As if our responsibilities to each other end at the border of our countries, or at our cities, or half-way across our cities, or at our back doors, or at our skins. No.
- Bhanu Kapil
There’s a film of dust adhered to the outside of the window of the studio apartment I’ve been staying at in Bethnal Green. Someone has tried to buff the dust away, but the diameter of their arm has only reached so far, creating streaky whorls. The window looks over a narrow street, and the second floor spot is an easy landing place for the abandoned particulates of passing cars. Dust is what is there and not there, what is left and what has left. This street is home to many little handshakes and exchanges. It’s a common thoroughfare for orange or blue-clad delivery cyclists ferrying food up from Shoreditch to Hackney Road, often chatting on the phone to someone, winning some scrap of life back from the all-hours app. An ice cream van trundles by at least once a day, tinkling a wind-up toy rendition of Yankee Doodle.
Right opposite the dusty window is a wall of crimson maple trees, fifteen identical ones in a row on this block. The leaves are batwing black on overcast days and on sunny ones their underbellies are backlit green. There is always a breeze, so there is always an interpretive concert in the leaves, not unlike the “ten hours natural white noise” video I used to have playing in my headphones at uni. Behind the maples are two 1960s red brick housing blocks connected by an iron footbridge. Visible through the octagonal geometries of the footbridge is the spire of St Peter’s Church, a neo-Norman assemblage of fussy flint panels and terracotta trims, built in 1840.
The church is on St Peter’s Close. I send a picture of the street name to my mum and dorkily caption it with something like, “if I ever get lonely I just remember that..”. She sends back the prayer hands emoji, but no keen accompanying intercession. I don’t know what comfort my being close to St Peter is meant to bring. Like a good lapsed Catholic I have forgotten. Out of sight but just beyond the church is Ion Square. I can’t get the Bloc Party song of the same name out of my head each time I cut through to the shop, so I re-listen to it after all these years, cringing lightly at the lyrics but forgiving it immediately.
I fear becoming one of those people that enjoys songs from thirteen years ago not because of any new appraisal but because I first heard them when I was a hyper-feeling teenager. Turning thirty has changed time because now age moves in decades not years (a moment ago I was twenty, next I am turning forty). Now the dominant unit of time has 3650 days, and those days pass very quickly. This speed must explain how it has been possible to spend nearly two years in near isolation. It’s late summer now, and the season has not been what I thought it would be. The de-habituation of closeness persists. Awkwardnesses, tone checks, short breaths, outings furnished with escape plans.
I headed to the UK at the end of 2019 in the hopes of finding some kind of easy old bond with the place. I wanted to become normal here, in the place that I am from. In my daydreams I performed twee linguistic somersaults for my ambition, imagining myself becoming of this place and not just from it. There’s been a lot of observing but not a lot of firm adhering. Sometimes I feel all eyes and no hooks, a strip of velcro missing the necessary friction of mingling. I still do not feel normal here, and here does not feel normal. Do you ever do that thing where you assume a robust wholeness in others but doubt it in yourself? This sounds humble or self-deprecating but the less complete, the more real. I shouldn’t assume that others here experience some essential, easy bond.
It certainly looks easy when I cross over the canal and walk up Broadway Market on these late August evenings. Everyone has someone to meet, a cold drink apiece, a warm plate of something between them. It all looks easy and essentially normal. I didn’t make it to normal status this summer, and that’s okay. I do find it strange to look back at June’s bright entry - how stridently hopeful I was, or how stridently I was trying to be hopeful and get with the programme. Hope might be what the patrons are performing at the full tables right now, and who could begrudge the long, long deferred meeting of social needs. As well as social beings we also remain linked biochemical objects; members of a immunological planetary commons.
Today’s UK pandemic policy of personal responsibility says choose what feels right for you, but subjective feelings and thoughts seem ornamental next to the straightforward actions needed to do right by our commons and keep each other alive. The atomised freedom talk doesn’t seem to grasp that life is sometimes an unknowable force. Feeling free doesn’t mean you are free. Life is not something that you choose if you are comfortable. The populists would have life itself on a shelf, shorn of spiritual significance, a market unit, a personal choice. The strange, interdependent, emergent arc of life doesn’t work like that though, does it.
Rain returns, falling from the grey paunch of a cloud. Afterwards nothing is particularly cleansed. The ice cream van tinkles Yankee Doodle again. The dust stays adhered to the window.
Things to read:
Afghanistan: A Lexicon, Mariam & Ashraf Ghani:
Over the past century, many things have been lost in Afghanistan: battles, wars, soldiers, standards, ground, money, advantages, generations, blood, hearing, sight, limbs, lives, livelihoods, land, dreams, dreamers, ideas, ideals, innocence, friends, friendships, parents, children, childhoods, schools, teachers, homes, villages, fields, forests, rivers, roads, bridges, dams, electricity, cities, monuments, paintings, poems, places, earrings, coins, keys, suitcases, maps, plans, plots, ways, means, sanity, reason, levity, proportion, judgment, balance, love, hope.The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis, Yohann Koshy (The Guardian):
It is imperative to remain less interested in who or what we imagine ourselves to be than in what we can do for one another, both in today’s emergency conditions and in the grimmer circumstances that surely await us.The Groves of Academe Are Always on Fire, Merve Emre & Len Gutkin (Chronicle Review of Higher Education):
Precisely as the humanities have fought to fit themselves within the constrained space of the university, they have made these enormous promises about what they can do, promises that are often better kept, it seems, outside the university.The Current Crisis of Sexlessness, Sophia Ioannou (Mental Hellth):
It is clear that desire is revolutionary. If it wasn’t, there would not be these motions to limit it. So, we must demand the space to desire, to be erotic, to create.
Until next month’s end,
H x
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