Exaggerated barriers

Those of us who have been cautious have now been locked down for some four months. With the compulsory introduction of facemasks in shops and similar internal public spaces, as from yesterday, the whole spectacle of viral infection becomes more sinister, more alien, more gloomy, with no definite end in sight. Already it seems to have been going on for an eternity. Remember those sunny Thursday evenings of neighbourly solidarity when we would go out into the street, clap, and catch up on what we’d all been doing? It seems such a long while ago.

When, finally, this calamity ends, and we look back, will it, I wonder, seem such a long period? In retrospect, how will we judge the lockdown? What will its popular name become? Will we define and label our recent pasts with terms like “before the pandemic”, “during the lockdown” and “since corona”? Will the whole dreadful episode feel like a major barrier in our lives, one that we have somehow or other survived and emerged out of, blinking, on the other side, or will it, as normal life continues, slink back into the forgotten ignominy it so richly deserves?

Barriers in time are unusual; spatial barriers are more noticeable and tangible, though not always so. In the late 1970s, David Canter, who later went on to specialise in the controversial area of “offender profiling”, wrote about the psychology of architecture and place, including the effect of psychological barriers upon perception of distance. These might be discrete physical obstacles like canals, motorways or railway lines, or they could be less obvious, like dense and confusing  areas of cities through which it was difficult to visualise a route. Canter suggested that where there was a psychological barrier of some kind the perceived distance would be greater than otherwise. Sadly, he wasn’t able to perform before-and-after studies on the Berlin Wall, or on the English Channel pre and post Tunnel, but he did offer an example from central London. The distance from Trafalgar Square to Waterloo is roughly the same as from Trafalgar Square to Oxford Street, but the former journey apparently appears longer because it includes the physical – and psychological – barrier of the River Thames.

While I understand this supposed result, I’m not convinced, for there are many other confounding factors. For instance, I find that even thinking about Charing Cross Road makes me feel tired long before I’ve mentally got anywhere near Oxford Street, and that’s even without the detour required in recent times to avoid the Crossrail hole (remember Crossrail?). However, as a general finding, it does suggest that in place, as well as in time, there can be psychological entities that cause perceived extent to be exaggerated or otherwise distorted. I think that, simply, where there is more information to be attended to, or where it is encountered during a time of anxiety or other stress, more is made of it than might otherwise be the case. The density of significant intervening information is somehow relevant to the effect, but it’s complicated and, in the nature of subjective phenomena, unpredictable.

Nothing in relatively recent history was more stressful than World War Two. When I was growing up, parents and others who had lived and fought through it readily classified happenings as “before the war”, “during the war” and “after the war”. From my perspective of the 1950s, the Thirties were an unimaginably long time ago; something very big and unpleasant had clearly happened since, something that I’d just missed, but which to the older people around me was immense and significant. The war was fundamental to the accounts of their lives, to their personal chronology, and it had seriously got in the way of the normal passage of time. During the early years of my childhood, “before the war” was another world; those six years of hostility remaining as a profound psychological wall. Only six years?

Fast forward most of my life. The other day, unexpectedly, I found myself on that generally very useful website called Ancestry.com, currently freely available via my local library service during the lockdown, and offering its vast collection of genealogical data which, I’ve realised, has to be treated extremely cautiously. The official documents are reliable, the navigation can be irritating as can the defaults to American data, some of the submitted homemade family trees are iffy to the nth, but mostly it’s fascinating. I found myself looking at the 1939 Register for England and Wales - an extremely valuable document - and at the data on the inhabitants of the road in which I spent my earliest years.

I was astonished. My road (we didn’t have streets round our way). So many familiar names from the Fifties, and to think that they were already there in 1939. As though the war hadn’t happened, they had sailed through that almost impassable barrier, into the early years of my childhood.  Those people had been there before the war, a possibility that had never occurred to me before, but there they were, in the Register. Sure enough, there were our neighbours, Mr and Mrs K, a nice old couple, he with torticollis and a strange way of walking, half looking backwards all the while like some dogs do; she with a fondness for nattering over the fence. Surprisingly, that wasn’t given as her occupation. At the corner house, old Mrs. C, from whose front room window my mother and I once witnessed a scary dog fight in the middle of the crossroads. Next door but one Mrs. N, who apparently was born in 1875, which explains why she was very old, but not why her house always smelled of gas. Mr. and  Mrs. W were listed, though not their fat grey cat Smoky, who was more significant in my early life. No. 111 was unoccupied.

Across the road, Miss L, who took me – shaking with fear - to my first Sunday School, and was listed as a shorthand typist. Also her mother, Mrs L, who my dad nicknamed The Fritter. My dad was left handed and a genius and therefore sometimes thought in mysterious ways his wonders to perform. The Fritter looked neurotic, harried, and we would see her nipping up and down the road, going to the shops, coming back, going out again. I’m afraid we mocked her silently from the safety of the net curtains. And further up the road, old Mr A, who had to be avoided on the way home, because you could never get away from him and his endless guff about his son in the South of France, and about his pleurisy attacks from which he annoyingly never ever died while your tea was going cold. And most unexpected, further up the road, Mr Cheeseman. I’d completely forgotten about him; he looked exactly as his name implied – like Stanley Baxter but with more cheese.

So long ago, and so suddenly into the present, frozen. One aspect of more general phenomena, evidently - various types of compression of time and place, expansion and collapse, warps in the fabric of whatsisname. Time flies when you’re having fun, goes slowly when you’re bored or anxious, but whatever you’ve been doing, when you look back, it’s gone too soon, and there’s little left.

They’re all gone now. All dead.

But to think of it, I mean, I can’t quite get my head round it. Those quiet people just carrying on in their semi-detached suburban anonymity, putting out the washing, watering the rhubarb, painting the shed, like nothing had happened from decade to decade. The Blitz, Belsen, the Bomb, and all the time The Fritter was tripping back and forth to the shops, frittering away her life, untouched by the central horrors of the twentieth century. Although to be fair to her, she had absolutely no idea that one day she would be immortalised on a blog page - as The Fritter.

Deliberating the Dangleberry

When I was younger I took a rather mocking approach to the activity reports of elderly relatives, who when asked about their day would cite as evident highlights putting out the bin, paying the milkman, or having a chat with the old boy across the road who has got to go in for a hernia. Now, being older myself, and retired, I can start to appreciate some of this, with the processes of expectation-minimisation and banality-elevation accelerated and exacerbated by the lockdown, as well as by age. Not going anywhere much, watching very little TV, not having any structure imposed upon my days, means not only that I’m unable to tell if it’s the weekend or a bank holiday, but that the formerly despised timetables of trivia have risen to the surface.

The basics of daily existence endure, and each one constitutes more of an event, as what formerly was background becomes foreground, as the infraordinary becomes the doorway to the potentially extraordinary, and as the mundane becomes mainstream. Each minor activity is transformed into something one can celebrate, is attended to more deliberately, nurtured more imaginatively, as though it was an artform, a happening, something to e-mail about at great length to someone half a world away, something to log as an achievement. In a crisis like this the overfamiliar comes to the fore. So if the weather’s fine, as it is at the moment, and speaking personally, breakfast will be taken outside. That’s a bit different from the norm, and represents a deliberate attempt at creating enjoyment and adding interest. Breakfast as an event, almost as a holiday  A feeling that one could be at the seaside even though that’s two hours or so away. Ah, maybe so, but see, the bananas are Boubas, from Cameroon. A Bouba can never be thin, ask any psychologist. Grow fat and happy. Chop one up and put it on your flakes. (No, not the psychologist). Black grapes from Brazil. The blueberries are … oh look, there’s a wasp.

The real fun sets in with elevenses, which advance ever earlier, currently starting at around 9.30, when rather than opting for a quick spoonful of the instant stuff, a “proper” coffee will be manufactured slowly and carefully, a decent mug will be selected, and one will feel that one is doing retirement properly. “Ah, this is the life”. “Sure beats being at the office”. “It’s Sunday, isn’t it?”. “Oh, oh, right”. Look, there’s another wasp. 

A proper coffee will be accompanied – according to whim  - by a pain au chocolat (a regular gift from a kind neighbour), a slice or two of only mildly burnt fruitloaf (toaster setting uncertain), or most frequently by white toast with butter and  an exotic marmalade, preferably one with rustic oo-arr credentials purchased pre-lockdown from an olde worlde garden centre with a coach park, space for 850 cars and a plastic tiger in reception. The jar we’re working through at the moment is labelled Mrs. Dangleberry’s Homemade Olde Englishe Stem Cell Ginger with Extra Dangleberries. It’s absolutely stunning. I could eat it till it came out of my orifices. By lunchtime, given the warm weather, something alcoholic will be calling.

You can see where this is going, can’t you. Yes. Cider. Given (a) the paucity of things to do and (b) the difficulty of finding anywhere interesting to exercise in, means that one’s diet suffers, at least in terms of being sensibly nutritious and under control, and one’s waistline expands. You may argue that these are small prices to pay for getting through this pandemic with a modicum of sanity, and I would have to agree with you. I mean, 14% extra dangleberries. 

Always, in this current situation,  one has to try and seek an upside, and preferably one actually available, one we can benefit from now, well before the dreaded lurgy is dreaded no more. Well, food, is an obvious upside, drink likewise. But seriously, the upside, as I see it, is that – regardless of, and because of, all the things one cannot do – one is forced to focus upon what one can do, and upon what is still accessible. Out of lack of alternatives one is compelled to look more closely and to appreciate more deeply. Much of what I’m referring to is yours anyway. It’s there, free of charge, always has been, no pre-booking necessary.

Rather like the prisoner who looks forward to the day when he’ll be allowed a shower and a change of clothes, we can concentrate on the everyday, the ordinary, the close by, and acquire pleasure and knowledge in the process. We just have to learn how to fiddle with the gestalt, how to twiddle the emphasis. We can explore places nearby which otherwise we’ve passed a thousand times and never thought to take a look at. We can take the time to observe properly, to examine, to stand and stare, to sniff and savour, even perhaps to learn properly (several of my friends are brushing up on their languages), to listen, to appreciate our loved ones, to practise – in the Frommian sense – being rather than having. When will we ever get a chance like this again? (Never, I hope).

At times like this you realise it’s not the fancy aspects of life that matter, not the expensive purchases or the air miles traversed in order to go on holiday or the exoticism of a complicated lifestyle. At times like this it’s things like “bin day is Tuesday” that matter, mid-morning marmalade that is important - like the one I referred to a moment or two ago. So let’s take up the advice and inspect more closely. Let’s have a look at the label on the back of the jar.  Mm, the print is rather small, but I can just make it out. “Dangleberry Genetic Technologies (UK), Swindon, Wilts., SN5 8VZ”. 

Quality of life. That’s what matters.

Beyond the Elephant

Don’t think of an elephant !

Come on, you’re not really trying. Have another go. Don’t think of an elephant !

Mm. Better. All right, does this help?

This is not an elephant. This is Dinky, a piano-playing dingo from central Australia who has performed on Piccadilly Radio, Manchester.

 

Did that make it easier for you? I hope so. And then there’s the elephant in the room. Don’t think of him either. While trying not to think of that particular elephant, or of any elephant, please accept the observation that this noble beast has a peculiar and very valuable role to play in communication. Perhaps you will agree that the elephant deserves better recognition as an informational asset, and should be awarded his own symbol, an emoticon or similar, to indicate when he is in the room. Though such a device would itself, of course, for reasons of safety as well as of propriety, have to be invisible.

Meanwhile, can we please have some silence. OK.

“There was a time when there was nothing at all, nothing at all, just a distant hum”. Recognise it? Part of the lyric of a song called “Hide and Seek” by Howard Jones, who once upon a time performed on Piccadilly Radio, Manchester. 

Nothing at all. A distant hum. Silence. The sound of silence. A bear farting in the forest while Bishop Berkeley was lying unconscious after a tree that he hadn’t heard fell on him. Mains hum. The pulsing of blood in the ears. Deafness. Beethoven’s deafness. It’s getting louder all the time, isn’t it. The silences in Beethoven’s later works. The silence between. Meaningful silence. Louder, please. Ludwig, are you there? Da da da da. Morse V. V for Victory. We shall catch it on the beaches. 

Noise out of silence; something out of nothing. Meaning out of meaninglessness.

Oh, get on with it. 

The hazardous nature of modern information handling was brought home to me unintentionally the other day by a very good friend, to whom I had mentioned, without elaboration, my virtual band, The Catford Tendency. This august institution, whose illustrious, rhodium disc-awarded, stadium-filling history extends back into the mists of time, has no web presence as such, and is known only to my immediate family and a few friends. Sufficiently intrigued to conduct a search, evidently, and presumably via the default method, my friend unearthed a reference to “Catford’s tendency”, from an obscure journal, relating to John Catford, who founded a school of linguistics in Edinburgh and was a noted expert on phonetics. And, seemingly, had tendencies.

Oh dear. Not right at all. What’s known in the trade as a false drop, a factoid that bears no relation to the truth, an inappropriate Venn overlap, a Boolean blunder, an illusion of knowledge. The “Catford” in The Catford Tendency is London S.E.6 and the “Tendency” was inspired by the name of a militant organisation a few decades back. Like the names of all musical groups it is both deliberate and arbitrary, and is so named for perfectly good reasons that I won’t go into. 

How often do we retrieve nonsense? How often do we realise it is nonsense? Well, at this very moment, probably you do.

Google, assuming that was the search tool invoked, works (to the extent that anyone knows, and to put it simplistically), by measuring the statistical proximity of terms. The more that people use those terms together, in their searching, and the more they co-occur in the documents retrieved, the stronger is the assumption of a valid semantic link. From the adjacency of words Google builds up a simulation of knowledge, mostly very plausibly so, and sufficiently so that it can make a pretty good go at “understanding" what something means. It’s all about association, and mostly it works well. Whole subject areas can be fabricated thus, and texts translated quite well into other languages. Occasionally it doesn’t get things right, and when it fails, it reveals, just for a moment, a vertigo-inducing image of a whole cyber-can of worms. That’s what happened to me the other day.

Unlike older, pre-millennial “text retrieval” systems, which depended upon laborious human indexing of selected vocabulary items and not on automatic full term indexing, today’s search engines have no sense of meaning. Well, of course, they’re just pieces of software, they have no sense of anything. They are entirely computational, mathematical, semantically blind, associating away there in the dark. Human indexers would compile a thesaurus (later generally known as a taxonomy) of broader, narrower, and synonymous terms. Their method was based on meaning, on human understanding, and on the classification of knowledge developed over many years by librarians and others. Google doesn’t employ knowledge in the same way. Given its central role in so many activities I sometimes find this pretty scary. Corporate foundations built in Silicon Valley, intellectual foundations built on sand.

This means that (even in its entirely non-conscious way) Google will never “get” a joke, or appreciate wordplay or a remote allusion. It doesn’t do meaning, it just computes statistical usages and associations. It wouldn’t, for instance, realise that there is absolutely no reasonable relevant connection between a synthesiser-friendly 1980s popstar with spiky hair and a wild antipodean pooch howling and plonking randomly on an old, beat-up, stand-up piano far away in the dusty outback west of Alice - although it might pull out “Piccadilly Radio, Manchester” as a commonality (something which we might be able to use creatively, admittedly). Nor would it “get” the Holmesian dog that didn’t bark in the night. What is extremely interesting is that it wouldn’t index the elephant in the room. For obvious reasons it won’t even know it’s there.

In various parts of the world there is currently much concern over freedom of speech. Dreadful fates await those who say the wrong thing or harbour ”incorrect thought”. Abuse, trolling, hate campaigns, physical assault, dismissal from post, withdrawal of funding, censorship, de-platforming, arrest, torture, and being “disappeared” are among possible outcomes according to where one lives. People want to say things but are afraid to. Many people want to say the same things. We live in frightening, self-righteous, unfunny, unforgiving and illiberal times where so often the rules of tolerance are set by the congenitally intolerant and enshrined in convenient spur-of-the-moment legislation. Hastily airbrushed legacies, instant wisdom, hysterical historical rewrites, Bebelplatz revisited, the Heinrich Heine warning trotted out once more. “Ah, but it’s different this time”. ‘Course it is. It always is.

The worse things get, there will be more elephants seeking room-space, elephants of many different shapes and sizes and colours and styles. We will need to be better able to create, identify and “read” them, as projections thrust up into mental space. To paint elephants in the sky will become a necessary skill, perhaps like those Dalinian beasts with surreally spindly legs, hovering and hallucinatory in cognitive space; we will need to learn how to see them, to know what they mean, and to share them with others. Like elaborate Joycean multilingual puns (James, that is, not William), and as demonstrated by many writers, artists and musicians, we need to be able to project multiple allusions to a point where they focus and intersect, a point whence an exact meaning is extractable. Intersections where the fringes of ideas, the haloes of sounds and the outer suburbs of verbal connotations conjoin silently to say something precise and legible to those who have learned how. All free from the censor, since there is nothing there to remove; all free from the algorithms of the search engine, since there is nothing to index; all free from the secret policeman, since there is no evidence, not even encrypted evidence. But – like the wise old elephant in the room – there all the same. Massively there. Free.

We see already, in certain unhappy parts of the world, how the oppressed are resorting to non-linguistic codes and symbols, abandoning the potentially self-condemnatory traces of electronics or written texts for the transient, the semiotically offbeat, the irregular and the allusive. To transmit meaning reliably but without the usual indicators of what it is actually about. To erect multilevel cognitive edifices significant to intended recipients but indeterminate to the ambient enemy. To create sense out of nonsense and messages out of silence. While persecution because of a desire for freedom of speech is nothing new, today’s everyday technologies leave readily traceable and permanent accusatory footprints. Ironic, wouldn’t it be, that – in our informationally intense societies, in our gadget riddled lives - in order to communicate while remaining free we should retreat from the definite, recoil from the word, abandon the recordable signal, subvert conventional language,  and learn to express ourselves in varieties of silence. For now, though, we need to return to the elephant. 

This is The Elephant. He himself is towards the right of the picture.

If you keep going for five or six miles you’ll develop a tendency to reach Catford. Good luck.

When does simulation become the real thing?

“For the last three months he hasn’t been to the shops, to the pub, to a café or a restaurant, hasn’t been on a bus or a train, hasn’t hugged his children – hasn’t even been in the same room as them – has spent a lot of time online, has had little direct contact with his friends, has watched lots of television programmes in which death, disease and incompetence have featured heavily, has been observed walking round and round his garden (like a teddy bear, though not with one, not yet anyway), hasn’t been anywhere, hasn’t taken a holiday, hasn’t seen the sea, still has no plans for going on holiday, hasn’t even been into town, avoids people, hasn’t been to an art gallery or a museum, washes his hands excessively, has hardly spoken to anyone, has developed a strange ritual of parking newly arrived mail on a chair for three days, has put on weight, sleeps badly at night although often sleeps during the day, is very distrustful of officialdom, appears reluctant to leave the house … “

Is this a case report of clinical depression with  additional touches of phobia, paranoia and OCD? Could be. Actually, it’s a description of the last three months or so … for millions. Whatever it is, it can’t be healthy. 

The fear of the end of lockdown intensifies, along with the fear that the new-normal world will be exactly the same as the old-normal world, except worse, and that an unexpected golden opportunity to try and put the world to rights will be missed by craven wet-nellied politicians and oven-ready-grandma retailing cretins. At this precise moment a mental health diagnosis that differentiates between what has been enforced and what has become learned behaviour becomes ever harder and ever more meaningless.

OK, so that’s for the millions. So what have I been doing? Well, I’ve spent a lot of time looking out of the back window.

Because of the fence it’s always hard to see anything very much, but following the recent windy weather one of the panels has become slightly dislodged, and over the last few days I’ve been able to look through a small gap. Finally I know precisely what the family across the back are up to. I’ve had my suspicions for a long while.

This family are the Plonkers. He’s a builder. Plonker Senior, that is. A builder, right? Need I say more? We all know what builders get up to, don’t we. Yep, they build things. Know what I mean? You need to distinguish builders from building workers. Building workers are artistes who specialise in bravado scaffolding, virtuoso wolf-whistling, and vaunting their debatable crack-allure. Builders are more serious, for  they are visionaries. They are more political than architectural, more psychopathic than expert in materials science. Plonker is a builder, and we’ve been aware for some time of extensive activity in his back garden. Now I’ve seen with my own eyes.

Plonker has a vehicle that looks like an elongated metallic rhinoceros with hyperflexible joints. Ugly looking brute. He also has a van that says “A Plonker -  Builder” on it. Plus a phone number, but I’m not telling you what it is because I don’t want you ringing him up and offering him money. There’s also a Mrs. Plonker who doesn’t come out much, except to exercise.

They have two children, one male, one female, both of whom plonk extensively and yo-yo off a length of wire attached to a tree branch. They do a lot of bouncing. A suspicious amount. They bounce even more than they plonk. I suspect a trampoline. They are extremely healthy and well-exercised, and all their activities are minutely timetabled. It’s pretty obvious that they’re training for something really big. 12 minutes of plonking; 53 minutes of bouncing, 90 seconds of hair combing, another 7 minutes of high speed plonking. They have sharply combed blond hair and wear terrifyingly neat uniforms, which they claim are for school. Heard that one before, haven’t we. They also have suspicious pets including a dog which is growing at an alarming rate, and which also bounces a lot in a lollopy kind of way. The so-called rabbit, don’t make me laugh, the so-called pet rabbit in its so-called hutch, is also extraordinarily healthy and bounces to an extraordinary degree.

In an evening you can see into their dining room. There’s something pinned up on the wall. I think it’s a map of Europe, but I’m not absolutely sure. Either that or an Olde Mappe of Nuneaton with strange colour coding.

They’ve also been building.

I know you think I’m making all this up, and that it’s all in my head. Yeah? Go on, admit it. Well then, get this. This morning, I stuck my camera through the gap in the fence and snapped the evidence.  Go on, look. The camera doesn’t lie, does it. See? See?

Told you. I’m not making it up. What you’re looking at is situated between their kitchen window and the so-called rabbit hutch. In the distance is a lamp post on the main road. You can almost see one corner of their green wheelie bin; it’s just off the picture. It’s bin day tomorrow, which proves it. So this is what Plonker Senior, with his constructional skills, is building. “No job too big, no job too small”, as it says on the side of his van (the one that isn’t the  rhinomobile). Well, you can’t accuse him of dishonest sloganising.

As I’m sure you recognised, what they’ve constructed in their back garden is a lifesize rebuild of the Berlin 1936 Olympic Stadium. Looks to me like it’s very nearly finished.  It all fits, doesn’t it, the exercise, the training routines. Just to the left of the wheelie bin, the one that’s just off the picture, is where You Know Who would have stood, back in the day. I expect Plonker Senior will hog the same spot. Must say I’m impressed. A nice finish. Quality materials. 

But enough of my parochial little local outlook on the world. We need to consider a bigger picture than the one from my back window.

To summarise, we as a nation do need to examine the wider effects of the pandemic on mental health. It occurs to me, and it may have occurred to you, that if the lockdown were to continue much longer, people might start going a bit peculiar and doing strange things. Even imagining things that simply aren’t true. With any luck, life will soon be back to normal. Hope so. 

Now then, where are the binoculars?