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[thehappyhomecook]

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[handshakemedia]

You are Entering Bohemia

Medlar Lucan's Recipe from the Decadent Kitchen of Life

Stolen from The Chap Magazine. Issue 26. Summer 2005: 25-27. Print.

The bohemian ideal of living—free, spontaneous, irresponsible—is enjoying a new and exciting vogue among people of taste. To salute this glittering social development, I should like to provide you with the Twelve Commandments of the Bohemian Life.

1. BE POOR—GLAMOROUSLY

This does not mean "have no money." It means "have money, but spend it irresponsibly," so that you never have enough for necessities, only for luxuries. Your rent money, set carefully aside in a cocoa tin, should be spent on beer or champagne. Avoid such things as pension schemes, mortgages, insurance policies, savings, cash ISAs, etc., like the plague. Live simply but extravagantly. Get hold of a private income if you can.

2. BE ARTISTIC

This you can do in several ways. Here they are in ascending order of difficulty.

The easiest way is to look like an artist. Dress the part: have messy hair, paint-splattered shoes, use no knickers, wear a jacket next to your bare skin. If you wear a shirt, hang it out of your trousers. If you have a vest, wear it instead of a shirt. Your home should be a ruined palace. If you can't manage that, a squat or a farmhouse will do. Be stylish with the poorest of materials.

A slightly harder option is to be an artist. This used to involve renting a studio, buying a smock and beret, paints, canvases, bottles of turpentine, an easel, etc. Today it's much cheaper, you just need a "concept," the more nebulous the better.

Hardest of all is to be a work of art yourself: a dandy, a fop, a living sculpture. This requires extraordinary self-discipline. It is not for the faint-hearted. Every volt of your spiritual energy must be projected onto the surface of things, not a glimpse of the soul must appear—except in the very fact of its invisibility. This process of distillation is not unlike that which goes into the production of the finest vodka.

3. BE DRUNK

Be drunk on booze, ideas, hashish (highly recommended by Charles Baudelaire, the Prince of Bohemians), no matter what. Drunkenness should be regarded as the default state of consciousness. If you can't be drunk, be hungover. This will help you with all the other commandments. It is an essential part of being artistic.

4. BE DISORDERLY

This is fundamental. Be hugely disorganized. In all things. Your appearance, personal habits, the storage of your possessions. Cultivate mess. Mess is creative. It must have no limits. Keep your food, papers, music, books, clothes, drink, face creams, etc. in the same undifferentiated heap, so that you find bits of last week's curry in your copy of Crime and Punishment, and all your CDs are smeared with marmalade, pate, or caviar. Never wash up, never tidy up, never do any cleaning. You must constantly lose things. You must never repair anything. If it's broke, don't fix it.

5. BE YOUNG

This has nothing to do with physical age. It is quite possible to be 20 and have the mental habits of a 60 year-old. Or vice versa. It is all a question of mentality. Free your mind. Experiment. Improvise. Take chances. Trust to luck, charm, and glamour to get you through. You must also prepare to die young rather than succumb to a tedious decline into age and responsibility.

6. BE SOCIABLE

Spend your days in cafés, laughing at people who go to work. Be surrounded by brilliant friends. Treat life as a party.

7. BE AN ANARCHIST

For the bohemian, authority exists for just one purpose—to be mocked, subverted, and despised. The State is merely ridiculous. So are all lawyers, bankers, financiers, and politicians. Rules are for the unimaginative, the dull, the mediocre. Mistrust all forms of organization. Organization is death.

8. BE SPONTANEOUS

Make no plans except wild ones. Do everything on the spur of the moment. Damn the consequences. Be unpredictable and unreliable. Break promises. If necessary, make a few promises solely in order to break them. It will cure you of the belief—forged in childhood—that promises are things to be kept.

9. BE PROMISCUOUS

Rove and forage like a mountain goat—not just in your sexual behavior (which is part of spontaneity), but also in food, friends, philosophy, all areas. Dabble in Zen Buddhism and Garbage Theory. Eat unusual foods and combinations of food; follow Joe Orton's example—have sardines with rice pudding and jam. For bohemian sex, mix up romance and cynicism, beauty and squalor. The 19th Century novelist Gustave Flaubert, as a law student in Paris, enjoyed having sex in brothels "with a cigar in his teeth." Always bring a touch of vaudeville to it.

10. BE UNIQUE

Avoid fashion! Either be behind the times or ahead of them; even better, miles out to the side. Do what others only dream of doing, or would dream of if they had the courage. Remember that glamour comes not from what famous people do, but from your own mysterious inner light.

11. STUDY THE LIVES OF THE GREAT BOHEMIANS

Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, D.H. Lawrence, Augustus John, Joe Orton, Otto Gross, St. Simeon Stylites (who lived on top of a pillar in Syria). These are the pioneers. Pick up tips from them. Be eclectic, inconsistent, experimental—but there's no need to reinvent the wheel.

12. DISREGARD ALL RULES AND COMMANDMENTS, INCLUDING THE ABOVE

You cannot be unique if you pay attention to rules, or care too much about what other people think. So do it your own way. There is no "should and shouldn't," only what is.

In the words that Winston Churchill used to mutter to himself before going to sleep each night, "Bugger everybody."