The Virus Within Us

“From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us. Hitherto, surprised as he may have been by the strange things happening around him, each individual citizen had gone about his business as usual, so far as this was possible. And, no doubt, he would have continued doing so. But once the town gates were shut, every one of us realised that all were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life.” (Albert Camus, The Plague, 1947). 


Yes – as if we didn’t know this before, that we are all ‘in the same boat’, Planet Earth – the arrival of Covid-19 has forced us into a new awareness of the interconnectedness of all of us with each other, and with all life forms on earth. 


And if we are not yet carriers of Covid-19 we are nevertheless all carrying the coronavirus. Because the virus is inside us, in our heads: we are carrying it in our thoughts, it is incubating and mutating within us. Nobody can escape it, it is contaminating our mental well-being. It is causing fear, panic, anxiety for our loved ones, concern for our health, concern for our livelihoods, sometimes concern for our lives. 


We are struggling to get our heads round what Camus names as “the new conditions of life”: holidays cancelled, trips abandoned, meetings postponed, plans thwarted, stocking up on products, self-isolation, ‘social distancing’, a dread about the future with the awareness that this is only just beginning…


I seem to veer between two poles in my thinking. The first is that this will be – as the dulcet tones of the official chief scientists paraded before us daily on our UK screens calmly portray it – an inconvenient but temporary health crisis that the country will be well able to manage if the public take suitable precautions. Though it is hardly reassuring when these precautions - soothingly and rationally presented on one day - segue seamlessly into quite different soothingly and rationally presented precautions the next day.  Like magicians whose skill is not to let you see how the trick works, the official TV faces of scientific knowledge present their magical thinking with sincere and serious panache. 


The second pole of my thinking – and, as I said, I oscillate between these thoughts – contains a cluster of much darker glimpses into a world twisted out of shape by the consequences of this plague. The stock market crash may be a prefiguration of a radical change to our social, economic and political realities. This global pandemic event, which is only just beginning, could mark this century in ways comparable to the ways that World War One inaugurated a century of profound dislocation, wars, revolutions and suffering. 


Of course that was not the whole story, but (consciously or unconsciously) we carry the memory of  20^th century trauma in our psyches. Humanity saw into the abyss – the destruction of peoples, of cities, of the natural world – and the abyss is still there, even if we look away. Hiroshima, Auschwitz and the environmental destructions of the Anthropocene era are signposts into the chasm. They are the deadly hole in the heart of humanity. 


If borders close, businesses go under, pensions shrink, food supplies reduce, social contact is restricted, no amount of online activity (for those able to access it) will compensate for the losses to ways of life we take for granted. Governments are talking up the relatively short-term nature of the measures they are ‘suggesting’.  A few weeks, a few months. This is supposed to reassure us. I am not reassured. 


In the UK in this last decade we have been assaulted by austerity-sadism and torn apart by Brexit antagonisms –- so on one level Covid-19 could ‘bring people together’, as they say, the recognition that we are indeed ‘all in one boat’. But the UK’s psychological wellbeing is not in good shape, in fact it is quite fragile: witness the aggressions, the racism, the undisguised anger simmering under the surface and erupting online or in public. How well set up are we as a nation to follow recommendations about what we ‘should’ do in terms of self-isolation and distancing? How soon before a much more draconian approach will be implemented? And how will we fare then? 


When doctors face agonising decisions about who to help and who to let die in hospitals – and, like the God-stories of old, they will have to choose who will live and who will die– how well equipped are we, and the social fabric, to withstand and survive these ravages on our sense of fairness and justice? 


We are as yet much too close to events – which evolve day by day – to see anything clearly about what this virus will do to us, as individuals, families, communities, nations. We have no ‘outsider’ position from which to look at events. I have seen it said that this crisis will show us that concerted, collective action can make a radical difference to how a society behaves – a sign that the environmental crisis could be tackled by immediate radical changes of behaviour once the will is there and world acts together to avert disaster. Greta Thunberg’s message has fully arrived.

I have no sense of which of the two poles of my thinking will turn out to be nearer the mark. But my gut feeling is that these events – which, as I keep saying, are only just beginning -  will lead to profound, but as yet  unpredictable, changes in our patterns of life. 


Meanwhile I am trying to carry on with my work, my relationships, my thinking-about-things, with as much continuity as possible. But I do feel at odds with the prevailing narratives. This may be foolhardy, but there it is. For example, as I wrote to a colleague this week:
“in these fraught times when the impulse we are being told to follow is to self-isolate, create ‘social distance’, I am taking up the counterintuitive stance that we should retain as much as possible live connections between people for our own emotional and mental well-being - because our inner psychological and spiritual well-being is a powerful (not omnipotent) prophylactic in the safeguarding of our physical well-being. We know that good human contact has restorative and sometimes preventative benefits for our physical well-being, and we shouldn’t abandon the wisdom of what we know in this present ‘crisis’”. 


At the end of his powerful evocation in ‘The Plague’ of a city living with plague and forced into isolation – a metaphor for the German occupation of France during World War Two, but also a universal portrait of the bravery and selfishness of people when faced with radical disruptions to the continuity of their lives and wellbeing – Camus writes about the end of the plague and that “as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux [the novel’s hero, a doctor who treats the sick regardless of the risks to himself] remembered that such joy is always imperilled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves…”


I wish you all safe passage through these beleaguered times.