Why has a virus brought the planet to a stop? This is the question I have been sitting with. Nothing prior to Coronavirus has been able to do this. Neither mass ecological destruction, with its resultant famine and disease, nor the high number of deaths in wealthy countries from opiates, obesity and alcoholism. Why is this? Is it because it is invisible? Is it because once more we have an ‘enemy’ we can conquer, within the body itself? The body has been so maligned in Western Culture. I would say hated actually – beginning with the Christian Church and continued in western traditional scholarship. Always designated to a lesser place, reduced and minimized in significance. Until we get sick! Until we are afflicted with an illness or a virus! Then the body is sacrosanct. We recognise we cannot live without it. I’m very serious – I think many people would prefer to be a walking head or a talking head. (Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days reflects this wonderful absurdity). People even speak of being betrayed by their bodies, as though their body is a slave in service to the far superior head/brain. This top-down concept of priorities is being truly dislodged in this present moment. We are all in this together. There is something comforting in this that many people feel, including myself. The virus does not differentiate between rich and poor, white or black, man or woman, it attaches where it can, invitation or not. How the disease might play out is however, profoundly effected by wealth distribution.
The Coronavirus confirms we are a social body not an individual mechanical body. We exist in an inter-subjective field – we transmit knowledge this way as well as viruses. We have not extended hospitality to this virus on our terms; it has leapt across all the boundaries, mechanized structures of control and ideas about ourselves as a separate individual body. We are in isolation to minimise the spread from body to body. We cannot make the virus hostage to our will. Currently it is holding us hostage! Our response to the Coronavirus has a history back to the medieval plagues. Isolation is known to curb the curve of infection but what will curb the curve of our insatiable appetite for addictive consumption? In these days and weeks of being at home with much less work and demands it is possible to begin to perceive other ways of living. I hope many people get to like it and recognise they have been conned – by a system that treats them as dispensable objects rather than feeling subjects. That we all need less material goods and far more spatial/temporal realms to explore our originality. We could begin by being inspired by the complexity of the living world that surrounds us in our cities, towns and rural countryside. We might discover a gentleness and love for living that requires so much less than we have been led to believe we need.