That "Something" in Lefebvre

"When the flight of a bird catches our attention, or the mooing of a cow, or a shepherd boy singing, we think we are being very clever and concrete. But we are unable to seize the human facts. We fail to see them where they are, namely in the humble, familiar, everyday objects: the shape of the fields, of ploughs." (pg. 132)

Some of the more dire Marxist discussion in Lefebvre caused my inner optimist to bristle, but I believe there are so many central concepts to this work that helped to articulate the tense back and forth between opposites that inevitably occurs in a discussion of the essence of "everyday life". The question of what that exactly means is one that often seems to culminate in a reference to a mystical something that is brushed accidentally through the course of an average experience. It isn't the sublime or magical necessarily; that would be too grand of a description. But describing it explicitly often seems to be impossible.

Lefebvre touches on this topic repeatedly but I believe he gets at the heart of this subject most directly by never settling on a definitive answer. He describes around the topic in a way that made me much more comfortable with it than either a large question mark or an answer that didn't sit entirely accurately would have. I found myself separating in my mind the "false" senses of the everyday (the mystical, the alienated) and trying to tease out where the genuine roots could be. Probably because of his choice of descriptions, I focused largely on my past in Vermont helping out at the dairy farm.

The experience of watching a cat with three legs and obvious sores lapping milk out of a puddle was one that stuck with me for most of my life and will likely always touch some part of me, but I think it falls under the category of "mystery" that Lefebvre would have discounted as not indicative of the everyday. However, the ritual and routine that follows the pair of muck overalls reaches toward it more directly. They wait on a peg just inside the office and you put them on before entering the milking room or the barns to protect your clothing. They smell permanently of manure and are streaked with brown and white in unexpected places. The thing that always baffled me about them was that, while you put them on to protect the clothes you dressed in, it's perfectly acceptable to go visiting in your overalls and galoshes, stinking and filthy. There's almost a pride that goes with it. There's inevitably a pattern that follows of the house's oldest woman grabbing whatever's handy and shooing you out to a porch or a stoop to sit with your fellow filthy farmers because she can't have you tracking muck everywhere, but she brings you a cookie and some coffee and will talk to you through the screen door which masks some of the smell.

"Our search for the human takes us too far, too 'deep', we seek it in the clouds or in mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us on all sides."

or

"Let us go farther and say that it is in the most familiar things that the unknown - not the mysterious - is at its richest..."
-Caitlin