The Aesthetics Of Wealth
I recently asked a student of mine, an Israeli gentleman, what wealth in his city looked like to him. He responded with a question: ‘A wealthy man is a man with freedom… is a man really wealthy if he works too hard to spend his money?’ Point taken.
‘But,’ I replied, ‘I feel like that sort of freedom isn’t always a choice. Don’t other factors influence how we have to spend our money, and how we choose to spend our money?’
He paused. ‘In different countries, wealth looks different and that depends on many things… history, culture, the government, the economy – what is important to us in Israel, may not be so important to you in England…’ A few weeks before the pandemic rooted itself in the UK, I had returned home from Cape Town. My migrating heart has drawn unprovoked comparisons between home and this new home; the most obvious has been how wealth is made manifest in the life of two international capitals. I’ve been considering a particularly pressing question: is there a correlation between the aesthetics of wealth and the ability to connect to community in these two Trojan cities?
At six-thirty a.m. in the wake of a lockdown, London is asleep. Its houses stand like sturdy soldiers, shielded by closed curtains, brick walls and roses. My running route winds through these formations for four-and-a-half miles. I like this hour. I don’t feel guilty for eyeing the driveways because no one is watching. Tangled between the stifling houses, squashed yards, countless bins, and the tightness of everything, there is a culture of catch and release: something new is bought, the thing that it replaces is passed on, discarded to waist-high walls for those who pass by to help themselves. And so thrown in with the chaos of London residentials are boxes and boxes of anecdotal prompts to biographies of those living behind the houses, strewn down driveways and littering the pavements. A bassinet filled with frayed and stained toys: the kids are growing up. Old furniture: new money. Lifeless cars recycled for extra storage space.
And a piano.
Tangled in the weeds growing in front of the door, this stripped down upright piano blends in with the bricks as though it has always been part of the wall. It’s missing keys, the strings are exposed, it’s beautifully bare and sad and I can’t, for the life of me, understand how it has been neglected for so long. I scan the front door for any clues to this musical mystery, but all I find is chipped paint and an overgrown garden – the background and focal piece in perfect harmony. Here is a skeleton of what-once-was-beautiful rotting, and a wave of unsettling nostalgia pulls me back out to South Africa, to the hope I had in a city I thought held my future.
I was 18 when I decided to move to Cape Town. My journal was splashed with photographs of the Cape Town Wheel, old parliament buildings, and the red hop-on hop-off tour busses: all things emblematic of the Mother City. Pinned to the Atlantic shore, this gorgeous port is the epicentre of South Africa’s past and present.
You can stand at any coordinate and be told the story of what once was. The narrative can be traced from the commemorative monuments nearby, or the spatial distortion and inequality that lies everywhere, or the rough sleepers, or the residential areas – Cape Town’s colonial history is relentlessly haunting. I lived on Bollihope Crescent. Our street was probably 200 metres long and lay perpendicular to the N2: South Africa’s longest highway. An English professor of mine, Hedley Twidle, once traced the interstate from the city centre to Cape Town International Airport – a small fraction in the 1400 mile-long road. When he spoke of this literary adventure, I thought it quite odd. Given the notoriety of the gangs in the areas that the N2 passes through, it was possibly life-threatening.
When undergoing such a journey, it is difficult not to note the abject poverty against the backdrop of Gatsby-like wealth of Cape Town’s affluence. Any aerial view might give you the impression that the city thrives. However, in the words of Professor Twidle: ‘Creating word paintings of poverty set against wealth – the problem is not that it’s not true. The problem is that it’s too easy.’ Which brings us back to Bollihope. It branched out from a student-centred middle-to-upper class neighbourhood and meandered to Main Road, where the side of the Shoprite grocery store housed the homeless and often smelled of urine. Every house on that street, in that suburb, in that city, was guarded with thick concrete walls so high that I could only imagine what lay behind them. No backyard peaks. No boxes out on the street. If you could afford the electric fencing to keep the city out of your backyard, you installed it. Throughout my three years on that street, I watched the crime rate increase at the same pace as the ever-growing walls. The air of distrust was so pungent; as though everyone had something to hide. If anyone was eyeing what was behind the walls, it wasn’t for answers to anecdotal mysteries, it was probably because you had something someone else didn’t.
Naturally this makes the South African public suspicious. A country that is well acquainted with historical theft is shifty and quick to protect what little it owns. The consequences of this is evident in a scope of habits: we don’t talk to strangers, we don’t know our neighbours, and we don’t leave out our stripped and unprotected pianos.
I was 21 when I decided to move to London. I stood on London Bridge with my mother, both of us tourists looking out across the Thames, dazzled by the glassy buildings, the cathedrals, the streams of possibilities. Until I migrated, my phone was constantly redecorated with tumblr wallpapers of the city’s landmarks: the London Eye, Westminster and red buses.
However, after living in this city for five months, the dazzling veneer is stripping away and I have been having a hard time adjusting. Where Cape Town exists in extremes, London lives in consistencies, parading a more gradual spectrum between the rich and the poor. But if we pan out from London Bridge, and head to the outskirts of Zone 3, there is something unnerving lurking in the residential areas. What did my mother do with the things I grew out of? She kept them. What did I do with things that were broken? I fixed them. So is it just an outsider’s perspective to notice how quick London is to catch and release? When Londoners grow tired of something, they exchange it. When something cannot be fixed, they toss it to the pavement and the Amazon guy brings something shinier and newer. History, culture, the government, the economy – the money of this city has enough bounty to strip away and replace altogether. And while this may have encouraged a community that is open and connected, does it teach us to look after what we already have? I still don’t know.
Perhaps every city has its pavement pianos. Wherever we go, there will always be a façade that masks the rotting reality of society underneath. I look at the piano that has been hauled to the curb and I hold onto the hope of the life it once had. In one way or another, it is moulding the future of its next destination, whether that means complete demolition, or restoration. Whatever the journey, the investment that will be pumped into it might not be entirely wasted. London might not be the dream that its aesthetics sold me - neither was Cape Town - but there’s still a possibility to revive that. I choose not to trade this one in. So I keep running, leaving behind the bare and vulnerable piano to await its next destination.
Written by Dan Champ
In March, I moved to London with the intention of kicking off a career in journalism; however Covid happened. Now I am an Online English teacher who travels vicariously through my students.