A.L. Kennedy and Belongings

A Point of View: Belongings

In these strange times, we're communally facing realities many of us have already faced. ... In short, many of us have suffered losses. From luxuries, to little treats, to furniture, to homes, to health, hopes, potential. The belongings that let them be in their worlds. And these weren't all bad people; they didn't all deserve what they got; they weren't in a Hollywood movie or a fantasy press release, they weren't just puppets created by this or that propagandist, they were people. Public discourse in the UK has marinated us in the myth that good people are rewarded and that the unrewarded can't be good. That bad people are punished and so the punished must always be bad. There is no mercy about that. One way or another, it condemns us all. In a reality of poor doors, spiralling repayments and free-range pain, it seems to me that mercy might be something we would seek to cultivate.

We're human: we look for patterns in the firelight, stock prices, weather, anything and everything. Sometimes there is no pattern, we're mistaken; sometimes we don't have enough information; sometimes we're misled. Demagogues can offer us rousing lies. Self-aggrandizing hates then light the touch-paper and retire. A percentage of us will cling to violent illusions of certainty if they're offered, confuse cruelty with strength. But if we're looking for justice, we might begin by being just, because life isn't, so we have to help it. Promises offered and never fulfilled, and in odd times, transitional times, our frailty can seem at its most stark. There are no Hollywood endings. Even if we're very lucky and we get the perfect sunset, or the first kiss, we have to go on, take the long road to what can be a terribly bitter end. So if reality won't be kind, then surely we must.

Many of these ideas have been chasing each other around my mind for the last months and years, but AL Kennedy puts them so much more clearly and concisely. The whole audio article is worth listening to, but this bit stood out especially.