Notes from the Far Side of a Pandemic
A series of short statements and quotes in a period of isolation and quarantine which will be developed over the next three hundred days.
The notes will be numbered.
Stories of illness are also stories of healers. (See “Illness as Metaphor” by Susan Sontag) The doctors and nurses and hospital workers and ambulance drivers fighting for us and with us will forever be heroes and heroines. Their stories will guide the rest of our lives.
Every time you open your cell phone, you look at images from photo libraries which are ‘projecting’ their meaning into space. You look, note, categorize, compile, classify, edit and reflect. Compare this to a virus, which we cannot see and the challenges of articulating the way it works and why. Communicating about the virus is as crucial as the medical fight against it.
The main signs of a virus are through its effects and when those effects cannot be controlled or easily overcome, the virus becomes more than an enemy. It turns into a colonizer of the body. This is part of the reason Covid-19 is so frightening.
The image below is a container of anxiety. Is there a microscope that can see anxiety? The image is a brilliant articulation of danger. It is not an image we will soon forget. It will always be a meme for the pandemic and our feelings about the experience, a marker of change and history.
5. An app available in the US, Britain and the Netherlands allows an aggregate information base to be built by individuals on a daily basis. This will show geographical clusters of disease development from an epidemiological point of view. This type of app can change the patterns and significance of the information we gather and alert the health authorities to possible dangers before the impact of the disease grows in one place or another. Covid Symptom Study
Cities are the epicentres of the crisis. Greater density equals more disease. Yet, cities are the lifeblood of contemporary culture and society and density is at the heart of what it means to be a city. Density has also meant greater levels of inequality both visible and invisible. Your life expectancy will be different if you live in a poor area compared to a more wealthy area. These inequities have to change in the post Covid era. Cities have to be rethought from the ground up. The creative sector must challenge its energies into new visions and new ideas for 21st century cities.
Fears, anxiety, paranoia. Feelings. Emotions. The challenges of surviving a pandemic include faith in self-control to a degree far greater than normally needed. To be alone in these circumstances is to be tested over and over again, everyday. For those with bubbles larger than one, there is the ever present worry about inadvertent or accidental infection. For those without some support or isolated on their own, there is the worry of fading from view. No one will know. Chaos. Uncertainty. Pandemics are by their very nature, non-linear. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere and we are stuck in the space in-between, balancing between self-knowledge, science, truth and darkness. We are accustomed to thinking about the future, which is why we are all hoping we will be saved by a vaccine. We know that the testing time for conclusive evidence that a vaccine will work far exceeds our capacity to remain calm and collected. Yet, and this is the wonder, we endure. We are proving yet again the almost limitless abilities of humans to adapt to nearly anything and stay the course. This cultural and biological imperative is cause for celebration amidst the pain and death that surrounds us. And, as we learn more about the illness, we will drive with force to conquer it.
It should be clear by now that our society has been transformed by the crisis we are in. Everything feels fluid and unstable. Yet to varying degrees, everything looks the same. This contrast masks the profound shifts we are experiencing. From simple to the complex. Take our medical system, for example. Every aspect of the systems which have governed hospitals for decades must be redesigned and rethought. From the complex to greater complexity. And universities need to rethink what a classroom means. Teachers have to redevelop if not transform their teaching. In a couple of months, we have moved from the regular to the irregular, the linear to the nonlinear. Even our sense of time has changed. What are the markers for a day passing? The clock or the sun? What does summer mean when there is little chance of enjoying regular activities and every human action is governed by the constraints of distance and fear? At the same time, so many people are finding extraordinary ways of being creative, helping others and supporting their families that it seems impossible to return to the avaricious and self centred society which we have hopefully left behind. Yet, it is the poor and the elderly who have paid a terrible price during this pandemic and we must never forget that whatever we build for the future must be inclusive, expansive and generous and must recognize that poverty is a shared social and moral responsibility for all of us.
Recently in the New York Times, Brian Greene, a physicist, said the following: “Why would any species spend time and energy on creative works that seemingly have no survival value? In a precarious world with limited resources, the puzzle is thus to understand why we are drawn to activities that relate so obliquely to the goals of securing food, or a mate, or shelter.” What is the desire to create about? Could it be as natural as eating or breathing? Could it be as essential as as any of the activities we define as human? Why do creativity and creative work sit at the margins of our identities when we all, to varying degrees, engage with our creative instincts every day? Wouldn’t we be better able to answer this question if we enlarged our definitions of what it means to be human? The restrictions we have imposed are cultural and ideological, not natural. Every time we cook, play or even daydream, we are invoking some form of the creative spirit. The supposed differences between the arts and the sciences are artificial and unhelpful. Both areas have different methods but share similar goals. The time is right to look for what binds us, rather than what separates one area of practice from another.
Beyond the startling figures of the dead and afflicted, there are so many families living in grief. They are immersed in the pain of loss and although words of support help, there is the overwhelming feeling that the anguish will never let up. Time will heal, say some. But time passes differently when trauma has imposed its weight and will on body and soul, exposing and nurturing the raw facts of absence, the hard realization that the pain will dull but never disappear. Behind and beyond the surface of statistics lies the truth of this pandemic. It is a vicious, painful killer and the families of the most vulnerable have been affected to a far greater degree than they deserve. As a society, we will overcome this, but how will we ever measure its cost?
In the 1950’s, cybernetics was an important field of study and a key foundation of the information sciences as we know them today. Founded in part by Norbert Wiener and beautifully theorized in his seminal book, Cybernetics, Wiener developed and deepened many of the current ideas we use today to understand computer technologies and their impact. It is especially applicable to the study and implementation of AI or artificial intelligence. One of the central ideas circulating at the time was that humans and computers were adaptive information processors. This idea collapsed the human mind and the brain into one function as information managers. This was, in my opinion, one of those major errors that end up embedded in public awareness and become memes. It is part of the reason we compare the human brain to computers and even dare use the word “intelligence” to describe advanced forms of data management and information processing. AI at this stage is really good at sorting through vast amounts of information and discriminating and prioritizing what is important and what isn’t. The reality is that we are very far away from the complex activities that we recognize as intelligence. Machines are not subjects. They may one day become quasi human but not for a very long time. The neuro physiology of the brain is so complex that subjectivity will remain its domain even as we use AI to engage in the management of some of its activities. .
