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Being and Homelessness: Notes from an Underground Artist

von John H. Sibley

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John Sibley was a homeless artist living in winter on the streets of Chicago for six months. The terrain is Chicago's Loop, Near Westside and the now abolished Maxwell Street open-air-market between 1989 and 2005.His aim in these philosophical essays is to shed light on a growing global problem. "Being and Homelessness" is not as much concerned with the cause but the wretched anxiety and pain of being homeless, which forces one to live, to exist in an in-authentic mode of "being-in-the-world." Sibley uses an existential lens to focus on this ghastly problem because the homeless being-in- itself is forged in rootlessness, displacement, and their lives are governed by the existential D's of death, dread and despair.After his dark night of the spirit Sibley believes that being homeless in the world, displaced and rootless, is one of the most terrifying challenges that a human can experience. "I gazed down into the underbelly of the abyss. I am blessed that I escaped the stygian darkness of the nether world of alleys, bridge viaducts, vacant cars and subways caverns. To escape that region of dread and despair teaches you that pain and suffering are central to the human condition," he writes.In these essays Sibley uses the term "being-in-the-world" as an experience that makes one acutely aware of that gap between consciousness and objects in the world. Being-in-the-world makes the homeless aware of a distance, an emptiness, a gap that separates them from the region of things.This essay is a plea to maximize this nation's resources, both public and private to help the wretched existence of the homeless. "I cannot recall the exact day-to-day or month-to-month suffering that I endured, but the existential feeling of dread, despair, hopelessness, wretchedness and loneliness still clings to my consciousness. "I write to illuminate the plight of the homeless so that when you see them in libraries, on subways, city busses, local train stations or standing in front of missions like they had stepped out of painter Edward Hopper's canvas, you won't judge them, as Anatole Broyard noted, as 'creatures of the darkness, where sex, drugs, gambling and other crimes are directed against a bourgeois culture that despises them.'" The homeless problems have become a Malthusian nightmare not just in Chicago but in urban cities across the nation and worldwide. The large population of homeless men, women and children give most urban cities a Third-World urbanscape.It would be disingenuous to state that the homeless only need shelter when the problem is much deeper than that. The Government needs to invest in creating a new Integrative Holistic Rehab Center [IHRC] to combat the multiple cause of homelessness. We need to heed the words of the homeless, Danish genius, Kierkegaard, who believed philosophy must recognize the presence of man-in-the-world.The reality is that for millions of us in our times we are only a lost job, a breadwinner's disability or death, a business failure, a lawsuit, a divorce, a long-term illness or natural disaster away from homelessness.Let the experience of John Sibley inspire you with its honesty, faith and redemption.… (mehr)
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Do not read this book, unless you’re prepared to lose your place in line, to have your applecart overturned, your ideas upended. Like the harsh Chicago wind, Lew Rawls clls The Hawk*, this book knocks over ideas like trashcans. Forget everything you thought about philosophy, art and “the homeless.” They turn out to be individuals, not a collective noun. Some are painters. Some, philosophers. This one is both, and a writer. Only this specific homeless painter could have written this book, a work with rising patches of genius, like the neck of a giraffe.

A penniless man fills with vast culture, more than the billionaire running the White House, who does not dine on water, on jazz, on Velasquez and on Caravaggio:
“While listening to Trane’s music and looking at the master’s paintings I was
swept into another dimension, which transcended my material impoverishment.
Sitting there, I thought, I could have been one of Caravaggio’s homeless
models. Or Velasquez’s Moorish assistant whose painting skill rivaled the
master’s”(42).

This Moorish assistant writes with more philosophy than all of D.C., starting with the idealist Berkeley, who lived three years in colonial Rhode Island near this reviewer. But Chicagoan Sibley’s homeless winter nights disillusion him with God, and lead him to Kierkegaard’s existentialism, his leap of faith from the absurd universe, from the dread and chronic depression experienced by modern mankind (68). (Or modern manunkind as e.e.cummings has it). Other philosophers come up like Schopenhauer and Korzybski.

Think you’re familiar with art? Expect to meet, up close, well painted, the unfamiliar with the famous: Basquiat, Emilio Cruz, Frederick Remington, Kerry Marshall, Maurice Wilson, Betye Saar, Pipin, Joseph Yoakum, Hayden, Cortor, Ed Paschke, Charles White, Pier Manzoni, Romare Berden, Norman Lewis, Renee Townsend, Warhol, “Doc” Towns, Venus Blue, Lucius Armstrong, Muneer, Karen Mzique, Stanley Kincaid, Gale Sheri Blackmore, Milton Roberts, Lorenzo Pace,Thomas Hat Benton, Art Green, Gladys Wilson, Judson Brown, John Yancy, Greg Brey, and Philip London. To name a few.
Up close, he sees at a Burger King years later a brilliant friend from art school, Maurice Wilson, Yale M.F.A., Seagrams Award winner.
“‘Maurice!’ I whispered… He looked at me, squinting, his face Sudanese black with shades of sienna and umber…’Sit down, Sib…they might see you.’ I sat down, wondering what they he was talking about. ‘Who might see me?’ I asked, puzzled as I looked around, slightly paranoid from his words. ‘The FBI, CIA, NSA. I tell you Sib, the muthafuggahs tryin’ to kill me.” I said in disbelief, “Why you, Maurice? It’s your imagination man. No one is after you…Maurice, you got somewhere to sleep tonight? Let me give you my business card.’ ‘No, Sib, I can’t take it. That card may have poison on it…’ I tried to shake the gloom that clung to me as I looked at a broken-down genius. A genius possibly like Friedrich Nietzsche, …who sat in a vegetative state in an asylum for more than a decade”(58). Fellow student Maurice follows portraits of his Art Institute teachers.
Sibley finds his route to homelessness c/o the American Court system paved by a couple of stereotypes: All Blacks Look Alike and the Jewish Lawyer. The latter urged a guilty plea because it would result in parole, but also because he did not know anything about his client, an Air Force Vietnam vet. Once he learned DocSib graduated the Chicago Art Institute School and painted, with a magazine article about his art, the well-intentioned lawyer regretted the guilty plea. As well he should, since the wrongful conviction in a cold 70’s December, for stealing $10 from a white woman, a felony, cost the writer his home and a career.
Some giraffe-like patches of genius. Leaving at 6PM every evening after working at a temp agency or doing street portraits, “south on State Street listening and feeling the seismic, metronomic whump, whump, whump of the Jurassic jackhammers…Everywhere I saw vehicles that looked like grazing Triceratops wallowing in mud. Giant cranes, bobcats and metallic Brontosauruses. The construction workers wore bright yellow hats and orange protective vests, grafting like soldier ants. They worked with gargantuan, metallic, robotic slaves.
“It was like gazing at a Jurassic subterranean nest. A vast pit of forgotten cultures, fossil records, landfills, and an ancient Indian burial ground…tribes like Chicago, Illiniwek, and Potowatomi, civil war soldiers, unknown murder victims, dogs, cats, and the homeless under the subterranean floor.”(69).

Additionally, Sibley builds an anthology of interesting quotations, from Orwell, “I wanted to submerge myself, to get down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants!”(Down and Out in London and Paris, 1933). To Renoir, reportedly, “A painter also has to paint with his balls”(63). To Julian Barbour, “Some people can pass a Cathedral and not notice it”(27). To Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action was White, how the G.I. Bill in NY and NJ funded fewer than .003% non-white mortgages. Or, back to Orwell, “There is something horrible about being homeless at night. The coldness, death lurking around every corner, the isolation”(Ch 4 epigraph 67). ( )
  AlanWPowers | Jan 29, 2018 |
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

If John Sibley's name sounds familiar, it's because he's the author of the over-the-top urban post-apocalyptic actioner i>Bodyslick, which I named a top Guilty Pleasure here in 2011; but it turns out that Sibley himself has had an even more sobering and fascinating life out in the real world, becoming homeless twice in recent decades even while pursuing higher-education options in creative fields. And now he has a memoir out about his experiences, Being and Homelessness; and while I'm forced to admit that it wasn't my particular cup of tea (I don't have much of an interest in the subject to begin with, disagree with Sibley regarding some of the political issues involved, and also found his writing style to be overly rambling and unfocused much of the time), let me also say that this is an unusually well-done book for this kind of topic and author background, and that those who have a greater natural interest than I in the intersection of art, philosophy and social welfare will undoubtedly find this a fascinating and worthwhile read. A meandering title that often makes its points in a roundabout way, some are bound to find this a clever and unique approach to the entire subject of "the homeless," while others are bound to tire of it quickly; this should all be kept in mind before picking it up yourself.

Out of 10: 7.8 ( )
  jasonpettus | Mar 22, 2012 |
"'Being and Homelessness' is an extremely eye-opening story and I admire Mr. Sibley's courage in coming forward with his experiences." -- US Senator, Chris Murphy (CT) ( )
Diese Rezension wurde von mehreren Benutzern als Missbrauch der Nutzungsbedingungen gekennzeichnet und wird nicht mehr angezeigt (Anzeigen).
  WordsworthGreen | Apr 19, 2015 |
This courageous and inspiring work of non-fiction by artist, John Sibley, gives a human face to those who live underground among America's homeless. "Being and Homelessness" dives deep into the existential nightmare of having no place to call home while the Arctic wind, known as The Hawk, blows off the lake. This book is philosophically wise and challenges us to take better care of those who live in our society with intellectual capital to offer like artists and writers. Among all the vitriol and rhetoric about cutting budgets to fund the most basic needs of Americans, John Sibley's self-portrait of the artist as a homeless man is profound, moving and inspiring. He asks the basic questions about what it means to own virtually nothing and still seeking to assert his identity and dignity in a nation which prefers to look the other way. The truth is that many people -- no matter how well off they may consider themselves and even those who can't imagine homelessness happening to them -- are one stroke of capricious catastrophe from living in the streets. So what happens when you are stripped down to the barest of bones and compelled to live on the streets? Sibley's story is not only enlightening about the dignity of man under the worst of human circumstances but it is humbling in its inspiration and victory in the rise of one homeless artist from the depths of deprivation. This story gets down to what it is that makes us human when all we have left is our humanity. ( )
Diese Rezension wurde von mehreren Benutzern als Missbrauch der Nutzungsbedingungen gekennzeichnet und wird nicht mehr angezeigt (Anzeigen).
1 abstimmen | WordsworthGreen | Jan 4, 2012 |
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"I get the stare because I am a constant reminder of not adhering to the American Dream: job, house, family, dog and a white picket fence. You stare at me because I am the antithesis of that dream. I am a nightmare that makes you wonder about your own vulnerability.
I was homeless. A "monstre sacre" in the city of Chicago."
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John Sibley was a homeless artist living in winter on the streets of Chicago for six months. The terrain is Chicago's Loop, Near Westside and the now abolished Maxwell Street open-air-market between 1989 and 2005.His aim in these philosophical essays is to shed light on a growing global problem. "Being and Homelessness" is not as much concerned with the cause but the wretched anxiety and pain of being homeless, which forces one to live, to exist in an in-authentic mode of "being-in-the-world." Sibley uses an existential lens to focus on this ghastly problem because the homeless being-in- itself is forged in rootlessness, displacement, and their lives are governed by the existential D's of death, dread and despair.After his dark night of the spirit Sibley believes that being homeless in the world, displaced and rootless, is one of the most terrifying challenges that a human can experience. "I gazed down into the underbelly of the abyss. I am blessed that I escaped the stygian darkness of the nether world of alleys, bridge viaducts, vacant cars and subways caverns. To escape that region of dread and despair teaches you that pain and suffering are central to the human condition," he writes.In these essays Sibley uses the term "being-in-the-world" as an experience that makes one acutely aware of that gap between consciousness and objects in the world. Being-in-the-world makes the homeless aware of a distance, an emptiness, a gap that separates them from the region of things.This essay is a plea to maximize this nation's resources, both public and private to help the wretched existence of the homeless. "I cannot recall the exact day-to-day or month-to-month suffering that I endured, but the existential feeling of dread, despair, hopelessness, wretchedness and loneliness still clings to my consciousness. "I write to illuminate the plight of the homeless so that when you see them in libraries, on subways, city busses, local train stations or standing in front of missions like they had stepped out of painter Edward Hopper's canvas, you won't judge them, as Anatole Broyard noted, as 'creatures of the darkness, where sex, drugs, gambling and other crimes are directed against a bourgeois culture that despises them.'" The homeless problems have become a Malthusian nightmare not just in Chicago but in urban cities across the nation and worldwide. The large population of homeless men, women and children give most urban cities a Third-World urbanscape.It would be disingenuous to state that the homeless only need shelter when the problem is much deeper than that. The Government needs to invest in creating a new Integrative Holistic Rehab Center [IHRC] to combat the multiple cause of homelessness. We need to heed the words of the homeless, Danish genius, Kierkegaard, who believed philosophy must recognize the presence of man-in-the-world.The reality is that for millions of us in our times we are only a lost job, a breadwinner's disability or death, a business failure, a lawsuit, a divorce, a long-term illness or natural disaster away from homelessness.Let the experience of John Sibley inspire you with its honesty, faith and redemption.

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