VAGABONDS OF THE MARGINS Part 1.

Vagabonds of the Margins Part 1.

As we move across these great cities, people, mere people, are minimised and marginalised in relation to colossal buildings, huge roads, all built to an inhuman scale. We scamper along designated paths, alienated from everything to this side or that, alienated, very often, from each other. Those buildings may serve capitalism or the spectacle, but they do not serve people, or not many of them at any rate, we are kept at bay, or charged admission to them. The roads too, so many of them are designed to allow goods to travel, the arteries of commerce, not of communication. We live in a strange alienated world that regards us as an inconvenience, or worse, when we are not at our task of consuming whenever we are not producing.

So when I speak of "the space that remains" I mean precisely those margins, waste lands, the atopoi, the nowhere that is everywhere, scarcely noticed, the blind spots of capitalism, fugitive, fragile environments offering scant shelter, but nevertheless, it is shelter. These spaces are literal and actual, but are sometimes also figurative, safe spaces of the mind where we can dream and awaken rather than live the trance of the driven life within the bloated spectacle.

I forget which surrealist named his fellow surrealists 'vagabonds of the margins', I like that label a bit too much, it has something of romantic projection, but it does fit. Surrealism was always somewhat marginal, but with the increasing success of some surrealist artists and the development of 'surrealist studies' the surrealists have become increasingly marginal to the image of surrealism and that image increasingly divorced from actual surrealism.
Driven to the margins, we must inhabit those margins more fully, make them ours. Fugitive spaces, engulfed by Capital, only to re-emerge elsewhere. They always do appear again, as the utilitarian world endlessly tends towards it's own ruin. These are spaces where poetry is unshackled from the chains of usefulness, zones of freedom.