I can and I can't believe what is happening. My brain is having difficulty piecing together all the facts into a coherent thread, a story I can get on board with. But then my darkest dreams and private fantasies about a 'clean slate' crisis seem to be happening, but the feeling isn't giddy joy but choking anxiety because as much as I'm loathe to admit it the status quo, despite it's traits of exploitation and quantifiable miseries and structural violence, has it's hooks in me. Even if my conscious mind has criticised and reviled it, it has still been the ground of everything. And now that ground is trembling and fragmenting and threatening to shift and upturn, again in ways I've fantasised about since I learned the very word capitalism, but still; as a bull-top might say from one of the many gay pornos I've been watching in my anxious exile from group activities, 'this is gonna hurt' (cue exaggerated moaning from an underpaid amateur bottom who is probably high as a kite on some unholy cocktail of GHB and poppers).
The people around me feel like echoes of themselves because the lives and dreams and plans that stilted them up or reinforced them in my mind's eye as an imaginary assumption, all of those intangible supports have gone, vacated, evacuated, emptied out into the void of non existence which feels closer than it's ever been. In my lifetime anyway. I've never lived through anything like this before lol.
We're in this strange transitional time between business as usual and formal closures and lockdown of businesses and schools. In this period I'm still going to work and putting on an admittedly threadbare smile and actively dissociating while I bring people their meals and take their drink orders. Also I'm splitting right down the middle as separate, kind of mutually exclusive concerns about isolating but also about supporting small business at this time yell each other down in the street. I mean, I've been serving families, large groups of revellers who are treating these past few nights as their last hoorah before going to ground, like it's a lark or an inconvenience and not a global health crisis with a steepening gradient of fatalities. Maybe I am being melodramatic, but which mode of operation is appropriate at this time; overly cautious or devil may care? The fact that I'm seeing the latter being performed by so many adults, and the fact that the knee jerk reaction of stressed out middle-class white people is to go out for dinner and drinks after a day of working from home and getting groceries delivered, exacerbates to me the difference in experience of a global crisis between the rich/comfortable, and everyone else. Not everyone has the security to treat covid19 as a novel chapter in society's flawed unfolding where they can stay home and catch up on highly-rated shows they've missed. If anything most people are experiencing it like you would a mental illness, because though psychology likes to pretend socioeconomic statuses have nothing to do with mental illness, it has EVERYTHING to do with mental illness; which means people with relative material security right now, who are outside the demographic of viral severity (under sixties, standard immune health etc) will be fucking fine, and are selfishly acting like it while the rest of us scramble to feel normal. If inequality was a bottomless source of disease before crisis, then I can't help but predict those wounds brought on by structural violences will only fester and worsen now.
The morality of the thing is freaking me out too, akin to McCarthyism or similarly paranoid witch-hunts with a vaguely ethical 'community-minded' basis. We are accusing each other of misconduct, establishing a precedent of shame and guilt, which is probably not ideal considering we've barely scratched the surface of what collective isolationism will mean when and if (but most likely when) level 3 closures are announced (at the time of writing this they hadn't, lol shit's pretty real now). I'm wondering how many thoughts and feelings and compulsive-anxious activities I can recycle over the next few months, whether I'm going to develop any nervous tics, using this time to expand my skill set and be 'creative' like my IG keeps recommending, or just go full feral and deep dive into the kinds of existential malaise normally reserved for immortal beings who are inconveniently and impossibly suicidal. There are certain movies I keep thinking about, the most obvious being Steven Soderbergh's Contagion (which I'm seeing on Google Play is currently one of their most popular digital rentals) but also that graphic-novel adaptation 30 Days of Night about a small town in perpetual night as per their arctic winters that has to survive a band of vicious nomadic vampires.
Obviously in the latter movie there's no virus spreading except for maybe the viral contagion of blood-sucking undead-ness, though in the film's climactic scene only one character is 'turned' while every other victim is dismembered and consumed (after prolonged sequences of torture, which the vamps seem to enjoy; like tenderising beef with a skillet before frying for optimum results?). However, the reasons I'm thinking about the film right now is the lockdown the town goes into as they realise somewhat incredulously (but which they are finally forced to openly acknowledge) that they have an infestation of vamps, and being super-strong and otherwise supernaturally endowed, their only chances of survival against vamps are in hiding out. Hankering down against a virulent, spectral enemy stalking the empty roads and eerily vacated sites of everyday life. Sound familiar?
Though of course the reality of covid19 doesn't look anything like this; ghosts/demons/vampires traipsing the skeletal remains of an abandoned city-scape sniffing humans out like rabid truffle pigs. But this image in it's hyperbolic narrative heft has something of an emotional realism to me, hews closer to the picture in my head and how various media sources have suggested I frame the situation. Is it a meta-narrative? And if it isn't, what is the current over-arching narrative and what consummate impressions (from friends and family, the internet etc) have synthesised to give said narrative (if it exists yet) it's particular flavour?
Do you remember 9/11? I barely do because I was ten years old and had recently discovered masturbation, so that was taking up a lot of head space with little left over for a consideration of geopolitics. But I do remember picking up on this sense of the world having changed in the course of a few hours, the strain on the faces of the adults around me as their world-picture was called into intense and rapid overhaul re America's reactionary call to arms, and that country's failure to acknowledge it's own invasive foreign policies which may or may not have directly caused the attack. The world had become a different place in a very short space of time, even if only symbolically as yet (especially for people as removed from the world-stage as New Zealanders, though we are now less naive about our actual place in the global order; there is no such thing as being outside the totalising metrics of this world, really, which becomes even more true under duress of crisis).
I remember as a child reading this in my childish way and experiencing a burst of euphoria, the same feeling I would get when there was an unexpected day off, like a teachers only day or faculty deciding school would break for the year a day or two earlier than expected, because just fuck it! It was the pleasure of disruption, of the status quo being shirked in favour of something more carnivalesque. The feeling was contagious and suddenly my friends and I were chanting '9/11!' And swinging each other round like it was a game, until my teacher growled us and said we were too young to register the situation's gravity but people had died and our response was insensitive.
Which it was.
But I feel the same weird joy-cum-horror right now, only this time it's struggling with the more adult realisations that disruption is never materially simple, that processes of liberation along the way induce suffering and demand collateral, and who is to say what (and who) is and isn't collateral? What will be cast into the flames of this conflagration and what will we conserve? Do we even have as much power as that to make some of those calls ourselves, or are we completely powerless to make significant shifts and resistances over the next few months?
I don't know. Uncertainty is my bread and butter right now.
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