Homes and homelessness at Christmas by Fay Bound Alberti

This month my blog is a brief one. The reason is simple: I am moving house for the second time since August. I write surrounded by boxes that are yet to be unpacked and glasses without a home. But amidst the debris of the move, I am minded how lucky I am to have a home when so many do not.

We have become accustomed, of late, to think of the lonely at Christmas; those without family or friends, those who are widowed or suddenly alone after a period of togetherness. Media coverage tends to focus on elderly people at Christmas, quite justifiably conscious of the gap between the haves and the have-nots in terms of social connection and belonging during a season marked by togetherness.

The world's first Christmas card, produced in 1834

Of course, for many people, families bring sadness and discomfort and a gap between the real and the ideal. The Victorian invention of Christmas, with all its trimmings: turkeys and sprouts, long hours spent at leisure, Christmas cards and carols, is just that for many: an invention. I have written about this invention for the Wellcome Collection, which is devoting a series of articles to loneliness during the Christmas week.

There are many kinds of Christmases, many different versions of family. Yet for homeless people and refugees, Christmas brings a particular kind of loneliness. The history of loneliness has received very little attention, though we know it is both an urban, modern problem. Early modern politicians worried about 'masterless men' roaming the countryside, many of whom were soldiers, but homelessness grew exponentially as a result of urbanisation and industrialisation in the nineteenth century.

It is impossible as 2018 draws to a close, not to see the numbers of homeless people increasing.  Since the 1980s, homelessness has been a particularly growing problem in the UK (and the US), but never before has it been so visible on our streets. Tory austerity and benefit cuts have resulted in more people than ever before being homeless at Christmas, as well as all year round. This Christmas, more than 24,000 people will sleep rough in Britain over the festive period. It's a shocking statistic.

As the weather becomes colder and the spirit of Christmas falls upon us, why not spare a thought for those with no place to call home. Organisations that support the homeless at Christmas include Crisis, which not only provides a Christmas meal and companionship, but also crucial medical and physical care. The Salvation Army provides support for homeless families and individuals, while other charities support specific groups, like veterans.

Support for the homeless is needed all year round, not only at Christmas. Charities facing a glut of volunteer in the festive season find themselves chronically understaffed  the rest of the year.  Like loneliness, the emotional effects of homelessness are exacerbated by the symbolism of the season. Not everyone wants to be with other people at Christmas; not everyone celebrates Christmas. But everyone wants a place to feel safe, and somewhere to come home to.

Wishing all readers and fellow History Girls a safe and happy Christmas.

www.fayboundalberti.com

The lifeline of libraries in an age of loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti

On Twitter this week, the writer Neil Gaiman responded to the debate on libraries’ decline. Rejecting claims that libraries were obsolete, he suggested that they are actually “more relevant and useful than they were 30 years ago”. He’s right, and not only because libraries lend books. 

Libraries have political, social, emotional and educational relevance. Their history is long and complex. The earliest libraries, based on cuneiform script on clay tablets, date back to 2600 BCE. They recorded mostly business transactions and inventories of goods. Over 30,000 clay tablets from the 2600 year old Library of Ashurbanipal remind us that the Middle East was, for centuries, a global centre of knowledge and education in medicine, art and culture. 

In the sixth century, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world were Constantinople and Alexandria. Egypt's Library of Alexandria is the most famous library of Classical antiquity. Dedicated to the Muses, the nine goddesses of the arts, the library was patronised by the Ptolemaic dynasty and a global site of scholarship from the 3rd century BC until the Roman Conquest. Filled with papyrus scrolls, the Library is most famous now for having burned down, resulting in a devastating loss of treasures. 

The Library of Alexandria

In the ancient world, libraries were a means to announce power, status, identity and civic pride; the same drive that was behind the expansion of libraries in the Enlightenment West. This so-called golden age of libraries saw many important European libraries being founded. The British Library was established in 1753 and Chetham's Library in Manchester, said to be the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, opened in 1653. The Mazarine Library and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève were also founded in Paris and the Austrian National Library in Vienna. 

An aisle of Chetham's Library, Manchester

The principal of libraries being open to the public was increasingly commonplace, reflecting their educational and civil status. Knowledge mattered; to be seen to be knowledgable arguably mattered more. Where once libraries open to the public had chained their books to the desks, the principle of lending libraries provided a means for people to carry that learning into their own homes, providing they had enough literary, space and leisure time. 

The Public Libraries Act of 1850 gave local boroughs the power to establish lending libraries, while the Education Act of 1870 expanded literacy. These two moments connected the desire for civic pride to the equally strong desire to educate the working classes, and to encourage their leisure time to be both clean and moral. Libraries represented civility and the pursuit of knowledge for social advance, and for its own sake.

What has changed? Why are libraries no longer seen as crucial to the social fabric, and therefore not worthy of investment? Why have there been such massive cuts to library budgets since 2010? 

Leaving aside the social indifference of successive Tory governments, and the wholesale impoverishment of institutions and structures that represent collective interest (the NHS, state schools, care homes), there is no longer any definitive sense of what kind of knowledge matters. In the age of Trump there has been a movement away from intellectual reason towards primitive impulse; we might argue that this precondition allowed Trump's rise, rather than being a direct result of his presidency. 

But there are other reasons too, including a lack of financial investment and support. Part of the reason why libraries are supposedly in decline is the growth of digitisation. More resources online, it is argued, provides better access than outdated buildings, with limited books; it also eliminates the problems of access: geographical, economic, physical. But not everyone has access to reliable internet resources. Books and papers and physical objects are critically needed in countries with dodgy internet connections and limited electricity. 

Besides, libraries are not just spaces to hold books. They are filled with insightful librarians and curators, who can link you to the source that you need (and even borrow it from other libraries); perhaps not as quickly as Google, but certainly with more humanity.

As a girl growing up in rural Wales, the weekly visit across the border to Shropshire town of Oswestry and its library, gave me hope. Searching the shelves, feeling limitless as my gaze drifted from Mills and Boon to Shakespeare, from Dryden’s poetry to local history, there were options available to me. Potential and places that reached beyond the narrowness of the shelves and the chlorine smell of the nearby municipal pool.

Oswestry Library

As a lonely child with a difficult family life, I treasured those moments of escape. I loved everything about the routine: the piling up of six books - SIX! - with their tattered and grubby plastic covers, cherry-picked from a dozen different shelves; queuing for the librarian; smiling as she expressed interest (or sometimes shock) in what I was choosing; watching as she flicked through the pages to find the sweet spot and oh the muffled clunk of the date stamp, those were physical moments of bliss. 

Carrying that stack home, holding it on my lap as a shield that protected me from the inevitable arguments of the car that backfired, squirrelling it up in my room where I could smell the pages and look at all the different people who had borrowed each book before me - or the joy of being the one single stamp of newness - was a special kind of bliss. I belonged to a community of readers who stretched beyond the narrow, sad confines of my bedroom. 

And for me that is the point. Libraries are far more than buildings to hold books. They are pivots of connections between individuals and the world outside; not only in the date stamps that nestle aside one another, but also in a more literal, physical way. Libraries are spaces where anyone can go, to browse, to sit, to read the newspapers they can't afford to buy, to keep warm, to think, to meet other people. And in an age of loneliness this collective, free-to-use space is crucially important, and critically endangered. 

Books bring people together, literally, figuratively, physically. When we imagine that libraries aren’t needed, and we allow governments to shut them down on the basis they aren’t viable, or God forbid necessary, we toe a line of individualism that weakens society as a whole. 

I don’t use libraries like I did when I was a child, though half the adult population do. I did try, when my own children were younger, and the weekly run to the library to perform those rituals of choosing, carrying, stamping (and inevitably mislaying) are treasured moments of motherhood for me. The moments of drawn out time are a distant memory for me - and no doubt for many, caught up in our technologically driven, imperative age where every second counts, and Amazon Prime has a same day delivery option. 

The depressing thing about libraries closing down is that lack of use becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; an ideological sleight of hand by which cut backs appear justified. Deprive public libraries of millions of pounds to buy resources, to fund decent opening hours and enough staff, and people inevitably spend less time there. Create a narrative of decline and obsolescence and libraries become - especially the local, public libraries that sustained me as a child, redefined as an unnecessary and unsustainable expense. 

Communities need libraries. Like they need hospitals and schools and roads and utilities. Libraries are spaces of learning and information, yes, but they are also spaces of acceptance and belonging and engagement in ways that are neglected in the 21st century. Many libraries are changing to adapt to the needs of their users; some have knitting circles and board game groups, tea mornings and yoga alongside Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice. And adaptation may be key to this survival. But don't let people say libraries don't matter. They have never mattered more. 

My new book, A Biography of Loneliness will be published in Spring 2019 by Oxford University Press. 

You can follow my blog and website for updates: 

www.fayboundalberti.com

Loneliness, Madrid and Dali's Great Masturbator by Fay Bound Alberti

Madrid 

This September, I gave a keynote at the annual conference of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSS), held in Madrid. It was my first time to Madrid, and also my first time to a philosophy conference, and both experiences were ones to remember.

I talked about loneliness and how we trace its history and meanings, across time and in different cultures. My talk was from a book I am writing on loneliness in the modern age - why so many of us are lonely when we are, in many ways, more connected than ever. And why studies say that Britain is one of the loneliest countries in Europe. (Soon to be lonelier, when Brexit takes hold.) In Madrid, I noted how different Spanish and British attitudes towards loneliness are, with Spanish people seeming to invest more in ‘neighbourliness’ than is the case in Britain. Yet as Olivia Laing writes in her study of The Lonely City, modernity has brought loneliness to many people, as suggested by the urban landscapes of Edward Hopper. 

Hopper: 'Automat' (1927).

Some of the conference themes were universal, including worries about the relationship between feeling and expression, and the fear of being misunderstood. When we compose an email to a lover, a boss, a friend, how often do we agonise over what we really want to say, and what we worry they might hear?  We find the same uncertainty in a range of historical sources, including early modern love letters: the hesitating pen of the suitor, the formulaic declaration of love that is followed by the coy reticence of the intended. I have spent many months in record offices, analysing love letters used in 17^th century court cases, usually submitted by women who claimed they had married their beloved, and rejected by men who denied any ceremony had taken place.  

Romantic communication is like a duet, each of the players taking their part, contributing to the harmony of the whole. The role of music in bridging the gap between feeling and communication was central to several conference papers, and is a growing theme in the history of emotions too. Music speaks to the body rather than the mind. And it has a range of different effects.  Put on a CD or flip through Spotify, find a favourite piece of rock music and experience what happens to your body. A raised heartbeat perhaps, a sense of urgency; it is unsurprising that people lift heavier weights, run further, when the rhythm of the music flushes through their system like testosterone. Compare this to a classical piece, and the calming waves that decrease our heartrate and make us breathe more slowly.

Emotions, like music, involve the body as well as the mind. Trying to invoke those experiences in prose, poem, song or art, raises challenges for the creator as well as the listener. During my visit to Madrid’s famous art galleries, I thought about these challenges, and the ways emotion crosses over between the pictorial and the physical, merging the intent of the artist with the interpretation of the beholder.

Painting is filled with the physicality of the artist, in the stroke of the brush, the thickness of the paint, the movement of the arm, the synergy between what is in the mind of the artist and what appears on the canvas. Consider The Great Masturbator, one of Salvador Dali’s early masterpieces. Dali completed the painting in 1929 and it was bequeathed to Spain in 1989. Now it hangs alongside a wonderful collection of surrealist art at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid. For 26 euros you can buy a Paseo del Arte Card that allows you to visit the Museo Reina Sofia as well as the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Museo Nacional del Prado. 

Museo Nacional Centro de Art Reina Sofia

Let us return to The Great Masturbator, this large oil painting that is instantly recognisable, with its melting lines and figures and faces. The emotional turmoil of the canvas practically leaps out of the canvas; a dream-world full of inner battles. The face that dominates the painting is said to be a self-portrait of the artist, his eyes closed in contemplation of the female figure, perhaps, that rises from the face. She is believed to represent Dali’s great love, Gala, a woman of Russian descent who was married to the French surrealist poet Paul Éluard when she and Dali embarked on a relationship. Gala appeared in many paintings, including The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1959).

Salvador Dali's The Great Masturbator

The phallic imagery and the suggestion of sexual ecstasy sits alongside more complex emotional ideas about sex, masturbation and genitalia, with the grasshopper fixed on the face and an ant colony suggesting emotional anxieties and discomfort. There is to me to be something lonely about the discordances found in the painting, a sense of the tormented feelings of the artist. It is certainly a canvas one could look at for hours and yet still wonder at the shifting emotional world it represents.  

Amongst the other treasures of the gallery is Guernica - Picasso’s vast black and white response of the bombing of a Basque Country village in Northern Spain by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italian warplanes, in which most of those killed were women and children. Having seen Guernica in print many times, it was still extraordinary to see the work close up. The crowds that were gathered around it testify to its status as one of the most moving, mesmerising anti-war murals of all time.

Picasso, Guernica

After Guernica, to the Museo del Prado, which offered more and more unexpected treasures: Rubens, Durer, Goya and Bosch. There I saw the glorious Garden of Earthly Delights  a modern title given to a triptych by the Early Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch. It dates between 1490 and 1510, and was painted as a warning against fleshly desires  in a world still ruled by fear of the afterlife. The painting always takes me back to my childhood, when I rifled through my father’s art books, horrified and entranced by the upside down world of debauchery and excess.

Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights

The left panel depicts Eden, the middle panel, a world of earthly delights and the right a surreal version of hell, in which participants of pleasure must pay for their sins. It was the bizarre and tumultuous cruelty of the final panel that stunned me as a child, and as an adult: the ‘Tree Man’ whose truncated torso seemed to be formed of a broken egg-shell, interrupted only by arms like tree trunks. Beside him, a bird-headed monster swallows a naked man whole, defecating bodies into a pit of trapped faces while animals torture people. The spectacular scene of hell and damnation reads like a contorted allegory of the Seven Deadly Sins. 

The Tree-Man, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, third panel

After the galleries, my friend and I walked down the Gran Via (or ‘Great Way’), an upscale shopping street that leads from Calle de Alcalá, close to Plaza de Cibeles, to Plaza de España. This street is a showcase of early 20^th century architecture from Vienna Secession to Art Deco, with buildings like the Metropolis Building (1911), topped with the mythical Phoenix.

The Metropolis Building

Finally, we walked to the Plaza Mayor (built during Philip III’s reign (1598 – 1621), where we drank Spanish wine, talked late into the night and ate tapas. I concluded, as the sun set, that Madrid is the perfect place to experience history, and a difficult place to feel lonely. 

The Plaza Mayor