Once again, I have been asking myself "what is to be done?" In 2006 I set myself a complex agenda which is now 100% complete and achieved. From time to time I added various small goals and extensions to that plan, and sometimes succeeded in kidding myself that I had a new set of goals and had reached a new stage in my life. With the Isle Martin Plan and its modifications complete, I have been once again asking myself "what is to be done?"
Whilst I am very happy where I currently live in the short term, what I would most like to do is inhabit a space where I would not be disturbed by the rules and expectations of those around me. Just as moving out of my parent's house was liberating when I was 18, I would like to move beyond the confines of 20-something shared housing into a world where I can define the parameters more freely. I do not wish to replace these rules with another set of rules, such as "living on a council estate", "living in a commune" or enforced nomadism.
Recently, I have found myself deeply regretting not being able to take various dead animals (roadkill fox and badger, two ravens) home and process them. I would like to spend a winter sleeping on a mattress of rotting bracken. I would like to be able to fill my attic with straw without anyone saying "planning permission" or "housing code". I would like to collect plants into a garden, and no, I am not at all interested in most of the plants you keep in yours. I would like to be able to dig a hole when I feel like it, and leave an open pit around for people to fall into. I would like to build furniture in ways no one but Syd Barrett would approve of. I would like to leave a brick on a synthesizer turned up loud for several hours whilst I cook meals you would not eat. I would like to be able to mess up the mains electrics and I would like to paint and texture things in ways that would reveal your aesthetic conservatism.
These are my goals. I believe that to achieve them I have to take control of a unit of geography. This seems vile to me, an affront to nature and a denial of "love thy neighbour". But in the cost/benefit analysis, it becomes clear that I must make myself look big and threaten trespassers with violence.
For some months now, I have been looking at houses for sale. They seem ill equipped for my needs. What I would like is a large garden with a shed in it. Whilst I take my responsibilities seriously with regard to eutrophication in an overcrowded world, there are very few parts of a "house" that I am interested in retaining. Roofs seem useful. But what is the boiler for, other than the socially-dictated generation of debt?
One solution would be to acquire a ruin and live in a shed in the garden. I do not know how to achieve this. Another would be to get a wood and hide in it. Here I am vexed by availability.
It is clear to me that the price of a house is dependent upon the availability of land. Bricks and mortar are cheap, and anyway I'm not bothered if they're all there (although you seem to need me to be concerned, and I suspect will force me to be so). Land is highly available in areas where the hand of the king is weak. The more slummy an area is, the less invested both the inhabitants and the authorities are, and the cheaper land becomes. A lack of investment leads to a weakening and diversification of polities (modelled continuously), and a greater concern for defining the boundaries and setting the rules I wish to escape. Or, in short, I would not go down very well on a council estate.
Secondly, the things you value in a house, the heuristic you call "well presented" has no value to me. "Well presented" is a burden, and entanglement of denial and a demand disguised as a duty to curate somebody else's ideological subjectivism. It is a threat against John Stuart Mill's property, and I bet there's magnolia in there somewhere.
I am spoilt by the freedoms of a rural middle class youth. It occurred to me only months ago that I was waiting for the large suburban house everyone around me had had growing up to fall into my lap. Unknown consciously, I had an expectation that I was due such a thing and that it was only a matter of time before I was burdened with such. The slow lumbering approach of home ownership felt like an unavoidable onerous task, something moderately irritating like having to clean your teeth or waiting for a train, coming towards me immalleably through the semi-accessible mists of the future. Now I have identified this misconception, perhaps it will allow me to move on.
I want to slip through the holes in the fabric of your social paradigm. I don't want to cheat or take shortcuts, I just have different expectations and have a closer relationship with fate than you do. The whole tangled ball of this system is only tenable because each of us sees only a few facets, distracted as we are with our egotisms and opiates. For better or for worse, the parts I am looking at don't add up. There is great narrative truth in several million small agents working selfishly, but in order to sustain the journeys we are on, we require a million small fibs and unnecessary regulations and abstractions.
I suppose what I want is to be left alone, to select what elements of culture and humanity I come into contact with. When feeding my ego, I would describe this desire as a true, pure liberalism. But it is truer to say that I don't want my million small fibs to be challenged any more than you do.
This is why I am living in my friend's attic.
