TENDER SCORES FOR THE HERE AND THE NOT YET HERE

Thoughts of Air

Lisa’s first piece of online art focuses on her sudden awareness of air— how porous and open to the world we are, and how we have to be that way: we can’t live without air, even though at this moment, the air also contains the power to kill us.

Watching her animation of particles floating in the air, I’m reminded of a lovely book called Caesar’s Last Breath by Sam Kean. An exploration of all things airy, Kean describes how scientists worked out what the air is comprised of, how they discovered that our own physiology changes its composition, and why this matters so much. The part that really stayed with me, though, is Kean’s suggestion that right here, right now, we could be breathing Julius Caesar’s last breath. The reasoning goes like this. Caesar’s last breath would have contained about a litre of air, which amounts to 25 sextillion molecules (that’s 25 followed by 21 zeros). A litre of air represents 0.000000000000000000001% of all the air on earth. If you do the sums, it works out that approximately 1 particle of the last air breathed out by Caesar will appear in your next breath. If that’s the case, then it must be the case for other people as well: the last breath of Elizabeth I, Mary Shelley, Rosa Parks, David Bowie, Prince. Going further back, it includes earlier human species, like Homo erectus, and then, further back still, the dinosaurs. Presumably that also means we’re breathing in the breath of those still living too, their last, but not last, breath contained the last breath of Caesar and the breath of the last dinosaur.

I find that the broader point that Lisa is making—that our boundaries are fuzzier than we realise—also resonates. I remember another book, one I read a long time ago. It was called “Life” as far as I recall, but that’s as much as I can recall, and I can’t seem to find the book anywhere. I’ll have to keep looking. Anyway, as far as I remember, the book began with the author telling us that clouds don’t really exist; at least not as we see them from our vantage point on the ground, from which they appear solid, stable, floating like galleons. Clouds are processes in a state of constant flux, with water vapour continually condensing at the top and evaporating at the bottom. Clouds hang together just long enough to appear stable, to hold their form, to seem “very like a whale”. On days with a high wind, or when flying, we see how wispy and insubstantial they really are.

We should think of life, and our own lives in particular, as cloud-like, the author argued: we too are processes in a constant state of flux, that hold together just long enough to appear stable and solid. To an alien lifeform from another planet, with a vastly longer lifespan, we would appear as wispy and insubstantial as clouds in a high wind. I like that image. I like thinking in terms of processes, not “things”, because it echoes how I was taught biology, ecology and anthropology: that living organisms are in constant exchange with their environments, and that our understanding of the world rests on a detailed understanding of the relationships that form these complex, life sustaining ecological webs. I certainly like it better than the ideas put about by so-called “transhumanists”, who argue that our bodies are machines, and our brains are computers, and that one day we’ll be able to upload the latter to the Cloud, or into new robotic bodies, so that we can transcend the limits of the leaky, sweaty skin-bags in which we pass our days.

Such a view worries me because, if we see ourselves us as autonomous machines to
be improved on by our own actions and ingenuity, then we also, inevitably, see ourselves as standing outside nature looking on, rather than an integral part of our planet’s ecological web. We impose on the natural world but, somehow, we do not inhabit it in the manner of other species. For a transhumanist, the words of Katharine Hepburn’s character, in The African Queen, ring true: “Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.”

The pandemic has made me realise it’s not just transhumanists who think like this, as various forms of the “Nature is healing, we are the virus” meme pops up all over. I understand the sentiment, but there’s an unspoken assumption lurking in this, which means I can’t quite get on board. You can only think of “nature as healing” during a time in which hundreds of thousands of humans have died, only if you also think that humans don’t count as part of nature. Nature is where we are not, it seems. But we do count as part of nature, and so does the virus. We need to take a step back and see that the decision about what counts as nature is itself a human invention, a form of collective agreement shared by a given community of people, much like money, marriage and government. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, the separation of the world into the natural and the cultural is, itself, a cultural decision. This being the case, it’s we humans who have the last word on what’s natural or not. There is no “natural” division.

I think it’s vital to question these unspoken assumptions about what counts as natural because, if we see ourselves as capable of rising above nature, or even leaving it behind altogether, then we begin to care less about how our actions affect the health and wellbeing of the rest of life on earth. If nature is “over there”, where we are not, it’s easy to assume that what we do in “our” non-natural arena is unrelated to what happens in the natural one. The transhumanist goes even further, and fails to recognise—or worse, does not care—that our exploitation of the planet’s resources risks the sustainability of all life, as the aim is to leave all that messy stuff behind anyway, as we transform into pure intellect. As futuristic and future-oriented as transhumanism sounds, it’s actually myopically focused on the present, with a cavalier disregard for what future generations think the world should like, or how they would like to live. As we’re not machines, but living organisms—leaky dynamic interdependent processes—we should recognize that this is wrong-headed and foolish: who wants to be a perfect human on a dead planet?

Another way to look at things, a view Lisa’s work points towards, is a more symbiotic view. Consider “forest bathing”, as the Japanese call spending time in wooded areas, strolling among the trees. Initially, this was thought to be good for us simply because it is psychologically uplifting, that nature is there to heal us too (which is another expression of human self-absorption—that nature is inherently benign and welcoming toward us, as opposed to utterly indifferent). It turns out, though, that spending time in forests exposes us to micro-organisms that come to form part of our microbiota—the bacteria that inhabit our gut, aid with digestion, and give our immune system a boost. Who we are, and how we feel, depends on organisms other than ourselves— we are interdependent processes entangled with all the other interdependent processes around us.

In other words, we think we’re individuals, but we’re not. We have never been individuals. I used to say the sooner we realise that the better, but, sadly, the pandemic has now done my work for me.

 

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Small Animals Panicking 



Less than a week in — that is, a week after the students were sent home, and we were no longer allowed on campus—my already failing concentration deserts me completely. Every time I try to focus, my thoughts scatter. I vaguely recall Hilary Mantel said something quite brilliant along these lines. I can’t remember what she wrote, but I remember underlining it. After much flicking back and forth through various paperbacks, I find this is in An Experiment in Love:



“Once you have begun remembering—isn’t this so?—one image springs another; they run through your head in all directions, scampering animals flushed from coverts.” 



So, not scattered thoughts as such, but close enough; possibly a bit too on the nose if anything: small animals fleeing in panic.

 

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More Thoughts of Air

I get an email today, from someone called Claire who works for a company called Inospin:



Dear Louise,


Looking at your research, I am reaching out to you as we have been recently tasked by a leading speciality consumer goods company to look for proposals on digital solution technologies that can detect and analyze urine, stool and fart inside or outside the body, without any contact. Based on your expertise, would you or your collaborators have any solutions? 

My expertise? In what? What on earth do they think I do? What do they know that I don’t? Also, what kind of scientific innovation company would use the word “fart”? They usually love a good buzz-word. Fart doesn’t sound very techno.



Come to think of it, though, I do know a man called Ben who demonstrated that fish communicate by farting. He and his colleagues won an Ig Nobel Prize for it, in fact (“flatulent fish net Ig Nobel award” as the science magazine, Nature, reported it). The actual title of the paper was “Pacific and Atlantic herring produce burst pulse sounds” which is suitably boring for the staid world of the academic journal. In the paper itself, though, Ben and his mates describe the herrings’ “bubble expulsion from the anus” as “fast repetitive tick” sounds, which they refer to by the acronym “FRT”.  Maybe Claire should chat to him. 


 

.  .  .

 

Subsisting in Emptiness

Lisa’s second piece is about how the “things that can only exist between us” and how they make us see that “we depend on each other to make the space we live within”.

Interdependency is a topic I discuss in my lectures. I trace it back to our long evolutionary history as social primates, and discuss the work of George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky, who argued that our sense of self—the sense that we exist as autonomous individuals distinct from those around us—arises only because we are fundamentally social creatures. In their view, we are not isolated individuals who must somehow gain knowledge of each other and learn how to live together, it’s the other way around. Social life is primary, social life comes first and, through human language and social interaction, we acquire the capacity to see ourselves as others see us—to stand back from ourselves and reflect on our actions—and from there our individuality and agency emerge. We sustain and maintain our selves through this social interaction; it’s no accident that solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments governments inflict on criminals. Indeed, there are stories of people totally disintegrating under such conditions. Take Bobby Dellelo.

Delleo was sentenced to five years solitary confinement in a US “supermax” prison. He thought it would be a piece of cake, no problem at all. A few months later he was hallucinating that the colours of his walls were changing, talking to himself, and pacing his cell compulsively. A few more months after that, he found himself incapable of sustaining a face-to-face conversation with his lawyer, unable to understand his words or hand gestures, and incapable of generating any of his own. Solitary confinement apparently produces changes in the brain similar to those caused by physical trauma.

For people with other kinds of brain damage, we see the reverse effect, where the presence of others can help mitigate their difficulties. In his beautiful book Into the Silent Land, Paul Broks, a British neuropsychologist, introduces a patient of his, Mary, who has suffered a burst aneurysm. As a result, Mary now has trouble constructing any kind of coherent self: she confabulates, and makes up stories about herself. She tells Broks they’re sitting in a hotel in Majorca rather than Brok’s office in England. She tells him (accurately) that her children are 22 and 19, but this comes after she’s already told him she’s only 24. Mary’s self is fragmented and wispy; she grabs onto whatever she can in the moment to forge a sense of herself. But Broks also writes of how “[w]hen Mary’s husband came to visit, he had a calming effect. They seemed to function as a unit. Her behavior meshed into the networks of partnership and so became more coherent. In any relationship, one person is partly defined by the other. For Mary, her husband was a guide to self-definition. He provided a template. He drew from her a behavioural repertoire and a mental structure to complement this own. The centre of gravity lay between them. There was a kind of equilibrium. This effect was not of his deliberate doing. That’s just the way it happens.”*

At the end of this essay, Broks writes of how scientists have now mapped the brain, and found there are no “secret compartments…no soul in the pineal gland”. We won’t find our minds or ourselves in the brain alone. Instead, Broks suggests, “minds emerge from process and interaction, not substance. We inhabit the spaces between things. We subsist in emptiness: a beautiful, liberating thought and nothing to be afraid of.”

Minds, then, are another thing that can only exist between us.

 

*Broks, P. (2003) Into the Silent Land: Travels in Neuropsychology. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York.

 

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Banning the P-Word



By the third Zoom meeting, it’s become clear we’ll have to ban the p-word. Not “pandemic”, not “panic”, but “productivity”. 



“I really haven’t managed to be very productive this week”


“My productivity has just plummeted”


“I really tried to be productive, but I just couldn’t focus”

Why is everyone talking like this? As though they need to apologise for their behaviour? People are sick and dying, and their families can’t visit them in hospital, can’t hold their hands and comfort them; they can’t attend weddings, christenings, funerals. People have lost their jobs. All over the world, people are locked-down at home, lonely and scared, or trapped with people who might do them harm. No one knows when it will all end. We’re not quite at the sharp end here in Lethbridge, thank goodness (or thank goodness, not yet) but, still, life is completely upended: we can’t go to the university,  the cinemas are closed, as are the hair salons, the bars and restaurants, the gyms and yoga studios. We have to stay home, maintain physical distance, wash our hands. A new one-way system is introduced in our local park, so that everyone can walk the same anti-clockwise circuit. The Johns Hopkins coronavirus map is covered in more and more red dots. The death counts ticks up relentlessly. This isn’t at all normal; it’s disturbing and strange, and frightening. We don’t know what will happen, we don’t know when or how this will end. Why on earth would you be particularly productive, watching all this play out all day every day? 


And yet, in our weekly lab meeting, everyone acts as though we should treat the shut-down like a snow-day: a bit of bonus time to not just catch up but to get ahead.  Yes, we all have our jobs to do, and we’re managing to get things done as best we can from home. And, of course, there’s nothing wrong with doing what you have to do to get you through and keep yourself going. If “this is the time!” to write your novel, learn to knit, develop your bread-making skills, no one is going to stop you. But that’s different from feeling that, not only should we continue to work at the same pace as normal, but we should actually be able to do more, work harder, free as we are from other distractions. We’re failing to recognise that we’re swamped with the biggest distraction ever. For most of the students in our lab, this is the single most destructive and frightening event they have ever encountered.  No wonder they can’t distract themselves. The Onion, as ever, got it exactly right: “Man not sure why he thought most psychologically taxing situation of his life would be the thing to make him productive”.

Productivity is just not helpful right now. Large numbers of us are just trying to hang on as best we can, our only goal to come out more or less intact on the other side. The focus is on maintaining and sustaining, on endurance and forbearance. It takes a lot of energy and ingenuity to simply stay put, and not backslide. We need to worry about everyone’s capacity to do that; we need to worry about the people who aren’t as lucky as we are; we need to consider whether it is possible to do things differently in the future, because this disease that allegedly “doesn’t discriminate” nevertheless does exactly that, because we live in a world that discriminates ruthlessly all the time.

Now, at lab meetings, we simply tell each other how we kept going this week, even if that means some of us stayed in exactly the same place.

 

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Carrying Space

In her third piece, Lisa explores the unknown. How “carrying space for what is not known, changes how we move through the world.” The obvious point of reference here is Keat’s comforting notion of negative capability: to be “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Comforting because when you have no inspiration and no clue how to go on, it becomes perfectly permissible to say, whether to yourself or any interfering others: “No, I am not “just mooning about doing nothing”, I am being in uncertainties.”

What really comes to mind, though, as I contemplate Lisa’s work is the book I’m reading: Hilary Mantel’s (yes, her again…) The Mirror and the Light. This is the final volume in her trilogy about the life of Thomas Cromwell. It took a while to get into it, what with my concentration in pieces, its disconcerting mentions of plague, and the fact that almost everyone seemed to be called Thomas (Cromwell, Cranmer, Wolsey, More, Howard, Culpepper, Seymour, Wyatt…), but the immersive brilliance of Mantel’s writing draws me in. The Wolf Hall books have received a lot of press, and many excellent reviews, in which Mantel’s use of the present tense is discussed frequently. Another thing that comes to the fore in this new volume—and is remarked on more frequently this time around—is that the characters use of the present tense means that they don’t know their own history. Mantel’s characters live “now”. As one reviewer noted, Anne Boleyn has no conception of herself as Henry’s second wife in a long line up rather than his lifelong spouse; Henry himself doesn’t realise he’ll end up with six weddings under his belt. There is no dramatic irony: we’re never asked to laugh because we know something the characters do not. In Mantel’s Tudor England, her characters all carry space for the unknown. It becomes immediately clear how this changes the way they move through the world, as compared to reading of their lives in history books, where the tales are told with the benefit of hindsight, and events are foreshadowed in ways that make the end seem inevitable.

Then again, story-telling, of any kind, is a human effort to weave together a series of contingent facts and events into a coherent whole, so the historian and novelist aren’t all that different. Our lives aren’t really stories, we only make them so, in the same way we make “Nature”. I suppose also there’s a tension in the notion of fictional characters holding space, when it’s the author that holds all the cards, and ultimately tells the story. But perhaps this is simply a failure of the imagination, or an inability to see what is in plain sight: that we’re all inventing narratives of our own lives all the time, to impose meaning on what happens to us, to make sense of these events. George Herbert Mead suggested that, in fact, we have two senses of our self: the “I” that acts in the moment, and the “Me” that follows just behind, narrating what’s happened, making up the story of our selves for ourselves. We turn this outwards as well and make up other stories about other things. We see this in the pandemic, where the mindless replication of a tiny scrap of matter, completely lacking any conscious goals or aim of its own, is turned into a story of nature seeking revenge on feckless humans. That’s not what’s happening, but it’s one way to make sense of an otherwise senseless experience.

 

.  .  .

 

Nostalgia for the Present

Any mention of Station Eleven, the novel about a flu pandemic, by Emily St John Mandel, is rapidly approaching cliché.  The thing is, though, the book really isn’t about a pandemic as such: it focuses on the just-before, and 20 years after, and explores what matters and what doesn’t. “Survival is insufficient” is the book’s message: there’s more to existence than just existing; we need art and music and stories. The main experience of reading it—possibly I’m alone in this, who knows?—is an intense nostalgia for the present: a character thinks fondly of electric lights, long since gone, and you think, yes, they were great, weren’t they? And then you resurface, refocus, leave the world of the story, and realise we still have them: you can flick a switch, and there they are. The real pandemic also conjures up similar feelings—we think fondly of when we used to hug our friends, go to the cinema, visit our grandparents; go to birthday parties and graduation ceremonies, hockey games, concerts, take a holiday; go for a haircut, go to the library, go to the coffee shop, the bookshop, even the dentist. These aren’t things lost in the past, never to return. They’re still here, but just a little bit out of reach right now. It’s nostalgia for the present.


 

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Houellebecq…What?



People like to claim they behave completely out of character when drunk, but being tipsy doesn’t change your personality, it just exaggerates it; you’re just more you when you’ve had a few. Responses to the pandemic seem a bit like drunkenness. A case in point: 



Lisa’s fourth post is about how the pandemic is opening up a space of possibility, a reorientation of the world:  we can’t go back to how we were before, and this is a source of both fear and optimism.  Michel Houllebecq—the notoriously grumpy and cynical French novelist—by contrast, says “I do not believe for a half-second the declarations that ‘nothing will be like it was before’… We will not wake up after lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse.” COVID-19 is a “banal virus” with “no redeeming qualities…it’s not even sexually transmitted.” 


Now, he could just be performing the role of “French male novelist” extremely well, but only, only, a white, French, male novelist could think a virus was banal, and bemoan its lack of sexiness. 

 

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A Tiny Non-Human Agent

I like Lisa’s piece on how the coronavirus is only something we can respond to, not control; that it acts as a friction against our desires. The use of her word “agent” to describe the virus interests me. Is it an agent? Strictly speaking, yes, because it takes an active role in producing a certain effect. But the notion of agent bleeds into notions of “agency”, and usually we see this as more than just the action of producing an effect. It also includes intention. We act with agency. Does the virus do that? It would seem that it doesn’t, but it’s not like we’ve worked out what agency actually is. Some people also suggest that machines and other non-living things also have agency. I have to admit that this makes some sense to me. I know that Josie, for example, has long believed in the viciousness of inanimate objects—the lawnmower that won’t start if someone is watching, the photocopier that eats your report. There is certainly a debate to be had on whether we act with agency at all times and in all places: do we truly choose the things we do, or are we forced into them by circumstance, by societal constraints, by history? Could we have avoided this pandemic, or not? Hesitation and procrastination, it seems, has been our enemy as much as the virus has in many cases: lock-downs, and physical distancing, and other mitigation strategies came too late, along with failures to order PPE in the right amounts at the right time. One could argue it wasn’t really procrastination operating here at all, but a failure to take the threat of the virus seriously. I do think there’s something to the idea of procrastination, though. I also think that procrastination is the perfect illustration of agency: I know I have to meet a particular deadline, I know it would make my life more pleasant and more manageable if I did, and yet I choose not to do so, and distract myself with other things. Viruses certainly don’t act like this, so does that mean that they lack agency, or does their agency emerges through their interaction with us? Could they influence our agency whether we like it or not? A bit like that zombie-ant fungus that makes ants climb to the top of grass stems, where the ants place themselves in danger, but the conditions are perfect for the fungus to grow. After all, some studies have shown that the common cold can influence our alertness, our cognitive efficiency, even if we lack all other symptoms.* Maybe asymptomatic coronavirus carriers may show other symptoms we haven’t yet recognised. Maybe this explains the otherwise unfathomable* interest in Netflix’s Tiger King series.

 

*Apparently this is unfathomable only to me. Another great theory spoiled by ugly facts.

 

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Meta-Metaphors

Lots of pieces are being written criticizing the use of war metaphors to describe the pandemic. Some have focused on how it simply makes no sense because wars have rules of engagement, and viruses don’t—everything is fair game, or rather not, to a virus. There are even more pieces on the inappropriate use of war-like language to describe those who have contracted COVID-19—all this talk of people “fighting” the disease, and “beating it”—because what does that say about the people who succumb? That they didn’t fight hard enough? I hate this way of talking, having lost my sister to cancer in her 20s, and two great friends to the same horrid disease in their mid-30s. The journalist, Deborah Orr, who died of cancer at the end of last year, once wrote an excellent piece on what not to say to people who were seriously ill. Number 2 on her list is: “if anyone can beat this, it’s you”. Of this, she wrote: “The idea that illness is a character test, with recovery as a reward for the valiant, is glib to the point of insult.” Too right. The one thing I haven’t seen is any suggestion for better metaphors. Are there any? I try to come up with something but get distracted when I consider the equally glib way we took the notion of viral infection and turned it into a metaphor for social media popularity, a usage that traces back to the late 80s, and then itself “went viral” in the early 2000s. Ah, we were all so innocent and daft then, weren’t we?

 

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All Time is Now Fieldwork Time

Time has gotten strange, Lisa says. An understatement to say the least. Although time has always been strange. Time both is and isn’t a human invention. Obviously, in one sense, time just “is”— seeds sprout, trees blossom, children grow, the earth turns, everything happens in and over time. It flows on and on, and there is nothing we can do about it. Clock time is our invention though. There’s no particular reason an hour contains 60 minutes. You feel this acutely when you do fieldwork on other animals. We work from dawn to dusk with our monkeys in South Africa, following them through the day, and recording their activities. You soon come to realise that days of the week mean nothing to them, and nor does the fact that it’s 2:30pm. Soon clocks and calendars stop making much sense to you, and the human world seems less familiar and much more peculiar than it did before.

At the moment, clock time seems arbitrary in just this way, as we spend all our time at home, and the days hardly differ. It feels like fieldwork time in another way too—the days go slowly (fieldwork can be very boring, and hot, and unpleasant) but the weeks flash by. One minute it’s Monday morning, and the next thing it’s Friday, and you have no idea how you got from one to the other, even though the individual hours dragged on endlessly. This must surely be due to the inescapable nature of “the time” these days. In the “before times”, before COVID, when I could go to work, I noticed how few students wore a watch. When I asked, their answers would be couched in terms of watch-as-fashion-accessory. This struck me forcefully as I think of watches as almost entirely functional. But, of course, with the time everywhere these days, on every screen, on every phone, there’s really no need to engage in the archaic practice of strapping the time to your wrist. I use the word ‘archaic’ ironically here, given that, as recently as 1836, the only official clock in the whole of England was to be found in the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, at the top of a steep hill. I know this hill well. I was brought up in Deptford, just down the road, and came to loathe that hill on school trips to visit the Observatory. The sheer horror of the climb, in a raggedy two-by-two crocodile of “mixed infants” as we were then called, sticky palm clamped against sticky palm, was leavened only by the chance to straddle the prime Meridian—another of our cultural creations—one foot in the Eastern hemisphere and one in the West. Here’s another wonderful cultural creation: in 1836, John Henry Belville started a business selling time. He would set his chronometer (a pocketwatch accurate to a 10th of a second) at the Observatory each morning, and then travel into London where his clients would pay him for a look at the correct time. When he died, his widow, Maria, took over the service, and then when she retired, their daughter, Ruth, carried on the family business until 1940. Ruth managed to keep this going even after more modern means of transmitting time signals were invented, first the telegraph and then the radio. Clearly, a case of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, as far as her clients were concerned. An amazing thing to think of: one hundred and four years of selling time.

 

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Romanticising Naturalness

A fantastic article today by Kenan Malik, about how we need to stop romanticising nature, in which he also takes up the “humans are the virus” meme, but with much greater facility. The piece references a new book by Alan Levinovitz, which sounds fascinating. Here’s a quote: “Only those who enjoy a lifestyle sufficiently protected from the ravages of nature have the licence to romanticise it. In countries with robust health systems, people have the dispensation to opt for natural childbirth, or alternative medicines, or reject vaccines. In much of the world in which ‘natural’ childbirth is an imposition on women, not a choice, both maternal and infant mortality rates are staggeringly high. It is poverty that condemns so many in the global south to rely on traditional medicine or to live without vaccines.” Yet another book to read. It is becoming very clear that I’ll never live to read all the things I want to. Then again, Hilary Mantel says “a book isn’t complete until it’s read” so, really, it’s my duty to at least have a go.

The article also brings in ideas relating to our interdependence and sociality. In particular, our failure to recognise how our actions affect the lives of other people, who suffer the consequences of industrial society without reaping any of the benefits. The last line is a killer: “It is the ‘bad’ of the social, not the ‘good’ of the natural, that we need to address.”

 

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Making Hay Online

When people are granted three wishes in fairy tales, it tends not to end well. It’s usually a warning of about greed and self-absorption at worst, or at best, it’s alerting us to the dangers of unintended consequences. One of my dearest wishes is to attend the Hay Literary Festival in Wales, but I have never been able to make it. This year, I was able to attend, but only thanks to a global pandemic that closed down the live event, and forced a switch to an online platform. Careful what you wish for indeed.

Obviously, the experience isn’t as good as being there in person, but the organisers have done an amazing job transferring their entire programme online, and what’s more, they offered the festival to the whole world completely free*. You simply had to register for an event, and log-on at the appointed time. Without this provision, another year would have passed with no Hay festival for me. Instead, I have listened to historians talk about the human “superpower” of cooperation, the deep roots of celebrity, and the complete history of the East India Company in 45 minutes flat, during which mentions of Deptford and the East India docks that I know from childhood, gave me a weird historical vertigo, as layers of history piled up and slipped past each other. It is a marvellous talk by William Dalrymple, and at the end of it I found myself spontaneously applauding, alone at 7am, in my pyjamas. I’ve listened to philosophers, economists and political scientists talk about the inventions that have shaped our modern world, how we balance the health, social and economic costs of COVID-19, and how we are failing to be “good ancestors” by treating the future as though it were some distant colony, where we can dump all our pollution and waste out of sight and out of mind. I’ve listened to writers discuss their latest novels (my beloved Hilary Mantel! My new love, Anne Enright) in interviews marked by their sensitivity and insight, by the simple willingness to allow the writer to speak and to listen carefully to what is said (Peter Florence, what a man). I’ve been mesmerised by artists: Jackie Morris, painting a beautiful watercolour in real-time, Helena Bonham-Carter performing Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 to her dog, in her own (lovely) back-garden. I’ve done all this in the company of up to 11,000 people from across the globe, all of whom have had the opportunity to comment and ask questions of the speakers. I have truly felt part of something much larger than myself. It is abundantly clear that Emily St John Mandel is right: survival is not sufficient.

*A marvellous gesture, but not sustainable long-term, so after each presentation there is a beautifully worded requests to donate and support the Hay Festival if you can “to secure the Festival for future generations, to imagine the world as it is and as it might be”. In addition, CAD$17.00 buys you a year’s subscription to “Hayplayer”, an archive of all thousands of recording—both audio from film—from previous Hay Festivals going back to 1995 (and including this year’s event).

-Louise Barrett

 

 

Louise Barrett was trained in both Ecology (BSc. Hons) and Anthropology (Ph.D.) at University College London, UK, and has taught in Anthropology, Biology and Psychology departments in the UK and Canada. She is currently Professor of Psychology and Canada Research Chair in Cognition, Evolution & Behaviour at the University of Lethbridge. Along with Professor Peter Henzi, Louise co-directs the Samara Vervet Monkey Project in South Africa. Her research programme centres on how ecology shapes patterns of sociality and cognitive evolution in the primate order. She is also interested in how culture and biology intersect in human populations, and how our ideas of “Nature” influence our attitudes and behaviour toward the natural world. Louise is also a member of Lichen Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that crosses the art-science divide. Her most recent book is Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Influence Animal and Human Minds (Princeton University Press).