Don't It Make Your Blue Eyes Weep - A Guest Post by Simon Solomon

Police breach social gathering legislation to pollute lagoon at Harpur Hill, Buxton 

Photos: Sky News

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion. - Albert Camus

In the febrile air of 1967/68 Paris, the Situationist International group planned a beautifully macabre stunt to protest the Vietnam war and épater les bourgeois by staining the Seine blood-red and depositing in it the corpses of a couple of hundred Asiatics to drift downstream to Notre Dame.

Reportedly, obtaining the cadavers was the easy part, courtesy of an enterprising plan to hijack a refrigerated truck en route to one of the city's medical schools that was said to do a brisk trade in Chinese dead bodies. However, the industrial dye proved a sticking point since the quantities were prohibitive. Thus, the plan sadly foundered, and the river herself remained artistically unperturbed. [1]

Fast forward to the viral madness of 2020 Blighty this week, when it has been depressing beyond belief to read of Derbyshire's Police's serial overreaches of the government's already draconian guidelines in locking down the entire nation - bar the odd permitted sortie to buy a pint of milk, stretch your legs or go to your job if you feel you must (and still have one) in order to, say, stay alive.

Taking as its departure point a spokesman's confidently philistine assertion that 'driving to beauty spots in the Peak District cannot be considered an essential journey', the constabulary has recently been keeping us safe by means of a catalogue of reassuring innovations - culminating in the reassuring use of drone surveillance to trace the car number plates of drivers back to Sheffield and subsequently name and shame on social media tweed-jacketed ramblers and old ladies with dogs. As Plod now extends its Orwellian arm to issue its wisdom concerning the dispensability of beauty for psychic health, God's green earth (beyond your own garden fence) is now - in its Cyclopian gaze - officially off limits. [2]

And so, building upon its blatant contempt for the necessity of beauty for anyone with half a soul or a breath of joy in their Covid 19-squeezed heart - and in a supremely dumb gesture strangely redolent of the French situationists (but without a soupçon of the spirit, wit and intelligence ) - the same force's recent desecration of a Buxton lagoon with a cheery black pigment at public expense has made good on its claim that communing with nature is to be outlawed, since the area (and doubtless any others it so decrees) is intrinsically 'dangerous'.

With this in mind, a surprisingly literate Facebook post on Buxton Police SNT reads, 'we have attended the location this morning and used water dye to make the water look less appealing.'

Difficult as it might seem for the rest of us to make this up, news reports state that the force has form in this domain, since the same tactic has been used in the past to reduce anti-social behaviour - such as children wading in the water or young people (whose risk of death from Corona virus is close to nil) admiring its turquoise tones in short sleeves. [3]

The former Supreme Court Justice Lord Sumption has lambasted the overreach in an extended public statement, the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has dubbed the force's behaviour 'sinister' and 'counter-productive', and even the former Justice Secretary David Gauke has called matters 'badly misjudged', while local residents have themselves taken to social media, with one commenting: 'If only they were this authoritarian to people carrying zombie knives, stealing your car or grooming kids in Rotherham' - an item of customer feedback one wouldn't be surprised in the current climate to see earn its writer a court summons all by itself.

How best to respond to people who seemingly think aesthetics are a species of foreign head lice?

Clearly, the aforesaid pushback is pointless against those who clearly don't even have enough shame themselves to admit they are wrong (while seeking to shame others for such dangerous behaviour as going for a spin and a scenic stroll). We are ourselves at a loss, but would suggest that any remaining poets, anarchists and libertarians not yet criminalised in the Buxton area should band together under cover of nightfall, create a kindly cordon sanitare around the local cop shop, and throw a bucket of some suitably irremovable industrial dye of their own choosing over a few local officers. (In this venture, we suggest scarlet might be a colour of choice to leave the recipients suitably red-faced.)

As for the Blue Lagoon itself, by some accounts the water is barely more chemically benign than ammonia, contains dead animals, turds and needles, and is so cold it might (literally) drag you under at a stroke. There are a few sensible signs up, we gather, so that people can assess the risks for themselves like adults. Such excremental details, however, only make us love it all the more for its clearly Baudelairean allure to the local populace, and we look forward to looking in when time permits. 

Notes

[1] On the Situationist movement and fun and games on the Seine, see Christopher Gray (ed. and trans.), Leaving The 20th Century: The Incomplete Work of the Situationist International (Rebel Press, 1998). Thanks to Stephen Alexander for reminding me of this.

[2] Except it isn't! To see a summary of the correct and updated government/police powers (which allow one to drive and hike in the country with loved ones to one's heart's content), see https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/explainers-52106843.

[3] This is of course in no way to diminish the deaths of a small number of 'non-vulnerable' young and middle-aged people from Covid-19 in the UK in recent weeks.

Símón Solomon is a poet, translator, and critic. He is a professional member of the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin and currently serves as managing editor with the academic journal Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society. He can be contacted via simonsolomon.ink

Surprise musical bonus: click here. 

For a follow-up post to this one, click here.

Soon It Will Be Easter

F. N. Souza: The Deposition (1963)

Oil on canvas (138 x 170.5 cm)

Soon, it will be Easter ...

And this year, Christ's period in the tomb - post-crucifixion / pre-resurrection - will have a terrible significance and reality for us all, in this, the Age of Coronavirus and the Great Confinement, as we lie suspended between life and death, frightened even to cough or touch our faces.  

Of course, sooner or later, we will have to wake from our viral slumber and leave our domestic isolation. Even if our bodies are numb and full of hurt, we will have to move; assuming we're still alive and haven't perished behind the stack of quilted toilet rolls where we sought safety and reassurance, but which became at last a 3-ply prison.   

But it won't be easy moving back into life and returning from the land of the dead - particularly as the idiots in government have crashed the global economy. It might be spring and the natural world may be "thronging with greenness" [1], but things are, I suspect, going to be difficult for a lot of people for a long time to come.  

And, of course, we won't really be moving back into the same world, or the same life; but a different world, a different life (even if it has the appearance of the same). Sickness changes us and changes everything.

Indeed, what D. H. Lawrence once wrote of the flu is perhaps something we might say of coronavirus, namely, that it's a transformative disease: "It changes the very chemical composition of the blood." Hence, the fact that even when one does finally recover, "one has lost for good one's old self ..." [2].

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Escaped Cock, in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 126.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 3995, to Mabel Dodge Luhan, [14-15 April, 1927], pp. 36-38. 

On Protecting the NHS

One of the justifications for the Great Confinement - or lockdown as those who prefer prison slang refer to it - is that we need to protect the NHS, i.e., prevent an increasingly creaking, crisis-ridden institution from collapsing as the number of coronavirus cases requiring critical care rapidly escalates.    

It's an interesting slogan: one cynically designed to play on people's love for a state run health care system staffed by (heroic overworked) doctors and (angelic underpaid) nurses and accorded sacred cow status amongst the Great British Public. You can criticise anything and everything, it seems, but not the mythical monolithic NHS, no matter how poor, actually, the level of service provison and how desperately in need of reform it is.

I don't know when or why the NHS became quite such a powerful symbol of national pride and identity, but as Danny Boyle's preposterous London 2012 opening ceremony demonstrated, that is precisely what it has become. [1] We may not have a mighty empire any longer, or a world beating football team, but we do have Great Ormond Street and Pudsey Bear.

As one commentator notes, the NHS "provides the state with its moral purpose, and citizens with an idea not of the Good Life, but of the Healthy Life". But it also, of course, allows the state to relate itself to us not as citizens so much as patients or patients-to-be, ascribed a number on one huge waiting list. From cradle to grave, the Nanny State is there to care for us (which is why, ironically, we must now stay at home and protect it).

Ultimately, however, as Tim Black argues:

"The NHS doesn’t need saving; it needs demystifying. And perhaps then, stripped of its ideological role as the long therapeutic arm of the state, it might be possible to have an honest and open debate about what exactly we want from a national health provider. A point-of-need service, or a secular religion?" [2]


Notes

[1] Boyle's 20-minute long tribute to the NHS - with dancing medics and a giant baby - brought a tear to the eye of many a viewer, but I'm not the only one to have found it absurd, delusional, and slightly sick-making in its sentimentality. Whilst the vast majority of people employed within the NHS are well-intentioned and hard-working, that shouldn't blind us to the grim reality of many UK hospitals or make the system (in all its bureaucratic ineptitude and wastefulness) immune to criticism.      

[2] Tim Black, 'NHS: the state religion', Spiked (10 Jan 2017): click here to read online.

For a related post to this one - on clapping our NHS heroes - please click here.