The Ghosts in the Benches / Public Therapy

Most of them had, and have lost. Most don't exactly choose to spend the gold nights sleeping on hard iron benches. These are usually very troubled people, product of an environment, an economy, a society. Guilty perhaps of weaknesses and terrible decisions, just like the rest of us.

Can you imagine not having an anchor or a place to rest your head? On the cold mornings some of the homeless in Santa Monica hide behind sheets that cover them from head to toe, faceless ghosts emerging from this bright urban hell. Some I can tell are remnants of a lifetime of drug abuse, probably combined with an afflicted psyche predisposed to addiction. Some might have been born with mental problems inherited genetically and triggered by trauma. Some of their personalities have been hardened by a lifetime of rejection. Some are prejudiced, racist, violent and wouldn't have been decent people with all the support in the world, but so are many blue and white collar people who don't endure these conditions.

There are indeed many things that differentiate the successful professionals jogging early in the morning from the poor souls they try to avoid as they run past the benches. I admit I too cringe at the foul stench of urine that permeates some of these poor homeless people. They often have no place to relieve themselves, no place to get to, nor a reason to try. I often wonder what these people, exhausted after attempting to sleep upright on these cold metal chairs, think of all the joggers who come from their beachfront houses to run half-naked in the cold, sweating with a purpose. Some of those runners might be busy, enterprising people, who will themselves out of bed not only to work hard everyday but also in the noble pursuit of good health. Some of them might simply be too concerned with how they look. But what if some of them weren't so different from some of those homeless sitting so close, yet so far away? A wrong turn, a bad choice, a surprising chain of events... Could this make all the difference?

What if someone had the same genetic psychological predisposition but was lucky enough not to fall into certain environment, certain relationship or suffer a particular trigger during their lifetime? If that one person hadn't been abused, if that one person hadn't gotten into drugs, if those drugs or alcohol hadn't stimulated certain brain chemicals developing certain pathology... Could that homeless person never had that breakdown from which he or she couldn't recover? Could he now be the snotty one running in his trousers, sweating his or her ass off after a comfortable good night's sleep?

Obviously, the wealthy live with their pathologies, illnesses and heartbreaks too. Some are just as addicted and unhappy as the "wretched bums" on the street. Perhaps in such cases, more of their position in life can be attributed to chance. Maybe coming from a wealthier family or

having been endowed with certain talents or killer instinct made all the difference. Or it could have been a simple matter of luck. I bet in some rare cases it could have even been narrowed down to a precise moment in their lives in which it could have easily gone either way.

These intricacies between "luck", fate and chance fuel a story I'm working on. It plays it out in a similar social context, deals with time paradoxes and delves into the concepts of free will, prejudice and xenophobia. All I feel I can do is to sit down and try to make sense of the questions that plague me. I am not pretentious or dogmatic enough to think that I will achieve a clear-cut answer to these problems, there might be none, or several, or I might not be capable, and art is certainly no the place for clear-cut answers. Maybe questions. Maybe the answers you bring to the table. All I hope to do by bringing something up into our anonymous conversation is expressing what rages inside me in the hopes that it can offer you a platform for the exploration of your own feelings. A space where you might arrive at some insight of your own.

I think art is the least dogmatic of enterprises. I can appreciate science so much because it holds onto answers only as long as they are in some way practical and it's ready to release them as soon as something else proves more useful or sensical. It is always open to rebuttal, always moving and progressing. Art, although not as pragmatic and instantly useful, does offer an even more open canvas to free exploration, where the ideas we put forward are always open and encourage interpretation and reinterpretation, even by the artists. These ideas are fluid and adaptable, and because so little is expected from us in terms of strict adherence or usefulness to the real world, we are extremely free to create even far-fetched concepts. Some of these have, in rare cases, even be of inspiration to more useful endeavors.

But art doesn't arise with that purpose. In my case it arises, like some inventions, out of a need, a necessity. Most of the time it's a personal, emotional need. I think that's true of the mediocre and the better artists too. Looking back at the work of great art and its depiction of human struggles, follies and aspirations across the ages, we can chart the evolution of the human psyche. Art history, it seems to me, is the history of human consciousness, our unconscious and our emotional life.

Maybe what artists do is go through therapy in public, but when successful it's a therapy so honest and symbolic that it can offer some relief or insight not only to the artist but also to those in the audience who feel connected in some way, those of us who hear a song that stirs true feelings, or find a book that knows our secrets.