We are survivors of immeasurable events,
Flung upon some reach of land
Rebecca Elson seems always in between. As an astronomer, she studied globular clusters, spherical collections of stars bound by gravity, which contain some of the most ancient stars in the galaxy. In photographs, globular clusters look like someone has popped the lid off a pot of silver glitter and upturned it onto black velvet: a dense sparkling mountain in the centre, diffusing to specks. As a poet Elson moved between inner and outer worlds, between the vastness of the sky and the solidity of ‘the small patch where each foot falls.’ Her poems are an experience akin to watching time lapse films of the night sky, the reader is ever vulnerable to the vertigo of her invitation to ‘Consider the fixed stars. // You are the falling ones.’
Elson’s poem “Antidotes to Fear of Death” sometimes appears on lists of poems for funeral readings, and in 2020 on the odd pandemic poetry list. No doubt due to its themes of finding hope, or some consolation at least, in thoughts of the immensity of the universe and the obliqueness of time:
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
‘Antidotes to Fear of Death’ was the last poem Elson published before she died from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1999. She was 39. But it was her poem ‘Evolution’ that inspired the title of a project that began at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing in April 2020.
*
At that time, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was in intensive care, suffering severe symptoms of the coronavirus. The UK had been in lockdown since 23rd March, announced by Johnson with the words, ‘I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home.’[i] In lockdown cafés and pubs closed, one-way systems were set up for essential shops, each place in the queue marked by a sticker two meters from the next. Social distancing was mandatory. We clapped for the NHS on Thursday evenings at eight o’clock and as time went on pans were banged, car horns beeped, non-clappers named and shamed on community Facebook groups. Around the time the UK death toll reached 10,000[ii] Captain Tom Moore completed 100 laps of his garden to mark his 100th birthday, raising over £30 million for the NHS. Pictures of swans and dolphins enjoying the newly clear water of Venice’s canals were shared widely on social media. Shortly afterwards the National Geographic showed that the dolphin story wasn’t true, but the herd of mountain goats spotted roaming Llandudno was real, as were the rockhopper penguins Edward and Annie, filmed wandering the rotunda in Chicago’s Shedd Aquarium.[iii] By early May the UK had the highest reported death toll in Europe[iv]. Later that month, Johnson’s Chief of Staff Dominic Cummings held a press release in the rose garden at Downing Street to answer questions from the press about his decision to drive from London to Durham during lockdown. We waited almost an hour past the allotted time for him to lope out, loose white shirt hinting a surrender that he refused to offer. Driving to Barnard Castle to check one’s eyesight became a wry punchline.
For some people there was time and space for creativity in those first weeks and months of lockdown. Sourdough starters were fed, artistic and literary projects dusted off, vegetable patches dug, or seeds planted in makeshift containers, Monty Don had to film himself for Gardener’s World. In one episode he turned to the camera to apologise, explained he’d forgotten something from the potting shed. A cut then he was back with the item he needed, though a couple of the objects on his table had moved, like a memory game. For other people though, things were considerably less fulfilling. Parents tried to entertain bored toddlers in flats, help lonely children reluctant to complete downloaded worksheets while their own work remained untouched until after bedtime. Teachers and lecturers adapted their courses for online teaching, students isolated in their rooms. Medics, the emergency services, retail and delivery workers went out and risked exposure to the virus, or worse, performing their essential roles.
And now it is April 2021. Screen-weary children and ‘quaranteens’ are back in school and through the asymmetric fringes of our lockdown hairstyles we look back on a year of socially distanced walks with strictly no sitting on park benches. We recall tiers and Christmas bubbles. We have a vaccine rollout, a roadmap out of lockdown, and a new lexicon: we self-isolate, social distance. We are enraged and baffled in turn by covidiots and covid deniers as we doomscroll for news of mutations, a wave breaking somewhere, protests and police violence, another bubble burst, another outlandish conspiracy theory about microchips and mind control. Experts on Radio 4 explain the concept of vaccine nationalism. We sit, Zoomed out in our Zoomrooms fretting about Zoombombers spamming our gatherings with inappropriate images. We wonder if it’s a faux pas to comment on the curated bookshelf in someone’s background or if that’s the equivalent of peering into their sitting room through an accidental gap in the curtains. We watch, incredulous, as an attempted coup unfolds in Washington DC. Meetings conclude with everyone waving goodbye like children’s television presenters with one hand, the other floundering for the exit button.
*
As these events unfolded there was a distinct self-conscious awareness that we were living through Historic Times and should be responding, documenting, preserving, indexing, archiving, and tagging every moment. Curators from the Smithsonian museums collected art, signs, photographs and other artifacts that multiplied on the security fence erected near Lafayette Square in Washington DC during the protests over George Floyd’s death. In Bristol, curators from the M-Shed Museum worked on the statue of slaver Edward Colston, thrown into the Floating Harbour as part of the same protest. The bronze statue itself, along with a magazine signed by the Foundry workers who cast it in 1895, the old bicycle tyre hanging from the statue when it was pulled from the Harbour, the red paint on the statue’s face, the graffiti on its body and approximately 500 protest signs will all be preserved.
As well as museum curators, a hospital doctor in New York began recording video diaries and a company called Medic Footprints collected doctors’ stories. Dr John Tregoning, a scientist studying respiratory infections at Imperial College London wrote a weekly column in Nature. Dr Janis Whitlock, a psychologist at Cornell University, started an online journaling project. Former fellows of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard set up Corona Diaries, an open database that allows anyone to record audio stories, and is intended to be used by journalists, artists and creators under the Creative Commons licence.
This impulse to seek out and archive written testimonies of everyday life is not new. In 1937, the anthropologist and ornithologist Tom Harrisson, painter and film-maker Humphrey Jennings, and a poet and Daily Mirror journalist Charles Madge launched Mass Observation. From that point, through the Second World War and until the early 1950s, Mass Observation ran a national panel of volunteer diarists and employed a team of observers. In the 1970s the Mass Observation Archive came to the University of Sussex, and in 1981 a new panel of ‘Mass Observation Correspondents’ was recruited. Currently, Mass Observation is encouraging individuals, schools, and community groups to send their coronavirus diaries to the Project. We had all set our minds to an imaginary future, already looking back on the archived present.
Life-writing is often divided into ‘source’ materials which capture everyday moments, emotions, and language, such as diaries and letters or the ‘small stories’ of social media; and longer forms, literary creations such as biographies, autobiographies, biofictions. Somewhere in the middle, resisting such straightforward categorisation, are examples of life-writing such as a lyric poem drawn from life, short-forms such as flash nonfiction, literary journalism or braided essays containing fragments of memoir. Source materials such as letters and diaries have been and continue to be invaluable to historians studying pandemics such as the Influenza Pandemic (1957-58); the Spanish Flu (1918-20); the Great Plague of London (1665-66); and the Black Death (1347-1351). First World War poet Wilfred Owen, in wry letters to his mother, Susan, in 1918 didn’t take the Spanish Flu seriously:
The thing is much too common for me to take part in. I have quite decided not to! Scottie [a regimental friend], whom I still see sometimes, went under today, & my servant yesterday. Imagine the work that falls on unaffected officers.[v]
Thomas Walsingham, an English Benedictine monk and chronicler of the abbey at St. Albans, recorded how the ‘great mortality’ of the Black Death transformed the world. ‘Towns once packed with people were emptied of their inhabitants, and the plague spread so thickly that the living were hardly able to bury the dead.[vi]’ Samuel Pepys’s famous diary offers detailed insight into the plague that struck London in the seventeenth century. One entry, on 30th April 1665, reads ‘Great fears of the sickenesse here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve as all![vii]’
The book critic for the New York Times, Parul Sehgal, described the diaristic impulse as ‘beautifully ordinary… Records of quarantine may be banal’, she writes, ‘but their very existence is reassuring enough to be lovely.’ Much as the narrator in Simon Armitage’s “The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash” tries to comfort a loved one through a hospital window, reminding her of her favourite tree and favourite bird. Other literary responses to the pandemic include Summerby Ali Smith, the fourth in her seasonal quartet of novels, was called ‘the first great coronavirus novel’ in the Evening Standard. This, along with Zadie Smith’s essay collection, Intimations and The New York Times compilation of short stories, The Decameron Project, join the latter’s namesake The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, (c1353) in the library of plague literature, stacked alongside Daniel Defoe’s, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man(1826), The Plague, by Albert Camus (1947), Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel García Márquez (1988), and Room, by Emma Donoghue (2010), among others.
The impulse to solicit, catalogue, and preserve is can be found among collectors of more literary forms of life-writing as well. A project at the University of Plymouth, led by Professor Anthony Caleshu and funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, seeks to promote the ‘therapeutic value of reading and/or ‘reflexive’ writing of poetry’. Carol Ann Duffy, former poet laureate and Creative Director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, set up ‘WRITE Where We Are NOW’ in the early stages of the pandemic, and continued collecting poems from around the world until 30th June 2020. Contributors include George Szirtes, Don Paterson, Grace Nichols, who writes of ‘The impromptu arias at windows / and balconies, the orchestras of pots’.
*
On 24th March 2020, just as the UK went into lockdown, Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing published Lives of Houses, a collection of essays that celebrated our fascination with the houses of famous literary figures, artists, composers, and politicians of the past. Little did they know as they read through those essays, checked the proofs, and prepared for publication how topical that collection would turn out to be, as many people’s lives became newly bounded by their own houses.
Shortly after Lives of Houses was published, I had the idea for a collaborative creative life-writing project, the Life-Writing of Immeasurable Events. There is, of course, much that is not immeasurable about the coronavirus pandemic. It is measurable in hours, days, weeks, months of lockdown. Measurable in number of cases, infection rates, hospital admissions, numbers of beds and ventilators; in how many tests have been sent out, how many sent back, how many positive results; in how much Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) was needed and how much was available to those who needed it. It is measurable by the numbers of people who can meet inside or outside, numbers of who can attend weddings and funerals. Measurable in unemployment rates, numbers of businesses closing, numbers of holidays booked, in the share prices of pharmaceutical companies. It is measurable by how many people have died, how many continue to experience symptoms of ‘long covid’; and in how many people have received their first and second doses of a vaccine. But what can be measured offers only a partial interpretation.
Elson the astronomer was undeterred by how little we can know of the universe. Elson the poet believed that ‘facts are only as interesting as the possibilities they open up to the imagination.’ I hoped to open up possibilities to the imagination by encouraging people to share what they were doing, feeling, experiencing, in those strange times, through life-writing. The first week’s creative prompt took inspiration from Lives of Houses, and asked people to notice objects in their immediate environment. ‘Little things, ordinary things, the familiar things you see and use every day. Or unexpected things, lost and then found things, things discovered in the backs of cupboards, jigsaw puzzles and board games dusted off. Or the absence of things: eggs and toilet paper, unexpected visitors or indeed any visitors at all. New things: vegetable boxes hastily assembled, books delivered by a neighbour and placed in quarantine beside the front door…’. Other prompts suggested finding poetry in newspaper reports, morning routines, the idea of ‘getting back to normal’, putting on a mask and ‘on not writing’.
[i] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-address-to-the-nation-on-coronavirus-23-march-2020
[ii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52264145
[iii] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/coronavirus-pandemic-fake-animal-viral-social-media-posts. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-wales-52109712. https://twitter.com/shedd_aquarium/status/1239661654629023747?s=20
[iv] BMJ 2020; 369 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m1850 (Published 06 May 2020)
[v] Med. Hist. (2013), vol. 57(2), pp. 165_185.
[vi] https://theconversation.com/how-medieval-writers-struggled-to-make-sense-of-the-black-death-134114
[vii] https://theconversation.com/diary-of-samuel-pepys-shows-how-life-under-the-bubonic-plague-mirrored-todays-pandemic-136222
Katherine Collins 
Leave a comment