Throughout most of my life, I have known precarity. Pardon my self-indulgence in the coming passages, but I do think proper writing comes from the writer.
I want to discuss that precarity, and the nature of it. Throughout childhood, and indeed adulthood, I have never been introduced to the concept of permanence. Three times I have had to pack up my entire life in two suitcases and travel hundreds of miles, leaving my home behind, and many Earthly possessions.
When I was a teenager, I watched my dad die, and following that I was moved along from flat to flat as my mum couldn’t make rent on time. Several times we got cheated by slumlords, my childhood home, a council condominium, was sold off at a pittance that could barely cover my now departed father’s medical debt. Why? Because the new owners had friends in the local council, and managed to exploit bylaws and bureaucratic pressure to get it on the cheap.
They even got the furniture, and my own things from my childhood, and they just sold it off or threw it away.
I visited that place several years after having left, this time as an adult, and talked to those vultures who was currently trespassing in that stolen home. And I noticed one thing remaining that they hadn’t picked away from the bones of my lost childhood, and it was a pine tree in the front garden.
I was with my dad several years ago at a military expo. We’d wander the training grounds, large and lush woodland, and I’d collect shell casings, a common pastime for kids with military family. In fact, my dad used to do it at my age too, as my grandfather was a captain.
And there it was as I was going down the winding trail, a small sapling which had years later grown into a full tree.
It had been nurtured, watered, fed, sheltered from the harsh storms in early springtime. It had grown into a tree because of the care and dedication of my family. I understood then, that even in having lost this life, something remained. That something was virtue.
The second time I had to pack up my life is very personal, so I’ll skip ahead to number three, the most recent one.
Once again, I left many things behind. I even lost some very important things, including most of the few family heirlooms I had. Keepsakes from my dad’s career, my mum’s old guitar, my grandfather’s ring, the latter was because of a mixup with the packing. I only had a night or two to get ready, and it was under somewhat trying circumstances. I wasn’t so much leaving the country as I was fleeing it.
I was fleeing an abusive government who had put me into a eugenics programme, I was fleeing the consequences of my criminal past, and I was fleeing homelessness, as the crooked slumlord who had embezzled me for years decided to unlawfully evict me at the height of the Covid crisis.
And in all this fleeing, I was once more dispossessed.
But I had one thing, one possession that I treasure a great deal. It’s something I actually gained from my precarity, another pine tree if you will. A small bracelet. It’s beautifully handcrafted from black leather and bindings, and it is adorned with the three crosses representing the father, the son and the holy spirit. It journeyed all the way from Bulgaria, right unto my wrist.
It was a gift given to me by a kind woman named Catarina. She was a mother and, at times, a beggar. She would bring in handicrafts from Bulgaria, and sell them in a richer country, and once she ran out, she’d go back for more.
I knew her husband who would fish at our lake in the village, and I met a few of her relatives at times. They were very kind, and often felt a bit embarrassed about how I’d always have something to spare for them, and how all they could do was give me a smile and a thank you.
So finally she gave me this bracelet, and it has served a reminder to myself ever since. A reminder of my faith, but also, a far more universal notion, namely what true wealth actually is.
Wealth is not something measured in currency, or gold, or power or adornments. It is not found resting on the brow of a king, or in the scabbard of his gentlemen at court.
Rather, true wealth comes from virtue. From lived memories, from the things you do not possess, but rather leave behind. As each time I packed my bags and lost everything, I now see that I gained far more. Each experience, upon reflection, made me wealthy in a far more acute sense.
The wealth of friends, the wealth of happiness, the wealth of pride and accomplishment. As I examine my past I no longer feel dispossessed, I struggle to feel contempt for the gangsters who robbed me, or the police who assaulted me, the so-called doctors who tortured me, or the landlords who cheated me, all those old enemies fade into the fog of my mind.
I became far more preoccupied with truer things. With the times I put my hand on someone’s shoulder to comfort them, when I would turn to someone that everyone else pretended not to see, when I listened to stories from old sailors and convicts.
I am reminded of all the times I felt scared, and hesitant, but did what I had to do either way. All the times I felt indignant, and used, and demeaned and ashamed, and how it bestowed upon me the capacity to help others as I saw them struggle with the same circumstances.
All the clichés you read about in books about poverty. How I had to do shady dealings beneath an underpass, how I had to eat rotten meat and vegetables because I had nothing else to eat, how it drove me to steal food, how I had to stuff newspapers into my army boots in the winter, how I would scavenge public ashtrays for affordable tobacco. How the only place I could afford to go to on the weekends was either the church or the lakeside.
I was what polite society might refer to as white trash, or a hillbilly. I’d wander around in the woods wearing discounted military surplus clothing, and just play my pennywhistle or talk to other people like myself, people that would blend into the background of life. The simplicity and misery that is rural poverty.
I remember the immense psychology of such a poverty, how everything stopped existing. Every shop, every venue, every building, no poor person ever said “Oh that looks like a nice little bistro.”, it’s just more crap you need to walk past on your way to the welfare office or the supermarket. It could be the gates of hell for all I cared, just another place I had no interest in.
These days, when I live in a nation that recognises me as an equal citizen, I am no longer so immensely poor. I am afforded opportunities to participate in life and its commerce like anyone else. Suddenly I begin to notice that I am surrounded by places again.
I also begin to notice the great contrasts, as one of my favorite supermarkets cuts through what today is colloquially referred to as a barrio. The walls are covered in graffiti, the few venues that remain open are usually either directly or indirectly associated with a certain kind of customer. Bike shops, night clubs, sex shops, tattoo parlors and so on.
Obviously I pass no judgement, I know plenty of people in all those consumer demographics, and they’re ordinary people. What I do notice however is how far and few these places are in between a slew of empty windows, boarded up doors and “se vende” signs. What gets me is not a feeling of disgust or moral outrage, at least not aimed at the local populace, but rather one of sympathy.
The entire neighborhood suffered like I did, and these shut down locales was just more crap for people to walk past, to the point of where they stopped existing.
Because back when I was a teenager I used to live pretty close to that place, hence my favorite supermarket being nearby. I used to know it back when it was bustling, when my grandfather would treat us all to dinner at one of their Chinese restaurants. It was a lovely working class neighborhood, with a vibrant community mixed with immigrants and Catalonians.
And the places were actually quite ritzy. The place we’d have dinner at was decorated with statues and tapestry, it had cushioned chairs and brass trim on the counters. It was a really nice looking place, a proper working class place, where the beauty of it came from sheer effort and hard work.
It didn’t look anything like one of those sterile pretentious places for rich people with their professional decorators and colour swatches, this place had character, whomever made it did so with passion, and through careful scrutiny over several decades. You don’t get that kind of atmosphere by hiring some contractor.
They had some of the best food, and little shops, and a nightlife, plenty of work and opportunities, and people sure had better things to do in the day than writing their nicknames on walls in a million different fonts.
Although in fairness, some of the graffiti is actually very nice. There’s a beautiful portrait of a crying Palestinian woman, with a small peace sign below it. That one always hits me right at home, especially since she looks a lot like a Croatian woman I used to know who was a refugee. She was always real cheerful and considerate in spite of everything, she was a social worker who looked after the poor, one of the few social workers who I actually liked and didn’t regard as a glorified snitch with government parking privileges.
She was in it for compassion, and always tried to help make people’s lives easier. And she very much typifies the point I’m trying to make in this article.
Because that’s virtue too, both with regards to my former neighbor from Croatia, and the artist who made the portrait of the Palestinian woman, since even in their own strife they still turn their heads to others. You don’t see that kind of beauty in high street art galleries let me tell you.
And I think some of the things I have detailed here, some of my recollections and thoughts, is the makeup of what liberals call a “hardliner.” A hardline communist is someone who cannot be bribed, or threatened, or intimidated. A hardline communist does not cave to loss of prestige or career or livelihood or personal freedom, they’re in it for the real thing.
To be branded a hardliner by the CIA, is to be marked for death.
And I think hardline communists are some of the wealthiest people in the world, because they have the wealth of virtue. No matter how dispossessed you become, no matter the loss, you will always be immensely rich.
And this is the only kind of wealth that may bring happiness. The reason why a hardliner is a hardliner is because of this stoicism, because no matter how dispossessed, how punished, how demeaned and oppressed, there is always happiness.
There is always a reason to smile, even if it is simply a smile of defiance, even if it is simply and expression of Sartre’s absolute freedom, even if such a smile is only meant to frustrate your antagonists, you still always smile.
The path to becoming a hardliner, a real communist, begins with Stoicism, and learning how to pursue virtue and finding real faith. Communism is not rational, no sacrifice ever is, no one ever gave their life for a rational cause. Rationality is cowardice, and self-preservation, no hero is ever rational.
Communism rather delves into the murky waters of virtue, where madness and beauty swirl together into a dance that paints itself like a nebula on the starry skies of history. Communism is what happens when the poor start reading books, that is when a Stoic is born.
