The emptiness aesthetic

There can be few positives extractable from this current global tragedy. One of them is the friendship, kindness, generosity and altruism of neighbours and strangers alike, qualities which so often lay dormant until activated by disaster. It’s good to know that they still exist. Still the same old country.

The second benefit, although in a normal sense hardly desirable, is the enormous reduction in activity in almost everything. Suddenly, the world is a quieter place. Environmentally this is good, and it would be even better if some degree of it could be sustained when normality returns. If this terrible episode doesn’t conclusively define and condemn what a disaster so-called globalisation has been, and lead to a fundamental change in how we manage our world, then we’re all stuffed.  Already over the last few days the sky looks bluer - probably just a meteorological coincidence - with the Spring flowers at their best.

 People are naturally gregarious, and enforced separation is distressing for many, as it is for me, grumpy introvert though I am. But when I see on the TV news images of commuters on the Tube, squashed together, noses in armpits, breathing in each other’s diseases, my reactions are a combination of nausea and relief that I’m not involved, although at many times in my life, normal times, I’ve been happy to endure and even to enjoy such conditions myself. There are sensory and psychological pleasures in congestion and busyness; they are among the appeals of a great city, expressions of life at its most intense and, some would say, most civilised.

While urban vitality is important, conversely, there’s something to be said for emptiness and quiet among the bustle. In London, the many parks, squares and commons cater for this need, and contribute their particular loveliness to this greatest of cities, throughout the seasons. Many other British towns and cities are similarly blessed; many aren’t, and finding a pleasant spot, quiet but safe, may not always be so easy. But for now the streets are empty too, and that is unusual and unnatural.

As an older person, rapidly approaching the official threshold of coronavirus vulnerability, I remember years with much lower population densities, little vehicular traffic, and tourist destinations which could be enjoyed in relative peace. When I think back to my suburban childhood the essential quality I recall is that of peace and quiet. You could actually hear how quiet it was; just a kind of distant gentle hum.  Not much traffic, no unwanted intrusions of other people’s electronics (except for “The Archers” theme tune wafting across from the old ladies round the corner - dumpty dumpty dumpty dump etc), just the occasional Vulcan bomber which was tremendously noisy and made your ribs rattle if it flew low. Today, scarcely a couple of miles away from where I grew up, as I draft this blog, the only sound I hear is lawnmowers and, bizarrely, the jingle of a cruising ice cream van. Though the ultimate reasons for this state of acoustic affairs are appalling, purely as background, as ambient sound, it makes me happy, reminding me as it does of more satisfactory times.

Cities are primarily about people, but as architectural and geographical entities they have other roles to play, including visual and spiritual ones. As someone who likes to draw and paint cityscapes I know I’m not the only one who has preferred to exclude people and / or traffic from the painted scene. Artists far better than I have exploited the same instincts for urban visual emptiness, whether they were trying to portray alienation and loneliness, a mood of noir, desolation ecstasy, a sensation of space, an architectural peculiarity, a time of day, or otherwise. In my case this habit has been enforced  partly because of painterly incompetence, but also because I love the paradoxical quiet sometimes to be found in the heart of a major city. It’s a state of mind I like to experience and to express as best I can on paper or canvas. It’s the sound of early Sunday morning. 

                                                        Notting Hill      ©  R. Abbott 2014

 Now, it seems, in the last few days, we have had this quietude thrust back upon us, unasked for - the empty streets and parks, empty squares, empty cities. Not so much a month of Sundays, as an unknown number of them to come.

Sensible advice therefore would be, for someone like me, to enjoy the sight while it lasts, to make the most if it. Much more sensibly, the advice is, not to. So I can’t, even if I wanted to. I have to imagine it instead. All the same, artistically, aesthetically, selfishly, I can’t help thinking that it’s a kind of missed opportunity.

 
Meanwhile I’d happily exchange this nightmare for a chance to inhale some armpits on the Tube. Armpits aren’t great, but in a normal world they’re rarely lethal. Stay safe.

An Outsider’s London

Though I’ve written quite a lot, surely far too much, throughout my life – hypergraphia as befits a temporal lobe personality – it never gets any easier. With increasing age most things take longer, and writing is no exception. Becoming more self-critical is a handy excuse for this, as is being more than ready to avail oneself of the endless tinkering that word processing software encourages. Whatever the explanation, for me, these days writing takes longer than it used to, and longer than I want or expect it to. Nor is there any guarantee that prolonged gestation and fiddling will result in a better end product, or even of having anything worthwhile to say.

Never mind. Today, the last day of the first six months of the year, I completed, on schedule, what is meant to be the penultimate revision of “An Outsider’s London”, an approximately 200-page account of a lifetime’s provincial fascination with the world’s greatest city. I ran the Microsoft spellchecker across the text, the shocking unfamiliarity with words such as “Profumo”, “Carnaby”, “Belsen” and “Hockney” stoking my disdain for this current era of parochially crass and juvenile Americanised information technology. Be that as it may, I’m pleased to have reached this stage.

Knowing of my fondness for London, and for scribbling, over the years several of my friends have suggested a project of this sort, unaware that I’d planned such a thing anyway and that, indeed, I’d made an initial attempt almost forty years ago. The original version, circa 1978, was a brave foray into a kind of multimedia – essays, poems, drawings, maps and diagrams – and was a thoroughly naïve, opinionated, uninformed and generally misguided personal take on a city that I adored, but knew only superficially. A city I loved for its complexity and variety, its senses of place and of past, its visual appearance, its inhabitants and its infrastructures, and its role in the British psyche. Before the theme got popularly named as such, this was an early outing in psychogeography. Like most things I’ve attempted, it went nowhere.

The new version keeps the old title but takes a different tack, a more chronologically autobiographical one, focusing principally on childhood, adolescence and early adulthood. It describes how, from people I knew, from radio and television, from books and newspapers, from paintings and photographs and songs, and from anything that came my way, I formed impressions and acquired information about the great city. Major components of the book concern processes of understanding and misunderstanding, of gradual clarification, of imagining and fantasising, of learning my way around from maps and personal exploration, discovering the “good bits” of the city as I perceived them to be, and subsequently using London as a focus for drawings and paintings. Inevitably, being personal, being me, it’s a little odd in places.

While unavoidably personal and place-specific, though, “An Outsider’s London” is an exercise in the whole business of how we begin to understand and learn a large and complex metropolis, and of how one’s impressions and reactions evolve and modify with age and experience, while simultaneously the city changes too. The London I first thought about in those distant postwar days is not the city it is today. So it’s also a book about education and social change, about perception, about likes and dislikes in city structure. Any realistic book about London is bound to have to face a great many themes, and so it is with this one. What we have in “An Outsider’s London” is a mix of autobiography, psychology and urban geography, a representation of what one might call a “lifetime metropolitan learning curve”. I wouldn’t, of course, call it that. I’d call it a rattling good read.

 
Tomorrow, the first day of the second half of the year, I shall start on the “final final” revision, knowing full well that it is unlikely to be the last, and I shall be enjoying every moment.