Strangeness // Walt Palmer

Walt Palmer examines the word “strangeness” itself as part of our guest edited month exploring the theme "Truth is Stranger than Fiction.”

This is what I feel: the idea of “strange” is, itself, quite weird. We dream that stuff up. Why are we so quick to label things, anyway? And why is our word for something that is less usual, or new to us, “strange”? We could be talking about the weather and something happens that never happens—snow in July, maybe—and we’re surprised; it’s damned odd to have snow in July, sure. But it’s not strange. It’s our weather—not “other” weather or others’ weather. And we’re not always talking about the weather, either. How is a person “strange”? Here’s how: we live in our heads, and our heads tempt us. Face it, imagination is as close to a miracle as we have: the brain functioning in a way that gives us something so apparently outside of our own experience. Still, understand the implications. Think about how we sometimes think about people. Now that can be pretty … odd. That “trick” of our heads is odd. Is “odd” a good word just there?

Yeah, the misappropriation of imagination to create something that we then regard as a fact about people who are not us, not from our place, not from our class, not from our beliefs? And then using that “fact” to deride them? No. I can’t deal; our own damned little worlds are works of fiction.

Nevertheless, I do it too, sometimes. It’s my worst sin. I don’t always ask, is the problem. Asking is the thing—the tonic. Maybe it’s not just me. Maybe in an acquisitive and confrontational world there is little appetite, or time, for inquiry—to know about that person who is not me. It’s as if we were making a deal and questions are currency—like to ask, costs. Sure, we spend all our time behind our own eyes, it’s a bit forgivable, right? But how does it happen that we fix so vehemently on some supposed, self-generated “normalcy”—haphazard, unconstructed, unconsidered—that when we find a wondrous array of human characteristic that is so various, we merely sit? We sit immediately, and only where we find ourselves. And, oh, we work ourselves to fit perfectly. When we could have fit anywhere, done anything? Is there nothing we ought to know outside of our own make believe? Wouldn’t answers to such questions expand the plausible, the appropriate, the acceptable? Wouldn’t that be more for each of us? Why aren’t answers also currency? Of course, we don’t really always do it—not entirely. We’re not entirely flawed. Each of us makes some effort in some degree. So, we vary in how much we subscribe to the need to fit, and in where we find ourselves in terms of what others’ expectations would be about our fittingness. But even within the best of us, and even though our outlook is good-spirited, we often come to this question: Are you strange, or am I? I would warn you to watch for that one. It’s the one that really costs. You spend that baby and you’re giving away everything. It’s a nonsense question. “Weirdness,” or any synonym for the ways we don’t recognize the largest parts of ourselves in others, is an arbitrary commodity for sure. If every time we recognize that question we think it all through, none of us is “strange”—not in the objective sense. But we’re subjective; each of us, and each of the communities—geographic, economic, philosophical, spiritual, religious, and ideological—into which we fit is easily characterized as “strange” to some degree, to someone (or to many). It’s a trap; our need to be certain about things relegates the unfamiliar to a different category of information. Weather can be weird because the weather on that day does not conform with the pattern of weather on similar days, but even the weather is smart enough to know that it is not strange to itself. People cannot be strange. Their behaviour can surprise us, but people are not strange if you’re a person. Say the word: strange. Now, what comes up? Is the thing unusual or surprising? Is it irregular, uncommon, abnormal? Is it different, exotic? (Note to human reader: Please put all those terms in “scare quotes.” And check the last two particularly closely.) That’s your fully functioning paradox, or (more honestly) your lie, right there. “Exotic” and “different” are not absolute; they’re relative (—like a cousin). And our mischaracterization of something that is far away, or from far away, or what we experience when we are far away—in terms geographic, economic, philosophical, spiritual, religious, and ideological—as “different” leads us straight to a particularly false corollary. What is “from away” is different, and what is different is odd. And—let’s admit it—if one is really fixed in their world, odd equals flawed. But “A” is no farther away from “B” than “B” is from “A,” right? Things are different, but only from each other. So, there is no absolute quality of “strange.” We should say, “That is where I would be if I were there,” “That is what this would be if it were that,” and “They are who we would be if we were them.” Everything that makes strangeness is the mere spinning of wheels, rolling of bones. Here’s who we all are: we are all, most directly (and relevantly, here) descendants of dark-skinned Africans. There’s your start. So, if I’m so preoccupied with where I should assign my allegiance, I have to recognize that such a thing is impossible: we—any of us—are as good as every colour and kind, and as bad as every belief that there is anything other than everything. No one is from far away; everyone is far from away.Got a problem with the out-of-Africa thing? Well, do you favour irrationality? “Oh, no!” you would say to yourself, right? Most people? But, maybe you do—favour irrationality. Maybe you say, “There’s more to knowledge than science.” Yeah, well, knowledge is what science is actually supposed to mean. Don’t call science nuts and then sit and watch your television show on Netflix, via satellite. Here’s what is true: there’s more to thought than science. Definitely. Lots of the important stuff that populates our brains rests on feeling what we feel. But if you “feel” that you have to “believe” that the Earth is 6,000 years old, and apes and people popped into existence in the same week, those six millennia ago … well, you just don’t know what you don’t know. Turn your TV off and go to bed. Spend some time there. Dream. Telling me what you know is a mere litany of the landmarks of our ignorance. And, I can relate. I do it all the time. Fuck! When I know, I do not ask, so I do not see. Paint has no colour, snow just falls, and never rests. Others jabber, moving lips on jumbled faces. Did you think that there was broad agreement on any but the simplest notions? Did you think that politics could be anything but compromise—enormously frustrating, but absolutely necessary, compromise? Did you think that individuals were in total control of their destinies? Did you think that our eyes were anything other than electromagnetic television receivers operating in the range of 430 to 770 THz? Well, right or wrong (and who’s to say) explain what you thought. I’m asking.Summary: That is all of the art that I can bring to bear upon the strangeness of what and who is here with me, in my cave. If art has a moral purpose—buried in there with the rest of what gives it value—maybe it is to disarm the concept of strangeness and get directly, and fully, to what we have seen, and not just what has actually happened to us. Should we speak only of what we supposedly “know”? Who tells the stories that involve the inarticulate? Who gives us the words of the reticent? Who conjures the universe of the one whose imagination fails? There is no strangeness. We own the lot. All of the life that has lived for a half a billion years and that we discover as fossils in the ancient sedimentary—it all lives in each bit of all of us, its place is our place and its time is our time. I hope that it’s the concept of strangeness itself that is weird. To regard the rest of the world as “other” is to look so closely to ourselves and our particular selection of conventionalities that we are blinkered. Maybe that’s weird. Yeah, I think that’s weird.

Walt Palmer is a former airline pilot and a recent graduate of the University of Guelph MFA Creative Writing program. So, he is pretty much a young, developing writer—except for the “young” part. He does research and writes and speaks about global warming and commercial aviation's prospects of becoming sustainable. He was born in Ottawa, grew up in Montréal, and lives in Guelph. He is married, with two adult children and a grandson. That's pretty much it ... he thinks ... (What else to add?)