On Dartmoor, in southwest England, search and rescue volunteers are regularly called out to look for people who have lost their way in the boundless wilderness. A significant proportion are Alzheimer’s patients who have wandered away from one of the many care homes on the fringes of the moor. The volunteers have noticed that Alzheimer’s patients move in a particular way across the open spaces: usually in a straight line. So resolutely do they stick to their chosen direction that they will often attempt to plunge headlong through whatever lies in their way. More than once, rescue teams on Dartmoor have retrieved elderly men from the middle of gorse thickets: they simply kept on going until they could go no further.
Alzheimer’s is commonly understood to be a disease of memory, and its effect on memory is certainly catastrophic. But more fundamentally it is a disease of orientation, a slow severing of ties with our surroundings. It particularly affects the brain’s spatial areas, such as the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, and spatial lapses are among the very first symptoms – misplacing keys more often than usual, getting confused on a regular route or finding it impossible to learn a new one. As the illness advances, patients inhabit an ever-diminishing ‘life space’, until their confusion makes it difficult for them to go beyond their own room. Alzheimer’s sufferers who go missing on Dartmoor are lost even before they leave their homes. Their spatial awareness has collapsed to a single dimension, and they are left, literally, with nowhere to turn.
So in order to get some writing done on what I had only recently started calling “my new book,” I needed a train and some snow. The snow would ground me, a train ride would move me forward.
It turned out that a train from Denver would take about 34 hours, dropping me off barely a mile from my house. I’d write the whole time; I could sleep when I got home. I told Ben about the train idea and as it happened, he was traveling to Denver for work in February. The plan was that we’d fly together, spend a few days frolicking in the snow, and while he stayed on to work I’d take the train back home.
In its own way, too, contemporary minimalism has little to do with “the society, the institutions and grand theories.” Despite its anti-consumerist bent, the trend focuses more on personal improvement than on any kind of structural critique. Practitioners tell you how you can be happier with fewer possessions but rarely ask why it is that Americans own so much stuff.
Though it might be an odd confession for a music critic to make, in these past few weeks I have not often felt in the mood to listen to records, streams or the radio. I felt a strong pull, instead, to bear witness to the changing ambient sounds of the city. On walks I find it hard to concentrate on music or podcasts, but I still find plenty to listen to: The chatter of birds who have suddenly become more loquacious than their human counterparts. The fogged-mirror breaths of a now-rare overhead airplane — where is it going? Who is on it and why has their travel been deemed essential? A woman on the other side of the sidewalk singing to herself, the cheery tune muffled by a paper face mask.
This is the kind of pastoral quiet I have sometimes desired from the city in my more irritable moments, but it doesn’t feel peaceful now. Just unbearably eerie. I miss the comfort of the noise.
The power of McSweeney’s work cannot be separated from its association with forms of oracle and soothsaying, and so it is uncanny that it should arrive in the middle of a global pandemic. Her style is created by loosing outbreaks of sound, and then containing them on the page. “Toxic Sonnets: A Crown for John Keats” is a cascade of fourteen fourteen-line poems, set in motion when McSweeney reads about “the tubercle” that killed Keats on a screen whose glow “wrap[s] the motel room in light.” A “crown” of sonnets—an old form, now again in vogue—is a kind of regulated excess: the last line of each poem spills over and often becomes the first line of the next. It’s the perfect form to suggest a spiralling, obsessive Internet rabbit hole, and its final section is a scary tour de force of open tabs.
O’Connell has a gift for channelling the “sense of looming crisis” that characterises our times, but is able to step outside it, to bring it into focus. This project began for him toward the end of 2016, that disabling year, when his therapist suggested to him that “it might be helpful not to spend quite so much time following the news”. His response to that suggestion was a kind of personal aversion therapy: he would not shut himself off from the portents of end times that buzz-alerted his phone, but follow them to the ends of the Earth.
A voice from the dark is calling me.
In the close house I nurse a fire.