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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