I once worked on a regeneration program in Hackney, London, a poor part of town since the beginning. Somewhere the planners and financiers of the regeneration were hacking their way through meetings with fat cats, but I, artist, writer, found myself at the soft end of the program talking to local ten year olds about the material world. Children are so accepting of the world they find themselves in that the word ‘regeneration’ – making the world anew – is meaningless. This lot didn’t yet know how poor they were, how prejudice worked, how much luck played a part in fulfilling ambition – they were ten, and their futures were full of themselves. I wanna be a pop star, said Rhianna, I wanna be a glamour girl, said Carly, I wanna play football for Arsenal, said Emil, and I’m gonna be a millionaire and have a big dog and a big television and a big house. They were ten. It was only a matter of three or four years before society took its carefully nurtured discriminations and inequalities and unfairness and flung it all straight in their faces. But I was hoping that we could at least trap some coherent thoughts or attitudes that would skew the regeneration in their favour.
So I got them drawing maps of the things they encountered on the way to school, to expose what sort of a material world mattered to them. I wasn’t going for a subjective analysis like a Situationist, but rather looking for a measure of it all, of the ambient accumulation of material. What’s ambient? They said. I explained that one day soon we will be recharging our phones with energy harvested from the waves of radio transmission ambient in the air around us. Do we breath radio waves, then? Well, no. But we’ll charge our phones from the energy they transmit themselves? Well, yes. Now start drawing!
The first boy I spoke to showed me his map and pointed out the huge dog turd by the post box, covered in green flies which fled at the mere hint of your shadow, and the McDonalds’ carton with the half eaten hamburger in it by the pedestrian crossing. Mundane stuff – but he turned out to be an artist in the making. “Have you noticed,” he said, “that everywhere you look, the rooftops are joined to the sky?” It was the poor part of town, and the day was full of poignancy – this horizon specialist had never been to the seaside to see that fabulous blue on blue of the sky and the sea. But what he said fledged the thought that all round our heads, as far as our eyes can see, is the edge of the actual world. Never mind the distant truth: we live in our observations. We live in the bowls of ourselves, whose rims are at the height of our eyes above the ground, and everything inside the bowl is us as much as it is the world. I thought that this boy was a twenty-first century boy: that he carried the future without knowing it. But then I moved on to Carly with her black patent shoes and her eyes smeared with the remnants of the makeup she was not allowed to wear inside the school gates. “Look,” she said, showing me her map. “There’s the dog-mess by the post box and here’s that McDonalds carton with the rotten burger in it.”
We live in the bowls of ourselves, whose rims are at the height of our eyes above the ground, and everything inside your bowl is you as much as it is the world. The swooping parallaxes and the continual shifts in perspective you go through every day are like the bowl’s mental optics. Your pack of perceptions. They shift with your relative height, your relative solitude and your relative mood. The quantum physicists used to say that the observer’s presence changes the event observed. What if that event is itself the observer – is it that that makes the truth a personal matter?
The next session with the children was a visit to Greenwich Park, which has a big hill at its centre with a statue of General Wolfe on it. Appropriate – it was he who scaled the heights of Quebec in the English and French colonial wars. Hackney is as flat as the river flood plain it is, so this meeting with the hill was profound. They were poor, remember, and ten years old. They didn’t travel much and they had never visited this place, only ten kilometres from their own homes. You could see the whole of the city and the hills beyond from the top of that hill. I arranged them all in a circle on the grass and we tried an experiment. Hold still, I said, as still as you can. And look hard at the horizon. Feel the weight of your head and hold it as steady as you can. Feel every swallow and every blink. This bowl of the world whose rim is the horizon is the wilderness you inhabit. It could be that you have fallen there, body heart and mind together; it could be that you have chosen to be there. Whichever way, it is your world. Your head and those others all around you are linked not as a community, but as islands in an ocean of possibilities, each head a lighthouse beaming out the presence of the edge of another piece of wilderness. Together, you are witnesses to the world.
Back in the classroom, a girl from Sierra Leone said her family were refugees from the war, because the war meant there was nothing to eat. She was different from the others – she had travelled maybe too much. The floor of her bowl was strewn with strife. What will happen if god takes everything away? She said. Because of all the wars we fight, if he takes everything away we won’t have anything to eat. We could always eat each other, I said. That’s stupid what you say, she replied, we can’t eat each other. Then she showed me her map. It was full of butterflies and plants.
What mattered to them? Everything. They each lived in a world with everything in it, everything mattered and they liked it all.