Qualities without men
I spent the weekend among a ”last of their kind” in Denmark. They live in a small self-established community on the outskirts of Copenhagen, just across the canal from the city centre. Theirs is an ungraceful yet fascinating blend of dilapidated cottages, abandoned trailers, and sudden multi-storeyed villas. More often than not, the facade fails to reveal anything about the people living behind it.
To tell you the truth, I’ve been staying with them for three summers in a row now. Not this one, though. This one I spend across the isles in Aarhus where I live and work, for the time being. I miss my Nokken as it’s called, this place within the place, this village within the city. I don’t miss it out of nostalgia or undue romanticism. I miss it as an alternative.
This weekend a local band where playing down by the canal. Somebody had put up a pavilion, open on all four sides, just to get the musicians a bit of shade. They played their usual mixture of old ballads and ragtime blues. The sound was alternating between a teenage prom back in the fifties, and a rural pub in the timelessness of alcohol and dimly lit rooms. Something along the lines of The Singing Detective, if you’ve seen that one.
My friends and I sat where the grass used to be, on the sands of a temporary beach, watching the river go by as the music was playing. On the opposite side, just a few hundred meters across the colorless ripples, an excavator was hauling big piles of rubble onto the back of a truck.
The sound was deafening, and somehow the whole situation reminded me of the climax of a story I was telling at a festival earlier this summer. The story about Tom the punk saxophonist who performed for an audience across a highway during rush hours. All sounds may not be music, but all music is sounds. Anyway, that’s how the argument goes.
Suddenly I felt trapped. Me enjoying myself over here on the Nokken side, and the industry and the factories employing themselves over there on the far side. We had nothing in common except the will to create something for ourselves. And only now, face to face and noisy as hell, were we fully aware of this, of our own intention, of our deviation, of each other.
I began to think of the early 20th century Austrian writer Robert Musil. Earlier that day I had re-read the first few chapters of his very long and very uncompromising The Man without Qualities. In it he writes – among an almost alarming number of other things – about Western culture undermining itself in its attempt to do away with the usual trappings of culture, such as traditions and taboo. Freedom becomes unstructured at best, repressive at most.
In the now internationally acclaimed business of creativity (TM) – the golden calf of my own generation with which I somewhat reluctantly dance along – restrictions and limitations are the new big thing. Everybody seems to know that you cannot be truly creative without them. The less space you have to move around in, the more focused and acute your movements are gonna be. It’s almost a new law of physics, and it might even hold true.
What I really don’t get then, is how we – personally and culturally – strive for the exact opposite in our daily lives. We seek to remove all restrictions and overcome all limitations. Even though they help us to focus our lives, and to thrive in a freedom that we wouldn’t know how to handle without them. Might this also be the reason that all of our Western creativity seems to come to nothing these days? The more, and the more outgoing and unruly, the less the impact.
I live in a world of diffused energy. Sometimes I can almost feel it creeping out from beneath my skull. Nokken is one of the few hide-outs where things are still contained within themselves. It certainly isn’t a very restrictive place, still it worships at the altar of simplicity. For such is the way of men without qualities in a society of qualities without men.
