After acquiring a felony record for a crime he didn't commit, John Sibley was homeless on the streets of Chicago for six months in the late 1970s. This was a humbling and petrifying experience that taught Sibley to cope with being stripped bare of all material possessions: job, house, clothes, and the natural necessities of modern life.
Along with hundreds of other tired, underfed, poorly clothed men, women, and children, Sibley got sermons and sustenance at the Pacific Garden Mission, which sported a blinking neon crucifix and a sign that proclaimed Christ Died For Your Sins.
Pacific Garden Mission
As Sibley describes it, the Mission's interior was fetid and musky with the odor of the homeless, which included people from all walks of life. One unshaven long-haired man - who looked like a gray-skinned zombie; had a thick rope of snot running from his nose to his mouth; smelled of stale tobacco, feces and urine; and had gnats and lice jumping out of his hair - was once a math whiz at the University of Chicago grad school before he got strung out on crack.
Homeless people in a mission
The degradation of being homeless made Sibley question whether there was any meaning to his life and weakened his belief in God. As Sibley puts it: "When I gazed up at Chicago’s vast landscape of wealth, I often wondered why a just and benevolent God allowed so much misery, racism, injustice, and ghastly horrors to seep out of the abscess of modernity."
Sibley's cynicism was reinforced on Sunday mornings, when two large white vans transported homeless people from the Pacific Garden Mission to the Emanuel Healing Temple, a church in a very poor black neighborhood in Chicago.
Emanuel Healing Temple
Sibley notes: "What I saw out of the van window reminded me of images I had seen on television of impoverished Third World communities: ragged children, skeletal stray dogs, garbage-littered streets, vast stretches of empty lots, homeless people who look like refugees, gangs, addicts, demented sluts, prostitutes, pimps, hustlers, ex-felons, AIDS victims, people with gross facial deformities, open-air markets for used goods -- it was like looking at a dumping ground for the rejects of society."
Poor neighborhoods in Chicago
Inside the church, visitors from the Pacific Garden Mission were guided to a special section for the homeless, where Sibley was humiliated by "The pity, the sorrow, the anxiety as the parishioners gazed at our unsavory appearance. Their stares were eviscerating. Children pointed at us like they were at a zoo. Faces echoed dread, nausea, disdain, contempt, and sorrow. Their expressions ran the whole gaunt of extremes."
Sibley observes that the homeless, many of whom are mentally ill, "tend to be the sickest, the most ragged, the dregs that society will not accept. It is not unusual for a homeless person to be diagnosed with a cocktail of disabilities: drug addiction, alcoholism, HIV/AIDS, diabetes, tuberculosis."
Homeless people in Chicago
Mentally ill individuals may find it almost impossible to help themselves, but - for other indigents - the community can reasonably ask, 'What about the issue of personal responsibility? What about substance abuse, criminal behavior, and poor choices.'
The subject does bear scrutiny, and Sibley (partially) addresses it in a 2018 interview in 'The Black Agenda Report' when he's asked why homelessness is so ignored by the mainstream US media. Sibley responds, "I think homelessness is ignored out of the fear that the structural issues that orbit it will open up an unspeakable truth: Why do blacks represent 40% of the homeless nationwide? Nearly 25% of Black families nationwide live in poverty. Blacks in the US, no matter what their achievements, never escape the judgment of inferiority." He goes on, "Corporate media does not want to address the intersectionality of race and homelessness because these topics would expose the need for more housing, justice system reform, employment and the impact of gentrification on the urban poor. In fact, in Chicago we are concerned that Obama’s new library on the Southside will cause gentrification and price residents out."
Paucity of business ownership may also contribute to black homelessness. Sibley comments, "I wanted to show how homelessness is a product of the globalization of unregulated capitalism. Since the white flight in the ‘50s and the riots' in the ‘60s, foreign business owners, mostly Chinese and Middle-Easterners, have enriched themselves off the backs of a disenfranchised black majority on the Near Westside (of Chicago). It is a classic example of Chicago’s wealthy, educated, market-driven dominant whites maintaining their historical stranglehold on both politics and the economy by using new immigrants to chisel away at black, economic empowerment."
Sibley appreciates the assistance that missions provide to the destitute, but suggests that 'enabling' street people - and collecting federal funds to do it - actually contributes to the predicament. He writes: "It seemed to me that the mission staff had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. After all, without poverty and homelessness, there would be no Federal monies. Since all of us who wanted to stay the night (at Hesed House Mission) had to give our social security numbers, those numbers would translate into Federal dollars."
Fortunately, Sibley wasn't homeless for too long. His circumstances improved, and - after pulling himself off the streets - Sibley worked at various jobs; attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC); became an artist; was employed as a substitute teacher; and wrote several books, both fiction and non-fiction.
In the end, Sibley didn't abandon his belief in God. Drawn to philosophy, Sibley embraced the ideology of Søren Kierkegaard - a Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author. Kierkegaard believed that, "Once you hit the very bottom of existence, once you become naked in a materialistic society, you will choose God" and that "Absolute faith and the leap to God can overcome the nothingness of our lives, especially the lives of the homeless and cast-offs of society."
Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard
The impetus for writing this book was Sibley's life as a vagrant, but the author's musings touch on many additional topics. As an artist, Sibley is naturally interested in the success rate of people in his profession. He argues that racism makes it especially hard for black artists to flourish because, "It is the corporations that sponsor the blockbuster exhibitions; the critic puffs the work; the expert who authenticates it; the leisured class that buys it; the company that insures it; the man who frames and installs it”.....and all this favors white talent.
In addition, Sibley notes that "Contemporary art critics reject notions of quality as outmoded and elitist. They praise the artist for humor, good intentions, political insight -- everything other than mere artist excellence." According to Sibley, the critics made Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" - an ordinary white porcelain urinal - the most powerful work in modern art history....now worth $3.6 million. (This reminds me of an episode on the sitcom 'Designing Women' where the decorators attend an art exhibit and Julia momentarily places her purse on an empty stand. Two art connoisseurs mistake it for a work of art. 😎)
Designing Women (Season 5, Episode 18).....This is art
Marcel Duchamp's 'Fountain'
Sibley is also bewildered by Hermann Nietzsche splattering himself with animal blood; Andy Warhol’s Campbell soup cans; urinated canvases; junk art; garbage art; canned Art; Coca Cola bottles; Marilyn Monroe's lips; Damien Hirst's cow cut in half and preserved in formaldehyde.....and more.
Hermann Nietzsche painting with blood
Art made with junk
Damien Hirst's cow cut in half
By contrast, Sibley - whose art is much more conventional - thinks, "Not everything created should be considered art. I have always felt that art should be grounded in humanity, which illuminates our fellowship with nature and the billions of people on this tiny blue and green pea-shaped planet. Art should rouse our passion about the meaning of existence on spaceship earth."
Here are some examples of Sibley's art:
The Metamorphosis of Michael Jackson
Elvis Painting
The Bassist
Travon Morte
Alien Abduction
According to Sibley, he was relegated to selling his art on the street level, not because he lacked talent, but because he was shunned, ostracized, and treated like a pariah by both Chicago’s white and black art establishments. Sibley contends that, "Major black magazines only legitimize you after you get the nod from the white establishment. The bourgeois “arty” Negros in Chicago are as nauseous and fossilized as the xenophobic wealthy whites on the Gold Coast. When cultural gatekeepers will not accept you, your options dwindle."
Sibley laments, "Even though I don’t consider myself a genius -- I have wanted to create a new thing: a new art that would tear down the walls between high- and low-brow culture -- liberating my being from the McDonaldization of art." Sibley goes on to assert that New York is more amenable to artistic success than Chicago, but even there successful black artists are "flukes."
In addition to homelessness and the plight of black artists, Sibley's essays cover a diverse array of topics, including: Caravaggio and Velazquez - historic painters whose work he admires; Emilio Cruz - a New York Abstract Modernist and art teacher who strongly influenced him; Maurice Wilson - the only authentic genius among Sibley's peers; Jean Michel Basquiat - the famous New York graffiti artist; Miles Malone - Sibley's beloved uncle who acquainted him with jazz greats like John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Charlie Parker; blacks being used for medical experiments (there's a long section on this); his frightening encounter in the Hesed House (a ministry built on an Indian Burial Ground) with a hissing, crimson-eyed woman who may have been a demon or witch; and more.
Hesed House
With respect to the jazz greats, Sibley bemoans the "lost culture of Chicago's Maxwell Street" - an area that was considered a modern 'Blues Capital of the World', whose open-air market was its beating heart. Sibley writes, "At its peak, it attracted 20,000 visitors each Sunday and helped furnish a living for 1,000 vendors."
Open air markets on old Maxwell Street
Sibley goes on to say, "Even at an early age, I realized the vibrant beauty of the city. After so many years I now only recall the myth, the memory and blues suffused-karmic sacredness of that lost culture. The people of Maxwell Street worshiped “Blues Gods” or man-gods with names like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King. These man-gods created a sound that cracked our temporal world and transported us to a music netherworld. This world disengages the body from mind into a world of joy, ecstasy, and transcendence."
Musicians on old Maxwell Street
The Maxwell Street neighborhood is now the property of the University of Illinois at Chicago, to be used for student dorms. Sibley muses, "When University of Illinois students listen in their new condo dorms to English rock groups, I hope someone reminds them that Eric Clapton studied Muddy Water’s recording, and felt that a major breakthrough in his guitar playing came when he could imitate part of the blues man’s Honey Bee. He also asked Howlin’ Wolf to show the band how he played a guitar lick on Little Red Rooster and many others who tried to pluck and duplicate notes created by the Maxwell Street bluesman. It is critically important that they realize their dorms were built upon the cradle of Chicago’s most influential musical contribution to the world’s culture.“
After describing the lamentable conditions that contribute to black poverty and failure, Sibley suggests measures to improve the situation.
One proposal is the establishment of private math and science academies "so that each decade could produce young, black, applied scientists who could invent a widget that could be sold in the US and the global marketplace to totally transform impoverished, black communities." Sibley feels it's important to stress research and development in black communities and de-emphasize the emotionalism of religion.
Sibley also believes it's vital to stop "black-on-black” genocidal crime. He cites Chicago's high youth murder rates, and notes "the only way the numbers will go down is by using cyberwarfare technology: the same drones, invisible spies, counter-surveillance techniques that we used in Iraq and Afghanistan searching to find Osama Bin Laden. We need to re-program to catch the killers of innocent school children." Rather inventively, Sibley envisions "micro-drones the size of bees and flies whizzing around, videotaping unsuspecting killers, and robotic birds that can’t be distinguished from real ones - on telephone wires, school buildings, homes, and dangerous streets - to create an invisible deterrent that tells killers and thugs there is no escape: you can run, but you can’t hide."
Insect microdrone
Robot hummingbird
Though the book is somewhat unfocused, Sibley's essays are compelling and informative. This isn't a 'light read' since many of the topics are serious and disturbing, but I'd highly recommend the book to people interested in the subject matter.
Thank you to the author for a copy of the book.
Rating: 4 stars
