The Last Word On Nothing

I have somehow become involved in wholesale Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) procurement. That is not my job, and I know nothing about it, but the old rules no longer apply in this sudden new world. All it takes now, apparently, is to know some people with particular connections in China and all of a sudden you have state governments and federal agencies clamouring at your cellphone, lighting up your home screen with the photo of your cat on it. I sense the urgency of the world squeezing through a bottleneck of production capacity and I am glad to be merely a switchboard operator in that game, forwarding emails from my people to theirs, hoping I am helping.

Meanwhile time has, in other ways, stopped. Mortgages are frozen where I am, rent in some places is suspended. School has stopped, no matter what the three homeschoolers on my Facebook feed pretend. Many people’s incomes have stopped. That is not sustainable, but this will, nevertheless, go on. For the academic year or for the calendar year? I don’t recall anything ever being quite so up in the air.

We’re in a liminal time zone, where Chronos clock time has given way to Kairos, the non-time time when you pivot and transform and emerge changed. We are in our cocoons, and all we know is caterpillar, and butterfly is something entirely different, and we are not there yet. What a trite analogy, and yet a crucial part of it usually gets lost. It’s what happens inside the cocoon—only miraculous as a black box, if you don’t see the sausage made—a liquification of the caterpillar, utter obliteration into butterfly soup.

That painful identity dissolution here at my desk sounds like incessant pinging and buzzing twelve hours a day as the people from my workplace, unused to working from home, abuse Microsoft Teams and Slack and ensure nobody in the entire department gets to focus for one single second. The middle aged ones are out of control with GIFs. It’s like getting those Facebook chain letters from your aunt, except you can’t ignore these ones because there’s a hiring freeze and possible redundancies coming down the pipe.

So you dutifully read through four pages of two people talking about something they should have their own channel for, and you ‘thumbs up’ the employee engagement person who has made an employee appreciation scheme entirely of emojis. And you venture out of the house to have socially awkward grocery shopping sessions with swim-goggle-and-scarfed neighbours. And this will, nevertheless, go on.

And so—though with temporarily less frequency—will this blog, which has always been virtual and always a source of social closeness with physical distancing. I have never met most of my blog-mates, and as darkness descends I have never felt closer to them.

Image: Prague astronomical clock (installed in 1410. Wikimedia Commons.