Being and Homelessness: Notes from an Underground Artist

John Sibley was a homeless artist living in the streets of Chicago for six months. His aim in his philosophical essays in "Being and Homelessness: Notes from an Underground Artist" is to shed light on and humanize a growing global problem. "Being and Homelessness" focuses upon the extreme anxiety and pain of being homeless as an artist, which forces him to live underground and exist in an in-authentic mode of "being-in-the-world." Sibley uses an existential lens to focus on this ghastly problem because the homeless being-in-itself is forged in rootlessness, displacement and their lives are governed by the existential D’s of death, dread and despair. After his dark night of the spirit Sibley believes that being homeless in the world, displaced, rootless, is one of the most terrifying challenges that a human being can experience. "I gazed down into the underbelly of the abyss. I am blessed that I escaped the stygian darkness of the nether world of alleys, bridge viaducts, vacant cars and subways caverns. To escape that region of dread and despair teaches you that pain and suffering are central to the human condition," Sibley writes. In these essays Sibley uses the term being-in-the-world as an experience that makes one acutely aware of that gap between consciousness and objects in the world. Being in the world makes the homeless aware of a distance, emptiness and gap, which separate them from the region of things. The essays articulate a plea to maximize this great nation’s resources, both public and private, to help the wretched existence of the homeless. "I cannot recall the exact day-to-day or month-to-month suffering I endured. But the existential feeling of dread, despair, hopelessness, wretchedness and loneliness still clings to my consciousness," Sibley said. “I write to illuminate the plight of the homeless so that when you see them in libraries, on subways, city busses, local train stations or standing in front of missions like they had stepped out of painter Edward Hopper’s canvas, you won’t judge them, as Anatole Broyard noted, as ‘creatures of the darkness, where sex, drugs, gambling and other crimes are directed against a bourgeois culture that despises them.’” The terrain is Chicago’s Loop, Near Westside and the now abolished Maxwell Street open-air market between 1989 and 2005. The homeless problems have become a Malthusian nightmare not only in Chicago but also in urban areas across the nation and the world. The large population of homeless men, women and children give most cities a Third-World Urbanscape. It would be disingenuous to state that the homeless only need shelter when the problem is much deeper than that. The Government needs to invest in creating a new Integrative Holistic Rehab Center [IHRC] to combat the multiple causes of homelessness. Sibley recognizes the need to heed the words of the homeless, Danish genius, Kierkegaard, who believed that philosophy must recognize the presence of man-in-the-world. The reality is that millions in hard times are only a lost job, a breadwinner's disability or death, a business failure, a lawsuit, a divorce, a long-term illness or natural disaster away from homelessness.