On Language & Being Lost
I recently returned from spending three months in a city I didn’t know, whose language I couldn’t speak. I arrived back in London just before the lockdown began. Now I’m in a place I know better than the back of my hand, and I’m with my family, but I feel infinitely more disoriented than I did in that other lonely city. When I listen to the news, to the daily briefing, I understand all the words separately, but together they don’t seem to produce any meaning. I try to look through them, beyond them, to determine what’s really being said, but I can’t figure it out; there’s nothing, just bustle and evasion couched in language.
Everyone is suffering differently at the moment – the virus is no equaliser – but we’re all feeling the effects, whatever they are for us, of extreme uncertainty. Will I get sick? When might the lockdown end? Will things ever go back to normal? Will we ever think of normal in the same way again? Rebecca Solnit wrote, in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, that ‘that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost’. Getting lost, she says – immersing ourselves in uncertainty – is transformative and important. Feelings of disorientation and bewilderment are the bases of the greatest things in life: ‘love, wisdom, grace, inspiration … things that are in some way about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else’.
There’s some truth in this. There seems to be great hope, at the moment, that once all this is over, things will not go back to exactly how they were before. Perhaps we might have glimpsed the possibility of doing more to reduce our environmental impact; of finding beds for a vast proportion of the homeless on our streets; of staying more connected with our communities; of appreciating the workers of the NHS for the awe-inspiring wonders they are all the time, not only in a crisis. Perhaps there might be great possibilities to be found in all this uncertainty.
And yet, I’m still sceptical of Solnit’s statement. Her words are infinitely comforting: we live in an age of doubt and instability, in which choice reigns supreme and precarity forms the bedrock upon which the economy is built; as a freelancer, and also as someone who has never really had any idea of ‘who I am’ or ‘what I want’, I have learnt to build uncertainty into my life, as most people have, for the same or different reasons. To believe that there is meaning and purpose in this banal uncertainty, this mundane fragility, is bolstering – is a deep relief.
It’s always a red flag to me though, when I find something too reassuring. We tell ourselves stories in order to survive shitty situations, and that’s certainly important, but there’s also a way in which these stories obscure the need to fight against adverse conditions that make people’s lives unnecessarily difficult, whilst persuading us that the status quo is just the way things must be, is the best of all possible worlds. Uncertainty, precarity, feeling lost in the world – these things are not always positive, and nor are they wholly necessary. This crisis can hopefully show us ways of moving against these things that are so endemic to our society: we can anchor ourselves and others by becoming more engaged in our communities and by caring more diligently for one another. We can fight against precarious contracts and working conditions and pay packets that mean people are walking a constant tightrope of survival.
There are some things we must cede control of: we cannot predict or decide the mutations of a common virus, and – although we can dramatically reduce the chances – we can’t stop ourselves from catching it either (not as of the 20th April, when I write, in any case). But there are some things, many things, we can control. For one, we can make sure we do not use language to console and conceal, but instead use it to reveal, to fight, to challenge, and to show that things can change – and that this time round, it could be us, not a virus, that changes them.