Written 15 April, 2020
I get up at 5.30am to light K’s fire, and go back to bed in the cabin and sleep till 9. I wake to hear a discussion of creativity on Radio National’s “Life Matters”. Perhaps because I’m so tired, I do something I normally wouldn’t have the courage to do – though I’m still in my nightie, I sit on the steps and ring in and offer a hot tip on creativity: Don’t grab at the first idea that occurs, but meditate to stop the chatter of the mind, and that way, when thoughts do occur, they’ll come from remote locations: so my hot tip: go for the weird thought. It’s not really weird, it just breaks our expectations of ourselves. I use the image of one of my favourite neuroscientists; It’s like reeling in a fish from a long way off, and as you bring it in, you collect with it bits of all the other fish along the way, so you haul in a fish like the world has never seen.
Then I go back to bed. In the afternoon, NIDA NEWS, a newsletter connected with NIDA, rings and asks could they serialize this blog. I sleepily agree. And go back to bed. I don’t get out of my nightie until I go for a long row before the light leaves the bay – and this time, I don’t take a fishing line. Maybe we can try to trust shops after all; maybe next week, it’ll work.
Another email from Shelley, my playwright friend in New York:
Dear Sue,
When last I wrote you, I was telling you that in this time objects are becoming words– like those black gloves on the ground I told you about and today, the teeny ferns growing out of stone wall of the park.
I want to try to describe to you my struggle to speak/write during these first 5 weeks that Covid was recognized as present in my country.
March was the month when the United States officially accepted we were in the pandemic.
It became the month that I lost my tongue.
It became hard to remember descriptive words or to get the words that I knew out of my mouth. They turned into a confusion of wings, without birds. A mute cacophony of stop or startle.She knows these nowShe knows theseGrammar in clumps on the ground. Stringing words together into coherent sentences became impossible.
There were no words to send out as my explorers into the new world of this pandemic—a place unknown to every person on the planet and which none of us had volunteered to venture into. When something microscopic, invisible, far reaching (and let’s not forget deadly), is hungry for us most of all among the planet’s inhabitants—words are not safety.
Running is safety, screaming is safety, weeping is safety because they are actions and reactions against the unspeakable. But Words, our emissaries of explanation, communication, and speculation mean nothing to such an adversary and so they hibernated inside me.
The words I loved to play in like an adept juggler, flew up and never came down again.
It is already April and while I feel more coherent, I still feel my language set as useless to the situation as I find my persistent peering out the window towards Mt. Sinai hospital.
The only patients now are coronavirus patients. Every day I peer out at its back windows and they all look empty inside. I know there are hundreds of patients in there,
but they might as well be as invisible as the virus that flew into their mouths, eyes, ears and landed them here. Lets be honest, I don’t have a single skill to soothe, let alone save any one of them. Words of my kind are unrepentant voyeurs.
Of my five senses, only sight seems to be fully operationable at the moment.
Hearing, smell, taste. and touch, especially touch, no longer knows face it how to speak their minds. All the people and things I can’t hold or run my hands over anymore. All of us become Philomela; our tongues cut out so we can’t speak the truth of what is happening to us.
This pandemic takes away more than taste and smell; I have lost my sense of perception, that 6th sense, which puts the 5 into harmony, into decipherable patterns, into story making.
The Corona Virus Hospital outside Shelley’s window. Photo by Alejandro Fogel.