Cuttlefish only live for a year or two, which stupidly still grieves me each spring. Puya raimondii, a cactus-like plant known as the Queen of the Andes, does not bloom until it reaches the grand age of eighty to one hundred years; when it does, it can grow to 10 metres tall and produce tens of thousands of flowers along its stem. Other cacti bloom just once a year, for one night. The cherry blossom’s glory is also annual, and its shedding is glorious: petals swirl in eddies in the air, sometimes spiralling to the tops of office buildings — I used to watch the tiny white shapes dance in the wind outside my New York office, high up on the seventeenth floor on West 57th Street.
Our attempts to maintain permanence are often clumsy. Pity the poor eighty-one-year-old Spanish widow who tried to restore a two-hundred-year-old Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) painting by Elías García Martinez, in a sixteenth-century Spanish church in Borja in 2012. She said she was trying to prevent it from being spoiled by damp, but she was ridiculed by the world for turning the face of Jesus into what one critic called ‘a hairy monkey in an ill-fitting suit’. It was quickly dubbed Ecce Mono — Behold the Monkey — and is now a tourist attraction. In 2018, in another part of Spain, Estella in Navarre, a local arts and crafts teacher tried to restore a wooden carving of St George fighting a dragon, but unfortunately transformed it into a cartoonish man resembling Tin Tin.
Perhaps US author Anne Lamott is right when she says, ‘Hope and peace have to include acceptance of a certain impermanence to everything, of the certain obliteration of all we love, beauty and light and huge marred love.’ Some things — and faces — are better left alone. Some things are best left ephemeral.
STREET ARTISTS UNDERSTAND THE beauty of ephemera because they trade in it. For most of us, the prospect of labouring intensely on murals while perched on ladders, cranes and cherry pickers for weeks, only to see them subsequently tagged with graffiti or smashed to ruins, is a sobering one. But for street artists, it’s a singular thrill. Temporariness is part of the game.
Which on one level is shocking. On another, their attitude resembles the Buddhist view of ‘attachment’, which asserts that clinging to objects, people or places will only create more suffering for ourselves. Buddha taught that all ‘conditioned things’ — anything that depends on certain conditions for its existence, whether objects, thoughts, or atoms — are impermanent, ‘by nature arising and passing away’. If they arise, he said, and are extinguished, ‘their eradication brings true happiness’. The universal law, then, is that impermanence governs all things. This in some ways echoes the Bible, which repeatedly teaches that attachment to material things, to things of the world, is a distraction, for all must perish.
Street artists practise detachment in a way that can be difficult for an archive-hungry historian like me to fathom; I have spent many years searching for small fragments of evidence, yellowing letters and water-stained documents in an attempt to understand the past, seeking, above all else, preservation. But not long ago, I found myself standing in an empty old movie theatre, the Star Lyric in Melbourne’s Fitzroy, looking at an enormous, delicately drawn female face, painted on a wall two storeys high, lit by shafts of light from high portholes. It was magnificent. The artist, Rone, knew that developers would destroy the building shortly after his exhibition, Empty, closed. A finite lifespan, he tells me, is what makes street art singular: it blooms suddenly, then is exposed to the elements.
‘The temporariness is what makes it contemporary, of the moment, and more important or special,’ he says. ‘When someone paints something on the street it won’t be protected, anyone can come with spray paint and draw a dick on it, and destroy it — but you walk away, there’s not much you can do about it.’
Rone, whose full name is Tyrone Wright, is one of Australia’s most commercially successful street artists. The thirty-nine-year-old, dressed in a black cap and T-shirt and a paint-splattered grey hoodie, shrugs off accusations of being a ‘sell-out brand’ by pointing to the fact that he is delighted that he gets paid to make art, something that would have seemed impossible ten years ago, before the mysterious British artist Banksy (who keeps his or her identity a secret) dragged street art into the mainstream.
Now internationally renowned, Rone has exhibited around the globe, including in London, New York, San Francisco and Miami, and has painted murals in Taiwan, Malaysia, the UK, France, New Zealand, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, the United States, Germany, Japan and Mexico. His exhibitions — usually photographs of his street art before demolition — sell out to eager collectors before they open.
Next to his desk in the warehouse space he shares with a collective of other artists — who wander around in paint-splattered boiler suits — is an old metal fan, its plastic centre melted into long loops, a keepsake from a burnt-out house.
He turns to his computer. ‘Wait, I just wrote this down: “Beautiful works in places of neglect to highlight what we may have lost”.’
Rone first became known for his portraits of ‘Jane Doe’ — an unknown, unidentified female — which he began painting in 2004 in response to a friend who was painting ‘screaming vampire faces’. He wanted to do the opposite, a ‘non-aggressive, non-sexual, beautiful image of an unknown woman. I fell in love with the way it worked on the streets — it would decay or fall away — just the eyes would be left, but still beautiful. Nothing lasts forever, it doesn’t matter how beautiful it is.’
It’s a fragility meant to heighten appreciation. Rone told me recently, ‘If you are lucky enough to come across a piece of work you like, you know it may not be there next time you visit, so you have to appreciate in that moment.’
A few days after I met Rone, the Star Lyric was rubble.
I STILL MAINTAIN THAT underpants that no longer fit are best thrown out. I do understand the desire to hold on to the memories they might contain, whether magnificent or mundane. But if we are conscious of the temporariness of anything, or everything, we will be far less likely to squander time looking backwards, or forwards, to other moments than the one we are in.
If we accept flowering is by its nature a fleeting occurrence, then we are more likely to recognise each bud as a victory, each blossom as a triumph. And if we accept impermanence, we are far more likely to live in the present, to relish the beauty in front of us, and the almost infinite possibilities contained in every hour, or a single breath.
Chapter 8
Accept Imperfection
When you look at the clouds they are not symmetrical. They do not form fours and they do not come along in cubes, but you know at once that they are not a mess . . . They are wiggly but, in a way, orderly, although it is difficult for us to describe that kind of order. Now, take a look at yourselves. You are all wiggly . . . We are just like clouds, rocks and stars. Look at the way the stars are arranged. Do you criticize the way the stars are arranged?
— Alan W. Watts, The Tao of Philosophy
SOME PHYSICAL FLAWS ARE apparent from birth. Others are pointed out to you. I never realised that I had a big nose, for example, until my brother joked about it once at dinner. A short time later, an artist who specialised in caricatures was asked to draw a cartoon of me to run with my newspaper columns. In it, my nose curved so far around my cheek that it almost tickled my ear. I can still remember the roaring laughter of my editor when she saw it. I hated it.