And that moment when the bird sings very close / To the music of what happens
- Seamus Heaney
Photograph: in an indigo twilight sky a mid-month crescent moon sits suspended between silhouetted magnolia branches budded in states of early to mid-bloom
Spring is properly convincing now, some days more like early summer. The hazy air at this time of year is for me an index of other places: Beijing, Northern California, and East London. I’m still in Edinburgh but it’s from a different flat that I write to you this month. I haven’t had a home base for a while, instead it’s been strings of temporary accommodation. While we wait for access to vaccination, access to the sealable place of a house serves as the protective factor against infection, and so to have a proto-‘vaccine’ at all feels good and fine. It’s not really the transience between places that bothers me as much as the administration that surrounds it. The searches, the requests, the emails, the waiting and the waiting lists, the adoption of the model tone of gratitude and goodness (with the self-superlative, aim-to-please implication that others seeking this shelter might not be so grateful or so good, the competition baked in, ever-present), and the pledge to at all times be the defender of the cosmetic integrity and ongoing profitability of someone’s property; the housekeeper that happens to pay the mortgage yet leaves with nothing, preferably without leaving even a single trace.
The transience does bother me inasmuch as I’d like to be able to borrow a physical book from a library and I’d like to join or start a food co-op and I’d like to know my neighbours in a way that counts - especially the ones that have to live as housekeepers to grow the wealth asset of another. I do still find it hard to say goodbye to places. Even entering as I do without expectation of permanent occupancy, the pang of separation arrives anyway. I run my hand along each wall by way of farewell, saying thank you to the house itself because, regardless of its asset status, it seems to me to be a being. And I do think about my leaving meaning never seeing the fence-hopping cats again, nor the neighbouring children (always easier to get to know than the adults, maybe that’s the old school teacher in me), nor the full expression of the season-turning remit of the leaves on the street. I accidentally let the grass in the window planter box die at the last place but brought it back to life in time to hand it back to the owner or hand it over to the next keeper. No one else will know about that particular small brush with death over the worst winter we’ve known.
When I first arrived in the city the tenement buildings seemed grim and impenetrable, huge-bricked repetitions designed to confuse the newcomer, rendering the streets indistinguishable. But the longer I stayed the more I felt the benefit of all the solid sameness. Of course each street did yield its own variations, but I also became buoyed by the quiet confidence that most people in the area were living in roughly similar conditions. Give or take some nicer aspect or moneyed remodel, the one-bedroom flat I was staying in would have the same one or two big windows and thick walls as the others in the building, and on the street, and in the neighbourhood. Their inhabitants would likely also have something beautiful and something ugly to look at outside. They would be unlikely to have a car and they would be likely to do small shops at the nearby metro-sized supermarkets, paycheck to paycheck or armload to armload. When I began to make small talk with people in the park I knew that this was their big surrogate garden, too. People brought rugs and books, bluetooth speakers and yellow cans, kids and dogs or just themselves, and they all occupied the green with the common ease of those who are thoroughly at home.
There is a house on the other side of the park that usually looks empty of life. The large slabs of grey granite are meant to be softened by the flower beds, I suppose, but the fussy effect of the precise planting is every bit as severe as the stone. Last week, for the first time, I saw the owners in the garden. They were sitting on fold-out chairs that they had brought down to the bottom of the huge lawn and they were reading newspapers together, a flask of tea between them. It looked nice. But they were behind a wall. I felt claustrophobic looking at the scene, and experienced a mean little burst of mirth: just over the road from their walled garden was the park, didn’t they know? Hadn’t they heard about the common ease that the rest of us enjoyed over there, together? The people with private gardens have begun to seem more strange than ever. From the perspective of a fourteen month-long dependency on shared greens, I find it hard to imagine how I would ever fit back into Auckland, the city in which my past social life was organised around private and commercial spaces, with parks more furtive thoroughfares than essential destinations. I can see it the other way, too, where I now know I can be at home anywhere so long as there is a shared Out There.
I no longer mind living with suitcase-level limits on possessions. I like unpacking into whatever idiosyncratic storage solutions are provided. I only mind the rolling, folding, wrapping and packing that comes around again so quickly. On those last-minute occasions I am confronted with all of the things unused - the dresses still hanging dormant after the optimism of their proud unpacking, lockdown still asking only for the same pair of trousers and rotating set of merino turtlenecks. Cooking within collection-limiting circumstances is fine, too. It’s a fun challenge to Tetris the remains of the pantry into meal shapes as the days count down to the next move - it suits me and my inability to follow recipes, a Ready Steady Cook assemblage of odds and ends more welcome than a shopped-to-measure process with the straight-laced pressure of repeat-after-me compliance. The decor in each place never quite suits, but within a few days the details fade into the inoffensiveness of familiarity. In a way it is a relief not to have consumer choices to make. Things like the unimaginative provided porcelain mugs turn out to be perfectly pleasant to drink from. My former commitment to choosing the right kinds of objects looks more and more like bourgeois exuberance, an exaltation of a private home as sanctified site of curation. This month I have felt impervious to sales tactics. I have fewer desires for objects. The people that go about aiming to generate desires for objects in other people seem more strange than ever.
These observations come from an almost glassy-eyed place of calm that I find hard to recognise and trust. I wonder if I am merely so wearied by the pandemic that I have become limp and rolled over in the face of what previously would have made me uncomfortable, something along the lines of the freeze/appease response. I wonder if I am turning circumstance into virtue, reading stoic commitment into a situation that is, in some or many ways, beyond my control. I wonder if this is just what happens when consumerism becomes less of an option, an over-compensatory self-satisfaction with having less. And I wonder if these great swells of feeling for public over private goods that feel so true will disappear if my personal conditions change. These thoughts sound reasonable but are ultimately a useless game of relativistic piety. I will not let myself get away with downplaying not only my own agency but the radicalising, laid-bare moment that so many of us find ourselves in. At worst, it doesn’t seem a bad thing to be in a situation that has broken the smooth surface of the concepts of property and ownership, objects and houses. At best, in instability I have found the seam of anger that lets me further unhitch myself from the wrong wagons. Besides, I don’t feel myself limp at all. I experience waves of welcome pleasure at the merest sight of new leaves, ripples, birds, and blades of back-to-life grass.
Maybe it’s not freeze/appease after all, maybe my glassy-eyed calm is my fight. Maybe finding joy and ripples of pleasure in and through instability is a fight against the myth of stability via ownership: you don’t have to own something to enjoy it, and you certainly don’t need to dominate land, dwellings, objects, or tenants (make that fellow human beings) in order to feel secure. Tressie McMillan Cottom said it best in her recent newsletter: “people say they want to be rich. I think what they really want is to be free.” I’ve never wanted to be rich, but, until the pandemic, I’d never quite so desperately understood my desire for us all to be free. I don’t want to ‘get on the property ladder.’ I don’t want my source of shelter to be even my own speculative asset. I don’t want to gather enough for a deposit and I don’t want a capital gain. I am fine being a housekeeper, I just don’t want the housekeeping to be generating wealth for an individual and supporting a marketised approach to shelter, further perpetuating inequality and land alienation. I will keep it well and I will brush my hand tenderly across each wall by way of farewell, but I wish it was all to hand back to a collective source for another allocation at the end of my time. How many people sit under small-fortune roofs, aided by the death of a blood relation? What a literally fortunate but terribly sad and terribly uneven way of enabling steady shelter. Don’t we want roofs for everyone, without there needing to be blood?
“See, this is wealth,” a special person said to me on the phone this month, referencing the meandering two-hour conversation we had just had. See?
Wishing you waves of back-to-life pleasure and conversational wealth, or else a vaccination, or else the proto-vaccine of safe shelter.
Until next month,
H x
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So much yes to this sentiment, it is that which nourishes me in London and is rooted in my childhood homeland: “I now know I can be at home anywhere so long as there is a shared Out There.”
Yes, yes and yes... 🙏🏽🤸🏽♀️