Regaining agency
“Habitualization devours work, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war. And Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.” — Victor Shklovsky, quoted by Bruce Nanay, “The Dethroning of Ideocracy,” The Monist, January 2014, p. 10, note 2.
Living, too, is an art. A steady diet of political manipulation and pandemic exigency often made daily life seem baleful, so the end of the Trump era is not only cause for celebration, but an invitation to revive the art of living — the arts of living, perhaps — to restore what we share as human beings, stewards of a tightknit planet we’ve been pushing into imbalance.
The pandemic brought this tightknit aspect home to me — our mutual dependence and how our collective actions affect larger phenomena, whether pandemic spikes or the quality of the air we breathe. We speak of climate science and epidemiology, but our impact on each other and the world around us is more a question of arts and skills we practice with a new awareness — a consciousness that breaks the grip of our habituation to situations that work against us.
There is ample peril in the world today, but the opportunity for defusing it and shifting things to a more stable and beneficent condition is there, right in front of us. Individually and collectively, we are artists of our own lives and the larger contexts that support them and the lives of others. We sense their health as much as we measure it. The measurements are important, of course, but we don’t need to stare at them to know we’re headed in a better direction.
We got in the habit of spur-of-the-moment gratification that stripped us of agency, making us consumers of life rather than artists within it. When “mass” is applied to culture, education, food, goods, healthcare, housing, transit, and tourism, the results are varied. It is possible to have an art of living at that scale, but there has to be a desire for it. That desire is the essence and the spark of urbanity, which wants the public realm to be robust and universal — a human right to a life that’s more than subsistence or worse.
Jane Jacobs wrote that city and countryside are attached, that the latter is an extension of the former. Extending this, the idea of their mutual alienation is misguided. The goal should be a symbiosis in which each finds its proper place within a resilient whole.
That whole requires cultivation. Its components form an interdependent ecosystem that has to be approached as such. The art of such cultivation is the most subtle art there is — not a question of command and control, but of working across a vast network. The credo, “Make haste slowly,” applies in spades.
Defining a region by its watershed and weather patterns may be a useful way to proceed. Both speak directly to the idea of interconnectedness and how variations spill over as floods, droughts, freezes, and excessive heat and aridity. How we live within and work a region should reflect its varying conditions.
This too is an essential part of urbanity, where it overlaps with the Slow Movement’s insistence on an awareness that’s hyperlocal — that is, attentive to a place’s terroir, the unfolding sum of what defines it. This is neither provincialism nor elitism masking as preservation, but rather a recognition of its nature. From neighborhoods to the regional watershed, place is an ecosystem of nested scales — manmade, cultivated, and true nature in the sense rivers and streams, mountains and valleys, and seismic faults.
The arts of living benefit from our urbanity and suffer when we fail to bring it. Politicians and their enablers truck in abstractions, craft legislation that actively seeks to stifle local prerogative in the guise of aiding the public realm but, in reality, aiding those who fund their campaigns and otherwise grease their skids. That think tanks that should know better fall in with this reflects overlapping funding sources. It projects a false consensus that is tetchily defended. At this point, it’s holding back something better.
The arts of living benefit from an imagination loosed from neoliberal suppositions, especially when they’re presented as progressive. Left to markets, the region will cater to the highest bidders and pay lip service to their attention-distracting causes. Everyone else will be left with what the market can never deliver: a public realm worthy of the name; a region in tune with itself, respectful of and creative with its terroir at every level; an ecosystem around which our lives are organized and capable of shifting as it shifts. The arts of living are necessarily dynamic and responsive. They are necessarily creative and receptive, attentive to the ebbs and flows that typify the whole of nature from tiny organisms to the planet, Gaia, on which our lives depend. She will rebalance, one way or another. Urbanity pays minute attention to the fact.
