Dear Ruark

I really fail to understand what you're saying here, though it occurs
to me that it might in part be because I find your emails bafflingly
vague.  Tell me how you are exercising "outside political will" by
saying the things you're saying?  And frankly, you're the one who
seems to me to have the romantic attitude and playing superficial
word games.

At 6:46 PM +1000 22/10/03, Ruark Lewis wrote:
>CHOICE is the term that tunes the community in to respect their
>homeless people. Sorry folks, fill your art with what empathy you choose,
>but outside political will must accomodate the ongoing ongoing ongoingness
>of rich city-poor trash paradigm. And if statistics are yr thing consider
>Mexico City where millions, live. commute from and die in oldage in a
>cardboard box. It is truth, it is not heartless to make the observations or
>the projection. To be silent is to hush it. I guess that art like poetry can
>>appear so useless and absent from the realness of the world


To say that it is a "choice" to be homeless in fact silences the lack
of choice that usually lives behind that reality.  It makes it seem
as if there's an alternative, when most people are homeless because
there isn't an alternative.  How does the idea that it is a "choice"
to be (say) evicted by the police from your home and to be sitting on
suitcases outside your home with your two small children wondering
where to go dignify that situation?  That is an experience which I
have personally experienced, and I had no "choice".  I was broke and
could not pay the rent because I was looking after my mentally ill
sister as well as two young children on my own.  Perhaps this
explains why your glib rhetoric makes me so angry, why your
assertions that it's a "choice" to be ill, it's a "choice" to be
jobless, it's a "choice" not to have anywhere to go, that these
things are "acceptable", make me see red.  And perhaps that personal
response is unfair. But I don't think these things are "acceptable".
That doesn't mean that I don't think they happen, because I know they
do.  Nor does it mean that I don't talk about them.

I am judging nothing, except what I see as a certain lack of empathy
and understanding on your part.  I hope I am mistaken.  However
questionable, and I don't believe anything I say or do is above
question, my actions in this case were in fact attempts to spare a
particular person, and it seemed to me, perhaps wrongly, that all
that mattered to you was your own entertainment.  It does seem to me
however that you are full of ready judgment.

(Suddenly I wish I was talking to Chris Jones, who strikes me as much
more anarchic than you are, perhaps because he is more able to
articulate what he means.  Bring abck your compost, Chris!)

And no, art isn't about "resolving" anything.  That isn't what it's
for.  That doesn't mean that artists, as human beings, might not  be
attempting to resolve or address things in other ways, as they choose
or see fit.  Mark Constable, whose email I posted the other day,
works with homeless kids most nights.  (Is that "sentimental" of
him?) He also happens to be a very interesting theatre director, and
he makes a direct relationship between the art he does and his work
in the world.  That seems to me an admirably committed and real way
of dealing with these questions.  I know or know of quite a number of
artists who work in these ways, most of them, alas, not in Australia
and most of them, as it happens, theatre artists.

Maybe you could tell me what you do yourself in order to address
these questions, and I might understand better what you're talking
about.

Best

A

--


Alison Croggon

Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com

Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/

Home page
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