At nineteen and living on the Gold Coast, I took an acid trip with a friend of mine as was our weekly habit. The Doors movie was on high rotation; we believed we were transcending the finite to open the doors upon the infinite. We were on a Socratic mission, living on the dole, searching for IT. On this particular occasion, he decided to stay at home and watch Rage, deciding the gospel of the homeless yuppies would prove to be pearls before swine on a Saturday night in Surfers Paradise. I went out to Surfers Paradise.
I wore a bright pink, acid, tie-dyed pirate shirt. A brave act to venture out on to Cavill Avenue on the mall in Surfers Paradise on a Saturday night but I was naïve or courageous, depending on interpretation. I spent all my money on the acid so I was wandering around the mall. I met two buskers and their girlfriends. I requested “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction and they played it. I sat on the ground right on front of them and listened. I told them I had no money but they played for me anyway. After a while, I busked a little myself though my voice could not be compared to those two troubadours.
I chatted to their girlfriends while they played. I made up an extravagant story to impress them, reading Jack Kerouac’s On the Road into my own life as I had a tendency to imitate in my own imagination, the heroes of my life: I travelled around Australia, living on the dole, enjoying a free and easy lifestyle. A group of men nearby in their unimaginative denim collared Saturday night shirts must have overheard my outrageous story as I they started mutterring angrily, “fucking dole bludger.” I have to admit I was afraid they might kick the tie-dye out of my shirt.
The dole bludger sins against society by raising himself, as individual, above the societal need to work, to earn one’s bread, to give back to society what has been invested into him or her. The artist should be excused from this social maxim. The work of art is accepted into Australia on condition art earns its living. For the musician and the busker, the troubadour, we begrudge our taxpayer money going towards his meagre living.
Socrates would never have survived today without the dole. He would have been put to work-for-the-dole programs, instead of running around, preaching love of wisdom, chasing dialecticians as if they were gods. In Australia, the pragmatic, work culture is – supposedly – very strong. Hence the invention of the negative stereotypical label of “dole bludger.” Taxpayer money going to the benefit of high income individuals though – that’s another story. Those men of leisure are sanctioned because they’re governing the working wheels of industry. Tuxedoed men at the spring carnival races, driving black luxury cars, smoking fat cigars and otherwise signifying superiority. Its laughable.
Dole bludgers are a multiplicity but among the dope-smokers and Oprah watchers, you’ll find the occasional modern day Socrates and Epicurus, men and women of letters and notes, emales and troubadours who can find no directly financial recompense for their labour in the form of a wage. By what criterion might the artist be separated from the “dole bludger”? It’s not enough for the dole bludger to say “I am an artist!” and pretend he’s living a life from On the Road.
Every homeless yuppie makes a return to society. The paradox in Kierkeyaard’s measuremeant is the invisible nature of the “knight of faith.” You would not know one just to look at him. Just as a bright pink, acid, tie-dyed pirate shirt does not make one a “homeless yuppie” (the shirt merely signifies “I am on drugs tonight”). In fact, a homeless yuppie is just as likely to wear a collared shirt on Cavill Avenue or a tuxedo at the spring racing carnival. He could be a capitalist – if it came to that. The buskers went to gamble their earnings at the casino and I wandered around until I watched the sunrise over the Pacific Ocean at Main Beach, rebirthing a new day. And I laughed my shirt off all the way home.
Very nice Ecko. A stranger among us, the enemy from within, a cyberpunk that jumped into the system – you can never tell, and yet – there is a difference. The knight of faith is an actor.
You’re right, Muli. The Knight of faith is an actor. He’s in an actor in the double sense of the word: a stage actor (where the whole world is a stage and we are but players) and an active actor, the agent who acts – not reacts as in, for example, the great politics of revenge. Kierkegaard helps define the actor in a way similar to Spinoza’s affects and passions in the Ethics. OR, as Plato defined it in Phaedrus, the soul is eternally moving – its always active.
In this sense, the labour or activity of deconstruction is freeing ourselves from a history of philosophical concepts (which remain today even if they are not recognised as “philosophical” IE one has a philosophy about things, a relationship between the idea and the body, statements and visibilities) as metaphysical that would continue to determine our sense of being – the Idea before the body, or the afterlife before this life. Kierkegaard radically challenges this idea of Christianity in “Fear and Trembling” his polemic on Abraham – who had faith in this life.
And Kierkegaard would have tried to stop anyone who would imitate or act like Abraham by killing their son for God because to imitate Abraham is not to imitate his actions, but his activity IE his faith – anymore than taking acid makes one a seer (though there still remains…)
[...] never shows the pain. He suffers to perform. Nijinsky’s bleeding feet… As Muli noted, the knight of faith is an actor and in the double sense of the word and in keeping the double [...]