The Season for Living

In October 2020, Bob Moran published a cartoon privately on social media. Bob was still employed by the Telegraph newspaper, though he would soon be sacked from this position. 

Bob’s cartoon was of an old man and woman on a hill, overlooking rolling fields and a nestled homestead. It was titled ‘Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.’

The following year, Bob published a variation on his cartoon. This time, the fields are covered in snow and the man and woman stand closer to one another. The title was still ‘Never surrender your right to be with the people you love.’ 

Bob’s reputation for righteous resistance to Covid restrictions grew on the back of a bobmorangetsit hashtag. And so Bob Moran did get it – the fulsome outlines of his first freelance cartoon cut through the amassing complexities of Covid messaging with a statement of searing simplicity: there are people and places that are of you and for you, always. 

Pictures do not speak a thousand words. Their force derives from their not speaking any words at all. Words anaesthetize. We take them or leave them. We are not touched by them, or only rarely. And they betray us. 

Bob’s picture of the man and woman on a hill is denounced by the words beneath it. This old couple is not defending their right to be with one another. They simply are with one another – standing their ground because they are rooted there.  

When we defend our right to a fundamental good, we diminish it. We admit as possible what ought to be impossible and thereby concede an essential point.

Once being with those you love is made a right of life, it ceases to be a way of life. What had been organic becomes engineered; what had been unwitting becomes knowing. An overlay of cynicism obscures the innocence. 

This cynicism dissolves horizons of possibility by relativizing what lies within them, creating scarcity where there had been plenty. Being with the people you love acquires a new limit even if your energies are spent in resisting that limit. 

Cynicism talks about that for which there had been no words. No matter what side it talks for, it fills what had been silence with words that are shared by all sides of the debate and that are therefore as likely as not to turn on those who use them. 

‘Plastic words,’ Uve Pörksen called them, which dispel the unspokenness of what is shared among people – what goes without saying – with talk that is no less destructive of communities for its having the atmosphere of considered objectivity. 

‘Rights’ is now such a plastic word, ready for co-option by any perspective on any issue, conferring solemnity on the most trivial arguments and equivocality on the most vital, outing the inconspicuous fundaments of ways of life so as to render explicit what can only be implicit.   

The man and woman in Bob’s cartoon have no words for being with one another in their world because being with one another in their world is not up for discussion. 

Bob depicts this with a directness that no words could achieve – by the unerring modesty of his lines, by the few elements of his composition, and by the unelaborated affinity between the curves of the woman’s back and the undulation of hills below and between the wisps of the man’s hair and the scatter of clouds above. 

This man and woman fit with one another in their world as pieces in a human jigsaw. There is no other place and no other way for them. They are enchanting because they are enchanted. 

The words beneath them break the spell as words are wont to do. We may agree with them, we may repeat them; but thereafter is only disenchantment.   

You can always tell this disenchantment, however righteous may be the cause it would support. It is dogged by fear and fervour – two emotions that will abound this Christmas, now sadly a festival of disenchantment.  

The fear stems from our latent sense that we have already given ground, that we have cut ties with the great counterforce of impossibility that sustains the man and woman in Bob’s cartoon, and the men and women in all ways of life. That we are not really with the people we love. That we must protest what can only be lived.

A low-hanging, mostly object-less anxiety overshadows our nervous talk, about next year when things will be as they should be or about this year when things will have been as they should be. 

Meanwhile, we are prone to peaks of fervour, awash with relief at every half-instance of seeming-being with the people we love, heralding fleeting simulations of belonging as if we have just been saved. We laugh with our mouths wide open. And talk too loudly when it is our turn to shine. And slump to inertia when the limelight moves on.  

As we lurch between vexation at what is not and euphoria at what is for a moment, we are pursued and in pursuit. Until the feast of fear and fervour is done with for another year. 

The couple in Bob’s cartoon do not feel fear or fervour. Their Christmas will be right. Because their Christmas will be. 

Perhaps we look down upon them, even as we are charmed. Their assurance lacks the sophistication of our ambivalence, for which only words suffice. 

Ah bless, we say, as we turn from their scene of consolation to resume our battle in the real world. 

Yet, in Bob’s picture of the old man and woman is represented the most realistic of all battle plans: lived resistance.  

We may say what we like, but if we do not buy our food from farm shops, and pay people with cash, and throw out our ‘smart’ devices, and teach our own children to be good and true, we will have lost our way – our way to eat, our way to trade, our way to interact, our way to hope. 

And when we have lost our way, we will have only words – the plastic pillar words of ‘health,’ ‘value,’ ‘contact,’ ‘future’ – which we may bandy about to our heart’s content and little effect.  

It does not matter much what words we use. The furore about online censorship and hate speech, the proliferation of pronouns and invented designators: all of that is mostly distraction, or temptation to use more words. 

The more words we use, the fewer ways we live. And living is the thing.  

A muted thing, admittedly – standing determinedly at the unmanned checkout, waiting for a man to man it, is an obscure kind of fight. Hardly like the barricades at all. 

But how much the cosier! There is snugness in a small space that keeps cold and dark outside. So long, of course, as it can keep cold and dark outside. 

Bob’s second version of his cartoon expresses this so well. The winds are biting now. The hills, laden with snow. But the distant farmhouse is all the more inviting, all the more a haven for its being a fortress against inclemency. And the old man and woman fit together all the tighter.  

A merry chat at the human checkout is the merrier for its being surrounded by the leadenness of robotic exchanges. The human spirit appears to greatest advantage in an environment otherwise bereft.

And if a merry chat cannot be amplified on the platforms that broadcast our plastic words, all the better! Those platforms are company platforms; we use them by others’ leave.

When we live we make our own platform, chatting happily, smiling pleasurably, all the while drawing in those who stare with yearning. Humanity grows more tantalizing as inhumanity lays siege.

There is a happiness that only comes from keeping menace at bay. 

It is what has made Christmas so joyous – a festival of warmth and light reclaimed from the frost and the night. A hearth of all things human, with wind and rain out of doors. 

A good template, then. Truly the season for living.    

And for giving. Bob Moran has published his first book of cartoons, Bob: 2020-2024. A fine restorative this Christmas for anyone keeping Empire at bay.  

Sinéad Murphy’s latest book, ASD: Autistic Society Disorder, is now available.