‘Schaffer and dwelling in the hidden art of life’
Oscar Wilde said ‘The secret of life is art; ordinary riches can be stolen from you, real riches cannot. In your soul there are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you’.
‘Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes. We were suddenly on Madison street among the hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys. ‘Wup! wup!’ (Kerouac, 1955, Pg216). Immediate, fresh and lively in manner, this book rests on fervent possibility. The essence of the desire to be and to be fulfilled runs lividly through these pages. Spontaneous in outburst, looking for connection, an unpredictability too that launches us into an adrenalin fuelled charisma as the moment rises eddy like air and fills our nostrils with its warm sweaty stench. Young and free and continually aiming to blithely ‘be’, that so many wish to be so.
I see the orange Chinese lanterns folks have brought home and let release over Belper valley and from my view they mark the sky in new constellations. But as they drift on the same eddy of air as Kerouac’s enthusiasm, it is a civilized expression of a wish, a desire as it cultural origins indicate. And in it’s English counterpart – contained!
Every morning before setting off to work in Leeds, derby, studio or somewhere, I stand at my doorway with my coffee observing the day and maybe a goldfinch if I’m lucky. Sometimes I sit in the doorway thinking that if I was as narrow as a door frame no one might notice me stay the day away. It is in these moments of reflective contemplation that the unexpected and unsought appears magically. I take ‘this time’ after the poet W.H Davies ‘ what is this life, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare. To watch the cows in the fields…..’. I watched sheep as they chewed their way through my whle garden. I didn’t find anything poetic in this, but it is a little funny. (incidentally like Kerouac’s novel, he followed the tramp nomadic existence and for most of his life).
‘This time’, the contrast between allowing space to be still and what actually happens when we do, is often cliched. The reality of course, is often obscure, incidentals between friends’, connections within framed moments that create pictures of ideals. Chinese lanterns are the quiet approach of the middle classes to frame a moment, wish and make it ideal. The art of life such a bourgeois concept and we sense inauthenticity, possibly unfairly, but primarily because it comes manufactured, packaged and ready to consume.
I like Kerouac and his road to nowhere or Denver, just for the sake of the lack of consumables (yet again idealistically as the group purloined off friends, relatives and those they met on the road). I like Maurice Blanchot the French philosopher who called the void, reverie like gaze ‘Nowhere without No’, referred to as ‘an awareness of impending disaster, the complete avoidance of meeting that absolute but through it finding some redemption’ ( Blanchot. M, Pg13). Kerouac’s beat novel certainly captures that avoidance, and simulates loss and a redemptive air, the freshness/rawness that is lost through the manufactured. It feeds us this lucid dream as authentic experience. But of course what experience is? A simulacrum, such cultural idioms masquerade as our real lives as we imitate, attempt to capture ideas to own and who can dispute that for each, subjectively, it is real?
cont…..