As I walked out on a bright May morning,
Like a hero in a song,
Looking for a place called England,
Trying to find where I belong.
Like a hero in a song,
Looking for a place called England,
Trying to find where I belong.
*
Looking back at the posts I produced over the last month - the first things I've published after yet another inadvertent break from blogging - I'm wondering if there isn't something underlying them all. I've decided that it's probably best described as 'despair'.
Globally, it feels like the world has been undergoing more than it's fair share of outrage and horror over the last few years. Of course, it's not like we've ever lived in a world free from war and terrorism and their consequences, and there's also a very sensible argument that both the internet and a digitally interconnected world have made many of us so much more aware of what's going on around the world in a manner which magnifies a sense of a world going to hell in a handcart, producing a false sense of how awful things actually are. When in actual fact globally, worldwide levels of violence have fallen over the last fifty years.
Still, that's small comfort if it's you that's living in the middle of a war zone, but - rightly or wrongly - from a relatively privileged position lived here in Britain, it still feels as though things are becoming worse. We're living through a moment of history which will have lasting, and unknowable consequences, which includes more than terrorism and war. I'm also thinking of a culmination of the growth in economic equality over the last few decades, the increase in power of a global oligarchic financial elite, an increasingly polarised public discourse around economics and immigration and other things besides. And behind it all, the unfolding ecological catastrophe the human species is now enduring along with all of the natural world. Again, perhaps we're always living though difficult times, but it feels as though it's more obvious now. And of course, here in Britain, we've just gone through an intensification of our own particular local politics, the consequences of which are still unfolding.
Still, that's small comfort if it's you that's living in the middle of a war zone, but - rightly or wrongly - from a relatively privileged position lived here in Britain, it still feels as though things are becoming worse. We're living through a moment of history which will have lasting, and unknowable consequences, which includes more than terrorism and war. I'm also thinking of a culmination of the growth in economic equality over the last few decades, the increase in power of a global oligarchic financial elite, an increasingly polarised public discourse around economics and immigration and other things besides. And behind it all, the unfolding ecological catastrophe the human species is now enduring along with all of the natural world. Again, perhaps we're always living though difficult times, but it feels as though it's more obvious now. And of course, here in Britain, we've just gone through an intensification of our own particular local politics, the consequences of which are still unfolding.
I have my own opinions, of course - like many others - but I make no predictions. Frankly, I hardly feel that I'm qualified to do such, although I know that's hardly something which stops many from making their own impassioned pronouncements. Or something which has stopped me in the past! Instead I choose to despair. A luxury no doubt, and perhaps it's the wrong word anyway. As often as I find myself reading something about the current political situation either here or somewhere abroad, I feel the equally strong impulse to look away, to absent myself, to refuse to engage with political events in even the limited, voyeuristic manner of an onlooker that I have ever engaged with them.
*
Perhaps I confuse my categories here, when I refer to this as underlying the arguments I was trying to make in those earlier posts. Aesthetics are not, after all, the same thing as politics, and it can be dangerous to mix the two (to put it mildly!). But on the other hand, politics are a part of our aesthetics, and that is the 'tradition' in which I feel I was trained when I was an undergraduate, and the approach that I feel I instinctively reach for when I choose to write about something on this blog.
How much political argument has made it into this blog? Probably more than I realise, creeping in around the edges of all my assumptions - you don't get outside of politics that easily, after all - but maybe not quite so much as I might currently fear. Perhaps it's different for others, who are surely far more disciplined about their own blogging, but personally I've found it to be a writing process which takes on an instinctively personal cast, whatever my actual intentions, which are generally opposed to making any overly personal revelations in a space like this. I do hope that little I say here has been especially strident.
How much political argument has made it into this blog? Probably more than I realise, creeping in around the edges of all my assumptions - you don't get outside of politics that easily, after all - but maybe not quite so much as I might currently fear. Perhaps it's different for others, who are surely far more disciplined about their own blogging, but personally I've found it to be a writing process which takes on an instinctively personal cast, whatever my actual intentions, which are generally opposed to making any overly personal revelations in a space like this. I do hope that little I say here has been especially strident.
So I don't seriously think that I'm going to alter much of my approach to what I choose to write about here. It's just that at present, I'm feeling such despair, such disgust and fear about our politics in general, that it's influencing my thoughts about the value of aesthetically political readings in general.
I'm looking for a space which feels uncontaminated with politics. It's inevitable perhaps, given the sort of person I am, that I should want to look for that in books and art.
No doubt these feelings will pass, if they haven't already. I'm well aware that my hoped for refuge doesn't actually exist.
I'm looking for a space which feels uncontaminated with politics. It's inevitable perhaps, given the sort of person I am, that I should want to look for that in books and art.
No doubt these feelings will pass, if they haven't already. I'm well aware that my hoped for refuge doesn't actually exist.
