Putting the Obscurity Back in Toil

I stumbled upon this article about these very interesting new art ateliers which I did not even know existed until this morning, and which my children will be so interested to find out about. Every Friday we dig through our beautiful fine arts box. It is full of post card size representations of famous works of art. We pick one or two gloriously famous pictures, most of which in a museum would take up a whole wall, and I read the back of the card which is a jumble of information we can actually understand, like the date the picture was made, and art speak which we try to untangle as best we can. Then whoever wants to try to copy the picture stands it up against the window sill and sharpens a pencil. It’s the job of the child to figure out how to do that, since I possess no skill whatsoever. When the child is six, she draws stick people and is congratulated for trying. When she is nine, she might try to just represent some of the lines and look at the picture more carefully. When she is older still, maybe she gets through the whole picture. Then we put the cards back in the box and that’s it for the week.

Reading the article, and looking at the work of these young people, this recovery of something that has been cast aside for nigh on a hundred years, it occurred to me that amongst all the things that have been lost–artistically, musically, literarily, theologically, philosophically–one of the most essential is the value of the ordinary person to live in obscurity.

Which is to say, we all of us live in relative obscurity, key word being relative. It’s important for human people to both know each other and be known. It can’t just be that some people know about me, it has to be that a handful of people know who I am and what I am like, and I for them. What’s that called? Friends. Relations? Embedding oneself in a network of relationships in which self disclosure leads to strengthened ties and connections?

It was interesting to look at the pictures of young artists standing around in big studios, individually attending to a common task. There aren’t very many of them, and not very many people know who they are, and there is not a big clamoring for their pictures. In that primordial way, they are toiling away in obscurity, nevertheless believing in the value of what they are doing.

But the toiling, and the obscurity, once the bedrock of western civilization, is something most of us, even me, find painful. If one doesn’t get fifteen minutes of YouTube fame, if one doesn’t become known outside one’s own actual sphere, the modern person feels the specter of failure fluttering over him, threatening his happiness.

It’s not enough to have a job, and a house, and a family, and useful occupations and true friends. I believe some people used to call that the American dream. The person who died surrounded by family having provided something for them, that person could be called a Success. Now, there is some sort of anxious loss if the picture doesn’t include a vast number of twitter followers, Instagram likes, and a legacy of conversations with strangers on social media. Surely I toil, but if I have to do it in obscurity, I must be doing it wrong. I must be known not just by the people who know me, but by some spectators who don’t really know me. That will be true success.

I was trying to enumerate for myself what success would look like in my social media world. A year ago I would have said that if I could just have 500 twitter followers I would have hit the big time. Now I think it must be more towards 1000. But I truly despaired when I read somewhere that until you have 10,000 you are really nothing.

Except that that’s just not true. The person who doesn’t have 10,000 twitter followers can’t be said not to exist. What is that old saw? If a tweet falls on twitter, and no one retweets it, did it even exist?

The corollary, the small comfort, if you can’t be famous yourself, is to know someone who is. If a famous person knows you, even if no one else does, then your life isn’t a complete waste. But perhaps even that–getting to meet the famous–is a mile too far. In which case you can go to a conference and hear that person talk, or a concert and hear that person sing. And then later you can say, ‘I was there. My life has meaning.’

I’m not really noticing this (especially about myself) by way of judgement or condemnation. Surely, building social media presence accompanies all the toiling. You do it in relative obscurity alongside your actual work, and then maybe hit a magic number, or a miracle happens and your child dances in on your interview and after that you remember the bad old days when no one knew who you were. But I think in so far as any of us have rejected, emotionally at least, the obscurity part of the toil, we are going to occasionally be batting back both disappointment and acedia, maybe even more often than that.

From a cosmic angle, there are a lot worse things than working very hard in an unknown corner. It’s hard for me to remember what they are. Dying and being separated from God forever? That’s worse than not making it big on YouTube. I should probably just go read the Great Litany and that would help me remember what true failure looks like.

And that’s part of the problem. To pray the Great Litany, you have to look into the obscure and dark corners of your soul and admit that however unknown you are on Twitter, the one Being who does know you, whether you like it or not, is God. In him there is no darkness at all, no hidden places of the Internet, no blog posts unknown. This knowledge may be vast, but it is also deeply unsettling. The one person we want not to notice us is God, but he’s the only one from whom none of us can finally escape.

And when you look at it like that, you, or rather I, might reconsider what it means to be a success or a failure. When you lay aside the fear and the wrath, and find yourself reconciled through the cross to that complete and devastating knowledge, toiling in obscurity might become slightly less of the disappointment it feels. Doing stuff that is not seen by anyone else, but you know is seen and valued by God, at least makes it bearable, hopefully. But it still helps to put it on Instagram. For me anyway.