01/o1/2012 – 00:02
Heart quickens
Eyes glisten
in recognition
of the perfect song
striking up
at the perfect moment.
Pearl Jam – Unthought Known
01/01/2012 – 00:02
Anxiety
Anxiety
The climate of poetry is also the climate of anxiety
May Sarton
1.
She’s unravelling
Imagining stains
She doesn’t know what to do with herself
To reign in the thoughts
All flapping and frayed.
2.
Head frozen solid
Tense and tight and agitated
Thoughts riff out over
And over, over
And over, throbbing on one spot.
Her mind’s been overtaken
By stabbing metal clots.
3.
She is at a low ebb
So ends up straightening the bed
More times than strictly necessary.
And ‘cause she’s feeling out-of-sorts
She ends up washing her hands twice
Just to be completely sure.
Then halfway down the stairs
She stops -
Did I turn the tap off?
drip,
drip,
I did turn the tap off.
drip,
drip,
She tries to resist the urge
To just go back and check.
But then the scars
On both her arms
Remind her it’s probably for the best.
If you can turn the thoughts off that way
You won’t be staining clean skin red.
Rock’s ‘secret feminism’
I really liked this article by Amanda Marcotte, Nirvana’s Secret Feminism. Not only because it focuses on Nirvana’s, and more specifically, Cobain’s, pro-feminist ethos (something too often overlooked in those umpteen ‘the REAL story of Nirvana!’ features malestream rock journalists like to trot out over and over again); but also because she highlights the profound impact a male rock band can have on the lives of their female fans and the pleasure and validation we can get from listening to their music (something too often overlooked in those umpteen ‘Riot Grrrl RULES! Dude music does nothing for us grrrls!’ features feminists like to trot out over and over again).
But why only focus on Nirvana? Pearl Jam also, “broke with the sexist norms of the era, choosing instead a pro-feminist public stance and song lyrics”. (And like Nirvana have also reached a 20-year anniversary- though not just that marking the release of their seminal album, but the successful 20-year career that followed too. Don’t burn out before your time. Steel yourself & bust through the bad. Know the joy of survival, of being Alive.)
Songs such as Why Go, Daughter and Betterman are as feminist as anything Bikini Kill ever put to tape. Eddie Vedder has made pro-choice and anti-rape statements on stage. He scrawled Pro-Choice on his arm during the band’s MTV Unplugged performance in 1992. They’ve Rocked for Choice. They’ve hung out with Gloria Steinem. Toured with and heart Sleater-Kinney (I’d never heard of Sleater-Kinney until I got into PJ. Now I heart them too). And you can find ripostes to this generally fucked-up capitalist war-mongering patriarchal world in which we live in a fair few of the band’s song lyrics and from other stuff they’ve said over the years.
In fact, that whole ‘grunge’/early ‘90s ‘alt rock’/whatever-you- want-to-call-it ‘scene’ was largely pro-feminist. Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Soundgarden too, all consciously set out to do rock ‘n’ roll in a different way to the hair metal bands that dominated rock before them. Out went the shit lite riffs and unoriginal lyrics, and in came guitars that soared and sludged and rattled raw and heavy in a myriad interesting and beautiful ways; songs that struck the whole heart/mind/soul. Here was a bunch of male rock musicians who were openly sensitive and intelligent, who weren’t afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Yet Cobain/Vedder/Cornell were also still quite masculine. But it’s this “man-womanly/woman-manly” (to quote Virginia Woolf) combination, which for me, made ‘grunge’ music, and the men who made it, so different, sexy, inspiring… and feminist.
They don’t make ‘em like that anymore, do they? However, I don’t quite share Marcotte’s view that the more ‘macho’ bands that have entered the rock mainstream following grunge’s demise make no room for the female/feminist rocker. According to Marcotte, the likes of Slipknot, Metallica and Limp Bizkit, unlike Nirvana (& co.), are ““no girls allowed”-style bands”. Whilst I agree that the sound of these bands and the masculinities they perform are more macho (and Limp Bizkit’s attitudes towards women far from progressive), I don’t think they send the message: “no girls allowed.”
Go to any Slipknot/Metallica/Limp Bizkit/other all-male heavy rock band show and you’ll find girls in the mosh pit: screaming, dancing, singing, head banging, moshing, crying, smiling; feeling fuckin’ strong and empowered and excited and Alive because up there on that stage is a band making the fastest/hardest/loudest/cacophonous noise, the only noise that seems to sum up and spit out what she’s feeling inside, that encapsulates all that’s fucked-up about everyone and everything in this world. In this music, this ‘macho-manliness’, she finds release, because it sounds like the inside of her head, it speaks to her, and gives her a voice, a sense of her own identity. It sets her free. Therefore, go to any Slipknot/Metallica/Limp Bizkit/other all male-heavy rock band show and you’ll see feminism in action.
When feminists say that certain rock bands are ‘no-girls allowed’ they’re not just warning women of the sexism they may encounter should they listen to them. They are also, in a more subtle way, warning women off those bands full stop. We’re effectively saying, ‘don’t listen to [insert all-male band here], they’ve got nothing to say to us, you should listen to [insert all-female band here] instead.’ In other words, we end up sounding like feminist police. And in the process we ignore and silence those female fans and musicians who do take part in the more heavy/metal/’macho’ sub-genres of rock, who may have gravitated to those genres precisely because there was something in the heaviness/macho-ness of the music that they liked and could identify with.
After all, ‘macho’ bears no intrinsic relation to ‘male’. Women can be macho. And macho doesn’t have to be oppressive or domineering or sexist. When ‘macho’ is performed in rock, it’s often just a sound, a roar, that’s used to capture and give vent to some of those strong and uncomfortable feelings and frustrations all us human beings experience, which may have nothing at all to do with hating on women. It’s just another form of self-expression and one which women can also experience and enjoy.
And besides, there are some male rock bands around today – Muse, Mastodon, and fuck it, I’ll include Metallica here too (and that’s just the bands beginning with ‘M’) – who do manage, invoking that grunge spirit, to fuse their masculinity, intelligence, and ear for a wistful melody, to create meaningful, interesting music that rocks bloody hard and bloody good.
But of course these bands don’t come together under one ‘scene’ a la grunge. I think it’s unlikely we’ll enjoy another era of pro-feminist rock like that we experienced in the early ‘90s. Music scenes come about differently these days; they’re so much more fragmented and transient. And as Marcotte’s article points out, rock music doesn’t have such a hold on the cultural mainstream anymore. The rock music that is the most popular seems to be the sort that has the least to say, is the least challenging. Mainstream pop culture also has less time than it did in previous decades for anything potent or political, particularly when it comes to music. Media has got more commercial, and consequently more conservative. We could see that as a shame; there’s so much that needs to be said and protested given the state of the world right now and yet there’s little opportunity for someone to be able to come forward and sing something. Although it’s hard to break through into the mainstream, with meaningful music, a meaningful message, without it eventually getting twisted, diluted, and all the meaning snuffed out of it. That’s what happened to ‘grunge’/early ‘90s ‘alt rock’/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.
Despite this though, there is still good, heartfelt rock music out there to discover and enjoy; that which came before, that which is around now, and that which is to come; rock music that does, and always will, harbour a secret feminism.
~
Pearl Jam – Daughter
“She holds the hand that holds her down/She will rise above…. oooooh!!”
Once asleep, but now I stand
Once asleep, but now I stand
I am asleep.
The sun is out and I am in her lair. She attacks me with her glowering yawns; big, wide, stretches of light, which stain my eyes red and leave my head stamped upon. But then I’m stirred by a thin, papery rustling; a crackling in the air that causes my head to clear a little.
I open my eyes.
The sun has retreated. She’s dimmed her yellow glare to a golden glow, and is settled at a safe distance behind the trees; trees whose leaves are rusting, and falling to the ground.
Then a bunch of clouds start to loom. Though they prove no tormentor. Merging together, thick and cottony, they form another pillow for my head. They hold still. The riffs of anxiety that have been playing out in me slow down. Then the rain comes, and clearer chords start to sound.
I catch a draught of the cool, crisp air coming in through the window. Swirls of wood smoke and dashes of sweet damp earth waft in gently. But there’s no denying that charge in the air, that charge that ignites my synapses with each breath I take. The weight of my sleep lifts. Its aches and pains are blown away. And then, with one more inhalation, the haziness is shaken, and my energy returns.
I sit up.
Blood starts pouring through my veins. It surges through in waves. The rain subsides. The sky goes quiet. The blood swells out beneath my skin. Then I arrive back on the shore of my own body. My slumber now seems to have been nothing more than a dream; my sleeping self a mere ghost. I was a ghost.
The sun begins to set, turning the air tender. An innumerable number of quiet little deaths seem to gather on the ether. The dream dissolves.
Then I’m in blackness. One by one the embers of my real self begin to burn again; warmth generated by the blanket of solitude I’m tucked up in fans their flames. And then it emerges: my core; my self; my soul, in a pool of orange glow.
Night takes up her tools and sets to work around me. Knocking down walls, digging out fear, dismantling the clock, she creates a swathe of infinity that sets me free. And so I start stretching back into my skin; heart beat pounding; rock ‘n’ rollin’. I begin to form new visions; think of revolutions; there are no inhibitions…
I stand.
The soundtrack
Soundgarden – 4th of July
Mastodon – Sleeping Giant
What has reading ever done for me?
What has reading ever done for me?
For Everybody’s Reading, Leicester’s (UK) festival of books & reading 1st – 9th October 2011
In fear, in sorrow
In fear, in sorrow
My sorrows sounded quietly back then.
I don’t really remember them.
Fading out across the ether…
I left no impression, and formed none either.
But I do remember the anxiety
You echoed it, riffed it right out of me
Songs that fuelled me, lent me some edge
Soundtrack to visions, a future more confident
I thought things were going
To be different.
But ten years on, the sorrows and the songs,
Only get more potent.
Muse – Con-Science
The riots (England, 2011)
Another day is done. The moon is out and shining.
But behind you, the TV is burning.
~
England is burning. Frightening, but not surprising. After all, didn’t we say this would happen? Didn’t we warn that this would happen? The kids will have enough eventually, we insisted. The cuts are going too deep, and they will fight back, it’s only a matter of time. It’ll happen all over again! Remember the ‘80s? we said.
We said that this would happen.
Or did we? Is this what we really meant? Is this what we had in mind? Is this what we foresaw?
People’s homes smoked-out, smouldering skeletons; streets shells of their former selves; local shops looted and livelihoods lost; young men run over and shot.
No, this isn’t what we meant, we couldn’t have imagined…
What has happened? To make things feel much more wrong? Something’s changed, things have changed, I don’t know what to think, to be honest; but something has changed.
~
By 4pm, rumours of a riot about to kick off in the city centre are circulating in the office. Buses have come to a standstill. Cars are on fire. Apparently. Shops are putting their shutters down early. Even Boots, it must be bad.
Walking down one of the main shopping streets, you think: it could happen here, this street looks similar to that one in Croydon before it got smashed up last night; they could get something to mask their faces with from the costume shop opposite Poundstretcher, they do Halloween stuff.
There’s not tension in the air as such, more an agitation, the sense that we are about to lose control. Each siren that sounds that day signals something more sinister, the workmen drilling the road suddenly make a deep thud, setting off a nearby car alarm, followed by more sirens, there’s been a road accident, so a traffic diversion, and by the time you’ve reached Asda? Defiant beats blasting out from a young man’s headphones. It’s like everything’s been tuned to a different pitch. My head feels a bit weird. And we’re all wondering: will it be our city next?
(Do we want it to be our city next? No, we don’t want the violence. But perhaps just to catch some of the illicit thrill that bounces off of it all? To have something wake us up, disrupt routine, instigate change?
But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish, illicit excitement of wartime […] a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessnesss. […] Nothing is more powerful than this nihilism, an angry readiness to throw everything overboard, a willingness, a longing to become part of dissolution.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook. )
By 10pm, I hear police helicopters hovering overhead.
~
Don’t attempt to politicise what has happened, they say. There are no deeper social or economic explanations for this, they say.
But there’s no need to try and politicise it, for it already is political. Everything is political. Same for social and economic context. Everything happens within a social and economic context. You can’t escape it.
And you do have to ask: ‘why’? Why is this happening? Who is doing it, and why? And why now? Yeah, I know hearty, arty analyses aren’t on trend these days, but we do have to ask, ‘why?’ We do have to go beyond, ‘they’re just a bunch of mindless yobbos, lock ‘em up and throw away the key’. And in doing so, that doesn’t mean we condone the violence, want to hug the hoodies. We’re not seeking to justify the violence, but the reasons for it, the underlying causes:
Poverty, perhaps? Police racism; cuts to EMA; a consumerist, social-mediated culture that breeds selfish individualism; bad parenting, failings of the education system? The effect of growing up on estates, in cities, that have a history of this sort of thing; violence, antagonism, hostility towards authority, where things never seem to get any better, and there’s not much left to lose? In Birmingham, they say it’s inter-racial tensions; for London, police racism lies at the root of it; for Leicester, Salford, Wolverhampton, it’s maybe none of the above, all of the above, and more. It defies simple explanation, an ultimate all-encompassing conclusion.
But it is sad, this sickness, it is sad (and remember, you can ask: ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn); kids having slipped through the cracks now trying to crack everything up. Many have asked: ‘where were their bloody parents?’ Well, maybe the kids would like to know too. ‘Chuck ‘em in prison’, the kids with nothing to lose – and why not? They’ll get fed, and perhaps the chance to train up in a trade; more than they get now.
Though it wasn’t just young unemployed lads, children, looting and robbing and setting things on fire. Respectable middle-class newspapers have been wringing their headlines in shock at the young middle-class girls – ballerinas! uni graduates! Olympic ambassadors! - who have been charged for theft and criminal damage. ‘How could this happen’, they cry? As if we can get our heads round the male underclass going out on the rampage . But nice, respectable, middle-class girls? What on earth could possibly make a nice, respectable, middle-class girl suddenly flip?
(Remember, you can ask: ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn).
~
Turns out there was a riot in the city last night. The women in the office are on it: ‘It’s just mindless.’ ‘It’s awful’. ‘Have you got a Metro?’ ‘They should be made to pay, why should we?’ ‘No-one was talking on the bus this morning, everyone was reading the newspaper’. ‘Why are they doing it?’
Walking down the same street as yesterday, Poundstretcher’s been smashed; windows are boarded-up (though hang on, hasn’t that one been boarded up for a while now?); shattered panes of glass; sloppily scrawled anarchy signs on the outside walls of the train station, and police on patrol, as another day dims, and we wonder whether it’ll happen again. It’s 5pm, but nothing more untoward as yet.
A couple of community support officers stop by a fast food restaurant to check in on an elderly man, dishevelled, head in his hands, slumped over a table by the window which looks out onto the smashed-up street.
~
(Remember, you can ask: ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn).
But then a part of me doesn’t want to attempt to analyse this situation, fix it into a theoretical framework, contextualise it, X, Y and Z it. Quoting Marx, going off on one from some intellectual pedestal, referencing history, economic factors, and social indicators, can be useful, important, in helping us to understand all of this (whilst also maybe making ourselves feel better, and somewhat superior, in the process).
But with that, there’s the danger of becoming too detached from the human tragedy of it all. Of it leaving you cold. To theorise moments such as these almost feels like an exploitation of the situation, a commodification of it. Stuff your book on ‘Deconstruction and Feminism’, it’s about time we started building things back up again. What can theory say to those families who had to escape from their flats in fear as the fires started to rage last Saturday night? What can it say to those shop owners who’ve just witnessed their lifetime’s hard work go up in flames? How does theory xyz relate to the tears and the terror of it all? What can it do?
Some things happen which you cannot comprehend, cannot think much about beyond, ‘this is sad, inexcusably bad’, and you just need to feel it, and not think too much about it, ‘cause thinking doesn’t seem be able to get you anywhere, anymore. It can’t always bring back what’s been lost.
(No, this isn’t what we meant, we couldn’t have imagined…)
~
Along a different street this time, one of Waterstones’ windows has been smashed, the one that displays the Costa Coffee sign. A stab of sadness in the stomach. But wait a minute, (walking along, there seems to be less people in town today), why are you feeling sorry for a corporate chain that’s had one of its windows smashed? I thought you were down with that shit! You felt pretty righteous on seeing those chain stores smashed up along Piccadilly in March. After all, those corporations can afford to fix a single soddin’ window.
But why does it all now seem so wrong? ‘Fires’ and ‘riots’, ‘riot girls’, have taken on a different tone, they leave a different taste in the mouth, conjure new meanings in the mind.
Indeed, it is sickening, Mr Cameron, (nice to see you by the way, four days after the first fire was lit, and you’re attacking the police for not doing enough, quickly enough? Even though it took you a while to turn up and do something too? Nice holiday?). Indeed, it is sickening, seeing a young injured man, bleeding onto the pavement, being robbed; reading that Age Concern buses and independent music warehouses have been torched, and hearing the callous laughter of young rioters as they delight in ruining someone’s livelihood.
And yet, in response to the kids who may just have had about enough of the cutbacks, this week it was Cameron’s turn to say ‘Fightback!’ (Yeah, let’s get on it, MAN!).
Something else co-opted, twisted; things have changed, and I don’t know what to think, to be honest.
~
Could the cycle repeat itself, before too long? (2008 – stock market crash; 2010 – the cuts; 2011 – the riots. And again; 2011 – stock market crash…) Those bloated men in suits working Wall Street are looking panicky again.
Oh, but none of it’s connected, they say. None of it’s connected.
And they’re right, it’s not connected – in any simple, coherent way. We don’t automatically go from the arrogant assumptions of the American president, to banking collapse, through to announcements of government spending cuts, resulting in people on inner-city estates finally feeling the pinch too much, so they end up punching back. No, it’s not as clear-cut as that. But the connection, the thread linking it all, albeit in a knotted, messy kind of way, is there. Though it never gets teased out, because they say none of it’s connected. And so those in power responsible for a lot of the mess get away with it; ‘cause if the global economy does collapse again, it won’t be Murdoch’s mates in government and on Wall Street who’ll pay, and take the blame. We’ll end up having a go at the teachers who dare strike for one day to protect their pensions.
And because those in power never get called out, we shouldn’t be surprised if all this does happen again: the crash, the cuts, the riots. (But this isn’t what we meant…) With a Prime Minister who insists what we’ve seen on the streets this week has nothing to do with poverty, and a Chancellor of the Exchequer who refuses to budge on his economic policy… no, we shouldn’t be surprised. ‘Cause with such stubborn intention to put ideology before reality, reality will only end up biting harder.
In the office, colleagues are cutting jobs, of the low-paid/part-time/admin variety, resulting in a fair number of women with children becoming unemployed. And I’ve had e-mails from kids who were unsuccessful at getting a place on the council’s apprenticeship scheme this year, begging for a second chance, ‘cause without this, they just.don’t.know.what.they.are.going.to.do.
Oh, but none of it’s connected, they say. None of it’s connected.
On the streets of this city, you can smell the stench of poverty, it lingers, it’s always there.
Oh, but that has nothing to do with what happened in town Tuesday night, they say.
On Newsnight, a debate on the riots saw the older white participants shout down the two young black participants.
Oh, but that is in no way indicative of what lies behind what’s been happening on the streets this week, they say.
And on the news, reports of what sparked the first riot, the shooting of a young black man by police, and how he didn’t shoot first, are buried at the bottom of the bulletins.
Oh, but that doesn’t hint at what else may lie behind what’s been happening on the streets this week, they say.
(Remember, you can ask ‘why?’, seek to understand, and still condemn).
And whilst we’re on the subject of the media, well, Murdoch and co., and their pals in Parliament and the police, have also shown themselves to be callous, cruel and completely amoral. Oh, it’s all been spilling out this summer! The whole system’s corrupt, no wonder we’re f*****!
Oh, but none of it’s connected, they say. None of it’s connected.
~
We board up the windows, sweep away the glass, the question that’s now being asked is: ‘What can we do to improve London’s image in time for the Olympics?’ Priorities, people! We must quickly paper over the cracks, no time for those hearty, arty, (arsey) analyses. Shut up and get on with things. Keep calm and carry on. We’re good at that, us Brits. Bits of gift shop tat are adorned with the slogan, we sell it right back to ourselves.
But then, who can blame us? For just wanting to carry on. Isn’t that what we all do, as individuals, every day, anyway? Put our faces on and pretend everything’s okay, even though it’s not (it’s really not)? To stop and attempt to probe further, to ask: ‘why?’, ‘what’s really going wrong here?’ can seem frightening, too overwhelming. It might mean we have to change.
~
It’s all so hard to comprehend. You try and get your head around it: ‘the worst scenes of violence the police have ever seen’; living through history. Another trip to the photocopier, you try to get your head around it, ‘it looked like a war zone’.
We’d heard about this sort of thing happening in the ‘80s, when our parents were the age we are now. (But no, we couldn’t have imagined…) We’re familiar with those tales of urban unrest, we’ve sung about Ghost Towns and White Riots, insisted those songs still spoke to us, still meant something today. But now that it’s actually happened, to us, in our time, now; well, things have played out slightly differently, and those songs don’t quite up sum up 2011.
(No, we couldn’t have imagined… What has happened? Something’s changed, things have changed, I don’t know what to think, to be honest.)
And then you go back to that one big question: what can you do? We grasp at the small glimmers of hope shining through, those things which make England good: local communities coming together to clean up the wreckage, multi-faith peace rallies gathering in city centres, to spread a more positive message.
And yet, there’s the sense that something much bigger needs to shift, it’s not enough. But you don’t know what. It’s all too massive, too much. And even if you think you come close to an explanation, there’s really no-one listening (is there?), those powers-that-be, they don’t want to know, for, ‘it’s got nothing to with poverty, society’, they say. It all comes back to the individual.
The individual must take responsibility.
And yet the individual seems ultimately, insignificant. Unable to make any real difference.
This gloom, this surrender to the dark waters which lap us about, is a modern invention. Perhaps […] we do not believe enough. Our fathers at any rate had something to demolish. So have we for the matter of that, thought Jacob, crumpling the Daily Mail in his hand. He would go into Parliament and make fine speeches – but what use are fine speeches and Parliament, once you surrender an inch to the black waters?
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
~
Another week is done. No moon tonight. Too cloudy.
Behind you, the colour on the TV’s been turned down.
But outside, sirens still sound.
~
PJ Harvey – England
Sonisphere Festival 2011
Knebworth, 8th & 10th July 2011
1.
Kick start my heavy metal heart,
XY guitar.
(Remember who you are.)
Thundering blood back through my veins.
Macho-testosterone can be sexy. Necessary.
Soundtrack & antidote to anxiety.
Insanity screwed up into combustible balls of chugging riffs & epic energy,
which explode, loudly; but then, more quietly,
sadness slides out along licks of melancholic guitar.
Moonlit Metallica.
Metallica – One
2.
Through it all, rock ‘n’ roll is the thing that remains.
The thing that speaks to you; sets you free; keeps you warm.
17 again. (And because sometimes, ‘fuck you bitch!’, is the only thing that will do.)
Limp Bizkit – Break Stuff
3.
The roar & the riot;
the rebuke, the fuck you, to the too-bright, sunny days;
to the conformity, false niceties, & corruption in the newspapers & on the telly.
Blast it all away.
Go on,
Fuck . It.
Turn the lights out & get turned on.
Embroil yourself.
Gutteral escapism.
Heap some depth & darkness onto these sickening, shallow, summery days.
Hell, yeah! *This* is the sound of reality.
Expressing what words fail to; the noise inside my head.
Encapsulated.
Right here, right now.
This. Is. It.
Mastodon – Where Strides the Behemoth & Mother Puncher
4.
Need to keep the darkness in.
I heart you rock ‘n roll. I heart you. 4 eva.
Poverty is lit up, ugly, in the city, in summer
Poverty is lit up, ugly, in this city, in summer. The sun makes a deeper imprint of it, presses it down, illuminates it. So you see it: hanging around on doorsteps, heaps of collapsed limbs attached to defeated bodies wearing aimless, expressionless faces; and swaying and staggering, unsteady on its feet, intoxicated, in the park, at 8:30 in the morning. And you note its deposits: the beer bottles outside the door of the characterless concrete office block on the corner, the one you obediently turn up to every day, and join the floor upon floor of people, heads down, droning their days, their months, their years, their lives away; another impoverishment.
The workers here, they kid themselves, (you kid yourself), they are doing something with their lives, they have to, (you have to), in order to get by, to mentally, get by. But it’s all a cover-up, it’s all a lie. For the reality is, the life is being snuffed out of them (is being snuffed out of you); reduced to carrying out nonsensical tasks; but what else is there to do in order to get by, practically, what else is there to do to survive?
The sun’s penetrating glare provokes the boiling over of those frustrations, resentments, prejudices and anxieties, sadnesses and madnesses, that had been simmering underneath, quietly to themselves, behind closed doors, inside of you, up until now. They now hang in the air, seething, in this city, in summer.
(And you sense that black strip wrapping itself around your skull again, something is pulled down, cutting you off from yourself, as you limp along, lethargic, heavy but empty, all itchy, anxious, and wrongwronguglywrong (Stopit!Stopthinkingthinkingthinkingdammit!Stopit!!).)
A police helicopter hovers over ‘that’ part of town. Its low repetitive rumble of doom, disquieting, clouding the blue sky sunny day. It’s not even 9am yet. As the day draws out, drags on, the heat increases, and with it, the ugliness, the impoverishment, the horribleness, intensifies. Nerves are prickled and tempers flare: a young man yells at his partner, who is rushing ahead of him with a pushchair along one of the main shopping streets, before turning his ire towards the driver of the bus he’s just stepped out in front of, forcing a sharp slamming of the brakes. And at the bus stop further along, a kid reduces his mother to tears, his impetuous temper too much for her, but even then, he doesn’t relent, but keeps shouting at her, and she ends up calling someone on her mobile for help. And the stench! Of this city, in summer. Piled up rubbish, pools of vomit. And pigeons, loads of them, loving it.
(And you think: if only the sun would stop screaming so much, put itself away, and turn the volume down on all this sweating, heaving, exhausting, horribleness; all this horribleness, and madness and ugliness; but it’s been kept down for too long, and now it wants to come out, so here it is, spilling out onto the streets, being scratched onto your skin, and is burning, burning, burning.)
School teachers are out on strike. And the town is swarming with people, young and old; shopping. ‘The people’ are not lighting fires of indignation here; the only thing that burns is boredom, frustration, people shifting for something to do (you heard there was a rally taking place somewhere, but…). ‘The people’ here haven’t gathered to raise their voices at the powers-that-be that do nothing to alleviate their poverty, but at each other: parents are yelling at their kids, and a group of teenagers are arguing with a couple of security guards round by the youth court.
And because it’s sunny, and there’s nothing else to do, this being a poor city, a poor city in England, a poor city in England in the summer, people get pissed; and sway and stagger, unsteady on their feet, intoxicated, in the park, at 1:30 in the afternoon. And beer bottles are dropped outside the door of the characterless concrete office block on the corner, the one you obediently go back to, and re-join the floor upon floor of people, heads down, droning their days away,…., kidding themselves,… No mention is made of the strike, (apart from the odd, “Is so-and-so not in today?” “No, she’s at home with the kids.”). Revolution remains something that involves other people, in other countries, that-thing-on-the-telly. There is no connection between the everydayness of the poverty, the boredom, the frustration, and the hostility; the void, ‘the people’ of this city are steeped in; and sexy, badass, put-it-on-a-poster, ‘revolution’.
A complete breakdown shutdown is the only thing that could do it, could end it; the horribleness, the madness, the ugliness, of it all; the poverty, lit up, ugly, in this city, in summer. But it’s too hot, there’s too little time, (and you’re tired). It takes all they have (all you have) to just get by, so they (you) shut up and put up instead.
Hope for a revolution dies. There is too much sun in our eyes.
