Let’s talk about that new apartment complex they are trying to build near you, and into which you are soon to move. Of course, it is too expensive. If you are honest, the whole facade is quite ugly, or bland at best. You can imagine how the grey siding will look in ten years when it has turned green from the slow growth of algae in the humid summer sun. You can imagine them knocking it down in another decade to replace it with a monstrosity more trendy.
But if the outside disappoints then the insides are sure to impress. New fittings and appliances, the plastic covers not yet removed, the perfect wall for your TV and a big couch. You wish the balcony was larger, and that it didn’t overlook all that traffic. Maybe you’ll grow some plants out there or store your bicycle that you’re hoping to start using again.
You have neighbors — you’d like to meet them but you never see them. You’ve heard the door slam as they come and go. They seem nice enough. Maybe it would be good to reach out to them — next month when things are less hectic. How would that go anyway? You’re no good at baking, and besides, even if you were, wouldn’t that be kind of creepy — food from a complete stranger?
This unease, you are not crass or self-centered for experiencing, for the contract you’ve signed was not with them. No, there is nothing that binds you to them save for the need to pass through the same liminal spaces. You are bound only to your landlord; an entity to be feared, with that ominous, medieval title: the landlord. Yet more often than not, this domineering figure is not even a person with whom you can hold a grudge or pay homage to, but a far more primitive cognition distributed across many persons, contracts, agreements, and spreadsheets. It cannot accept praise or fear, only your money. You stand in relation to precisely no one but yourself. You have signed the contract — you must live somewhere, after all — but you’re already dreaming about the next place.
I suppose we all dream about living in a place that we have built for ourselves, and this is why the countryside always holds its perpetual appeal. “One day, I’ll buy some land and have a real place of my own.” For those more oriented to city living they can expand their concept of a “place of their own” to that vague concept the community. Perhaps, these people find not only that their needs are better met in the city, but feel they make some significant contribution to the city itself, or if not the city, then at least the neighborhood. Alternatively, perhaps many more city people desire also for that “place of my own” in the country, yet feel the strong pull of success and influence such as can only be had in the city. So they bury their plans and allow them to slip into the repressed unconscious, where it escapes only as anxiety and impulsive extravagance.
Why is that we have accepted living in spaces designed by ghosts who bear no connection to us? City people pride themselves in building “community centers.” Only look at a real community center and witness that hideous building of institutional brick and concrete, neither communal, nor the center of anything. There is an important lesson here. We cannot have a community center built for us; we must build it for ourselves. This is the great error of socialism. Perhaps resources can be centralized, but love cannot. The venture capitalist makes the same error. There is no such thing as effective altruism if it is merely the effective distribution of surplus. Love cannot be outsourced.
So it was that Judas bemoaned the “wasting” of the expensive perfume for the washing of Christ’s feet when it could have been sold and the money given to the poor.
Thus, when the the landlord or the developer dreams of enriching his life, we should not be surprised when this enrichment does not include us, the lowly tenants. For we stand in no relation to him. This man thinks himself free and powerful, yet is crushed by the necessities of the games of finance, trapped between competing bids to develop a plot of land — “who can bring forth the most fruit from the least acreage? Let that man come forward and lay out his plans, and we shall take his plans and make them manifest over all the earth.”
When does the project begin? Yesterday. Tomorrow it is done. The trash compactor already smells from the freshly thrown fast food. The birds screech vainly over the sound of the landscaper’s engine — the closest thing left to song.
Easy it is to hate that man and his works. We can imagine his hardened soul and the crass cynicism he has grown inside himself, that he might not merely survive but thrive in the wolves’ den.
But are we not also locked in the same pit? At work, do we not also fight over the same pittance, and live on the leftover scraps that have fallen from the table? Have we not all been punished when we were young, for caring too deeply? Do we not harden ourselves every morning when we face the day?
Why think that the forces that harden that cynical developer, who crams every last apartment that he can onto a strip of tired, exhaust-ridden land are any different than the ones that assail us and drive us to anxious distraction?
It is the same force — deeper than any state, or the avarice of any powerful business.
Permit me one fantasy — an impossibility, I will grant — but perhaps a worthwhile thought experiment. Let us imagine that the developer must live in the place that he builds. What would this do to his plans? For though he builds ugly apartments to be consumed and ravaged by strangers who follow him on his path to success, does he not make his own home beautiful as best he can?
Perhaps he would say, “it is enough, the buildings are too close together. Any tighter and there will be no sun on the northern street.” For now, forcing him to live in the place that he builds, we have accessed something far greater than the need for money. We awaken in him the need for beauty. Might he also say, “let us build a footbridge over that stream, and a little gazebo on the hill. The oak tree thereon, we shall leave.” The last row of apartments, he will not dream of, for from his window he can see his children playing and laughing under the shade of the great tree. Even his selfishness can guide him, when he desires his friends to have ample parking spaces for their visits, so he will relax the parking codes that people may come and go as they please and never worry about finding a spot, and he will not suffer that parasite, the tow truck company, to ever profit from his domain.
When his children grow, perhaps he will say. “I am lonely, let us build little apartments on the embankment so that our children will have affordable places to live and mingle amongst each other.” When he grows old, perhaps his children will say, “let us not send father to the nursing home. For this is the land that he has built, and nothing will take him from it. Let us make sure that our parents always have a place in our community.” The word community, and the proper noun by which they call it, shall have a meaning to them, and a sense of pride. For this is no Enclave at Stonecrest — the simulacra of a place. This is a real relation between a land and its people.
I wanted to laugh and cry reading this. There were so many gems, but the proposal that the developer should live in the complex he builds was the crowning jewel of the whole piece. Keep it up, Bryan!