To Leave our Selves Behind

Urban Myth by David Antonides

I miss the undulating flow of a varied existence, the rhythmic passing between spaces, the rituals that celebrate the demarcation of time and place. The experiences, for the most part, remain largely similar. But they are no longer physically or temporally distinct from each other. And I'm finding this problematic.

So yes, I miss going to the pub, and going to soft play with my children. I even miss going to work. But it’s not the places themselves that I miss, rather it’s the ability to pass from one space to another. And, crucially, the ability to leave them. To return to a place that is not them. Or, to put it another way, since pretty much all of our shopping has moved online, I don’t miss the feeling of being in a shop so much as I miss the feeling of not being in a shop. Just like, since all our social drinking now takes place on our sofa, I miss the time when our lounge wasn’t also a pub. And now that I am fielding my work on devices that are always inches away from my fingers, I rather miss not being at work.

In the locked down world, our rooms become strange palimpsests, each event leaving behind traces of its experience. The phone call to the social worker still echoes faintly in the room where I am attempting to socialise with some local Dads. The empty bottles are still there while I am attempting to reconstruct the soft play centre that my 4yr old misses so much (I mean this metaphorically but, if I’m perfectly honest, there’s nothing quite like the sight of your 16 month old, at 7am, innocently handing you an empty bottle of Supermarket IPA during tidy time, to make you pause and reflect on these things).

I miss the transitional space of my commute. Commute, from the Latin com- (together) and mutare (to mutate or transform). When we commute we are transforming together, leaving our selves behind at home while we exchange them for our work identities. I have great admiration for people who routinely work from home, I don't know how they do it.

Aux Limites du Reve by Robert Gheyssens

Once my wife and I learned that all the structures and routines we used to rely on were being taken away, we of course, like so many others, tried to create new ones afresh for ourselves. Our children, especially the 4yr old, benefit from the predictability of routines, structures that, paradoxically, allow greater freedom than in their absence. And on the whole it’s worked fine. But one of the things we struggled with unexpectedly was working out how to separate weekends and weekdays. I’m a teacher, and my oldest loves learning things, so inevitably I created a home-school timetable based around learning activities that he enjoys doing. But then when that first Saturday came, he carried on doing them, and were left confused as to whether I should stop them. No ‘literacy hour’ for you boy, get the TV on now! So we let him carry on with the weekday routine that he had become familiar with. But then the same problem arises, if he spends all his time at Mummy/Daddy Home-school, then when is he not?

(Ever since we once offered him pancakes for breakfast on a Saturday, he very seriously announced that every Saturday from then on should be Pancake day. I grumbled a bit at the time, but I am now eternally grateful for what is literally the only event that establishes it as being a weekend, rather than a weekday.)

Our lives previously were studded with so many rituals and spectacles that would take us out of the daily humdrum of our lives. Departures, arrivals, returns. Commutations. There is a psychological importance to these rituals that I’ve read about before, but am now learning about first hand.

Feve by Chuck Hipsher

In Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis of the carnivalesque, he describes the psychological rewards that come from these moments of liberation and temporary subversion of the norm. Pantomimes, Commedia Della’arte, they existed and thrived at key moments in history because people needed opportunities to deviate. To experience the unfamiliar so as to make the familiar more tolerable. Creating spaces where one’s ‘natural behaviour’ (i.e. our basest desires), normally suppressed by social rules and convention, can be briefly revealed without consequences. The men become women, the paupers become kings. Early rulers recognised that these moments can act as a kind of pressure release valve, helping control the populace through allowing them to vent otherwise pent-up emotions. But it can go even further than that. Bakhtin argued that the carnival spirit rejects the pretense of "the unconditional value of necessity... [freeing] human consciousness, thought, and imagination for new potentialities." It is clear why the Catholic church tried so hard to ban such festivities in the 1600s.

The soft play centre we used to frequent, in what I assume is a nod to the Bakhtinian theory of carnivalistic power-subversion, is called ‘Topsy Turvy World’. It is a space where the children rule like emperors, and adults are forced to follow, in painful subservience, on their knees, crawling through endless tunnels and holes as if in some grotesque parody of childbirth. It is a place where, as long as you are less than 4ft tall and your joints still work, freedom abounds. Where what is normally suppressed becomes actively encouraged: running around at breakneck speed, climbing up, jumping off, throwing, swinging. It is an alternate reality which helps the ‘real’ world feel more tolerable.

We have filled our lives with these ritualistic moments of emotional release. For them, it's soft play, trampoline parks, that slightly creepy funfair the rocks up at our local park every few months. For us too, the theatre, the sports stadiums, the concert venues. Bursts of colour, of escapism. Without them, the days lose definition, and I am left feeling like I'm living in an endless grey calendar, the grid-lines washed away by a slow, monotonous rain.

Mask - Peacock by Irena Bespalova

As I write, tonight marks what would have been the night of the Eurovision Song Contest. A fabulous explosion of riotous kitch that good taste, modesty, and a sense of quiet reserve would normally prevent me from enjoying. It’s one of my favourite nights of the year. Pure Bakhtinian carnival. A Viktor Orban spokesman described it as a 'homosexual flotilla' shortly before Hungary decided they wouldn't take part in such immoral debauchery. Giant hats, human hamster wheels, angels with unicycles and women with beards. Insecure demagogues will always feel threatened by rituals that celebrate subversion. (Note also Trump's unique refusal to attend the White House Correspondent's Dinner, their great annual tradition of state-permitted power-reversal theatre).

I'm worried about Strictly this year. It’s not just familiarity that makes it so popular. It fulfills a function on a deeper level. It allows us to momentarily create a communal otherness that gives us permission to leave our ‘selves’ behind for a few hours. Alain de Botton talks a lot about this in Religion for Atheists, how the most successful religions have provided their followers with these moments, these rituals, and how with the fading away of religion into social irrelevance, we have always inadvertently sought to create secular alternatives to satisfy the same underlying needs.

Anyway. Instead of Eurovision, last Saturday I held an alternative Zoom night with half a dozen or so of my friends, re-watching and scoring past Eurovision classics, and it was brilliant. It was effort, but we are going to have to work to retain these moments. Moments of communal transformation, of leaving our carefully regulated selves behind, of rejecting 'utilitarian values of necessity'. For without the flotillas there to take me away, it sometimes feels like I am left treading water in a  shapeless grey sea. I am eagerly looking forward to their return.

Mural depicting Conchita Wurst (Eurovision Winner 2014) in the Museums Quarter, Vienna