Squatting, Blogging, Art, and (just barely) Woofi
I hate the squatters next door.
The people in the house next door didn’t pay their rent, so their landlord, who had been trying to fix up the place after years of neglect by the previous landlord, finally gave up, stopped trying to improve it, and in fact stopped paying the mortgage. Now the mortgage company owns it, it’s been condemned by the city, and there are many people there illegally occupying it. Yes, I’ve seen Rent and read the freegan take on squatting. I’m not convinced. As I said, the landlord was trying to make it better, and the tenants cut him off at the knees. A building cannot be improved if the landlord can’t get enough money to make his mortgage payments and he eats up his savings trying.
I resent the way the squatters behave. They treat the property I live on as if it’s an annex of the one next door, camping out on our stairs, cutting across our front lawn, and even allowing their guests to hang from our tree. (When I told the guest that the tree was on our property, that she didn’t belong here, and to go away, I got a lecture on how the “law of the universe” forbids the owning of a tree. Like she has a pipeline to the universe and I don’t.) They abused their landlord when he really did try to make the building a nicer place to live, in marked contrast to the way I had to pester my landlord literally all last winter for a ten-minute fix that has since given me reliable heat (as of course I’ve only recently found out because he had it fixed at the end of the heating season). The squatters look down at me because they are artistes (yes, that’s the French pronunciation!), and I am pedestrian enough to hold a job.
But I begin to wonder if my hatred is not because the squatters are parked right in the middle of a dilemma of my own.
Most of the squatters, like the characters in Rent, seem to think that society owes them a living because they are artists. (One of them described himself as a genius when objecting that I called the police when he was demonstrating his “genius” with his electric guitar on the balcony to the entire neighborhood, for the dozenth time, early one morning.) I grant that I think our system for making a living by art doesn’t work. It can’t be a popularity contest. The most important art flies in the face of the mainstream; it won’t be popular. It can’t be by connections for the same reason: the people in power want to stay the people in power, and so they will not assist any art that risks a change in the status quo. I’ve often mourned that the need to earn a living has left me little time to explore my own artistic aspirations. I’ve often deplored the soullessness of commercially successful art. And yet . . . the art the squatters are producing seems sterile to me. Except for that inflicted on the neighborhood unwillingly, they are the only ones who experience it. They touch no one else artistically, let alone any of the other ways they could be helping people if they weren’t playing artist to their tiny circle.
I am not sure I’m not rationalizing, though. I mean . . . I have this blog that is read only by people who know me (sometimes I wonder why I bother with the blog aliases when all these people know each other!). I debate whether I should concentrate on my writing or my knitting, which at least will yield something useful for someone else at the end, or just on my woofus (yeah, the Wrong Dog—it’s his blog, remember?—who loves the squatters, by the way). I try to decide whether the writing will actually accomplish something or just detract from what I can do that helps people. Take, for example, this precise moment in time. What am I doing? Blogging on said blog that only some of the people who know me read. What should I be doing? Quick survey of foremost obligations: catching up on Bianca’s financial sheets (two weeks behind and she’s got other work for me to do and there’s a third party waiting for me to do it!), taking Sunny Out (so he can try to con a few more biscuits out of Biscuitwoman—OK, it’s small, but it would make him very happy), knitting on those socks for Joh, or maybe even working on my fiction—it touches fewer people than my blogging, but the potential if I pull it off is greater, but the probability that I will pull it off is very low. So do I hate the squatters because of their inconsideration for the needs of those around them or do I hate them because they have the courage I don’t, to do without a lot of material things for their art?
I don’t know. In a way, maybe it’s better that I don’t know. I remember when George Bush said what people like about him is his moral clarity, and I thought that anyone who thinks morality should or can be clear, of all things, is a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up for the safety of those around them. I think this murkiness needs to be dispelled, though. Hating is Bad, both in itself and in its effects. I’ve always found it hard to stop hating unless I know why I do. Of course sometimes, as with George Bush, understanding the why only makes me hate more. If it turns out that my hatred of the squatters is really about the harm they do, then it’s going to be a lot harder not to hate them.
And here I am at the end of this entry, no wiser than I was when I started it. The financial sheets are no more caught up, the woofus is no happier, the socks no further along. Maybe next time I have a moral dilemma, I should skip the blog.