Idly watching the world joke and fight on the internet, as the schools closed, I saw factions form. Some hopeful people wrote about all the deferred work they would now have time for. Some people shot back that they should shut up about it because those of us with kids now had to try and work and also homeschool our children and the last thing any of those people are thinking about is increased personal productivity. As my own students in my college courses readied themselves to try to learn from me online, in the intellectual equivalent of a field hospital, I heard from them, again and again, the same things: that though they now had, ostensibly, so much more time and freedom, their focus was shot. They couldn’t seem to sustain attention for anything but the simplest tasks. I began to think that those of us pointing to homeschooling as the reason we couldn’t be productive at work might be missing the true cause, which runs deeper, which has nothing to do with whether you live with children or really anyone else at all, which is the tearing asunder of something we had not thought we could lose.
I can manage perhaps two hours a day of mental effort before I am forced to turn to mindless tasks. I have been working through our massive backlog of laundry. My husband and I have not been in to work in three weeks, but still, work clothes are working their way through the process. Dress pants and button-down shirts are being overtaken, in my folded piles, by our new daily wardrobes, the bagged out jeans and stained sweatshirts. Nothing is public facing anymore.
I am supposed to work, but my mind refuses to attach to anything that isn’t virus related. There is no news from elsewhere. In the paper, most everything is pandemic related, but whatever isn’t I skip over as if it were irresponsibly frivolous: political campaigns, terrorist attacks in East Africa, some form of peace making with the Taliban, all homogenizes into irrelevant patter. I want only the wailing of sirens, the beep of an EKG. My friend John died last week, but of an ordinary thing—a sudden heart attack. The news strikes me bodily, but then is subsumed by the flow of pandemic news. He died, but not of this, so there is not space or time for him.
I take in information ravenously, but find my thoughts growing rare. My mind is not quieting so much as receding from me. I have been looking at acoustic maps of the daily, vertical migrations of plankton in the oceans. At night, the undulant mass of them rises to the sea surface, and then is driven down again by the sun. I think of the Latin species name of the little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus, “the mouse-eared one who flees the light.” My thoughts and ideas flee from me. A dull lassitude has settled in my mind. A hooded darkness has muffled the world, wherever it is, outside my house, my yard, these three other people here with me.
I make video lectures for my students, and from my clothing, you’d think they were all from the same day. Same hoodie, same fleece jacket over it. Only the varying dishevelment of my hair and the type of light coming through the window hint at the passage of time. My attention is fractured, my focus lying in glacier-blue nuggets of glass all over the road after an accident has been otherwise cleared away. Words are growing inaccessible, and instead, I find myself drawing. Every day, I feel compelled to make a picture, the way I used to feel about writing before it began to slip away from me.
A little less than a week ago, I developed symptoms consistent with COVID-19. They have been mostly mild: a transient fever, fatigue, aches, a dry cough, shortness of breath. The line between somatic and psychosomatic blurred and then disappeared as I sat on the couch one evening, and began to feel desperate for air. I stood up, trembling, staring hard at my fingernail beds for any hint of cyanosis. Panic, the only perpetual motion machine, fed on itself, its symptoms the same as those of genuine dyspnea and deadly decline. My husband asked what to do, if he should call for help. I foresaw an oxygen mask, intubation, the frantic clawing of someone in respiratory distress. I forced myself to slow my breathing, terrified more of the hospital, the last place to be if you can possibly help it, where there are too many bodies, too few beds. I pulled air into my lungs and slowly stopped trembling. There’s nothing to do but ride it out at home anyway, and I’m alright. Just tightness in my lungs, and pausing at the top of the stairs with my hands on my knees, catching my breath.
My need for mindless occupation became clear when I had finished every last item of laundry in the house. Pulling the last, matted stratum of socks from the hamper, I said out loud, “Ah ha! I finally got to the bottom of all this!” and suddenly, viscerally, missed my students, their range of reactions to my poor puns and wordplay: the genuine laughers, the polite laughers, the eye rollers, the impassive-too-cool-ers. I won’t see them again. Some of them, ever, some not for months. In some ways, I am well suited to the isolation. Profoundly introverted, I am not suffering for lack of social interaction. I find myself needing to hide somewhere in the house away from my family just to be more fully alone sometimes. But I cannot pretend this is ordinary solitude, of the kind when I work at home, in the blissfully empty house, while everyone is at school or work but me. Torpor and dread coexist somehow, converging to annihilate my capacity to think. I can eat, drink hot drinks, dig and rake the yard until I wonder why I’m so tired and realize six straight hours have passed. I can keep in contact with a few friends, but the conversation is hard to sustain. We mostly send each other pandemic memes; the equivalent of sitting, unspeaking, on the same park bench, people watching the same people. We aren’t sure what day it is. I thought it felt like mourning, but we haven’t mourned, as the losses accumulate. We can only grieve. Mourning is a social act, public, externalized. It is grief brought to the surface. The grief is irretrievably sunken right now, far down deep in darkness while we all carry out whatever is supposed to happen today. Everything but what is strictly necessary has migrated far from us, has been made inaccessible, has been suspended, so deep that the acoustic map can’t tell the mass of it from the seafloor itself, just beneath. Sometime, we’ll have to begin dredging.
thestagecoachroad 