October 24, 2003
after the painting
After I finished painting the "master bedroom" in the seaside shack late this morning I took a quick spin along the cliff tops before returning to the city. I lingered for a moment in the seaspray, light and wind allowing the flow of the wilderness sweep through me.
Unity between the subjectivity and nature (inner and outer) is what I longed for.
I was full of anger. Or was it anguish. I couldn't really tell. I was out of contact with my emotions. But this old image came to mind, whilst I watched the rolling surf crash of the southern ocean into the rocks at the base of the cliffs:
E. Munch, The Scream, 1910
Seagulls swirled overhead, the sun burst through the cloud cover, the wind cut me to the bone anger surged within me.
And I wondered. How can I turn those deep dark emotions into a negative thinking, rather than rejecting them as Seneca once advised.
The turbulent passions have to become the impetus for negative thinking I reasoned: a kind of thinking that registers the leaps, ruptures in the historical flow of life. Why was I angry?
It had something to do with life in the metropolis:
Paul Citroen, Metropolis, 1923
The money economy of the metropolis in modernity swallows up the old values of familial relationships that were once embodied in the holiday shacks of yesteryear. Then there was a unity between inner and outer, between self and world.
In the metropolis the patterns of our conduct are now informed by a dulling, calculating, instrumental rationality. It is a different mode of experience in the metropolis: one that destroys the old humanist values of holiday life at the beach and leaves us with nihilism fulfilled.
As this American story puts it, "vacation is true freedom. It's as close as we get to the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ideal of the Declaration of Independence...With robots doing the work, we should all be on perpetual vacation." (Link courtesy of Ashley over at Notes from Somewhere Bizarre.
One can dream about such a future. The economic reality that governs the metropolis is that robots means massive unemployment. Robots will take many jobs and so millions of unemployed humans will end up in government welfare dormitories (eg. lie on the pension in Whyalla); or we will being doing mundane casual jobs to replace the old ones. Either way we will not afford the holidays of yesteryear.
That holiday mode of dwelling is gone. It is now part of the ruins of our history. All we can do is remember that unbroken harmony between inner and outer as we live its rupture.
I turned away from the wilderness, drove to town, took Agtet to the vet , and returned to the apartment in the inner city. Was it home? A shelter in a dar world where I can reside?
P Booth, Untitled, 1978.
Home resides in the past and its image is cherished in my memory.
I tried to lift my spirits by shopping for lunch at the Central Market and seeking out the people I knew who worked in the stalls. I needed a friendly smile and a warm hello to help me accept that my life was a continuous existence of journeying and migration.
It was the nomadic nature of existence in the metropolis that made me so churned up emotionally.
P. Booth, Untitled, 1978
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