10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #9 Leslie Jamison's "Other Voices, Other Rooms"

Illustration by Eleanor Davis, from Leslie Jamison's Other Voices, Other Rooms

This is the second post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Leslie Jamison’s superb “Other Voices, Other Rooms” (The New York Review of Books, May 14, 2020).

This piece is a wonderful celebration of my favorite subject – the everyday. It ingeniously links two seemingly unrelated topics – Jamison’s baby and the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition “Private Lives Public Spaces.” The piece unfolds in seven sections. 

In section one, Jamison tells about how being with her baby heightened her awareness of everything around her. She writes,

Being with my baby every hour of every day demanded close attention, not just to her—whether her fluttering eyelids meant she was waking up or just dreaming, how close she’d rolled to the edge of our bed—but also to everything else, because the alternative to paying attention was growing bored out of my mind. My hunger for stimulation meant my gaze was sensitized, the way your eyes can see more after you’ve spent a few minutes in the dark.

She says, “Those newborn months made the everyday visible again. It was all suddenly there.”

Section two introduces the MoMA exhibition:

An exhibition called “Private Lives Public Spaces” comprises a collection of home movies showing everyday scenes: one child pushes another in a sled as the day darkens around them. Lace curtains billow in a breeze. A woman mock-proposes to another woman at a lawn party, kneeling on the grass and laughing. A middle-aged man in a suit and tie rides piggyback on the shoulders of another middle-aged man in a suit and tie. Boys take furtive sips of Manischewitz at someone’s bar mitzvah, their glasses glinting in the ballroom light.

Jamison describes one of the movies:

An anonymous movie called My Dream Trip consists primarily of vacation footage shot on a train—the café car and narrow aisles, a pale water tower visible through a rain-streaked window—with voiceover from a man whose voice sounds like Kermit the Frog after twenty years of pack-a-day smoking. Smoker Kermit is thrilled by everything he sees. “So beautiful,” he keeps saying at the sight of the St. Louis Arch, “so gorgeous.” His gaze is humid with enthusiasm. And when he sees the automated gate at the entrance to an underground parking garage, he says, “Hello hello HELLO,” as if greeting a long-lost friend. Tenderness saturates the footage of his wife wearing her white camisole in their sleeping cabin, or eating potato chips and drinking beer out of a plastic cup in the dining car; his nighttime footage of the red-light district in New Orleans feels like a feral fever-dream, blurred by unspoken desire.

That “Hello hello HELLO” makes me smile. I, too, have experienced that heightened state of consciousness when, like Smoker Kermit, I’m thrilled by everything I see. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s bliss. 

In sections three and four, Jamison describes some of the moments in the MoMA home movies that most affected her. She writes,

One sequence in the Jarret family movies shows a small group of people dancing in a living room. It looks less like an organized party than a spontaneous eruption of festivity on a regular weeknight: three women doing the twist between the coffee table and the couch, one in linen slacks with a cigarette between her lips; folks with furrowed brows playing cards at a table behind them; a baby in a lace dress propped against a corner couch cushion; a boy in a red bathrobe and one in black suspenders, both clasping their hands together and swimming downward like fish, checking their feet occasionally, not sure if they are doing the steps right. It’s an ordinary evening brimming with the extraordinary condition of being alive, and watching gives me a sense of vertigo, as if I’m falling through cracks in the surface of experience—witnessing the secret of what it feels like to be this person, in this moment. Something rises inside me, as if it could touch these strangers just beneath their skin. Something in me wants to.

Now comes section five – the core of Jamison’s meditation. For her, she says, fascination with the grace of ordinariness “began in twelve-step meetings, listening to the voices of strangers in other basements in distant cities – riveted by stories or clichés that my literary training had taught me to understand as banal.” She says, “Recovery was teaching me that every life held profundity. Banality was just a call to look harder.”

That brilliant last line – “Banality was just a call to look harder” – went straight into my personal anthology of great epigrams. Change “was” to “is” and the line could serve as my personal credo. Section five ends with another inspired line: “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!”

In sections six and seven, Jamison expands her meditation on beauty to include other artworks she sees at MoMA, e.g., Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Mountains, Mt. Rosalie, and photographs documenting the artist Lea Lublin’s 1968 Mon Fils (My Son). But, for me, the high point of the piece is section five. “Meaning is happening Now! Now! Now!” are words to live by.