unfoldings // august, 2021
on retreat: private indulgence or public display? some accumulated thoughts on the month that goes from quiet to commotion.
Rest.
A drawing by me. For more, see Instagram.
August in my neighbourhood does not hum in its quiet, but it is quiet in some other slant of the word. It is lonely more so than anything. It makes for a bit of a non-space, where the slight growl of distant traffic is in reach but unseen and most of the parked vehicles carry the swift defecations of birds from several weeks ago. Once in a while a new sign is erected to mark out the imminent arrival of a large moving truck or construction work. We know to look out for these signs. They will a row of vehicles to move that have been left out, forgotten by those on holiday. It is this imminence of expected movement (queue la rentrée of September, literally tomorrow) that perhaps is what makes August so much more quiet. The calm before the storm or what not. Those who remain seem to be those who have either been left behind or have little desire to leave. It is difficult to tell the reasons apart. Perhaps the two aren’t so distant anymore. The group— though it is hardly a congregation of any sort— linger in ones and twos among brasseries and un-stocked supermarkets, occupied for no other reason than to pass the time. I can’t tell what they are feeling or thinking about. So many of us have perfected the light stroll. Either we have all cried too many tears over the last year or so, or we have learned how to cry without tears. At this point in the all too well known turn of events, I just assume every one of us is grieving. We mostly leave each other alone.
I try to think of our shared privacy as a form of solidarity in disguise. Maybe not even disguise— maybe it’s pretty plain to see. There has always, I feel, been a form of respect in looking away that is difficult but well-meaning. But it’s unnerving, this feeling that we’re perpetuating an age old problem of not reaching out, and therefore giving the impression of lack of care— because what if someone is hoping for and needing a brief hello, some acknowledgement in any capacity. Brandon Taylor’s Lionel describes in Filthy Animals: “sincerity was a condescending emotion”. I consider the ways in which people apologise for one’s own hurt, one’s own difficulties and how impossible it is for others to truly know how one feels— what explanation or description is to be given when it is something of yourself? We do not owe ourselves to others. Perhaps it is not silence that we’re giving each other but a quiet, a much needed quiet. Perhaps some things are better left unsaid. I don’t know what’s more sincere, or the kind of sincerity we need more of. To simply say that sincerity is something true feels inadequate. If sincerity is supposed to be a kindness, then why does it hurt so much, so often? I thought sincerity has something more to do with the guttural, instinctual, but maybe there is room to get better at reading the room— not so much taking up the task of reading others but learning what space others need, how much we ought to show up and at what occasion. This time from Taylor’s Grace: “Grace feels embarrassed for her, the way she sometimes feels when she can hear Enid praying in the next room in that tiny apartment of hers. Some things you should get to keep to yourself.”
This quiet— people seem to be relishing in the distance they have finally managed to allow in between. Perhaps they acknowledge the before and after of all that they have been through, not that any of this has necessarily passed. August has provided some gesture of pause, some faint opening for something else. Without grasping at false generalisation or placing a naive neglect of each of our personal hurts, this quiet has some semblance of peace. It is at least the outline of the capacity for something soft— the brief coming up for breath that is both intake and exhale even if it does not last.
So where has everyone else gone? It has not been difficult to recognise, through this brief but sunken quiet, how many have taken to a fleeing act as soon as it was possible to do so. I have not known how to feel about it all. Myself included, I went away for a short while to Köln. I also then had a week of Paris all to myself. I have felt that one way or another, we are all very much learning how to come out of hiding.
I have been turning over the word retreat.
It is strategic, by nature. Retreat acknowledges the action of withdrawal (whether out of surrender or another cause for flight) and also the retirement of action itself. It is both noun and verb as well as both move towards and departure from. The word carries multiplying contradictions, holding back this way and that, tempting forward the kind of movement that registers its own change as well as its own brevity. Retreat takes into account something spacial: it’s as though we’re moving to the left and back— not necessarily out of something, but at least into a different, nestled territory that doesn’t, arguably, feel as brave and open as one might suspect or hope for. The return to a former state? Or perhaps the vaguely defiant stride away from / against something already in mundane motion. No matter what it is, retreat reckons with the space that it creates and insists, by nature, upon.
If we’re thinking of the retreat as a specific genre of holiday, then it assembles yet another gathering of insinuations. A retreat must have some degree of distance between A to B for it to qualify as a retreat it seems. We assume it must include going somewhere in order to take a step back / out. But I feel like a retreat could take place in exactly the same location so long as something within rhythm, pace, and priorities is changed. Maybe the furniture is shifted, lifted. Maybe the others aren’t home and it’s just you. I certainly felt that difference.
We seem to live and breathe the desire to take flight, get away, move on up and outwards— we have all these expectations in a changed self via changed environment (which is all too often ultimately reliant on an inherent change in location). It goes without saying that tourism is a sharp culture that has entrenched itself as the patron of such transient experiences. It’s difficult to imagine a much more local world before it all went haywire. Rory Sutherland’s recent piece ‘Why no one wants their holiday to last forever’ underlines the nature of retreat as a cycle we have curated for ourselves. We like variety and the contrast of two experiences: ‘This is why it feels so damned good when you open the windows in your house,’ he writes. But is our tendency to want what we cannot get or cannot keep purely evolutionary when surely so much of it is caused / massively impacted by straight-up-capitalism? Not to mention the privileges of actually being able to afford a certain scale of retreat. We’re so used to abundance (and so many of us have come to rely on it) that it is our knowledge of the grass out yonder that makes us compelled towards it. We know that if this one thing is not enough to satisfy us, then there is always something or somewhere else.
On one hand, so little fools us: we can tell when we’re being sold something now more than ever, we know how to block ads as well as each other, unsubscribe when we feel spammed, we take matters into our own hands to hold people, brands, corporations and what not, accountable. But while it’s all oh-so-empowering, on the other hand, I’m so tempted to say that it also makes us negligent. We grant ourselves the agency to remove ourselves from unfavourable situations. We do not wish to be challenged. We do not want to be wrong. We tell ourselves this is all that I deserve and I deserve so so much. We brand ourselves activists while doing the bare minimum. We believe in absolutes and then suddenly we sound cultish for no other reason than to feel that we belong to some greater thing. I’m reminded here of the leaderless bands who flock through Ballard’s Kingdom Come— they shout and kick but don’t know what for. When asked who they’re following, they call you the mad one for asking. And likewise, those held accountable don’t feel the weight of responsibility: the apologies are pitiful and the care is nonexistent. You are framed as the mad one for bringing it up. It has all become too easy to call a thing done. Sure, I’m all for distancing oneself from toxicity, but what of the confrontation of necessary matters? All these acts of removal give the dangerous impression that erasure is somehow all the more negotiable. Social media pretends their algorithms aren’t racist and decide none of the racists go against policy. Meanwhile it’s on the daily that I see the art community face swift censure and removal, and all this erasure over what? A nipple and the balls to post such sights apparently.
So much about retreat feels like emulation. We fancy a change, and so we grant ourselves a changed environment hoping it will alter and reset our internal condition upon return. We long for the next time we set off and tell ourselves that it is a solution to our day to day. And in our day to day, we find ways of creating the illusion of rest, all in the name of self-care. *Insert Lorde’s gift of a commodity culture critique album*. All this seems to beg the question of what that removal of the self means— and I say removal because as soon as illusion enters into the picture, there is always some degree of unreliability that comes into frame. This is some form of retreat in itself. What happens to the responsibility, the power, the ability to take a stand / stay for long enough for something to matter? Where do we go when we turn to and rely on emulation as a practice of sustenance? The temporality of getting away for a limited amount of time makes it easy for us to put matters aside— not just our affairs at home (which is important! I am certainly not denying the importance of taking breaks!) but we also have little responsibility to the local life we’ve entered upon: we don’t know about the social dilemmas, we don’t need to know about the politics since we don’t have to vote and we’re not here to stay— and if we’re even more surface, we don’t even have to interact with any local people should we choose not to. We could stick to our English-speaking hotels and our Monocle and TimeOut recommendations and hop between driver set-ups that takes us straight to desired destinations. We can then return to wherever we came from and tell ourselves we feel better, lighter, changed for the better. Alexa play ‘Mood Ring’: Let's fly somewherе eastern, they'll havе what I need…
None of this is anything new. The weight of expectation we deposit on ‘the ultimate get away’ frustrates me deeply (I grew up with International School kids who told each other they were bored of daddy taking them back to Bali and Bora Bora year on year). Nothing is ever enough for some folks. This Summer’s majority feels particularly overcompensating in tone. Overlapping forms of retreat have come out to reclaim, reminisce, and (over)consume. And what for? For the sake of it mostly. Without so much as a moments pause, when the gates of Europe opened one after the other just this month, the bookings skyrocketed. I saw this vividly. I felt so suddenly distant from a city I had turned inwards with across this past year. It’s not so much Paris itself that has changed. I feel like I’ve watched an old friend get seized over by a new crowd. You can only hope they remain true to themselves, and all this while they are retreating, retreating—
Where have we gone?
Köln gave me remembrance of a familiar time and place. Something past, mostly. It was not so much the specificity of the city’s physical shapes but the time I was able to give to myself during that week there. I walked from Südstadt up into town each day, telling myself to rely as little on the maps app as possible and turning to memory. I touched the Rhein a good few times and stood considering the same waters swerving past good ol’ Wiesbaden, Mainz, and Frankfurt— the vague triangular outline of our past home. But anyway, I found myself forging some semblance of local life. I walked with firm feet even while I didn’t know where I was headed. I know that I thrived on the vague discomfort of not quite knowing enough each step of the way, and all this turned into a comfort. The pretence of it all turned out to be the only true thing that I could give myself— and such a realisation makes me ever so slightly reconsider my antagonism towards those who have latched onto grand getaways this Summer. Just slightly though. I remain of the mind that grandeurs are not necessary. I gave myself all this semblance of familiarity with a broken— though never, thankfully, entirely lost— tongue. Such is the joy in the halves of language. I do, however, recall crying a few times over the fact that this could have been a life and I could have come so much closer had I been given the chance to stay all those years ago. For such a brief moment, Köln allowed me to feel so close to myself. I let myself be surrounded by the immediacy and brevity of it all. I let myself get all emotional about it.
I wonder at the implications of a simultaneous sanctuary and a place of hiding in such a word as retreat. Who is hiding from whom? What does it take to create a sanctuary out of a hiding space? Is the act of hiding part of what makes it a sanctuary? It seems we associate sanctuary with solitude. What if it is a hiding of the self from others, to gather strengths in a way that seeks comfort from some form of removal— what then? Again, this same question of what that removal means. It seems retreat can be as much about a sanctuary because it is self-curated as because it is made separate from others. The self-curation part feels very significant— it is indulgent in whatever form of meaning that takes to the individual, and also deeply personal and therefore private. It has the potential of being all that we cannot grant ourselves in our day to day.
Hoping you all had a good Summer! Thank you for being here.