An idolater singing a Hebrew melody...
...Some spend this interval in listlessness, some in high passions, the wisest...
...And if it take the second must refuse A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark...
...only the Creator...
...And does it matter if we do...
...How do we respond to the Extraordinary...
...Do you think God is incapable of taking the block of wood into Himself...
...When we praise nature or man or any experience or work of man, we are worshiping the Creator, and the Creator alone...
...Pater, like Coleridge before him and James after him, like the metaphysicians of what has come to be known as the Counterculture, was after all the highs he could accumulate in a lifetime...
...The second danger, I think, is even more terrible...
...For the sake of the honing of consciousness, for the sake of becoming sensitive, at every moment, to every moment, for the sake of making life as superlatively pol ished as the most subI ime work of art, we ought to notice the Ordinary...
...Before he sits down to his meal, the Jew will speak the following: "Blessed are You, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, whose Commandments hallow us, and who commands us to wash our hands...
...Be one of those upon whom nothing is l o s t " What is to be gained from noticing the Ordinary...
...To seem to supersede it is to transgress it...
...There is no one who does not know when something special is happening: the high, terrifying, tragic, and ecstatic moments are unmistakable in any life...
...The second thing that ought to be said about the Ordinary is that it is sometimes extraordinarily dangerous to notice it...
...And this is strange, bec a u s e I have just spoken of the gratitude we owe to the unnoticed foundations of our lives, and how careless we always are about this gratitude, how unthinking we are to take for granted the humdrum dailiness that is all the luxury we are ever likely to know on this planet...
...And the more extraordinary the Extraordinary ALEINU, the title of this column, is taken from the prayer which begins with that word, and means, "it is incumbent upon us...
...The world, and every moment in it, is seen to be sublime, and not merely seen to be, but brought home to the intensest part of consciousness...
...Morally and metaphysically, what are our obi igations to the Ordinary...
...You remember how in one of the Old English poets we are told how the rejoicing hosts of Heaven look down at the tortures of the damned, feeling the special pleasure of their own exemption...
...Ordinariness is sometimes the status quo, sometimes the slow, unseen movement of a subtle but ineluctable cycle, like a ride on the hour hand of the clock...
...in any case the Ordinary is above all what is expected...
...It is first noticing, and then sanctifying, the Ordinary...
...That is one way it is dangerous to take special notice of the Ordinary...
...The Kotzker Rebbe went so far in his own striving that he even dared to interpret the command against idols as a warning not to make an idol out of a command of God...
...and then it is not until long afterward that we become aware of how the visitation was not, after all, an ordinary one...
...The Riddle of The Ordinary Cynthia Ozick Though we all claim to be monotheists, there is one rather ordinary way in which we are all also dualists: we all divide the world into the Ordinary and the Extraordinary...
...So it is dangerous to notice and to praise the Ordinariness of the world, its inhabitants and its events...
...The consciousness of Ordinariness is the consciousness of exemption...
...This column is for wrestling with God and His commandments...
...But there is another way of thinking which is easier, and sweeter, and does not require human beings to be so tirelessly uncompromising, and to be so cautious about holding on to the distinction between delight in the world and worship of the world...
...But before I am ready to speak of this new, nevertheless very ancient, danger, I want to ask this question: if we are willing to see the Ordinary as a treasure and a gift, what are we to do about it...
...When all that story's done, what's the news...
...Pay Attention!, that the only answer we can give is to look, see, notice, and pay attention...
...when something does not insist on being noticed, when we aren't grabbed by the collar or struck on the skul I by a presence or an event, we take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude...
...the poet is Yeats...
...Or, to put it another way, what is to be gained from noticing the Ordinary...
...There are ways to try to apprehend the nature of this luxury, but they are psychological tricks and do no good...
...Her story "Usurpation" won the O. Henry Award for 1975...
Vol. 1 • June 1975 • No. 2
