Two Nouns #21 -- In the Sick House
COVID as Copy and Paste
A meditation on coronavirus, this newsletter format has been stolen with pride from Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House,* thanks also due to The Artist's Way.
COVID as Boiled Frog
In January, my dear father, a pulmonologist and public health expert, took on the mantle of Nigerian Paul Revere; I first stopped shaking hands during business meetings in Paris in late February. My employer banned business travel the first week of March and sent everyone home five days later; I have spent nearly one month in London “sheltering in place.” I am familiar with the earliest forms of restrictions, and bracing for the next. I am grateful for my safety.
via @woke8yearold
COVID as Mobius Strip
I am grieving a clear timeline of past, present or future. In this scrambled version the division of day into night into week has quickly lost meaning. We are each somewhere on a continuum between the moment you realized that you are living through a once in a century crisis and the moment you emerge, blinking, into whatever is next. China is living furthest into the unknown; Italy is some 10 days ahead of the rest of Europe; the US – and your mileage varies depending on where exactly – lags another two weeks, and the poorest, least developed countries are further behind still. The organized fictions of daylight savings time now seem quaint; we are all orbiting a new star, the aptly-shaped virus that does not care when you are in your encounter with it.
COVID as History Lesson
The Onion article for this moment is this classic, in which “According to the historians, by looking at things that have already happened, Americans can learn a lot about which actions made things better versus which actions made things worse, and can then plan their own actions accordingly."
We do not appear to be not doing that. The word quarantine refers to the 40 days Italian sailors would keep ships in a harbor before allowing them into their ports during the 14th century black death. We just celebrated a century since the end of the first World War, but skipped memorials to the failures of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Two years before George Orwell's 1984, Albert Camus' novel The Plague introduced an up-is-down denial of official facts that feels too fresh.
COVID as The Big One
I think often of that goosebumpy New Yorker article about the Cascadia fault line running underneath Washington state (the American canary this time as well). Kathryn Schulz's reporting touches on Japanese and native American oral and artistic representations of an earthquake and tsunami that crippled the Pacific coast around the year 1700. We built Seattle and Portland on shaky ground anyway, because we did not or could not listen to the humans devastated 200 years prior.
Whatever your familiarity with seismology (and I have not become an armchair scientist this month) it is humbling to understand that we have lost the civilizational memory to be able to see danger coming. More worrisome of course is the lack of political cohesion and empathy as our prevailing forms of organization (nation states; brokerage accounts) fail us all.
COVID as Night Stalker
Last week I was taking a sanity stroll to cleave the day from the night. In a Bloomsbury park, I made sudden eye contact with a woman in her 60s, preparing, I thought, a safe place to sleep overnight. We startled one another. If in normal times we were two women at risk – totally alone behind a darkened hedgerow– the pandemic produced unusual ease. Who would rob and rape in a time like this? In her eyes, I registered distress, then calm. She saw the same, and I nodded to her – we both feared a greater villain of the night. Still, I think we were relieved not to see a man looking back at us.
COVID as Passport Privilege
Control is a fiction, I have relearned lately. Still, I am the kind of person who always wants to know how I got sick -- which grubby subway paws or coughing airplane toddler is responsible for a cold.
So I was briefly obsessed with the superspreader from Vietnam, a twenty something heiress to a steel fortune who likely imported COVID-19 to Milan and then Paris fashion weeks. Likewise the academic scientist who set off Boston’s outbreak with their presence at a biotech conference. And the second home owners who use summer as a verb, now compromising communities across the Hamptons, the Hudson Valley and Cape Cod.
Examining the causality here was harsh medicine for me. It now seems that the thoughtless routine of global travel that has defined my last decade is its own virus, one circulating this disease to places where the less privileged are going to suffer. I wonder about the positive climate impact of everyone staying home, hoping we have triggered a pause in the warming process so profound it might be seen from space, or at least the future.
COVID as Bad Juju
I worry about the delayed onset in African countries, whose residents are commonly quarantined from the west via zealous immigration restrictions that for a time provided them a buffer from foreign disease.
I note the first African cases of COVID came via the “been tos” – the wealthy locals back from holiday, the Euro-American corporate workers toggling, as I did, between London and Johannesburg, Paris and Dakar, Los Angeles and Lagos.
Even as the continent’s tech and venture capital scene scrambles to source smart responses to the crisis, I think about the craven African leaders who duck and run to OECD markets to have their health care needs met. I belly laugh that they now must lie in the beds they have left unmade. Then I gulp to think about the harm that will sweep through societies where multiple generations of public failure have produced a vacuum of credibility, a reliance on spiritualism, not enough running water to follow COVID rule #1.
COVID as Leftovers
I have devoured listicles documenting the things left behind in the mad disemboweling of western supermarkets. Shoppers have abandoned chocolate hummus, vegan meats, Hawaiian pizza. Fair play.
Unpopular for a reason (via Aaron Strick)
What are the cultural practices we might leave on the shelf after this? The business suit? The cinema? Air travel? Ideally, the fiction that some work is skilled and some work is not. Looking at real or digital storefront shelves, spare a thought for the abstract supply chains that bring you Kenyan broccoli and Spanish oranges, the central American migrant labor that won't pick this year's harvest, the last mile of at-risk delivery staff. Spare a thought for the doctors who are suiting up as best they can.
COVID as Refrigeration
Driving up a southern Michigan road one afternoon in 2009, I saw a phalanx of men wearing reflective vests and moving cones about the highway. They were marked as employees of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Obama-era stimulus that kept millions of households from disappearing down the drain. I remember how often politicians and pundits used the phrase “shovel ready” to describe such projects, and applied it to the men that I saw. It’s a grim phrase in today's context.
People talk about governmental plans to rescue capitalism as cryogenic – we’re attempting to freeze and later reanimate the global economy without suffering too much nerve damage. Others see this as a moment for a liberal shock doctrine – to burn it all down and start somewhere better for working people.
Neighborhood restaurants, gyms, personal care, live experiences – all at risk of premature death. My pet industry in this madness is the creative sector. Somewhere in my brain is lodged the fact that Austrian artists Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt and Kolo Moser all perished in the 1918 flu outbreak. Heavy losses even without tallying a dollar value.
Klimt's "Death and Life" at the Leopold Museum.
It’s great that Netflix has volunteered $100 million to support the entertainment production sector. Many other private companies are contributing in kind, but not enough. And remember that the Depression-era Federal Project Number One threw a governmental life preserver to writers and painters and musicians. Defending the project – which at its zenith employed 65,000 creative people – in 1936, bureaucrat Jacob Baker celebrated “its progressive revelation to the American public of the economic significance of cultural activities, which, instead of being luxuries that can be dispensed with, are enrichments of our lives, and material as well as spiritual enrichments.”
COVID as Conference Call
Like many of you, I recently said goodbyes I didn’t know were long goodbyes. I’ve canceled anticipated reunion plans, and worried about loved ones far away. We are on pause from full humanity. Our psychosocial preference to connect is why we hunted in packs and slept in piles and lived in villages until so very recently. It’s why we are now on Zoom and House Party and Marco Polo and people are creating masterpieces on TikTok and Twitter and YouTube.
Technology has kept us close. But we shouldn’t mistake motion for progress. The efforts to other and disadvantage some nations, classes (hello “essential workers”) and businesses form a part of the ongoing discourse of blame and hierarchy. Be vigilant. This isn’t even the end of the beginning.
COVID as Dream House
*The most inventive prose I’ve come across in years. Machado writes the experience of domestic abuse in bursts that form a tale of dread, knowledge, and catharsis. The subject matter has particular resonance for a quarantine in which some people are trapped in settings they would not have otherwise chosen, with those who may mean them harm, and tensions high, and nowhere to go. Resources to help here.
COVID as Action
If you have wondered how to use any relative security you may have to create it for others here is a short list of causes I think worth supporting.
Thanks for reading as always. In solidarity,
Dayo