{"id":99616,"date":"2020-04-15T14:50:23","date_gmt":"2020-04-15T14:50:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=99616"},"modified":"2020-04-15T14:54:08","modified_gmt":"2020-04-15T14:54:08","slug":"3am-in-lockdown-35-steve-finbow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/3am-in-lockdown-35-steve-finbow\/","title":{"rendered":"3:AM in Lockdown 35: Steve Finbow"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two Kinds of Islands<\/strong>
\nBy Steve Finbow<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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My eyes have opened and my mouth is dry. Not a good sign. I get out of bed and naked walk to the kitchen. Not a good sight. I cough. Using the dwindling Yorkshire teabags my mother sent me from London before all of this started, I make a cup of tea. It is eight o’clock; my girlfriend will not be awake for a few more hours, so I have time to do whatever I please. I rinse my mouth with water, spit into the sink, try not to pick my nose, try not to touch my face. The tea isn’t as good as it should be, there were no sweeteners in the last package.<\/p>\n

All margins are dangerous. If they are pulled this way or that the shape of fundamental experience is altered. Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins. We should expect the orifices of the body to symbolise its specially vulnerable points. Matter issuing from the orifices of the body is marginal stuff of the most obvious kind. Spittle, blood, milk, urine, faeces or tears by simply issuing forth have traversed the boundary of the body. The mistake is to treat bodily margins in isolation from all other margins.<\/p>\n

I look out of the window. The morning sky is the same relentless blue it has been for the past twenty-eight days. It is not the blue of a Jarman screen, or the blue of a Klein sponge, but the blue of artificially faded denim that you find on cheap market stalls. A washed-out blue punctuated occasionally by the dash of a crow or the smudge of a pigeon. I cough. The tarpaulin on the roof of the building opposite flaps and ripples. The scaffolding poles act as launch pads for the squabbling sparrows’ insect raids; the local cats look both bewildered and emboldened.<\/p>\n

The final, most difficult task is to retain whatever understanding has been attained through contemplative isolation after the return to everyday life. Or, in terms of an example that suggested itself some time later: the ability to retain the security of the monk sunk in meditation in the mountain-top monastery while negotiating the rush-hour traffic after a trying day at work is the mark of one’s being genuinely on the way.<\/p>\n

The wind is blowing from the east as I watch the cypress trees in the courtyard bend westerly. Birds swirl around and land on the blunted neo-classical towers of Langres cathedral. I open the window. The air is cold. I cough. There are no human sounds \u2013\u2013 no children laughing, no car engines, not even the throaty roar from the severely autistic teenager who lives in the apartment below. Spring feels like it is caged, waiting to see what happens next.<\/p>\n

Such a person is not able to experience himself \u2018together with’ others or \u2018at home in’ the world, but, on the contrary, he experiences himself in despairing aloneness and isolation; moreover, he does not experience himself as a complete person but rather as \u2018split’ in various ways, perhaps as a mind more or less tenuously linked to a body, as two or more selves, and so on.<\/p>\n

I go to the toilet. Check my messages, emails, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. I cough. I look out of the back window, which is really the front window, and the spruces sway rhythmically, their pink pines not yet pink. The height of these trees frightens my girlfriend, she fears that, in a storm, they could fall and crush our bedroom. For some unaccountable reason, I trust their root systems.<\/p>\n

The concept of the \u2018individual’ is false. In isolation, these beings do not exist: the centre of gravity is something changeable; the continual generation of cells, etc., produces a continual change in the number of these beings.<\/p>\n

I finally dress and walk to my office where I look through the books for something to read. Anthologies seem the most apt things \u2013\u2013 busy, filled with people, different narratives, some barging against the next, then two holding hands, then one alone in the crowd, some speeding by, others dawdling, still others moving against the flow. I cough.<\/p>\n

True solitude is the feeling of being absolutely isolated between the earth and the sky. Nothing should detract attention from these phenomena of absolute isolation: a fearfully lucid intuition will reveal the entire drama of man’s finite nature facing the infinite nothingness of the world.<\/p>\n

But I’m not in the mood to read, I’m not in the mood to socialize. Over the past two weeks, I’ve spoken to more people on the phone than I have in the past two years. I dislike talking on the phone. I dislike talking. I lived in Japan for five years and I couldn’t speak Japanese. I have lived in France for just over three years and my French is worse than my Japanese. I cough. A series of rapid beeps tells me I have a text message. One of my best friends has died. No, not from that.<\/p>\n

But what is the one if not a particular perishable and corruptible object which we consider arbitrarily in isolation from every other object? And what forms a whole if not a particular finite combination, filled with holes, which we arbitrarily believe to join all the elements of the sum? In both cases, we do not understand diversity and its production.<\/p>\n

I make another cup of tea. Turn on my laptop. I cough. The news consists mainly of reports on the contagion \u2013\u2013 numbers almost viral in themselves. I click and click and click and the news only changes to indicate lost time, lost lives. I type Chaturbate and click on favourites, out of the fifteen there is only one online. Her room is furnished in faux fur and leather, all pink and white and grey, there is a clock and a vase of flowers on the bedside table, a pink cuddly toy on the bed beside her, her fake breasts rise and fall as she coughs into a pink tissue.<\/p>\n

The way to re-returning goes through death, or who knows? \u2013\u2013 re-return ends in death. We make our connection to what preceded individuation by going down the spiral of our natural character, dwelling in ourselves, conquering the isolation of our shape, transfiguring ourselves towards our beginnings, but not transfiguring ourselves by losing the figural sense of our individuation, in death. The life that was before we were we, we love through return<\/em>; our eyes are turned towards our beginnings, towards the initial anonymity. We return to where we haven’t been before, but where everything else was; we go towards the infinite potentiality of life, from which actuality and the inherent margin of individuation got us out.<\/p>\n

I close the laptop. The sun is now above the cathedral’s multicoloured tiled roof. The Van Goghian cypresses have stilled their dance, the gardener is pulling up some weeds, she is wearing a large smock, a sun hat, rubber gloves and a mask. I think of eating some toast but have run out of Marmite, another thing missing from the last package. I make a third cup of tea, this time with PG Tips pyramid bags. I cough. I take a book from the shelf, skip past the introduction and read, \u2018Geographers say there are two kinds of islands. This is valuable information for the imagination because it confirms what the imagination already knew’. I have two choices \u2013\u2013 to go back to bed and sleep or to slip into a hot bath, both offering what Freud calls \u2018the blissful isolation of intrauterine life’.<\/p>\n

@stevefinbow<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Two Kinds of Islands By Steve Finbow.     My eyes have opened and my mouth is dry. Not a good sign. I get out of bed and naked walk to the kitchen. Not a good sight. I cough. Using the dwindling Yorkshire teabags my mother sent me from London before all of this started, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-99616","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buzzwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99616"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99623,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99616\/revisions\/99623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99616"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99616"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}