The global impact of Coronavirus is simply unparalleled in modern human history. Close to 200 000 people have died worldwide at the time of this writing, and that figure is bound to appear depressingly quaint within a few days. One of the grim ironies of this pandemic is that its successful transmission has been facilitated by the very systems of travel and commerce that characterise the triumph of capitalist globalisation (not to mention some world leaders whose ruthless mendacity is only Trumped by their ignorance). Major cities like New York and London are paralysed, and there are reports of coronavirus cases in a remote Amazonian tribe. Consequently, my nerves are frayed, twitching versions of their former selves. Alright, maybe this is a slightly misleading statement. In truth, I’ve always been something of a worrywart, a glass half-empty-and-filled-with-strychnine kind of guy. The spectre of death is something I have dreaded since early adolescence. My earliest memory of mortality’s grim finality was (unsurprisingly) experienced through the movies. I remember watching Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas when the whole death-thing whacked me upside the head like a champagne bottle wielded by Joe Pesci. And unlike him, this death dude was decidedly not a funny guy. In a film filled with deaths both understandable and inexplicable, it is Ray Liotta’s eventual arrest that truly jolted my young mind into a sudden awareness. When the policeman places his gun against the cocaine-addled gangster’s head and screams an order to freeze, Ray Liotta muses that if it was a ‘wiseguy’, he wouldn’t have heard a thing. He would simply be dead. This was the moment of my unspoken dread’s first articulation. One second here, the next second elsewhere. Or nowhere. Goodbye sweet obliviousness, welcome creeping existential panic!
Despite this morbid fixation, nothing could have prepared me for the all-consuming terror pervading the world right now. Death has become airborne, transcontinental, a spectre catching the red-eye into Johannesburg on business. No longer content playing chess with the late Max von Sydow, Death has turned its dispassionate gaze towards world domination. The neon crawl of economic indicators has been hijacked by the macabre spectacle of a global death-count to the right of Wolf Blitzer’s stoic face. Prime ministers, beggars, would-be kings, healthcare professionals, Idris Elba. If we’ve learned anything from the wide range of confirmed cases, it is that the Coronavirus is an equal opportunities predator that preys upon social elites and the socially elided alike.
Economists suggest that the financial crisis concomitant with the Coronavirus pandemic will exceed the impact of the second world war. The economic fallout precipitated by this virus will result in a whole wave of secondary deaths that may not make it onto an official Coronavirus death count (suicides, domestic violence homicides, people with chronic medical conditions who will be a secondary focus for haemorrhaging healthcare systems, poor people everywhere who will starve as a result of Draconian lockdown measures).
There are so many hidden dimensions to this virus that it is simply impossible to gauge its impact in terms of the economic cost and lives affected (death not being the only way that people die). The news media is understandably transfixed by this ongoing shared narrative, and its online ubiquity can be seen in constant news updates about symptomology, the explosion of dubious internet teaching platforms and quarantine porn. Given the complexity of this subject and its influence upon practically every sphere of contemporary life, I was puzzled about formulating an article that could adequately express my mounting anxiety. A reflection on the scandalous lack of resources available to healthcare professionals worldwide? A scathing indictment of an American president whose level of human compassion lies somewhere between Ted Bundy and Genghis Khan? So many targets worthy of a pen dipped in bile! However, I want to make a few quick observations about the dangers quarantine poses to mental health and how this recent lockdown exposes a festering rot at the heart of global culture.
Firstly, a quick disclaimer. I live in a country where close to 50% of the population do not have access to running water. For many South African citizens, living in unbearable proximity to others is an inescapable reality of everyday life, let alone quarantined existence. I am a white South African cosily ensconced in the Kwa-Zulu Natal suburbs, and my biggest physical drawback during this pandemic has been a torturous 72 hours of enforced cold turkey from cigarettes (three cheers to it getting easier from here on in!). The contentious banning of cigarettes is a matter for another article, but what I’m underlining is that I speak from an incredibly privileged position relative to the vast majority of South Africans. Therefore, I understand that complaints about the psychological impact of lockdown may seem like small potatoes compared with the travails faced by many South Africans familiar with the desperate exigencies of daily survival. However, I hope that readers will find enough truth in the following words to forgive my necessarily myopic account of psychic disintegration.
I’ve always considered myself to be an introverted person whose enjoyment of solitary activities (reading, watching films, video games, masturbation) would make this quarantine period a piece of cake. How wrong I was. If this lockdown has taught me anything about myself, it is that I am an intensely social being, despite my cynical misgivings about contemporary society. This is the third week of South Africa’s lockdown, and I’m getting edgy. I’m surrounded by people that I love, yet I am beginning to develop contempt for their overly familiar faces, the predictable cadences of their voices, the same, tired physiological responses to our shared entrapment. This nervy short-temperedness is complemented by a healthy dose of guilt for such meanspirited and unfair contempt, and thus we end up hating ourselves as well as each other for these perfectly natural, embittered responses to such enforced, unremitting proximity. It is as if we have suddenly been thrust back into an earlier, distinctly pre-modern social system of constant face-to-face interaction that many contemporary people are singularly ill-prepared for. We need social engagement with others beyond the obvious limitations of online communication, and yet this fundamental desire is where the virus thrives. Tricky bastard, right? Like HIV, Covid-19 requires human intimacy for transmission, death hidden in the trojan horse of human flesh.
I’m sure that this two-fold envelopment of awful feeling (the classic layers of inner and outer loathing that characterise depressive thought) is a response many readers will be familiar with. Of course, there will be some people who assert that this pandemic has brought their families closer together. I’m sure that may be true for some lucky families, particularly those with work-obsessed parents forced by circumstance to actually communicate with the strangers they live with. It is a slavish dimension of human consciousness that we are so desperate for silver linings we’ll ignore the pulsating cumulonimbus they inevitably frame. I would argue that this lockdown has exposed the emptiness of internet ‘connectivity’ and the mocking, narcissistic void at the heart of online interaction. We can post videos of ourselves doing asinine things to alleviate our anxiety and prove the indomitability of the human spirit when facing that other dreaded horseman of contemporary disaster (boredom). But do people actually want a video of pampered celebrities doing lethally inappropriate singalongs of anti-consumerist pop songs from the comfort of their mansions? We can sit on Facebook comparing each other’s bedrooms from the comfort of our navels (or is that the other way round?), but what does our much vaunted ‘connectivity’ matter when we cannot engage with the human beings who are sitting five meters away? It is a grotesque irony that in this era of social distancing, the greatest gulfs in distance seem to exist between people who live in the closest proximity with each other.
