New Escapologist: May 2020
Stay Alert!
Stay Alert! is the new advice from England's government as their Steerpike-like whispering Svengali scuttles germy across the abandoned landscape.
As an habitual daydreamer, I don't really like staying alert even when it's useful. And in this situation, it isn't.
Stay Alert! Alert to a virus. Remain on the edge of your seat at all times lest Johnny Corona seep through your letterbox or down your chimney. Stay Alert! Stay conscious in perpetuity of something bigger than all of us yet invisible to the naked eye. Stay Alert! Remain in a state of constant vigilance against something you can neither detect nor control.
I preferred their earlier "Stay Home" commandment even though it chafed at the grammar pedantry centre of my brain whenever I saw it in the news. It should have been, of course, "Stay at Home," though I sympethise with the inconvenience of breaking symmetry with regards to the fuller message. Once the decision was made to choose catchy tessellation over ideal grammar, one couldn't very well say "stay at home, save at lives" because it would have been meaningless, so they arrived at "Stay Home, Save Lives." Good enough. The advice was good too.
And yet they ended up choosing meaninglessness just a few weeks later anyway.
Maybe they mean we should "stay alert" to Cummings whose Grenouille-the-tick-like death-carrying unleashedness actually could creep up on the non-alert and lay his eggs in unexpecting brocheoles. Maybe that's what they meant all along. Well, we can't say they didn't warn us.
Stay [at] home, save lives,
Robert Wringham
New Escapologist
Locked Down After Lockdown
The idea that office life is over is almost certainly overdone. Not everyone loves typing away on the sofa day after day, panicking about being out of the corporate loop.
Bloody hell. Imagine “panicking about being out of the corporate loop.” Excuse me while I fill a whole bucket with sick.
But for those lucky enough to have the choice to work from home, the collective near-death experience we’ve endured as a nation may be prompting a re-evaluation of what matters. Commuter dads [for instance] who once rarely saw their children awake have got used to the casual intimacy of being around them all day long.
No. Sorry. I’m going to need another bucket. Not for the sentiment (which I agree with) but for the phrase, “commuter dads.”
Don’t worry, things improve. The columnist asks if office life will soon be a thing of the pre-pandemic past. Spoiler: it won’t be, but some Escapologist-pleasing changes might yet be afoot.
The piece goes on to describe some of the post-lockdown measures currently being proposed to revolutionise working practices in light of the need for social distancing. Among them are a wonky but surely beneficial “four days on, ten days off” modality and our old friend, the Four-Day Week.
Personally, I’d settle for the sort of open-ended furlough for workers (and non-workers) of all stripes in the form of UBI. Eh, readers?
Lampin'
Forget idling. The new word for taking it easy is “lampin’.”
It comes from J. B. Smoove’s character on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
As part of a singular explanation of how “lampin'” made it onto the show (and in which he gives us the additional treasures of “cold lampin'” and “Lamptons” almost inadvertently), Smoove explains:
I told him the difference between chillin’ and lampin. If you’re chillin’, you could be standing up chillin’; if you’re lampin, you’re laying the fuck back.
So now you know.
Curb is in fact responsible for another pro-doing-nothing phrase: “I’m in my sweats!”
It’s yet to take off in the way of lampin’ but it’s almost as good. Larry blows into Jeff’s house, insisting he help with a crisis, but Jeff is already wearing his pajamas. “I’M IN MY SWEATS!” he shouts, and will not be moved. It’s an immutable law. Once you’re you’re in your sweats, you’re done for the day.
Some days, I never even get out of my sweats to begin with.
On the Edgar Allan
I stumbled upon this interesting paragraph by Poe. The American writer, of course. Not the Teletubby.
It’s from his short story, The Domain of Arnheim in which the protagonist inherits a fortune and suddenly has the space and time to assess what is important in life:
He admitted but four elementary principles, or, more strictly, conditions, of bliss. That which he considered chief was (strange to say!) the simple and purely physical one of free exercise in the open air. ‘The health,’ he said, ‘attainable by other means is scarcely worth the name.’ He instanced the ecstasies of the fox-hunter, and pointed to the tillers of the earth, the only people who, as a class, can be fairly considered happier than others. His second condition was [romantic love]. His third, and most difficult of realization, was the contempt of ambition. His fourth was an object of unceasing pursuit; and he held that, other things being equal, the extent of attainable happiness was in proportion to the spirituality of this object.
Health, love, contempt for ambition, and the lifelong pursuit of something wonderful. They’re remarkably similar to our own good life tenets, aren’t they? This should not be a surprise. In Escape Everything! and the forthcoming The Good Life for Wage Slaves, I make the point that these “conditions of bliss” as Poe calls them are actually rather obvious and are present in all kinds of perfectly mainstream religious and cultural and philosophical system. They’re even present in Hollywood movies. The mystery is that people overlook them all the time or reach them through such an archaic and indirect manner as to lose sight of them for years and years and years.
Especially interesting in Poe’s protagonist’s view are his contempt for ambition vs. lifelong pursuit. Might one not say that the lifelong pursuit requires ambition? Is this not a contradiction?
My read is that the former is a matter “career ambition” (to be escaped) while the latter is something quieter and more personal (to be honed and inched towards over a lifetime). I do wonder sometimes about my own ambition to publish books and which of those two categories it might fall into. Am I a career writer now? Or is the writing just the export wing of something more important? I think it falls into the latter category but it certainly bares scrutiny and I’d like to test it a little more.
I recently read a book called Conundrum by Jan Morris, a travel writer who transitioned from male to female in the 1970s. One of the preserves of masculinity she sought to escape was career and what she called “public life” (i.e. business and politics). I don’t agree that these are “male” things at all, but that’s how she saw it in the 1970s. The point is that she specifically excluded a quiet life of domesticity, independent travel, and book writing from the grasping, empire-building world of careerism. And she escaped.
Jan Morris’ point of view is only one citation in favour of what I’m probably trying to justify, admittedly.
Towels are for Wusses
Actually, the phrase is “towels are for pussies” but I won’t use that version myself because, well, it’s a bit sexist, isn’t it? In its defence, the phrase was coined by a woman for the benefit of another woman with no men for miles around. And, now I come to think of it, it probably has a double meaning relating to sanitary towels, doesn’t it? But hey ho.
Oh! By “hey ho,” I didn’t mean…
Never mind.
Towels are for wusses.
It comes from Homesick: Why I live in a Shed by Catrina Davies. I read it a little while ago and liked it quite a bit.
“Towels are for pussies” is what the author’s sister used to say after they went swimming together in a natural lake. Drying off with a towel, when you could dry slowly and naturally in the sun, is bourgeois and hoity-toity. Not taking a dip just because you don’t have a towel is a failure to seize life.
The phrase stuck with me. Not only does the phrase fleet across my mind almost every day when drying off after a shower, it comes to mind whenever I think, “oh, I can’t do X right now because I don’t have X.”
Forget about X! Let nature handle it! Or at the very least, improvise.
For ages now, in the kitchen, I’ve been using a small coffee cup as a ladle. I don’t know why I don’t have a ladle. I suspect I once had one but either lost it or (if it was plastic) melted it.
I know I once intended to get a ladle but I kept forgetting, and my improvised replacement (the cup) does the job just fine. In fact, over time, I have become accustomed to thinking of that cup as a unit of measurement. Ladles, like towels apprently, are for wusses.
All I’m saying, I suppose, is that a certain kind of creative thinking or biting the bullet can be equal to (and, sometimes, preferable to) resorting to a commercial solution. Whether your surroundings are natural, domestic or otherwise, just use what’s around instead of delaying until you can go shopping for yet another thing.
Blimey, this is like a 2010-style New Escapologist post, isn’t it?
Officially a Dud
It dawned on me in my last year at university, when my peers were discussing the pros and cons of management consultancy, that the future I’d been sold – the one involving Records of Achievement and mountains of aspiration – was a dud.
When I hit my thirties I started to get nervous, but I pressed on along my strange and lonely path, because it was too late to turn around. I had plenty to say, but nothing that would look good on a CV. I leaned right out over the edge of an existential void. When I searched for the outlines of my future, I saw nothing.
Now I’ve hit my forties it all looks different again. The void is filling up. Millions across the ‘developed’ world are having to confront the fact that the future they worked and planned for, the one they were sold over and over again, by countless teachers and politicians and estate agents, is officially a dud.
Here’s Catrina Davis again (mentioned in the item above) with a relatable description of an Escapologist’s time under lockdown: a tiring cocktail of survivor’s guilt, a sense of approval for some of the new ways, relief at having made Escapological life choices, and some anxiety for those who didn’t or couldn’t:
Given the body bags, and the millions going bust and hungry and being locked out of parks and in with violent partners, it feels sacreligious to admit that almost nothing about my daily life has changed, let alone confess that what has changed has mostly changed for the better. New ethical codes have come into play and I prefer them to the old ones. Work less, drive less, shop less, sleep more, go outside for an hour to exercise, talk to your neighbours, listen to birdsong, breathe unpolluted air, don’t fly. It’s an absurd privilege to be able to sit in peace and write these words.
Arbeitslieder
To help promote the German book, I was asked to put together a short playlist of work-related songs for social media. So here are five top songs about work.
The German for “work songs” is apparently Arbeitslieder. Cool.
Book Availability
Escape Everything! is frustratingly hard to get at the moment. In preparation for a paperback release, it's no longer being distributed. Additionally, the paperback's release has been pushed back into January thanks to Coronavirus.
There are some crazily high-priced copies for sale on various online marketplaces, but please don't spend fifty quid on it. If you would like to buy Escape Everything!, the best way is to buy the hardback directly from me, or get the eBook version from the publisher, or look out for a used copy eBay.
That's all for another month, my fellow scarperers. In the meantime, stay alert!
Robert Wringham
www.newescapologist.co.uk