Isolation and Distance

  What an extraordinary state we find ourselves in: obliged to stay at home, avoid others (even family members we don't live with), cancel all social engagements and visits. The places we may like to go out to, moreover, are closed until further notice. Most of us are "working remotely" (or not remotely working) while at the same time juggling childcare because the schools and nurseries are closed (I am awkwardly typing this, for example, with my one-year old son asleep in my arms) . This sounds like something of a "nightmare situation" for many ie. those who become easily bored by sitting at home, who enjoy socialising and going out to the pub, gym or shopping-centre, even those who prefer the banter and busyness of the work-place to time spent indoors.
    Yet for most writers "self-isolating" is a necessary way of life and for some, even, a kind of prolonged spiritual discipline (Beckett wrote of art as "the apotheosis of solitude"). As for social distancing, I feel like my life-long instinctive unsociableness and avoidance of company may at last be interpreted as something other than the weird, rude behaviour of a boring loner. It may be one of the effects of aging and is almost certainly also to do with having a young family at home and moving from London to a quiet Home Counties town, but in recent years I have felt less and less temptation to go out anyway - giving up drinking this year (at least thus far) seems like letting go of one of the last few incentives to heading out to pubs or attending social events. So this governmental edict seems to ratify the direction I was veering towards anyway, and will hopefully also permit me to recover a healthier balance between writing/study time and family time than that toad work squatting on my life usually allows.
    But before I become too self-congratulatory, I should remember we are facing an unprecedented public health crisis and this should not be regarded as a holiday of any kind. Many more lives will certainly be lost and of course we should all be taking the strategies of isolation and distancing seriously. The shortage of food and basic amenities like toilet-roll in our supermarkets precipitated by selfish panic-buying is also a growing concern. When I went into town the other morning at about 8am, the shelves of the two main supermarkets were already mostly bare and I came back with a few random items (eg. poppadoms and croissants) rather than the essentials on our list, feeling like I'd been on one of those scavenging missions the characters in The Walking Dead used to go on when the series was still watchable. Because I'd left the house in a rush without showering I likened myself to scuzzy old Darryl coming home with his crossbow over one shoulder and a dirty hessian bag containing a few tins of indeterminate food-stuffs over the other. (Fortunately I didn't encounter any zombies on the high-street, although maybe these were the shambling, unthinking hordes who had already stripped the shelves.)
    From a political viewpoint, this sudden sense of blind panic and Dad's Army unpreparedness seems to reflect the nation's dawning realisation that this is a monumental crisis for a societal infrastructure which, after ten year's of swingeing austerity-cuts and siphoning of public resources into the hedge funds of affluent Tory-donors, was already to a large extent at crisis-point; chiefly of course the NHS and social care but also in the deregulated bear garden of the gig economy. We were told that the "flexible" freelance job-market was the way forward but for all those hundreds of thousands of workers living a more or less hand-to-mouth existence each month (many poets, writers, musicians and other artists among them) and whose income has just evaporated overnight, its hard to see how the government is going to be able to underwrite or recompense all their lost earnings.
   But if this period of lockdown forces us to revaluate the fragility of our current social and economic conditions, as well as making us understand the value of living on less, being less greedy and choice-driven in what we buy and sharing with our neighbours when we can (especially the more vulnerable and less fortunate members of our communities), we may look back on it as a turning-point, an opportunity to move beyond the abysmal state of anguished schism and discord which the debate over Brexit landed us in. Brexit is now relegated to the ridiculous waste of energy and rhetorical bickering it always was, and rightly so: we have more fundamental issues to confront now, like working together to ensure our own and each other's safety at this precarious time.
   "Almost all our unhappiness comes from from not knowing how to sit alone in our rooms", Pascal suggested (and I love that qualifying "almost" at the beginning). Thrown back on our own resources and own company by forces outside our control, shouldn't we now mine the positives of this situation and use this time to our best advantage by catching up on all the long-put-off writing-projects, the fat novels we started reading but abandoned, the classic movies and "must see" series we never got round to? The internet is suddenly bristling with suggestions and offers of creative activities which can help us use our downtime wisely and productively. Once we have got through this dreadful situation, let's hope we can look back on this as a time of opportunity and endeavour rather than a privation.

Tranquil Labyrinth

 In a world which seems to be spinning further off its axis every time you turn on the news and the fabric of our society feels like its coming apart at the seams, with many high streets degenerating into rows of charity shops, thrift stores and boarded-up facades (to the colossal indifference of our equally derelict MPs), one takes refuge in simple, tactile pleasures. 
    What a relief, for example, to come across an independent bookshop on a high-street in Hertfordshire which not only has new, discounted and secondhand books but also an adjoining record shop on one side and its own separate coffee shop on the other side: the amazing David's in Letchworth Garden City. I had been there twice before and had been impressed enough without realising that there's also an upstairs to the bookshop, a tranquil labyrinth of well-stocked secondhand shelves that could restore the sanity of the most Brexit-fatigued, world-weary soul.

Heap of Broken Images

      

The triggering of Article 50 last week was widely spoken of as an "historical event", an example of that common doxological trope that positions national events involving soi-disant important dignitaries as "history in the making" and the events and actions of ordinary people as mere un-newsworthy flux ( I'm reminded of the line from In the Cave of Suicession: "It was not a day that changed his life but it was a day in the change of his life".)
    One of the least egalitarian men in Britain, Jacob Rees-Mogg, compounded this fallacy by working himself into such a lather on March 29th that he actually believed that comparing Teresa May to Elizabeth 1 ("a modern-day Gloriana") represented a meaningful analogy and invoking Sir Francis Drake (and by metonymic extension the Spanish Armada, in the same week that other Tories had waxed gung-ho about fighting to keep Gibraltar from post-Brexit Spanish control) was something other than public school-boy wooden-sabre-rattling of a particularly embarrassing kind.
   Although at the current rate of ill-planning, lack of foresight and high-handed ineptitude in diplomacy (as though when against all logic you choose to divorce someone you get to dictate all the terms and settlements) Brexit may never actually come to pass, March 29th will be come to be remembered as momentous for all the wrong reasons. It's the lack of a sense of historical context among Euro-sceptics which is so damning, leaving them blind to the importance of us remaining part of that European (and world) culture whose influence has given us almost all that is valuable and enduring in what passes for own cultural heritage. The essence of our traditions - the legacy not only of being a small, mercantile island but also of being the most voracious colonial expansionists of all time - is that they are largely an engrained palimpsest of other borrowings and plunderings, rather like Barthes' image of the text as textile, inwoven from other intertexts. What would we have left - in literature, art, music, cuisine - if we were really to remove all the elements we haven't over many centuries imitated, absorbed or pillaged from other cultures? Surely it would amount to very little: The World According to Jeremy Clarkson, the Wurzels' Greatest Hits and the fry-up breakfast, perhaps?
    And yet it's one of the abiding strategies of not just the political Right but of liberal humanism in the arts to promote a vision of British history and tradition that manages to subsume influences from extraneous sources as though they were both nationalised and naturalised. In his fascinating study The Origins of Modernism (1994), Stan Smith explores how Eliot, Pound and Yeats all participated in this rhetorical process within their poetry, often at odds with the iconoclastic vigour of their engagements with language and form.
   Especially relevant here is Smith's identification of what Eliot saw as the crisis overtaking Europe after the First World War as seminal to the thematic currents of The Waste Land, showing how even at this early stage Eliot's ideological stance was rearguard and xenophobe:
   "What The Waste Land laments is the loss of that cultural-political homogeneity which Eliot was to advocate in his lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933, published as After Strange Gods. Eliot's desiderata here consciously spell out the implications of 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' and they identify precisely what is absent from the modern waste land: 'at least some recollection of a "tradition" such as the influx of foreign populations has almost effaced'; 'the re-establishment of a native culture only possible for a people less industrialised and less invaded by foreign races'.
   Like Eliot's notional period prior to "dissociation of sensibility", was there ever really a time of "cultural-political homogeneity" to harp back to, any more than the immigration-free, closed-bordered Albion many Brexiteers deludedly pine for? In its stark, anxious vision of the fracturing of European culture and history, fragments of which the macaronic text "shores up against its ruin" - another palimpsest of borrowings - perhaps The Waste Land will ironically come to seem one of the prescient poems of our times:
  "The poem speaks not of reconstruction and restoration but of disintegration and decay, emerging from that moment in which time and space, history and geography, were rewritten and redrawn at Versailles, and post-war frontiers fabricated new and factitious 'organic wholes' and instant national traditions out of Europe's heap of broken images".

  
  
  

Brexit Blues

  While England behaves like a spoilt obnoxious child who refuses to participate in interactions of mutual benefit both to themselves and their immediate neighbours, it's already becoming clear that the gloomiest prognostications from the Remain camp have come true and we are spiralling towards a disaster which is economic, ideological and cultural all at once. The most dismaying phenomenon to observe in the last few days is that incidents of xenophobic hate-crime have already escalated, authorised by the opportunistic rhetoric of the Brexiteers as both major parties implode: at the moment our only hope is in the bankrupt disarray of politicians whom extremity and recession will force into either calling a second referendum or indefinitely stalling the calamitous break-up no-one really wants except venomous bigots like Farage, Nuttall and the madman who murdered Jo Cox.