You live in New York. You’re Mexican, Puerto Rican, Japanese, Greek, Bronx. You live in an apartment above your life and work. You work in the piano store downstairs. You help out at the church down there. You head out into the city for the rest: chef, security, dentist... Your apartment block kind of looks a bit like the Led Zeppelin cover one. The windows look out to Park Avenue. Metro-North’s outside on elevated tracks. Wednesday morning sees you there. Home working. Day off. Between shifts. Biding your time. Hazy, muted sunlight. That smell last night. Gas explosion. Two buildings disappear in under two minutes. Compacted from five storeys to just over one. Eight of you are dead in the rubble.
It’s hard to know how to live, or to lose the feeling that there must actually be a certain way. Are you getting it right? Do you know how to do it, or at least enough of it? News and changes, external and personal, buffet you and disturb all those thoughts time and time again. Am I out of touch with things? Am I advanced or retarded in developing in life? Will I ever go there? Get to that?
“If you're not a liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not a conservative by the time you're 35, you have no brain.”
With age comes conservatism or not, George Osborne’s pro pensioner budget came last Wednesday. And ‘If you’re a maker, a doer or a saver: this Budget is for you,’ he said. The ideological championing of ‘makers and doers’ brought to mind Tony Benn, who had died the previous Friday. From November 1990:
“[…] Despite the fact we’ve been told we’re an entrepreneurial society, this is a country today that has an utter contempt for skill. You talk to people who dig coal, run trains, doctors, nurses, dentists, toolmakers – nobody in Britain is interested in them. The whole of this so-called entrepreneurial society has focused on the City news we get in every bulletin, telling us what’s happened to the pound sterling to three points of decimals against the basket of European currency. Skill is what built this country's strength, and it is treated with contempt. I must confess the auctioning off of public assets, particularly the latest disgusting Frankenstein advertisements that told me more about the mentality of the Minister who devised the scheme than it did about the sale itself, these are assets built up by the labour of those who work in electricity and by the taxpayer who put the equipment in, now to be auctioned off at half their price to make a profit for a tax cut for the rich before the next election comes.”
Sad thing about Tony Benn dying is the fairly intangible position of him. Passionate, uncompromising ideals, eloquent… What did he do, in neat bullet points? Why does ‘everyone’ smile at the mention of him? Pub conversation about Benn once resulted in: “his heart has always been in the right place, if not his brain.” This is probably the thing to remember when reading HYS sections fighting between ‘an inspiration to me from my teens onward’ and ‘he destroyed industry in the ‘70s and was rubbish in every government post he held.’
Conscience. Simple expressive articulation of thoughts honed by getting and staying involved in society, by reading the theories and the studies, and by passion for beliefs and pride in what works. ‘You can change your government with a pencil.’ Every reminder of Benn was a reminder to bother being a part of society. To pay attention, learn and think, and for god’s sake help.
On 22nd March a 15-year-old girl called Shereka Marsh who had nothing to do with gangs was shot in the neck and killed at her boyfriend’s house in Hackney. She’d just given him a pair of Nike Air Force 1s as a 15th birthday present. She lived with her mother. Her father lives in Jamaica. She took the Jamaican High Commissioner round her school the week previous. Then on Saturday some of/someone in the group was playing with a gun and.
Accounts on indiscriminating databases – the girl still exists on Twitter. The day before she died: ‘I don't understand the concept of life.’
Two years ago on Radio 3 polymath Raymond Tallis explained a passion (Wagner): “[…] we’re the only creatures who know we’re going to die. So we have the sense of finitude that runs through the whole of our life. So we know there’s the threat of all meanings to be cancelled at any time. And so we long to find a meaning that will somehow resist death. A meaning that will bring all the little tributaries of meaning together at one point of un-gainsay-able significance.”
Trying to find something to leave behind, or that is more powerful to think about than the time you will take to live. Perhaps continuing to continue to pretend that your life will never end. Maybe that’s stronger in youth when there’s so much unprecedented stuff on its way to you. Though you keep hold of a feeling that there’s a reserved place for yourself decades up ahead.
“The finding means that in little more than a century, humanity has figured out not only the age of the universe—it was born about 13.82 billion years ago in the Big Bang—but also how its birth unfolded.”
The ‘smoking gun’ to confirm the Big Bang theory turned up on the 17th, by the way (puns and metaphors). Residual heat from the origin of the universe has in it a preserved pattern of gravitational waves: this almost certainly proves that there was massive exponential expansion within the “first millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second of the existence of the universe.” We’re talking a growth in that time to something bigger than the perceivable universe (92 billion light-years across).
An even more mind-boggling astral transition from an impossible, understated before to an impossible, all-encompassing after is the first kiss. Clothing ad or no, as an illustration of an experience some of the details still catch you (mostly the pre-kiss mumbling).
The best thing about cynical shit is that it reminds you how powerful your own genuine feelings are. You’ll have those for the rest of your life and you’ll give them to people for the rest of your life.
“As they helped him out, Mr. McPherson begged his rescuers to leave him and find his wife, please find his wife. But she died.”
The Washington state mudslide of the 22nd. Nearly 11:00 a.m. there, and “the Oso landslide brought down something like three times the volume of mud as there is concrete in Hoover Dam in one momentous cascade, creating a one-square-mile path of destruction.” Mr McPherson and his wife, Gary and Linda, had clocked up over 40 years together. The number of dead currently stands at 25, with 90 still missing.
“I stress that I don’t wish to be flip about the position of the loved ones and people who know people who are on the flight, but it is in some ways exciting to us.”
Still missing: plane. MH370’s had daily media updates since 8th March. By Monday it had to have crashed in the sea, but the search goes on. Angry families attack the spokespersons. Grief in all shapes and sizes. The media include these particular details without much comment or judgement. It’s implicit that the chaotic consequences of emotions and mourning are collectively understood. The way animals look when they watch each other grieve.
Radio 4’s meta- ‘coverage of the coverage’ on Saturday saw Will Self questioned on the appeal of the story at existential level.
“As they helped him out, Mr. McPherson begged his rescuers to leave him and find his wife, please find his wife. But she died.”
The Washington state mudslide of the 22nd. Nearly 11:00 a.m. there, and “the Oso landslide brought down something like three times the volume of mud as there is concrete in Hoover Dam in one momentous cascade, creating a one-square-mile path of destruction.” Mr McPherson and his wife, Gary and Linda, had clocked up over 40 years together. The number of dead currently stands at 25, with 90 still missing.
“I stress that I don’t wish to be flip about the position of the loved ones and people who know people who are on the flight, but it is in some ways exciting to us.”
Still missing: plane. MH370’s had daily media updates since 8th March. By Monday it had to have crashed in the sea, but the search goes on. Angry families attack the spokespersons. Grief in all shapes and sizes. The media include these particular details without much comment or judgement. It’s implicit that the chaotic consequences of emotions and mourning are collectively understood. The way animals look when they watch each other grieve.
Radio 4’s meta- ‘coverage of the coverage’ on Saturday saw Will Self questioned on the appeal of the story at existential level.
“[…] Nowadays everywhere we go is monitored and particularly air flight. Since 9/11 the level of security in the sense in which air flights are determined experiences – we go from A to B, everything is closely monitored – has become very much part of our consciousness about movement. And that’s why the idea of the lost flight is so potent. It presents us with this idea that, you know, maybe we could go anywhere. After all, there isn’t a destination in the world at the moment that doesn’t seem to already bear the impress of a human foot. If you go to the South Pole you’ll very likely to run into the back of Prince Harry, who’s sort of manhauling his way there.”
Taking this element of the plane story as proof of genuine uncertainty in the world – where things can be not known or predicted – uncertainty in your life, where it isn’t distressing you, is a kind of freedom. Freedom from experience, from a course or from being steered, from precedent, from the sense that everything everywhere is charted and predetermined, leaves: well, what do I do? Sadly, beyond the cost-free beauty of trying/thinking/seeing something as genuinely different and spontaneous and unpremeditated in your life as you can, what you do rather depends on…
“The UK’s five richest families have accumulated more wealth than the whole of the bottom 20 per cent of the population […] The handful of billionaires – which includes property investor Charles Cadogan and Sports Direct boss Michael Ashley – have amassed a combined wealth of £28.2bn, more than the poorest 12.6 million people in Britain, according to Oxfam.” That’s the Independent on an Oxfam report from 17th March.
So where to go, then? In or out of Ukraine? In or out of Europe? Well, everywhere and anywhere, daily – sometimes without getting out of your chair. Pay attention, do your bit. Let everything rolling out in front of you help you to think. The longest and the shortest days of your life should tell you just how long and short your life will be, whatever happens. Getting out of breath’s good.
Oh, and the nice supply teacher from Glee has separated from her husband in real life.
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