early march, illegal migration bill

so it's a sunday night and i'm at a poetry reading in london. the floor is sticky with beer and i can feel its residue on the backs of my jeans. i'm here on my own even though i'm surrounded by people who i've known for as long as I've been reading poetry -- 'twenty years older, with the skulls plainer in their faces', as per the one line that sticks with me from orwell's book about the second world war (the one about unicorns and shopkeepers). one of them's on stage now; he's asking himself what it would be like to be a fish feeding on a dead moroccan in the mediterranean. ('I had been wondering', a friend wrote to me three years ago, 'why would I want to bother thinking about, or writing about, or impersonating, a cop, or the Home Office'.) the reading is a total dirge, all black depression and astronomic hopelessness. i hate this right now. the moment it's over I leave and cycle away, i have a headache, i get home, M. has a headache, i feel angry and stamp the anger down, i read a few pages of a scholarly but despairing text about the recent history of Yemen, give up and fall asleep, M. falls asleep, I dream of a desert, of watching a woman give birth, i get up, a Facebook post by my friend R. shows a demo of thousands of Italians on a Calabrian beach, clouds piled up thickly on a metallic blue sky. 'We can win', R. writes: 70 people like this. 'the sea does not want to be infected with leprosy and pus. not yet'. writes B Traven, the pseudonymous author of furious disabused novels for anonymous abused people. 

***

there is a massive flare up of seborrheic dermatitis on the right hand side of my face. it's the evening of the next day. i'm writing in the historical present tense out of convenience: you'll get used to it. 'i go to' parliament square for the emergency demonstration against the illegal migration bill. the escalator at westminster tube station has a banner ad for a new fighter aircraft designed by BAE: 'delivering investment and creating high skilled jobs across the UK's regions'. the banner was up when i was last here too. when was that? it must have been when i went to the much smaller solidarity vigil for alaa abd el-fattah. today it's 'Commonwealth Day': the flags of Britain's neo-colonial big happy family have been raised around the square, 56 of them running along every side, filtering the bright yellow lights from the church windows, the building of the supreme court, of westminster abbey. that light falls on the thin mud of the 'garden' and makes it look yellow too, like the dirty wet sand on a beach near where the tide is withdrawing. i never noticed before how much this place is enemy territory: i've been here dozens of times but it is always the *event* that i have experienced, never the setting. not deeply. in fact i didn't even realise while i was there that the flags aren't always raised, that they were raised *today*, that 'Commonwealth Day' is *today*, that someone is actually paid to spend their whole working day executing this attempt by state power to carry out a landgrab on calendrical time. i never gave all these symbols any credence, why should i, in a fake socialist regime the flags could be for 'socialist republics' and the statue of winston churchill could be substituted for a big worker in concrete, it would hardly make a difference; and the reason I'm paying attention *now* is just that there's nothing else to pay attention *to*, the defeated MPs of the Labour left are standing outside the building talking about racism, and the victorious MPs of the Labour right are inside talking about 'inefficiency' and 'incompetence', and i am here half-listening to the first group and reading live updates from the speeches of the second on my phone. & this is how the power structure reasserts itself: the spectacle taking place on top of the fire engine in the designated zone of democratic dissent is anticipated and allowed, the few hundred people who have come out to consume it are tolerated, their language of rote though largely sincere moral outrage has been relegated to its proper place, is being articulated and embodied by the people who are professionally expected to articulate it (the head of the fbu is reminding us of the slogans of the International Workingmen's Association -- the state has its form of nostalgia, and we have ours), and meanwhile *inside* the building the primary disagreement has become just what it ought to be, a purely formal exchange of opinion about who are the agents most able to implement a programme of national border security *that is itself in no way up for debate*. in circumstances like these, the demo seems to flicker and slide out of focus, i see it as if i'm looking at some kind of bleached diagram, the event and the setting change places, and it is the *constant* thing that i want to describe and not the delusional 'novelty' of the occasion (the 'demo') to which it contributes and gives shape. i wait to cross the road behind richard burgon and diane abbott, wearing their casual suits, going home at the end of another day's work spent opposing the incremental collapse of the system that requires them to do exactly that. i can see burgon's lightweight running shoes. and the air has the first coolness of spring, who cares about this, everyone's played their role, and everyone is waiting for the moment when things really blow up again and no-one's able to act anymore as if this is just how it is. 

... i walked out of that poetry reading because the state of depression that it dramatised felt to me like something totally superficial and unreal, like an intoxication, like a pretence. we *want* the destruction of the bridges that connect us to reality, intention to reality, self to world. we want this because once the bridges have been obliterated then no one can object if we go on to indulge ourselves in wild expressions of pain and personal abandonment, which we find comforting. but those connections *aren't* *bridges*, that's such a shitty ready-to-hand metaphor (it's been bludgeoned into me by the news), they're so much finer and subtler than that, even if I find myself walking through a rote demonstration in which everyone is just dutifully playing out their pre-scripted roles (& **obviously** I've played them too) I still have the ability to articulate that reality and to sense it and to reach out to other people who feel the same way: and the haste with which certain people seek to rip through those threads of everyday world-relation and declare them to be phantoms and illusions of the mind is *either* an expression of extreme narcissism or self-loathing or both, and in a way it doesn't matter which, because in the end the result is the same: hubristic declarative unhappiness, backed up by the organs of official reality (it's inevitable uh huh), leading more or less inexorably to actual misery and isolation. i just don't believe in that shit anymore. even the weird angry rash that has spread across my face feels like a kind of relationship to reality as i see and perceive it, and i am bored by the practical respectability attributed by people with more or less the correct socially sanctioned opinions to their own acts of grandstanding demonstrative self-nullification, however much disguised as recognition of the #objective situation#. there is no such thing. and the thought ricochets into the question of what 'accomplishment' in poetry/music etc means, as well as in the 'space' of our politics. the world is *already* designed to rip through the threads of our own meaningful connection to it, and so it is purposeless to go at these threads pre-emptively ourselves. for so long as i am able to talk to people and understand them and make them understand me, i am not going to get depressed about what 'poetry' (also 'politics' etc.) can 'do', or about the supposed fact that too few people are listening to me. poetry and conversation exist on the same level; and everyone who wants more from the former than the latter is as ridiculous as the person who wants a revolution to come to humanity out of the ('objective') world and thinks that the only agency they have is to eradicate the last traces of their own agency. it's day two of commonwealth week: the designated theme is 'Forging a sustainable and peaceful common future’. the worse things get, the more committed i am to defend the threads of my own connection to things and to people. there are bridges that are so thin and so fine that no enemy can follow you across them; and so why flee across them and blow them up? this is all i can manage for today. 'my aim is to express, to the best of my ability, what i feel as an ordinary person'.