'how do you get around life-as-you-know-it being over'

 'what we call isolation in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse. isolation and loneliness are not the same.' - hannah arendt, the origins of totalitarianism, p.625.

for hannah isolation was not being able to act together with other human beings (politically as it were), an isolation that could just as easily occur in work wheras  'loneliness concerns human life as a whole'. there was solitude as well - strangely where one may not feel lonely when there are no other people around.

'man in so far as he is homo faber tends to isolate himself with his work, that is to leave temporarily the world of politics.' 

if you remember this was the point against which richard sennett was trying to argue in his the craftsman. there's a similar point in the greeks where the artisans cannot take part in the governing of the city because they are too busy working. 

it popped out of the discussion of hannah arendt's the origins of totalitarianism that horsemouth listened to last night (and so horsemouth plans to do a little reading). it was a discussion pulled off course and away from this particular book by biography, by arendt's affair with her teacher heidegger, by heidegger's subsequent descent into fascism, by the quotability of the banality of evil, and probably by fred stein's photo of her (as perfect a picture of an intellectual as was ever taken). 

enthusiasm for arendt began again in 2016 (at least in terms of book sales we are told) as all round the world people (trump and brexit and modi etc.)faced up to popularism and adopted arendt's description of it as an alliance of the elite and the mob. 

(against popularism horsemouth proposes poplarism)

horsemouth also listened to programme (god bless the beeb) on john wyndham's the day of the triffids. this is a somewhat strange novel (british science fiction is always somewhat strange, the graft never seems to fully take). it is an apocalypse and a rebuilding. full of post-war anxiety about the shape of society.

'it must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.'

just as the panel grapple with the strange silence that the pandemic lockdown caused being like the strange silence of blinded london,  we grapple with the anti-vaxxer/ anti-lockdown conspiraloons arguing that the isolation produced in society by the lockdown and mask mandates  is motivated entirely by the desire of the state for totalitarian control rather than for reasons of disease control. 

'how do you get around life-as-you-know-it being over'

to horsemouth they are another example of the elite and the mob - it suits those in the elite who want to return to a fully active capitalism (whatever the death toll) to have people on the street arguing for it. this alliance has not died off because brexit has been done but become a permanent fixture.  

and yet we are moving into the time of compulsory vaccination/ vaccination as a requirement to be allowed to work (look at greece and germany) - there are those in the elite to whom compulsion and the police look like the only tools in the box, the only solution to any problem.  

potentially there is, the other side of the pandemic (if indeed there is ever an end), a backlash against the scientists (they made us wear masks). 

last night pasta and pesto for dinner (red kidney beans, fried onions and peppers) and the evening's musicians of bremen tune on the banks of the susquehanna horsemouth and howard try to get all indian. a river song. 

also last night a documentary on COUM transmissions and the early industrial music people. horsemouth couldn't help noticing the gentrification (of both hull and hackney).

horsemouth continues speechifying in his head. he has a presentation to deliver on wednesday (assuming it happens).