Lightness
“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don’t mean escaping into dream or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective . . . . The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future.” (Italo Calvino, Six Memos . . .)
Heaviness, a burden to some, embodies the values of the powerful: heavy cultural artifacts are made to last; they contain over time the jewels of power. The gothic church is a monument; A Book of Ours—expansive pages, bright colours, writings crammed together—is a monument well bound; it, however, subverts the social hierarchy with its light “memos” from the lives of those without visibility, the homeless. Yet it is built to last. The project that preceded A Book of Ours promoted lightness, that “change of approach” more in keeping with the daily realities of the homeless: The Homeless Library. Its participants made books of their lives on scraps of paper bound together crudely, their words sometimes inscribed over words already printed. If you blew on some of them, they would scoot along the surface of a table. They were blanked out scraps of former whose, waste, and their poets were, as Lawrence sometimes calls himself, Riff Raff. But their lightness gave them another property: “These days the papers in the street / leap into the air or burst across the lawns-- / not a scrap but has the breath of life” (Charles Reznikoff).
During a workshop for six participants writing and designing A Book of Ours, around four trestle tables placed end to end and covered with paint-jars, pens and pencils and large partially filled sheets of paper, I walked off for a 20-minute chat with Lawrence; in the far corner of the room was a glassed-in case displaying some of the books from The Homeless Library. Lawrence selected one and began to read a poem that he had delivered to the “fuckin’ politicians” of the Westminster Parliament who in 2016 had invited members of The Homeless Library to present their work. When he finished, and after we talked about it, he tossed it back into the case, soundlessly. The poem read from the book was immensely important less as a “creation” and more as a presentation of self as representative of an invisible body of citizens, and even more as a gesture, full of anger and hope, in the public sphere and the seat of power. But the toss: at once dismissive of the artifact, its near-bodilessness, its hardly bound and amateurishly constructed aspect, its lightness signifying waste. But the toss also indicated its mobility, an expression of an unbounded will and freely articulate imagination. Lawrence took up his concertina book and, hunting for the poem, ruffled the pages. As an instance of book-making, it resembled samizdat publications. The aesthetics of these books shift away from forms of monument and permanence, allure and invitation through carefully manipulated design and colour features, to mobility and usefulness. These books, as arthur+martha has always insisted, contain a history by and large kept undocumented in what Sean Bonney might've called the “police account.” Their fragility and ephemerality, their lightness, transports the language, memories, and insights of “the other.” In Glasgow I have seen them on exhibit in glassed-in cases, as they have also appeared in Manchester, Brighton and London, and now here upstairs at the Booth Centre in the corner case, valued as precious and rare artifacts.
Poetry, lightness, music: A “concertina” construction, Lawrence’s book was full of musical staves, across which he wrote poems—not under the staves as is conventional. I noticed that in the poem, the word “poverty” appears twice, the second time running vertically, in an ungainly writing-over the forward-moving lines of both music and poem—cutting through, intervening, disrupting a flow of ordinary musical and poetic rhythms as the disclosure of what lies irredeemably behind the song, as Lawrence says, that is in the poetry. A Brechtian scene of the juxtaposition of the painful with the hopeful reality. The concertina as “sacred waste” (Bataille).
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