From the Corona of a Fading Star: Lockdown Musings

The other day I was sitting in my living room reading. It was hot and I had the windows open on two sides. Cool clean air blew in, bringing with it a slight scent of the cedar trees at the front of the building.  I was reading The Mirror and the Light, the concluding part to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy. Unlike the first two volumes, which are very much historical "blockbusters", this third part is a more modernist affair; serpentine and elusive in its depiction of the last years of Thomas Cromwell at the court of Henry VIII. Nevertheless I was making good headway and the lockdown had given me an excuse to spend more time on the sofa immersed in the world of the 16th century expertly conjured by Mantel.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I never usually do that, have the big front window open for any length of time, and especially when I'm trying to concentrate on something. It opens out onto the main road and is directly in line with the aircraft that until recently would fly only a few hundred feet over my home as they come in to land at Heathrow. But these days are unlike any we've seen in living memory, certainly not since the planes started making their descent over West London, forcing a significant proportion of the capital's population to endure near permanent roaring noise from early morning through to late evening.

The other thing I noticed was the presence of many little birds in the garden. I'd heard their distinctive twittering, which contrasts with the irritating noise made by the green parakeets which like to hang out in the cherry blossom tree directly next to my bedroom window. It's as if the absence of those great mechanical birds of human invention has encouraged the more meek and attractive of London's flying creatures out of wherever they've been cowering all these years.

Even though West London is very green compared to other parts of the city I rarely see much wildlife, apart from the deer in Richmond park, urban foxes and the occasional heron. No stoats in the hedgerows. No minke whale gliding down the Thames past Old Isleworth. I've only ever seen a badger in the wild once in my life and it was running along the grass next to the A316, seemingly heading for a night out in Twickenham. I thought someone had spiked my drink. I'm an incurably urban person and still feel anxious if I happen to end up in a field with cows or horses.

I've been very lucky in lockdown. I'm on the first floor of a small block, not two dozen floors up, shut into a little box where the windows don't open and the lift is always broken. I'm able bodied and can exercise every day if I want. And most of all I'm still working, and in a relatively safe environment. More than that I'm contributing towards the development of a vaccine for coronavirus (or SARS Cov-2 as it is listed on our technical documents). It's an odd experience in the midst of this world historical event to hear projects you're involved with discussed on the radio. To hear that arrogant right wing blowhard Nick Ferrari interview someone whose name you've seen on internal emails. I don't envy people shut into their homes all day with only a short trip to the shops or local walk to break up the monotony. In truth the weekday routine between work and home is monotonous enough. Without trips out into the city it's all blurring into grey on grey.

I miss the technicolor of Soho and Dalston, of the crowds in the West End, hipsters and un-hipsters, even the tourists at the Tate and British museum. I even miss the smells of public transport. Isn't that strange? I'd never thought about how the underground smells before, but now I haven't been on it for nearly seven weeks I'm struck by the absence of that sooty, metallic, vaguely burning smell which mixes with the odours of the people who you squeeze up against; eyes fixed to floor, ceiling or phone. Never risk meeting the gaze of the Other, not in-between stations anyway. There are undoubtedly people in this city for whom the daily commute forms the most intimate experience of their lives. I wonder if they miss it the way separated couples yearn for each other's bodies?

London as tropical paradise, Battersea Park, April 2020

Cycling out West I reach the river at Hampton and head out towards Chertsey. It's striking how the character of the built environment changes once you get beyond Hampton Court, as if it functions as some ancient boundary marker or invisible checkpoint. On one side metropolitanism, on the other, "Gammon country". It's also Ballard country. Weybridge, Addlestone and Chertsey, Byfleet and New Haw; a network of satellite towns around the Western expanse of the M25 where JG Ballard set his final novel Kingdom Come. Brooklands, where the doyen of dystopian fiction located the shopping mall around which much of the novel's action happens is a real place and home to a large retail park. That's as far as the similarities go however, as the book's evocation of "St George's shirt" wearing street gangs, sports obsessives, and race riots is fanciful in the extreme to anyone who has visited these places.

Ballard actually makes this dullest of suburban enclaves sound far more multicultural than it actually is. Cycling through Weybridge or Shepperton (where Ballard lived in a non descript semi-detached house) you'd be fortunate to see any non-white faces on the street. As I cycled over Chertsey bridge a middle aged white man, his face partially covered with a scarf was standing at the kerb wagging his finger furiously at the few cyclists who were passing. "You're only allowed out for an hour, yeah!" This was his admonishment to the lycra clad hordes surging over into Surrey like Visigoths in homeopathic concentrations that Sunday morning. He looked like he'd been there a while.

There's a libidinal economy at work in following rules, a rather sad pleasure in submitting yourself to the other's demands, regardless of whether the other is really bothered or not. The psychoanalysts know this well. Masochism is an extreme variant; the self flagellating monk always gave a couple more thwacks of the whip than was strictly required by the demands of penance. Stalinism and modern managerialism continue the tradition in their own ways; fluffing up the superego, garlanding the cop inside your head. It's a matter of anticipating the other's demand and then punishing yourself a little more.  

Since the lockdown this tendency has become a real dividing line between people. You can quickly gauge which side of it a person is on as you pass them in the street. Two meters just isn't enough. I've seen people trying to squeeze themselves into cracks in the walls at twelve paces away. I see large anxious men out jogging, suffocating beneath dust masks while they work off the effects of a 24hour Pringles binge. Out in the suburbs I observed quieter streets, fewer people exercising, more obedience, and a heightened feeling of being watched. Lockdown has validated tendencies that are quintessentially "little England". The edgelands of West London are a natural breeding ground for radical curtain twitchers; people who call radio shows to demand the army shoot sunbathers in Hyde park.

NHS/Key Worker tribute Barnes, May 2020

During the first two weeks of the lockdown I seriously contemplating putting in a request to be furloughed from my job. Even though I was employed I felt obsolete, cocooned in a routine that was a little too close to normal but without any of the things which break up "normal" and render it tolerable, i.e. the excesses. Most of all those excesses shared with others. I had in mind to volunteer as a porter at West Middlesex hospital. I'd been a porter a Kings College Hospital, Lambeth (where I was born) for several months before I went to university. I remember it as a rather rewarding occupation; dashing around delivering pharmaceuticals to wards; roaming the hospital's vast Victorian basement and running up six flights of stairs carrying twenty kilos of intravenous fluids to the liver failure unit. That was a grim place, high throughput.

I also had this image of Ludwig Wittgenstein working as a porter at Guys Hospital, London Bridge during the blitz. It was typical of the man, who during his military service in WW1 would demand to be sent to the most dangerous and disease ridden posts on the Western and Russian fronts, despite apparently being eligible for a medical exemption that would have kept him away from the action entirely.  He evidently felt a desperate need to test himself, to find out if he was worthy of living. It's an ethic I deeply admire. There's a blue plaque at Guys (at the part that's now Kings College Student Union), close to the statue of John Keats, which commemorates the Austrian philosopher's contribution. I've felt a bit more useful since I've been working on vaccines for the present pandemic. Essential work, but behind the front lines.

I've been reading a lot of "down and out" literature during lockdown; Knut Hamsun, Charles Bukowski. It's the OUT part that's attractive right now. A great deal of Hamsun's Hunger takes place on the streets of his fictional city Kristiania. I find myself envious of characters in novels who enjoy chance encounters while out Flâneuring. It's an experience which the surrealist André Breton called The Marvellous. Right now there is little marvellous about being around other people out of doors. They cower, shrink and avoid eye contact. Either that or they ostentatiously barge through sending the fearful scurrying into corners. The great surge of public feeling towards health workers is not mirrored in the everyday experience of shopping for groceries. At the supermarket - which is now marked out like a cross between a military exercise and a Japanese gameshow - people do not speak, nor do they linger to peruse the inessential items on the shelves that once captivated them. Alcohol is an essential item, especially alcohol.

Face coverings are becoming more common and with them an increasing sense of distance and alienation. Seeing the faces of other people is closely linked to a feeling of shared ethical experience, as Levinas teaches: "the facing position, opposition par excellence, can be only as a moral summons. [...] The epiphany of the face is ethical". Combine this creeping 'covering-up' with the suspicion that what lurks beneath the veil is contamination and potential death for you and your loved ones, then the suggestion that the pandemic will lead to the rediscovery of "real life" encounters away from digital mediations sounds like fools hope.

Hammersmith, April 2020

I don't suffer from the agoraphobia that has taken hold of otherwise reasonable people lately. While I follow the guidance for social distancing I bend the stick where my sanity and sense of autonomy require. Exercise once a day? No problem, how's an 18 mile walk to Battersea and back sound to you?; how's 50km on the bike up to Finsbury park and back? Throw in a loop around Kensington for good measure. London streets are rarely this empty and safe, so why pass up the opportunity? In the long run stick bending is better for your health than cowering under the bedclothes with the miasmas. One's immediate response to the imposition of a rule - especially when that rule comes from government - should not be to obey but to interpret. We are all jurists in the court of our own reason. Improvising around rules, as opposed to blind obedience, is what distinguishes adults from children. It's also what makes jazz great.

A friend of mine told me that his sister and their family had taken to building dens out of tree branches in their garden. He'd been led to believe this was an "on-trend" activity among the "gardened" classes under lockdown. I thought of the characters at the end of Lars von Trier's Melancholia, hurriedly building just such a symbolic shelter, as the vast form of the green planet hurtling towards them envelopes the horizon before annihilating everything in a firestorm. In the film, building the den was preferred to the suggestion made by Charlotte Gainsbourg's character to drink wine on the veranda. I'm yet to grasp the sentiment, so am still occasionally drinking beer in the park, sans shelter.

Melancholia highlights another prescient phenomena, that of the thriving lockdown depressive. The reasoning has it that persons of a depressive or pessimistic outlook find less has changed in the world relative to their expectations and so find it easier to adapt. This has been termed depressive realism, which broadly supposes that non-depressed people hold a “positivity bias” which colours their general outlook, whereas the supposed “negativity bias” of the depressive actually gives a more realistic appraisal of the world. Research has yet to bear this out, but right now who can argue with them?

60% of people in a recent poll would feel uncomfortable going outside even if the government lifted lockdown restrictions. Whether this is irrational fear of the outdoors or rational fear that the government is lying to them about it being safe is unclear. The truth is that long before the fateful meeting between a bat and pangolin in a Wuhan wet market, the nation's collective mental state had been none too robust. Incidentally, throw in a Catholic priest to the above ensemble and you've got the set-up for the best joke of 2020.

The last two years of Brexit chaos have resulted in huge levels of political fatigue and generalised social angst. In the autumn last year, leading up to the general election there were times - usually after some divisive outburst from Boris or one of his "disaster nationalist" minions - that I could feel the tension and discontent in the train carriages as I travelled into Waterloo. A frequent smell of strong booze and an equally strong feeling that given half a chance things could seriously kick off. It's hardly surprising considering the degree of cognitive dissonance we've been subjected to over the last few years that many people would rather shelter at home regardless of what the government says. Coronavirus could be fake news or Godzilla in invisible form. Either way it's safer in the toilet roll igloo, with the box sets and free porn. 

Walking the city is a delight. Whenever I've spent substantial time walking across London previously I've always ended up with a layer of grime to wash off myself at my destination (that's pollution not UK Hip-hop). I can't usually wear contact lenses for more than a few hours in the city centre because of all the airborne filth. But on the walks I've taken into zone 1 over the last month it's undeniable how much clearer and fresh the air is. Roads are quiet, frequented now by an increasing number of families who go out cycling in unison. Some of them could do with a bit of practice, but it's preferable I think to dodging shark-eyed and over caffeinated commuters on their racing bikes trying to beat their personal best from Bank to Putney. If this crisis does lead to an increase in cycling in the capital I hope it looks more like cycling in the centre of towns in the Emilia Romagna region of Italy. There it's almost exclusively inexpensive hybrids people use, and the roads are restricted to cars in a variety of ways to make cycling safer for people of all ages. And you see them, grandmothers and students all together without a "performance jersey" in sight.

Cafe Oto boarded up, Dalston April 2020

The square mile is especially ghostly right now. Cycling east through Chiswick I reach Hyde park and head along South Carriage Drive until I cross the A4 and pass underneath the Wellington arch, upon which sits the monumental bronze quadriga carrying the goddess Nike, resplendent astride her chariot. In Shoreditch and Elephant and Castle local artists have painted murals depicting NHS nurses in PPE. They stare out like images of saints and revolutionaries seen on the sides of buildings in Latin America. Saints is perhaps more apt, the presence of the mask there to remind us of the risks frontline healthcare workers are taking for our salvation. But salvation to what? 

I had the idea - an awful liberal compromise of course - that Labour should press for legislation to write the NHS as a universal, publicly funded and free at point of use health service, into the British constitution. Perhaps as part of the Royal demesne? The most attractive part of this plan is that in keeping with a long standing tradition, any attempt to sell the health service off would be deemed treasonable, as it assails the property of Crown. And who would pass up the opportunity to see the intestines of certain Conservative politicians pulled out at Tower Hill? Currently the opposition are doing little but acting like an echo chamber for the government. But hey, Starmer is "electable" and that's all that matters right?

Iain Sinclair talks about the "captured" city as a way of describing the wholesale handing over of large swaths of London to developers and the subsequent destruction of community life. Previously public spaces are privatised and securitised. The city is rendered "unnavigable" to walkers, to those who seek occluded histories buried beneath the rising towers of glass and steel. Several square kilometres around Kings Cross station have been turned into a testing ground for facial recognition technology designed by Google, whose UK headquarters sits at its heart. Fail to comply with mandated forms of consumption and you'll quickly be confronted by private security advising you to move on, the features of your visage forever consigned to the Great Memory.

The infrastructure for the kinds of technology being mooted, and in some cases rolled out, across the globe as a way to track people suspected of carrying coronavirus is already in place across much of the UK. There is a frightening similarity between the asymptomatic carrier of coronavirus who must shun physical proximity with others for the sake of potential contagion, and the logic of the security apparatus of modern states, for which all citizens are potential terrorists/subversives; a logic which time and again is used to justify increases in surveillance and mass gathering of data from the public. The present crisis will see unprecedented use of such technologies and possibly even the sharing of medical records with big data monopolies like, you guessed it, Google.

What we've totally lost over these past weeks is something that's been slowly seeping out of urban life for years; the spontaneity, the "Marvelous", the unscripted and digitally unmediated encounter. Things get worse but they don't get more interesting. That's the problem for me; an empire in decay can be an aesthetically pleasing thing, but there's nothing in the infantilised drudgery of our ever more digitally mediated dystopia to get the blood flowing, to return the witness to life more violently (to paraphrase the painter Francis Bacon). The city as an imminent space of social life is the mortal enemy of cyberspace. Perhaps, but who has time for imminence anymore? Who bothers to look up at the sky or take notice as their city is transformed into a vast gated foreign investment portfolio? What sort of metropolis of "managed flows" and "regulated exchanges" do we have to look forward to in the wake of the pandemic? What will people put up with?

Isleworth, May 2020

The seemingly opposed imperatives of preserving the economy and of preserving public health are in fact predicated on the same form of governance; the former is geared towards managing populations towards maximising capital accumulation, encouraging appropriate market behaviour, etc; while the latter strips the concept of economy (oikonomia) back to its bare bones by directing the management of people and things solely towards the preservation of biological existence. Both are quintessentially "economical" in foundation, born of a total surrender of individual and collective agency to technocratic management and sham politics. The phrase "being led by the science" is a child of the latter.

Economics presupposes a neutral domain from which it can govern. There is no such thing. Economic "science" places the burden of neutrality onto the scientific advice to which planners and politicians choose to listen. And it is resolutely a choice.  Isn't it all very convenient? In a week that the government announces its strategy for easing the lockdown, Neil Ferguson, the Imperial College professor whose predictions of mass death led to the lockdown in the first place, is captured by the Tory supporting Telegraph newspaper receiving his "married lover" (notice the appeal to the ever present Victorian moral sensibility there) at his home against his own advice. It's almost as if they felt they had given him too much credibility and needed to remove him from the picture to open the way for a new strategy. Discrediting him as a "lockdown hypocrite" delegitimizes in advance any criticisms he might make of the government's management of the crisis.

I mentioned the Giorgio Agamben controversy in brief in one of my previous "plague" pieces. It's a measure of the unthinking "will-to-cancel" that is so common now among apparently educated people that a philosopher who has done more than most to spell out the ever present dangers of sovereign power is cast into the proverbial pit with the conspiraloons and MAGA hat wearing neck beards. Along the fault line separating high anxiety from depressive accommodation sit those for whom any concern for a liveable future beyond the corona-horizon is tantamount to desiring mass cremation pits for the over 70s.  It's symptomatic of the reflexive impotence that grips our epoch that anyone who wants to think beyond the present crisis, to safeguard a world worth living in, are dismissed as death cultists or even Trump supporters.

It's a great shame for the Left that the open veneration of life (that is of course a "doing" word) and liberty is now most frequently articulated by the worst elements of the Right. Put aside the denialism and conspiracy theories and there are other non-Stoic, non-economic arguments against prolonging the lockdown longer than is necessary. The explosion of domestic violence and the forcing of millions of people into penury chiefly among them. I trust the mind that always questions government demands over the one that complies by default. I know who would be more likely to denounce me to the Gestapo. It is not a virtue to readily accommodate oneself to the loss of human intimacy, to allowing people to die alone, to be buried or burned without ceremony. Agamben is spot on in his observation that at no time in the history of our species have these things been forcibly prohibited by governments.

There were hopes that all this spare time might give people the opportunity to consider what is important for them in life. This is another fools hope assumption, that when bad things happen people necessarily start questioning themselves. What actually happens in the face of a major loss of control over our lives is that people often further narrow their horizons. Thinking is after all the hardest thing to do, made all the harder when a state of necessity prevails that deactivates all critical thought in favour of pure bodily survival. Constant inertia does not breed vitality of mind. There were poets in the trenches, there are none in the toilet roll igloo.

All of which makes it likely that any post crisis reinvigoration of social values will occur in an atmosphere of greater social atomisation. Whatever the next few weeks hold as the government attempts to bluster its way out of lockdown, the only certainty is that things will be different, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be better.