There’s nothing that pleases me more than a sense of belonging. I like when things overlap and I like when I’m at the centre of it somehow. It’s ego but it’s also human.

Take a day like this:

I am sitting in the Bodleian, staring out the window, towards the dome of the Radcliffe Camera, thinking how absurd it really is, that this is my local library, that this grand place is where I work, that on my desk are three volumes of magazines from 1908 bound together in such a fragile way.  And there I am, gazing blankly, mouth hung open in that expression of well-meaning vacancy, when who should stroll by but someone I know, who says hello in a frantic whisper.  Later I go downstairs to the Lower Reading Room and smile at a colleague as he looks up from his studies.  Rolling down Broad Street, another colleague passes, waves.  Now I’m sitting in a cafe listening to music made by friends of a friend, watching a local businessman, whom I happen to know, cleaning the upstairs windows of his restaurant.

Why does this please me?  Why do I persist in having what amounts to a village mentality, and why should any of it matter, anyway–these brushes with a sense of community, this six-degrees-of-separation thing? Why do we get off on knowing that someone out there knows us? Oxford is a great place for this; anywhere you go you’re likely to know someone, if only obliquely, or else someone is likely to know someone you know.

“The local,” William Carlos Williams once wrote, “is the only universal.” I guess that’s probably true. I guess in a way that’s why I like the overlap so much. Why, in the end, it’s so important.

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I have a few things to say on this.  Watching BBC Question Time this evening reminded me of some of them.

1. I genuinely do not believe that people are, for the most part, concerned about knowing exactly how many people leave and enter the UK each year, or about putting a cap on that number.  What I do believe they are concerned with is knowing how immigration will impact them directly.  It’s not about what will happen to Britain in general; it’s Will I lose my job?  Will crime in my area increase?  Never mind if these are logical questions.  It doesn’t matter what immigrants look like, where they come from, what their stories are.  All that matters is the local and the personal, and no one seems willing, or able, to address this.  The debate has become so curly that it’s impossible to get past the repetitive rhetoric.  Who has the balls to explain, on an individual level, the impact that immigration actually has?  Who has the balls to suggest once and for all that letting people in may not be the worst thing in the world?

2. The points based system.  Bless it, bless it a million times, because it’s the only way that I would be able to live in this country with the man that I love, with my friends, my job, my ambitions.  But let’s be honest.  It’s not a fair system.  It’s a completely ridiculous scheme to allow people of certain social or financial standing entry into the UK.  The fees for visa applications alone are prohibitive (I’m looking at a £500-700 fee to pay in January–my third such fee in as many years); but applicants also have to be able to prove access to a certain amount of funding.  They have to be educated, or highly skilled, or both.  They have to meet rigid criteria.  Students must be able to show that they can not only pay enormous international fees, but support themselves at the same time.

I’m not saying this system should not be in place.  I think that, for what it is, it’s excellent.  It ensures that graduates of UK universities and highly skilled individuals are able to choose where they want to put their skills to use.  And as a middle-class white American girl, the points based system is my only real hope for forging a life in the UK.  I know I’m lucky.  I have supportive and successful parents who have backed me financially–who have been able to back me financially–over the years.  But it’s still been a struggle, and I know how many people are not, and never will be, that lucky.  So let’s not pretend that the points based system in any way addresses the entire issue.  It’s a start, but by indirectly excluding people based on cost and criteria, it still leaves questions unanswered and voices unheard.

That’s it for now, and yes, I’m biased, terribly biased.  But then again, why not?  If the politicians are too afraid to leave their comfortable, circular world of empty oratory, we’ll all have to speak for ourselves.

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I have a lot to write about, but no impetus to do it. I’m suffering from a miserable cold and though they’ve finished work on the house little things still seem to be out of place: my bicycle is naked without its basket, the mirrors are still not up, we have more laundry than seems humanly possible for two people to have. We spent a few days out in the country, both of us coughing and groaning, feeding pigs and then sitting close to the fire catching up on our television-watching (as we don’t have one, every time we’re in a place with a TV, we become a bit scary). I appear to be useless at the moment; all I can manage is to suck on Strepsils, feel sorry for myself, flip through the Observer, watch snippets of Lord of the Rings (why that, I couldn’t tell you).

It’s been rainy and cold lately, but in general, the city has taken on a hue of almost heartbreaking beauty: late autumn, and though dark falls early, to catch the sunlight glinting off the windows is a reaffirming experience.

I’m formulating new ideas on literature and politics (more to come), aided by a quick and almost careless line in Joyce’s The Dead: “He wanted to say that literature was above politics” as well as by various more overt articles. I’m rearranging books and looking forward to making the house nice again. I’m listening to music and buying all my winter clothing secondhand. Next week is election day; so I remember four years ago, being in Boston and walking in a chill November fog to Copley Square where thousands were rallying for John Kerry. I remember going to sleep with the nation still undecided and waking up to dissapointment, and having to change my outfit because I was irrationally afraid that people would think I supported George Bush because I was wearing cowboy boots. Our own minds are very strange sometimes.

Also, my first Guy Fawkes night coming up. It’s going to be a very political week.

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If I sound overly melodramatic about the state-of-the-political-world it’s only because I am. This distance, put between me and the circus quite consciously, is making me crazy. I went to a Democrats Abroad meeting in the pub a few weeks ago and felt bolstered; I listened to a young student from San Diego deliberate with herself and felt like the world was coming to an end.

All in all, I think I’ll feel better when it’s over and we have a new leader.

In the meantime I’ve started school again. I’m sinking rapidly into the feeling that what I want to do more than anything else is wrap myself up in words and swim in the sea of Academia and sunbathe in the fruits of my research. (Mixed metaphors, anyone?) So I’m formulating a vague plan.

On a happy note, the Man has returned from his sausage-making expedition smelling of pork and bearing 22 lovely-looking sausages. Moreover, he assures me, we have some more in storage, waiting in a friends’ freezer. It’s a good world, all in all.

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This being the first and only write-up on last night’s presidential debate that I’ve read so far, I’m coming from a distinctly uninformed standpoint here. But never mind that. There are only three points which I wish to call attention to, and I don’t think any of them requires a higher degree of credibility than I have:

1) I can pretty much guarantee that Senator McCain’s almost-decision to “suspend campaigning” in light of the current financial crisis was a purely political move, likely cooked up by advisers to make the Senator appear sympathetic to the crisis and more concerned with his country’s plights than his own campaign. But it’s a catch-22: if he had suspended his campaign, he would STILL be campaigning. The very act of suspension would have been an act of campaigning. Once you enter the presidential race, you don’t leave until someone’s been declared victor. EVERYTHING that you do is part of the act.

2) From the Post article:

“Later, McCain’s voice dripped with derision as he questioned Obama’s statement that he would meet with the leaders of rogue foreign countries, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“So let me get this right: We sit down with Ahmadinejad, and he says, ‘We’re going to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth,’ and we say, ‘No, you’re not’?” the senator from Arizona said.”

Oh, I know what’ll help the USA interact with the world at large: cutting ourselves off from it! No, Mr. McCain. I think it takes a lot of guts for Obama to say something like that on national television (in this era of frighteningly instinctive, “gut-based” electoral politics, Obama now runs the risk of being unhelpfully associated with the Iranian President). I also think that he’s absolutely on the right track. Forging relationships–however tremulous–is something we clearly haven’t tried to do as a country for the last eight years; and I fail to see how a simple willingness to meet with other leaders–however terrible they might be–can be detrimental to us now.

But I think it all stems from a fundamental difference in worldview that was highlighted later on in the debate…

3) Also from the Post: “The two candidates had an emotional exchange over the bracelets they each wear in memory of U.S. soldiers who died in Iraq, underscoring the deep divide created by the war.” I think staff writers Michael D. Shear and Shailagh Murray are wrong here: this is not a divide created by the war. This is a divide that always was. See here:

McCain wears the bracelet of a 22 year old soldier killed outside of Baghdad. McCain recounts the plea of the soldier’s mother: “But Senator McCain, I want you to do everything — promise me one thing, that you’ll do everything in your power to make sure that my son’s death was not in vain.”

Obama wears the bracelet of another young soldier. He says of this soldier’s mother: “She asked me, ‘Can you please make sure another mother is not going through what I’m going through?’”

I couldn’t help, in my circuitious mind, to think of Euripedes’ play The Trojan Women, which might be the most powerful anti-war narrative ever told. It’s not about the soldiering, or even the war itself; it’s about how it effects the women left behind, and it’s painful. McCain wears a bracelet that symbolises finding meaning in war–a defeatist attitude, as if the act of war is inevitable and all we can do is not seek to prevent it, but merely make sure that it is “not in vain”. Obama wears a bracelet that symbolises the possibility that future generations of mothers and sons, of human beings, will not have to suffer the rigors of battle and its gutting aftermath.

“I have left the gates of darkness where the dead are hidden and Hades dwells apart from the gods, and come to this place,” says Polydorus, son of Hecuba and Priam, appearing as a ghost, opening Euripedes’ play. The candidates are in the “this place” of the play; a place not where the dead are hidden but where the living roam, where “future” and “possibility” exist, where the human mind may still be swayed, or opened. Let us hope that we move towards light, and not closer to the gates of darkness.

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