The Wall
Banging your head against it, repeating yourself, reading
It’s impossible to write right now, which is of course the time you have to write. I keep trying and giving up and the thoughts and the day just snowball so one day you just have to break the drought. I wish I could do it daily, as I always say I will, and did once, and it was the best thing I ever did, but I just don’t, and haven’t, and that’s okay too, or has to be. Because here I am, now. And words are going on the screen.
Timecapsuling it for myself, the world only becomes insaner. How long can they hold it, I’ve been wondering since the dystopia— for want of a more horrific word—arrived. How long can they keep telling us we’re not seeing what we’re seeing, experiencing what we’re experiencing, that wrong is right, how long can they keep denying what is so obvious, how corrupted they are, how by the day more and more of us see it, and are joining to condemn it, are seeing behind the curtain, just how naive we were to believe our interests were at the heart of our leaders, that democracy would hold, how now (who thought it could get worse) even the absolute basics of human decency are being thrown back in our face. People marching against genocide are terrorists, heads of genocidal states are here to console, and Epstein is up in everything. All the way to the execrable top.
It’s hard not to sit with your phone (the only place any sort of truth is disseminated, albeit sandwiched between targeted ads and propaganda, you have to have a mind of steel) and watch the structures of the world crumble before your rectangle eyes. It’s fascinating, dizzying, horrifying, profoundly distressing, informative, rallying, devastating, hopeful, depressing.
You walk your dog. He is present, here now, simply. He worries about you. But the greater world, he does not know. You read Walden. You stop Walden for a bit and read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, the fact she is long dead comforts you, she is resting and at peace and doesn’t have to deal with this shit, and you feel jealous that she doesn’t have to live in this time, then feel immediately horrified as she lived through WW2. You wonder what she would say about now, what your Nan would say. You’re comforted by the fact that in Haushofer’s book, being blocked off from the world which appears to have died behind the mysterious wall doesn’t feel very nice; you thought you’d be jealous, being shut off right now from everything seems like paradise. You need to come back to some place of humanity, something smaller, to connect with the essence of things again, the essence of people, you are heartened by how many showed up to the marches against Herzog, and horrified at how many got hurt, including old people. Our Prime Minister just keeps holding the line we’ve been waiting to break for so long now. A person, a human, that once had some sensibility, sanity, a basic brain, heart, what did they do to him? To all of them?
To ramble and to ramble and to ramble. I just received the most extraordinary message from a stranger about my book, such a human message, from a very real human. In the bookshop Yas and Emma and I went around trying to find books that reminded us of our humanity, like Walden, and other books about simply being human, what it is to be that, how to exist on the planet, how to be, and I found I kept picking out books on trees and dogs. This is how little I must currently think of humanity, I shrugged to Yas.
But we must refuse that thinking, mustn’t we. Faced with the human story, unless you’re Pam Bondi in the chamber with the Epstein victims just now, most our defences crumble. It’s the wall we put up between reality and what we need to believe that dehumanises us. You can see the defensiveness brainwashed into people righteously committing and defending their atrocities in Gaza and elsewhere: if they stopped and thought for a moment, they’d crumble. I think a lot of the Barbies in their pink onesies, if only we could go around in a little truck and with a well-articulated monologue snap the zombies out, release them from their man-songs around the fire.
We have to look. We have to write. We have to stare at things, even our fucken phones. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.
