In Praise of Dirt

In the search for enjoyment where would you more likely look, in a laboratory or in an artists studio?


Unlike some people I enjoy large amounts of history and identity, so I also enjoy large amounts of stains, as something to look back on.


A Brexiteer friend of mine, in the pub, (of course, where else are they to be found?), was telling me the importance of identity: 


"For the Welsh", he said, "they have their leeks, for the Scottish they have their kilts, for the English..." he stumbled and couldn't find a single clear image as to what that is to be English and what, indeed, would it be?


It is not for nothing that Malorie Blackman in her mature Noughts and Crosses has her black characters describe the white characters as 'blanks', and also not for nothing that the most appalling vision of conformity comes across as a white man in a clean black suit and dark shads in The Matrix who spawns like a zombie hydra whose main reason for their  scariness (zombies not hydras) is for nothing else but their inability to reason and their sheer mass of numbers.  


I ask the heading question because our overriding fetish of controlling spaces with cleanliness and order is directly opposing our need to be creative, where our main hubs of humanity gather are maintained  not in a frenzied passion of excitement, jubilation and festive culture but as laboratories for neo-liberal experiments. 


The fundamental belief of capitalism with it's need to manage and contain and monetise is not a process of living as much as it is a process of blood being taken from a willing arm, the blood being money in this analogy. 


Characteristics of the, disappointingly figurative, High Street are just that, disappointing, but also, and tellingly, sterile.


The need to be clean is not as powerful a motive to be so as the need for other things to die, which partly comes from our belief of our exceptional status of our destiny as nationalities and as humanity, in general.


The firing rage, the guillotine, the lethal injection (again lab equipment) the whole gamut of death sentences are not clean ways of behaviour, but they are orderly, and on the whole mass society prefers mass order over an individual's mass freedom.  Utopias are made from a single personality.


Totalitarian states exist because they remove all opposition, first with those are more obviously different into increasingly smaller circles where even the slightest difference becomes unthinkable.


Minorities are removed from majorities so that the people who still have the power to oppose can be removed for their opposition, like a bag of unruly cats.


We are born as blank slates, but part of life is the accumulation of things, stuff, friends and experiences; the other part of life is maximising the celebration of our gains while minimising the sorrow of our losses, though even these terms are too reductive to made fully expressive, which is, in itself, another symptom of our scientism of life in language.


Humphrey Bogart didn't want the lights to wash out his hard earned wrinkles yet this is exactly what our belief in neo-liberal capitalism has done in a blistering whitewash of history, identity and family managed and produced as if it was a detergent sealed in it's neat blister pack against disaster, like lobsters and frogs in a boiling pot.


The recent disease of European minds has been attempted to be 'cured' (itself a sinister newspeak) with an intensity of greed for money and status and fame and which has actually only made things worse as survivors and victors of Large Wars. 


The drones that people arrogantly play with and have such fun with at weddings shockingly forget that it is almost the exactly technology that is the reason so many other families have had to go to funerals. 


Yet our short term vision for short term gain means that we miss this point accidentally as well as deliberately, even if we are looking for a way out, to use Milan Kundera's phrase, 'the trap that the world has become'. 


We look after No. 1 until there is no-one left to look after.  As Victor says in David Hare's My Zinc Bed 'the whole world is in AA'.


Even relating back to the question of the question of artist studios and laboratories is misleading as the distinction isn't so neatly separate.  Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin was only possibly because it was untidy as the chaotic mind of a mathematian looking at the logic of clouds can yield incredible results of technological progress for the rest of humanity. 


In short, if we are not progressing as society it will be because we are not playing and that we place the undeservedly high value on being clean.  Whole elements of society would be better off if there was more paid play time in the Pixar model of development and research.


The question of identity, how is it made?  Through art but our increasingly pigmy culture it is viewed in increasingly narrow frames of reference to the point where there is no reference, let alone a common one and cuts in the arts takes less and less oxygen out of the world allowing the smallest of imaginations to survive, who in turn are less powerful and less useful even to manipulators with vested interest in us. 


As a reminder: we live in unprecedented times and one of those unprecedented advantages is that we are mostly free from catastrophe severe and fatal, what we have misunderstood, in a not so immaculate conception, is that largely disaster is the norm for most of the world and for most people who have lived and we cannot expect anything different to happen to us, but in our concrete bubble of our own making, filled with amniotic fluid  and a multitude of umbilical cords, our own life- blood is drained out, as a cow milked of it's supposed worth.


We've convinced ourselves that the green deserts are wilderness and countryside and have never altered the view since despite reasonable arguments that it makes the world not so much a garden but living museum, and any view to change this or to let loose the 'raucous summer' of rewilding (to use George Monbiot's feral pharse) is an impossibility that, frankly, staggers me as the benefits are obvious and manifold. 

Life and, it's tenet, Living does not do very well when it is highly controlled.


Make the world a better place?  Start by skipping the washing one week a month and make some real memories.