12. September Digest/Digress
Sometimes writing is like sharpening a knife
— Che Gossett
Welcome back to the monthly digest/digress from Hannah Lees. September is over and autumn is here - here in Scotland, anyway. I thought that by the time I wrote to you again I might be back in London, but I’m still here. Perhaps by next month I’ll have mustered the will to return to the not-my city. But in this time of extreme upheaval and extreme monotony I simply haven’t been able to bring myself to change course and opt out of the situation I am in, staying with family in the north-east. Not making a decision is still making a decision, but I am unusually happy in this state of limbo. I don’t know what to do next or what to believe but this time the absence of surety is less a void than a vault, a darkened chamber filled with tinkling things that I feel no urge to hold up to the light. I am laughing more. I have less alternating panics and rages bubbling in my veins. I am singing more. I am learning new skills with my hands. I am eating more. I am not busily plotting how to shrink myself. I have christened my fears in freezing waters touched by my ancestors, not numbed but softened.
Where last month’s end I could tell stories of ripe golden wheat and barley berries this month sees a scene of stubble: elegant stalks hacked down by the combine harvester, wheat separated from the chaff, chaff caught by wind and sent asunder into spider webs and window panes. Geese fly in from the arctic and choose the field next to my grandmother’s house to feed on the stray grains left behind. We are guests but at the same time this is the closest thing to a family home I know. Photographs of my likeness as a squint-eyed baby and as a pinafored child and as a teenaged violinist populate the mantlepiece and dresser top. Even when we leave I’ll still be here in this house. Sometimes I wish I had my own home - and by ‘my own’ I don’t mean a mortgage but simply somewhere solitude-protecting and element-repelling and rent-stabilising, but I find that a prophylactic browse of home interiors on social media saves me from too much home-makery yearning. Looking at pictures of beautiful home details is dreamy for a moment, until I start to wonder about the material flows behind such images. Who owns these dwellings and how did they get their money? Whose land are they built upon? What zombie pact did they sign with capital?
Who gets to make a beautiful home - one in which they know they can stay, should they want and need to stay? The ability to stick around might be the thing that makes it a home - not forever, just long enough. The beautiful part is not necessarily the expensive part (the most utilitarian solutions can find beautiful arrangements) but the staying part certainly is. September saw the end of the eviction freeze in Britain. A vital protection put in place for renters at the height of the pandemic has now been withdrawn. But we are already in a new kind of height. Officially we are in a second wave (though rather than distinct peaks it feels more like a blazing failure to manage the same original wildfire) with numbers of confirmed cases higher than the first height, and a test and trace system in tatters. We have been told that if we can work from home we should work from home, for the next six months. Six months. Homes, again, without a vaccine, are the vital instruments in the public health toolbox. In this pandemic homes are the best thing we have at our disposal to protect the public, but homes are not publicly protected, and it is tenants that are disposable.
And so I resent London and its private landlords. What mild, milky enthusiasm I had for the place has curdled. The public squares are empty and all that seems to be of consequence to those in power is the fact of the missing takeaway sandwich market. As ordinary lives struggle and shatter, the central banks have no problem laundering drug money and making property empires easy for the few. It is a cronied centre that has tricked its pilgrims into believing that it is a centre of excellence. Of course there is excellence in London (there is excellence wherever there are pulses) but I want to resist its self-centred centripetal force. I want to say no to centres of excellence in general. Where can you be excellent? By the current arrangement, being excellent is possible in the centres of finance or the centres of law or in the intersecting sectors of finance and law or perhaps in public administration. But there is a public wherever there are pulses, and I hate the thought of anything creative or care-filled needing to exist in hungry scavenger relation to apex predator finance. In London, as in most centres, the money people make bears little relation to their contribution to the common good. I can’t centre myself on the things in the centre. I want to say yes to flourishing in place, wherever you are.
I’ve been thinking about debates, or trying not to think about debates. I used to be one of those insufferable competitive debaters, a third speaker employed almost exclusively to rebut the preceding arguments of my opponents; knowing how to disavow and dissect but never building and coalescing around a positive offering. I still get adversarial urges. But debates are showmanship conflicts. And, beyond any issue you might take with the take-down style, political debates are merely intra-framework conflicts. Political debates neuter true questions, like how to effectively end the entwined ongoingnesses of life-threatening colonialism and capitalism, or how to dislodge the illegitimate sovereign status of the settler governments that the recent New Zealand and US debates take as given. Some days things feel all-too-imaginably apocalyptic, but why is it easier to imagine apocalypse than it is to imagine a fair and thriving future? It could be a case of needing to live the future now; to live as though you are already an ancestor. Otherwise all we are doing is living out the future of a past that is not our own - a pathogenic world order of impossible infinities made ‘possible’ by genocide and ecocide and enslavement.
But there I go pontificating on the internet again. My appetite for language in the paragraphs above is unsatisfying. I do not feel sated by opinions, charm, outrage, or even pain. What I am doing here in Scotland right now is the stuff of being an ancestor. Nothing grand. Just, as Nan Shepherd calls, a leave to live. For the first time in a long, long time I have leave to live. I feel less as though every single thing is a referendum on my worthiness. Each day I am struck at least once by the future nourishment value of this time, the squirrelled-awayness of it all, the collecting of stuff with which to build and coalesce. My small bodily adventures on the coasts and in the Cairngorms will escape the tethers of sentences and instead thread down and wind around whatever and whoever comes next. They don’t need to be a blood relation, I just know that my being here is giving me a will to carry on, for them. I’m thinking more about water than blood. I’m thinking about the clean granite gleam of the mountain burn, the brown peat dream of the sea-bound river, the crash-calm translation of the daily waves. I don’t know why this matters, I just know that it does. It stays there in the vault, no need to hold it up to the light.
This month I’ve been re-reading Helen Garner and Tommy Orange and first-time-reading Brian Dillon, thanks to a review from Kerri ní Dochartaigh in The Irish Times. While I waited for Suppose a Sentence I read Essayism on loan from the library: “I admire, dear human, what you have clawed back from sickness and pain and madness.” I’ve been watching I’m Thinking of Ending Things (with Ryan, on the laptop) and Wild Rose (with Joanie, on the teevee) and it took me the longest time to click that each of these films starred Jessie Buckley - a testament to the shape-shiftiness of her imagined character (Lucy? Louisa? Lucia?) in the former. I loved the failed horror status of Kaufman’s film, the queasy creepy anticlimactic sadness of it all, the casual plagiarism of the desperate imagination and the lifelong sentence to remember youthful slights and embarrassments. Most of all I loved it because the tone took me back to the early days of knowing Ryan and watching Synecdoche, New York together on his couch under one of those fake mink blankets from The Warehouse.
Until next time may you get through the battles you tell no one about,
H xxx
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