The blog is back…Across the car park, in the real park, can see a man slinging something over a tree. Hoops for handles, he lifts himself off the ground, bringing his legs out straight in front of him. These patches of urban green are now gyms, and things that they were before, only more so: places to walk the increasing numbers of dogs, patches to stroll or run around in, to maintain the body as the clock collapses.
I feed the birds on the balcony. Black sunflower seeds, mixed nuts, mealworm, monkey nuts, fat balls. The squirrels come, one with a bent tail. Two massive wood pigeons turn up, and two robins, one fat one thin. There are lots of great tits - wahey - and even a wren, once. A pair of magpies watch on, but they don’t join in. The people downstairs seem to have moved out, and I sometimes wish I had access to their garden. The rubbish and the recycling has not been collected for days: if it were warmer the smell would be unpleasant. I wonder what has happened. Perhaps the council has just given up.
There is nothing essential about any of the ‘work’ I do - by design - and I have no relation to schools, hospitals, takeaways, or any other of the few places left open these days. All teaching and any meetings are conducted online, which does not function as much of a reality principle. I go for walks. I take photographs. I rearrange my books. It is not that bad, though, like everyone I am sure, I seem to cycle through multiple moods in a day, ranging from abject despair to indifference to mild euphoria and even optimism. I look forward to the sun, the other sun, the one that gets closer to our hemisphere. I can’t believe people are talking about dimming the sun. I would join an army in opposition to anyone who would darken the sun.
Sometimes someone asks me to write something: I usually do. I teach a course on nihilism to men and women in little rectangles, and I like them as much as it is possible to like someone in a little rectangle. I wonder if I will ever meet them in person.
I think about what the internet, and lockdown, will do to us, is doing to us, collectively. Months ago I wrote ‘we must cling on to the ideas of a non-state social or collective being’. Posters telling people to ‘Be Kind’ are weird, haunted, repressive admissions of an absent social conscience, battered and deemed unworkable decades ago. Yet people are still kind, not because they are told to be.
I increasingly dislike the internet. The way everyone is reducible to a meme or a cliché of one kind or another, that there’s a little description for everyone; its so gloomy. I hate the way it compels people to identify or over-identify as something or other, or with some silly type of thing or another. It is anxiety-inducing. But it is also nothing.
The internet will never replace real interaction, real conversation, real dialogue, real freedom. Freedom is walking in nature, with a friend. It is having nowhere in particular to be. It is the present moment, dilated.