Dear Yuri,
It is 6 April 2020 and I am writing this letter to you on an old studio terrace, overlooking Islington’s final Victorian square.
It’s been twenty days of self-styled lockdown and the slow bleed from Winter into Spring continues along its pulmonary current. Before me: a landscape of blossom embryos, renaissance skies and green quadrilaterals. Is this what the apocalypse looks like?
The sky, a water coloured vignette; the air, uncharacteristically still, bar the occasional thrust of stray cars.
Life as we know it has stopped.
It seems World War III has arrived at this point in History, albeit a less aggressive affair. No tanks, no trenches – just a frontline of mask-wielding NHS superheroes and working-class ‘provisionists’. We are told that this war is being waged against an invisible enemy, but in reality, the real war is being fought in our heads.
In the movies, a contagion is rendered with red-scale skies, looted cityscapes, and an army of undead. In London, the same mindless order of things persists. Beyond a veil of condensation, anxious overachievers loop the square in wilful somnambulance. Picnickers and bench idlers sit, not to admire the spring-time diorama, but to push whatsapp forwards and insta reposts across an invisible frontier. In the ugly, Pollard Edward homes opposite, a generation of hipsters work out – CLICK – make lunch – CLICK – read books – CLICK – and masturbate to moving pixels – CLICK – and once they’re done, they curate these images in little 9 x 9 squares awaiting their digital absolution.
Capitalism may have ground to a screeching halt, but the self-harming, production-hungry capital ‘I’ remains at large.
Yuri, I believe you once saw the world from above. Well this is my picture from below.