From the first impression of oddness to the second glance at the person with a very own kind, style, manner, and vision.
Oh yes, I’m happy to be odd. Someone who follows gut feeling rather than general trend. What, flashy? No, that’s not the point I’m after. My own kind of living has to do with the way of life. That doesn’t require wisdom, though a little wisdom never hurt anyone.
So what would be the alternative to oddness? Ah yes, the uniform, the even, the unremarkable life with style. Uniform is a word that breathes down my neck. Not because of the fabric — because of what it demands. When the uniform life is demanded, imagination and creativity are the first to be left behind. And they slowly wither away. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time that creativity and the extraordinary have found themselves in the crosshairs. It has never worked though, this attempt to root out these two traits of being human. Creativitators have survived quite well in the underground of society too.
Yes, it takes some courage to turn toward an individual, odd kind of life. The joy taken in oddness makes other people somewhat suspicious and irritated. Why is that, though? No one takes up too much space in the visibility of daily life. The odd ones take up exactly as much room in their surroundings as uniform or normal beings do on our not-so-grey planet. And yet, in plain view, they’re the ones who give off a feeling for living that makes people restless. They make full use of their freedom to shape their lives however they please. As long as the oddness poses no threat to life, limb, or one’s ethical sense, how then is “That just won’t do!” justified?
There’s a story from my boyhood I’ve never forgotten. The three-year-old child, that is, me, sat in the Globus department store, right in the middle of the fashion floor, on the bottom step of a staircase. My mother, the seamstress, was once again on the hunt for clothes she could sew herself on her machine.
Odd, my mum.
Suddenly a bright yellow something appeared between the racks of clothing. My child’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets trying to place this odd and thoroughly eye-catching being somewhere. The heavily made-up face, an enormous, brightly coloured pair of glasses with a thick frame, and the womanly movements were all being put on display by a man. I had no drawer to file him in. My child’s brain searched, found none, and gave up. Who or what was that? My mother’s answer was: “That’s the odd fashion designer from Rheinsprung.”
What left me in happy wonder then, and still does now, is the courage to bear the lightness of being in one’s own kind.
Because one’s very own kind is always manifold.
Kind also means art.
And artists have never properly learned to spell “conformity.”
When my gaze, with or without a sideways glance, lands on someone odd, my curiosity, my wonder, and with it my interest are awakened. Isn’t that a direct invitation to freedom and to breathing easier, when someone can live out and enjoy the peculiarities of their personality?
No corset. No armour. No prison. Only the sheer delight in a life of outrageous diversity lures the individuals out of hiding.
“There’s nothing to hide here,” Fred Spillmann would call out today, somewhere between the racks of clothing.
And he’s right.
Patrick Fockler and Glenn Marais - for instance.