HETEROTOPIAS
1. Crisis
They live in a pretty red-brick house on a street shaded by plane trees. Three children. A dog. A sleek black people carrier. The couple go running each morning, but never together. Faces shrinking, limbs shrinking. He no longer wears a suit. She stopped wearing her heels and skirts and blazers. This year they can’t even afford a holiday in Dingle. His hair has turned white. Faces lined and weathered, clothes tight and trendy.
Every day now he collects their kids from school, an IPad under his arm. A shield to ward off the accusation of unemployment, the sin of idleness.
Have they changed their minds about the world? Lost their faith in walls, in solidity, in reality. Running off their fear and anger, step by step, in drops of sweat. Applying for jobs for which they are too old, over-qualified, too expensive. She considers working for free. He shudders when a man his age serves him chicken from the drive-through near the M50. Both men avert their eyes as they exchange money and food.
The couple read self-help books. Take digital marketing courses. Attend recruitment fairs, back-to-work seminars, and how-to-be-an-entrepreneur sessions. Learn how to answer a thousand intrusive interview questions in the quest for a job with a Corporation, any Corporation.
What is in the boot of your car? How many beef cattle are there in Canada? Describe your brand. How have you dealt with a failure in the past. What does success mean to you. What makes you laugh. What do you do for enjoyment. And there is a voice in his head, one he has not heard for many years saying: this is bullshit. They want to own you. Want your balls in their hands so they can squeeze. This world and its lies makes me laugh. In the boot of my car there is the smell of despair. My brand is ‘sucker’ and I have dealt with failure by running and drinking. Success means that my children will not be ashamed of me, that my wife will sleep with me, that I do not have to drive my car head-first into a wall to escape the questions that pile into my head every night.
After the car accident – a minor incident where he struck a boulder on the side of a motorway – he has an epiphany. A wake up call. He tries to explain it to his wife. He is convinced that they just need to confirm their faith. Believe in the dream. Be entrepreneurs, digital warriors, sell themselves as a brand. Recognise that things are indeed slowly improving. Coming back to normal.
A FOR SALE sign is spawned overnight in their front garden. The new bubble. They will downsize, move to the country, move out of the country. Begin again. Anything is possible. Is. It. Not.
2. Deviation
College boys piss on a homeless man on Dawson Street. Girls in false eyelashes, in clothes laundered by their mothers and paid for by their fathers, call people scumbags because they dare to drink on the boardwalk or on beaches, raucous and littering, on a sunny day. We live in the Age of Anxiety and compassion is the ultimate sin, the purest deviancy.
Girls and boys who work for free because they have no rent or bills to pay. Good little serfs in the new moral economy. Children of the new age. Digital natives with no moral or political compass. Or rather the compass is rigged by Google, Silicon Valley, the new tech elites with their vacuous platitudes and fascistic organisation. Documenting, recording, seizing control.
Pay attention to the language of the technocrats – it is poisonous. The way they use words can seep into your soul and rob you of critical thought. Their language fakes compassion, is relentlessly, breathlessly POSITIVE. Their CEOs peddle propaganda about women, third world countries, ethnic minorities but all they want is your soul. Ownership of your identity: retinal scans, facial recognition, your digital traces. The new face of the camps (that ultimate paradigm of modernism) is the workplace. Prison camps, rape camps, laundries, industrial schools, refugee camps, labour camps. And the workplace.
The dream workplace: seductive, clean, bright, with smoothies and wraps and ping pong tables and TED talks. Work is leisure, and leisure is work. And we hand over our dreams, fervent in the belief that they know how to cleanse us of our sins, make us happier, create a better world then we ever could. And if you can’t get into one of those dream work camps woe betide you.
We pay the privateers for our time (free work), our water, our natural resources. We pay them with our labour and souls to strip-mine and profit from the very foundation of our lives. If you can’t pay or play the game, you will be left behind…
Their new list of seven deadly sins:
Homelessness.
Poverty.
Unemployment.
Ethnicity.
Obesity.
Negativity.
Anger.
3. Many Spaces within One Space
An old man in a dress coat and a suit, stoops to pick up a copper from the pavement on Pearse Street. A five cent coin. It should be a penny, I think, not a token that you can slot into the Eurocratic slot machine. I am on my way to the Docklands. Research for an essay into publoid space. A word I learned on my Master’s course which is being discontinued. The college authorities prefer the business and digital courses over obscure arts courses that teach dead philosophers and out-moded thinkers.
Publoid space. A space that is no longer public but not (yet) fully private. Temple Bar Square. The Docklands. Apartments blocks with shopping centres even the ones that are abandoned, taken into State care but still patrolled. I know how to look for the security guards that lurk in the corners, the ones that scan you at the barriers when the Tall Ships come, or some other commercial festival takes over the area. I have witnessed these private security firms refusing homeless men entry into the space. Or men and women they rate as being unworthy of entry into publoid space. The space of corporate dreams. Space of censorship. Our space handed over to private companies. Our city colonised and handed back to us in exchange for a price. Spend money in here or at least conform. Don’t be poor, dirty, angry or publicly drunk (but you can get drunk in the bars). Be awed by the Spectacle of ships and food tents and global corporate office blocks. Be humble.
Go into the Docklands and try to take a picture. Stand in front of Facebook HQ and point your camera or phone and see what happens. I dare you but don’t bring a valuable camera or phone because they will try to confiscate it. Don’t bring ID. Cover your face as best you can to avoid the camera surveillance. Turn off your geo-positioning on your phone but it’s better not to bring it at all. Be prepared to be threatened when you ask them about who owns this space and why don’t you have to right to take a photo in public. If you fight for your full rights, be prepared to be arrested.
How can we write or tell stories when they are stealing the ground beneath our feet? Does it not bother you?
The ultimate symbol of our times, of our city is a beggar. Small businesses and the city council want to ban begging in the city centre, the last resort and the last human right of the poorest. The right to roam and forage and besiege the comfortable. The right to be annoying and mad and angry and to put your hand out and ask for alms.
The right to be dirty, obese, skinny, out of control, to use a public space for play, protest, and pleasure.
The body. Our bodies are more and more absent from public life. Ghostly echoes, imprisoned. Voiceless?
4. A Break in Time
‘I feel like there’s something missing in the world. Or in my life,’ her seven year old daughter says to her.
She is lying beside her on the bed. She has a fever. It is too late to go to a pharmacy to get medicine and she can’t afford a doctor on call service and they cut her medical card last year. She wipes the sweat from her daughter’s brow and gives her a sip of water. Presses a cold wet facecloth to his forehead.
‘Or that there’s something I haven’t done,’ she continues, her pale blue eyes searching her mother’s anxiously. ‘Or something I did wrong.’
And the mother thinks, oh my god, she is reading my thoughts.
Her daughter’s dark hair is soaked with sweat. The flat is cold. She turned off the heat at eight. Panic rises in her. She tells her daughter she’s going to get some medicine.
‘Mam? Don’t leave me,’ she says.
‘I’ll just be a minute’ she says and pulls on a jumper. She turns on the lamp. The light flickers, the connection is loose. She adjusts the cord and the light steadies. Damp brown stains on the wall in her bedroom. The landlord promises to fix the damp but never does. Threatens to raise the rent because rents are rising across the city. The apartment is tiny and poorly built. One of many. The walls and windows sweat condensation. There is something wrong with the plaster on the walls.
She goes out to the living-room which has a small kitchen at one end. On the kitchen table sits a mess of bills. Small amounts paid off each week in the post office but the bills are all overdue. She feels dizzy and a wave of nausea hits her in the stomach. Black spots impede her vision, swell and grow until she falls down into darkness.
