LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 32 – Thursday, 16th APRIL

 

Trump, in times of crisis, has his uses.

     It is immensely comforting to know that, at the click of a few buttons one can get the latest up-to-date news concerning the present President of the United States.  And one can also assume that whatever one is likely to read about what the President has done, and certainly about what he has said, it will be something that, with all one’s liberal sensibility, one can reject utterly.  He is (in more telling ways that I had considered before I thought of the comparison) the Apartheid de nos jours.  He is, in his actions, his thoughts and in his speech utterly, bigly, rejectionable.  He is the secular anathema of our times.  He is what we are not.  Simples.

     The most effective showing up of Apartheid was when opponents said to the then South African government, “If you think that Apartheid is the right system; then just follow your own rules!”  The point being, that Apartheid as a corrupt and corrupting system could only work if the rules were bent.  The system was build on lies and therefore it only ‘worked’ by corruption.  It was the same sort of approach that workers used against unreasonable bosses when they ‘worked to rule’, obeying all the petty restrictions that grow up in workplaces and are usually ignored in the service of efficiency and ‘reasonableness’!

     Trump really believes that he has achieved what his little-me British impersonator wanted as a kid, to become ‘King of the World’ and he speaks and acts as though his thoughts are fiats. 

     How well are Americans living in the Trumpian vision of America that he is forging?  Ask the dead.  Ask the jobless.  Ask the hungry.  Ask the sick.  Ask the disenfranchised.  Ask the victims.  Ask the women.  Ask the blacks.  Ask the refugees.  Ask the undocumented.

     Of course you would get a very different picture if you asked billionaires, CEOs, polluters and fascists.

     When is the Republican Party going to recognize that Trump is a dangerous embarrassment and that the stench of their support for a man clearly unsuited to high office will cling to them for the rest of their lives?  Dump him and his pernicious party – as if Trump has any clear idea of what the wider Republican Party was, is, or even stands for!

     But for liberals he is the standard against which they can be measured.  Every day, every bloody day, he says or does something that is quite clearly wrong, and junky-like, every day I am drawn to that section of my on-line Guardian that lets me see and hear his latest outrages against truth, the WHO, China, the EU, decency, the English Language, morality, history, NATO, UNO, postal voting, or whatever else Fox News brings to his attention.

     But Trump has achieved immortality.  His (please god) one term presidency will be written about for the foreseeable future.  As a leading candidate for the worst president ever to be elected (by a minority of the popular vote) his car crash of a presidency will fascinate and appal forever.  His Trump Presidential Library (leave aside the sick irony of that concept) will be packed with books detailing his lies and narcissism and his fatal mismanagement of the Covid-19 crisis.  His presidency has rocked the very foundations of The Republic and virtually obliterated the moral force of the USA in the world.  It will be a very long road back from the damage that he has done.  And that road back will be in the aftermath of the virus, and clearly he has none of the qualities necessary to unite and rebuild the country.  His campaign slogan rings hollow and every day it gets more hollow and fatal.

From our tiny section of Castelldefels that we see and hear on a ‘normal’ day, i.e. one during which we do not make any excursions, it is difficult to judge exactly what is going on around us.  But, I suppose that we have become accustomed to picking up smaller details in the repetitive daily life that we have and we use those to flesh out a wide picture of the general response to our continued lockdown.

     To me it seems as if there is greater movement around us, as you might expect when the government has said that construction workers and other non-essential workers can go back to work.

     As we are on a sometime used flight path for Barcelona airport, it is usual for us to have the sound of planes from time to time: we have had none, even though, as far as I know, the airport is still open for some flights.

     We are not on a main road in terms of though traffic so our immediate neighbours own most of the cars that we see.  The most traffic we get is pedestrians walking their dogs, usually illegally as they are far too far from their homes.  There is greater noise of kids, who must be getting beyond stir crazy in their enforced incarceration.

I cannot see any real changing of the lockdown well into June.  And that is a sobering thought.

    

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 17th – 1st APRIL

A third day of indifferent weather – something that should be of supreme indifference given what is happening in the world today, but in the confined ‘world’ that one inhabits at present, something that is of irritating importance.

     The daily morning tasks being completed (up to and including the Guardian ‘quick’ crossword) it was a pleasant surprise to have a phone call from a Cardiff friend, Hadyn, informing me that he had purchased one of Ceri Auckland Davies’s[1] paintings in a recent auction.  This hawthorn is one from a series Ceri painted of trees in bloom, and a good choice!  The tree fills the picture space and is set against a moody sky-filled background rising from a low horizon – a dramatic and lively painting.

     From where I sit typing I can see two more examples of Ceri’s work: an atmospheric print of a night view of a lamp lit façade of a Venetian palazzo[2] painted in a freer style than the meticulous detailed manner that he usually adopts, and a large charcoal drawing of a rock cleft in which the quasi-abstract depiction of the faceted rock face encourages pareidolia in a busy surface that always engages my attention as it is directly opposite where I usually sit. 

     As a striking contrast to the ‘face-filled’ rocks, the focus of attention is nothing.  Literally nothing, whiteness, blankness.  The far opening of the rock cleft is onto sea or sky and that is a patch of vibrant white, unworked and blank whereas all around it is the detail of charcoal sketching. 

     I am endlessly fascinated by this work and, like the best Giles cartoons (and that is a signal honour of comparison from me!) there is always something new to find in the detail of the draftmanship and the juxtaposition of light and shade.  Each time I look at it, I highlight different sections and let my eye slide through the confined landscape in alternative ways.

     What has all of that to do with the current crisis?  Everything. 

     Our lives have been thrown into total confusion; the economy of the world is in free-fall; our individual freedoms are being compromised; millions are being forced into greater poverty; domestic violence is on the rise; we are being turned into ourselves, a forced introspection; and survival, for most of us in the wealthy west, usually a concept rather than an ever present threat, has now become visible, palpable struggle.  It is exactly at times like these that one needs to consider the worth of a painted tree!

     It used to be said that a society could be judged by how it treats the poorest and least advantaged in a community: the disabled, the imprisoned, the dispossessed, the mentally ill, the criminal, the refugee, the old, the homeless etc.  The point being made is that it is easy to look after those who are already able and keen to look after themselves, but what about the others?  In the same way, bare survival is obviously essential, but we must, we have to be concerned with the quality of survival as well.  It is to the everlasting credit of the wartime government in Britain that, at the same time that it was struggling to keep the effort to free the world of the threat of fascism, it was also working to ensure that there were clear plans for the betterment of society after the conflict was ended.  The 1944 Education Act was a gesture, no, much more than a gesture, of defiance and belief that something positive must come from something so negative.

     The Arts in all their forms are the way that quality of life can be guaranteed, in a way they encourage us to believe that there is something beyond mere survival.

     I am not so idealistic that I believe that a painting, or piece of music, or a good book; a well composed photograph or a well directed film are protection against the vicissitudes of this world, especially when they come in microscopic form, but I do think that the creative arts are there to make the struggle to survive worth it and they do, sometimes, provide the solace to make it bearable.

     That all sounds much more apocalyptic than I meant it to sound: I am warm, comfortable and well fed; I am protected from the elements and media to amuse myself surrounds me; I can write and I can speak.  My ‘prison’ is well appointed and I can take exercise outside the walls (just); I can contact friends and read about others; I am freely confined! 

     And yet, especially in a country when the death rate is rising day on day I do appreciate that I am of an age group where my continued life is dependent on my adhering strictly to governmental guidelines and the following of those guidelines by others around me.  For almost the first time in my life, I am directly threatened by a very present moral enemy.

     But, having talked myself into a state of sombre seriousness and existential angst, I can get out of it by merely (and that word is surely justified here because of the ease with which I can do it) looking at a painting, reading a book, listening to a piece of music.

     And, as far as looking at paintings are concerned, my emails have been filled with various institutions urging me to take a virtual tour or plunge into the catalogues and explore the holdings.  Galleries around the world are offering lectures and guides; things to do; things to make; ways to get involved.  Opera companies are offering performances streamed on their sites; books are being electronically offered – to say nothing of the television shows and films that are freely available on line.

     Now is the time to explore, to take a whim and see how far you go and where you end up.  So much is available and only for the cost of the electricity that drives your Internet access.

     When arid introspection threatens; the digital world is available!

    

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[1] welshart.net; lionstreetgallery.co.uk; www.albanygallery.com

[2] https://www.redraggallery.co.uk/print-ceri-auckland-davies.asp

LOCKDOWN CASTELLDEFELS - DAY 16 – 31st MARCH

For the first time in two weeks I left the confines of the house and pool and ventured out into the silent street world to take the rubbish to the communal bins.  They are about 100m away and I felt that my excursion was an expedition. I met no one and only one car passed, or rather I passed it as the driver was sitting in the car on a zebra crossing, texting – some things never change in spite of the country being in the grip of a crisis!

     A crisis in which the numbers of infected and dying are still going up in Catalonia.  The lockdown has now been in operation for more than two weeks and we should be seeing some sort of change in the numbers.  This must be the high point of the infection of the virus and we should over the next few days see a reduction in deaths, at least.

It is a sign of the times that I was sent a video that shows someone wandering through a packed Spanish warehouse explaining that the wrapped boxes of essential medical equipment we can see are all destined for France because the Spanish government had refused to pay for them.  This video has provoked a storm of outrage, especially when front line workers in hospitals are not properly protected from the virus.

     It turns out, however, that the video is a particularly despicable piece of fake news from Vox the Spanish fascist party, designed to embarrass the ‘socialist’ government of Spain.  What it has pointed up however, is the ready belief of the citizens of Spain that their elected government would actually behave in the way that the video indicates, that the government does not really care about the ordinary citizens.  This attitude has been allowed to develop because of the tardy approach of the government in the early stages of the virus’ spread in Spain.  And there is still great skepticism about the approach of the powers that be that each new death seems to reinforce.

Yesterday was a ‘wasted’ day for me because I lack self-control.  That accusation was more than adequately justified by my surrender to Facebook, Netflix and YouTube with various other Internet Interludes.  There was a terrible logic of consequence as one digression after another led me deeper and deeper into visually enticing indulgence after indulgence and, after a final binge on Sherlock, it was suddenly two in the morning!  I suppose it is one way to take one’s mind off what is ravaging the rest of the country!

The weather has been indifferent for the second day running and rain truncated my daily wandering around the pool; it is tempting to fall in with the climate and sulk the day away, but there is far too much threatened imprisonment ahead to start slacking and fail to make the most of the opportunity that self-concentration affords!  And will go on affording to those who can take make something of it.   

     And I’m doing my best – apart from yesterday!