Cambridge is not my home any more and I doubt I’ll ever live there again. Over the last few visits I’ve entirely made my peace with that fact, oddly opening up a new level of aesthetic appreciation of a place I no longer pine to return to. It makes me think of Eliot’s line about arriving where you started and knowing that place for the first time:

I was struck that this letting go seemingly reached its culmination almost exactly four years since the start of the pandemic. This was a scene from my garden just under four years ago, with my now departed friend, trying to make the best of a bad situation. Molly to my surprise, given she was once a feral cat who barely tolerated company, loved the disruption of it, particularly in the second lockdown when my then partner moved across the country for a new job and I was home alone with her nearly 24/7.

I’ve spent a lot over the last few days talking about pandemic trauma. I’m not sure if that’s because my friends in Cambridge are more willing to talk about it, or more willing to indulge my increasingly incessant psychoanalytical speculation. But it’s clear to me this was the most formative period of my life, in ways I’m still living out even now. There were endings which began in my life during the pandemic and beginnings taking root four years on in the space left by the end of the endings.

Is this true of other people as well? I suspect it must be but I see little evidence of this in public culture, constituting a silence (an affective gap, a blank space, a structural hole?) which I’m increasingly prone to interpret as trauma. There’s a rigidity which comes with this silence. A contraction of the space into which you might move, a loss of the capacity to expand. To inhabit trauma involves the end of what came before it, but beginnings are made possible by this, even if they are neither easy nor immediate.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make and end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.

- T.S. Eliot

If you can’t end things, you can’t begin things. If you cannot really leave, you foreclose the possibility of a (transformative) return. My sunnier interpretation of Julie Resche’s bleak negative psychoanalysis is that it’s only through confronting “the black matter that constitutes the heart of existence” that such a return becomes possible. Breaking attachments is just as important as making them, even though it is considerably more painful. But if we can’t face the breaking of attachments then we’re doomed to find ourselves saturated by the fragments of past losses. If you never really let go were you ever really here?

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one

- T.S. Eliot