The Dwelling

….This briefly brings me back to the ‘make do and mend’. It is a dubious phrase laden with ideals and images of small holding, knitted gloves, grow your own and buy the greenhouse! It’s nostalgia smothering with cupcakes and marketable equity! It is another marketable source, commodity driven and new bourgeois taste dictated to the masses. In mid thirties and mid life crisis over beng the perfect man or woman, 30 somethings’ are the easiest disillusioned market. Or are they? Is it just a matter of learning ‘an art of life’, that at this point it’s time to realise that tilling the furrow is hands on, that to be a kid again is as easy as digging a hole to Australia in the soil! There is nothing quite like messing around with stuff. Maybe Joseph Beuys is right and Edith schaeffer had caught on – anyone can become an artist! In a time when there is little funding available for artists, many look resourcefully on how to continue to make, what to sacrifice and time is limited as earning climbs in priority, the make and mend policy borrows even more time. Therefore the sole artist/researcher are challenged.

Kerouac knew that to write ‘On the Road’ needed a sense of collaboration, being with, experiencing and making the art out of time first, before he could write about it. Schaeffer knew that she needed to be living in the sense that made every act; in Koestler’s words ‘an act of creation’ ( 1964, The Act of Creation), before the work would evolve and become apparent. I’m trusting in the same right now as I begin this writing drivel, in vain efforts to encapsulate musings that live between a sense of scholarship and digestible letters! Both Schaeffer and Kerouac, interestingly would describe themselves as quasi religious – ‘strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic’ (Chambers. A, of Kerouac, 1991) and Schaeffer of Christian origin. J. Schaffer a philosopher of considerable clout on metaphysical logic and wonder, similarly reveres time and existence. I wonder on the fusion of spiritual, mystical general allusive dream ideal here, that perhaps hones the idea of the hidden art of life and can be quite rightly accused of romanticism rather than religious wanderings or existentialism. So in experiencing and writing I’m attempting to extend the ‘grow my own’ art of life, reach a little further and collaborate a little more. This writing maybe useless but dear Gombrich has it right, ‘but there is at least one thing in common between art and scholarship: both may appear utterly useless – as useless in fact as dreams and all memories’ (1957; 1963, Pg 106), but in catching his real drift, it is born out of a sense of my own Spacetime. Adios for now!

….Just because Chinese lanterns are set adrift by families across the valley doesn’t mean that is less authentic subjectively than those who originated such practices in China or those who are sold on the ‘make do and mend’ of popular thinking right now, so would make these themselves. Invention and experience are born out of engaged connection with what is right beneath our noses. However I do challenge the idea that this is authentic in terms of the art of life and I do claim that many practices are simply co-opted, and masquerade to give us a sense of it. Deep down we know it, but we buy into it. Deep down we want to imitate what as ideal purports to fulfilment from the reign of a boat on the river, to nostalgic kitsch aprons as they hark back to the culinary art of love making!

So what of Schaffer a philosopher on metaphysics, a researcher on all that jazz of existence? what of Edith Schaefer, a theological dubious rhetoric of the ‘Hidden art of homemaking’? But it is both that proffer an understanding of the art of life. For obvious reasons as an artist whose works follow the metaphysical, I’m biased with Jonathon Shaffer whose essay on Spacetime quotes Alexander (1950), ‘Space and Time, so far from being the least self-subsistent of things, are in truth in their indissoluble union the ultimate reality in its simplest and barest terms…’

However in its simplest form there is E.Schaeffer and her philosophy in the making of art from everyday life – something out of nothing. It is easy to sneer and suggest it is romanticised homemaking and a typical machanism of a ‘homemaker’. Yet despite this cynicism I think she may be speaking of a thousand things we acknowledge in our quiet, hidden lives. A frustration at our inability to appreciate these small things against the myriad of worries, new political austerity measures, precisely because it has become co-opted into a political measure of rhetoric saying we should and perhaps this article only adds to that! We have a frenzy of approval rating trying to achieve just this. What is missed here, is that most of us already do have a hidden art of life if we could only appreciate our own instead of comparing with what should be. Whilst Edith Schaeffer may be outdated, outmoded, old fashioned, her quiet insistence that a moment can become art not by a connection wiht some other, not by accomplishment, not noticed, not by manufacturing it from something we’ve seen or heard or imitated but becasue we’re making it up for ourselves, evolved out of genuine interaction and experience and in our own Spacetime.

cont….

‘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…..

So back from a few pub trips by now and I’m rewarded by the return of conversation from an 11yr old who has not lost the art of conversation, can add her own wit to an otherwise ordinary day and create unexpected forms of conversation. More than that, far from staying with the drift of the art of conversation those meanderings and incidental meetings have conjured previous contemplations of the art of life. Metaphysical, existential – yes. Meaningful? You never can really tell. But subsequent posts will be dwelling on the ‘hidden art of life’.

Bear with me, I wrote the article and its too lengthy for here, so mini series a la ‘docu Joanna thought life’ is on the way!