Hello everyone,
It’s so good to have you here for Letter Please, the monthly letter from Hannah Lees. A month is an arbitrary thing but most of us have to flip the calendar over, so we may as well observe it together. It’s been great to have more sign-ups recently for this ritualised monthly stocktake of ideas and events, joys and pains, pushes and strains against the grain of the order of things. Life is hard, subscribing is easy:
Photograph: painted memorial stones left by primary school children lie on a low concrete wall overlooking the River North Esk in Angus, Scotland. The day is foggy. The day is today, May 31st 2021. On the near side of the river is a pebble beach and on the far side of the river is a pharmaceutical factory.
On meaning and mattering
I was staying with my grandmother Joanie last year when I heard her say it. It was August and I was busy time-travelling, trying to place myself in a more expansive past and future—anywhere far away from the confines of the pandemic present. On that early evening in August Joanie was looking out at the garden as she peeled potatoes, Ryan was at the table patting the proudly offered tummy of the floor-rolling dog, and I was tidying away the clean lunch dishes from the drying rack when she said it.
“I think what’s hardened me is death, being around so much of it.”
I made a quick calculation, weighing my demurring instinct against the very real gap between our experiences and all the things I hadn’t seen and couldn’t know. To resist her knowledge of hardening would be to fall into a too-usual dynamic: her statement met with my well, have you thought about kind of contrarianism. I knew the best thing was to let her know that I was listening, that it was okay to proceed. My watery response has long since evaporated, but Joanie’s words remained with me like an oil slick. Exposure to death (being around so much of it) does do something to the psyche. As Alex Colston writes, “the pandemic confronts society at large with the recurrent question – as much political as psychical – of how to address oneself to a mass death event”. For some it is a hardening, for others a softening. For all it is a crisis of meaning.
Some days—still working from home, still keeping distances—it feels that all of life has become the childhood phenomenon of repeating a word until it sounds utterly alien, signifier and signified smashed to smithereens of sound shrapnel. It’s happened for others of you, too, with a gradual or sudden or grindingly ongoing evacuation of meaning and mattering, especially for those weathering fifteen months of social isolation, for those weathering deathly public health failures, or deathly colonial occupations, or—. I know I am conflating distinct violences and losses here, but that’s how it feels right now: flailing about in a sludgy soup of powerful voices and actions that render so many lives and ways of life disposable.
Here in the UK the ruling conservative flavour is one of bumbling, foppish flattery (we didn’t act to protect you at the start of the outbreak, or the next wave, or potentially the next, because we simply respect your freedom altogether too much). I want to claw my eyes out when I see the word “pub”. It’s not that I begrudge people gathering in beloved third spaces as restrictions ease. What I begrudge is the framing of the pub as an acceptable prize—as though a dished-out visit to a pub could atone for the hundreds of days of mind-numbing home isolation or body-breaking, life-endangering disregard for safety. I almost don’t want to go to a pub because I don’t want the Tories’ narrative control to win out. I do not want to audition for a fuller life with the script that directs us to glug our beers and shrug away the horror of so many lives gone and so many remaining lives tattered, hollowed out for so long.
*
There was a popular interview with actor William Shatner in The Guardian this month. The only reason I clicked on it was because of its place in the ‘most read’ section of the day—I wanted to know what was drawing so many of us to click. The headline offered Shatner’s advice to, “take it easy, nothing matters in the end”, but readers looking for a laid-back permission slip may have been disappointed when the full context of the headlined quote was finally revealed at the end of the piece:
It feels rude to ask a 90-year-old if he worries about death, so I ask instead what he wishes he had known at 20 that he knows at 90.
“Here’s an interesting answer!” he says perkily. “I’m glad I didn’t know because what you know at 90 is: take it easy, nothing matters in the end, what goes up must come down. If I’d known that at 20, I wouldn’t have done anything!”
Shatner’s full answer didn’t quite match the click-baity offering. Not a piece of mindful-style observance (notice your thoughts and let them float on by), and not an absurdist’s edict (nothing matters, yeehaw, let’s go), but a red-hot danger wrapped up in a temptingly impish smile. Shatner’s concept of the truth of nothing mattering might be more akin to the One Ring to rule them all: powerful but corrupting. Having too much of an appreciation of the non-mattering of everything might be simply too disabling (if I’d known that at 20, I wouldn’t have done anything). Maybe this was what led us to click on the headline after all. Maybe we, the beleaguered masses making up the ‘most read’, had lost the plot of our lives and were looking for impish, nihilistic confirmation of the departure of meaning.
It struck me as a profoundly lucky thing for Shatner to have been insulated from non-mattering until a time roughly age-appropriate enough to make the knowledge perky rather than perilous, punctuated by exclamation rather than ellipsis; to be able to have non-mattering as a concluding point of glee rather than a dirge of omission. Shatner had had the chance to find youthful confidence in mattering. Whether or not the mattering was real it had made his own life real to him as he was living it. His life mattered. What too many are experiencing is a profound unreality, a profound non-mattering. I sometimes think about how, when I finally make it back home to New Zealand, I will fail and fail and fail to adequately explain the experience of this carelessly-induced long-term isolation and its scary slide into non-mattering.
But this is a fantasy. Incompetent or cruel or capitalistic handlings of the pandemic have made nothing matter too soon, yes, but the too soon effect has already been in force for too many people, for too long. In the making of places like New Zealand a great number of lives and ways of life have been designed or neglected or policed out of the ruling realm of meaning and mattering. Social trust was never there to begin with in settler-colonies, nor anywhere touched by white supremacy. What to do with this truth? It’s time (it’s always been time) to fight for the universal right to youthful ignorance, no matter our age. Everyone needs the chance to take for granted a sense of mattering. Whether or not anything means anything we might simply try acting like it does, if not for ourselves then for all the people that have been ruled out of mattering.
*
On Twitter the other day a famous novelist tweeted that, “nothing matters”. Another day a poet slash professor tweeted a non-ask: “how do we carry on when there’s nothing to hope for”. I wondered if there was a mask or a vaccine to protect against this kind of non-mattering contagion as I felt the globules of their non-meaning enter me. I was glad that they had an outlet for their pain, with people there to listen and reply to them, but my other reaction was one of wariness and even rage—how was this type of non-mattering really all that different to the way the ruling class has undermined meaning, if not by intent then by effect? Can’t artists do more (the well-resourced ones, especially)? Both tweets have since been deleted, so maybe the writers’ own wariness caught up to them, too. Pain is one thing, but homilies of hopelessness are another. Expanding the idea of what is possible is psychically as well as politically healthy—not easy, but healthy. As Mariame Kaba says, hope is a discipline.
And so I return to the question of the pub, or more the question of whether I should return to the pub. The pub-as-prize doesn’t feel prized when people you love and people you have complicated feelings about and people you don’t even know are still dying or desperate or in danger, here or there or anywhere on earth. Something about living in seclusion has made for compensatory webs of empathy: if we can’t see people in person then we have to work harder to imagine them, and if we can imagine them then there is no limit to who we can consider and care about. But there is a chance that I have over-identified with the dead in an over-compensatory note of desperation, for the sake of their memories and against the ruling order of their non-mattering—not wanting that Tory narrative control to win out.
I can’t bear to think that I will harden, but staying so soft feels like it will be the end of me. Staying so soft is an impossible responsibility. I’m still resisting it but I am better appreciating the potato-peeling pronouncement on hardness. It’s time to act like a youthful William Shatner who, blissfully and usefully, had no notion of non-mattering, had no need to disproportionately harden or soften. It’s time to let go of my convoluted private protest and go to the beer garden if that’s the place to build a sense of connection. It’s time to be in the land of the living while I’m still here. And, hey, maybe the ‘most read’ status of the interview had nothing to do with nihilistic confirmation. Maybe there are just a lot of Star Trek fans out there. Beam me up—June please!
Until next month,
H x
heart / share / subscribe - it all helps