Imagine
making art, not with paint or clay, but with life itself as your medium. A
“life artist,” or “Lebenskuenstler” as the Germans would say, is someone who
finds beauty in the colors life puts at their disposal, someone who makes do
with the brushes they’ve got and doesn’t pout over a few mistaken strokes.
On the website Lebenskünstler, a Life
Artist connotes a person who approaches life with the zest and inspiration of
an artist, although he or she may not be working recognizably as an artist. He is a Lebenskünstler. Someone who pieces together
his living from various activities that, collectively, bring in just enough
money to live. No office, no suit, no boss, no rules. German has a word for such
people, the website claims, and English doesn’t. There’s even a higher form of
Lebenskünstler, the website says, and that is the Überlebenskünstler, or
“survival artist.”
Lebenskünstler
– one who recognizes opportunities in life and takes advantage or makes use of
those opportunities to make the most out of one’s own life; one who lives life
deliberately and to the fullest capacity (concept from Henry David Thoreau of
“living deep and sucking out all the marrow of life”); one who gambles with the
outcome of his/her own life by seizing opportunity; one who makes living an
art.
So, the German word
Lebenskunstler means ‘an artist of life’. It
acknowledges that being an artist is not, in the first instance, about what you
produce, but about your contribution to your environment based on the way you
live. As creative entities, we can share our creativity in many ways. By how we
dress or decorate our homes, by what we cook, by how we educate our children or
entertain our friends, by how we dance and make love, by how we speak about our
lives.
The website says that Lebenskünstler refers
not so much to people who turn their life into a piece of art, and that it is
not for nothing that Berlin has been dubbed a graveyard for ambition. The German capital has a particularly impressive
record of attracting those eager to make a living as artists, many of whom
succumb to the many initiative-numbing charms and morph into Lebenskünstler ,
Oscar
Wilde once purportedly said “I put my talent into my work, but my genius into
my life.”
The website focuses on the
Lebenskünstler of Berlin. Going back to the 1970s – or maybe even to the 1910s
– there has existed a decadent, artistic underground in
Berlin which has placed little value on “making it” for the sake of making
it. The king of decadent Berlin is the
“poor but sexy” Lebenskünstler, an archetype who has had a huge influence on
culture and nightlife here till this day. The Lebenskünstler cares little about
his next record deal or art opening or publishing deal. Instead, life is his
art. Only “now” matters and how you can make the most out of each moment. Screw
success and any concept of “the future” because for decades Berliners – think
of WWII, the Cold War etc. – have felt there is NO tomorrow (and they are right
of course – we will all die).
The Lebenskünstler’s
dilettantish self-expression might have no audience other than his circle of
friends or 30 people in some tiny Kleinkunst venue.
So with the concept of the Lebenskünstler
we actually have a quite good idea about what it might mean to be a Life
Artist. We´ll soon find out that the term fits very well to many other people
than the Lebenskünstler of Berlin, and in that connection we will ask whether
the Life Artist is a person who creates himself through his will, or whether he
is letting an external source of creation work through him?
Art of life is a sovereign
life expression. In the sovereign life-expressions we clearly meet something,
which arises as richness, gift or grace in our life, something we have not
created ourselves, and which at the same time is the actual and carrying in all
being together between humans.
The Danish philosopher of life
K.E. Løgstrup says, that the spontaneous life-expressions come from the
universe, and that the Universe therefore not is irrelevant to Man. He isn´t
self-dependant, but is connected with the Universe. So Løgstrup claims, that we
must interpret the Universe, and the sovereign life-expressions, as created. In
that way we have an external source of creation, which we, with the right kind
of living, could become one with. But how?
The relationship is the
mirror, in which you can discover yourself. Without
the relationship you are nothing. To be is to be in relationship, which is the
actual life. You only live in relationship, otherwise you don´t live, life is
then without meaning. So it is not because you - as Descartes says: ”I think,
therefore I am!” - that you live. Nor do you live because you create yourself,
as Nietzsche, Sartre, Rorty and Foucault say. You live because you are in
the relationship, and it´s the lack of ability to understand this, which causes
conflict.
The reason why that there is
no understanding of the relationship, is that we use the relationship to
achieve something, become something, to be remoulded. We use the instrumental reason on human relationships,
where it only should be used on technical relationships. It is the thinking´s
dangerous course, the course of the will to power. The communicative reason has
vanished.
But
the relationship is the means to expose yourself, because the relationship is
to be. It is the actual life itself. Without the relationship you don´t live.
In order to be able to understand yourself you must understand the
relationship. The relationship is therefore a philosophical sparring partner, a
mirror in which you can see yourself. To understand this is to use the
communicative reason, which in the context of art of life is a
meditative-existential reason.
The
mirror of the relationship can either distort or expose the truth about
yourself. Most of us see in the relationship, in the mirror, that, we
preferably want to see, but we don´t see that which is real. We will preferable
idealize or escape, and rather live in the future than seeing the relationship
in which we are in the moment.
Becoming
is the thoughtprocess, and both Nietzsche, Foucault and Rorty are seeing this
in the image of art, as a creative process, but they don´t come out of the
intellect, and confuse the thinking, the intellectual training, with the whole
of the human unfolding and life itself. They see the whole of the
human unfolding as a creative process, which with will can be controlled; that
is: controlled by the thinking. Life is seen as a work of art, which Man, with his
will, can model as he wants to. But his brush is then the thought, and the colors
of the thought is the old, the past. It is therefore not new colors. He is an imitator.
This is not how a true Life Artist
works. A Life Artist doesn´t imitate, he creates something new, and the new is
life itself, not the thinking. Life itself is his colors.
In order to get in contact
with life itself, the Life Artist often spend an inordinate amount of time
engaged in carious leisure activities. The question then becomes: are such
forms of recreation a waste of time? Everyone
needs a break from work, responsibility, and even other people. As Aristotle
observed, shared leisure activity is often the glue that bonds friends
together. Indeed, the philosopher Josef Pieper went so far as to claim that
leisure is “the basis of culture.”
Pieper based his theory on –
you guessed it – Aristotle, who said, “Happiness seems to be found in leisure;
for we deny ourselves leisure so that we can be at leisure.” Basically, we´re all working for the weekend. Pieper,
though, had a specific notion of leisure in mind; not just any old form of rest
and relaxation is beneficial for us. Pieper agreed with Aristotle that we must
strive to flourish in our nature as “rational animals.” Hence, leisure is most
properly that time preserved from the work a day world to spend cultivating our
intellectual tastes. Pieper, picking up a line from another Aristotelian
philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), said that the right sorts of leisure
activities – those involving intellectual contemplation – can even make us more
like God: “’Because of the leisure of contemplation’ the Scripture says of the
Divine Wisdom itself that ‘it plays all the time, plays throughout the world.’”
Many philosophers and other
intellectuals have also been, and sometimes still are, accused of being bums in
the sense of being useless to society – often forgetting that the democracy and
the human rights they live by, are created by philosophers. For any philosophy
majors out there, recall the look on your parents´ face when you told them what
you were spending their hard-earned college savings to study!
Aquinas, though – in an
admittedly self-serving statement – asserted that it is “necessary for the
perfection of the human community, that there be persons who devote themselves
to the [use-less] life of contemplation.” The
problem with society, as Mill has noted, is that we get so caught up in making
a living – working to make money so we can have shelter, food, and green nail
polish – that we forget to live.
Already the ancient Greek
philosopher and Life Artist Epicurus was a misunderstood man with an image
problem. Because he recommended that his
followers steer clear of lives of political and financial ambition, he was
commonly thought to advocate a life of idleness and lazing about. Because he
taught that pleasure was the proper goal of good life, Epicurus and his
colleagues were dismissed as decadent sensualists. Because he occasionally
wrote about food and drink, his philosophy has been characterized as one of
wanton indulgence and gluttony. Even today, the term “epicure” is popularly
associated with the pleasures of fine food and wine. Add to this the fact that
Epicurus, breaking with ancient Greek custom, welcomed nontraditional students
– women, servants, and prostitutes – to his school of philosophy, and we can
see why Epicureanism was associated with sexual license and rumours of
debauchery.
A modern English idler, which
promotes all the qualities of an idle way of life, is Tom Hodgkinson (born
1968). His philosophy, in his published
books and articles, is of a relaxed approach to life, enjoying it as it comes
rather than toiling for an imagined better future. Together with his friend
Gavin Pretor-Pinney he founded The
Idler which is a bi-yearly British magazine devoted to
promoting its ethos of 'idle living' and all that entails (read an additional
account on idleness in my pop culture files on The Hobbit and The Big Lebowski).
Ronald
Hutton´s book The Rise and Fall of Merry
England: The Ritual Year 1400-1700 demonstrates how the festive culture of
the Middle Ages was gradually eroded by the Reformation and the Puritans. It
was in this merry time the legend of Robin Hood was formed. Robin Hood is
a heroic outlaw in English folklore who, according to
legend, was a highly skilled archer and swordsman. Traditionally
depicted as being dressed in Lincoln green, he is often portrayed as
"robbing from the rich and giving to the poor" alongside his band
of Merry Men. Robin Hood became a popular folk figure in the
late-medieval period, and continues to be widely represented in
literature, films and television. In The Hobbit we discover that this idea of gift economy is shared by
Bilbo Baggins, who gives most of his treasures away. Also it is seen in the
hobbit custom of giving presents when they celebrate their birthdays, instead
of receiving them.
And
Max Weber´s book The Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism shows how the competitive Protestants booted out
the co-operative Catholics; it shows how a new ethic based on work and earning
a lot of money came to replace, in the eighteenth century, the old medieval
ethic, which was based on mutual aid. The medieval culture (which wrongly are
depicted as a dark age by the Protestant work ethic) combined a love of Jesus,
who preached idleness, and a love of Aristotle, who argued that contemplation
led to happiness. (I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to banish
their guilt around work).
And with Jesus we have the
spiritual practice, which I consider to be the central art of life. A spiritual
practitioner is namely a genuine Life Artist.
In my book A Portrait of a
Lifeartist I set up six steps in the spiritual practice: that is: some
existential conditions, and some, common to all mankind, growing conditions,
and growth levels, in the Life Artist´s voyage of discovery into himself, and
thereby into life itself. The steps are:
1) The separation of the
observer and the observed
2) Religion and supporting
exercises
3) Passive listening presence
4) Discrimination
5) Creative emptiness
6) The wholeness of the
observer and the observed
Step 5, Creative emptiness, is
the condition where the mind is completely released from your perspective, from
images of any kind, and the ideas, symbols and conceptions, which are their
manifestations. The known has stepped
aside for the benefit of the unknown, the beauty of creation. Everything is
new, unnamed, unformed, non-linguistic presence. The mind is pure, fresh,
young, innocent; completely open and receiving. The mind is awake and the heart
is open, awareness and love in one. And in this creative emptiness reality and
truth can be discovered, or received, it is one and same.
Lao
Tse said it so simple as it can be said, that the wise rules by emptying the
mind and filling the stomach. Eckhart called the creative emptiness Virgin Mary,
or the Virgin Mary-state, where God the father can give birth to Christ into
Man. The creative emptiness is the possibility for the birth of Christ in us.
This
creative emptiness can in other words not be reached by an act of the will. The
creative emptiness comes when you in self-forgetful openness are one with nature.
This is a so-called communicative view of nature, which claims that nature is
of value in itself, that there is a beauty and richness in nature, which is of
non-causal and non-mechanical kind, and that Man as a natural being has a
community with this nature. You could call it metaphysical naturalism.
Mogens Pahuus has in his book Karen Blixen´s Philosophy of Life
argued, that Blixen, when she speaks about God, is using the word in a quite another
meaning than the traditional. According
to him she uses it completely synonymous with nature, or rather, the creative
powers in nature. It seems like she thinks of the human nature as being related to the
rest of nature. The human nature is a
unity of spirit, instinct, sensation, body and feelings, something which you
can´t control and master by standing outside it, but which is connected to
life-feeling, spontaneity and self-forgetfulness, when you are one with it.
Reason, you can say, is lying in an adaption to the realities, both in oneself
and the surroundings.
Karen Blixen says in a quote from Out of
Africa:
“People who dream when they sleep at
night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not,
a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They
also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited
freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on
the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will.
The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream,
but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side,
and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long
splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never
seen or heard of...”
This can of course only happen
in the Now. You can also say, that where the old before was characterized by
personal and collective images, which worked in sequences in past and future,
then the old now is characterized by universal images, which work in
synchronism with the Now, or with nature. It was this Karen Blixen was
describing as the ancient, the original, and which she always was seeking as
authenticity, autonomy, possibility, freedom and adventure. It is a return to the Now, to the timeless eternity.
As Rabindranath Tagore said: ”The light is young, the eternal ancient light;
the shadows are a brief moment´s matter, they are born aged.”
In
India, as noticed by Ananda K. Coomarasway, works of art representing
indifferent objects, local personages and scenes, such as fill the walls and
rooms of most of our museums, have been characterized as desi (“local, popular,
provincial”) or as nâgara (“fashionable, worldly”) and are regarded as
esthetically insignificant; whereas those representing deities or revered
ancestors, such as might appear in temples or on domestic shrines, are
perceived as tokens of an inward, spiritual “way” or “path,” termed mârga,
which is a word derived from the vocabulary of the hunt, denoting tracks or trail
of an animal, by following which the hunter comes to his quarry.
Similarly, the images of
deities, which are not local forms of “elementary ideas,” are footprint left,
as it were, by local passages of the “Universal Self” (âtman), through
contemplating which the worshiper attains “Self-rapture” (âtmânananda). A passage from Plotinus may be quoted to this point:
“Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike
by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an
archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture
memory of that Original.”
I have termed these tracks,
trails and footprints as “the dreaming tracks and songlines in the artwork of
Man and the Universe,” or as “the universal images in time.” They correspond to progressive karma. I have, with
inspiration from Karen Bixen, termed the Original as “The Ancient.”
Karen Blixen´s storytelling is
about finding the universal images behind everything, the original, as she
calls it, the Ancient, where you live in accordance with yourself, with God´s
plan with you.
When
Karen Blixen was lying in her sickbed, and after having realized, that this
maybe was God´s plan with her - she made a pact with the Devil, that she from
now on could change everything into stories. And in her stories, and in her
following life as a storyteller, she realized the dreams she had had as a young
woman.
All her following stories, for example Seven
Gothic Tales, are reflections of her own experiences with destiny. They are all about
how to find the dreaming tracks and songlines in the artwork of your life - God´s plan with you - and
about people who live in accordance with these power lines, and about people
who don´t live in accordance with them.
These themes continue in Karen
Blixen´s storytelling ever after. She obviously had an experiental knowledge of
the steps in a spiritual practice. Her experience of unhappy love and illness
must have opened her to this knowledge. She first began her life as a storyteller
when she was about fifty years old, and at that time a “finished” storyteller. She
had the material ready. But she used the concepts she knew from her own life. Apparently she hadn´t read anything about spiritual
practice. Because in the spiritual practice God´s plan with you is called
progressive karma. Compensatory karma is the karma you create yourself under the
influence of the cyclic forces of nature. Progressive karma is the help you receive
from an external source; you could call it the Wholeness, or with a religious concept:
God. Therefore this help is beyond your will. Progressive karma is one and the same as creative emptiness.
The place, where you can find
your own progressive karma, if such is available, is therefore in the life you
have lived, in the history of your present life.
In the inexplicable events in
your own life, in the rows of moments of spiritual longing, in the fateful
incidents and actions - in them are contained the progressive karma.
In
the history of your life there is an artwork. This artwork shows the dreaming
tracks and the songlines in your life. It lies as invisible strokes
underneath the history of your actual life, and these strokes become visible in
the creative emptiness. It is the ancient self-portrait which came into being
before yourself.
This artwork of
your life is the contribution to your environment, based on the way you live. In Out of
Africa Karen Blixen writes:
If I
know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her
back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers,
does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with
a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is,
or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me,
or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?
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