Bohemia

1.

Being a summary of the final chapter of Alain de Botton’s ‘Status Anxiety’

At the start of the nineteenth century a new type of person began to be noticed in Western Europe and the United States. He dressed simply. He lived in the cheaper parts of town. He read a lot and valued art and emotion above material success. He was often of melancholic temperament. He came to be known as ‘bohemian’.

The bohemian is defined, primarily, by what he is not: bourgeois. “Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom,” wrote Flaubert. Whereas the bourgeoisie accord status on the basis of commercial success and public reputation, what matters to the bohemian, above all else, is to dedicate himself to feeling and art. The martyr figures of bohemia sacrifice the security of a regular job to paint, travel, make music, and write. He may never have comfort, may struggle sometimes to feed his body, but it is not the body he is to be concerned with, it is the purity of the expression of his soul. Lack of success in his field is no indicator of failure – for the world is governed by idiocy and prejudice and it is only natural that it should reject and misunderstand the refined sensibilities of the artist. That he is not understood is a sign there is much to understand. That he is neglected and even tortured emphasises his superiority and dignity. The poet is almost fated to a life of poverty and despair, perhaps even suicide. Like the delicate flower, he does not fit into this world of crassness and soul-destroying work. Like the albatross that soars majestic, once landed his great wings render him unable to walk. Like the crucified Jesus, he stands above the mass of men, loved, then hated, then loved again. His life is a spiritual life and a life of non-conformity – yet merely not conforming with the bourgeois is not enough: he must actively oppose. He should irritate, annoy, shock and offend: devote himself to anything so long as it is taboo to Mid-Westerners, pharmacists, and judges.



2.

Being a long and stupid failed attempt to reflect on my own life with regard to bohemia.

Reading that chapter reminds of something I once was, and am, and have now passed through. Certainly, to value feeling and creative expression above all else – through travel and writing – is a large feature in my life. And to shun material wealth too. And yet, there is so much about the bohemian philosophy that is not only laughable, but also a little ‘primitive’. One can only go so long defining oneself by what one is not. If hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom – and by this I understand hatred of the aspect of oneself that is conformist, unoriginal, unthinking, merely habitual – then perhaps love of the bourgeois is the end. Live and let live, that’s what I say. Each to their own. You do your thing and I’ll do mine. And a million other clichés besides. I have no need to make anyone come around to my way of thinking – all go where they need to go in their own time – and it affects me not how others live their lives. If I want to be poor, to create, to travel, to live simply: all well and good. And if others want to devote themselves to money and fancy cars: that’s okay too. Sure, there are certain aspects of the world as it has been set up that make my chosen existence seemingly more difficult than it needs to be – but then again, it’s not that hard to work around it. One can, for example, get a job: they ain’t so bad.

It seems a prime tenet of the bohemian life to avoid work. “All jobs, other than poet and warrior, are soul-destroying,” Baudelaire declared. A hundred years later, Kerouac spoke out against “tight-collared commuters” and praised bums and artists who watched freight trains pass. Well, I don’t know about Baudelaire but I do know that Kerouac ended up a miserable mess of man who drank himself into an early grave. The thing that they don’t seem to have realised is…jobs are okay. I know, I know: we’ve been taught all our lives about the drudgery and wretchedness of the 9-5, the office cubicle, the shirt and tie – that ancient symbol of imprisonment – but as one who has journeyed to that land, I want to tell you that it’s not that bad. Number one, there are a lot of nice people there. Number two, it gives you a reason to get out of bed every day and gives structure to your week. And, number three, it pays the bills, puts food in your belly, and gives you a place to sleep.

In the ideal world, of course, we wouldn’t have to work to do those things: all that’d be taken care of and we’d be able to devote every second of our day to what we really want to do. But, again, that’s another land I’ve been to and I don’t think it works like that. With endless free time, there’s no real pressure: tomorrow will always be there – as will the day after that. I’ve never been more creative than when I’ve had a deadline or had to squeeze in what I wanted to do around my forty hours of work. Conversely, I’ve never been less creative than when I had months of nothingness and a home and a bed and ample money in the bank.
Another surprising thing about work, I’ve found, is that it actually frees me up in certain ways. Without structure, I can be prone to overly think about what to do with my time, where I should go, perhaps what I need to change. Should I leave town? Should I get a job? If so, what job should it be? I start looking for things to do, places to go, and that becomes my life. Even if I have a little bit of money and aren’t going hungry, I may wonder about the future, worry about how I’ll survive when that money runs out. The future looms so much larger when there’s not much of foundation in the present. Work answers all those questions for the mind – and, like I say, it ain’t that bad.

My last job was as a landscape gardener: I quite literally dug it. I remember one time I hadn’t worked for a bit and I was moping around feeling a bit lost and bad, even depressed. And then my boss called me up late in the morning and asked if I could go in: within the hour I was happily digging away and a life that had seemed so dreary had suddenly become filled with joy.

Another great lesson to me was that offices are actually really cool: I worked eight months for the Canadian government in Guelph – filing, doing admin, sitting in little cubicles – and, I swear, it’s the only job I’ve had that I didn’t want to leave. Sure, there were times when I hated it – but there was a point, maybe five months in, when something clicked and work became joy. I decided I was going to do it my way, that was part of it. But perhaps it was also that I stopped fighting, came to accept my position. The people were good people. The work wasn’t hard. And there were plenty of opportunities to make it fun. All my life I’d believed that offices were death – but had I not been at the end of my visa I may have still been there.

I guess what I’m saying is, hey, bohemian, don’t underestimate the value of work. It’s not only good for body and mind but it can also be of benefit to the soul.

No longer opposing the world of work is just part of my not really opposing anything. I just don’t see the sense in it. Okay, I’m lucky that I live in a free country, and have a passport that affords me passage to almost every country in the world, and am not tied down by familial commitments or fear. But at the same time I think it’s more than that: because, for sure, there are a hell of a lot of people in my position who can find plenty of things to oppose. It all strikes me, though, as naivety – let’s not say ignorance – and a certain lack of psychological development.

Let’s look at protests, for example – which I’m immediately conscious I know so little about, and judge quite superficially, which is sort of what I’m protesting against here, irony of ironies – and try and peer a little deeper. Because, for me, it’s mostly just a lot of angry people finding things to project there anger at. When a million people marched on London to protest the Iraq war were they really horrified by what Blair was doing or did they just want someone in power they could pick on and make fun of, and have a jolly day out shouting at the police and climbing on statues? No doubt there were some who felt deeply moved by what was going on and needed to express their voice – but I’ll happily and confidently wager any hat I’ve got that it was mostly just people doing something for a laugh. Students and the rise in tuition fees? Well of course they don’t want to pay any extra money, who would? But that’s hardly a reason to change policy. Why should they be supported? What’s the alternative to raising fees? Those are the questions I’d like to see protesters answer, not mere whines that it’s not fair.

But I’m getting off the point: the point is about opposition. And the thing is, with the bohemians, it was like they had an obsession with the so-called bourgeois that didn’t seem healthy. So they didn’t want to live them: big deal. But why go out of your way to piss them off? Why not just let them be? I mean, what harm are they doing to you? But perhaps it’s all just a way to avoid going deeper into one’s own psychological makeup – into their precious soul – and it was just easier to find an enemy in the outside than to do the demanding work of looking within.

The bohemians – if we can massively generalise – were hedonistic and carousers. To me, that will always designate a certain basicness of development. A man who sucks a carcinogenic smoke into his lungs, or imbibes a toxic liquid such as alcohol until it causes him significant impairment is lacking a very specific kind of intelligence and awareness, and it’s a sure sign that he is not operating anywhere near the depths of his being. Finding multiple enemies in the world, likewise, is, in my opinion, another of those signs.

All the world is a mirror and every man is your brother. It is not important what he does to you, but what you are to him. If you hate your enemy, unpalatable as they may be, you are still hating. Anger is not necessarily an unhealthy emotion in its place, but when it becomes hatred it becomes an ugly and poisonous thing. That the bohemians hated and sought to annoy and upset the bourgeois – the “pharmacists and the judges” – says nothing about the bourgeois and everything about the bohemians: namely, that they were hateful people. And, for me, that’s something to get over.

So, hating and being an ass to others only reflects badly on yourself, even when those others are perhaps asses too. But, more than that, it also demonstrates a certain shortsightedness – as though the office worker in the suit and tie who stresses and strains at work and goes home tired is all there is to the man. But perhaps he is a loving husband and father also. Perhaps he goes home every night and meditates three hours – or paints – or supports an aged mother and drives a hundred miles every weekend to see her. Perhaps, too, he has come to know his soul, and knows something of beauty and truth and love, and has chosen his work because it suits him. Perhaps none of that is true and he does hate his work, and hate himself and the world at large, and is deeply unhappy, as our mythology would have us believe. It’s quite possible, of course – but I’d like to consider all options.

I went a few weeks back to a talk by a few people associated with the arts and one guy who pricked my ears – not with his prick, I hasten to add – was a fellow who worked in association with Leeds council in setting up various arts-related events. One of the cool things he did was talk to local property owners and persuade to let artists use empty shops and offices to do exhibitions, installations, etc. Sounded like a great and beautiful thing: a real utopian, bohemian vision come to life in the middle of the city. He said it was hard to bring art to the city, that the cities were becoming more and more generic and that all the councils cared about was opening more shops like Primark. All sounded very sad. Anyway, that night there was a thing going at an empty space in The Light – Leeds’s newest shopping centre – and I decided to head on down. I was new to town and still filled with those visions you have of meeting awesome people that you might want to spend time with.

Well, in a nutshell, it was shite. Usual modern art kind of nonsense – a pile of tinned beans; some Argos catalogues arranged in a certain way; boards painted in ponderous, pretentious prose – plus a series of cacophonous, ‘avant garde’ (I suppose you’d call it) ‘music’ (I suppose you’d call it: noise is more like it) that is surely only of pleasure to the ones who are in their jazz trances making it. I don’t believe anybody there enjoyed it: just bodies wondering around looking for things that might be of substance but finding nothing; a gathering of minds gone wrong yet thinking themselves right. Happiness? No. Disappointing? Yes.
Little wonder that people prefer Primark to what the local art world has to offer if this is the best they can muster: I’ll take a Primark over the permanent establishment of a place like that any day, and I shouldn’t think I’ll enter into a Primark as long as I live. But it was shite, unappealing, dull and stupid. Which brings us right back to the bohemians.

Again, defining oneself by what you are not – even if the thing you are attempting to not be is ‘bad’ – doesn’t necessarily make you and what you do ‘good’. Most people walk dogs so Gérard de Nerval walked a lobster tied on a piece of blue ribbon. Posh people can be arses so the Dadaists interrupted their meals and shouted “dada” in their faces. And bankers and corporations can be greedy so protesters wear movie masks and camp in front of cathedrals. I see nothing commendable in any of that. I see attention-seeking, youthfulness, obnoxiousness, disrespect. How much more worthy a vision of truth and beauty that can leave everyone smiling.

I don’t even know what I’m saying anymore. Am I just typing words that fit with the ones that came before? Am I uttering utopian platitudes that speak of a way of being I am incapable of embodying – and perhaps one which is in total contrast to the way I live my life? Am I hateful and shallow because I mock and disregard protest and bohemia, think them lacking something that I think myself to have? Perhaps. The more I type, the more I feel like no more than a brain attached to a screen, something devoid from the reality of the package of body-mind-emotions that go to make up the living being currently known as Rory. But, no matter: I’ll go on.

Kerouac. Beatniks. Bohemians. Lee Miller and Man Ray. Neal Cassady. Bill Burroughs. All these souls, living their desperate, expressive, struggling lives. But happiness is where it’s at, for me. Number one: it is the happiness of your own soul. I like writing and I like it a lot – but if you could promise me happiness in exchange for my never tapping out another word, I’d take it. I don’t care, to be honest, what I do, as long as it fulfils me down to the tips of my toes. But the man who sucks on cigarettes, on whiskey bottles? Or the woman who rails against the status quo, the government, those who live their lives for material opulence and luxury? Can they really be happy and fulfilled? As I’ve said, hate is hate, whatever its target, and it simply ain’t good for you. Neither is liquor, intoxicants – you wouldn’t do those things if you truly loved yourself. Have a game of squash, Jack: you used to love your sports, captain of the team an’ all. Feel the air in your lungs. Run about. Put a tackle in. Go home dirty and aching and full of endorphins, some natural high, not just sitting there feeling bitter about the world and your life and wishing it would all go away. You don’t feel good, Jack? That ain’t the world’s fault, it ain’t society’s doin’. Society changes the way you want it and I’ll bet you’ll still feel the same, still find some other thing to blame for your woes. Look in the mirror, baby: it’s all you, it’s all your own doing. You gotta take responsibility, you gotta work out your own salvation. You don’t feel so good, you say? Well get off your arse. Get therapy. Put the cigarettes away. Go a little deeper into your soul. There ain’t no mystery to finding your joy – it’s all been written long ago – you just ain’t doin’ the work, keep thinking that the wrong things’ll bring you what you want, even though I keep telling you they won’t.

And what about you, Rory? Where you at? ‘Cos it weren’t that long ago all you could think of was hatin’ London – that’s right, I said “hate” – and there wasn’t so much in your life either…

You’re right, of course. Wow. I been thinking of that the whole time I been writing this thing: that I had hate, that I had fallen. Damn, it’s a whole lot better now: now that I’m up in Leeds, doing something I enjoy, with a nice girl to come home to every night. Without that…sure, I wouldn’t be so happy: a big part of life is what you come home to, you know I believe that; and, sure, I ain’t got no job – that I been speaking so highly of – but it sure feels like I got me an occupation. Studying. Being a student. And I like that.

Yeah, life’s all right. I don’t even know why I got to railing on them bohemians. I read that chapter and it fired a few things in my head – make me think about what I once was, all mad and idealistic and thick – and it made me think about where they fell short, all those despairing poets and suicides and old Jack, drinking himself to death when he had the chance to break on into something new, that Buddhist thing he flirted with but ultimately ignored for his love of bitterness and the bottle. It’s a shame what people become, just ‘cos of art. Number one: make yourself happy. Be decent to other people. Fix your own heart. Pissin’ people off ain’t no way to make good things happen. They’re all hung up on shaking the status quo, being controversial, as though that was an end in itself. And, sure, some good things have been weird and shocking to your standard Joe – but it don’t mean that every little thing that shocks him will be outstanding. That talk I went to also had this woman who seemed to think all theatre – that was her gig – had to challenge people, get in their face and make them think. But why not just make something lovely? What’s wrong with that? So much of it is just diseased and twisted minds revealing themselves to the world: it ain’t evolved. Cassady and Ginsberg, much as I loved their joie de vivre, mainly just talked shite. Bill Burroughs had a head half cracked – and it shows. What people see in that stuff, God only knows. James Joyce? Well there’s a man who never appreciated the benefit of an hour’s 5-a-side. Poor, poor souls, the lot of ‘em – but then maybe they were doing what they needed to do, just as they needed to do it, and it’s all somehow served me for the better in my own journey towards joy. Kerouac takes one path and reveals to all the misery of too much art and too much liquor and we all see it ain’t such a good path to take. Meanwhile, the rich banker goes down his way and, despite his yachts and big ass houses, we see the lies in his eyes and the stresses on his face, and we think, no thanks, we’d rather just be happy sitting in our little basement flats popping fifty pees in the metres and having hugs, weaving rugs, strumming our gee-tars and – oh shit, I’m still a bohemian.

Okay, I’m still a bohemian: and when I started churning out this shite I think I knew that’s where I would end up. But a modified one. The latest model in a long line, stretching right back to the start of the nineteenth century, when the first white young male decided to toss off his career for a life of substandard poetry and woe; and then when the woe didn’t work he thought maybe he’d get up to fight, get in the faces of those that had what he secretly wanted (security) but didn’t want what he had (poems); and then when that didn’t work – when he realised that fighting society was still being in that society – he dropped out, and left it all behind, took to the road and learned the joys of nature, touched his soul and found self-expression, wildness and freedom; and then he said, let’s go beyond that: let’s be healthy too, dig ourselves a little well of happiness, not piss people off, and not be bad to our own bodies, and not harbour hatred in our own hearts; let’s be hippies, and love each other and the world; and let’s go beyond that too, because that doesn’t work, and keep adapting and shifting and changing till we find something that does; let’s go back to the world; let’s take our art and our love to the world once more, and if they won’t have it, fine, ‘cos we’ll have it and we won’t need them to have it, we’ll still keep on doing it and we got our little day job to take care of all the rest ‘cos, you know what, we sort of dig that too. Hey, don’t you feel healthy? Don’t you feel balanced? You can go to yoga and you can go to football; you can paint and make music and you can turn up for work in the office the next day too; if you want to, you can do on holiday, go live on the beach for a while; you can raise kids; you can learn love. You can do whatever you want: even write long and pointless blogs that so few people will read and still get that feeling that you’re expressing yourself to the world, that you’re being heard, that you’ve found an audience. So you won’t get paid: so what? The reward is right here, in the expression, in the sharing – and if I want some money, there’s plenty of ways to do that. Not all work is soul-destroying, you know. But then again, some things are. Not living the life you want to live, for example. But what’s stopping you? If you can dream it, you can be it, I promise you. Just don’t expect – you substandard poet, you writer of pointless blogs – for the world to suck your cock and tuck you into bed at night too. Sheesh. Now that’s asking a bit much.

It’s a good old life.




3.

Being a short story I might make up, in which a group of young people growing up in a small town form a club that embodies the history of bohemia.