The world, like a giant liver, receives everyone and everything, including these words
- Claudia Rankine
The end of August sees in a still day in early spring in New Zealand. Sound carries on a day like this. The air is full of the hollow-poled music of a scaffolding installation two streets over, workers using the butts of their hands to secure temporary structures on the way to untaxed capital gains for a private owner. New Zealand doesn’t so much have an economy as a housing market, with a few knick knacks tacked on, and a tithing system to the land’s loss leader, dairy. But the sound of the scaffolding raises in me a resonant frequency, an instant transport to springs past, a sound that could be the bells of a cathedral calling in the faithful. A frantic feeling of peace - to have the luck to have a free mind on a rare free day in early spring. Today has been a huge blue day, the sky’s skin round with blue, cirrus clouds like stretch-marks. From my spot near the window I can see a backlit palm tree, a young nikau with new leaf outstretched, not sure whether to give or receive.
This morning I woke early to the clench and drag of chronic pain. It hasn’t happened in a while, but I’ve been stressed I guess. The pain means I am not living the usual vibrating hyperlexic hummingbird flight. Instead I am sedate and sedated, with pain-killers that turn fizzy blood flat. We live on rainwater here but the winter has been extremely wet and there’s tank supplies enough for long-ish showers. In the dark I let the quick needles of water strike my body until the heat displaced the pain, then hopped back into bed to watch the pre-blue emerge from black. I’ve been in pain and I’ve been slow but I haven’t been unhappy. I feel unwell but I feel so very well to be off work and paid sick leave. With each strike of the scaffolding I thank every worker that has fought, together, for this entitlement. Still not enough in the pandemic (syndemic?) era, but it feels like a minor miracle after the last few years.
At the start of the pandemic I internalised the shame of precarious employment. I saw so many switch from office jobs to work-from-home situations, maintaining their same salaries and stacking up savings during understimulating circumstances. That wasn’t me. Opportunities dried up and at many points I felt like the dross that the salaried forgot. I went to a seminar this month on the unequal effects of the pandemic, and in the pre-talk small-talk a group of tenured lecturers spoke to me about their nostalgic memories of their first lockdown in New Zealand: getting back to the simple things, taking walks, talking to neighbours. I remembered the same wonders. And I also remembered the daily death all around (still the daily death all around - it still matters), the forbidding pace of the new London hospitals (alas it was well-paid staff and public protections we needed, not rows of unstaffed ventilators), and the worry worry about work, in a new-to-me city.
The shame is gone. I only feel tenderness and anger, both at once. The pandemic has meant, for some, a compounding of inequities or a loss of innocence, but it has also meant a spiritual shedding of so much of the self-selling competition-buying labour unit selves that we were groomed to be. Some days I feel free but that’s never (yet) the whole picture. Freedom needs the big beloved environment and big tumbling community with whom to practise and make this freedom together. But we all have to work so hard, for so many hours, over so many health-risking days and nights. Even those tenured ones in their right-time-right-place houses with their big bookshelves and too-easy lockdown nostalgias, they’re busy too.
One of the most painful things is to see the establishment reestablish itself after it looked so wonderfully vulnerable. In the last two and a half years the shareholder owner capitalist millionaire billionaires have grossly inflated their profits. The rest of us have become more gaunt. More sick, more tired, more stretched. Maybe that’s what the tenured were really nostalgic for - not the home baking simple pleasures but the sense of political possibility in the first year of the pandemic. I know I will get up but right now I find myself on a floor of grief for the discarded precautionary principle of public health and the profiteering creep of let-it-rip. My grief silences nuance. Today I have only clumsy blunt things to say about the lonely fatigue of being an odd-one-out access-insister, mask-asker, window-opener. I fear the epidemiological aftershocks. But I have a hope too. I want next year’s first clear bell spring scaffolding song to see more networks of care and study outside of formal settings. More resonant frequencies, together.
[I interrupted myself sending out the newsletter to take a good long phone call from a friend, so that feels like a good omen. Wishing you good omens, too.]
Until next month,
H x
heart / share / subscribe - it all helps
P.s. From this time last year, August Please 2021:
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.