In
the first week of self-isolation there were simple, though sometimes difficult,
tasks. The first was getting over the jet-lag. This was familiar, and couldn't
be avoided. Energy was low, it was hard to concentrate, and sleepiness came at
the wrong times.
The
second was adjusting practically to the new situation: getting the housework
done, establishing new routines, breaking old habits to avoid a
threat outside the house. As it happened, this was familiar too. Many people
were obliged by health warnings to stay indoors, sometimes for days on end, during
the months of the bushfire crisis and smoke hazard in Australia this summer. It
was relevant training.
What
was different, of course, was the virus. The third task was coming to terms
mentally with the fact of being in an epidemic - a mortal threat to growing
numbers of people, including everyone I know and love. Realising that there is
no-one who's absolutely safe from an agent as infectious as the novel
coronavirus is. And realising that I might be a bearer of the infection (which
I hardly realized while I was travelling).
All that involves emotion work, which in one way or another will go on
as long as the epidemic does.
 |
| For no reason at all - a perfect Waratah |
In
the second week, things are becoming more complicated. I'm over the jet-lag, have a
bit of energy back. But I can't move about the city and get on with purposes
that involve other people: libraries, choirs, work, politics. Plotting to
overthrow world capitalism on one's own isn't very convincing - you do need a
cabal, and cloaks, and a dark cellar to meet in.
Events
that I'm looking forward to later in the year are being cancelled one by one,
or postponed optimistically to next year. I'm beginning to pick up the threads
of writing projects that I can do in isolation, or in semi-isolation after the
14 days for quarantine are over.
But
they have to be re-shaped for the new conditions. In my booklet Writing for Research - free to
download, folks! Just click on the link at the top of this page, or go to https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7PfMzZfEk7vQ0Fvd3JEWnBBUmM/view
-
I quote the South African novelist Nadine Gordimer saying that "some form
of solitude is the condition of creation". True. I've never had the urge
to write great works in a crowded café while swigging Calvados and smoking
Gauloises. But there can be too much solitude, too.
Like
many others I'm also trying to understand the politics that have emerged in the
epidemic. On previous days I've commented on the incompetence and mendacity of
the right-wing governments, here and abroad, that are making such a mess of
this situation. I hadn't got round to the Modi government in India, which the
epidemic has caught in the middle of an anti-Muslim pogrom that is becoming as
brutal a repression as the Chinese government's efforts in Xinjiang.
But
it's the Australian system that I have to think about immediately, and the two
main models that Australian politicians follow, the US and the UK. It's now
hard to believe that such sustained mismanagement as we've seen from these
regimes is simply a matter of confusion and incompetence. There's more to it
than that. I'll offer some thoughts in my next posts.