Today marks one year since the British Government implemented the very first National lockdown. Whether you like it or not, you will be exposed to lengthy (and, quite frankly, tasteless as well as pompous) statements from politicians and, to the lesser extent, mere mortals on how “it has transformed pretty much everything and all landscapes—political, economical, intellectual, psychological, to name a few— have changed forever,” and it will be heard literally everywhere, including your hoovers and food processors.
New sincerity, you see. “It is ok to share your emotions with everyone else, because we are in this together” (I don’t think so.) They would ask you (with polite pressure) that “it is time to reflect upon what happened to us all as a society”—a bittersweet offer you cannot refuse.
Yet you can if you want.
The lessons of this lockdown? None, of course. If you don’t mean under a “lesson” the simple fact that you didn’t get the shit either earlier or later in the season, or got a milder case than others, or still aren’t sure whether you got it or not (I can relate to the last). Pure luck isn’t supposed to teach you anything, nor should it be taken for granted.
Yes, but how could I describe this last year in my own terms? As the longest brain fart in my lifetime I guess. If it were intended to be a rehearsal for getting dementia later in life, I’d say that it has succeeded. Never before in my life was I so stupidly forgetful, so uninspired, so dull and so freakishly unproductive. I feel like both my Russian and English are getting weird to the point that I don’t even know anymore if I can speak and write properly in either: it feels like an odd detachment of sorts, and God forbid me to allow this feeling to become stronger.
Ah, and the books, of course. I don’t know about you, but never in my 45-year life did I feel so unsettled and fearful when looking at the piles of books I should read “immediately”. The more I think of it, the stranger it gets. I have no idea whether it’s only me or that others feel the same.
Each and every line in my academic writings took me an awful lot of time to be adjusted properly: all the projects I planned beforehand and were so proud of somehow look ridiculous and derivative in my own eyes now. And don’t even get me started with procrastination: we all are making lousy jokes about it, but, frankly, it’s awful. You begin, you postpone, and you begin again, and the only thing that somehow pushes you in the right direction is fear of failing miserably. Not cute. So, start again then.
Fair enough, you life resembles both Phil’s in “Groundhog Day” and, at some point, the macabre after-death ramblings of Harriott Leigh, a confused woman in May Sinclair’s “Where their fire is not quenched”:
“The strange quality of her state was this, that it had no time. She remembered dimly that there had once been a thing called time; but she had forgotten altogether what it was like. She was aware of things happening and about to happen; she fixed them by the place they occupied, and measured their duration by the space she went through.
So now she thought: If I could only go back and get to the place where it hadn’t happened.
To get back farther—“
Can we all go back? No, we can’t. We should move on somehow, whatever it takes from us. But what I really want is to erase the whole lockdown experience from my addled mind completely. Not sure I will succeed, though.
No comments :
Post a Comment