Loss, what’s that?
— Yusef Komunyakaa
It’s All Hallows’ Eve, there’s a full moon - a blue moon, the hunter’s moon - and I’m back in London just in time for some kind of lockdown in England. Who even knows. I catch myself, usually when I’m waiting at the pedestrian crossing, thinking oh no oh dear oh wow oh yes oh me oh where is this thing called a democracy, this thing called a pubic. And by the time I get to grips with the question and all the breathing through it I’m already crossing the road and scurrying back through the gate, down the alley, through the door, up the stairs, and into the one room we currently have to our borrowing names. I urge myself not to let the the question disappear amidst the scurrying. In the city it feels harder to stay connected to the rhythm of the seasons. But, as it happens, the countryside is finding that connection harder, too.
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My grandmother Joanie says the frosts should be here in this part of the world by this time of year. There were no frosts in October. She says that when she was a child and when her boys were children they would spend the school holidays picking tatties in the fields. By October the potato foliage would die back in a hard frost and the crop of tubers would be safe from rot and ready to harvest, many hands needed up and down the drills. The tattie holidays. Back-bending work it was, but at least the children were closer to the earth and had less bending to do, or so it went. In the field next to Joanie’s house in the month of October in the year 2020 the tractor sprays a chemical vine desiccant on the foliage two weeks before harvest. Topkilling, as its known in the business. The tatties continue their churn of sugars to starch beneath the withered leaves above, even without the touch of frost. Their skins set nicely down there, away from the light. Their harvest still involves some human touch, but there are many more stray potatoes left behind now that the machines are the primary tattie takers. I am probably getting this all wrong, though. Or, if I am getting it right, I am still getting it wrong by sharing it - some grabby kind indigenising work, hungry to prove just how mixed in with the land I am. But I did not earn my family money by picking tatties in the October holidays.
Instead I got to make forts, ford streams, make bad-luck arrangements of peacock feathers in the bunk-bedded bedroom in our burn-side cottage. I got to play. One night my grandfather took me to one of the hotel bars in town where there were fiddlers playing, and I decided then and there that I wanted to play, too. No one else in my family played music. I do not remember being a beginner but my mother probably does (screech). I did not know that when we moved to New Zealand my fiddle-playing would code-switch to a classical register and that the whittled wooden body of the fiddle would become a vi-o-lin. In New Zealand the reels and jigs became the novelty programme-padders, the crass and jaunty counterpoint to the exquisite poise of the Moz-art, the Brit-ten, the Beet-ho-ven. Of course there was eventually a happier ending where I was able to dissolve the binary - Beethoven being every bit as rambunctious and necessarily violent in his compositions as the supposed salt of the earth, after all. When we moved to New Zealand I didn’t earn my family any money in the October holidays, but I cashed in on my classical token by playing in a string quartet at Catholic weddings and fundraising dinners. Whenever I played for the nuptial masses I wore long black clothes, funerary, maybe a proper goodbye to all that tattie picking.
My worst fear is turning out to be one of those people that, in a plane crash, reaches into the overhead compartment for their luggage before evacuating the plane - not because they love their stuff so much as it’s just what you do when you get off a plane; a normalcy bias. Sometimes I think my whole life is an exercise in de-programming, an exercise in turning the violin back into a fiddle, then turning the fiddle up to the light to see the shades of self-exoticising at work in the wood’s whorl. There are still things to which I am party that no longer work, things that make me feel like a priest who no longer believes in God and yet still scurries along to deliver the Sunday homily. Things like catching planes - can we ever hand-on-heart step onboard again without a care? Does the scurrying really cancel out the question? Traveling less seemed impossible but now, thanks to the virus, it’s here. It was never truly impossible, it just wasn’t ever made politically or economically possible. But each aeroplane journey is part of a chain of cause and effect that might lead to your own or your children’s or your grandchildren’s demise. Not a one-off crash, either (we should be so lucky). In 2020, just like on a crashed plane, a normalcy bias is denial.
Jenny Offill writes not post- but pre-apocalyptic fiction; not some off-the-hook, never-mind-how-we-got-here, living-in-the-wreckage tale of hardship, but tales of living in the scurrying now. Pre-apocalyptic fiction does not lazily (nor hopefully) leave the reckoning up to historians. Essayist Elisa Gabbert says that presentism is believing we understand the past better than the people who lived through it, which means also assuming that future historians will understand this moment better than we can. Jenny Offill doesn’t wait for future historians - she doesn’t even count on there being future historians. But doom isn’t a call to cocoon and recoil. It is not a shoulder-tap for preening preppers or survivalists or those desiring of self-containment and boltholes and just-in-case weapons. We have to build together, not seclude alone. When it’s safe to do so we’re going to have to win back from the virus an old-new comfort with the closeness of others. In the meantime we have distanced ways to be close. We need Solnit’s disaster solidarity, not disaster self-reliance. We need to see agency as a web of brains and sap and feathers, not just individuals reaching for their luggage. There were no frosts in October.
Reading:
Full Surrogacy Now by Sophie Lewis, because I’m still not sure about this unassailable role we call mother, this unquestionable thing we call family.Subscribing to:
Amy’s newsletter, At the Bottom of Everything, because she is writing generous, life-giving (amidst the taking) instalments of “my first year of widowhood, the unbearable weight of his absence, my sadness.”Looking forward to:
The November 12th launch of Ireland’s Winter Papers 6, because!Listening to:
Weyes Blood, because she sounds like a combination of Joni Mitchell and ABBA, and has a song named after my home town.Watching:
Mamma Mia II, because seeing Joanie singing along while knitting me a pair of bright red socks is a pleasure that must never be denied.
See you next month. Until then may you furnish your mind with something other than dread,
H xxx
P.s. It has been a year! A whole year of the newsletter! Here’s how it started. Thank you for reading along right from the start or right from this very second or somewhere right in between. You are always right on time, in my book.
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