I’ve been Goose since my first few weeks of Uni, when my friend Josh christened me as such and the name stuck. It’s an identity I feel I’ve taken for my own, a name I relate to, a word that weirdly I feel more comfortable with than my own full name. It’s weird that, isn’t it. How a collection of sounds means ‘you’, and yet you can feel no true affinity to that name. Lucy has always felt like someone else’s name – perhaps that’s because it belongs to so many other Lucys. In every school I’ve been in there’s always been others. In almost every job I’ve had, too. No one is called Goose. Just me. (except the Goose in Top Gun, but he’s dead anyway #spoilers).
So it’s funny to have taken this identity with me. I took it to the states, in a way, and then I brought it back. 3 months on the wing to return home to roost. And then I took myself, the goose, l’oie, across the channel to go and amass baguette regrets and learn french.
Then 2020 happened. Covid happened. and I lived through a global crisis in waters that weren’t my own. Weirdly disconnected from the city around me; a migratory creature, never quite settling on solid ground, shifting as the ground shifted under me but with no recourse for the flight home. Clipped wings.
I’ve been thinking recently about how liminal it feels to be bridging this gap between the UK and continental europe, both at a time of global uncertainty and, on the micro level, during brexit. Both of these things on their own would have been untethering experiences, but for me now the two of them have resulted in my feeling cut off from the world. Neither one nor the other. I am a liminal goose, crossing and recrossing the border in my head every day without moving an inch from my front room.
‘It is like the bird as event. The concept is defined by the inseparability of a finite number of heterogeneous components traversed by a point of absolute survey at infinite speed.’
Deleuze & Guattari – what is philosophy
They call this act the survey, or as is written in small brackets marked by the translator’s little * ‘survol’ the over flight. that’s how I’ve translated that with my hard won B1/B2 french. look at me; learning. What I think this bit means is that the Event (the thing that happens) is made up of all these little zones of happening, and the always already happenings, which is traversed, or crossed, by the point of observation (me, the goose, the bird). Always already transitory, not belonging to either zone or the other, and only able to see the happenings from a great distance. The overlappings of happenings. This is rudimentary – I find when i read Deleuze and Guattari that I think I understand more than what I actually understand; like when I first moved to france and told people ‘I understand more than I can speak’ which was wildly incorrect. People who are not very skilled often over estimate their ability – people who are very competent underestimate it. We meet in the middle at a falsehood of competence. So I may have misread them, but tbh I feel like a lot of theory-bros also misunderstand them, so I’m probably not alone in that respect.
Anyway – back to the image of the migratory goose, crossing the threshold of two spaces (england/france. the brexit barrier) I feel like the moniker, Goose, allowed me to exit the threshold of who I had been before I became myself, and so it’s funny that this moniker has bridged the threshold of the two zones of myself as well as the threshold of this new section of my life, where I straddle the channel and exist neither in one place or the other. Constantly in the underpass of European identity.
I see few birds in this city. Hardly hear them in fact. Paris, in the early hours of Monday mornings in winter is devoid of birdsong in a way I never imagined it could be. The most romantic city in the world, strangled by its forced pollution and rising fog ridden and silent in its late sunrise. On the migratory course, few canadian geese find their way here, the river in not being tidal has fewer birds for its banks never protrude and offer up morsels for the eating. I did see an otter there once, though – so that was new.
Watching the news I see reports on the happenings across the channel. A french dubbed Boris Johnson talks in feigned bluster like an SNL sketch and I feel like I’m looking at myself from the outside. What is national identity? I firmly believe it doesn’t really exist, not for us anyway – we’re a disparate conglomerate of people, neither fish nor fowl, and unable truly to come to a decision about things.
For Deleuze and Guattari, again ‘The concept of a bird is found not in its genus or species but in the composition of its postures, colours, and songs.’ What then is the concept of myself-as-goose? How are my postures, colours and songs shifting by being placed in this liminal space. An English Goose in french airspace, hanging on the wing over the declared covid battlefield, “Nous sommes en guerre’… bu, the enemy is invisible and uncaring and unbattleable. We can’t drone strike it, or force a racial bias on the populace in order to convince people to go to war against it. War is, in and of itself, a futile metaphor for what is happening. As D&G talk about zones within a concept, the a and b, and the fragility of the ab space which is both and neither of the former, then within the existence of the liminal goose (that is to say, myself) there exists the a (the UK) the b (France) the ab (where I exist both between, and above, the two) and then we add onto this the layer of c, in which covid anxiety and the shift in landscape that comes along with that anxiety, has further warped the conjunction of zones and my position within them. I exist in the zone of abc, and due to my position here, I exist within it alone. I am Goose. I am Lucy. I am British. I’m in France. I am worried about the effects of Covid on those I love in two places, who operate under two sets of rules, and the entire landscape of a city I had slowly been falling for shifts every 8 weeks as we fail to manage the disintegration of its structures under the measures of ‘war’.
This has gotten confused, and confusing. I don’t really know what I’m trying to say – except that I’m a fish out of water. Or, if you’d rather, A goose in unfriendly skies. Unfriendly weathers. A goose out of weather.
Anyway – I’m finding this thread of thought q interesting so expect to have more in this vein of thinking soon (or maybe late).
Take care of yourselves.
L’Oie
Goose FM 