I mentioned yesterday how my anti-car scruples have gone more lax in the past few years, with making a living in this urban fabric being the primary impetus. But there’s also the influence of the photographic eye. I don’t remember ever taking photos of cars in Lebanon; in fact, I spent a long time taking photos of buses. Over here, though, it sometimes feels like cars are the only finely-crafted aesthetic objects around. That says a lot about a place.
As the closest thing to public art in deserts of the the capitalist real, cars are synecdoches of time and class and desire; a classic car is a snapshot of a historical era, but it’s also a capsule of futurity—a promise in a bottle. They never promised us jet packs, tbh; they promised us endless growth linearly tied to progressive freedoms. Cars are the David and Mosè di Michelangelo of that mythology.
I think that’s one reason we look for beauty in banal things; like seeing faces in the clouds, yes, but also, like prison notebooks dutifully lettered and numbered. What else is there to do with our time?
The beauty we find is also a hopeful mirror of our selves; if something ugly and discarded can become an artwork, maybe so can we, thrown aside on the margins of history, as we are, like litter. We lift up the lowly because we still believe that the first shall be last—that this world is our inheritance.
If you spend any time with a certain genre of writing, you will no doubt encounter the concepts of the “true self” versus the “false self.” And if you think that doesn’t include you, because you don’t read that sort of thing, I wonder if instead you’ve ever considered a notion like “false consciousness”—that false self expanded outwards to encompass the more collective body. You may not spend much time discerning God’s will upon your life, but I bet you’ve asked yourself at least once why people vote against their own interests. That’s the false self made political.
And I’d say that even the spiritualist’s selves are also political. How often is her exhortation to us to shed the layers of attachment to wants and expectations, as though the true self is always smaller, plainer, more smoothly polished and better fitting in a pocket of quietude? The true self is never baroque. The true self is always minimal.
But these are the philosophies of an acquisitive and extractive society; the true self in the slum worlds these spiritualists avoid on the highways of abstraction is not found in “less,” although they will always evoke the stoicism of saints in fascist prisons or soviet gulags as examples of true faith found in the wombs of suffering.
No, the true self is neither spartan nor rococo—the true self is collective, and if our social worlds better reflected that will that they urge us to seek in silence and contemplation, we’d be surprised to see how verdant and overgrown we would truly become: not less, but so much more than this.
That’s why true justice is always at the point of production. Your attachments are downstream from those satanic mills.