Lockdown often feels, or did feel, like being trapped in a snow-globe, especially when the weather is unchanging. The Winter months, particularly January and February, were unearthly tranches of time, where the outside and the inside did not feel different enough to bother exiting the one for the other because they were the same time and place. It became increasingly impossible to generate enough dynamism within the day to do anything. The energy usually created by the perpetual motion of the city gave way to a film-set: a really sparse, Beckettian zombie film in which even the zombies had given up on their desire and retreated to dreamless, brainless sleep in suburban allotments.
I’m not an essential worker, naturally, or essential in any way, for better or worse - better for me, as no one ever expected anything, and worse for everyone else for the same reason. Naturally, lockdown is and was a myth, because there were many people continuing to do many kinds of jobs, and people were only really as locked in their houses as their own private neuroticism told them to be. As JJ Charlesworth put it in a tweet from last October: ‘There was never any lockdown. There was just middle-class people hiding while working-class people brought them things.’ Someone tells me that a man they know who usually worked as a very well-paid sound engineer has taken up delivering for these now-ubiquitous fleets of people bringing food to people in their houses: he seems, by all accounts, very happy. Perhaps we will all became nodes in a consumerist delivery circuit, bringing things to each other until the end of time. At least if we are cycling about we might stay fit.
At the end of January I updated Philip Larkin’s ‘Days’ (1953)
And I could barely bring myself to even do this! Like many of the friends I spoke to at the end of February, people had entered into their own private snow-globe for days at a time, wrapped in a blanket of utter nothingness. People stopped being articulate, forgetting words, unable to hone their usual expression against the whet-stone of everyday sociability. How strange that we require so much movement to keep our minds alive. Brain-fog, distraction, utter, pure boredom: at points I wondered how anyone in the history of humanity had ever managed to do anything at all. It is incredibly impressive that anyone has ever done anything. No wonder there is so much envy and hatred towards the energetic! It is impossible to concentrate. It is impossible to do anything. Do something, the same thing for the next thirty minutes. Can you do this?
I felt myself slipping into a mild depression around Christmas, which is unusual as I am generally buoyant with a tendency towards mania … up not down, the sun not the cave. I could tell this as my thoughts became ruminative, backwards-looking. A couple of thoughts got stuck, like little cogs with their edge sharpening every time they completed an ever-tightening cycle, generating a cut that became a scar in the present. I was reminded of Nietzsche, of course! In the final paragraph of his Preface to On the Genealogy of Morality, he writes this:
I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practise the requisite art of reading, a thing which today people have been so good at forgetting - and so it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ -, you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a ‘modern man’: it is rumination…
It’s interesting that Nietzsche says this, as I’d forgotten that he doesn’t mean rumination negatively. Elsewhere he is rather mean about cows, or rather about George Sand in particular, who in ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche refers to as ‘lactea ubertas, in English: the milch cow with the “fine style”’. So what is rumination if it is not the endless repetition of a bad meal, the kind that renders you unable to think outside your body? According to Etymology Online, only the single best website our culture has managed to emit, the two meanings of ruminate turn up around the same time:
1530s, "to turn over in the mind," also "to chew cud" (1540s), from Latin ruminatus, past participle of ruminare "to chew the cud; turn over in the mind," from rumen (genitive ruminis) "gullet," of uncertain origin.
Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?
I don’t know.
Tee hee.
‘Cud’ is a pretty interesting word, if mildly gross. It is ‘it is a bolus of semi-degraded food regurgitated from the reticulorumen of a ruminant’ according to the additional-citations-needed-Wikipedia entry on the topic. How many stomachs do we have for reading? How can we stomach lockdown? What happens when your mind becomes a stomach? What limits are reached when you can only turn over something in your own mind before wanting to simply turn over your own mind as such? How strange this time has been, how weatherless, how lacking in futurity.
But there are still books! They can’t take them away from us, yet. There is still reading. If we have forgotten the habit, we become inconsolable. Just as we have to practice other arts - the art of getting out of bed, the art of not being ridiculously self-indulgent all the time, the art of trying not to get into terrible states, the art of not becoming a potato and all the other arts. Nietzsche tells us to eat his words and to throw them up a little bit, the better to feel them. Nietzsche had stomach-ache. If we are dyspeptic we can feel resentful. It may take us more than one go to digest our meal. We need not be resentful if we learn how to read again. The glass of our snowglobe gets pierced, shattered….shattered! by shards of light.