How Time Moves for a Writer During Coronazeit
Everyone is wearing their best finery: smoking jackets and drooping diamond earrings; fabric draping off of female bodies, rustling when the women walk. The men’s chests are puffed under their pressed shirts. Somewhere, violins are playing. We are at an elegant dinner party, but a wildfire rages outside. We do not know yet if it will come for the rest of us, but the roses on the tables have begun to wilt from the heat and there is condensation on the glasses of ice water. The violinists have taken note of their nearest exit. The guests are sweating. Eyeliner is melting on a few faces and being dragged off-course by crow’s feet. The men hold on to their decorum and keep their jackets on, but the struggle shows in their furrowed brows. We desperately try, all of us, to keep up the banter, as some of our acquaintances silently disappear. A glaring space is left where they were. This is how I would describe lockdown to a non-inhabitant of our planet. The healthier you are, I’d tell it, the more lavishly you are decked out. Healthy is the new privileged.
Since coming indoors, I have been struggling with my sense of time. It has shed its clearly defined parameters and morphed into something much more fluid, moving in all sorts of loops and halts. It’s as if the waves in the ocean, instead of always moving reliably towards the shore, now take random leaps sidewise or backwards. Riding them, I risk whiplash. What time feels like and what it is seems separated by the deepest, darkest trench right now.
All this jolting has made it hard to think. In the early days of confinement, I kept walking across my apartment with a task in mind. Whatever it was would get lost and I’d end up standing mid-room, trying to piece together what I had set out to do. This happened more than a few times. I’ve since learned from other people it happened to them too. Then, I’d have these eureka moments and rush-up from the couch to write down “salt” on the shopping list before anything else grabbed my attention. Other times, I’d be in the shower letting the hot water pour over my shoulders and realize I couldn’t reliably say if I had already washed myself. I did. Or was that yesterday? The days had become a blur.
Now that we are two months deep into confinement, things are a little different, but when I wake up it still takes me a moment to place myself within the week and month I’m living. My husband and I regularly check-in on each other about what needs to get done that day. But he too keeps forgetting about our son’s online class at 4pm and needs to be called back in from outside time with two minutes to spare. Meal and bed times are slipping, because we’ve stopped noticing the movements of the sun, perhaps because of how little we get to enjoy it now.
And it is not just time in the present that has become warped, but also my sense of future. Everything (potentially) happening after today feels equidistant, no matter how many weeks may separate events. I’m convinced it is because my power to exert control over any of them is equally remote. How long before schools reopen? Will the swimming pools open for the summer at all? When will children be allowed to celebrate their birthdays with friends again? When will it be safe to ride public transportation without masks? Should we cancel our trip back home in July? As immigrants, when will we see our extended family again? When will I feel safe?
There are many reasons for this struggle with time, but at its core is a mind coming to terms with all the radical change so suddenly dumped on our doorsteps. I’ve heard it called grief, but I’ve felt grief before and it didn’t feel like this. Grief makes the present throb, dangling the past and future just out of reach, and in grief anything is better than the present. I feel nothing as rhythmic or predictable as throbbing. What I feel is a loss of parameters. How can you create — in my case, write — with such a radical loss of references? There is something profoundly absurd in trying to construct a normality out of these completely abnormal circumstances, as if we were trying to continue with our fancy dinner party, while a wildfire rages outside.
As a writer, I am touched by this struggle with time in a very specific way. In terms of craft, the conceit of time cuts across our most basic techniques. Time creates order and order creates structure. What is plot, if not the organization of events in time? Tension can be created within a story by the order in which you give the reader information and the concept of order depends on a before and an after — therefore, of time. But stylistic elements of technique can also fall foul of time. Style implies not only the aesthetic selection of certain words, but also the ability to place them in a certain aesthetic order in a sentence and paragraph. It’s all about rhythm and flow, both of which hinge on a sense of time as well. Without time, you can hold an idea in your hand, but you cannot move it. You have no story.
What you do have is a lot of frustration. A creative outlet for any artist, and a writer too, is a lung. This intermeshing of body and soul from which we create is never clearer than in the bodily suffering that comes from not being able to do it. My stomach is in knots. I can’t sleep. My back has been bothering me. Mid-pandemic, there are so many reasons to acknowledge the hazard it is to have a body at all.
In early March, around International Women’s Day, I ordered a t-shirt with the slogan “Girls Just Want to Have FUN-damental rights”. It seemed like a relic from a by-gone era when I pulled it out of its manila envelope (and not, sadly, because women now enjoy the equal treatment of our male counterparts). It’s more that the dire urgency of the present situation has superseded other important concerns. And yet the two things are not irreconcilable. It made me again want to try and glue the heavy load of the present with the future we will, sooner or later, wake up to.
This horrible pandemic is a rare before/after moment. We all await with anticipation for it to be over. We long to cast off the crippling fear for our loved ones and for the physically fragile members of our community, not to mention for ourselves. We need to again feel the warmth of normal human interaction and shed the logic of contagion that can lead us to label strangers as “others”. They are others, but they are also brothers — lest we forget. And after, there will probably be some trauma, some obsessive-compulsive behaviors we have trouble shaking. Some people may find they have become utterly reckless about bodily harm in general, when they are finally able to unclench their anxious jaws. Some may find they have acquired an almost violent intolerance for all those that continue to act selfishly or negligently, in disregard for the climate or the poor.
Everything that is wrong with our slow-to-action political systems, healthcare structures, patterns of consumption, distribution of wealth and opportunity, lack of financial sustainability for the much-needed arts, sense of community has been brought into sharp relief. I’ve been wearing my activist t-shirt in the hope the world I wake up to when this horrible pandemic is over is not the same world we had going into it. That, I think, would be the worst possible outcome — the biggest waste of time.
Mariana Villas-Boas is a Portuguese writer and storyteller living in Zurich, Switzerland.
