Guest post by Sinead Murphy:
Don’t Be Fooled By The ‘Easing’ Of Restrictions
The UK government’s grip on our physical lives is now, at last, to be ‘eased,’ at least in the sporting arena. It is announced that fans will be allowed back into stadiums, though in limited numbers – no more than four thousand at any event.
Even those of us sceptical of Covid measures might be tempted to welcome this return, as a first loosening of the government’s stranglehold on our bodies. But we should not be fooled. ‘Easing’ is an old trick, and not at all what it seems.
Anyone raised in the Catholic tradition will know this trick very well. It consists in allowing that which is to be curtailed to run freer, so that it may be more elaborately curtailed than it could possibly be if it were simply, straightforwardly, suppressed.
When I was growing up, attending daily Mass and a Sisters of Mercy convent school, the flesh – as it is tantalizingly coded by men and women of the cloth – was the site of all evil; sin was of the flesh. So the flesh was hidden – right? Silenced? Nowhere to be seen or heard? Wrong. Nothing was spoken of more frequently. Nothing was dressed up more showily. Nothing was brought through such an elaborate round of beautiful contortions and cantations, like a slow-motion routine on Strictly.
If something is suppressed, then you cannot constantly and with great inventiveness and to great effect suppress it.
Mrs. Doyle in Father Ted captures this trick to perfection, when she condemns the racy writings of a novelist visiting Craggy Island, not by shushing all talk of them but by detailing in loud and lewd language their scandalous and contemptibly fleshy contents, luxuriating in the sins that she rejects. Nothing is so effective in the condemnation of the flesh as the constant and eloquent articulation of it as that which is reviled.
This is suppression, not by silence but by talk, not by invisibility but by high visibility. You show in order to conceal the more elaborately. You say in order to hush the more successfully.
The Victorians too performed this trick, carefully and intricately dressing even the legs of the piano so that they were, not hidden but hidden in plain sight, exposed as the thing that was to be concealed. Women, most guilty of the flesh, were attired in the infamous ‘crinoline,’ which caged their buttocks by way of emphasizing them and emphasized them by way of caging them. At the height of its trickery, the Victorian contour was dominated by the bustle, a bone-and-horse-hair exaggeration of women’s posterior that makes Kim Kardashian’s silhouette seem streamline: all by way of heightening condemnation of the flesh, provoking and foregrounding those urges most subject to censure.
And now this old trick is to be performed on us; the sins of our flesh are to be multiplied and detailed and paraded for all to see, all the better to be pilloried. When the few thousand fans return to the stadiums, it will not be an easing of restrictions on physical life, but a new level of elaboration of those restrictions. The fans will be admitted on condition that they maintain a studied distance from one another. That they turn their masked faces away, in particular from those climbing the stairs and therefore exhaling more forcibly. That they do not stand. Or shout. Or sing. The whole event will be a deliberately choreographed denouncement of their physical life, much more intense than if they had simply remained at home. Will they also take the knee with the players and the officials, like those congregations in the churches of my youth?
The trick will work too on those of us who remain at home. We have spent the last eight months with no crowd to hear or see, only a fake crowd, piped on the loudspeaker and printed on the banners. Now there will be a real crowd to hear and see, but it will be a silenced crowd, a submissive crowd. And we will partake in its mortification by being cast as its witness.
Sins of the flesh: no longer staying home out of hearing and out of sight but ritually enacted before our eyes and ears. Not an easing of the attack on our physical lives, but a new and potent intensification of it.