The homeless are ahead of us

[imomus]

"My style is a homeless look. Homeless people inspire me," Kaffella (35) tells the photographer from Hel-Looks. "Homeless people with their ragged and oversize clothes inspire my style," agrees Joona (17). "I'm into dark clothes and homeless looks," Giuliano (17) tells the Helsinki style website.



The homeless are "the other in our midst". In terms of how they're living they might as well be on the other side of the world, yet they're living right beside us. They fascinate us. To admire them too vociferously is to court accusations of glorifying poverty and suffering, of course: for every style rebel who sees glamour in the homeless, there are three self-righteous conformists touting the right and duty of the homeless to drag themselves up by their bootstraps and become exactly like the rest of us. The difference that some celebrate, others seek to stamp out.

There's something appealing in the artlessness with which photographer Hideaki Takamatsu -- who's been photographing homeless people in Japan for fifteen years -- frames the question. Of his new photo book Street People -- coffee-table portraits of the homeless posing like fashion models -- he says: "I wanted to make a photo book that can attract young women". According to the Mainichi News, the book "opens the door on the beauty and style of the homeless" and "portrays the homeless just as they are -- in their regular outfits and settlements. Readers of the volume will not see the homeless as pathetic, but as rather fashionable."



The current recession and the environmental crisis are international, and so is the accompanying fascination with the homeless; suddenly they're "ahead of us" rather than "behind us"; suddenly their difference from us is a "good difference" rather than a "bad difference", one inspiring fascination rather than horror. American style magazine Details recently ran an article in their Men Style section about Daniel Suelo, who's been living without money, in a cave in the hills outside Moab, Utah, since the turn of the century. Suelo -- an anthropology graduate who dropped out to become a monk in Thailand and India -- keeps a blog, which he updates from the Moab public library. It's called Zero Currency.



"I clamber along a set of red-rock cliffs to the mouth of his cave," reports Details style journalist Christopher Ketcham, "where I find a note signed with a smiley face: CHRIS, FEEL FREE TO USE ANYTHING, EAT ANYTHING (NOTHING HERE IS MINE). From the outside, the place looks like a hollowed teardrop, about the size of an Amtrak bathroom, with enough space for a few pots that hang from the ceiling, a stove under a stone eave, big buckets full of beans and rice, a bed of blankets in the dirt, and not much else. Suelo's been here for three years, and it smells like it."

But soon the article hits a lyrical sweet spot that evokes envy more than disgust: "The morning ritual is simple and slow: a cup of sharp tea brewed from the needles of piñon and juniper trees, a swim in the cold emerald water where the creek pools in the red rock. Then, two naked cavemen lounging under the Utah sun. Around noon, we forage along the banks and under the cliffs, looking for the stuff of a stir-fry dinner. We find mustard plants among the rocks, the raw leaves as satisfying as cauliflower, and down in the cool of the creek—where Suelo gets his water and takes his baths (no soap for him) —we cull watercress in heads as big as supermarket lettuce, and on the bank we spot a lode of wild onions, with bulbs that pop clean from the soil."



If anchorites become style icons and asceticism becomes aspirational, what can we expect? Well, perhaps a wave of cave gentrification of the kind seen recently in the New York Daily News, which threw a spotlight on the desirable three-story home of Curt and Deborah Sleeper in Festus Missouri -- built inside a cave. But hobo pioneers would have to scoff at the Sleepers, who've brought a slew of mod cons to their cave life. Living in a cave inside a modern, fully-equipped house... well, it's the slippery slope to homelesslessness, isn't it?

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I actually think choice is overrated in questions like this. I think the important thing is to decide how -- once a category of people exists -- people who are not in that group relate to it. And I think positive relationships of all kinds -- including emulating, bigging up, admiring, identifying with, being fascinated by -- will certainly percolate through to benefits for the group in question. I'm constantly surprised by the kind of reactions this stance gets; it's as if people are saying "You can't be positive towards that group! Stop eroding the stigma around them, which is there for perfectly good reasons!"

[(Anonymous)]

This is Momus in a nutshell. There is a problem, and the solution is simply for people to say it's not a problem. Homelessness would be perfectly fine just so long as people admire it and big it up. I'm reminded of the scene in Life Of Brian when a succession of people stop by to tell the crucified Brian how much they admire him, when all he wants is for them to help him get off the cross.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Well, you aren't going to erode that stigma by showing me Thoreauvian examples of "homelessness." I think we all know that Suelo isn't the person we're talking about when we say that word. He's basically on an extended camping trip, for crying out loud. Find me an urban homeless guy who didn't get there by making a "lifestyle choice," yet who somehow realized that homelessness was a lovely life not characterized by pain and hardship, and the stigma will begin to erode. Your position is based on this idea that there's this invisible benefit to being homeless that we're just not seeing, because we're too busy thinking homeless people are by and large miserable. I don't understand. Are all the homeless people we see on the street, who look miserable and unhappy and desperate, just trying to hide this special benefit so we won't take it from them? Where is the evidence of this benefit, other than in your imagination?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think there's an "aggressive normality" built into your question; the assumption that life in advanced capitalist societies is somehow basically okay, and going in the right direction, and un-damaging for the people living it as well as the people paying for it with their lives. In fact it's unsustainable, broken, and makes people unhappy (as this article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/26/women-wellbeing-unhappiness), to take one example, underlines).

Since Suelo is the most articulate exponent of the ills of the normal world to hand, let's quote the substance of his critique, as outlined in Details:

"SUELO graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in anthropology, he thought about becoming a doctor, he held jobs, he had cash and a bank account. In 1987, after several years as an assistant lab technician in Colorado hospitals, he joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes. He was charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area, teaching first aid and nutrition, and handing out medicine where needed; his proudest achievement was delivering three babies. The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields—quinoa, potatoes, corn, lentils—for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and white flour and refined sugar and noodles and big bags of MSG to flavor the starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. "It looked," he says, "like money was impoverishing them."

Suelo combines these observations with a spiritual argument, spelled out on his website (http://sites.google.com/site/livingwithoutmoney/Home/18--isn-t-it-hard-living-your-life-of-asceticism): "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for somebody who takes more than she needs to enter into the Present Moment."

Which brings us back to the Scottish mental health findings Bunting details in her article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jul/26/women-wellbeing-unhappiness): the fact that, despite increasing levels of wealth (or because of them), "common mental disorders such as anxiety, depression, panic attacks and anhedonia (loss of capacity to experience pleasure) had significantly increased for girls from 19% to 32%. The increase for boys was much smaller, at only 2%. But the latest set of results are even more dramatic. There has been an increase for both sexes: boys are now on 21%, and girls are at a staggering rate of 44%."

Combine that with the housing crash and the boot is on the other foot -- homeless people would be entitled to think that the homed are by and large miserable, and getting more so.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

No, I'm not saying that capitalist society is "more advanced" or "better" or "normal." I'm saying that I don't have to struggle to fulfill my basic needs on a daily basis, and there are a good many people out there who do have to struggle to get those things. I'm not advocating that homeless people be brought into the world of 5-bedroom McMansions and Ferraris. That's a horrific world, and I should add, one which barely 1% of the world population fits into. So it's not like if you're in the capitalist system, you're a McMansion-having, Ferrari-driving goon, and if you're not in the capitalist system (i.e. "homeless" or whatever word you want to use), you're absolutely free of all worldly evils. It's you who wants to create an idea of normalized systems here, not me. The decision to talk about Suelo, in itself, speaks to this very idea. Instead of presenting the average homeless person, you present this guy who holds university degrees, and is at least some kind of medical and nutritional expert, and moreover, he gained experience living a simple life in a very protected system (that of Peace Corps). This is not what I think of when I think of a "homeless" person, yet this is the convenient example we're given.

In the end, there's no real difference between people who denigrate the homeless and the people who "glorify" them (I hate to use that word, but it really seems, in the end, to be what you're doing). The former say that homeless people choose, through laziness essentially, to be what they are, and that if they just picked themselves up by the bootstraps, everything would be fine. And the latter, like yourself, always portray the homeless in strictly Thoreauvian terms ... the pictures you render are always of educated experts, or people with amazing intuition, who choose to retire from society at large to live more simple, frugal, sustainable lives. Neither argument differs significantly from the other, in that both sides are arguing for the existence of self-determination. But the bottom line is that, while one will always be able to trot out these types of examples, neither really explains what life is like for the bulk of homeless and impoverished people. That's the problem.