street life
autumbled
Autumn in Berlin and the grimy guy begging outside our supermarket is absorbed in a book. When I come home he’s set it down to thank a woman who dropped some coins into his smashed paper cup. It is Sylvia Plath.
I prefer him to the punker dude who spreads himself with a large dog either side right in front of the sliding doors, then leans far across the pavement to make elaborate drawings in chalk which people then have to step around. His begging seems to me a form of veiled aggression. It is a set-up that forces compliance on every passerby, lest we tread on his art.
The two months I was away I compared the daily forecasts and found Brisbane, in its winter, was invariably a degree or two warmer than here. Summer has been short and late. Just last week on the canalside two boys in the late sun were playing chess. These are the last days, and it will be so cold til June next year we will see nothing of each other but our faces.
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Begging IS a form of aggression as it happens here – an angry insistence that people who are often barely making it are somehow “richer”. Displacement of class struggle :(
Maybe we’ve had very different experiences. Lately, I spend more time in the S-bahn than anywhere else in the city and the trend is unshakable: people riding home from work, often tired, most often there is no way of telling what class they are in, but it is very safe to assume that many of them are barely making ends meet or dealing with problems not unlike those of the beggar. And then there is all this abuse going their way. The number of times I’ve observed people being shouted at for refusing money or being in that role myself – head to toe, with the beggar banging on doors and bars, making shit up about me, telling a story of my/his/her EVIL. Not everyone can reply to that. I, for one, was utterly frozen in disbelief, sure that my truth (that I had 4 euros till the end of the month) wouldn’t be believed because I was wearing clean clothes. This was perhaps the most extreme case and, in fact, nobody had much to say on the matter in the train, the beggar becoming more and more aggressive in their alienation. A typical case is people begging for money, being offered food (because one may have a bag with groceries and no cash) and spitting/swearing at you.
My point isn’t that “they” don’t suffer or that there isn’t a divide about which “we” (people who do buy 3 euro coffees on occasion) are in denial from time to time, refusing someone on a basis of some judgment about their character or the number of people we have given to on the given year. Nor am I denying that the position of begging is not one that people chose for fun and most often they are so much in need that I/you may utterly lack that frame of reference. My point is that the aggression, when it happens (and I have seen it happen a lot) is dispaced and often projected on the precariat – people, precariously employed or allowed into the country on substantially lower welfare rights (than the beggar often) or too lost (/”mentally ill”) in this maze to take matters in their own hands. They suffer from the same structural inequalities that produce the beggar and they are NOT to blame.
Funny story about street musicians (although I generally agree with your point there, but think this is better done in Ukraine where the restaurant often give the tip to musicians (and they would be offended to take from the table), being able to assess their clientele better than the musician may be): there is a guy (old guy) in Berlin who walks train to train with some kind of a santur and just bags randomly on it, pulling the same kind of face that ‘real’ musicians do on trains, but doing complete bullshit and (he knows it, I sense :D)) I’ve never seen anyone give him money but he does it anyway and I take it to be the best piece of art I’ve seen in a while – a true comment on 99% of music you would hear performed on a train here and only a slight exaggeration of how annoying it actually is to have live music of not-your-choosing in a moving shoebox.
Well, I also see plenty of people who approach human-to-human, who are asking honestly. I see plenty of people who *are* richer, turning their faces away when someone is in need.
It must feel lonely to pass a cafe where people are sitting in the sun spending three euros on a coffee when you have nothing. But if they turn you down, I don’t feel that entitles you to stand glowering intimidatingly over their table for minutes on end.
Same with those hired salespeople who bounce into the path saying, Care to help the environment today? care to help children? The aggression lies in the phrasing of the question, intended to take away our ability to say no.
On the other hand Europeans so often astound me with their callousness. To sit in an outdoor restaurant being served and buying a meal, then to not bother responding to a musician who has livened up the atmosphere and now comes round humbly asking for small change is another form of aggression and entitlement, and it’s exercised from a position of more power.