Lest we forget

I had to read 'The One Day of the Year' for Year 10 English. Anzac Day was on the wane then, but even so, reading it was a strong introduction to the aesthetic experience of staleness.

Yesterday I thought that pandemic writing would need to be like pandemic experience, formally, aesthetically, structurally. I was thinking about modernists. Some of them seem to have registered their shocks by using forms and tools that hadn't been used before. Some of that work remains unintelligible and indeed uninteresting to me; I used to think that was a failing in it but now I think it may have been part of its point. Some work stretched or pushed existing forms and tools to attenuations of various kinds, producing attenuated tightropes, variously scary kinds of bridges between the complacently taken for granted 'known' of life before the break, and the felt but not understood life within the break and after.

The persistence of forms of expression from before the rupture spins a line back into the past, a line that carries currents and cargos in both directions. Lifeline or deathline? don't know, but it's a cool question to ask, right.

I slept till 7:45 this morning so I don't know whether anyone within earshot played the Last Post at sunrise, or stood in their 'driveways' (what are those) holding candles. Those are some of the activities various Anzac Day 'stakeholders' encouraged others to participate in. I started the day waking up inside the uncertainty principle. Coffee was interrupted by distressing text messages and phone calls from people in my network. I reminded them of the boundaries and after a while I felt better.

In the shower I thought about pandemic writing: materials, aims, themes, motives. These are in fact the tools of before. Right now there are no others. I asked myself if the way I habitually write is plastic enough to be spun or stretched or extruded into lines that will bridge then and now.

Social media brought ironies and overwhelms. Anzac Day really doesn't matter to everybody. Formal ceremonies were held in various places and they seem really pointless and empty without masses of spectators; they seemed offensive and empty before anyhow. But not to everyone. Some people love the spectacle and find meaning in it. I have always had a sneaking suspicion that they are right; unburdened with the mental disfigurements left by a postmodern relativist humanities education they are not distracted by the proto-fascist look of Anzac Day commemorations and they are able to infuse this ready-made ritual with important human emotions which have no other way of finding public expression and recognition in our national imaginary. Uncertain. There are no marches today and saying that this is the case brought a note of left-wing triumphalism into the commentary of many people who are used to thinking that their opinions about any cultural event at all are of interest and value to the world at large.

Some people really need to do the things they always do, and I am aware of a small handful of private illicit dawn services, enough to indicate that the gathering together with old comrades and the going through of the rituals of medals, uniforms, flags, silence and saying Lest we Forget was felt more important than staying in isolation and following the regulations, probably by many ex-service people and their families. But they should have stayed in isolation. But I'm glad they didn't. But they should have.

Candles and radios and standing outside homes in the birdsong and sunrise has a saccharine poetry to it, perfect for Instagram and crispy mouthfuls of media content. And yet small homemade roadside shrine kitsch is more palatable than uniformed military band and private school cadet kitsch. Aesthetically this Anzac Day is probably the least offensive one ever. The lack of official speeches to cloud the mind might even have made room for people to draw their own conclusions from thinking about the past. Even without the heffalump urging of the unspeakable prime minister, people observing their dawn services today might naturally have thought of the Spanish flu pandemic with new appreciation for the sufferings of the First World War generation. It's possible. I'm uncertain.

Anzac Day is the only national holiday which marks something real and that matters - thousands of beautiful ordinary people died horribly and nobody recovered from it, ever. It's also a transnational national day. (Are we going to be more bound to New Zealand than ever in coming years? Why yes we are) The small domestic beauties of isolation have their uses but they don't substitute for the big, confusing, obscure, tense/flabby experiences of collectivism. We need both.

Here's to sunrise.