6. March Digest/Digress
Queen & Slim; Girl, Woman, Other; Severance; pandemic questions (and a chaser of dubious distractions)
If love doesn’t prevail, who wants to live in this world?”
- Li-Young Lee
Welcome back to the newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere. A March reflection needs no introduction. I’ve had a lot of emails come through with their fumbling In the Time of Coronavirus or During These Uncertain Times preambles - clutching at knowing tones and comfortingly-worded embraces. I dreaded having to write my own. I don’t want to come up with more public answers. Better to contribute to more public questions or pauses at this point, surely? Besides, my attention span is shot to bits (whose isn’t? (This question is only one part rhetorical - another part is truly curious: has anyone reached the hallowed climax of self-optimisation espoused by all the productivity porn swimming around right now?)). Some people in isolation are coping by making and some people are coping by being. Either is good if you’re where you want to be. Either is bad if it blocks you from the other state that you want to be in. I’m lodged in the being phase. I thought I wanted to be more in the making phase but this letter from Nick Cave made me feel a little differently about it all. Staring at walls is my new pastime. I have not read a single whole book since this all began, let alone written coherently.
But it is the end of the month - my arbitrary line in the sand. So all I can do is either not write a newsletter at all or write a newsletter in spills and bursts. At this point I don’t know which one it’s going to be. If I make it through to the end of something newsletter-shaped I will open the new public comments feature at the bottom. Please reply if you feel like it. And not just to me - I’m going to bring my teacher voice out to urge you to please talk amongst yourselves. It’s proving so hard to pin this experience down and look at it with enough lucidity to describe the here and now, so I want to hear your here and now. Whenever I try to write an introduction I just get caught up, again, in the stream of updates, takes, and numbers on my screens (yes, I sometimes close Twitter on my phone and automatically open it up on my desktop - that’s normal, right?). I live near an arterial road and there are more ambulances and hearses passing than usual. It is hard to focus for all the sirens. Not a lot feels sure but one thing is—
If you (someone with an internet connection) are reading this you are either sick, trying not to get sick, or not yet sick but at risk every day thanks to your socially-necessary work. It has been awe-inspiring and awful to see what essential work really boils down to. Awe over the labour that counts, horror over the labour that doesn’t really matter and yet gets the most reward. (Oh but wait, that was February’s topic - sadly perennial until we radically change how we see to distributive justice). The work that sustains us is most often the least sustainably paid: sanitation workers, supermarket workers, healthcare workers, elder care workers, all sorts of care workers, school teachers (still there on rotation for children of other key workers and children for whom school is a kind of home), transport workers — the list goes on, but not that much further. Many of us reading will not see our profession or job title listed on this list of essentials. I hope that sobers us. Not shame, but sobriety - looking at the substance of our capitalist lives and incomes and asking whether it is really the healthiest thing to imbibe.
My anxious friends are feeling it in their chests - the heavy fear of the virus: for themselves or their vulnerable loved ones; the heavy fear of livelihood collapse: for themselves or for their neighbours; the heavy fear that we might forget, that we might let our insights go when this is all over. The chest is the locus of the pandemic: the fight-flight-freeze of life-rupturing confinement repeats in the chest; the cell-rupturing virus itself repeats in the lung’s linings after a sojourn in and then down the throat; the beating heart of what might come next lives here in the chest, thrum thrum thrumming. I’m not ready for stories from that part of the chest, though. I am just not ready for the big think pieces and op eds. I’m not ready to hear from people ready to careen out of their lane to line their intellectual portfolio. People are being victimised every day. People, like writer Leslie Jamison, are missing human touch every day. People who are not currently direct sufferers are also adjusting (and, according to David Kessler, grieving) everyday. Right now I’m more interested in the quiet insights.
I want to hear from the parents that are seeing the labour of teachers for the first time, the able-bodied that are living the everyday disinfecting procedures of the immunocompromised, the spouses seeing The Mental Load usually carried invisibly by their other halves. I am staggeringly moved, mouth agape, at the calm prose of those health workers and home caregivers telling us with such clarity about about their suffering family members and patients in China, Italy, Spain, France, the USA. How do they come home (or stay home) and, in the quiet hours when their charges are sleeping, lay out the story of what they are seeing and caring for? I listen to the New Yorker podcast episode on what cultural changes might come from this pandemic. It is too early to say, of course. I am sure I might but I cannot currently imagine how I will go back to easy hugs and handshakes. But even as my mind goes through these changes I immediately feel how minor they are compared to the change that comes when your loved one dies. Or when an entire community of older people dies in hospital while their families are quarantined at home. I watched a news segment a week ago and was devastated by the opening line: “everyone dies alone”. And devastated, too, by this testimony from Eli Saslow on losing his partner Birdie:
They held a press conference since she was the first to die in Indiana. They said we got to say goodbye over video. I guess it’s a nicer story. I don’t really blame them. I’d like to find a way to sugarcoat this thing, too, but I can’t. Anything good I could say about this would be a lie.
For the past two weeks (well fifteen days, but who’s counting) I’ve been at home with my partner Ryan in our shared flat in East London, where I’ve been furiously wiping down shared surfaces before and after use. The smell of bleach is a constant companion. Another constant companion is scaly skin on my post-soap hands and a tender routine of bathtime for vegetables when we get them home from the shop. I’ve been finding it hard to get out of bed, but I’ve also had some great external stimuli. First was the impromptu 8am Zoom meeting that Ryan had to attend for work. Our bed is squarely in view of his little self-facing computer camera so I had to high-tail it out of the frame, quickly smoothing out the covers before his colleagues could spy any errant depressive lumps. Second was Ryan’s well-intentioned rise-and-shine opening of the blinds, which revealed a man on the scaffolding directly outside the window, startled during his work on the gas mains piping by my bedded eye contact. Before this plywood-lined slapstick box of a London bedroom I spent a week with my grandmother in her rural home in coastal Scotland. The damp smell of the sea was a constant companion. Another constant companion were the daily press conferences from Boris Johnson - who I thought looked hungover but turned out to have been in the early stages of infection. And before that I was in Brighton on a last (didn’t know it would be last) weekend away. My last (didn’t know they would be last) music and book events were, respectively, Dry Cleaning and Hilary Mantel. Of course they are not really lasts. Just for now. Just for a while - an indefinite while. But those feelings of lasts got me thinking about the last film we saw at our local cinema, Queen & Slim.
Directed by Melina Matsoukas, Queen & Slim is a film filled with lasts. The characters know it, we know it: no matter the outcome of their life-on-the-run from racism road trip we know they will never have another one like it. When I first watched the film I felt there were a few too many lasts (a few too many narrative strains) but maybe that was the point - an exuberant fuck you to any audience members that would limit their life-living love; their harmless, innocuous, yet miraculous existence. Something like love grows between the pair but its is, at least in part, a palliative passion. A sense of dread constantly accompanies their growing desire. But isn’t that all of us? The immediate stakes might be lower than they are for these law-twisted lovers, but don’t we all love because we know life will end? The film unspools in beautiful hand-held frames of natural light, shot from the car window. Theirs is a love on the move. I so want to be able to recommend this film about escape from violent, carceral USA as a discrete, stand-alone work on a discrete issue. But everything is spiked by the crown of the virus right now, everything. Queen & Slim’s Love on the move leaves me thinking about Hannah Arendt’s idea that without freedom of movement we are enslaved; that a democracy cannot function without movement - this is true for imprisoned or ‘wanted’ bodies; is it also true for locked down bodies?
For the greater good we have shut down movement, for the moment. But how long is this moment? The current restrictions on movement are problematic for people who are without a home. The restrictions are worrying for people with other-than-viral health and disability needs who are marooned without care. The restrictions are terrifying for the many people for whom home is not a cosy haven but rather a site of domestic violence (safenight.nz is a great campaign at the moment). And what about people who need to move in order to find safety? Migrants already bear the brunt of the nationalist, NIMBY tensions involved in either being free or being denied movement. And what about how the clampdown on movement is policed? Patrick Thomsen’s piece in e-Tangata makes the point that Pasifika communities are rightfully wary of police having the power (once again) to enter anyone’s house to check if they’re complying, and that an expansion of police powers “is also an expansion of a violent settler-colonial state that has discarded and undermined the agency of Māori, Pacific, Asian, Muslim, queer and disabled peoples, time and time again.” I know best to follow instructions from expert-informed governments right now, and to encourage everyone to do the same. But I also know that expanded executive powers pose risks to marginalised people - so let’s keep an eye on those powers.
Just before the pandemic really hit, or before I really accepted that it had hit (for it had definitely already hit) I read Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. It was on the train up to Scotland from London. I spent all seven hours of the gentle carriage-swaying journey (clickety clack clickety clack) swallowing up a book that I’d been meaning to read for months. I was surprised and delighted by the twelve interlocked British womxn. Just as I started to think that a character was being used as a little puppet for contemporary debates and ideas and references up would crop another fresh story with a twist of pathos, told with such a lightness of touch. The characters support each other. They forgive each other. They sit with each other’s differences rather than policing each other (well there’s a bit of policing, but who can’t resist the odd self-righteous jab, even when/especially when you’re a revolutionary). This paragraph is clearly not a recommendation - the Booker already did that for us, many months ago - but I do want to remind us of the perfect riot right there for us in the title. Other. You could read it as a capital-O Other, to be othered, divided from the main. Or you could read it as an expansive choose-your-own adventure/identity/way of being. The book absolutely performs the latter and so can we.
Right now I am reading (in fits and starts) Ling Ma’s Severance. My sister Martha recommended it to me and I downloaded it to my iPad from the library without stopping to look at the blurb. It turns out that it is a satirical novel about a pandemic - thanks, Martha! The prose style reminds me of Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go: detached and wry in the face of unfaceable horror. It might be a terrible idea to read something like this right now, but it might also be a great idea. Satire helps me see our virus in a different light: a new register through which to understand what is happening to our own world right now. It’s already helped me process my (hopefully temporary) mourning for the city that I was only just getting to know, now locked down. Ma’s main character, Candace, is a disaffected office worker who holds an ambivalent relationship to her adopted home of New York and the way that the city writes her days. Clearly not pro-consumerism, she is also not anti:
To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?
Consumption is sometimes figured as a disease (remember Affluenza?) but, perhaps to my shame, consumption has also been a means of participating in a new city, establishing small connections to it. I don’t know many people here in London. But buying my morning coffee at my local coffee shop was a place that I was ‘known’ and where I ‘knew’ others. As was the book shop. As were the string of charity shops up and down our local high street. Now it’s the local independent grocers, whose owner-operators and young employees I now know more thanks to this crisis. I might not know them, but at least I now know some of their names.
I will leave you with some lightness. They are working for me, these three dubious forms of distraction (feel free to add your own dubious distractions in a comment):
Pace or scurry around your house to a beloved soundtrack.
Have you seen The Favourite? I recently re-watched it with my childhood friend Heather and her partner in their flat in Glasgow (I wonder when that can happen again, pal). I had almost forgotten how deliciously chaotic it is. Scheming kinky palace shenanigans; Olivia Coleman playing something like herself again; black hole neediness swallowing up sycophancy; black laughs abound. Now that I’m in isolation with Ryan I have started playing the theme from the film as I pace around our room and stroke imaginary rabbits. I love to find new ways to creep him out. He is the most tolerant person I know, so I always need to reach new heights of weirdness to be able to ruffle him to my satisfaction.Re-watch a shitty terrestrial TV series.
Did you ever watch that Australian comedy/drama Offspring? I watched it on TV One in New Zealand in 2011. 2011 was the year that my best friend Grace moved from Auckland to Melbourne for the first year of uni. The show was set in Melbourne, in the same leafy suburbs that Grace found herself living in as a student in share houses. I visited Grace so many times that the city started to get into me, too: the brown of the Birrarung, the jingle of the trams, the wrong-place Victoriana. I started re-watching the show on Netflix because I was craving the sound of Australian crows - slightly different caws to the London ones out my window. And I wanted something crap and predictable. No thrilling tension, no clever formal innovation. It delivered. Find your 2011 terrestrial TV show and re-watch it on the internet, that’s my distraction prescription.Dance around to a shitty song and learn all the lyrics. This will be your post-Covid-19 karaoke belter so choose wisely. It will never let you down; you will forever harbour its lyrics and remember how you danced to them during your confinement. I discovered mine when I was looking for a song to accompany a photograph of the new leaf on my monstera plant to send to my friend Georgia back in Auckland. A language of new life, etc. I settled upon Des’ree’s 1994 hit “Life”. Learning the (so bad that they’re good) lyrics to this one won’t be hard if you want to choose this song for yourself, too. I have no special claim to it but let me know if you do go for it. We can be connected via this song for, well, life. “I don't want to see a ghost / It's a sight that I fear most / I'd rather have a piece of toast / And watch the evening news” (with Des’ree on the toast all the way, but ghosts might be preferable to the evening news right now).
Stay home (if you can), stay safe, and sit tight, thinkers! Make or just be, whichever you need.
Until next time,
H x
P.s. The photograph up top was taken on my last day with my grandmother Joanie before I caught the train back to London (a nervous edge-of-dettol-sprayed-seat trip to forget). Pictured is Dunnottar, a fortified castle from the middle ages, not too far from where Joanie lives.
P.p.s. Which novels or essay collections are proving readable for you right now?
Okay I'm going to write a comment on my own post (what wild iso behaviour is this?)! I've been thinking. I said some disparaging things (in paragraph four ^) on people proselytising about the world they want to see post-pandemic. I was really thinking about academics or others that are using this crisis moment as a kind of leverage for their own public profile. Which is yuck. But. What if, by making more space in your (extremely harried or currently-playing-dead) mind for imagining the world you would like to emerge into, the more chance we have of those imaginings happening?
(I so wish I wrote like you do, Hannah. The Listener in particular would be extremely blessed!) You've provoked a great many thoughts and it's also lovely to hear what's going on for you as you settle into your new life which bears no resemblance to the life you thought you were flying into on New Year's Day. Today I'm having a "day off" from high adrenaline and gloomy statistical realisations, because the chest stuff you describe simply isn't sustainable, let alone healthy, eh? So I'm following my own advice from Jeremy, William and my recent podcast and turning to SENSE AND SENSIBILITY for some respite. Arohanui to you, e hoa.