this is another post from slow fade that i'm transferring here. as the new title says, it's a list of things that gave me joy in the first few weeks of pandemic, those days of being penned in and trying not to panic. it was first published 31 March 2020 with the title in search of delight
--
January was its usual brittle mess; February I swept up the shards
and read two self-help books simultaneously, swapping from one to the
other every few pages, like feet moving forward, right left right
left. I’d tried to read John Paul Flintoff’s How To Change the World before, in 2017, but was defeated at page 28 when he insisted I
ask myself impossible questions like “Who am I?” and “Why am I
doing this?” before I continue. This time around I found more
kindness towards myself, and I’m going to credit Flintoff, along
with my friend Selina, for the fact that I’m now involved in local Mutual Aid work, checking in with a smattering of neighbours and
diffidently waiting for someone to need me.
Selina
also pointed me in the direction of Beth Pickens’ Your Art Will Save Your Life. Written in the immediate aftermath of the Trump
election, it calls itself a love letter to artists but really it’s
a set of tools and strategies offered with a plea: to keep making
work, to understand art as a survival mechanism, not just for the
artist but for any mysterious stranger who might need it. I’ve been
trying to hold tight to Pickens in these first days of lockdown,
returning again to her admonishment: “You and I both know that you
need to make your work in order to be alive.” Some days I believe
her and write a few more sentences; some days all motivation drains
from me and I’m back to asking, “Why am I doing this?” –
again with no answer.
It’s
not that there isn’t time to write; in this weird dilation time
washes in waves. But I drift in it unanchored by a sense of purpose;
it’s hard to write in this glassy state. Thankfully – and I know
I’m blessed to be able to say this – one thing I can still do is
read.
*
Jenny
Offill, Weather, p107
There
are thousands and thousands of deer here. Soon it will be hunting
season. “At least most people who hunt up here hunt them for food,
not sport,” she says. I watch them bound away as we turn down her
dirt road. “Why don’t they farm deer?” I wonder. “Is it
because they are too pretty?” She shakes her head: “It’s
because they panic when penned.”
*
Books
have minds of their own. I’ve had books literally slide out of my
hands after five or six pages if I picked them up before they felt it
was time for me to read them. They know when I need them, and then
they come calling. On Friday 20 March, the day the schools closed,
the book that came calling was Delight, by JB Priestley.
Published
in 1949, when Priestley – yes, him of An Inspector Calls – was in
his mid-50s, Delight is a list of 114 things that, just like the
title says, give him a feeling of particular enchantment. Some relate
to his life as a playwright: the fantasy casting of a play, before
brutish reality takes hold; that moment mid-rehearsals when “the
play is more alive than it ever will be again for you”; the
exquisite promise of the theatre just before the curtain rises, when
“nothing stirs for a second except our imagination”. Several
detail his love of smoking good tobacco, preferably in the bath, or
when other people think he’s hard at work. There’s a twinkling,
often naughty humour in a lot of this writing, and a joy in play:
playing music (however badly), playing charades, rough-and-tumble
games he played when a child, nonsense playing with his own children,
tricks you can pull on other adults. He has a teasing eye for others’
foibles, but also his own; the entry on being recognised, he admits
cheerfully, is “contemptible”.
The
pages sing when he describes the landscapes he most loves, the gold
mist of dawn, the way his soul responds to the sight of pine and fir.
He declares Shakespeare the curse and ruin of the English theatre,
reveres a forgotten music-hall magician, and wonders whether any art
is higher than the sublime joy of a Marx brothers movie. A
fascinating chapter on making writing simple discusses the gulf
between younger critics/writers and those of his own generation:
between their taste for “cleverness and solemnity” and his desire
to write in a way that might connect with “the people in the the
nearest factories, shops and pubs”. The whole book glows with
generosity: a true and abiding care for those who might be overlooked
or hurt by society, written by someone who grew up witnessing “the
deep cancer of injustice”.
The
tone of the writing is cheerful, in an unforced and genuine way, but
a glimpse of the tumult he’s lived through is never far away. A
chapter called “sound of a football” thinks back to the boys he
played with as a youth, and in passing but devastating parenthesis
mentions that most of them “never reached their middle twenties but
died among the shell holes and barbed wire on July 1st 1916”. In a
chapter on the stereoscope (and what a weird contraption that was),
“several years of bombed London” hover like a dust mote. Solving
crimes in detective novels is “easy and sensible compared with the
problem of remaining a sane citizen in the middle of the 20th
century”.
But
it’s clear from his list of delights that he sees the problem of
the modern world not just in the violence of war but in
capitalist-industrialist progress, in the tick of the clock and the
turn of the record player that distance humans from the best in
themselves. He writes as a declared Socialist Intellectual, one with
“a streak of the jeering anarchist, who parts company even with his
friends when they have succeeded to power”, somehow reconciling
this with his repeated grumbles at the monstrousness of income tax.
“The society of split seconds is also the society of split minds,”
he mourns. When he imagines civilisation in ruins, “no more radio,
no more electricity”, he gives every impression of finding this
quite a good thing. Even in the late 1940s he was reading urgent
books warning of “soil erosion and dwindling water supplies and
mounting hungry populations, until you see nothing in the future but
wars, famine and death”. Who wouldn’t dream of a future different
to, better than, that.
But
this book didn’t jump off the shelf to taunt me with foreknowledge.
It came to me because in these wild and strange and frightening
times, I crave delight, and that’s what its pages gave me. More
than that: it gifted me a sense of connection, not just across time,
but across writing.
*
This
started out as a title, “little bits of joy”, and a list of four
or five things. Small things, sweet things, things unrelated to
theatre that I wanted to share with friends but felt shy to write and
do so directly. Every night I’ve written this, I’ve not written
emails. On nights when I’ve not written this, I’ve not written
emails either, just sunk deeper into stupor. I’m trying to let go
of the pressure to be productive, to get things done; it’s part of
trying to recognise my participation in what writer Cassie Marketos –
in another text shared with me by Selina – calls “emotional
capitalism”:
‘It
seems that the complete shutdown of functioning society has,
perversely, created a gap in the wall of what I will call “emotional”
capitalism. That is, the constant, overpowering pressure to shape
even our most private lives according to metrics of tangible output
and efficiency. We “spend” time or we “waste” time. We have
to do things right, “feel” them correctly, have only good
friends, write when we're not working, read when we brush our teeth,
catch up on podcasts, know what everybody else seems to be knowing.
We all know this is exhausting. Until COVID, though, none of us had a
gigantic, collective psychological permission slip to refuse it.
Doing “nothing,” these days, is all that most of us can do. In
fact, doing nothing has become our shared moral imperative.’
Every
day, a little planting in the garden. Every day, making a lunch and a
dinner for four people. Every day phoning my mum to check she’s OK.
Every day checking five different Mutual Aid whatsapp groups,
fascinated and sometimes alarmed by the social dynamics, beguiled by
each glimpse of generosity. These things are only nothing in the
warped value system of capitalism. A value system that lives in my
body like a virus for which I have no cure.
*
I’m
steering clear of theatre online. To quote Durga Chew-Bose: ‘Too
much and not the mood.’ For sure I’m a little envious of David
Jays and his brilliant idea to set up a #lockdowntheatreclub on
twitter, but even that is watching theatre-related films rather than
filmed performance. If anyone asks, I shrug and tell them the bottom
has fallen out of my life, and that’s just how it is for now.
Nothing makes sense. Except for the occasional blog post or open
letter demanding a radical change to the exploitative conditions
under which theatre/all art is made. Thank you Harry Josephine Giles,
Alexandrina Hemsley, the authors of the challenge to the Arts Council
to reconsider their typically dismissive attitude to independent
artists, from a different field Susan Jones, also Francois Matarasso:
thank you for your eloquence and inspiration.
By
comparison I’m writing about fripperies here. But if there’s one
thing John Paul Flintoff and Beth Pickens agree on, it’s the
necessity of joy and the inter-relationship between fun and
social-justice work. ‘There are two ways to change the world,’
writes Flintoff: ‘to decrease suffering or increase pleasure.’
Either way, writes Pickens, doing it in a joy-filled way is more
sustainable.
And
so, a small list of little things that have delighted me since the
theatres, and then the schools, were closed. It won’t change the
world. It’s required me to be selfish to get it written. But I
offer it in hope that someone else might find something here
delightful too.
One
week into lockdown and I feel a lot like I did when my youngest was a
baby and the elder not yet three: all that freedom I’d slowly
discovered with just one child suddenly yanked away from me, replaced
by the plate-spinning panic of one or other of them always needing
something and those needs never being the same or in sync. This album
was released towards the end of the worst of that time, in autumn
2010, and carried us into the first few years of primary school. It’s
the work of two musicians – Kathryn Williams and Anna Spencer –
who are also parents, and has the sophistication of the very best
Pixar movies, plaiting emotion and humour and a love of pop music to
create a series of perfect partnerships: an electropop tune about the
disco-bright properties of toothpaste; a song about the spooky way
home burping and bleeping with strange hoots and squelches; a bouncy
chalk-scratch chant about playing hopscotch. I hadn’t listened to
it for years when I put it on again last week, wanting to remind my
youngest, now 11, of the dry-toned instructions of Illegal – don’t
climb those shelves, don’t put lemonade in the fish bowl, don’t
drink the dog’s water – set to a dirty low funk pulse, like a spy
cop card shark pulling an ace from their sleeve. But it’s an album
that lives inside me, time immaterial: any time I see a sweet on the
floor, the song Sweet on the Floor will unspool in my head, a
yearning lament for what is wanted but cannot be, as painful as any
unrequited or broken love.
A
bot that tweets, thrice a day, the cover of a lesbian pulp fiction
book from the mid-20th century. Some of them are clearly trash (‘men
wanted her luscious body … yet she was a woman driven to the
sadistic pleasures of inverted love’), some are hilarious (‘Lesbian
Web of Evil’ is quite some title), and occasionally there’s one
that sings true: Vin Packer, author of Spring Fire (‘A story once
told in whispers now frankly, honestly written’), was the pseudonym
of Marijane Meaker, who wrote about lesbian love from her own heart.
The illustrated covers are glorious, a frenzy of stockings and
loosened cleavage, tousled hair and gazes turned inwards, one woman
to another, not giving a damn who can see.
There’s
a moment in Weather when the narrator, Lizzie, realises how
extraordinary it is that she keeps not bumping into the annoying
school-gate mum she’s constantly avoiding – so extraordinary, in
fact, that it can’t be her skill alone that keeps them apart, but
the other mum actively avoiding her too. She works in a library and
notes: “My book-ordering history is definitely going to get me
flagged by some evil government algorithm.” She meets someone new
but remembers that her husband “is used to my all talk, no action
ways”, that it “took a long time to bank all that goodwill”.
Now and then a line reminded me of that bit in the National’s
Demons, where Matt Berninger sings “I stay down, with my demons”,
and the note drops on the word “demons”, and the fall is too
easy, too manipulative an emotional trick. Mostly, though, Weather is
as concise and pellucid as Dept of Speculation, and a little steadier
too. Which is just as well because Weather is a novel about a small
person trying to live with the enormity of climate change,
environmental catastrophe even, and shitty right-wing politics, and
so many people dependent on the overpowering love you have for them;
it was too much to read now, in the heart of disaster, and also the
perfect reminder that the disaster was always there, we’re just
looking at it through a different lens.
(The
link embedded into the title is to a website Offill created, also on
changing the world, and who wants to read it along with me?)
A
new fish pie
Sometimes
I get stuck in my ways with cooking: I’m so often in a rush, trying
to finish before racing out to the theatre, and my main imperative is
pleasing the kids, who change their food likes frequently and
arbitrarily and rarely seem to like a vegetable in common. Being home
all the time has opened up a space in which I can be slower: it’s
like I’m actually cooking every day rather than hustling a meal
together. A couple of disasters have emerged from this, not least my
daughter’s birthday cake, my second attempt at following a Felicity
Cloake recipe and definitely my last. But there has also been a
triumph: a new fish pie, made with smoked mackerel, leeks, capers and
a bechamel sauce seasoned with sherry, topped with potato and
breadcrumbs, a sophisticated step up from the fish pie I used to
make, at least until one of the kids goes off mackerel, or leeks, or
both.
Magnolias
in bloom
I
mean, they were when I first made notes for this post: mostly the
magnolia petals are wilting now, pushed aside by unfurling leaves.
They are my first sign of spring amassing, that I’ll be able to
unhunch my shoulders soon. Now I’m noticing other signs: gaudy
crowds of hyacinths chattering in the livelier flower beds; electric
blue ceanothus throwing up sparks; drift of blossom, pink and white.
I’m so grateful for every tulip I pass on the regulation daily
walk, for the new leaves spiking from lavender, eruptions of daisies
in revitalised grass. I can’t think about next week, or next month,
or next year, without plunging into panic: the spring flowers help to
hold me in now, to take pleasure in everything small that surrounds
me, getting on with growing, getting on with being.
Blue
skies
But
also, it dawned on me this morning: no aeroplanes. Remember when the
volcano in Iceland erupted and planes were grounded for a few days? I
didn’t notice. I live on a Heathrow flight path so the sky above me
is always crowded, slashed with contrails; this time I want to
appreciate the clear and the quiet. Mum, says my youngest, have you
noticed that ‘listen’ and ‘silent’ are made of the same
letters? One day pouring into another, an expanse of emptiest blue.
I
have to be careful watching plot-heavy movies, thrillers or
adventures, the tension of them messes with my breathing, induces the
mildest of asthma attacks. Lately the anxiety of coronavirus has
triggered the mildest of panic attacks; invisible hands squeeze tight
beneath my ribs, my diaphragm heavy as iron. My wonderful friend
Rhiannon Armstrong, for whom illness isn’t a sudden catastrophe but
a lived, daily experience, has made a set of slow gifs that encourage
steadier breathing, kaleidoscope whorls, inhale as they emerge,
exhale as they retreat. She’s also made poems from shreds of paper,
which slowly tick like the ponderous pendulum of a grandfather clock
too old now to keep modern time. My favourite is a gif of two bubbles
falling to a wooden floor and bursting, played in reverse so it seems
that the bubbles are rising from its dust.
The
blessed kindness of strangers. Organising shopping for each other.
Popping to the pharmacy. Offering reassurance. Dispensing advice.
Every few days another call: thank you for your flyer, I’m OK, I
don’t need help, but thank you. I’m so glad you’re well, I’m
so glad you’re safe. Figuring out how to get through this together.
