….Just because Chinese lanterns are set adrift by families across the valley doesn’t mean that is less authentic subjectively than those who originated such practices in China or those who are sold on the ‘make do and mend’ of popular thinking right now, so would make these themselves. Invention and experience are born out of engaged connection with what is right beneath our noses. However I do challenge the idea that this is authentic in terms of the art of life and I do claim that many practices are simply co-opted, and masquerade to give us a sense of it. Deep down we know it, but we buy into it. Deep down we want to imitate what as ideal purports to fulfilment from the reign of a boat on the river, to nostalgic kitsch aprons as they hark back to the culinary art of love making!
So what of Schaffer a philosopher on metaphysics, a researcher on all that jazz of existence? what of Edith Schaefer, a theological dubious rhetoric of the ‘Hidden art of homemaking’? But it is both that proffer an understanding of the art of life. For obvious reasons as an artist whose works follow the metaphysical, I’m biased with Jonathon Shaffer whose essay on Spacetime quotes Alexander (1950), ‘Space and Time, so far from being the least self-subsistent of things, are in truth in their indissoluble union the ultimate reality in its simplest and barest terms…’
However in its simplest form there is E.Schaeffer and her philosophy in the making of art from everyday life – something out of nothing. It is easy to sneer and suggest it is romanticised homemaking and a typical machanism of a ‘homemaker’. Yet despite this cynicism I think she may be speaking of a thousand things we acknowledge in our quiet, hidden lives. A frustration at our inability to appreciate these small things against the myriad of worries, new political austerity measures, precisely because it has become co-opted into a political measure of rhetoric saying we should and perhaps this article only adds to that! We have a frenzy of approval rating trying to achieve just this. What is missed here, is that most of us already do have a hidden art of life if we could only appreciate our own instead of comparing with what should be. Whilst Edith Schaeffer may be outdated, outmoded, old fashioned, her quiet insistence that a moment can become art not by a connection wiht some other, not by accomplishment, not noticed, not by manufacturing it from something we’ve seen or heard or imitated but becasue we’re making it up for ourselves, evolved out of genuine interaction and experience and in our own Spacetime.
cont….
