The Pulmonary Rorschach: notes from the middle of a whirlwind
For a variety of non-corona personal reasons in our lives—mostly very joyous ones —this project has been on hold for the last few months. We’re back to producing podcast episodes behind the scenes which we’ll bring out later this year, and will resume weekly articles here for the foreseeable. Thanks for subscribing in our absence!
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When you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs, or swept over the rapids and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you’re telling it to yourself, or to someone else.
- Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Since the Corvid-19 crisis reached these shores, a fragment of a family story keeps returning to me. Portsmouth was the town where I was born and prior to that, two generations had criss-crossed the country via Birmingham, suburban Surrey, London and Edinburgh - but from the Scottish capital my grandfather had also lived in that island city, come to school, via the charity of the De La Salle brothers, to board at a school where my father would later begin his teaching career. Walking past that arcane college, as we would often do, my father once told me what his father had, about his memories of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 coming to the city. Lying in a boarders’ dormitory whose shuttered windows were high above that street now filled with traffic, my grandfather had lived in a then unimaginably other world where the slight but noisy mostly horse-drawn traffic would have long-since ended by the time the boys went to bed. But the signature memory of 1918-19 was the habitual nocturnal clatter, that would resume after a quiet evening, so he would lie awake, listening with horror to constant backdrop of cartwheels, out of place and all night long, knowing this to be the sound of the inexorable tide of fresh bodies, transported under cover of darkness.
As an image, its horrible exoticism provided its stickiness in my young mind - the combination of cartwheels and pestilence placed it in a period of plague as surely as a beaked doctor’s mask or a passage from Pepys or Defoe. Suggestive across times and cultures, the wheel has cycled through our collective imaginations to evoke the turn of life and death: King Lear envisions himself dug alive from the grave, caught purgatorially between life and death, bound upon a ‘wheel of fire’ and his fool cautions his entourage implicated in his deathward decline to "[l]et go thy hold when a great wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with following it” while his friend Kent pleads with Fortune to “smile once more; turn thy wheel!”. Each of these borrows from the discursive lexicon of the wheel of fortune, a European corollary to the Buddhist iconography of the wheel of dharma, turning through life and death. The relentless of the image haunts in the way Romero’s zombies do—before Danny Boyle taught them to run—like death itself their arrival is inevitable, and the slowness of their coming does nothing but amplify the unstoppable nature of that sure and certain horror. Perhaps it is this combination of the deeply and familiarly storied and the historically outré that kept those wheels turning over cobbles in my memory. These days I hear that cartwheel-clatter in my mind in idle moments.
We find ourselves in a time, when the familiar and the unimaginable coexist in a horrifying and unsettling present. Frederic Jameson’s much quoted claim - the definition of Mark Fisher’s ‘capitalist realism’ that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism” (‘Future City’ New Left Review 21 May/June 2003) doesn’t ring as true as it did even a few weeks ago: there’s been a levelling up of sorts, so that imagining the end of both has become a damn sight easier than we knew possible.
Which makes this a fruitful time for any of us with a non-systematic politics, those who seek a rupture of the neoliberal order we’ve lived under for decades. Jeremy Corbyn, with some justification, feels vindicated as a proponent of European social democracy on the question of public spending: someone has certainly stumbled into a forest of those previously elusive magic money trees. In the US, Bernie Sanders finds New Deal-style measures suddenly inevitable and couldn’t conjure better conditions to make the case for Medicare for All had he written the script for the disaster movie in which we reside, as the uninsured are dying and the rich are endangered by the individualism they so recently celebrated. I see these and I feel vindicated, this bears out the world as I understand it, or at least, a necessary first step. But others are having the same experience and drawing the counter-running conclusions: on behalf of the centre of the Democratic Party Shadi Hamid, writing in The Atlantic finds vindication for pragmatic technocracy, and further right, Rich Lowry in the National Review finds epidemiological endorsement for Hungarian-style hard borders and the nationalism of Viktor Orban. Opinion polling suggests the populations of the US and Britain are seeing their choices of tinpot populists vindicated by the crisis.
What to make of these contradictions? We cannot all be vindicated, these commitments being so contradictory and fundamentally opposed. We are, to return to Margaret Atwood, “in the middle of a story” and so “it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness”. Attempts to solidify this moment are premature and vindicate not these ragtag political commitments but the pattern-finding tendency of our monkey minds, the pre-requisite for storytelling itself.
Confronted by Atwood’s “wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs, or swept over the rapids and all aboard are powerless to stop it” the narrative impulse is to select features of the confusion and suppress others. To fail to do so is to live the undifferentiated life of the psychotic break. And so we tell stories, and we are always making selections — inevitable though this is, it is always a mystification; at best a partial truth, and often a lie. A narrator is always unreliable, and — tempting though it is — we are as likely to see ourselves and our pre-existing commitments in the blood-flecked Rorschach of these uncertain times as to divine reliable truths. A storied understanding of the world is a productively mistrustful account: what we therefore hold to be true or untrue, is plausibly true or untrue only from the perspective of the speaker. Every speaker, every viewer is first and foremost a maker of choices. The fullness of reality is always beyond us. If it is useful to understand ourselves as storytelling, pattern-finding animals, though his suggests a number of uncertain principles for tentative making meaning.
We never live our lives in only one story but always in a mishmash of multiple stories – and the stories I set out to tell you always interact with the stories you bring to our conversation. This leaves ample room for each of us to find ourselves reflected in the contingencies of events, but very little reason to truly be confident in our findings. The terms of the story change the sense of what matters. The story through which we examine events makes all the difference in, and even to, the world as we know it. But such selections are underway constantly in what we take to be ‘real life’ because stories born out of pattern finding shape the world, the way we perceive it, and how we act. Our ability to make meaning out of the world by pattern finding has been crucial to the evolutionary trajectory of homo sapiens. For all that it has offered, and the richness it adds to life, a narrative caution suggests that we must proceed with open eyes through this precarious and misleadingly storied world. And for all of my life this function has been evaded and alluded. The era of the end of history has also been the era of personalised politics — and so from both sides a collapse of the possible.
From this moment, we have a chance to escape this muddy relativism — particularly at this time when action is so sorely required. In the current crisis, we find ourselves without certainties. While looking into the entrails of a crisis, and seeing a reflection of the ideology with which we entered is a form of fatalistic narcissism which is entirely backwards-looking, it is a salutary opportunity to rediscover a banal profoundity about the nature of the future. This, itself, is an innovation of sorts. We can foreclose on the foreclosure of that so-called end of history. This is a Hegelian moment of negation of negation, rich with possibility. The trajectory of neoliberalism is that the story has played out, history has ended, there is no alternative. The project of an insurgent politics has always been to undermine this fatalism. To return to Mark Fisher:
[E]mancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.
- Capitalist Realism, (London: Zero Books, 2009:17)
What the ghosts of the Left has failed to achieve, a virus has blasted open. Keenly—in the horror of the current whirlwind—we feel ourselves in the middle of a story. We do not know what is to be done, but for the first time in a generation there is a shared sense that a currently unknown answer can be articulated. The illusion of certainty is over, the assumed end of the story is suddenly unknown, the rules of the game are once again provisional. The old world may be ruining itself, but we who were never afraid of ruins, can begin to see though this fog and to hope to attain the impossible.
