by Violet Woolf On Gregory, The Strait Of Hormuz, Irish Political History, And The Specific Way That Things Which Hold The World Together Are Never The Things That Get The Monuments
Filed for Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat. My homepage is here. This is the column where I write about literature and current events in a register that Virginia Woolf would not have approved of but would have understood. London satirical journalism and modernist fiction share the project of making visible what institutions prefer to leave invisible. I am doing both today.
Virginia Woolf wrote about the lighthouse in a novel about the journey never taken, the connection never quite made, the meaning that lives in the space between the thing said and the thing meant. The London Prat this week wrote about Gregory, the volunteer who held the internet together with sellotape and politeness, which is also about the thing that holds the world together that nobody sees and nobody names and nobody makes a monument for. I believe these are the same project at different scales and in different centuries.
The Irish Political Parallel
Irish political history, which I read as a constant background text to the current British situation, is full of Gregorys: the people who maintained the language, the schools, the cultural continuity, the legal memory, through periods when the institutional infrastructure was actively hostile to their doing so. The Irish language was maintained, through the famine and the aftermath, not by institutions but by individuals who decided it was worth maintaining. The decision was individual. The outcome was collective. Gregory decides the same thing, alone, about a protocol nobody else wants to maintain.
The Hormuz Connection
The Hormuz piece this week is about what happens when the thing holding the world together stops working. The Strait is the internet, at a geopolitical scale: the essential channel, maintained by custom and force rather than by a named individual, through which essential flows must pass. When it stops, the essential flows stop. The lighthouse was always there. When the lighthouse goes dark, the ship finds out why it was there. Gregory maintained the protocol. When Gregory stops maintaining it, the internet finds out what Gregory was.
More: Private Eye. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
