Читать книгу Obedience is Freedom - Jacob Phillips - Страница 6

An area of common land in West Berkshire lies near an intersection between the industrial cities of the Midlands to the north and the ports on the English Channel to the south. The same spot is intersected lengthways too, connecting west and east on the old horse-drawn carriage route between London and Bath. The common land is a few square miles of woodland, heath and scrub. For centuries it would hardly merit much attention. Being common land it has no explicit purpose as such; it is simply ‘there’. But this land is also itself the site of an intersection of a different type. This land has a distinct history as a place on the intersection of war and peace.

This is documented from the time of the English Civil War. In 1643, Parliamentarian troops paused there to ready themselves for what was to be a decisive battle of that conflict. There are traces of much older earthworks still perceptible beneath the soil too. Long, linear banks of earth dated to the fifth century may have served a purpose for Roman troops, as even the circular Bronze Age pits nearby could have been used by a tribe practising with their weaponry before setting off to defend their settlements. It is said this site was later an outpost for soldiers preparing to defend Anglo-Saxon Silchester from attack. A map from 1740 shows a military camp set up there and in 1746 this camp was the base for despatching troops for battle with Bonny Prince Charlie. By 1859 it was being used as a training camp to prepare for a French invasion. There were 16,000 troops stationed there in 1862; in 1872, it was 20,000. Later it was used for infantry training for those going to the Western Front and eventually it was taken over by the Ministry of Defence for use as an airbase for the Second World War in 1941.

The history of this common land is given over fully neither to peace nor war; it is where they meet. This is where peacetime prepares for war. The order and obedience required for battle are established here. Yet this is also where fighters return to recuperate in peace, free from the demands of the fray. This is then a place of rest and regeneration.

A decisive change came some decades after the Second World War. This could be when the history of this place reaches a crescendo, when the meeting point between war and peace is suddenly brought into focus. People will then see this as a place that discloses that which is held in common by war and peace. For even winners and losers belong together. Both sides play the game. Both enter the scene, take the risk, yearn for the prize. To attempt to win the battle is to consent to possibly losing the battle. To enter into war is to accept you might not have peace on your terms. There is common ground between sides, in that each side shares something fundamental with the other. This is something beneath the battle itself, functioning like the rules of a game, tacitly present – just ‘there’ – like common land itself.

War and peace require a specific place of meeting if they are to be differentiated from one another. If times of war cannot become times of peace, the battle will never cease. Then, even in peacetime, everyone is at war. Recreation is riven with contention, people mistake combat for contentment. Order and obedience no longer intersect with rest and regeneration, because there is no boundary where you pass from one into the other. With no common ground from whence to be despatched into the heat of battle, there is no common ground to which to return and rest in the cool shade. War becomes cold war. Peacetime becomes intensely heated. Those who would feel the rush of victory can only do so if others are to feel the sorrow of defeat. There must be commonality from which each side departs, but also to which each side can return. In this belonging, obedience meets freedom.

The decisive change in the destiny of the common land came with the Cold War. NATO announced they would deploy cruise missiles in Europe on 12 December 1979. In 1981, it was reported that these missiles would be housed on two sites in England, one of which was this common land. It would provide a base from which military trucks could depart carrying these missiles if or when they were launched at important cities in the Soviet Bloc. The missiles were to be kept in large concrete silos, six in number. These resemble ancient ziggurats or pyramids, with heavy shutters opening to vast chambers, where their precious cargo would be immersed in the deep darkness within. It is difficult for us fully to appreciate how sinister these seemingly sentient missiles seemed in an age less technological than our own. They were remotely controlled and could fly a thousand miles below the flight radars. Each one contained enough atomic power to detonate an explosion sixteen times the size of Hiroshima. The spark of Prometheus lay nascent within each silo, ready for the floods to break forth upon the Earth when the shutters opened.

In a pamphlet from the early 1980s, a mother in a nearby town describes the moment this new purpose for this local land was announced on the news:

I had seen a BBC TV programme about nuclear war … It came to the bit about putting dead bodies in plastic bags with labels on and leaving them in the road to be collected. I sat in front of the television, my one-year-old in my arms, my heart sinking with fear. Someone, somewhere, is actually accepting the fact that my children will die. Someone, somewhere, is quietly planning for the deaths of millions. This is not a dream, it is real.¹

This mother became one of many thousands of women who protested against the cruise missiles base in the years that followed. She had joined with others in organizing a march from a nuclear weapon’s facility in Cardiff to the common land and the scenes that followed are those with which this common land is now always associated: Greenham Common.

Initially they called themselves ‘Women for Life on Earth’. Leaving Cardiff on 27 August, they arrived on 5 September: ‘a long straggling line of women and children tramping through the dusty Berkshire lanes with leaves in their hair’.² The single-carriage roads that led up to the site were arched over by the boughs of ancient trees, under which far more orderly battalions had once marched in lockstep. The woodland on either side was birthing its September fruits. The leaves were still green and lush, just tinged by the encroaching autumn.

When nature called, the kids would run ahead and duck under these trees, clambering through the leaves into dusty enclosures enclosed by broad, low branches. Some would dare to run further into the woods, wanting to be first to glimpse the eight-foot wire fence recently erected around the Common. On the other side of this fence, the grass had that scorched yellowy colour that can make the English countryside in late August feel almost Mediterranean, if only for a few long days. Squinting in the summer sun after emerging from the trees, the kids saw freshly tarmacked roads and a few clusters of USAF buildings in the distance. The marchers emerged from the mysterious hollows and reaches of the English countryside to approach the main gate. Mowed grass verges appeared, with gorse between them and the woods, and neatly trimmed little privet hedges in front. Coming from the musty darkness of the trees into the brightly dazzling sun, the newly landscaped terrain seemed fuzzy and unreal.

There was a carnival atmosphere. The women had a folk band playing alongside them and ‘they all looked so beautiful with their scarves and ribbons and flowers … The colours, the beauty, the sun … and so many people’.³ Some had decided to chain themselves to the fences and maybe it was the joyful intensity of the occasion that led some of the others to decide they could not simply go back home and return to normal. Some set up a large campfire and slept out under the stars. Over the following days provisions arrived, makeshift structures were erected and, around the nucleus of the fire, some of the women decided to stay indefinitely. The encampment was later named Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Over the next three years it developed into what is now a well-known chapter in recent English history.

Within a few weeks it was decided it should be a women-only space. Some of the men present had been confrontational with the authorities, taken control of elements of the camp, or been overprotective of the women during skirmishes with bailiffs and police. These behaviours were not welcome. Numerous direct actions, court cases, imprisonments and campaigns took place in the next three years. The most well-known event is probably the ‘Embrace the Base’ event on 11 December 1983, when 30,000 women encircled and enclosed the entire base, linking arms around the nine-mile perimeter fence. There were marquees set up by the main gate for refreshments and childcare. The kids inside were kept amused with painting and makeshift puppet shows and their creations were later used to decorate the barbed wire. The event was on national television news. During the report, talking heads were interviewed in front of the main gate, voicing either approval or disapproval of the action. The kids’ brightly coloured paintings and puppets could be seen some way behind them but the wire fence was not visible at such a distance. Their creations thus seemed to be suspended in mid-air, hovering on the horizon. The women’s children, seeing their pictures on the TV, would be overcome with excitement and pride. Their triumphant cheers drowned out the droning commentary on the merits or demerits of the event itself.

Other direct actions were more volatile, taking place under cover of darkness. The project to house cruise missiles at USAF Greenham Common involved regular manoeuvres, when military trucks would take the missiles out of the silos and drive them around the surrounding countryside of Hampshire and Wiltshire, usually to a firing range on Salisbury Plain, five miles west of Stonehenge. To prepare and practise for a launch, the missiles would be edged out of the Greenham silos with great care, with much monitoring, pacing and controlled moments of focused pushing. Then the warheads left their dark place and were exposed for a moment to the night air and the stars, before being bundled hastily into the cribs built onto the military trucks waiting outside. These nuclei of awesome atomic power were then borne along the country lanes, passing through the high streets of small local towns, around the market squares and past the pubs, newsagents and grocery shops.

The women had phone networks on 24-hour alert all around the surrounding counties and would mount spontaneous blockades and sit-ins on the country lanes to stop these manoeuvres. These blockades developed into liturgies with regular features; sometimes the lighting of flares or the smearing of mud on the trucks’ windscreens while the convoy waited for police to clear the roads. Often, the operation would be aborted and the missiles sent back in retreat. Returning to the Common, the ancient role of Greenham would then recommence. This was always a site of both exit and return; a place from which people could depart into battle, but also come back to peace. The missiles went from ex utero to in utero. The shutters would be reopened, the cargo carefully laid back in the immersive darkness. As the soldiers trekked back to their lodgings shortly before dawn, they would hear the triumphant women drinking and singing in victory around the dots of flame they could make out coming from their fires all along the perimeter fence. With each battle’s end, there was a common place to which people returned.

The Women’s Peace Camp was a nexus of intersecting battlelines. There was the intersection of west and east. This was the making local in parochial England of the architectonic power blocks of the Cold War. This was where the opposition of the ‘free world’ to ‘communism’ was not rhetorical, it was real. It was also where the faultlines in domestic politics met, still then largely categorizable as Left and Right. The actual battles of the Cold War were never really between Americans and Russians, nor did the Greenham Women interact much with the American troops who worked in the compound. When there was combat, it was between fellow citizens, between the protestors and the police or bailiffs, or between others sympathetic to either one side or another. One woman described the locals of Greenham with contempt as exuding a ‘kind of deferential, cap-touching Toryism’.⁴ The villagers were angry about the encampment, as were many of their magistrates, councillors and judges. Stories were passed from woman to woman along the pathways encircling the base, of local men lurking in the brambles ready to pounce or gangs of lads pouring sacks of cement into their tanks of drinking water. Even among the women various tensions flared up, usually between those with more radical and separatist impulses, against those with careers, husbands and children to factor into their plans. Yet another battleline surrounded the camp; that between men and women. This is the most primordial division of them all, a boundary always assumed until recently to be the most insurmountable.

Looking at this episode of history now, certain things command our attention. The command is heard all the more forcefully because the official chroniclers of Greenham have been so inattentive. Looking at history with your eyes firmly focused upon it makes your own time look different when your gaze turns back. Glance at history lazily and your eyes will never see the horizon beyond your own. Then history affirms the status quo, the boundary between then and now is just as expected, not fuzzy and unreal as your eyes adjust to something new. But Greenham does not just ratify the values of today, there are times when it also revokes them. That is, this episode shows a clear intersecting of things today’s culture wars cannot countenance as belonging together.

Today’s identitarian feminists would struggle particularly with Greenham’s celebration of natality, of the primordial commonality between mother and child. Those who hold that defining womanhood through life-giving capacities is but an outdated remnant of obedience to the patriarchy only see things from the other side of a broken binary. Their eyes cannot be focused on those moments when such things were held in common. If the duties of motherhood are always enslaving, women’s liberation is freedom from procreation. But, to look attentively means that behind the permitted voices hover the remnants of very different experiences – suspended along the horizon, out of focus, some distance away – the wire fences holding our contemporary maladies in place disappear, leaving only the colourful expressions of a more innocent time. Greenham is striking today because many of these women went into battle precisely because they saw themselves as the handmaidens of life on Earth, by virtue of being women.

The quote given above from a mother moved to political activism after she was ‘sat in front of the television, my one-year-old in my arms, my heart sinking with fear’ is but one example. The bind between mother and infant unbinds her energies to be expressed in political action. The name ‘Women for Life on Earth’ would today seem more natural for a pro-life group than a feminist organization. The similarities do not end here. One of the original leaflets for this group asks ‘Why are we walking 120 miles from a nuclear weapon facility in Cardiff to a site for Cruise missiles in Berkshire?’ On the back was a picture of a baby born dead, killed by the radiation from Hiroshima, saying ‘This is why.’⁵ At least one key player in setting up the camp was a midwife. Welcoming and integrating mothers with children and babies was a sine qua non of it being a space for women, a place where the demands of motherhood could be genuinely welcomed by those upon whom such demands are ever laid.

Natality informed the rationale for a distinctively women’s peace movement: ‘because I am a woman I am responsible’, said one.⁶ Dora Russell wrote that peacemaking is a natural extension of a feminine genius: ‘If differences are not to be settled by war but by negotiation, there must be more feeling for cooperation’, she says, and ‘[w]ithin a family, a wife and mother traditionally tries to reconcile differences’.⁷ She points out that there was a broad spectrum involved in the movement, including some who, like today’s dominant voices, considered a focus on procreative capacities to be symptomatic of male oppression. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that keeping our eyes firmly fixed on this episode makes it clear that a great many involved in Greenham Common would be unwelcome in feminist political activism today. They would be cancelled and endlessly trolled as conservatives or reactionaries.

This side to Greenham is a story very few of its contemporary admirers are likely to tell. But, as Russell stated in 1983, ‘there are large numbers of women who felt compelled to act because of the traditional roles in which they found themselves’.⁸ The group Babies Against the Bomb was founded by Tamar Swade, who describes early motherhood as joining ‘a separate species of two-legged, four-wheeled creatures who carry their young in push-chair pouches’ and who occasionally ‘converged for a “coffee morning” or a mother-and-baby group run by the National Childbirth Trust’. At these gatherings, there would be ‘much discussion about nappy-rash, (not) sleeping and other problems pertaining to the day-to-day survival of mother and infant’. The thinking behind Babies Against the Bomb led directly from these most motherly of concerns – ‘Why not start a mother-and-baby group whose discussions included long-term survival?’ she asks. For ‘[t]hrough my child the immorality of this world … has become intolerable’.⁹

Understandings of womanhood in the world of Greenham, closely linked to femininity as procreative, cannot be explained away as internalized patriarchy or the unfortunate residue of past oppressions that we have now progressed beyond. It is difficult to imagine the Greenham Women responding positively if asked to redefine their women-only space in such a way that procreation is no longer inextricably bound up with their identity as women. Yet it is easy to imagine how the online discourse would condemn them as right-wing, religious cranks for having the audacity to set up what some might insist is renamed a ‘People with Uteruses Peace Camp’. Once these remnants of the past have come clearly into view, the horizon of the present is then altered. Today’s world starts to seem fuzzy and unreal.

There is real a sense of freedom documented by these women who would not consider motherhood mere subservience, freedom from a gynophobic capitalism, which pushed motherhood to the periphery, away from the purportedly more serious, male-dominated workplace. The women’s bind to their infants – their unquestioning allegiance to their children – freed them from the inexorable self-centredness that prevents people from taking responsibility for the wellbeing of others. Once a binary is broken, differentiation is lost because the other side falls out of view. Viewing natality as subservience lapses into a surreptitious totalitarianism. Contemporary society values transience, optionality, re-invention. It fears permanent, unconditional attachment like that of parent and child. Then, living in a culture that dismisses unconditional attachment leaves people conditioned by self-attachment. The drive for self-fulfilment dominates. Disparaging the love more visceral than any other fosters a culture that is less responsible in ways extending far beyond child-rearing itself. A culture in which child-bearing is conditional on self-fulfilment is restrained from developing basic impulses of responsibility and care throughout. This is not to say that only those who have children exercise such responsibilities. It is to say that the degree to which natality is celebrated in a culture is a vital barometer of how responsible that culture is. Obediently accepting the demand of allegiance promises a more genuine freedom, more genuine than that pseudo-freedom that leaves people locked up in themselves.

Seen in this light, it is important not to explain away the inextricability of motherhood and womanhood for Greenham. It is spoken of as something that fostered solidarity between the women. Bodily reproduction, potential or actual, was assumed to be primarily a matter for women, something in which men participate in a very different way. It was not the only touchstone of solidarity, of course. Others included the threat or experience of sexual violence, particularly. This is always lurking in the songs, poems and writings of the women, like the legends of local men peering at them from beneath the brambles, and is often bound up with allusions to domestic circumstances, which led some of the women to ‘up sticks’ and live on the camp in the first place. But men can be victims of sexual violence, albeit far less often, with far fewer cultural apologias and never fostering male solidarity. Bearing the locus of the generation of life in conception, however, and gestating that life, giving birth to it and then suckling it – these were then implicitly assumed to be things men could not possibly do, without question. The exclusive priority of this allegiance of a mother to her child, over all else, meant that women, particularly, felt called to protest against the threat of nuclear war.

For the threat of nuclear war felt terrible to those who had recently borne children into the world. Swade discusses one who was compelled to join the Peace Movement because ‘the mention of nuclear war conjures the waking nightmare of her children burning’. Another describes a recurring dream in which ‘the four-minute warning would come while she was at work’ so she couldn’t ‘cross town in time’ to get to her offspring.¹⁰ One woman, Simone Wilkinson, connects her decision to join the first march with an encounter she had with a Japanese woman, while pregnant with her second child. She was told that ‘when a woman was pregnant in Hiroshima, she was given no congratulations but people waited in silence for nine months until the child was born, to see if it was all right’.¹¹ Swade describes the newborn baby as a ‘creature whose every impulse is towards survival but who is so dependent for it upon others’. She goes on, ‘my immediate, instinctive reaction to nuclear war is in my capacity as a mother’.¹² The intensity of this inter-human dependence in motherly instincts thus fostered a belonging with any others under threat of nuclear war.

If motherhood could foster the wide-ranging concern for others that drove anti-nuclear protesting, it could even foster a belonging between the two sides that did actually enter into battle. These are the opposing sets of citizens; the women and their opponents in society at large.

For example, the campfires burned at Greenham throughout the Falklands War. Battlelines intersected between the Peace Movement and those celebrating the ‘Gotcha!’ jingoism of ‘Our Lads’ vs ‘the Argies’. On 12 October 1982 there was a victory parade for the returning troops in London. A group of women decided to go, turn their backs on the parade as it passed them and unfurl a banner saying ‘Women Turn Their Backs on War’. An account of this action by Lynne Jones presents it as something not intended to be overly confrontational, as such. She says that the victory in the Falklands was a victory also for British ‘democratic liberties’ and these were lacking in Argentina, so the jubilant crowds could be expected to support that freedom of expression at the parade. Having found a spot along the route, Jones and her group of activists waited incognito among the people with their Union Jacks. She got talking to a mother of one of the returning soldiers. She addresses her account to this woman directly: ‘A plump, smiling woman, your hair freshly done, bright blue eyes, who came and stood right in the middle of our group.’ She goes on: ‘You chose us deliberately, you told me, because we weren’t too tall and you thought you could get a good view over our shoulders.’

They ended up talking a lot as they waited and the disguised Peace Woman helped the military mother with working her new camera. It had just been purchased so the mother could catch a memento of the proud moment her boy marched past with his regiment. Jones mentions a connection between each of the women, centred on motherhood: ‘Here you were, in your best clothes, come a long way with your husband to see your son who’d got home safe from war’ and ‘Here was I, equally glad your son was safe.’ This motherly connection came to a head when the action began and the women unfurled their banner and turned their backs on the soldiers. There was a commotion, with jeers and insults thrown at the women, one of whom broke down in tears at seeing the horrified reaction from their new blue-eyed friend. The military mother cried out, ‘I thought you cared about my son!’ The Peace Woman replied ‘It’s because we care about your son that we’re here!’ The old common land of Greenham was at that moment active in the heart of the capital city. In that moment both sides saw they were coming from the same place, the same set of motherly concerns, they just differed on how those concerns should be realized.

Jones reflects further on what the two women held in common. She writes: ‘We share the same values, you and I. We love freedom and happiness.’ Then she turns to where the difference lay: ‘You would tell me such things can only be maintained because your son fights to protect them’; whereas she would say, ‘The fact he has to fight destroys the things themselves.’¹³ This last observation is important. According to this account there is a profound commonality between the women, not just as mothers, but also as each bearing an allegiance to a particular cultural sensibility and set of assumptions described in terms of ‘freedom and happiness’. The difference between them centres on how best to realize and achieve the manner of life they both want. There is common ground, it is just ‘there’. The differentiation is not a broken binary, because neither side refuses to countenance the opposing position. This holds the promise that there is somewhere they can meet, that this particular battle can eventually cease.

It is hard to imagine such an account emerging from the battles of today’s culture war. That is, from the moment, say, a man appeared from nowhere in Parliament Square during the Black Lives Matter protest of 2020 and ripped down all the racial slogans from Churchill’s statue, or when a youth was stopped from setting fire to the Union Jack on the Cenotaph later that day. Neither are there any such accounts from the annual Women Against Trump marches each January nor the ‘MAGA stand-off’ between Nathan Phillips and the protesting teenagers at March for Life. One of the most active protest groups, Extinction Rebellion, employs a rhetorical framework which means common ground is impossible to reach; there can be no accommodation to human extinction. All this shows that the culture war is fought on the other side of a broken binary, the common ground is no longer just ‘there’.

Once the common ground has gone, war and peace can no longer be distinguished. A war among cultures is the coldest of wars. Insofar as culture is defined as ‘a whole way of life’,¹⁴ to war against another culture is to enter into battle against a foe with whom there is no common ground. That is, no acceptance of a shared origin or history that can be agreed upon, no acceptance of a shared endeavour to realize and perpetuate in a common manner of living and no ultimate ends or goals to which a shared culture might lead people. A war like this, not centred on physical combat, can be enslaving in all dimensions of life. Even those not conscripted into battle are still restrained from engaging with challenging ideas because the dominant side deems them toxic. Being on the other side of broken binary means people of different views are treated with suspicion and distrust. For those who do engage with the war directly, notifications ping from social media late in the small hours of the night, invading every private space and all domesticity. There is no place to which one can retreat, nowhere to return and be recuperated. Common land, like Wendell Berry says of wilderness, belongs to ‘nobody’ and so ‘belongs to everybody’, it is ‘the natural enmity of tyranny’.¹⁵

A shared common ground of belonging, of mutual allegiance, functions like a womb from which society and culture come forth. A culture that is estranged from natality betokens a culture suspicious of mutual allegiance at its most visceral. A culture thus truncated is condemned always to be fractious, always ensnared in unbridgeable differences of opinion. A culture that celebrates primordial allegiance, however, can know the freedom of shared endeavour. As Christopher Lasch states, ‘the sources of social cohesion’ are to be found ‘in shared assumptions so deeply engrained in everyday life that they don’t have to be articulated: in folkways, customs, prejudices, habits of the heart’.¹⁶ This source or origin was once simply ‘there’; the tacit, unspoken assumption that each belonged to and came from a particular place, to which they would always return once hostilities had settled. It functions like that Paul Embery describes an ‘old universal moral code’, binding on all, ‘irrespective’ of ‘class or political beliefs’; a ‘deep social and cultural homogeneity’, which engenders ‘a spirit of reciprocity and belonging’.¹⁷

In this substratum of allegiance, we encounter identity unpoliticized, not intersected by ideological commitments, something more primary than the political. To make identity fundamentally political is to drag the unspoken realm of our ‘habits of the heart’ into the harsh light of day. That which sleeps within is then always awoken. People are rendered ‘woke’. To be woke is to have lost the place of inward slumber and not to know one’s way back to it. One is not ‘awake’ because the present needs to grow from the past to be truly present. Instead, the alienated past lingers on and torments the present and so the word has slipped into the past tense. Being woke means to be deprived of a past, to be living in a tortuously enduring state of having always just-this-second awoken. It is to live in those dread infinitesimal first milliseconds of the morning, before you can remember the day before or what lies in store for the day ahead. It is to be disorientated, unkempt and squinting under the merciless strip lights of a world that aborts itself in every moment. It is no coincidence that the Jacobins declared Year 1 after the French Revolution or that the agitators at the barricades in 1851 dated all their correspondence from that date for the rest of their lives. To call something ‘progressive’ is to secure a vantage for the present that rudely cuts out the past.

The Guardian songbook of Greenham Common prints the lyrics of one of the camp’s most common songs: ‘Carry Greenham Home’. Those who celebrate this music today do not notice how haunting it is, because this period of history still evinces the sense of a shared cultural home, of mutual allegiance. Then, shared concerns could be expressed differently and contentiously, while still remaining shared. This allegiance resides not in the sphere of conscious assent, of self-chosen lifestyles or desired identities. A culture truncated from its sources of social cohesion is perpetually ex utero, forever orphaned, because it is deprived of that which lies beyond any choosing or self-selection, of that ‘so deeply engrained in everyday life’ it does not ‘have to be articulated’. This is also why it is so hard to imagine a way back, because that would be a way to go from ex utero to in utero. This also explains why the phrase ‘culture war’ is ubiquitous and yet the phrase ‘culture peace’ has not yet been coined. There is a broken binary and repair is needed if we are ever to envisage a pax cultura.

The generative promise of mutual allegiance seems fuzzy and unreal to us today. It is jarring to suggest that what people think of as inhibitive of freedom actually liberates people to be themselves. It is counter-intuitive to say that dutiful attachments actually free people to live their lives fully. Looking back on this antiquated viewpoint is like being the man who was once that one-year-old on his mother’s lap when the news about the cruise missile base went out on TV. It feels fuzzy and unreal to read about yourself as a babe in arms, stumbling across this passage as an adult many years later. This describes a moment deeply engrained in my own history, yet I am not even aware of it at all. It lies somewhere beyond my conscious awareness. It is beyond my memories; beyond my earliest reminiscences of skipping through the woodland around the common on a summer’s day; beyond my remembering of the triumphant cheer I voiced when my childlike painting was shown on the national news on a December night. But all of us were once caught up in an allegiance like that my mother described in that passage. Our allegiance to peoples and places similarly sleeps somewhere within us and seems unreal to us now. But this is not a dream, this is real.