‘Cellf’ and utopia
‘Cellf’ and utopia
Posted originally 14 Oct 2018
I met Grace Roselle in front of 52 Division. She was sitting on a slab of concrete writing on a large piece of cardboard. She was making a sign. The sign read MASS AWAKENING of HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS is HAPPENING. REJOICE! On the sides were symbols - for peace, an inner eye, a heart and a star. Grace didn’t know she was sitting in front of a police station.
Grace is 25. This I found out later when we became friends on Facebook, but it was obvious to look at her what age range she was in. Grace is also homeless, and that was a surprise. She didn’t look homeless, which is to say grubby and ground down. Her clothes were neat and newish, and she looked groomed and fresh-faced. She looked, in other words, like someone who could pass for normal if she ever wanted to. She sleeps in a shelter, which she assured me feeds her well three times a day. Her mother is dead. Her father is in Newfoundland. She hasn’t told him she is homeless, she says, because he can’t take any stress.
She is spiritual but not religious. Her spirituality is central to her life. We talked about that while I took pictures of her. She didn’t mind that. She said she herself was once into photography and the best pictures she took were when people forgot they were posing and acted naturally. She too wanted to act naturally but her eyes tended to avoid the camera, and she only looked back at me when I stopped shooting. She had a nice smile, it was a smile that said, I am open. To everyone and everything, to the world and the cosmos. It was a spiritual smile.
Spirituality is always vague. It embraces everything except the empirical. I imagine that’s a big part of its appeal, to young people especially. It has answers for the big questions of meaning and existence, expansive answers. Spirituality is what you get when you erase any trace of negativity and conflict. It’s what you get when you imagine the world as one big happy family. So maybe it has a special appeal to people whose mothers are dead and whose fathers are too stressed out to talk to.
Grace lives (or would like to live) on a diet of fruit and fungi mostly. This is part of her spirituality. On Facebook there are pictures of a big tattoo of Mother Nature on her back, which she designed herself. It’s on a blue background with a Mother figure that looks like Grace sitting in a yoga position surrounded by fish, a fox lying in her lap and a deer behind her. There’s also the sun and the moon. On Facebook she says the tattoo is six years old, and was brighter back then. Sometimes nature can be disappointing. There are also lots of attractive pictures of herself, because she is pretty but also she is very studied at posing. This is a generational thing, my kids are similar: they know the look they want the camera to see. She has travelled a lot - to Europe, Egypt, Bali, Australia. There are friends in the pictures, and boyfriends. There is also a spiritual teacher, Premdas Swami. He looks the part of a guru - straggly yellow hair, bushy white beard, wizened face. He lives in a jungle in the Australian outback. He seems the high priest of fruitarianism. In some of the pictures his legs look incredibly thin, like twigs. That must add to his other-worldliness. Grace seems in transports of happiness being with him. There is also a picture of the two of them lying together.
Grace has a picture of a poster on her FB page. This one is much more elaborate than the one she was writing up when I met her. In the middle is a brain with the word BALANCED written in it, and on the top corners are DNA strands and neurons. Across the top are the words BEING HUEMAN and underneath I AM NATURE. Next to a drawing of a female body are the words I AM GOD. MY BODY IS MY SOUL. There is much more - a graffiti wall of spiritualism. One message that seems noteworthy: I LOVE MYCELLF! An explanation is offered near the bottom: I AM A CELLF, MADE UP OF CELLS WITHIN MY OWN CELLF WHICH CAME OUT OF MYCELLF TO LIVE IN HARMONY WITH MYCELLF … STUDY THYCELLF. And then PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE.
Grace studied horticulture at Niagara College. She has been active politically in environmental causes, though it seemed in talking to her that she’s now put her political activism on hold to pursue her spiritual interests. When it came up in our conversation that I was a socialist, she made a point of saying that she was more in favor of anarchism. Being a Marxist my inclination would have been to say: ‘But of course anarchism - the path of least resistance’. But instead I avoided the issue.
I did put up some resistance to the spiritualism, but mostly I expressed my concern about her being homeless. I came off sounding like a dad, hard not to, given the disparity of ages. But she seemed far from clueless. She was planning to go to Costa Rica for the winter, already knew how much the flight would be (about $300) and was pretty sure she could raise the money. In the context of her FB page it seems she isn’t exactly the helpless waif she might appear to be, and staying at a shelter might not be much different that bunking at youth hostels in Europe. Or I’m hoping that’s true, for her sake. Of course she could also just have been lying to me about being homeless, or rather inventing her own inner truth.
Even sterile flowers grow out of fertile ground. Spiritualism is sterile and inane. But I wonder if there isn’t also a glimmer of something else. I’m thinking of a remark of Slavoj Zizek’s. In one of the few times he departs from his role as a Marxist contrarian, Zizek echoes the orthodox view that Marxists are not utopians. He insists that it’s impossible to know, beyond the broadest generalities, what a future beyond capitalism will look like. But if he had to guess, what he imagines isn’t at all the orderly and harmonious worlds of the famous literary utopias of the past (from Thomas Moore to William Morris). What he imagines instead is a world a bit like one of Pieter Bruegel’s paintings, where everybody gets to do whatever crazy thing they want. I think Zizek is on to something, and I could certainly see Grace in one of Bruegel’s paintings, or even in one of Hieronymus Bosch’s: she would be in a happy throng of fruitarians, ecstatically gorging THEMCELLFS.
