Ugliness And Hope
“We’ve become prisoners in a self-made hell in which progress implies that our every single action leads to the deterioration of the basis of our own existence. We’ve become entangled in ugliness. And that might be our hope: the demanding necessity of change.” Morten Skriver, author and visual artist, has moved back to his childhood home in the suburbs of Copenhagen. Under a looming ecological and aesthetic disaster, he finds a glimmer of hope.
By Morten Skriver, visual artist and author
Photo: Uta Scholl/Unsplash
Four years ago, I moved back to my childhood home in the suburbs. I’d abandoned it 45 years earlier, fully convinced that the move would be permanent. I hated the suffocating boredom of the endless rows of terraced houses. The bleak town center with its gray high-rises from the 1970’s. The construction of the highway plowing its way through the few remains of woods and open land. A lifeless social and cultural vacuum which spread endlessly and seemed to symbolize all misgivings in the world. People seeking downwards in a mindless consumer’s daze with no recognition of the entailing ugliness taking hold of our surroundings.
I found my refuge in the urban center with its reminiscences of an original and dense way of living. The harbor, visited by freighters and home to a fully operational, gigantic shipyard; the thousands of production companies and workshops in the backyards. Wholesale dealers and specialized shops of all kinds. People, high and low, moving, working, and living among each other. The city was still a humming, pulsating organism. But during the following decades I would see it all disappear with an increasing speed. The city lost the functions that had created it. Instead, it was absorbed by the suburbs and became a stage prop in the ever-smiling amusement park of the consumer society. Wherever you went in that period, you’d see a similar transformation and standardization of the human experience. Everywhere, the cultural diversity was annihilated, just like nature’s diversity, and for the same reason: a mindless, all-encompassing techno-economical apparatus calibrated by a continuous material growth. We’ve become prisoners in a self-made hell in which progress implies that our every single action leads to the deterioration of the basis of our own existence. We’ve become entangled in ugliness. And that might be our hope: the demanding necessity of change.
As it became clear in the 1970’s that humankind was busy creating an enormous ecological catastrophe, it could be felt as a relief to those who for long had felt dismayed by the physical development in the world. Suddenly things made sense. That which was ugly was also carrying a fatal disease. The lack of public recognition of the gravity of the moment was rooted in a general inability of understanding. The technological civilization had always seemed to be an escape from the present. A continuous restless and disorientated departure. We separated ourselves from the nature which had created us and entered a sphere of technology that mirrored and nurtured our needs in a loop of consumerism, entertainment, and tourism. We believed in technology’s messianic promise of salvation from boredom, pain, and physical limits. The plundering of nature’s capital was regarded as merely a technological problem that somehow would solve itself. But now we’ve reached the last frontier of our illusions. Despite our enormous material power rooted in technology, we’re inextricably linked to the mineral and biological body of the planet. We’ll always be a minor part of life on the planet. By ourselves we’re nothing.
A new and adventurous journey awaits us. We must seek back to our roots. We must reconquer slowness and embrace moderation as committed participants in the evolution of life on planet Earth. But utilizing the wisdom and the skills we have acquired on the way. The ecological disaster – from the extinction of species to the rapidly accelerating climatic changes – is entwined with our inhibited material activity. We’ve created a global destruction machine, systematically amplifying all kinds of entropically deteriorating processes. It’s the inevitable consequence of constant economic growth. The principle of life runs in the opposite direction. Biological organisms absorb energy from the sun and preserve it in extremely delicate circles while creating a complex range of species, languages, and emotions. This is where we belong, in the ecological evolution’s finely tuned balance between form and improvisation. We must settle down in nature’s persistent ritual rhythm and be nourished by the depth of qualities and the dialogue between whole and part. It’s upon us to partake in the music of creation; the better we follow its rhythm, the more intensely we’ll seek into the morphological resonance of nature and the continuum of beauty which has illuminated all previous cultures of humankind.
Fate has brought me back to my childhood home. It’s small, beautiful, and practical with a garden full of berries, old tress, insects, and birds. The surrounding shapeless mass of suburban houses, infrastructure, malls, public housing, and business districts is just as ugly as I remember it. But the ugliness doesn’t frighten me today. Here’s not much to lose and no pretentions of unique qualities. The place seems calmingly free of illusions. Even as I close my eyes, I’m reminded of the churning mechanical destruction of the foundation of life by the hum from the highways and the flights above me. Wherever we are, we’re in the center of it all. Ugliness mustn’t be ignored. It’s a warning and an instruction which we must study closely and try to understand without filters.
My suburb borders the last remains of a natural reserve which was praised for its beauty by the poets of the Romanticism. When I was a child, the area was under attack from all sides, sliced into pieces, decimated, and impoverished in the name of progress. But now I’ve discovered a small resistance movement, working tirelessly to protect what’s left. Fights are being won, and I’m doing my best to assist. The showdown with the illusion that nature exists only for humankind can’t wait. We must defeat ourselves.
A front line runs throughout our planet: political, economic, social, cultural, technological, and philosophical. It’s a matter of our own liberation. By making room for the other, that which is not human, by letting us be colonized by the universe, both our existence and bonds with the community of life will grow. We’re not heading towards a new place but towards a new presence. Beauty and meaning come to us through our choices, through our ways of living, producing, and consuming. You could call it a practical religion which seeks to fill the void at the heart of our collective life. A reunion of human, spirit, and nature.
Photo: the Cameraslinger/Unsplash