I, So, Late (Rambling thoughts on Coronavirus)

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​The best part of self-isolation is the idea that we can reconnect to the home and the ol’ family values again. The worst part is that the home has already been isolating many people from their family, community or friends for long enough. I don’t like to dwell on bad news but it would be harmful to ignore the fact that domestic violence rates have risen since we were instructed to ‘stay the f*ck at home.’ It’s fair to say, it aint all plain-sailing.

The home. Such a funny concept. The walls from which we pay our tenancy, our division and our duty. The walls which cave our desires and fears. Those walls upon which we engrave our handprints and growing pains. Material items boxed and shelved, strewn, folded and suspended. Layers of dulux paint coating the thumb-prints of parties, blu-tack and capricious memories. Fridges that whirr full of brands and expiry dates. Cupboards that hold contingent tins full of beans and soups that imitate home-cooked homeliness. Grave-yard ovens where every over-cooked scent of frazzled and charred dinner wafts through the fan like a spectre. Microwaves that worry us by whisper of brain tumours but seduce us by their hyper-modern efficiency.

As we sit now, prisoners in our homes, do we see it as a jail? Are we living in solitary confinement cut off from the outside world? No not really. On some ultra-modern hover-craft we are catching the VR train each night; meeting our friends and family in CyberVille. Having house parties on smart phone apps. Swigging vino with mates at the insta LIVE pub. Waving at Nan on Messenger and holding fully-staffed work conferences come Monday on Zoom.

Can we ever really feel isolated in this ultra-connected online world? Or do we feel more isolated by the very fact that we are connected this way?

Many have compared the Coronavirus Pandemic to The Blitz, but who is the real enemy here? The virus? Our neighbours? Or the world we perhaps no longer feel accepted in?

As another 'lockdown' day yawns across the white squares of the calendar into grey chunks of housing blocks, some people continue to drive along the regulated black lines, nostalgic for the adrenaline-pumped fear of being late for the 8am online conference check-in. Others find themselves bankrupt and bed-ridden and are confused by their contented complacency about it because at least, thanks to Corona they don't have to carry on anymore. It is out of their ungloved hands. Others peer through masks out of shutter blinds, their mind, fizzling like Fukoshima. 

No bombs fall here, no spitfires can be heard overhead. Only the tap-tapping of keyboards, muttering of discerning old folks and the occasional car winding in a paranoid haze down the once bustling streets.

Today, the Coronavirus pandemnic reminds me of a poem W. H. Auden penned during the start of the Second World War in 1939,  September 1st; the date of Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Auden, the great cynic of the Empire, originally wrote the last line as ‘We must love one another or die’ but said in an interview that he thought to himself; ‘that’s a damned lie! We must die anyway!’ So he changed it to ‘We must love one another and die’.  In the end he said he hated the whole poem and tried to bury it, but it didn’t die. Snapped up and slapped all over newspapers during the 9/11 attacks, many people have coined it ‘the right poem at the wrong time,’ alas, there is something wise and relevant about it’s nuanced, bored, lonely tone of  inner revolution:

… All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority 
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such things as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Today, comforting ourselves in the cosy furniture of imperialism, Many of us can relate to Auden’s solitary figure observing a terrifying world outside, a world of industry and ego, climate change and mental illness. Others are too busy living. Are we the children who are ‘afraid of the night’?

… Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

…

What resonates with me in this poem is the ideology that above all, we must love, even if Arden said, quite rightly, that as mere mortals we are all to die anyway. And during this pandemic, when people recall the "Blitz spirit" they refer to a sense of stoic British compassion, enduring kindness for the communities shattered and buried under the debris of war. The "Blitz spirit" has always been a myth, academics now say, contrived by the Government to stop us slipping into psychosomatic illness and civilian chaos. But the sense that we need to love one another, give out public displays of affection for our NHS to escape/overcome this enemy is prevalent.
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So, if there are no bombs raining down on us, why do we feel like we are under attack? Perhaps, we are just afraid of the other - Germs or Germans. Isolation then, is the very psychological form of the word. It is a noun as much as it is an adjective. It is not a thing to be in, as in to be in ‘isolation’ it is a thing to describe how someone feels; ‘I am feeling isolation’.

Perhaps it goes back to the Marxist sense of alienation, to feel estranged from our Gattungswesen - our ‘human essence’ as many of us feel estranged from the top tiers of society. Those capitalist stars above, whom we peek at in paranoid curiosity, not through the ‘black mirror’ (our smart phone) but through the glass sky of industry. We feel deeply isolated in our ‘otherness’ to a super-fast world that still perplexes our deeper homely original self.

Or maybe it is simpler than that; isolation a sense of being cut off from an entire town/village/world which doesn't understand us anymore? Doesn't know the real person whom steps out the front door each day and leaps over the chasm of social expectations, smiling and charming their way into a corporate world, where an emotion is an emoji (happy face)?

That very real person, who sits at home and picks their spots in the mirror and worries about their crooked, stained teeth and the stretch marks on their arse. Those whom live with some off-shoot of Modern Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, hopping cautiously over the blemishes on every slab of the pavement to work.

Certainly, many of us don’t feel as if we are good enough to be even a mere commodity to the commercial realm that exists outside our front door. Yet, we are supposed to feel as though we are an asset to this transnational business which is thriving away, all very seriously and judiciously. Whilst this virus shuts down the world we knew, are many of us clamouring to change the way it once was? 

“We are in a square, where nothing really matters apart from our anecdotal lives, all these stories we told one another until this point don’t matter,” said a musician friend of mine in Brighton. “This quarantine has had an unprecedented positive impact upon people who normally live isolated lives, who now become more connected by truth of them sharing an online experience which did not exist previously. Some people may have suddenly realised that they have lived a very lonely experience up until now, saying to themselves ‘what really changed?” 

So here we sit, some who have always felt alone, others who feel impacted by the sudden confinement of the walls, here we are on our computers; waiting for the next big thing to guide us into a sense of seemingly God-given meaning. Dying to feel the present but yet dying to escape from it. 

“In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.”

Adam Curtis.

And in our echo-chambers, here rings the concept of ‘ubuntu’ - or “I am, because you are” - the idea that we all are all connected and that one can only grow and progress through the growth and progression of others. This ideology could intercept, if not demolish, our modern day lives of self-individualisation, re-building a better world beyond neo-liberal warfare and narcissim - if we allowed it to hold space beyond the computer. 

Yet, we are terrified of what lies in between, what could we possibly be without the framework of a digital society to tell us who we are? And what should we be, as seemingly self-determined people, without the goading of others and moreover Parliament to tell us what we should do with our lives? 

How about if our ‘online’ society guided us into greatness, a common good? Like the decent Police officer who tells us to stop having a BBQ on the beach because we should respect the lockdown rules. A gentle nudge in the right direction rather than a water canister sprayed in our eyes. But can we still be good citizens without our essential free-will? One of the great philosophical questions is turned on its head as antagonising algorithms re-code the Bible into HTMLS of hysteria about Muslims, Single Mothers, A 'Chinese Virus'. Technology and bureaucracy become the chief symbols of superiority and we all sit at the shrine of the TV screen as it is preached to us.

Should any of us have a moral superiority? We are told to respect one another by way of keeping distance to not infect our vulnerable, by the means of ‘social distancing’ as it is now known. But, if it was not made law, and we didn't respect that idea, are we still inherently good people, going about our daily lives resuming ‘business as usual’? We may respect this government instruction and take a wide berth around asthmatic Barbara at Waitrose, but do we do so merely in anticipation of how it will reflect upon our own lives? As in, “if my neighbour sees me violating the two meter rule will she hate me?” And when Covid-19 is over, do we go back to resuming our social mores, avoiding one another in a transparent haze?

Maybe most of us are deeply good. Let’s not slip into pedantic pessimism. After all, half a million of us signed up to be NHS Volunteers which is more people than those who signed up in response to Lord Kitchener's chubby finger 'YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU.' (Although, we do have internet now and through the digital spread of information it is much easier to round up the troops, not to mention we have a much larger population.)

If we, the civilians of Britain, have a good altruistic soul, it has been trapped under the St Patrick-flag-blanket of that great lie, the British tight upper lip. Generations of compassionate crusaders have wagged their tongue, ready to sing a language of our unifying values, our aspirations, our humanity. Hundreds of thousands of young people sing to that chorus today. "I am because you are" - the concept has been integral in breaking down the rotten apple of apartheid in post-colonial African countries. Could it pull open the Iron-shutters of the neoliberal Western world now?

Fundamentally, up until now we have gone about our daily business, shopping in Aldi or perhaps Waitrose, purchasing the goods which we feel will sustain our household, our tribe, but where has tribalism turned to? Fighting over loo rolls? And what kind of people are we now, tribes of people, who return to their virtual reality when the outside world has sustained them enough to get by? 

“According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written, not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stage-managers, who had since made a great mess of it.”

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy.

Well, to end my meandering thoughts, if this life is a great old mess, some play where the stage crew have gone awol, why not just enjoy the spectacular theatre of it? In doing so, we might have time to stop and stare and appreciate the beauty of her. Turn off the TiK-ToK app a second to hear the tick-tocking of a world which slowly rotates around the sun, unassumingly, mysteriously and miraculously plodding on. Our singular lives may currently be as atomised as she is - but there are many worlds in this world and just as microscopic life-forms collide; the atoms and fractals also dance a synchronised dance. We are the alchemical soup of something bigger, we are the sum of our parts. Ubuntu.

Margaret Cavendish (c.1653)
17th Century Philosopher and Poet 

Of Many Worlds in This World
Just like as in a nest of boxes round,
Degrees of sizes in each box are found.
So, in this world, may many others be
Thinner and less, and less still by degree:
Although they are not subject to our sense,
A world may be no bigger than two-pence.
Nature is curious, and such works may shape,
Which our dull senses easily escape:
For creatures, small as atoms, may be there,
If every one a creature's figure bear.
If atoms four, a world can make, then see
What several worlds might in an ear-ring be:
For millions of those atoms may be in
The head of one small, little, single pin.
And if thus small, then ladies may well wear
A world of worlds, as pendants in each ear.

W. H. DAVIES

Leisure

What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.

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