The Infra-Ordinary: All That Goes Unnoticed

How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?

– Georges Perec

Inspired by Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, this prompt invites thinking about the various ways we might attend to the ordinary around us through creative reading and creative writing (Emerson). When reading Perec, I am often reminded of T.S. Eliot’s line, “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” If I begin to measure a life in the moments that go unnoticed I might, as Perec, notes “rediscover something of astonishment.” In conceptualizing the ordinary, then, I trace its defining principles through its etymological roots and through Perec’s theorizing on the infra-ordinary. In considering the etymology of ordinary, its earliest definition is “belonging to order.” Latin invites the definition of “usual” and understands ordo as a “series or arrangement.” Ordinary becomes so through its repeated nature, the consistency of its presence is outlined. The ordinary operating consistently doesn’t mean it contributes to awareness, quite the opposite: I disregard my coffee spoons daily. Therefore, Perec envisions the infra-ordinary as the unnoticed. For example in “Approaches to What?,” Perec discusses how “railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed” and how we recognize scandal as the pit explosion in the mines. What we forget or are unable and unwilling to see is that the truly marvelous and significant and scandalous thing may be the daily work in the coal mines (p. 1).

Our worlds move in the peripheral, the unnoticed, the habitual and yet, we remain unaware of the little nothings of our days. In this prompt, I will ask you to inhabit different forms of attunement and to become aware of what rests in the unseen and the unnoticed parts of the daily. Often our lives are composed of snippets of the ordinary, or infra-ordinary—things we might have deemed unpoetic. Through generative reading and writing practices, you will learn to acknowledge and hold space for the mundane and tiny occurrences of the everyday: the small affective, felt, and sensory experiences that layer our lives. 

What Happens When Nothing Happens?

Read a brief excerpt of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. I suggest pages 22–27. 

Take a moment and answer this question for yourself: What are you noticing in the text? 

Engage in a practice similar to Perec’s. Choose a space to stay in for 10 minutes. Create a list of what you see. Write through your own observational lens, inhabiting your form of perceiving. Try to write the entire time. Don’t stop. Don’t filter yourself. Find the movement of what and how you perceive. 

Sit with this spatial and embodied awareness of your own noticing. We will continue to build with it. 

Creative Reading: Becoming Attuned to Resonance and Text

In this practice I ask you to embrace noticing the poetic in two different ways of orienting to the text. 

While reading these poems, try to notice in two different ways:

• Take note of lines that you feel are resonant for you—lines that move you in some way. 
• Take note of moments of inventive syntax or compelling form/language. 

Note: When I ask you to engage in noticing what resonates with you, I am not asking for you to move toward relatability. Quite differently I am inviting you to move with curiosity, wonder, and the felt experience where the why may or may not be something legible in articulation or explanation. 

Read:

Jenny Xie’s “Invisible Relations” from Eye Level

Hanif Abdurraqib’s “For the Dogs Who Barked at Me on the Sidewalks in Connecticut” from A Fortune for Your Disaster 

What lines did you choose? If you begin to weave a pattern of thought, desire, and/or curiosity around this noticing, why did you find this line compelling?

Attunement is an affective layering that conjures a poetic cohesion. The cohesion is made and remade with your intuition and thoughts. You are the connector—the one drawing threads in the interstices. This is how you become aware of your own noticing and its distinct situated nature in the correlation of time and place. This is a crucial reckoning for contemplating the ordinary, and with it the unnoticed, peripheral commonplace pinings. 

The Layered Assemblage, or the Multitude of Prompts

Continue to inhabit an affective space of layering and noticing. In this culminating prompt, I ask you to write into your attention and attunement. However, I ask you to notice and move quickly between spaces and ideas—following a way of looking in all of the directions of thought. 

In this space now, you have oriented yourself to the ordinary, the poetic, to things you may not have seen and sat with before. 

Write for one minute per prompt below. Try to follow your immediate response to the prompt. Write what comes to mind and spiral into it until time tilts your head in another direction. 

• Describe a moment where someone asked you to look at something. What was it? Who was it that asked you? Did you look? What was it like?
• Describe something only you believe you notice every day. 
• Describe something you believe goes unnoticed. 
• What color was the sky this morning?
• What is a sound that echoes in you? 
• Close your eyes, what image do you see?
• Fill in this sentence. I am as _____ as ______. 

Compose and Cull Together a Poem

Take a moment. Breathe. You did it. Now, look at what you have in front of you. Go over each part of your writing journey today: the observations, the underlining of resonant or syntactically exciting parts of poems, the answers to these prompts. Take these seemingly disparate parts and sit in this moment. Cull these together. Write a version of a poem with these fragments/parts. Make it yours through your associative configurations. Share it with someone.