March 2012
Sven Lindqvist
Resident from 26 - 29 March 2012.
"Tell me what will happen when the majority of mankind has become technologically superfluous."
Listen to A London Address: Sven Lindqvist
Recorded on 29/3/2012. Duration: 22m 41s
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The Tang dynasty painter Wu Tao-tzu one day stood looking at a mural he had just finished. Suddenly, he clapped his hands and the temple gates in the picture opened. He entered into his work, the gates closed behind him and he was never seen again.
When I first heard this tale as a child, entering a picture seemed a very natural thing to do. What else could you do?
Not to enter would have been to miss a golden opportunity. Pictures were few and far between in the 1930s, remember!
In Sweden there was in those days not a single television channel, no lush colour photographs in illustrated magazines, no coffee-table books full of eye-goodies and very few children’s books.
So when I saw a picture that was more than a black smudge on the page, I jumped at it. Or rather, I jumped into it, as if it was a jungle to explore or a room to live in.
The pictures that most excited my fantasy were often those on tins. Tins of sardines, of meat or even of tropical fruit.
Opening the tin was opening the picture.
Smelling the contents brought me to the brink of the picture world.
Eating was entering.
******
As a schoolboy, a few years later, I had already lost this natural gift of entering into pictures. I now took what seemed to me a more realistic view of the matter. I prepared myself for a career as a practising magician.
An older friend who was a professional and gave regular, paid performances, showed me how some of his tricks were done. I used all my pocket money to buy a cloak, a wand and a top hat full of secret pockets.
Now when I heard the tale of Wu Tao-tzu my question was: How did he do it?
What was the secret behind the opening of the gates at the sound of clapping hands?
How did he manage the art of his own disappearance?
He seemed to have penetrated his painting and found an inner room, a liveable, habitable inner space, behind the surface of art. How was this illusion created?
Or was it, perhaps, not just an illusion? After all, the great German novelist Hermann Hesse spent his whole writing life trying to carry the myth of Wu Tao-tzu into effect. Robert Musil and Marcel Proust were not far behind.
The more I studied the myth of Wu Tao-tzu, the more I was fascinated by the possibilities it opened.
Questions multiplied. Why did he disappear? What company did he leave behind?
Did he experience the culture of his day as desperate and meaningless? Or was his vanishing rather an act of artistic self-confidence? An attempt, perhaps, to verify art in life?
Anyway, Wu Tao-tzu had the courage to solitude. That is what is so tempting about his fate. He had the courage to disappear and continue alone, on the other side of the visible in art.
******
I have been on the look-out for Wu Tao-tsu all my life. I chased him in China, in India, in Africa. On my last long journey I found his tracks in the deserts of central Australia.
Few deserts are so well taken care of as the Australian. Every stone, every bush, every waterhole has its specific owner and custodian, its sacred history and religious significance. Every holy place has its own holy picture.
The eternal truths of Aboriginal religion are expressed in the surrounding landscape. The landscape is mapped in the holy picture. Pictures and places have a peculiar personal intimacy. You belong to them more than they belong to you.
It is your duty to travel to these places. To care for them. To paint the ground with the very pictures that map the ground.
You enter these pictures by painting your body with them. You enter them by dancing them back into the ground. You enter these pictures by dreaming them, by going to sleep in them, and sometimes even becoming pregnant by them. You survive by keeping these pictures alive. And by keeping them alive you do your bit to make the whole universe survive.
******
I write this from the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall looking out over the City, St Paul’s and what was once London’s East End. I am sitting in “A Room for London”, shaped like “Le Roi des Belges”, the ship Joseph Conrad captained on the Congo. It is a work of architectural art created by Fiona Banner and David Kohn, inspired by a work of literary art: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
The project is sponsored by “Living architecture”, an organisation dedicated to the message that modern radical architecture is not only to be looked at from the outside. You can enter these houses and live in them.
So this is a room the Chinese painter Wu Tao-tzu could have entered into after having clapped his hands.
It is a fully equipped bed & breakfast where he could have stayed the night.
It is a room for him even to live in, if he wanted to leave the world. Who would have come looking for him on top of Queen Elizabeth Hall?
Down there is London, dark, glittering, full of mysteries.
I first got to know London through Jack London. It seemed utterly significant to me that the man who explored the abyss of London had the same name as the city whose misery he was about to uncover. That couldn’t be just a coincidence, could it? I was only nine years old and anything was yet possible.
Jack London’s People of the Abyss was one of the first “real” books I read.
It was “real” in the sense that it was not a fairy-tale for children or an adventure-story made up for boys. The Abyss really existed. Jack London had been there. He had braved all authorities who said that it was impossible to go to the East End and still more impossible to stay there.
“To live there yourself”, his friends said, disapprovingly. “It can’t be done, you know.”
Cook’s travel agency would unhesitatingly and instantly have sent him to Darkest Africa or innermost Tibet, but to the East End of London, barely a stone's throw distant from Ludgate Circus, they knew not the way!
Finally, having burnt his ships behind him, he plunged alone into that human wilderness of which nobody seemed to know anything.
I came in secretly behind him.
******
”Nowhere in the streets of London may one escape the sight of abject poverty”, said Jack.
“It must not be forgotten that the summer of 1902 was considered ‘good times’ in England. The starvation and lack of shelter I encountered constituted a chronic condition of misery which is never wiped out, even in the periods of greatest prosperity.”
“Following the summer of 1902 came a hard winter. Great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets of London crying for bread.”
That I had never seen in Stockholm. I had never seen “tottery old men and women searching in the garbage for rotten potatoes, beans, and vegetables.”
During the unemployment of the 1930s hungry men often came to our door asking for “a boiled potato”. Always that same boiled potato. It was the proper, simple, humble thing to ask for. It was the proper, simple, humble thing to give. You could not refuse a hungry man his boiled potato. Poverty and unemployment had this utmost boundary: the right not to the rotten, but to the boiled potato.
As a child I could always spot a child from a poor family. For one thing, they had a special sort of mitten that came in the Church’s Christmas Charity parcel.
They also had a peculiar smell. Most Swedish working class families in those days lived in one-room-apartments, lacking both shower and bathroom. So their children smelt of sweat and mould, of damp and dirt and overcrowding.
That was child poverty as I recognized it. But Jack London had seen “little children clustered like flies around a festering mass of fruit, thrusting their arms to the shoulders into the liquid corruption, and drawing forth morsels but partially decayed, which they devoured on the spot.”
And their parents? What did their mothers say?
“The women from whose rotten loins they spring were everywhere”, wrote Jack London. “They whined insolently, and in maudlin tones begged me for pennies, and worse. They held carouse in every boozing ken, slatternly, unkempt, bleary-eyed, leering and gibbering, overspilling with foulness and corruption, and, gone in debauch, sprawling across benches and bars, unspeakably repulsive, fearful to look upon.”
“And I remember a lad of fourteen, and one of six or seven, white-faced and sickly, homeless, the pair of them, who sat upon the pavement with their backs against a railing and watched it all.”
And watched it all.
I couldn’t help feeling that Jack London used the child’s perspective to paint an unfair picture of these women, yes of all the people of the Abyss. They are, he wrote, “encumbrances”, of no use to anyone, not even to themselves. “They clutter the earth with their presence and are better out of the way”.
The poor themselves felt there to be “a wise mercy” in “sending them over the divide”. They already had a language for it. A dose of “black jack” or “white potion” would “polish them off”, they said. All agreed that the poor person who gave too much trouble would be quietly killed.
At the heart of London’s darkness there was this quiet, peaceful genocide, accepted and agreed even by those who were the next to be killed.
This is the world I met in one of the first “real” books I read as a child. It made a great impression on me. When I finally visited England for the first time in 1948 what I wanted to see above all was the East End of London. I wanted to walk every street and enter every house mentioned in People of the Abyss.
But they were all gone, bombed out. The abyss of war had obliterated the abyss of peace.
******
One of my early ambitions as a writer was to do a book about Wu Tao-tzu, using Jack London’s method in People of the Abyss.
His experiment had always fascinated me. It contained my own story. But I wanted to repeat it in a different direction, using different material.
Where did Wu Tao-tzu go when the gates in the mural had opened. What did he do in there? What happened to him?
I can see it now. Literature has been really important to me only as Utopia. In my books, and not only there but also in the hopes I have, in my demands on life, in the motives of my actions, briefly – everywhere it may have practical consequences – I discover the same presumption as in Hesse, in Musil, in Proust, as in the whole line of writers who have shaped me: that art is not closed to man, that man can step into art.
The opposite of the East End is not the West End. But where is it then? I want to know how people are living there and what they are living for. In short, I want to live there myself.
“Live there yourself”, said people with the most disapproving expressions. “You can’t, you know.”
It must be possible. The prospect of a clearer and freer way of living has always been held out to me in art and literature. It must exist. Somewhere.
I’ve seen it in poems and pictures. I’ve heard it in music. There’s a fearlessness there that makes my life foolish.
There are opportunities for happiness there, that frighten me more than unhappiness. There’s an abyss in reverse and one falls upwards.
Why, then, do I live as I do?
Not even the professors at the university – scholarly men and women who without a moment’s hesitation would have sent me to the darkest corners of the archives and the innermost petty details of the bibliographies – not even they could help me.
“Art as a way of living”, I tried.
“Yes, of course! An excellent subject for a study of motifs”.
“But as a personal experiment?”
“What do you mean?”
“To examine the habitability of poetry. To live in a work of art.”
“Like you inhabit a house? You can’t.”
“To test the ways of the spirit in practice.”
“That’s – hm – unprecedented. I don’t think we can do anything for you.”
Clearly I had to manage on my own.
Having burned my ships I was now to enter a world of which no one seemed to know anything.
Like Jack London in 1902 in the city of the same name.
But in the opposite direction.
He stepped out of fiction, I wanted to enter.
He left his culture, I wanted to find the heart of mine.
I wanted to be present in the arts when they happen, an observer in disguise, an eyewitness of the spirit on the lookout for a better life than ours.
So I clapped my hands and started writing The Myth of Wu Tao-tzu. The first Swedish edition was published in 1967. It has never been out of print since then. The gates to the first English edition will open later this year. If you ever dreamed of a bed and breakfast in art, there is your chance.
******
As I was celebrating my 80th birthday in a ship on the roof of Queen Elizabeth Hall, my old friend, the Chinese painter Wu Tao-tzu, came to see me.
He liked the strangely beautiful piece of habitable art where I was staying.
But the problem that was bothering him now was not how to enter art and live there.
It was the problem of feeding ten billion people.
It was the problem of fuelling five billion motor cars.
It was the problem of building two billion houses and apartments.
Our consumption of oil, paper, meat etc cannot be multiplied by the population of the world. Natural resources would come to an end in a few decades, in some cases months.
We have created a lifestyle that makes injustice permanent and inescapable.
We have created a world where robots produce robots. Where capital breeds capital with very little need for the Eastenders of the world.
Tell me what will happen when the majority of mankind has become technologically superfluous.
At the same time rebellious with hunger and economically unimportant.
What will then stop a final solution of the world problem?
In People of the Abyss the Eastenders already saw it coming.
They are, Jack London wrote, “encumbrances”, of no use to anyone, not even to themselves. “They clutter the earth with their presence and are better out of the way”.
The poor themselves felt there to be “a wise mercy” in “sending them over the divide”. In 1902, they already had a language for it. A dose of “black jack” or “white potion” would “polish them off”, they said. All agreed that the poor person who gave too much trouble would be quietly killed.
Jack London’s East end was “the world as I found it” in the first “real” book of my young life.
At the heart of the world’s darkness there was this quiet, peaceful genocide, accepted and agreed even by those who were the next to be killed.
************
Sven Lindqvist is a major Swedish writer. Since 1955 he has published 30 books of essays, aphorisms, autobiography, documentary prose, travel and reportage. Many of them have been the centre of Swedish literary and political controversy during these decades. Internationally he is best known for his books on China, Latin America and Africa. Sven Lindqvist was born in Stockholm in 1932. He has a PhD in History of Literature from Stockholm University, an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University and an honorary professorship from the Swedish government. He has two children, Aron and Clara. Since 1986 he is married to Agneta Stark, a leading feminist economist.
http://www.svenlindqvist.net
http://aroomforlondon.co.uk/a-london-ad ... -lindqvist
podcast at link.
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