i. the moon is not only beautiful, it is so far away

  I'm thinking about how life changes after something seismic happens. Something that takes us outside of our way of living. Outside of how we thought it was. I’m wondering if it’s a bit like coming back from the moon. I wonder if we don’t come back with a different point of view. Coming back to Earth from the moon is written about very well here lazenby's moon.

  It’s funny to think that already within the space of a fortnight we have a delineating sentiment. Already we’re starting to talk about before the virus in the same way people used to talk about before the war. And now we have a life during the wartime delineation. During the lockdown. And there shall be a hereafter where it will be after the lockdown even if not after the virus. The lockdown is an unimaginable difference to some. An existence outside of hyperreality. It’s been described as surreal, but really is it anymore so than the way were living? Something I’ll be interested in seeing is the immediate fallout of after the lockdown.
  I’ve a funny idea. Not amusing. Just funny. There’s a book that Kurt Vonnegut wrote when he was an old man who’d earned his wrinkles in both thought and biography. It’s called Timequake. I looked up the term timequake in the OED and it lacks a definition. I’ll try..

Timequake.  noun

A timequake is a fracture in the space time continuum where all existence is put in a timewarp where they have to relive the last ten years of lives their as an observer, as in the great timequake of 2003 and when everyone was transported back to 1993 and had to relive the same thwarted flirtations, the same bad hairstyles, the same culinary mistakes, the same corny jokes, and the same deaths of those they held dear over the last ten years again. Hardly a barrel of laughs.

  After the timequake ends, at the precise second where people can continue their lives rather than relive them, everybody just freezes. A kind of apathy petrifies humanity in the same way Ice9 froze the ocean in Vonnegut’s earlier novel Cat’s Cradle and brings an end to man’s existence. A question of free will has inadvertently, inevitably so, has been planted in the everyone’s heads. They are depressed at what they’ve been through. We have to grapple with the idea of determinism. There's a stark ennui revolving around the painful acceptance that the lives we’re living are not necessarily the ones we’d choose. This is true for all (see The Prince and the Pauper for example), but it is most noticeable in the realm of the quotidian, i.e. teachers complaining about marking, nurses complaining about being overworked, waitresses complaining about sleazeballs, prostitutes complaining about cops, cops complaining about being called pigs, students complaining about homework etc &c. Vonnegut illustrates this in the scene where the novel’s hero, Kilgore Trout, the only person not affected by this apathy, and thus not frozen to the spot, looks at the motionless city and tries to wake up the citizens. He runs around and around, wake up, you’ve got free will! he shouts declaringly at the human statues. He spends a long time doing this with no results. Finally he runs into the foyer of a hotel and shouts at the single figure in it wake up, you’ve got free will! Slowly the person in the distance starts to move. They gradually pick up motion. Back and forth they start to move. Free will says the stranger. Why, free will’s a crock of shit says the black janitor as he gets back to mopping the floor. After this Trout amends his message. To revive the people he begins to say You were sick, but now you’re well, and there’s work to do. 
  Of course, the implication isn’t that the sickness wasn’t necessarily the timequake. 
  I can’t fully remember what follows. However, I do remember that it contains a very tender scene afterwards. Kilgore Trout’s swansong. Before he dies there is a ceremony organised to send Vonnegut’s much loved character off. Naturally Kurt is there himself. It would be rude if he weren’t. There’s a lot of love going round. Trout himself is at his most charming. At one point he puts out the idea that Stonehenge was built in a time when the Earth’s gravitational pull was much less and that the ancients could throw around these giant rocks like pillows. I suppose that’s what happens afterwards is that people reconnect. Or, simply, they connect. They've good reason to. they've good reason to do it meaningfully. They develop a human feeling. One which may have been not have been all that there beforehand. Or one that had been lost. 

part of an ongoing series..