Necessity.
Last week I set out out on a Necessary Journey, to Amsterdam. Yes, I was needed, but I will not lie to you dear readers, I was glad glad glad of the necessity. The sense of being herded, detained in my own home for weeks on end ( home's your castle) by other parties was doing something to my mind's peace...my maybe soul. Grinning guards at check points when I had to travel, queues cattle-like at supermarkets, I accepted, with its consequential cortisol spikes, helplessness...(the curve the curve). The news, the newsfeeds arguing the toss, disputing fatalities. The helpless old in nursing homes. Collective Guilt. Mea culpa mea culpa.
I accepted it, all.
And now the oh so reluctant opening up (dance of the seven veils) complete with doom laden warnings to the restless, squeals of refusal from the people thoroughly spooked and BLOODY WELL NEVER COMING OUT AGAIN, PERIOD!
And science as news, as newsfeed, as irrefutable, with its contradicting, blaming, framing messages:
There will there won't be: second waves, antibodies, cures.
There is there isn't: alleviation in hydroxychloroquine, remdesiver, masks.
Locking down, or kind of not, has it hasn't saved the people, flattened the curve.
But facial Masks are useful, useless, helpful, pointless to prevent your spreading, but not breathing in, a virus...
droplets, droplets travel many metres, wait to ambush, hoover, hang, athough they don't... they may... they are...dissolved... they are too fine for masks to stop them... not, they're not!
Just wear the masks? Yes, wear them anyway. Ok?
Me, I took positions on this virus, like you do. I got behind the immune system coping, the right to prudent autonomy, that kind of thing. Behind questioning everything spinning from the panicked government, irrefutable scientists, news, the newsfeed. I wasn't scared, or any more than I am always scared of life's incalculable shifts and endings.
But then, days were weeks and weeks were months of lockdown. Fear comes to you anyway. Hysteria, a kind of madness flying out from all the shifting narratives, sticks. Even as you try to hold your ground, sustain your people. The point comes where you can't sustain this flight from normal, or say the words ( flattening curves, in it together, stay safe stay safe) ( you never said the words). You must resume your everyday, or spiral into some basically unhinged.
A Haircut.
And so I walked from Centraal Station into the enlightened city of Amsterdam, blinking at bodily proximities of 1.5 mts, fumbling for masks for trams, and breathing, breathing mouthfuls of lung expanding air. Walking, walking as you do in cities always, taking in the city vistas, its canals and buildings visible anew in the absence of the tourists. Only the locals out and shopping, walking, talking in their native tongue, the strong stretched vowels prevailing in the soft warm air.
I listen, soothed, on my way to have my hair cut on my second day. I had a sense that I would be renewed, made good again in the sanctum of the salon, the snip snip of the stylist's scissiors. Accumulations, dead ends from the lockdown falling from me as the stylist layered and washed and combed my Irish hair.
And so it was. I walked back up from Prinsengracht, crossing the Kalverstraat to Dam Square so free and fine and easy, light as air. I felt my head sit lighter on my shoulders, cleaner, sane.
You pay your money and you take your chances...
Days pass, and we grow accustomed to the freedoms here, the restrictions too that have become the price of freedoms. Coffee in a cafe, dinners out, apologetic waiters limiting numbers, murmured reminders of social distance as we the Grateful Customers smile assent. The people walk together in the public spaces easily, reminded of the virus by shop assistants, waiters wanting so to have you in. Observe the rules...oh yes, oh yes, but nonetheless entice you...in. Come in, come in, oh careful does it; this way, do come in.
Nudists,
The angel child and I take the train to Zanvoort aan Zee, on Friday. The Zee the Zee, I say, it's been forever dearest (corralled in midland locked-down Ireland) since we've been and seen the sea!
It is divine, is all. The sun shines kindly, warms our pallid Irish skin, the breeze blows back our new cut hair, the sand gives gently to bare feet, we walk the shoreline, talk, the two of us, content. We turn at midday, cross the sand for coffee, walking through the people sun bathing. I pay them little mind.
"So um, why are they all, I mean, ah, naked?"
Huh?
The dear girl's face is creased with distaste at a solitary naked man stretched careless on a towel. Full frontal, to be clear. There are a few of these guys, as well as little groups of men and women comfortably naked, unbothered in their skin. We agree we must be on the nudist stretch, and to get our coffee back the way. And she, the dear girl, asks me as we hasten ( she more disturbed than I) if I would, I mean myself, be into that, because she most definitely would not. I say I think I would (among congenial people). I say I think, after the initial awkwardness I'd be ok with it. She definitely wouldn’t be. I cannot say I blame her really, observing the ever so slightly predatory solitary man. The fleeting facial smirk, the calculating eye. But ah, the little laughing groups!
I talk about about my naked dreams over coffee. (We’ve done her dreaming on the walk) Dreams of the recurring kind where you are shoeless, barefoot, sometimes naked, in the public space. Where you are OUT, too late to dress, go back, or find your shoes... your clothes. Self conscious, feeling foolish, solitary, shamed and naked in a public place. We ponder on it, poke at it, consider exhibitionism, shame, or boundaries, appropriateness, grounded ness. Thefeartheshame. Recurrence, and what it is that I'm (just) not getting here, why doomed to dream the dream over and over.
We shift to Normal People which she is re-reading after the TV show. It turns out to be, basically, related, we decide. Connell and Marianne and intimacy in bodies, minds, the heart. Baring body baring heart. The desire for it... fear of it. (And still the public discomfort about...naked need?)
I wonder later if in fact the dream discomfort’s with vulnerability, openness. Not leaky boundaries, sagging gates, between public and private, as I had loosely guessed. Not a dream of jeopardy, abandonment of lock downed, closed off, safety ( we hysterically require) The feartheshame neurosis. Not that at all. I wonder if in fact being naked, honest/open with all others is the last frontier? Connection, laying bare the body/heart. The feartheshame neurosis. Being able for it, being willing, to try.
