Life under "Lockdown" - A London Diary #3
I think the side-effects of
self-isolation are beginning to show. Most of its manifestations were perhaps
predictable, others may be less so. There’s no doubt the world has had to slow
down. Social norms and taboos have shifted. People, mulling things over, have
naturally begun to speculate. Most of us have found ourselves with more time on
our hands. Time regained. Some people are finding ways to employ and use that
time to their advantage, other people are finding it more challenging to deal
with this new reality. Almost everyone is longing for it to end, although
Government policy and public opinion here in the UK both seem very confused and
divided.
For some though this state of
enforced self-isolation has prompted a certain amount of reflection. Others
have been quicker to judge and condemn. While some are ranting and fuming,
others are feeling philosophical. Perhaps
then, as we all wrestle with the restrictions which currently confine us,
perhaps it’s only natural for many of us to begin to question and to wonder: if we can pause the world like this, then
maybe this is the perfect moment to stop and reflect, to
re-evaluate, and perhaps also to begin to redefine, to reorganise, in order to realign
our world, and redirect our collective future? – Out with open-plan
offices; in with more cycle lanes, etc.!
Naturally enough, people seem to
have bifurcated into pessimists and optimists. Some see our present predicament
as a prelude to dystopia, others as an unprecedented chance to launch ourselves
towards utopia. No wonder then that people are reaching for precedents and
portents. Seeking to read the tea leaves of our present times. Just as Arthur
C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973)
seemed to foresee the arrival of an unknown interstellar object, dubbed ‘Oumuamua,
in 2017, so too people were quick to highlight the seemingly uncanny coincidence
that a novel by Dean Koontz, The Eyes of
Darkness, published in 1981, eerily appears to have predicted a pandemic
arising out of the Chinese city of Wuhan. Too spooky, some might think. But the
plot sounds more like the Terry Gilliam movie, 12 Monkeys (1995) than COVID-19. Perhaps it’s worth noting that Rendezvous with Rama also begins with
Venice being wiped out by a massive meteorite in 2077, something to look
forward to then!
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| 12 Monkeys (1995) |
The truth is though, that the sort
of scenario we are currently living through is unprecedented in living memory.
Comparisons have been sought with the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic of 1918, but very
little appears to be readily accessible regarding that global incident for us
to fall back upon, and there’s no one still alive from that time to ask about
it. It’s little wonder then that so many people are reaching for fictional
counterparts – describing our present trans-national urban “Stay at home”
‘lockdowns’ as “Ballardian,” and the unprecedented change to social norms
according to draconian Government diktats as “Orwellian.” It’s not quite
Kafka’s nightmare world yet, although Kafka’s vision
has been fully realised before, first in Nazi Germany and then behind the Iron
Curtain during the long years of the Cold War, and yet, given present
circumstances in North Korea and in other nations of similar ilk, evidently Kafka’s is a recurring dream, and given the recent alarming rise in populist authoritarianism –
who’s to say the Kafka-esque nightmare won’t become
more contagious as such 'lockdowns' inadvertently compel us to obediently fall into line?
Small wonder then that a lot of ordinary
people are seeking to look beyond the cynicism and exasperation, attempting to
look beyond the bars of the metaphorical cage which we are all impatiently
rattling. Some in the UK are doing this by evoking a wartime Blitz-like spirit of “stiff
upper lip”, “make do and mend”, “keep calm and carry on” – even though others
have thrown all caution to the wind and have thrown lavish (‘social distancing’
flouting) street parties to celebrate the 75
th anniversary of VE Day.
People’s coping mechanisms have manifested in all manner of ways. Some people
have been posting marvellously creative and improbably realistic photos of
themselves imitating famous paintings just using household items and fancy
dress. Professional musicians, such as Yo-Yo Ma, Gautier Capuçon, Neil Finn,
and the Rolling Stones, have been live-streaming or recording performances from
their homes. Writers have been hosting live web-chats and giving readings
on-line. All attempting to lift people’s spirits, to occupy themselves, to feel
less isolated, less alone, less aimless and at a loose end. The actor, Richard
E. Grant has been posting a daily “Withnail & Isolation” quote on
Twitter,
much to the collective delight of the many fans of arguably his most famous
film role, which all too appropriately always end with his breaking down into
an exasperated yet gleefully maniacal laugh. Everyone seems to be seeking some
form of light relief, and, perhaps with it, some sort of a continuing sense of
hope.
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| Withnail & I (1986) |
Interestingly an old and hitherto
little known news story seems to have hit a vein of unchecked enthusiasm on-line
recently when
The Guardian newspaper
published a piece about the “real life” version of William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies. A new book written by the historian, Rutger Bregman
(he who was much feted by the media for having the audacity to affront the
hypocrisy of those attending Davos to their faces a few years back), has brought
to light the story of six teenage boys who were rescued from a remote tropical
island called ‘Ata, where they had been castaway for 15 months in the
mid-1960s. Bregman uses this story to bolster his contention that human beings
are innately good and cooperative in their core natures, the very opposite of
Golding’s spoilt public schoolboys, similarly stranded yet who quickly revert
to a brute form of “primitive tribal savagery”, eschewing civilisation and
decency in a crude contest of survival of the fittest/nastiest. A lot of people
were quick to share and circulate the story on-line, positing it as “an
uplifting tale of hope”, “something heart-warming”, “a story to brighten our
days”, “a ray of sunshine” in the present gloom.
I couldn’t help looking beyond this
though. For me, the real story the article highlights resides more in the
immediate spark it so clearly lit in terms of its reception firmly located in
the here and now, and the rapidity with which it seemed to spread, which I’d
hazard to claim points more to a morality tale of our present times. There are
a number of issues arising around the telling of this tale through the
mediation of two white men, the Australian Captain who rescued (and who also
later went on to employ) the boys, and the Dutch historian retelling this true
tale of benevolent adventure to a global audience; as well as questions concerning how the rights to this story have been
managed, and what, if any, agency 'the boys' have had in all of this – especially
now that Hollywood execs appear to be circling like sharks looking for their lucrative cut.
But parking those issues for now, the
world is currently off-kilter and people are evidently searching for a focal
point upon which to fix a collective sort of self-reflection, something to
kindle hope, something to fan those optimistic flames, a parabolic mirror to
conduct the collective laser light that might help to burn out the current
canker – both physical and metaphysical – which is increasingly afflicting us
all. Perhaps people are hoping to find evidence that we are all essentially
good, and that we can heal the great rifts in our current globalised society –
after all, we may not all be in the same boat, but we are all in the same
storm. That’s for sure.
People have long looked to stories
of castaways and to tales of survival for personal inspiration, and as a means
of posing to ourselves hypothetical moral and ethical challenges and conundrums.
They are the kind of stories which (as anyone who regularly reads ‘Waymarks’ will
no doubt have realised) have fascinated me from an early age. From the
eponymous novel Robinson Crusoe
(1719) by Daniel Defoe, and the Journal
of Robert Drury (1729), to more recent tales, such as movies like Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), Silent Running (1972), Mad Max (1979), Cast Away (2000), even Wall-E
(2008), and most recently The Martian
(2015) and Ad Astra (2019), to name
but a few. The idea of isolation and survival in the face of extremes is something
everyone speculates upon at some point in time, asking ourselves: what would we do in such a situation?
 |
| Wall-E (2008) |
When the lockdown began it jogged a
long forgotten memory to the forefront of my mind, and so I asked some of my
old school friends, via Facebook, if they recalled the incident. They did. And
it was this: one day, during an English lesson a senior Chemistry teacher
knocked on the classroom door and entered with an important announcement –
there had been an outbreak of legionnaires disease discovered at the school; we
were safe where we were, but we were immediately being quarantined and couldn’t
leave. Questions quickly ensued. We may be there hours, it maybe days, they
couldn’t tell us, but we’d all be safe and looked after, the emergency
situation was being sorted. The Chemistry teacher then exited as he had to
inform the other classes. Wide-eyed conversations and various levels of
disbelief, uneasiness, and excitement bubbled away. The English teacher then
managed to marshal the meteoric speculations and moderate the chatter very calmly
and carefully, until after a short while elapsed and the Chemistry teacher
returned with an important update: we’d
all been duped!
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| Jim Hawkins meets castaway Ben Gunn - Treasure Island (1883) |
We were about 12-13 years old at
the time; young enough to be innocently credulous, but old enough not to immediately
freak out and start crying. When the hilarity, annoyance, and relief died down
and the two teachers stopped laughing, we were told that this had been an
exercise to get us to use our imaginations – we were to think and write about
what we thought being quarantined would be like and what feelings such
isolation might foster with us being cut-off from our homes and our families …
One of my old school friends on Facebook commented, “They probably wouldn’t get
away with pulling a stunt like that today!”
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| Cabot Square, Canary Wharf, London - 16 April, 2020 |
This recollection was in part
prompted by an imaginative parallel which I’d experienced a few weeks ago, when
I ventured out on one of my increasingly infrequent forays to my local
supermarket in Canary Wharf. Walking through a deserted Cabot Square, I stopped
a moment and looked around, realising I was the only person there. The dry
fountain, the tall high-rise buildings, the roads around devoid of cars, taxis
and buses as would have been normal on any other weekday afternoon, the absence
of people and the total silence of all human activity was suddenly very eerie.
I felt like Will Smith in the movie version of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I am Legend (2007). Thoughts of H.G.
Wells’ War of the Worlds (1897), and
John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951),
soon followed. The zombies, Martians, and man-eating plants from outer space
were in a sense real, but metaphorical – coronavirus was the unseen foe which
had succeeded in emptying Canary Wharf and the City of London. Science fiction
very suddenly felt all too real.
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| Cabot Square, Canary Wharf, London - 16 April, 2020 |
Looking out of my window at home as
the days clocked on into weeks, I began to see and sense the rhythms of my
neighbour’s lives changing. People whom I often saw only fleetingly, if at all,
before began to build new routines. In the prolonged unseasonably fine weather,
emerging to sit in the sun at lunchtimes on the tiny green square of their
lawns. Others emerging for an hour in the afternoons to watch while their kids
ran about in the communal courtyard in order to let off some of the steam which
inevitably builds up from being young and cooped up all day indoors. Everyone
is currently stranded on their own desert island, all of us counting an
unending succession of two metre intervals until our rescue and release.
The internet is undoubtedly both a boon
and a burden during this crisis. It enables us to connect, but also it reinforces
the reality of our isolation. It’s a window to look out of, and to clap the NHS
from on Thursday nights (if you feel that that will help), and it’s also a virtual
window out of which to shake your fist at the world, and to look down upon the
conduct of others, such as heavy-breathing joggers, overzealous Bobbies on the
Beat, and the ineffective platitudes of our politicians (should you wish to). Hence
it provides escapism, but sometimes it needs escaping from. It’s a rabbit-hole
at the best of times, and worse still in times like these when it can be a
portal to a Mad Hatter’s tea party. But interesting things do unexpectedly appear
there from time to time, and prescient themes occasionally seem to prevail.
To give an example, the other day I
stumbled upon a short film by Lena Friedrich, titled
The Hermit, on the website of
Aeon magazine. I’d never heard of the
“North Pond hermit” before, but it is a remarkable true story of a 20 year old young
man, named Christopher Thomas Knight, who dropped out of society in 1986 and
took up residence in a remote part of the woods in the Belgrade Lakes area of
Maine in the USA. Remarkably he lived alone without any human interactions
until 2013, and only then because he was caught stealing food and supplies.
He’d lived by stealth and thieving rather than bush-craft and survival
techniques, but nevertheless he had weathered and survived the extremes of some
27 winters outdoors, which is no mean feat.
The North Pond hermit story, as
many have pointed out, is reminiscent of that of Christopher McCandless (as
depicted in the 2007 movie Into the Wild),
who similarly dropped out of mainstream society in 1992 and sought to live
alone, surviving off the fruit of the land in a remote part of Alaska, but died
either of poisoning or starvation (or perhaps both) having trekked into the
wilderness without a map and having his route back cut off by a swollen river
he could no longer cross. Tragically he was only a quarter of a mile away from
a serviceable crossing point, but having no map he was unaware of it. Or that
of the wildlife photographer, Carl McCunn, who arranged to spend around five
months in the Alaskan wilderness in 1981, but failed to make confirmed
arrangements with the pilot who dropped him off to return to pick him up again,
and so, when he eventually ran out of supplies he committed suicide rather than
face death by slow starvation.
However, the story of the North
Pond hermit didn’t so much remind me of McCandless or McCunn. Rather it reminded
me more of Onoda Hirō, a Japanese soldier from the Second World War who
survived thirty years living as a ‘hold-out’ in the forests of Lubang island in
the Philippines, occasionally raiding and getting into skirmishes with the
locals, until he was finally persuaded to surrender in 1974 (I’ve written about
Onoda and other Japanese WW2 ‘hold-outs’ in more depth
here). Despite the
parallels, the North Pond hermit was in many ways the antithesis of Onoda, who
was driven by a fanatical sense of duty and mission. Conversely, Knight seems
to have been driven by the negation of these qualities, despite his apparent
qualms and his subsequent remorse about thieving as a means to live. One thing they
each had in common though was an ability to deal with, and perhaps even to
welcome extreme isolation. Hence perhaps why, when people’s curiosity is piqued
by such stories, they tend to think of such individuals as seekers for, and
keepers of a deeper truth – a truth which humankind might do well to learn
from.
In a sense, it’s the same with this
current story of the “real life” Lord of
the Flies. To see those six runaway boys from Tonga as a signal flare of
hope desperately shot into the dark sky over the atoll of our current corona
‘lockdown’, where we are all stranded and isolated amidst a pounding sea of self-serving,
selfishness, and self-interest, might be exactly the kind of reassurance a lot
of people need right now. In reality though, those teenage Tongan castaways are
but one case study, defined by specific social and cultural contexts which are
unique to those particular boys and their very particular story. The stories of
other genuine castaways – for instance those on Pitcairn from the wreck of the Bounty, or those on the coast of South Africa
from the wreck of the Grosvenor, or
the coast of Chile from the wreck of the Wager,
and even that of the fictional school boys in Lord of the Flies, are all very different.
Context is key. Lord of the Flies (1954) was written by
William Golding as a deliberate counterpoint to, and direct inversion of, R.M.
Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1858), which Golding thought improbably idyllic in
the light of his experiences of fighting on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day
during World War Two, and later as a school master teaching boys aged 11 to 18.
As such, it paints a deeply pessimistic picture of human nature which many
readers find irresistibly unsettling, as the novel’s enduring popularity
attests. Ultimately though, all stories are refracted by our own reading of
them, we all project something of ourselves onto the reality of others and
perhaps even moreso in times like these, when we all seem to be living whilst
trapped in a sort of hyper-reality. A reality in which we are all, both
physically and metaphorically, marooned in our own sense of isolation, yet
oddly one in which we are all also living under a state of siege.
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