Health and safety gone mad. Do you remember when that was the mantra of the fake libertarians who hated political correctness? You couldn’t do anything any more, according to them, because of the EU or the feminazis, the gays or the humourless lefties. The right didn’t self-isolate with their offensiveness, unfortunately; it simply became mainstream.
Now, health and safety has actually gone mad, for good reason, and it’s not really funny any more. They are drilling and banging in the house next door to me, busy with their home improvements. What a racket. I have found myself thinking about where so much amateur DIY ends up. A&E. Should I glove up and push a gentle note through their door? Would that be the neighbourly thing?
I understand, of course, that as our worlds become smaller, we focus more and more on our homes and on what makes us feel safe. It is this that gives us a feeling of control. This may be delusional, but it’s also comforting. All those silly books I reviewed last year on hygge and lagom, all the Marie Kondo-ing everyone was doing. All the Mrs Hinching now looks vaguely prescient; what else to do but clean up? Why not huddle under a blanket and throw away stuff you never needed? Why not have a cinnamon roll as the world burns?
Before the virus, the world felt uncertain anyway: Brexit, Donald Trump, the collective failure of the left, the rise of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, India’s Narendra Modi. Never mind Russia and China and the bizarre president of Belarus, who has advised drinking vodka and visiting a sauna as ways to stay healthy in the current crisis. Get on your comfiest socks instead, make rye bread and declutter. No harm done.
Now the world outside really is unsafe, everything changes. The demand for “safe space” will never chime in the same way as it once did. No one’s priority right now is being safe from opinions they don’t really like; we all want to be safe from viral loads. Public space is dangerous – and eerie, empty urban vistas have never looked more beautiful.
Private space is dangerous, too. Domestic violence is rising all over the world, the terrorising by men of women who feel less able to escape than ever. Home is a sanctuary for some and a prison for others, and home, the domestic sphere, the only permissible location for many women, is now the only place many of us can be.
Sure, we are lucky to have homes – and our society’s sudden ability to shelter the homeless is obviously a good thing – but so many homes have no outside space and walls can quickly close in. “Home, with our bodies touching / Home, and the cameras watching / Home, will infect whatever you do / Where home, comes to life from out of the blue,” sang David Byrne, capturing the ambivalence about what home may mean.
I hear this ambivalence all the time at the moment. I hear the people who are boasting that their homes are not in the centre of the epidemic, and I hear those who think that, after all of this, they want to move. I hear those nesting and baking and making themselves feel safe by dipping into a reservoir of happy childhood memories, covering themselves in gravity blankets of nostalgic pastimes, tethering themselves to happier memories.
If you didn’t feel very safe as a child, this doesn’t really work, I find. What works best is a kind of numbing, not mindfulness but mindlessness. The shrinks can back off a bit for a while. Of course, it’s good to experience a whole range of emotions, rather than cutting ourselves off, but we can’t all be feeling all the emotions at the moment. For me, watching MasterChef is great because I have no emotional investment in any of the contestants and can just watch as they transform food in ways I would never dream of (good and bad).
To get through this period I can feel part of myself shutting down. This has happened to me before, when my children have been in hospital and near death. It is a physical response to trauma and I find I can sleep when, normally, I would never be able to. I observe this in myself and others. The catastrophe has happened and the anxiety lessens. Life is not safe. The illusion that it ever was turns to ash.
Friends with disabilities and chronic illness, these are the experts now. They know about being stuck at home and perhaps home, as James Baldwin said, is not a place but “simply an irrevocable condition”.
The new condition that the virus requires is a level of disconnect. It depends on self-reliance as well as the need to reach others who are alone. The new condition is already disrupting chains of command. The government is infected and now sends out the medical experts to make its policy announcements, to do its dirty work. How small these big men of government now look. Dominic Cummings isn’t so Teflon, is he? Just one of the herd.
The people who look big are the supermarket workers and the medics. That whole other realm of fake experts, the new-age gurus, the homeopaths, the Goop drips – all those grasping attendants of the “worried well” – have never looked so fraudulent. All that spiritual advice about living in the present, embracing the moment, the power of now? Yeah, well, the present is very difficult. The present is where we are and it’s unsafe.
Knowing this is one thing, feeling it is another. The poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke knew about uncertainty. He told us to stop looking for answers and to learn to love the questions, “like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language”. We don’t know what is going to happen. “At present you need to live the question.” That’s what is hard. Very hard.
So as we weave our cocoons and wait to see what emerges, the only certainty is our gratitude to those who leave theirs to look after us all. That is enough for now. More than enough.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
