To care about voting nowadays
The minute you emerge from the home to the olfactory frenzy of the city, you’re on. Like it or not, this city of smells, few of them good, serves that small, but not unimportant purpose of letting you know you’re alive. And to be alive, is surely the first condition for creativity. Switched on, the senses embrace chaos and thrive on drawing it into tangible order. Your foot taps to his beat––the headphones hardly personal; you smile as she belts out a tune––cycling past too fast to be self-conscious. A sticker on that pimped out Macbook: THE FINE ARTS ARE NOT FINE. You wonder whether that’s because they’re base or vulgar or if the point is they’re underfunded and therefore not OK.
Now I’ve got my coffee and my breast pocket is pinging––it starts. A motley WhatsApp group is feeding a long-running joke about Slavoj Žižek, the wildly gesticulating Slovenian philosopher. Somewhat envious of his bona fide eccentric credentials (he has a lisp and a tic) he is the commentator we love to hate, with the balance landing on ‘love’ because in a city like London we have the opportunity to experience his particular brand of enthusiastic pessimism on a regular basis. It was the same crew who introduced me to existential poet Fernando Pessoa (the Portuguese), author and agitator Italo Calvino (the Italian) and defender of the Undercommons Fred Moten (the American). Yes, it is in London that I’m most exposed to the creativity of the world. These expats, (in this case Isabel, Patrick and Ashleigh respectively), adventure far from their home-lands and assemble in cities to continue the exchange of information, ideas and innovation that have propelled humanity and creativity for centuries. It’s this collision of dynamic forces that makes stuff happen.
I am the Australian. In return I tell them about Pauline Hanson (and the drag act Pauline Pantsdown whose comeback may be imminent as the former has inconceivably been returned to the senate), the ever-quotable film The Castle (‘how’s the serenity?’), our abhorrent record on detention, and a bit about Asian nations on which I’m better versed than them. I recommend an Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, as his defiance of the Dutch colonisers (who imprisoned him) and of Suharto (who placed him under house arrest) is a story that should be heard; a prescient reminder the new establishment may be no better than the old establishment.
Though on the surface cities appear to favour the establishment, they actually depend on an organic undercurrent of creativity. The establishment is staid, whereas creatives are in perpetual movement and all that activity creates a need for community. People to perform, people to watch, people to paint, people to see, people to talk, people to listen, people who’ll make the coffee and always bring treats, someone, anyone! with a car––or a van––a van would be perfect… Instead it’s a bike on a fine day, on the rest––the majority––I descend into the depths of London, a rodent ferreting my way through the red oesophagus of the underground thinking endure. But I come to my senses and observe: as a writer, everything’s material, even these seemingly mundane moments. There is a steaming cold sore in close proximity, an old woman with a gummy smile and excess saliva, a preacher with blue rings around deep black irises. If I get off at Oxford St, I smile back at the looming Topshop model and think look at the size of those teeth! There is a shrunken man sitting at the foot of a grand stone edifice. He’s chewing slowly. I imagine him toothless. He fists a crumpled McDonalds bag, grubby fingers producing a few more limp chips which he mashes––a not-displeased look on his face. He has a sign that reads ‘please help’. Well, exactly.
If it’s early I’ll walk past people stretching and rubbing weathered faces after their slow wake from the night before. Blankets flung to one side––sad and crumpled––looking thin and not at all warm enough to fend off the weather. They are silent. I am silent. Later, they’ll be interrupted in their public bathroom ablutions by teens who amplify their obsession with image, leaning over basins to closely examine every perceived imperfection just an inch from the mirror.
I think of Deanna Roger's brilliantly proud face. The way it moves when she throws down words. Uncompromising. I saw the spoken word poet perform live last month (the timely, rhetorical, Who cares about voting nowadays? Indeed), with a raw energy I associate with anticipation. It’s in city streets that anticipation meets possibility; in the corners, lanes, nooks and crannies––in urban decay and renewal. It’s drinking beer at Freud’s in the middle of the a.m. talking shite about some creative or political or enterprising project, getting up the next day and doing something about it.