When I think of the word “coronavirus”, I become conscious of my lungs.
I feel the head of a sail tied around my vocal chords, the luff drawn down the mast of my spine, tack tied to the pit of my stomach. Tobacco-stained, slightly ragged, it thrashes in anxious winds, snapping this way and that, twisting over on itself, knots within knots.
The breath has cultural and spiritual significance. It is the physical centre of many Eastern religious practices. The virus attacks this centre, the very system that produces breath, the effluence that marks the space between the living and the dead. It poisons the red roots that give us this life.
If we are to take this virus seriously as creatives, then we should know it for what it is, for what it does, and face it head-on. In his essay I, Coronavirus, Bayo Akomolafe calls it Mother, and identifies her as creator and destroyer, clearing the air of our carbon decay while tearing apart our lungs [1]. His tone is awe-struck, perhaps over-awed. Maybe that’s just how I read it.
But it is this frame of emphasis, and how he moves it around, that is most compelling. If I were to compliment it with an image, it would be a pair of pneumonic lungs. You’d feel the plunging effort of your breath while looking at it. For me, this writing is my struggle for breath.
Sometimes I confuse the words convalescence and convulsion with one another. In lockdown this was a dangerous mistake; there were moments I got so twisted up inside that I thought I’d turn inside out, my sail folding over me like a winding sheet.
The more I try to write these posts, the more it dawns on me that an autoethnographic account cannot be sanitised. Fooling yourself only muddies the page, warps the frame, obscures the image.
Apparently nearly everything else can be sanitised: hands, worktops, floors, promises, expectations, statistics. Communication. This is the “official” narrative of the virus, and all things are to be cleansed of impurity as long as it exists; the ritual must continue again and again and again. An alms-giving to empirical science and dismal economics.
Lungs filling up with whitewash. It doesn’t improve the image. It doesn’t help inspire the creative id. I must be honest.
I work two jobs, one during the day as an undertaker and pallbearer, the other at night as part of the transfer team for the coroner. This means I usually deal with old people and funerals during the day, young people and overdoses at night. As one might expect, these jobs can be both dangerous and interesting, not always, but they have that potential, especially during these “trying times”.
During the peaks of the pandemic, the workload could be overwhelming. I would often work on call with my day job late into the night, only to have to attend a call from the other early in the morning. The pattern would cycle around to the next day and I would go home and try to write something for my course before the next call. Rarely would something be written.
At those peak times the mortuary would be full of coffins on sets of load-bearing wheels, they would overflow into the cold rooms, into the chapels, into the embalming room, into the workshop. Staff would push themselves between the fleet, shuttling them back and forth, only to encoffin more of the deceased, more for the voyage. We’d go out to care home after care home, hospital after hospital. We’d go to people’s houses and secure their recently-passed to carry stretchers and struggle down the stairs with a strained air of dignity as the family looked on, gasping in our masks, steaming up our face-shields, sweating in our Personal Protective Equipment. It became routine.
Apart from my recent financial woes, at least you could call it a living. Or maybe you shouldn’t.
I speak of this because it was my experience of the pandemic. It didn’t really help my creativity. It got in the way, and it seemed to make my writing cold and anemic (I sent a weird piece declaiming the merits of solitude to a writing competition, which they coolly passed over with Wittgensteinian-esque silence).
When I had time off, I usually didn’t know how to spend it in a way favourable to recuperation. I would pace around my bedroom, back and forth. After a while I started pacing around the kitchen and dining room, until someone else living here said I looked like a caged animal. So I went outside.
I would take a walk around the block and eventually it became my route. I would pass things along the way that would make me think; a vacant, neglected playground, a murder of crows cackling in the arms of leafless trees, a pond full of rubbish near a place called “The Keep”. A plant tray sat on a garden wall with a sign on it saying “Help Yourself”. There was nothing in it. For a while this is what I noticed. It took me a while to see the good in things, but my route was a kind of “detox”.
That walk was more of a boost to my creativity than the surreal absurdities of funeral care during a global pandemic. My sail only fluttered, breathing became easy, the image formed clearly in my mind.
Two very nice people on my course have recently produced a blog called the Elpis Anthology. Soon they will be showcasing pieces of writing from that anthology based on the theme of Hope, which looks to be more than what you’ll get here. Please take a look, and thank you for reading.
[1] Bayo Akomolafe, I, Coronavirus: Mother, Monster, Activist (2020) <http://www.emergencenetwork.org/icoronavirus/> [accessed 7 May 2021].