11 May 2020

Castaways in the Time of Corona


"The Real Lord of the Flies" - The Guardian, 9 May 2020


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! 

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 75th 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.

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!

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!”

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.

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. 

The Hermit - Aeon Magazine


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.

Onoda Hiro, c.1944 & 1974


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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