Reflections from a home front: 10
I thought I’d start with the poem for a change. In a week where I’ve felt less buoyant than previously, I have indulged in playing with some lighter stuff. [1] If you’d like a more thoughtful poetic take, try Malcolm Guite’s second Quarantine Quatrain.

My own experience of Zoom – which includes work meetings, study groups, family chats and virtual drinks with the choir – is that of a mixed blessing. The moment when a familiar face enters the screen, there’s a little hit of pleasureable recognition.  A few more people arrive, and – hurrah! – we’re together again. In spite of everything, here we all are! But here is an illusion, and it’s a less than convincing one in so many ways. 

Although one-to-one works, after a fashion, group gatherings leave me feeling unsettled. I feel self-conscious and find it hard to know when to speak. And when I eventually do, it doesn’t feel as if I’m talking to anyone. This renders me less fluent and feeling a bit stranded. I know it’s suggested you turn your camera off, but seeing the group without me in it feels as if I’ve absented myself from proceedings, which makes me feel even more on the edge than I already do. 

There’s some consolation in knowing not all of this just me. For all of us, video calls eliminate so many of the subtle but vital cues to successful human communication that we pick up brilliantly, intuitively and mostly subconsciously. And this problem is exacerbated by multiscreen screens. It’s a significant challenge to the poor old brain; no wonder we’re left with Zoom Fatigue. (Now officially a thing.) For analysis of Zoom’s fascinating but complicated effects (for certain people it’s actually a better way to communicate) see these articles from National Geographic and the BBC.

Even more unsettling than the neurological challenge is the emotional charge. When forgathering is forbidden, these facsimiles simply remind us of the living, breathing presence we do not have. It reminds me of a time when my daughter was about seven and I went away on a work trip to America. She completely refused to speak to me on the phone, knowing instinctively that it would be more than she could bear. 

Look, don’t touch. Hear, don’t hug. The experience is shot through with ambivalence.

Well, it’s better than the alternative nothing. That’s the obvious argument. But if there’s one thing that the current situation has brought home is that for many things, there isn’t always straightforward way to determine what’s better or best, to put the short term alongside the long term, to put one kind of benefit above another. 

It seems likely that Zoom’s face replacement service will have a place in the emerging post-lockdown world. But if nothing else, we will surely value the simple act of being together, real people in real places – something so ordinary but so vital to human flourishing.  

[1]The Wandering Albatross said I should note that this more the result of pollen fever than cabin fever.
[2] An absolutely brilliant thing on Twitter. Suspect mine would not come out well, though.

Reflections from a home front: 9
Five weeks in and we’re getting restless. After the initial adjustment phase, where we worked out how to live our newly constrained lives, thoughts are now turning to the even more difficult question of what happens next. 

As well as thinking about very practical problems of how to lift restrictions to avoid a Coronaresurgence, we are facing the fact that the world we return to will not be the world we just left.  We may not have been asleep for 100 years, but so fast and far-reaching will be the changes that it could certainly feel like coming out of hibernation.  We might well feel apprehensive. What will we find outside when we open the door? 

But if the material and economic world has been turned upside down, so have we. 

Collectively, we have been confronted with some uncomfortable realities: the illusory nature of our control, our vulnerability, the overwhelming complexity that underlies some moral choices, our sheer mortality. For us as individuals, acutely aware of all this, confinement has given us the opportunity to reflect on the status quo, and on ourselves.

People emerging from serious and perhaps life-threatening illness often seem to do so with a very different outlook on the world. Some also acquire a new zest for living and a strong sense of purpose that provides the necessary impetus to make lasting changes. It’s a paradoxical experience: you wouldn’t want to go through it again or indeed wish it on anyone else, and yet you wouldn’t want to go back to being the person you were before. Under the current threat to life and restriction of activity, we seem to be experiencing something similar: increased appreciation of small pleasures, expanded compassion, greater clarity about what really matters, shifted priorities. It may feel as if we have been restored to something lost, returned to sanity, reclothed in our rightful mind. We couldn’t see the wood for the trees; now we see the whole of the wood, and each individual tree. 

It’s a completely transformed perspective of a sort that we can’t bring about through our own intellectual effort, however much we might desire it. It can only be received as a gift. 

There are immense questions about how we deal practically with the new world that we eventually shuffle into. But the still bigger question is not about how we regain what we have lost, but how we can hold on to the gift we have been given. How do we avoid wasting this once-in-several lifetimes chastening of an entire population? How do we hold our course? How do we build according to what we have learned? 

Today’s poem began with that phrase, “can’t see the wood for the trees”, which popped into my mind during a walk and seemed worth a poetic exploration. “Oh, you’re in a Wordsworthian phase,” said the Wandering Albatross. That wasn’t intentional; it’s just how it came out.  You can hear how it came out by clicking the play button.

      Couldn’t see the wood for the trees  
       In what was left of evening light,
       Across the empty fields we glimpsed
       A grubby sprawl – the tangled twigs
       ​A hundred trunks and branching limbs
       And things that flapped and things that crawled,
       And no way through. We did not see
       The wood, nor any tree. 

       But in the morning air, we saw
       A copse that traced the chalky slope –
       ​Each tree in rightful place: the beech
       And hazel rooting for the ash,
       The grazing snail and spying thrush,
       And ancient paths that call our feet
       Through woods and trees.

       That fading day, we knew our days
       Were numbered and no longer
       Where we lived – the constant flicking
       Seconds on display, and ticking
       Boxes, and the things that ping
       And measure up. We could not tell
       The time, nor break the spell.

       But in this strange dawn light, we sense
       A different stroke – a time to weep
       A time to plant, a time to keep
       The turns of earth and tidal ebb
       And spirit’s flow. It’s time to feel
       The pulse that urges us to dwell
       Under this time’s spell.

Reflections from a home front: 8
Our reaction to the lockdown, as briefly observed last time, might depend on whether we are meerkats or sloths at heart.  For one effect of living in this unfamiliar and uncertain territory is the way it tends to bring personal character traits to the surface. Sociability is just one dimension, though. There’s also our adaptability, our ability to cope with crisis or uncertainty, our reaction to being told what to do – or to no longer  being told what to do. 

Not only do the strictures reveal our traits, they seem also to intensify them. To continue with the bestiary, whilst I’m really quite a happy puffin, pottering about the burrow and making occasional forays along the local coastline, I am, it turns out, sharing my space with a wandering albatross that’s flapping about with increasing agitation.

Character traits also play out against the particulars of our situation. (With the prevailing conditions again tending to push things to the extremes; work is all or nothing, we are with family 24/7 or never. )  So, for example, and to return to the social aspect, a sloth in glorious isolation will hang happy, but a sloth forced to share the branch with other sloths, or – worse – a family of displaced and discombobulated meerkats – might be pretty stressed. 

With these amplified differences in character and situation, it could feel as if our social distance is becoming a psychological one. But, at the same time and with equal efficiency, the situation reveals our common humanity in all its interconnectedness. BC, it was sort of possible to carry on under the illusion that we could pursue our own individual path, doing our own thing in our own time. Now, it couldn’t be clearer: we’re all in it together. The truth is that we were always in it together. However much we may feel like different species at times, we’re all on the same planet.

I have to admit that my poem today isn’t a new one. (Well that’s a slippery slope, said the Wandering Albatross.) I’ve got a new one started but it hasn’t quite fallen into place yet.  However, I’ve been tidying my old poem collection and, in the course of rounding them up from various corners of the computer into one neat folder, I found this one. It was written for quite another sort of occasion, but, there’s something there about difference which seems to resonate. So I thought I’d dust it off and give it an airing while the other one sorts itself out. And here end the animal analogies. For now, at least.

Some of those having a better time seem to find it a tricky admission. For few enjoying quiet pleasure wouldn’t feel a twinge of guilt when the world is in pain. It’s partly social conditioning. It looks inappropriate to be enjoying ourselves when others aren’t. We can also shift the blame, at least partially, onto our poor old brain. In its drive for efficiency, it prefers to file things in neat and tidy categories. A this or a that; a good thing or a bad thing. But only partially. We do of course have the ability to move beyond facile judgment, to hold uncertainty and to stay with conflicting, layered emotions. But it’s a kind of wisdom and we have mature into it. We have to learn to accommodate and appreciate nuance, complexity, ambiguity and paradox – and to navigate amongst them. 

As so many have observed, these things have been disappearing from a public discourse that tends to black-and-white binaries – as evidenced by the whole sorry Brexit affair. But perhaps now, in this very different kind of crisis, it may be easier to see the texture of a bigger picture. Perhaps, as we enact the tensions of the situation within our own lives –  mourning a friend’s death even as we clap for the NHS – we’re apprehending more of our entangled reality. 

Perhaps the distance we now feel, from each other and from normal life, might afford the kind of perspective we need to reset our course.  Perhaps, from the distance of years to come, we could be celebrating the legacy of the best.

Of course any kind of final balance is a long way off – as if these things could be put in the scales anyway. But the eventual reading will be up to us. 

       Sound effects
       The world’s invaded by some viral strain.
       Contagious care can never be contained.

       So long the queues; so scarce delivery slots. 
       We bake our daily bread, we tend our plots. 

       School’s out; we’re on indefinite staycation.
       We’re in for an exclusive education.

       Performances are pulled from every stage.
       ​Play spills across the screen and down the page.

       No trips are now advised; all flights have ceased.
       Just bird song carries on the sweetened breeze.

       Two metres’ rule has pushed us all apart.
       We pull the strings that stretch between our hearts.

       Within the pupal shroud all things dissolve
       And secretly refold, and in the spring –
       Behold, the blaze of unsuspected wings! ​