Pandemic Sketches

I’m a writer trying to write. Laptop open. Dog under my feet. Staring at a dirty computer screen marked by scattered, past lunches and dust. The radio playing in the background. Work emails. Pandemic hovering around. Trying to write. Trying. This is not writer’s block. This is not — necessarily — COVID ennui. Behind laptops across the country, people stare at their screens, feel uninspired or anxious, and blame the virus or the moments of isolation and quarantine that threaten our days. I’m not confident, however, that the virus is to blame for me not writing.

You can’t feel sorry for a writer who doesn’t feel like writing. You can feel sorry for the families of those who’ve died. You can feel sorry for people still out of work. You can feel sorry for those who have passed. You can feel sorry for the long haulers. But writers? We don’t feel sorry for writers because they get to write. Writing is the principle vehicle for expression. Inside each of us is the desire to express. What job could be better than expression? I’m an expresser. After a moment of or an attempt at expression, writers then get to complain about their writing (“I have a deadline!” “I’m so busy!” “I wrote x amount of words today!”). This is the writer genre. Expression of one’s self as much as of one’s topic at hand. You can’t feel sorry for a writer. You can feel sorry for the people who stare at their horoscopes each morning hoping for a better day. That would be me.

The three drink rituals that comprise my day: Coffee in the morning. Espresso in the afternoon. Bourbon in the evening. Water at the gym. That’s four? I can’t count.

Is COVID responsible for all contemporary boredom?

The phone vibrates. Texts. I answer texts. Facebook messenger pop ups. Instagram DMs. I answer them. Then they stop. When do they return? Social media is a life of waiting and responding to others.

I love the mundane and the banal. I write to sketch each out. I had a coffee. I posted to Facebook. I walked the dog. I wrote 500 words.

I was reading Roland Barthes’ Mourning Diary for a book project I may or may not complete. The book is a collection of Barthes’ diary notes, sketches and thoughts, written down after his mother died. Barthes was very close to his mother. He expresses his mourning in short notes, immediate thoughts, loss, pain. It is difficult to read someone else’s privacy. Most of our privacy is banal, but various moments, death or otherwise, trigger intense pain. Barthes recorded his privacy as he mourned his mother. Has anyone written a COVID mourning diary yet? I sometimes think my Facebook posts are that.

I mourn the state of academic writing. Pre and post-COVID, it feels as if within academic writing, we do not desire the essay, the personal, the exploration of meaning within popular culture and the daily interactions that provide some sort of direction for what to need, what to want, where to be, what to believe. I’m bored with academic writing. Out of all the modern forms of expression — Facebook post, advertisement, essay, song, Tweet, shared image, policy report, news item — academic writing is often the most boring. Repetitive. Pretentious. Hyperbolic. Boring. I look at a given Table of Contents. I look away. I’ve spent so much time writing against academic writing, and yet, here I am, still an academic writer.

Walking through an open field on one of our daily 3 mile treks, my dog zig zags in front of me as if he is drunk or cannot decide whether to go left or right. This is the banal existence of being an Australian Shepherd outside. Direction is, of course, confusing. And not just to dogs. When I read memoir or the news, I feel as if most of the world feels as if it is without direction. My social media accounts are flush with posts reflecting people’s desire for direction: “Should I remarry?” “Can I love?” “What will tomorrow bring?” “Do I believe in myself?” If there were a metaphoric theme of most of the podcasts I listen to as my dog and I walk through fields and neighborhoods (Family Secrets, Terrible, Thanks for Asking, Modern Love, Family Ghosts, This is Actually Happening), it would be direction. People always are in need of direction. The podcast provides the space for people to talk about their need for, their lack of, their hope for direction.

Roland Barthes has always been my patron saint of theory. His theories of meaning direct my academic writing. His love for his mother is painful to read. He is despondent. He grieves. He mourns in every part of his body and thought. He writes another book about her and in that book he writes about a photograph of her, but never shows the photograph. Barthes recognized that meaning is not necessarily in the image or idea itself but in how we read the idea or image. I’d argue that this is all that meaning is. Ourselves. Meaning is in us, not the text or the image or the political event or the horoscope or the loss.

I sometimes think 80% of the world is unhappy. I keep returning to the idea that social media is a site of public unhappiness. 80% of my social media feeds appear to be people stating how unhappy they are with someone or something. Self-help posts on Instagram. Facebook confessions. Arguments on Twitter that are no more than projection or one’s own self. At any given moment, 80% of the world is probably lamenting a death, conflict, illness, break up, or divorce. We often think we’ll stop or prevent unhappiness, then we find ourselves repeating patterns of behavior that lead to unhappiness. This, of course, is how politics and war work, but it is also how we work. I made up the 80% number. I really haven’t counted all the posts I read.

I hadn’t seen my parents during the pandemic until my father suffered a massive stroke that we believed would kill him. I drove to North Carolina with my mask beside me in the car. I stood beside his bed in the ICU unit. He likely did not want me there. He could talk, but not to me. I wore a mask, but his continued disappointment recognized me. The ICU nurse had to lift him up from the bed to the room’s chair using a special device that carried him the way you see helicopters carry wounded elephants through the jungle. He couldn’t walk. He could barely raise his arm or hand. It was extremely sad to see someone who had — rightly or wrongly — commanded a dominant presence in our household and who was now unable to do the most basic thing for himself. I felt sad for him, the father who never felt sad for my losses.

Mourning dominates any discussion of grief. You are supposed to mourn because you grieve. All around us, people are mourning the loss of loved ones taken by what we cannot see, a virus. I mourned for the loss of my marriage, but will I mourn the loss of a parent? Will I keep a mourning diary to document how I feel during a time period that follows such loss? I know I am supposed to mourn. I know mourning is all around me even if I cannot see it; it is pervasive. Mourning is within my writing that I cannot seem to write.

Contrary to most academic reader critiques I get, the most important rhetorical trope of writing is repetition. Repetition seals an idea. Repetition reminds. Repetition generates meaning (accurately or not). Repetition points out that what we believe or think or are angry about or happy about or sad about today has already occurred and will occur again. That observation could be the focal point of a pessimistic rhetoric, of course. Or it is a rhetoric of the self. “You already said that.” Yes, indeed, I did. We say everything over and over. We experience the same things over and over. This is how I’ve often viewed my writing, but in a positive way. I am writing the same sentence over and over because I still can’t “see” what it means. I view that “sentence” as a continuation of a thought that has not yet concluded: what does this mean and why? I am always asking about meaning. I am always saying to myself: “You already said that.” I know I did. But what did it mean?

I work hard to not repeat my parents’ behaviors. I pay attention to my children. I make them the priority. I listen to them and their pain. I text everyday. My mother says she does not want to repeat her parents’ behaviors. “I won’t burden you with my problems the way they did to me!” But in doing so, she repeats the behavior of familial distance. When you don’t burden others, you don’t share, and when you don’t share, you distance. While people use social media to unload their unhappiness, that is also not always a bad gesture. Distance shrinks when people know about each other’s pain. Isn’t this one reason to go to therapy? Or to mourn? Or even to write? To shorten the distance between two meanings (I feel this/I see you feel this).

My fucking dog wants too much attention. COVID has been good to him. He gets more attention than he should because I am working and trying to write from home. I remember a father’s day when I was a kid and I asked my dad if he wanted to go on a bike ride. “No,” he said. I was in Asheville once, and we were having lunch at White Duck Taco, and I said, “Let’s stop at a brewery for a beer before we drive back to Flat Rock.” “No,” he said. I’m not sure I even wanted much attention from him, though I often mourned the lack of attention. I didn’t, however, want distance. But without direction regarding how to be a son or a father or a person who needs another person, we have a distance that will be there until he finally passes. At that moment, we gift ourselves the right to say something cliché like: “if only we appreciated what we had.” Sometimes, I think I write in order to repeat this simple point to myself.

Do I really not want attention? Then why am I writing this?

COVID is about repetition. It’s here. It’s gone. It’s here again. It has and then doesn’t have and then has again our attention.

Several years ago, when things seemed normal but obviously were not, we listened to the sirens wail above us as they promised the arrival of missiles from Gaza. As we gathered the kids from their beds in order to huddle in the stairway and take shelter from a possible strike, we looked out the window of the apartment we rented on Marmorek Street and saw Tel Avivians sitting in the café across the street, drinking, talking, trying to ignore the sirens. There is impending doom sometimes, and maybe it’s best to ignore it, to keep one’s emotional distance. I’ve written about this moment before. I’m sure I will again. It keeps repeating in my head. It seems to mean something to me, even if I cannot entirely see what.

I call to ask how my dad is doing, and they hang up the phone, saying, “I can’t talk right now.”

The world and its meanings are communicated in popular culture. What we watch, read, sing, tweet, like, heart etc. are the spaces where meanings collide and surface. As an academic, I often demonstrate meaning in such a way, only to hear from critics how I trivialize an issue. I’m not trivializing a pandemic, or social injustice, or the complication of meaning, or loss, or even mourning. I’m looking for the same unobtainable answers everyone else is looking for, only I wonder if they exist in our tweets, TV shows, songs, cartoons, and wherever else popular culture may be hiding them as we hide them internally as well. Isn’t what we many of us academics were trained to do: find so-called hidden meanings? I can’t talk right now. Why not? Because the meaning of the moment one is within is so overwhelming and so dreadful and so intense that there are, as the other cliché notes, “no words.” Stare at that dirty laptop screen. Hang up the phone. Ignore. Project. Barthes’ mourning, too, reflects that type of discursive frustration: his observations are short and fleeting. His emotions too distorted to be reflective in a type of meaningful prose, or any type of meaningful prose meaningful to anyone other than himself.

And maybe that is what my writing continues to be: not meaningful to anyone but myself. Then why write it? Attention? To shorten the distance? I hear those scholarly critiques: “What does this have to do with the discipline?” “The writing is too personal.” “What should we get out of this?” “So what if the writer felt this way; what does that mean for us?” There is a type of already built within the machine distance academic writing cherishes. All of our discontent with ourselves or our losses must remain distant. I’m not blaming my fellow academics. I can’t blame them for what is basically a human trait. Making the distant(injustice, oppression, the political) close. Make the personal (loss, hurt, desire, want) distant.

I am staring at this goddamn dirty fucking stupid laptop screen, and I cannot write. I’m too distant — from this pandemic, from these words, from the promise of future mourning, from what couldn’t be, from everything and everyone around me. So I write a few sketches, a few fragments of observations, a few thoughts that may just let me see something for once. Or may not.