Gleaning Boston

 As I said the first day of class, I don’t have much of a connection to Boston. I came to Northeastern after visiting Boston just for a few days, and, even now, I’m not too aware of my surroundings (though I am trying to get better). With this in mind, de Certeau’s chapter made me think about how I interact, with my walking, to the city around me.  It also made me think back to a French film by Agnes Varda called Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I).  In this documentary, Varda films people in France who are “gleaners”—she looks to the people around her and films them on everyday activities that most people never really notice. For instance, one main part of the film is after a market wraps up and the vendors are closing down. A group of people come into the space and “glean” whatever they can from the leftover produce. Fruit is often dropped or left because there is a bad spot on it or doesn’t look as perfect as most people want it. However, for the “gleaners”—who range in age, gender, race, etc.—it is wasted food that could be easily enjoyed for free. What Varda’s film points out is that we often see what we want to see. And we ignore what we don’t want to. As de Certeau writes, “the ordinary practitioners of the city live ‘down below’, below the thresholds at which visibility begins” (128).  Many of these people look odd; the stigma of picking up “trash” follows them, even though they live their lives, saving money on food, feeling better about not wasting good resources, and also experiencing the city in a way that is unlike anyone else.   

So, the reason I mention Varda’s film is because I have been trying to be a gleaner of sorts myself lately, when I walk around the city. I am trying to see what I usually miss, what de Certeau calls the “everyday” experiences and those same experiences that are usually rendered invisible in a way. For instance, it’s easy to be walking among many people and pass by the person with a Dunkin Donuts cup, asking for money. It’s quite easy to pass by the man sifting through the garbage, though he neither looks as if he is in need of anything nor frantically searching for a lost item. I think that all of this will be important for picking a space for project 2. And just as Varda considers herself the filmmaker, she, too, is someone to be observed, someone whose actions change the city around her. Her film asks us to notice them, and I think that de Certeau is making that argument in many ways: that we should take note of our place in the structure of the city. In any case, I have a lot to think about for the next couple weeks, and now I just need to focus on the double sided way of gleaning: first, as looking at others around me and, second, as a way of looking at myself. It is in this type of activity that I think my own interest in community engagement comes in, as we seek to understand our own place within the world around us—whether that is in Boston in general or the immediacy of the coffee shop I do homework in each week.