Austin Downtown Arts Magazine

Essays/Non-fiction

Austin does not exist

by Paul Geller

So where have I been living the past four months? There is a map of Texas in front of me, with a dot marked "Austin." Technically, that's the place where I have been. However, it is far more correct to say that I have been living in a figment of the imagination, a cloud that hovers over the edge of the Hill Country, a cloud that's not connected to any real geographical place. The Austin I know, the qualities that make it different from other cities across America, they're all part of an old, collective dream. But dreams are volatile, they can be imagined elsewhere. That's why the Austin I know does not really exist.

I come from a Belgian town called Leuven. Eighteen miles to the west lies Brussels, the Belgian capital. Brussels is dirty. Brussels is vulgar, and often ugly. Brussels doesn't care about visitors. It doesn't even brag about itself like, for instance, New York, because unlike NYC, it doesn't give a damn about your opinion. Brussels is unsettling. On a hot summer day, the tension in the neighborhoods is palpable. Brussels is a battlefield, where the Germanic and the Romance world have been fighting for cultural and political supremacy ever since the Roman legions, 2000 years ago, stopped their advance just south of Brussels. Brussels is one of the great cities.

Austin is the opposite of Brussels: a small, old town with a lot of new money and a big university. Because it only exists as a dream, it is an easy place to live. It has plenty of bars and cafes, good food, good movies, and a relatively enlightened city council. You meet lots of very well educated people, conversations are interesting, and contacts usually are oddly stimulating. Judgments are rare. The panhandlers and the bag ladies are in general non-aggressive, friendly even. The dream of Austin is a very particular dream, a dream of the sixties come true. In the sixties, people all over the Western World suddenly realized there was an enormous creative and artistic potential in them that was waiting to be realized. Before that period, the Artist often was a slightly suspect figure, somebody with a bohemian lifestyle that decent folk tended to avoid. Now, being an artist, and living the life of an artist, is a respectable and enviable occupation. Of course, very few people ever produce anything with lasting artistic value. However, Austin has taken this dream one step further: you can find there all the amenities of the bohemian lifestyle, without actually having to be an artist, and without feeling threatened.

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Living in a dream is an uncanny experience. In Austin, I've often felt the vertigo of living in a cloud, in a world that is not rooted in a real place. Countless times I've looked around in a theater or at an exhibition, searching for something that rarely penetrates the dream: Engaged Austinites. I mean people who are somehow rooted in the real sorld, businessmen and professional women, teachers, workers, the kind of "cultural bourgeoisie" that really cares about the real Austin, the kind of open-minded bourgeoisie that is the backbone of every authentic and culturally interesting city.

I also rarely saw the kind of counterculture that invariably co-exists with an opinionated and cultured middle class, and that creates the tension that artistic achievement thrives on. This counterculture would have a hard time here, because dreams don't fancy real tensions, and anyhow, in a dream anything goes, so the idea of a true and dangerous counterculture is a bit silly in Austin.

Austin is fascinating. There are not that many places on earth were dreams have come true. How long is it going to last? Young, energetic, intelligent and well paid women and men are moving in droves to Austin. Typically, they are software engineers, entrepreneurs, and not artists. However, many of them are attracted by the possibility of living the bohemian life. Are they going to kill the dream? Already, old-time dreamers, people who have been living here for, say, five years, are complaining that the new money is killing 'the spirit'. Rents are going up, neighborhoods are gentrified, and there are traffic jams. Is the dream slowly being strangled? And, more interestingly, would that be a terrible thing? People will start to leave Austin, maybe after they've studied here a couple of years, and they will take their part of the dream with them. Maybe they will find another place that does not really exist, so that they can live another collective dream. And maybe, maybe some will discover that living in a real place is not that bad.

It was a dream to live here. I do not know if I would like to live here. It is probably time to go back to Belgium.

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