Lonerize

I have always been far from the madding crowd, man and boy. Living on my own for over twelve years now, there are a few thoughts I’d like to share.

Does being a middle aged ‘single householder’ make me a dried up old bachelor? Pedophile? Rapist? Oddball? Weirdo? Eccentric? Artistic? Bohemian? Bookish? Introverted? Violently psychotic? Aggressive? Socially phobic? Depressed? Take your pick, because everyone seems to have an opinion and often as not they latch onto those nice juicy negative labels.

The discourses/narratives available in this society, for those who enjoy spending large portions of their time alone, appear (at least to me) to be very narrow and pejorative.

Oh I have great social skills, but apart from a few close friends and the remains of my un-dead family, people in general terrify me. Am I blessed with incredible wisdom or do I need help!

I find as I get older, I become more and more ‘cynical’ of society in general and its somewhat aggressive exaltation's to ‘join in’. Even though experience has equipped me with various psychological tools to spot certain personality types, I keep finding myself embroiled in the same old negative merry-go-round of superficial relationships and boredom.

But then again, maybe that's it really. I can predict people's behavior - which is nice when you meet good one's - but others, its like a slow motion car crash, I know it'll end in tears.

This is so depressing because you can foresee the tired, long, boring story is gonna have to unfold in its own time. Just reading 'Contemporary Solitude' by Joanne Wieland-Burston. She approaches solitude from the Jungian perspective. She list's the cultural and mythical stereotypes of loners through the ages and sees the need to be alone as a sign of maturity and a breaking free of the Great Mother archetype.

Although, there is a danger she warns, of the loner becoming grandiose and 'lonerism' becoming pathological - hence we see the classic stereotypes of the Shadow loner - murderers, socio/psychopaths etc.

Anthony Storr's book 'Solitude' reinforces Burston's ideas about the ability to be alone as a sign of maturity and independence.

Our heroes in popular fiction, comics and cinema are often classic loners, rejecting the herd and going it alone. They always suffer for their outsider nature though, and are often shunned by the wider society and misunderstood.

It interest's me how 'The Loner' is so central to our hero myths yet mainstream society who consume most of these outsider narratives, often reject true loners in their midst - or just those who don't 'join in' with the clique or crowd.

The paradoxes of humanity.

I do have a suspicion though….I’m basically a miserable old bastard.

Psychogeography

First really got into this phenomena by reading the novels of Iain Sinclair. Most of his factional books are about 'reading' the architecture, graffiti, local myths and psychological atmosphere of a city, district or a building. In Sinclair's case, it is Greater London which gets an annual poetic and symbolic deconstruction via his non-linear narratives.

I do believe that all geographical spaces - be they rural or urban, town, city, beach, mountain, wood, school, factory, Soccer stadium - each have their own very particular subliminal energy, that is composed of all the mind's of the people who have passed through them. It's like, a person's sadness, grief, joy, hopes at the moments they worked, lived or just passed through these spaces, are impregnated forever into the wood, stone and steel, and can be activated by certain sensitive people who can feel or read the signs.

Guy Debord and the Situationist's made psychogeography into something of a scientific and political idea, as has Raoul Vanigem, but it has antecedents in Baudelaire and the Parisian flaneur.

Basically, Psychogeography is the perfect pursuit for the genteel bohemian in all of us.

Stop and look around you and think of all the infinite lives that have been and will be that haunt the most banal street corner and public park. Read the graffiti on a toilet door or a bus shelter and decipher the city. Mostly Its about being subversive by 'playing' with information that is abundant and free.

Its also of course about how architecture 'shapes' our interpretation of ourselves - how we feel inside spaces where our individual consciousnesses were not taken into account. Are we literally made and thought up by the physical environment?

I think its important to attempt an objectivity initially, as to the energy of certain place's, and how they do or don’t match up with your expectations. Listen to your instincts as you tune in to another language. Some people are more sensitive than others and pick up (to use a hippy phrase) 'vibrations' or resonance’s that others do not. Gaston Bachelard called them reverberations, like cyclic echoes, similar to a chord being strummed on a cosmic guitar and ourselves being the amplifier.

My old tutor at university had a theory about microwave radiation - emitted from people's electrical neurochemistry - being somehow impregnated into the fabric of surrounding objects at times of great joy and stress. These traces could then be activated and 'played' once again by a passing signal receiver - 9 days for example.

Had a female friend who would avoid a certain antique shop in the village. It sold genuine 30's and 40's antiques: clothing, militaria, furniture, kitchen utensils, ration books etc. She said she could feel all these shapes, moods and subliminal whispers passing through her mind like clouds whenever she entered the shop. She wasn't the kind to make it up either - very anti-spiritual person.

I personally always find beaches resonate with something beyond my normal awareness. Where the land (civilisation) meets the wild uncontrollable sea - the source of all life. Its like a magical nexus, a borderland, a separate republic, a curiosity shop for the exchange of ideas.

This is what the surrealist's saw too, especially Dali, a place of transmutation and the bending of time and space. Look at Picasso's beach 'monsters' from the 30's and 40's he felt the resonances too.

There is a really interesting Google lecture by Will Self on Psychogeography - his own love of it and its history.

He talks about the micro-climates that we inhabit in our car, plane, cab, computer mediated world. He argues that the way we properly perceive and navigate space is an essentially physical experience that we are losing after 100's of 1000's of years of feeling the narratives of a journey through our feet.

Capitalism creates an illusion of space and traveling, but is just in fact, a series of brief mediated shuttles between work, home and shopping.

Self recalls the great travelogues or 'Picaresque's' as he calls them: The Canterbury Tales, Pilgrim's Progress, Don Quixote, the Beat's, and how they are essentially about the 360 degree movement through space and the physical enrichment of the soul that creates. He believes we should reclaim the streets, re-appropriate the beautiful, and that walking as a mode of transport is a great social leveller.

Take a stroll and find out for yourself.

Gypsy Interludes: On Getting Lost

Even as adults, I think we all need playgrounds.

Islands of spontaneity, psychological sandpits, what Hakim Bey would call 'Temporary Autonomous Zones'. I'm not taking about mediated experience's via the entertainment, leisure and travel industry's, I mean autonomous, self organised and willful journeys of psycho-geographical experience.

These physical spaces act as catalyst's and swift nutrient injections for our souls. Places within relatively easy reach by car and train are the best- one to two and half hours to reach, but far enough away to experience a different ambiance, an otherness that generates fresh perspectives and also an examination of our selves and other peoples everyday life-worlds.

It is important that these places can be reached relatively quickly as there value lies in the sudden juxtaposition of two worlds within a single culture or country. The loss of your usual identity and the availability of masks if you prefer, or just the beautiful anonymity of being a pure observer, without constantly having your identity and historical baggage reflected back to you by every familiar face, building, sound, taste, touch, smell.

Both Proust and Samuel Beckett have talked of habit as being the great deadener, how we yearn to break the repetitive cycles of doing and being that we perform and are performed by in our tiny little corners of this big and colorful world.

To travel abroad is fantastic of course (Sometimes, depending on the individual ), and to backpack around the world for months on end can be the greatest of adventures and a superb intellectual and cultural 'open' university, but eventually - unless you plant roots somewhere - there is the return home to the parent culture. This return often involves a 'knuckling down' to the practicalities of what is termed normal life. For many this involves a job, career, mortgage, children and pension plan. So begins the inevitable nostalgia trawling back through those old gap year/holiday photo's, and the promises to yourself and others, that when the mortgage is paid off and the kids have left home, you can really begin to live again and read all those books, write that novel, paint those canvasses and finally explore Renaissance Florence with your other half.

Many people live like this and take it as normal, seeing travel as an international 'event', an escape to the sun for a fortnight a year, or the 'traveling' experience as something done when your young and relatively unbaggaged both mentally and physically. The problem with the annual holiday is that it often induces a certain amount of stress and anxiety. Its necessity for many as the once or twice yearly escape valve often generates anticipatory fears: 'We must enjoy this holiday, we deserve it, but what if, what if, what if??? The reward for nearly 50 weeks of work and its inevitable attendant stresses - fear of unemployment, competitiveness, mortgage re-payments and keeping up the 'normal' consumerist lifestyle - turns travel and a holiday in the sun into another product that must be consumed within a permitted time period and therefore is a hollow escape and never a true holiday from the self!

The ease of jet travel, the ability to 'hop on a plane' and find yourself in a soulless baggage lounge in some foreign country in a couple of hours is convenient for the inveterate traveler, it makes sense for the wanderer or professional who has to get to far flung places as quickly and as safely as possible. But Aeroplane travel isn't actually traveling, there is not the sense of movement or passage through geographical and psychological space as there is when you travel by car, train, bicycle or on foot. You never experience any really tangible change in the air temperature, scenery, architecture, smells, sounds - all those things that travellers of old took for granted - the sense of a journey, an adventure that would spawn wonderful and strange tales around the future fireplace.

Jet flights are flights from your experiencing self, there is no perceptual journey only a boredom of waiting and insipid distractions.

Your identity is opaque and un-porous in a plane, by necessity of altitude you have no sense of crossing physical borders, just the admittedly (if your lucky) often beautiful skyrama's and huge landmass's, the brief tranquilized dream period before your crude ejection into another culture via the alienating process of the arrival lounge.

The whole flight and hotel booking, passport and security processing ordeal tends to re-affirm your identity and personal and cultural history too, rather than being a minor inconvienience, it reminds you at all times of who you are and where you've come from. You are this named person, and are permitted to be here at this space and time - because you have this written and pictorial identity. You have been 'allowed' to enjoy yourself as long as that self is really you!

I'm not being totally negative, it is lovely to jet to a sunny and exciting climate sometimes - it can be a great spontaneous escape for a romantic couple for example, but what I'm advocating is a more personal journey of the self, or with just one other person.

I will often get a return train ticket to London or Oxford, it takes around two and half hours to get to London and just over an hour to get to Oxford from my town. I must admit to being a bit bookish, arty and a committed Flaneur.

I like to roam the ancient streets of these two great cities and be surrounded and sometimes intimidated by the ever present ghosts of the past. The anonymity of just buying a ticket without having to divulge your identity and then collapsing into the seat in anticipation of the journey is one of my little anticipatory pleasures - its so easy too. The shunt-swish of the train wheels, the surreal parallax views of changing countryside, hills and blue horizons, people's back gardens, citys and towns seen from a secret and unusual passage. Your imagination can roam in the rhythmic bubble of a train. I like those little old houses lost in the countryside and like to imagine all the people who have lived in them.

Suddenly, on that train you are nobody, a soul in transit, a nomad, a physical and psychic gypsy untethered to your former identity - you are out of the loop and a little bit lost, which can be quite wonderful!

I prefer to tell no one where I'm going too, like a secret holiday, a spontaneous shedding of 'me' and just dissolving in the experience of now . As Christopher Isherwood said: 'I is a camera', 'I' is the observing self lost in pure perception, relatively uncontaminated by the habitual stimulus that often surrounds him or her.

I the walker, the Flaneur, strolling along London's South Bank, lost in the colourful crowds, the seething mass of consciousness, drinking in the buzz and communality of the crowd, while simultaneously being not of the crowd, but just being the lone observer, a tiny boat bobbing on the surface of humanity and beautifully cast adrift. Occasionally I will dock in a quiet port, a small cafe or eat a sandwich in a park and then up anchor for a cultural interlude in a museum or gallery.

It is when I am alone and experiencing this that I can really dissolve and dilute myself into what is around me, I become a vessel for pure stimulus without the usual inhibitory, over sensitive personal ant-virus software kicking in. Even the bugs are interesting when viewed from the new me.

I advocate the spontaneous use of the Gypsy Interlude for everyone - even if only a couple of times a year. To lose one's normal identity and role for others even if just for a day or two. It is difficult and possibly dangerous for some to 'disappear' totally for a day or two alone I know, but compromises can be reached - I do take a mobile phone, but have it turned off and just check for calls ocassionally. But often for the relatively inexpensive price of a two hour train journey and a B&B if you wish to stay longer, you can give your weary soul an injection of pure living and throw away, for a little while at least, the old you and meditate on who you were, and who you want to be. Or just spend your entire life being a psychic gypsy like me.

Enjoy getting lost.

The Only Good Hippy is a Dead Hippy

The hippy archetype has been the most powerful product that industry and the media has attempted to sell to us during the last 20 or so years! I say 'attempted' because there will always be a kind of dissonance where the world of REALITY meets that imaginary world that the advertisers want us 'to think' we live in.

They sell us the old hippy ideals of communality, individuality, concern for the environment and the expression of our diverse sexualities - but really, our lives are just grubby work, endless debt and a drab banality. All our delusions of choice, aren't real choices at all, they're just lifestyles and products to consume, and if we want to opt out and make a choice that isn't on their product list i.e, to be idle and 'find our one true vibe' (hippy speak there) we find that we're reduced to children and criminalized and labeled 'undesirables', 'outcasts', 'weirdo's', 'dole spongers', 'deadbeats', 'scroungers', 'drug fiends', 'dreamers', I could go on...

You get my drift though, its a kind of collective schizophrenia, where your average corporate wage slave likes to think he's a bit edgy by 'doing' Glastonbury and smoking dope on the last Sunday of the month - while simultaneously, having a panic attack about the cutting edge kudos of his mobile phone.

This is modern life, this is the modern hippy, is there anyway to escape being captured and labeled by greedy capitalist fuckpigs? Anybody know a way of life that hasn't any chance of being co-opted and sold back to us as a fucking 'lifestyle choice!'

What about BEING DEAD! SELL ME THAT YOU FUCKERS! Oh no, I just thought: UNDERTAKERS! NECROPHILIC HIPPY BASTARDS.

The Joy of Smoking

I started smoking at 15, basically because it was still seen as cool by the yoof in the late seventies and early 80’s. I managed to give up for nearly 7 years, but I missed it.

I still enjoy smoking – in moderation – and as I reflect back on the history of Western civilization I think I have spotted a relationship between tobacco use, the development of modern self-reflexive consciousness – and hence the birth of what we now call the modern mind. I personally think that the decline and wide scale banning of tobacco use has serious repercussions for the maintenance of our basic humanity.

It was the South American shaman’s who first cultivated tobacco and traded it to the world. As is well documented, the Egyptians and the Greeks were heavy smokers - Plato was an eighty a day man - and the decline of the Roman Empire happened because The Goths and Visigoths repeatedly blockaded the ‘Tobacco road’ as the historian Gibbon has recorded.

The Catholic church were abstainers obviously, and it was only when Leonardo began cultivating it himself and ignited the Renaissance that humanity took a quantum leap once again.

Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Swift, Dickens, Einstein, Picasso, Stephen Hawking (when younger) Neil Armstrong, Bill Hicks, all were addicted to the weed. There was of course a world wide tobacco drought in the years preceding the first and second World wars.

Post war, it was the French of course who revealed the importance of the ciggy to our very souls.

Those Parisian Café’s, clotted with the smoke of Sartre and Camus’s Gitanes, were the intellectual breeding ground for the Beats and the lighted match to the 60’s counter culture. Modern writers of that ilk like Will Self and Martin Amis can often be witnessed rolling their own in literary sympathy.

The humble ciggy provides pause for reflection, an existential moment.
It represents the symbolism of a single human life contained in that little white tube: the ignition of our birth, the slow burn of our histories which can be stubbed out in an instant, the loss of innocence with the nicotine stain of experience, and the slow, inevitable crumbling ash of our slide into decrepitude and death. All is vanity.

How many times has my sanity been saved (or yours) by the ciggy after some trauma - that late night phone call, the hospital loitering, the hideous final demand, the romantic breakup.

Or the simple pleasure of the post-coital smoke (I have had sex once) the after dinner burn, the boredom bashing fag break at work.

The last hope for mankind now rests with all those huddled despised little groups outside the Jobcentre, your local pub and Netto’s car park.

Spark one up with me in celebration of the past and the hope of a new tobacco Renaissance.

The Single Domesticated Bohemian

Just wondered if any of my fellow idlers who might live alone, ever feel more like Sysiphus pushing a great big rock up the cliff face of intolerance and misunderstanding, rather than a free spirit who just craves autonomy?

It's getting harder and harder to make ends meet: pay rent, food, bills, council tax etc, and maintain any kind of self sufficiency and personal freedom without morphing into a workaholic twat with an A Type (for arsehole) personality.

The work I do get away with 24 - 34 hours a week - at the very most - is unfulfilling and tedious and fucking pointless: designing and making signs for mostly grubby little wannabe tycoons with some souless business idea which I'm actually helping them sell! God I hate these fucking people. I'm a sensitive man for Christ's sake!

All I get is: 'It's okay for you, you've got NO KIDS, 'It's okay for you, you've got no RESPONSIBILITY', 'It's okay for you, you've got no MORTGAGE',or the best one: "who's gonna look after you when you're OLD!" How fucking cheerful.

That's the trouble with me I'm too happy go lucky, I need to knuckle down to the MATURE MAN STEREOTYPE, get myself some serious baggage: bitter divorces, estranged kids, mortgage loan's, mother-in-laws, spouses families, terror of redundancy and general ennui. Bit pessimistic aren't I? I've seen so many people, many with kid's and family's that are just downright miserable.

I'm not materialistic, I don't own a car, I don't crave for the latest gadget or lifestyle, I don't really crave for anything except a bit of peace to paint, read, smoke and dream.

I'M AN INDIVIDUAL, I DON'T BOTHER ANYONE, I DIDN'T ASK TO BE BORN, SO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE! Except fellow bohemians , of course.

Anybody got any advice for someone 'Who thinks Too Deeply and Too much', no kid's, no family, no ties. Should I emigrate, copulate, denigrate, subjugate, cogitate or simply hibernate for the winter, and think about it again in the spring? Shall I just go on benefits again. I think alot of claimants are at least being more honest/authentic human beings than moaning wage slaves like me.

RANT OVER. Thankyou and goodnight.

No Dad, No Protestant Work Ethic

I've noticed as I've got older, how many of my freinds and ex-girlfreinds grew up in single parent families where the father was absent, either through divorce, adoption or death. My self included.

The reason why I was initially drawn to these people was, as I see now, a particular opinion they held about the work ethic and modern industrialised society. They loathed it. I was wondering if Big Brother is just Big Daddy in another guise? I know that that is what he represents to me.

People I have known who have grown up in the traditional 'phallocentric' male dominated household are often more deeply fucked up than the offspring of 'single parent mothers', it just takes them longer to realise it, and often too late.

No dad can mean, poverty, exclusion and alienation (less so now), and it can also mean freedom to dream and question the status quo without some bitter twisted wage slave telling you to be like him and conform and consume.

I really admire people who reject their parents values who come from very authoritarian family backgrounds, i'm not idolizing SP families, I just thought it was time to stop kicking single mum's and stop selling the idea of 'family values' 'cause they ain't so clever and it don't get us out of the mess.