11. August Digest/Digress
On (time) travel, Annie Ernaux, Little Fires Everywhere, domestic braggadocio
Poetry is not made with words.
I can say it’s January when
it’s August.
- Linda Gregg
Welcome back to the monthly newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere. This month’s end I write to you from Scotland, where my partner Ryan and I have been for the entire month. We caught the train from London at the start of August - the first time our bodies had moved at a pace faster than our two feet could carry us in five months - then isolated for two weeks to make sure we were in the clear before merging with my grandmother’s bubble. I didn’t tell anyone where we were going or what we were doing. In the first instance I suppose that this silence came from a kind of shame. I didn’t know if we were doing the right thing. I didn’t know whether we were being supremely selfish in undertaking unnecessary train travel and attempting to see someone in the vulnerable age category for Covid-19 risk. I didn’t know if my travel would make others worried or envious or sad. I didn’t know how it would all work out, whether we’d even make it into Joanie’s bubble or whether we’d need to turn around and go back, defeated. I didn’t know how my frayed nerves would handle sitting in a confined space on a train for seven hours alongside strangers, after being so careful and meticulous all these months. As it was the carriage was near-empty and what passengers there were all wore masks. We two didn’t talk a lot, instead keeping our eyes glued to the window where we became reacquainted with the concept of the sea, the concept of a coast.
It’s not only been a gift of physical movement but of temporal movement, too. Being back here finally broke the unending present, and those first two weeks in isolation were a time-traveling fugue. The weather was warm and the sun held strong, all syrupy across the pre-harvest crops. While Ryan worked his London hours I went on long solitary walks to revisit scenes from my childhood: the particular riverbank where at eight years old I sliced my finger to the bone and watched the quick blood ribbon and whisk in the coursing water; the particular bend in the farm road where I would park my yellow bike and lay in the long grass, listening to audiobook cassettes borrowed from the library lorry on my walkman; the particular field where we lost my tiny toddler brother in the tall shafts of wheat - lost then found with the locator beacon of the guardian dog’s tail above the heads and husks. Another field where I rode in the tractor cab with my dad the farm hand as he ploughed the furrows for potatoes; the lunch break when he accidentally shut the tractor door on my fingers and I felt the thrill of new powers: suppressing tears and offering forgiveness. I passed banks of violent violet - willowherb choking the countryside in style. With the Grampians at my back I met characters heather, bramble, blaeberry, nettle, gorse, thistle, silver birch, knotty pine. I whispered their names like a new-old spell and at the same time hated myself for romanticising what should have stayed normal. The fact of my leaving was as present as all the memories of my being there, the years of absence aggregating and casting their warping ways. My feet said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
But maybe leaving isn’t always betraying our origins. Without my leaving there would be no assigned significance in the road’s bend, the river’s bank, the field’s grainy gold, the child-of-wage-workers’ shame/pride/shame/pride. New materials have melded with my original matter, new places and contexts and ways of being and social stories and economic orders have made riches and destitutions of my starting stuff. Only in leaving did I know that it was the birthplace that first gave me a gaze. I can see and say and be because it was here that I was first a me. All the while I have been reading Annie Ernaux in translation - most recently The Years. Ernaux takes her own starting stuff and her first me to another place entirely. Instead of the droning “I” of memoir the voice is a collective “we”, like a Greek chorus speaking of and for each age, from 1941 to 2006, and collecting remembered/forgotten evidence and observations of French politics and culture along the way. The working class family is a domestic setting to return to, with deliciously un-poetic precision: “the puns heard a thousand times… hackneyed, only irritating, they served no purpose but to consolidate the family esprit de corps”. Where a single thread from her single life must be taken up, Ernaux uses the distanced third person “she”: “there is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’, as if now it were her time to tell the story of the time-before.” I might have been meant to feel sad, but I felt relieved to think of myself as a one day generic ancestor when I read Ernaux’s scene of life-sized ephemerality: “in conversation around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation.”
For now, at least, I feel so lucky to be spending so much time with my grandmother, knowing that we are so known to each other right here and now. We watched the television adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere together last week. The suburban conformity story seemed to start with something fresh but soon fizzled into overwrought acting and flimsy plotting; actions inconsistent with the characters’ own motivations within the world of the show. I understand that the show (and its informant novel by Celeste Ng) asked questions about the nature and identities of motherhood, but its melodrama felt didactic and embarrassing. Where the novel had restraint enough not to answer all of the questions it asked, the adaptation sobbed and jaw-thrusted its way into self-important and underwhelming answers. The bigger ideas came in the littler moments. When I watched Witherspoon’s character Elena line up her children’s perfectly-folded lunch bags - her whole being throbbing with a prim pomposity of purpose - I realised that, at the moment, I am more interested in mother as a verb than a noun: the doing of it, and how to de-privatise and de-individualise the doing. I’m on a wibble-wobble knife-edge with the need to make domestic and caring labour visible as work but, at the same time, not paint it as something to revere and applaud. Or, as Kathi Weeks points out, if domestic and caring labour is work then “as work, it too is something to struggle against becoming the whole of life”. Weeks’ words could not be more relevant to the period of the pandemic, where certain forms of domestic labour (sourdough! banana bread! home-schooling! sticker charts! sewing! organising! gardening!) have become a zone where we perform productivity and perhaps even luxury. How exactly did we start waxing rhapsodic online about our domestic labour? Why do we want to be seen to be doing domestic things? How has domesticity become a means of attaining status? (And when so many are living with food and housing insecurity isn’t this all extremely inconsiderate?)
Maybe it’s a sublimated training in capitalism: how can I turn this disaster into an ‘opportunity’; how can I wrangle a nice sheen of productivity from a wasteland of social isolation and vocational underemployment? Maybe the pandemic has induced this recent iteration of the domestic as a sphere of leisure - the national and global are alarming, at best, but look how I can marshal my home life! Or maybe it’s because white feminism is scrambling for a note of positivity. Domestic labour after all remains an overwhelmingly feminine domain. But rather than resist and agitate, the domestic (or at least the instagrammable domestic) is instead framed as a choice - a positive, glamorous, glossy thing. Of course it is a glossy choice for those that have also made the choice to place their more grimy domestic burdens onto precarious and poorly paid workers (does anyone remember cleaner-gate with Owen Jones back in May?). Whether literally so or merely presented as such, it now looks like stepping into the kitchen is a dreamy option - an opportunity for fulfilment and expression and joy. Maybe it is all of those things. Maybe wanting that small zone of control right now is natural. I can’t say that we’re not helping ourselves when we post a picture of that perfect loaf of bread, but most times we’re certainly not helping anyone else. We’re invisibilising the effort and true cost and relational or even generational knowledge behind the work. We certainly don’t need to feel guilty, we just need to remember Weeks: all work is something to struggle against becoming the whole of life - for ourselves and for all who labour.
Wishing you safety and security; connection and purpose,
H xxx
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