Writing in a Time of Quarantine

image: Loïc Furhoff for Unsplash

What does one write when the world seems to have stopped on its axis? How do you find words for what is happening? Initially what we saw online were deserted streets, café tables piled in corners, shuttered restaurants; now many of us are seeing the same thing in our own local communities and neighborhoods. What does the writer do? Describe the forlorn bit of newsprint one saw blowing down an empty street?

There’s such a sense of responsibility here. We are the ones who are supposed to call out the mighty, to point to the hungry child and the deadly pollution, to bring humanity face to face with its failures, responsibilities, and triumphs.

So the writer looks at the newest plague and needs to parse it, to take it apart and analyze what it means, where it leads us.

In the summer of 1982, Tim Dlugos wrote a four-line poem entitled “My Death.” The summer before, reports of a mysterious cancer spreading among gay men had begun appearing in major newspapers. In the poem, Dlugos makes no explicit mention of what the looming threat is, but  there’s a terrible sense of foreboding in his few lines:

when I no longer

feel it breathing down

my neck it’s just around

the corner (hi neighbor)

It’s not that we haven’t written about the plague before. From Poe’s Masque of the Red Death to Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain, from Boccaccio’s The Decameron to Crace’s The Pesthouse, authors have delighted in using outbreaks of deathly illnesses to warn us of how quickly our norms could collapse, given the right circumstances. (I toyed with the idea of writing a plague novel myself during the brief H1N1 pandemic back in 2008.) To my mind, the most powerful of all of them is Albert Camus’ The Plague, a parable about the necessity of human solidarity in the face of an absurd universe (and an allegory of the Nazi occupation of France).

It’s one thing, though, to take a historic event and make it into an allegorical story: Camus lived through the occupation, but not through the cholera outbreak on which he based his fictional disease. It’s something else altogether to witness it happening now, here, in real time. And that seems to call for some sort of commentary.

The imagined dystopias that dominate so much of our popular culture have been accruing in the margins of the real world for a long time, and they’re coming home now.

“In the dark times. Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.”

(Bertolt Brecht)

I don’t yet know what to sing, how to put our dark times into words that are meaningful to anyone besides myself. Ysabelle Cheung thinks we can only capture this time in fragments of poetry, random thoughts, unfinished sentences.

I hope sometime to do more.