Footage - Footfall - Underfoot...

Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.
Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’


I tried to watch that programme, earlier: ‘Britain In A Day’. Made up of filmed footage from 12th November 2011, from hundreds, maybe thousands of people across Britain, it was a snapshot of a whole range of other lives, a chance to eavesdrop on people waking up, falling asleep, meeting, parting, falling in love and feeling lonely. Everything of life was there, from the reality of 5am in the milking parlour, to the night out, to the happy family doing nothing very much at home. I thought I’d love it. I expected to feel moved, uplifted, reaffirmed in my belief in the human condition, the human experience. I had read Caitlin Moran’s review in the Times, and been moved in turn by how moved she had been by the films… her lyricism in describing the compiled snapshots caught my imagination, and as I settled down with a mug of coffee on a quiet Sunday afternoon, I was looking forward to feeling just like she had done.

It didn’t work out like that.

Instead of being moved, uplifted, I could feel a profound sense of sadness overwhelming me… a sadness at the utter meaninglessness of so many human actions, interactions. The tiny clips seemed to sum this up, dwelling on the pointlessness of the man waking up at the terminus of the last bus home, the Sisyphean repetition of the daily task, or the ultimate shallowness of the soon-forgotten social conversation. We all do it. We greet the person we don’t know or whom we don’t much like. We observe the conventions of the social formula, the code of manners and the way we know it’s meant to work. And I’m not disputing this. I’d never dispute the polite traditions which keep us acting in the way we should… which keep things peaceable. I observe it and I think it’s right. As I’m writing this, I’m being distracted by the unusual events at the Aegon Tennis Championships in London, at which a finalist, having lost his temper and displayed the sort of angry behaviour which led to a linesman being injured, has been disqualified and lost his hope of winning the title. Whereas I can see the disqualified player’s point about inconsistencies of punishment, nonetheless the display of anger seems, at best, ungentlemanly. Not quite cricket, one might say – not the conduct one would expect in a civilised game, with rules. And it’s the same thing, really, whether you’re on the tennis court or with your friends, on the cricket pitch or in your workplace, competing in the Olympics or your school Sports Day or trying to keep your footing on a crowded city pavement on a Saturday afternoon: it’s all about thinking of your actions in terms of what they’ll do to someone else. If you push your way through the crowd, you’ll push someone else off their course. If you get too angry, you’ll risk hurting someone else, whether physically or with your words. I mean: maybe it’s all lies, good manners? Maybe it’s all about hypocrisy… being polite to the person you really can’t abide, hiding your boredom or your anger or your hurt? If we take the words of TS Eliot as truth, that ‘humankind cannot bear very much reality’, then maybe what we do is construct elaborate fictions of niceness around what are really shallow, banal, unpleasant interactions. Maybe that’s what Thoreau meant when he said that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’. We go through the routines, the greetings, the interactions – yet none of it means very much. I think of this, sometimes, based on the colloquial insincerity of the Northern Irish ‘How are you?’… a phrase normally spoken as the other person walks past you at speed, not waiting for an answer; a hasty greeting more than any kind of genuine enquiry.

And that’s exactly how ‘Britain In A Day’ made me feel. All the things that all those many people were doing, all their words, whether accelerated or glimpsed at their own accustomed speed, were perfectly valid, yet all those things were also perfectly meaningless. Most of what we do, most days, is as mindlessly empty as the phatic insincerity of the social formula. We repeat our routines, daily, yearly, until they all add up to define us in a lifetime, making sense of an indifferent universe in the empty space of time. We don’t stop to question the absurdity of what we do, because that would be like the person with the fear of heights looking down at the crucial moment and losing their nerve just as they tried to conquer their terror. Routines that dictate that everybody has to do the very same thing – commute to and from work or school at once, have the same components for dinner at the same time on specific days, exchange the same empty words with matching insincerity. It’s the intoxicating insanity of the many people who approach Christmas Day with the dread built on hating turkey and Brussels sprouts, yet knowing they will force themselves to eat them, maybe in the company of people they don’t much like – because, they say, ‘it’s what you’ve got to do.’ The irony of the times of day when traffic is at a crowded, gridlocked standstill being called the ‘rush hour’ because everybody’s on the move. The ubiquitous influence of the social formula which led me, one humiliating day, visiting the doctor for some long-forgotten reason, to say ‘oh, fine thank you, how are you?’ when he asked me how I was. We fill our empty hours with illogical, pointless routines to find a meaning… with empty words and interactions in a world where everyone is so busy constructing lines to fill the silences that nothing really ends up meaning anything.

Maybe, when you look at it like that, ‘Britain In A Day’ had it all quite right. Maybe its footage from all those thousands of people, stitched and edited together, speeded up, slowed down and, here and there, quite clearly focused on, actually did present an honest view of some randomly-chosen day sixth months ago or more. It’s in those lines I quoted at the start – the final words from a Samuel Beckett text. Moments of weakness aside, we all want to go on. Most of us fight death; most of us, though we might want a trying week or month to pass, are not in a particular rush hour of impatience to reach the end of our lives. So most of us find a meaning and routine to live those lives – a reason to keep opening our eyes as morning comes. Faith in life or faith in something beyond our lives – faith in each other or belief in something beyond each other. Hopes for a career plan or a journey. Allowing ourselves to think that sometimes a connection between people will be more than just the script we always use; that sometimes the bond will last and echo far beyond its shallow words. The small voice of hope that, somewhere in our ever-repeated routines, there will be that tiny moment of truth when what we’ve done has shifted an expectation or made a tiny mark. When Thoreau talked of ‘quiet desperation’, he continued that ‘… the mass of men… go to the grave with the song still in them.’ At least those words imply there is a song… a song of hopefulness and meaning found. A song too often silenced by the formulaic exchange of empty words, the echoing vault of cliché. A song drowned out by the rush hour traffic, the pointless habit or the shiny, illusory negative of a strip of film…

We eavesdrop on each other’s lives and words every day. It doesn’t take a documentary to make us see ourselves and one another as we are – as people searching for meaning and searching for something to fill a silence or a gap. The trick to the modal necessity of going on is finding the words to get you through the darkened blankness… those instants when real communication actually occurred, when everything fell into place and when you realised that, just maybe, though you saw it only briefly, the world is not an entirely indifferent, cruel one after all.

Those are the moments worth living for. Those are the times when must changes to shall and then to will, and you see through the darkness that the cloud will ultimately clear. In your own life, other lives, all lives… the visibility will not always be obscured, the going on won’t always be a chore, the words we use won’t always be insincere.