A modern flâneur returns to nature
In order to become a painter of modern life, do I have to place myself at the heart of the metropolis. or can I be idle in nature, taking a moment to meditate, rather than exist in a world of glances and fleeting moments? The inorganic versus the organic.
To begin with a stroll amid the deafening roars of the passers-by and the swarming traffic.
Yes. I am a modern flaneur or at least pretending to be. The concrete slabs and pavements are my stage and I am dressed in my brown corduroy trousers. A dandy showing off fine threads as I weave my route through the Metropolis.
In all this raucous noise, in the beeps and the bonks, the scuttling and the shuttling – I hope to be overwhelmed, slapped with a sensory overload - to the of bellowing the embers of creativity.
I can stare in admiration.
I can ogle in disgust.
I can be at a momentary peace.
I can be overwhelmed to the point of a white blindness.
This modern city is a world of churning paradoxes where, as Karl Marx would say, all that is solid melts into air. Ephemerality oozes up from the ground, all new things there to be replaced, all moments drifting past.
Yet, apparently being at the centre of the universe, or more so, at the centre of the metropolis, where the action is – that is where the flaneur must be.
Now a question - does creativity need to stem from upheaval? Is that what attracts artists to the city? A thirst for a cocktail of cataclysm and renewal over and over again, sucked up violently through a ginormous straw.
Are the words of Harry Lime in The Third Man true? –
In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
Do I need to go and look for a scrap with the crowd, for bloodshed? If I seek brotherly love in nature am, I resigned to creating some kind of kitsch ticking clock?
Do I have to be a stranger in the crowd, an actor on the concrete stage, a pedestrian on my own two feet, right in the thick of it?
The alternative of course is to get away from all the action and be a loner in nature, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Over Sea Fog, I could find solitude in a world where the action isn’t.
As Copenhagen philosopher and keen stroller Kierkegaard said: above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I've walked myself into my best thoughts and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it.
Healthy advice for the legs, for the heart, for the head there Kierkegaard. I decided to walk around the metropolis of Dublin. Absorbing it all like a wandering sponge, botanizing on the asphalt as Walter Benjamin would say, following in the footsteps of thousands of pedestrians before me.
Charles Baudelaire in Fleurs du Mal gives advice to any beginner flaneur he says: for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite.
I entered a park. A brief stint in nature within the city. A spot to get rest and respite from the Baudelairean ebb and flow at the heart of the multitude.
I stopped at a pond to admire the grotesque beauty of gulls in the metropolis. They have grown to the size of bulldogs, their anatomy corrupted by the beef burgers and battered fish they peck at, spilling out of dustbins around the city.
Parks provide a pretend nature in a jungle of grey. Wind whistling in the trees, crunching gravel and chirping birds can let someone escape to a far off woodland. Only the ringing of a siren, the high-pitch of the doppler effect ripping them out of their scenic slumber.
Ah. Who is this dandy? Parading himself in fine garments on a boulder. Yes, there’s Oscar Wilde, lying in splendour under that tent of grey that Dubliners call the sky. A torso of green jade, pink thulite, the legs are blue pearl granite and the shoes are of Indian charnockite with bronze aiglets, a tie made with grey porcelain. Wilde immortalised in such splendour. As he said: “All the world is a stage, but the play is badly cast”.
I am badly cast for this concrete pantomime. I find myself feeling nauseated by the metropolis, claustrophobic in this patchwork prison of asphalt. I am trying to botanise but alas all I can find are pretending parks and grimy moss growing in the cracks of the pavement.
I have a cathartic moment. I will alight a train, the great weapon of modernity and travel out somewhere beyond the city. The sprawl will explode into life either side of the train and I will return to nature. It will be a palette of new colours for my eyes to drink.
Go away from this colossal centralization and chug chug chug away towards the periphery.
This rail line I am travelling on from Pearse Street Station to Dun Laoghaire is the oldest commuter railway line in the world. It was opened in 1834, when Baudelaire was only thirteen years old.
Sigmund Freud encapsulates the paradox of modernity, how it has given us the telephone with which I can now call up my son who has moved far from home, but modernity also gave us the train, which is what took him far from home in the first place.
Now time to get off and breathe in this smooth salty air!
Robert Macfarlane in Mountains of the Mind wrote of his love for an escape mountain-top, but I will mutate this to the seaside, I hope he doesn’t mind. The seaside became a ubiquitous symbol for the city-bound spirit, a crystallisation of the romantic-pastoral desire to escape the atomized, socially dissolute city. You would be lonely in a city crowd, but you could find solitude on the edge of a pier, looking out to the horizon.
I find it more peaceful here. As the bard of Salford John Cooper Clarke, a modern flaneur himself says ‘Where the action isn’t, that is where it is’.
I will be truly idle out here and simply, observe.
In my dialogue with the metropolis, I asked myself what I love – the concrete, the shimmering neon, the perfumes, the stinks, the beauty, the paradoxes, the fleeting moments, the ephemerality, but asking again in this moment, on this pier, I love the passing clouds and the giggling gulls.
Despite the turmoil in the streets and the repulsion I felt, I am still drawn to the Metropolis. That great theatre of the unexpected.
Baudelaire loved solitude but wanted to be in the crowd. Is it possible to link both, to be both within the ebb and flow of the city and the crowds and able to escape away. There is less invasive staring here, the gulls don’t seem to mind.
Charles Dickens when travelling in the country often complained about the lack of street noises that he required for literary creation. He said that the city supplied something to his brain which it cannot bear to lose. London was his muse and only a day there set him up again and started him, he felt like he stagnated without crowds around him.
During Victor Hugo’s exile in Jersey, on his walks along the coast, he found himself inspired by nature. For him the crowd enters literature as an object of contemplation. The thinker who reflects on this eternal spectacle – the surging ocean - is the true explorer of the crowd in which he loses himself as he loses himself in the roaring of the sea.
As Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote of Victor Hugo:
'As the exile on his lonely cliff looks out towards the great, fateful countries, he looks down into the past of the peoples. He carries himself and his destiny into the fullness of events; they become alive in him and blend with the life of the natural forces - with the sea, the crumbling rocks, the shifting clouds, and the other exalted things that are part of a lonely, quiet life in communion with nature.’
Like Victor Hugo I will construct a bridge between nature and the metropolis. Spending time absorbing the voices of chaos, only to retire to the countryside to be idle and watch the constant battlefield of nature.
To finish with the immortal lines of John Cooper Clarke again:
A pen, a notepad and idleness. Those are the three requisites for the manufacture of poetry.
The powerful play will go on and on and on in the metropolis and when I am drunk with idleness, I will pop back in on the train and contribute a verse.
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