The end of everything we took for normal has a dire aesthetic fascination. The streets lie silent and still under unnaturally clean skies. A lone walker stares into a deserted bookshop. Office buildings, once vulgar, fulfil their true potential as sets for a sci-fi nightmare, glassily reflecting the empty city. While I do not want to in any way downplay the tragedy that has left thousands dead and will kill thousands more, there has been one eerie byproduct: the apocalyptic beauty of lockdown Britain.
Take a walk through quiet streets for your daily exercise and you come across vistas sci-fi has spent more than a century preparing us for. A main road so still you can stand in the middle of it, among the squatting pigeons. A row of expensive shops all closed and dark midweek. Such scenes of The End have haunted the modern imagination since HG Wells described the abandoned streets of the imperial metropolis and devastated Surrey in The War of the Worlds. We’ve all absorbed these visions of apocalyptic Britain, generation after generation, from the 1970s TV chiller Survivors to Danny Boyle’s uncannily convincing dawn photography of an emptied landscape in the film 28 Days Later. Surely we can be forgiven a frisson of macabre awe at seeing all these fantasies become real.
It might be healthier to embrace the nightmare than pretend we’re in a cosy new normal. I’m not too sure about “lockdown culture”. It’s all so positive and mutually supportive. Let’s bake, exercise and singalong. But imagination is black-hearted and feeds on shadows. Positivity is the opposite of sensitivity. The 18th-century aesthetician Edmund Burke looked honestly into his own soul and confessed that, for all the seductions of pretty things, he was more truly drawn to disturbing sights – a pitch-black night, a cliff face, a storm at sea. Burke called their aesthetic appeal “sublime”. Tell an audience gathered to watch a play that a public hanging is about to happen down the road, he says, and the theatre will empty.
A normally bustling city or town that has been reduced to ghostly calm is a startling instance of the sublime. And a new one. For all the gleeful shudders of sci-fi, no previous generation has ever quite experienced this before. Writers imagined it and film-makers strived to visualise it – but no one has actually woken up in a modern world that has come to such a disturbing standstill.
“When a day that you happen to know is Wednesday starts off by sounding like Sunday,” wrote John Wyndham in The Day of the Triffids, “there is something seriously wrong somewhere.” For weeks now, every Wednesday has sounded like a Sunday – and so have all the other days. When life outdoes art, we should allow ourselves to embrace the spectacle.
For right now we’re surrounded by the sublime, and the disaster outside is much more powerful than the ersatz culture indoors. While art is reduced to virtual reassurances, a walk to the shops is a horribly unforgettable scene of a world turned upside down. My local shopping centre happens to be located in a classic example of 1960s futuristic architecture, with concrete towers facing the sun above a concrete piazza. Its time has come. It’s just a shame JG Ballard isn’t around to see the spaced-out queue for Waitrose on a Saturday morning. “The last members of the middle class fortifying themselves against society’s collapse with a final fix of quinoa,” he might have said. As I join the queue, I know I will remember this grotesque moment of pandemic life when I’ve forgotten every online art exhibition.
The latest news images reveal a further surrealism: the lockdown in decay. More and bigger queues, as DIY superstores reopen. It’s rumoured garden centres will be next. As Ballard would say, the middle class must have its illusions even in the apocalypse. In truth, looking at images of gathering crowds, I feel a pang of loss. At least the early days of the lockdown were absolute. At least they were sublime.
You can still find the sudden silence in the heart of the city. There are moments when no other walkers are about, no cars come by, and empty workplaces tower above in brutalist disregard. It’s worth seeking out such ground zeros of total lockdown. In the centre of the city in the day, you can appreciate the terrible beauty of the day the earth stood still. At least it will be something to remember in the sad convalescent years ahead.
