The image seems clear, even obvious, to me – it could be from one of the better-written fantasies, or from a film about some medieval saga... an old man living alone in the woods; there is a shift in the wind, or the light – he looks up, creases his forehead slightly, sniffs the air – sighs, without much emotion, and turns to walk towards a small wooden cottage. Where he will look among boxes and shelves for certain books, some dried herbs; for small but powerful things he hasn't needed for a long time....
***
I started taking this current virus seriously earlier than most of the people around me – about six weeks ago, probably between the second and the fifth of March, because we were getting messages from colleagues in northern Italy. One of the email lists I subscribe to has a lot of them – northern Italy is fertile ground for Jungians – and they were very clear what they were going through.
It was not good.
Antonio, who is also a heart surgeon, was very definite that this would hit us like a ton of bricks; Monica, who works with victims of torture and is thus not easily spooked, and others, also spoke up, with real grief, fear....
So I had early warning, and not from media or rumor. A transition to dropping things in order to take the new crisis seriously was made smoother by our rather unfortunate university strike – not well planned, not apparently successful... the new leaders of the union are passionate but not calculating, the kind of people who are so certain that everyone will understand that they are right, if only people would see, see!, then they will surely support our noble cause!
I don't know why they didn't issue us banners of some kind. As the strike ended, the virus was increasingly visible, and the world changed, leaving the strike in the dustbin of history, along with a number of other things.
Of course, the UK as a whole has stumbled to catch up with the virus – as has our university, and our school. Days after some of us were already doing online classes, figuring out software by talking to each other, the university finally started cranking out policy statements... and we received Statements that the university and school Knew that we were Anxious (and thus, by implication, helpless), but that with the Help of the People at the Top we would all somehow get along.
Which completely ignores the reality, which is that university lecturers are distinctly smart people who can figure things out, make things happen, make unusual situations work....
I suppose it's another facet of neoliberalism, though most supposed leaders in most historical eras would probably do the same thing: panic, lose focus, hold meetings, babble, and finally send out policy statements.
After so many years in so many different corporations and departments and universities, my need for, and interest in, statements by people in official positions seems to have completely dried up....
Which is also in tune with what is happening now: one doesn't have to be nobly and radically optimistic to sense the strong intelligence of groups and communities, the deep ability and passion to take care of each other. An ability and passion entirely missing in many political structures and professionals these days, especially in the English-speaking countries, which have been finally getting their comeuppance for long periods of arrogant prosperity.
An ability and a passion to, in a phrase that has been so battered over the past fifty years that it seems, at times, to consist of mere splinters:
to build a better world....
***
Thursday, the third week of March. The university will mostly close soon, so, on a Saturday I take an Über into town. I wear a mask – it is my first time out doing so, and I am awkward with it, and my glasses keeps steaming up. Ordering masks was in itself fairly difficult – Amazon, online, expensive, and only the third order was not canceled; they took four days to arrive, but Antonio had told me I needed them (FFP2 are the type we want, and FFP3 are really overkill), so I got them. He had phoned me the previous weekend while I was walking across campus, and given me clear marching orders: go home, get a mask, don't hang around in the middle of even this small city.
And Mary Jo, who was a professional nurse – and before that was an Army nurse, so she puts up with no nonsense of any kind – said she had just gone out in her New York neighborhood with a mask and gloves. She said people smiled at her, but were pleasant – I am having the same experience: people smile or don't have expressions, but no one seems mocking or shocked. I must not be the first to do this on campus.
The taxi driver is young, Muslim – curly hair and some acne, a big, sweet lad from the looks of things. We talk about making money – he was a bouncer before this, but he didn't like it; I point out that being a bouncer will also not be a job in much demand for a while, he is surprised, he had not thought of these things – but he gets it. Things are a bit complicated for him; somebody hit his car in London, totaled it, he borrowed money to get this one – and now Über business is declining. We talk a bit about how to manage, finding something to do, some income or support... he's confident that things will be all right. He evidently has family and friends around here, so: support systems.
I get out, waving to the guys working on the roof of the house across the street – it still feels a bit odd to be wearing the mask, but okay. And I tip the driver £5 on the app – that's the second time I've done that this week – that burst of empathy...
***
Some Geordie friends have told me several times that masks are useless. (One repeated this today, in Easter week... which seems very late for such nonsense; there's an echo of working-class bravura and cynicism, that defensive move where they make everything look awful, historically so they could bear all the bad news.) They don't seem to quite understand: it is indeed difficult to completely block this virus, but it's not hard to slow it down, and slowing it down could be the difference between light, and –
Well, it could be a way of keeping systems from collapsing; and perhaps of keeping individual people alive.
It is now, in the second week of April, calm, for me... in the past few weeks people have erupted with indignation, and the English and American governments have responded with startlingly incompetent selfishness. Fortunately we are in an internet world, and people generate ways to take care of themselves, of their neighborhoods... there is something very real and very intelligent about what is coming from medical people, scientific people, and a vast number of everyday people who are paying attention to them – mostly not from political people, of course, but honestly who cares about them at this point.
***
I have given not one but two online interviews about COVID-19 in comparison to AIDS. Of course, everyone is weighing in about everything these days – there are good and neutral reasons for this: everything is very charged, people are isolated in a startling external quietness, people want to do things to recreate the parts of their world that seemed normal – and so there are constant attempts by individuals and systems to integrate meanings into the illness, into the experience of the illness....
***
COVID-19 and AIDS are absolutely different, of course, in the real world.
AIDS is a strange meta-sickness, attacking the system of defenses so that other illnesses, strange and unfamiliar because they’re normally too weak, appear. And the disturbingly invasive aspects of that older virus being contacted through sex or needles – it is always weirdly threatening, disorienting because of those images of invasion and transformation. Even after nearly forty years, it remains... strange, and strange to understand.
COVID-19, on the other hand, is a variety of a cold/flu virus – the most familiar thing there is, the thing that everyone everywhere knows, the most everyday sickness – families, kids, schools, people sniffling in a shopping center, or coughing in a theatre in winter. Of course this version is transformed through its severity – and its slight strangeness: there are familiar cold/flu symptoms that appear, but others that don’t; and the real worry, the thing that is hard for us to absorb because of its strangeness, is that it will become total: that the choking off of air will move through the lungs.
In the online interviews, this was the part I was most uncomfortable saying... and I don't need to expand on it here. It's clearly the thing that has all the medical people so distraught, so – may I say – broken-hearted? And it is...
It seems to be a hard death. The body choking, the lungs filling, tension and exhaustion, for some hours or days. Not the worst death, and certainly not the most long-drawn-out, but – perhaps something where a part of the experience is: there isn't time to manage one's feelings.
***
And now I am sorry that I said that. It probably doesn't make any difference, but... I'm sorry.
***
These two illnesses are absolutely different, at the surface, at the level where all the realities and symptoms happen.
But, at a deeper level... the fear and anxiety around serious illness, and the deep terror of death...
I've written such a lot around this in the past couple of years, working on the books about HIV/AIDS; I don't want to go too far into Becker's Denial of Death, its brilliant update in The Worm at the Core, or the depths reached by Herzog in Psyche and Death, his book on death archetypes, which changed my understanding forever.
Suffice it to say that the terror of death is a basic driver of culture; it is something deep and amazingly universal. My own sense of what death means has expanded in the past few years, from the sharp images I got too close to in the late 80s, to... a sense that it is always too big for us to imagine. Which is why most of our religions, philosophies, tales, creations, and destructions exist at all: we are constantly trying to make, build, something that will stand up to it.
None of them are complete answers, though.
Our urban Western culture has, of course, become relatively blithe and clueless about death as a familiar part of our world, especially death in the streets (you have to go back to the Spanish flu for that). Mostly only medical people and military people remember, as it is deeply embedded in their livelihoods.
Others cannot usually acknowledge the possibility of death – therefore the current wave of bad government, especially in the English-speaking world, shuffles, avoids, gets confused and chaotic… leaders whose derangement and dysfunction seems, finally, to have real consequences. The worst of them have never taken either death or life seriously, and it is catching up with them.
***
That's what is the same about the two illnesses: though they are utterly different, all the deep panics, complexes, deep structures and deep chaotic reactions, seem... exactly the same.
Which is why everyone in all of the HIV+ groups seems to have slightly puzzled expressions pass across their faces, intermittently over the past month – a bit like mine: are you all as utterly surprised, as panicky, as you seem to be? Did you not know that these things are possible in our universe?
Are you like young children, who cannot understand why Grandpa won't be coming back from the church?...
***
The Crisis (the current one, not the old one) has more sharply etched the differences between people. Some people I know are ready, not unaware, not shocked – others are anxious and disoriented...
There is no way of telling from a person's background, from what you already know about them, whether they can handle this or not. Which also means hierarchies of strength and weakness, independence and dependency, arrogance and timidity, are shifting – they keep getting reshuffled, some of the very loud are suddenly relegated to whimpering confusion. And, more pleasantly, some who are frequently uncertain seem... clear, definite. Unconfused.
And yes, I realize, we ain't seen nothin' yet, and things will change, and people will also change, possibly several times. I'm talking about the way we respond to the general prospect of serious illness, of people dying, and the ability to manage major changes in public behavior, in the look and feel of the streets, of the city.
There are people who are not disoriented at seeing danger ahead, and sometimes it's a surprise. You don't know much about their lives and you think, with curiosity: where did you learn that?
But that ties in with the entire psychological/cultural/existential conversation around the denial of death, in its ancient and modern forms: things happen around us, and we may either pay attention to them, draw conclusions and realize what is and what is not real... or we don't.
There is such a range of variation in this, so many different stories and lives and psychological structures – but at the moment it feels as though the largest difference is between people who have crossed some line to be able to imagine this kind of thing, and yet go on; and people who have not...
Of course the exceptions are the medical and the military, whom I refer to every time I talk about this, as though they are two magical castes who know more than the rest of us... and perhaps they are. Even among them this is not universal, but it is much harder for a nurse or doctor to hold onto a panicky naïveté in the face of death; most of them eventually, at three in the morning after a long shift, or by the bed of a patient they've come to like, will have to cross to... understanding.
***
Interestingly, some who are usually fretful and anxious seem peculiarly calm in the current atmosphere. Perhaps if you carry around anxiety, and no one ever seems to understand it or take you seriously – and then you are in a situation where there is a real reason for anxiety, and everyone else is anxious too...
that seems to be calming. They seem to speak and move differently than they usually do, as though through a liquid that is lighter, less resistant. Everything has become, unexpectedly... easy.
***
In the first days of confinement, extroverts were so confused, so frustrated! Suddenly bound indoors with their feelings, especially those feelings they might usually avoid in energetic, outward-facing activities – and now all they could do was have those feelings... they snap at others online, and explain at length how everyone else in the world is clearly a fool. Blame and chaos: extroverts thrown back into the noise that lives inside them.
Some extroverts seem to have been positively enraged that they could be mocked for this – perhaps they do not notice the ways that they would normally shove the introverts aside, mildly mock and ignore them. Well, although of course extroversion and introversion are polarities and real humans live in the large spaces between them... perhaps we should have expected this.
One extrovert I know, after two weeks of weirdly aggressive and dramatic pronouncements about many things under the sun, posted that he sensed a lot of irritability online lately... and perhaps even he had shown some of it. But I can only roll my eyes so many times on any given day....
Many introverts seem, on the contrary, rather calm. Perhaps, for many, this is how things should go... most of my analysands are actually calmer than usual, as though the world is pulling at them less. They are centered... and several of them are moving with astonishing speed through personal transformations that have been near, visible but not quite reachable, for several years; as though disengaging with the world has made some deep things very easy.
I'm like this, too; things seem reasonable and calm... I'm Montaigne in his tower. But I have far better heating.
***
Some fragmentary notes from the interviews:
There is a sense that the world may be forced to change – really change....
*
Statistical understanding: we are all so accustomed to this – it's how people communicate these days, in science and news and social planning. But we’re not very good at seeing what it really means: numbers of people who are ill, numbers of people who might die – people see their own deaths, the deaths of those they love, very differently, with huge depth and importance: one per cent is not small if you are part of it. And that is the great contrast in the neoliberal world – bad politics looks at numbers, which seem rational and sufficient, if you are not paying attention – but good politics treats all its citizens as important.
*
Symbolic and real: when people are comfortable they don’t mind mixing those up… like the blurring of sadness and depression, of PTSD and emotional trauma. Symbolically, you don't want to spend more on services, you want to hold onto money in numbers, you want to support your party, even when they are insane; and, in America, you want to support Trump, because he seems to resist the status quo, and you hope your life might change. But in reality, he will do nothing for you, and if you are sick or dying... there is nothing more real than that.
*
There have been strange minor events in the UK that I don't understand: people have destroyed ambulances, wrecked hospital delivery vans. Are they angry and frightened because their businesses can’t compete – and thus short-sighted, but sort of reasonable in an enraged sense – or are they hoping for the end of the world? Because hoping for the end of the world is common among radicals; but you don't really want to be there when it happens.
And so, the American evangelicals behind Trump who insist on still going to megachurch services: hoping for the end of the world... wiping everything clean is an absolutely destructive approach to social inequality. Especially because what is left behind is never in any way 'clean', it is a chaos of wreckage and bodies; and because we are human we then take the time to clean it all up... and bury, not only those we love, but all of them.
***
So Boris was sick, and recovered... it was interesting to see people who trumpeted, in rage and (implicitly, from my point of view) terror: I don't like him but I don't want him to die! That would be terrible! I would never say or feel that!
I don't mind saying that I'd have been perfectly happy for him to die.
Everyone dies; it's not magic. There are many elaborate traditions of forgiving the dying or the dead – which can matter for the living; but respecting death and saying you would never wish it on anyone – that seems to me nonsense. It's embedded in an idea that some of us may actually escape death, that we have a say in something that is rare or will not happen unless we wish it, which is ludicrous.
And, at a deeper level, it reflects the ancient traditions arranged around our own terrors – it's the kind of thing that made people abandon a village in the jungle, because after someone died there, the area became taboo.
A number of people have died, will die, from this virus. Why shouldn't I prefer that some of the more evil and powerful people, who have committed so much wreckage on the world, be put into that line? When you have seen people die... any constraints about wishing someone dead seems merely a luxury, a self-indulgence. A way of appeasing the gods, or of seeming nice in the face of terror.
It may be an accident that, at a point where the worst of the baby boomers, the most pathetically arrogant last wave of a period of brilliance weighed down by egotism, would be faced with an illness that would particularly target people their age. Why would the idea not occur to us that this is the perfect way to take out Trump, Boris, heads of gas companies and Republican and Tory parties, Hungarian nationalists, Putin's manipulation machinery... why would one not wish for all of that ludicrous, pathetic, horribly powerful evil to be taken from the world?...
***
I showed Angels in America for my class on AIDS last week; it was so wonderful to see it. So many moments, speeches, words, symbols, that relate to so much that we're doing right now, here...
I would love to talk about it at length. But this post is already far too long – longer than a conference paper....
***
As for me... life is quiet. I am busy, but perfectly comfortable: patients are all online, and have been for weeks (only one objected, and he stays in informal contact). Online analysis is more tiring – an hour feels longer, the eyes don't rest with screens, one's attention is constantly in demand – but isolation is making them more productive, some of them flowering and changing with a kind of time-lapse photography effect.
With all my sessions now online, it occurred to me to put the little folding table from the corner of the kitchen next to the desk. A sensible precaution: mugs and cups are now only on the table, not next to the computers. See, I can plan ahead.
And students contact me about their work. I told the ones who were abroad what to do, with some stressful disagreements (one of which I lost, but it's clear that the three guys who insisted on staying in the boondocks of Norway are fine); and reassured them that we would handle marks and things... the university will panic, of course, but that's its job. I've told them all to use whatever opportunities they're offered to get extra time if they need it; but that it's worth getting things done, getting their own work into the kind of shape they can be proud of, so they can move to... the next part of their lives; which may seem uncertain, but will not, I think, be boring.
I've contacted other people I know – probably acting a bit too avuncular, a bit too I'm-not-checking-up-on-you-or-anything... which I know must seem insulting at times. But I also know that even the clumsiest and tritest gesture of reaching out can allow someone suddenly to talk, someone who obviously had no one to talk to; so the sententious Professional Carer bit becomes forgivable, in a broader context.
Anxiety floats and swirls around me, but none of it seems to touch me – not because I'm at all numb, or avoidant, or immune – but because it all just seems so obvious, so familiar. I'm calm; not trying to be calm, just... calm.
***
The most important thing remains writing the current book – the one on the psychology of the politics of AIDS (yes, rather weird combination, but surprisingly full and energetic in meaning). I'm not going fast – even with coaching from Terry, a wonderful reconnection twenty-eight years after the first time she was in my life – but I don't feel guilty or sad about it. Just a bit grumpy, just a bit pushing myself, nagging myself, frequently... and of course this is indeed an ideal time to see all these things, as they are reappearing in such spectacularly public ways, in ways that are shared, this time around, by 'regular' people.
***
And what would happen, might happen, to me? I'm making sure the will is up to date – online, as local firms are not responding, even to emails.
I've thought quite seriously about it: am I scared of dying? Now?
For thirty years, I've identified – overidentified – with AIDS and death. I've told the story of Verena Kast, my brilliant supervisor, saying to me: you seem to be taking care of your patients, giving them some hope and direction... so why don't you do that for yourself? And the shock of realizing that, for decades, I had hidden fear and sadness, with hope and expectation, behind the ashen darkness of an overidentification with death.
That's far better now. I'd love to live, I'd love to finish this book, and the next. And in one direction have a boyfriend, move somewhere warm, live a more social and lively life... and in the other direction remain with patients and university and books, a quiet life similar to this one, but there's not really anything wrong with that, any more.
But if I died in the next couple of months... I don't mind it, really. I've had years – decades! – longer than I expected to have, or than anyone from the old days of HIV/AIDS could really expect. I've lived on four continents and visited a fifth, done all sorts of... well you know how that list goes on. And on.
So, dying in the abstract would be okay.
And even dying in physical reality... I don't, very sincerely don't, like the prospect of dying from this illness; it seems painful and miserable.
And, let's face it, when I recall my visit to the emergency room last year... it's obvious that my American accent could well move me down a list of those who get a ventilator.
I don't like any of that; but it's not horrifying. I think – how can we ever know this? but I have never believed this in my life before, so I take it seriously now – that if I were in that misery, that the misery itself would be real; but it would not be terror, or horror, and it would not collapse into I-wish-I'd-never-been-born.
I just don't think that level of despair would happen to me any more... we never know, of course. But I'm even calm in the face of that.
***
Easter. Spring. All sorts of passionate things about life and death, energy and hope and future, and ending.... we usually float easily through the various observances and non-observances and holidays and details; but not this year, everyone seems to be paying attention.
One of my analysands is a priest, a kind and serious man – we talk several times during Easter week; he is busy, taking care of people in his village, especially the elderly. As they plan and reorganize all the Easter services so he can hold them online, they are also bringing baskets to people, wearing gloves, standing far back from the door each time... many of his parishioners are older, fragile, and he himself is only a few years younger than I am, so. He knows.
I've told him I will listen to the Matthäus-Passion, what is still for me Bach's greatest work, on Sunday... I keep thinking, actually I'm going to be rather busy, there's this marking that's due Monday and the new online initiative from Stefano and Bernard, and they are impatient for feedback...
But I can play it anyway. It won't be a completely clear-and-present hearing, but I will be there. The piece is in my blood anyway – since the amazing experience of being in a full-scale performance at the University of Virginia in, it must have been 1976 or 1977... on Easter Sunday. My family came down to see it, I told them they would want to be there. Otto Werner-Mueller, a serious and powerful conductor, teaching this mass of students and teachers how to do this huge and intense work, and to do it as though we meant it.
It's all there, I just turn around and it all comes back to me.
***
Yet another Easter: the brilliant scene in the television production of American Gods, which so cleverly cast the charming miniature powerhouse Kristin Chenoweth as the ancient goddess Easter. She is in an unusual position relative to the others – unlike most of the very ancient gods who are no longer worshipped, she is neither poor nor desperate. The entire world of Christianity still funnels energy to her, through Christ's rising and the whole spectrum of Easter traditions. There is a bizarre and hilarious party at her country mansion, with eggs and bunnies scattered everywhere, and many varied figures of Christ and the Holy Family – because there are so many believers still projecting so many different things onto Christ, he appears in a number of adjacent forms... it is an eerie scene.
Easter herself is glowing, social, in charge, and does not show her power most of the time, preferring to manage younger gods by charm rather than confrontation... until she is seriously challenged.
At the end of that episode, and that season, she is moved to do something she has not done for thousands of years, and in the terrifying last moments of the episode she shows that she can take back her blessings of life and spring: she glows and darkens, her hair flies from its bonds, she waves her hands over the fields and forests, and they blacken and collapse, for miles and miles....
The power of life and death: it has two sides.
Always.
***
I am, of course, merely someone who has been present at this kind of thing before – one of the ones who was in the direct path of an earlier storm of death and chaos and unmaking.
And I'm fine. This is not shocking to me.
***
And so I shuffle through the forest, a bit slowly, back to the cabin.
And I go through the books, the herbs, muttering a bit, and thinking: what will be needed, what will be next....