Short Talk on Pandemic Prolepsis
Viviane Sassen, Inhale (2011), from Sassen’s Parasomnia photography series. Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa. Note the exhaustion.
Coronacoaster (noun)
The ups and downs of a pandemic: one day you’re loving your bubble, doing work outs, baking banana bread and going for long walks and the next you’re crying, drinking gin for breakfast and missing people you don’t even like.
Author unknown, “Coronacoaster meme,” Instagram, 2020.
I laughed when I first saw this meme swirling around social media some time ago. I immediately screen-shotted the post and within minutes, ten more friends were sharing my amusement. The image resurfaced on my Instagram feed about a week ago, but I refused to share it again. At first glance looking at the post, my face immediately contorted into a half-smirk for an audience of one, the “one” being me. However, I quickly began to feel hot rage rising inside me. This anger subsided into a numb sense of sadness, which I instinctively embraced. Perhaps rekindling anger is more inspirational than defeat. I concluded with defeat on all sides, having spent no more than quickly moving seconds, leaping from hot to numb, and punctuated by some inevitable eye-rolling.[1]
Now, I do not mean to overly editorialize this opinion piece. I author these memories in reflection and, in doing so, those fifteen seconds are stretched into hundreds of words that seem almost Romantic, with a capital ‘R.’
As shocking as it may sound, I did not jump out of bed in response to seeing this meme, nor did I wrap myself in a warm housecoat to cover my nonexistent satin sleeping gown. I did not, then, follow-up by placing another log on the dwindling fire to keep warm from the chilly English moors while inking my quill and jotting down my reflections in an effortlessly lyrical prose.
What actually happened: I saw the meme, rolled my eyes, scrolled down as far as I could with the sheer power of a forceful thumb swipe, scrolled back up to re-confront the picture, sighed in annoyance, and turned off the lights while rolling my eyes for a third time before falling back asleep.
I did realize rather quickly, however, that my visceral reaction to the text-image put so many of my “pandemical issues” back on the fire.
Seeing that meme some months back, and then again for a brief moment just days ago, made me feel like I had just been reintroduced to the technology of clocks. Without requiring a detailed outline of humanity’s temporal disorientations in times of plague, I think it is fair to say that time moves differently now.
Our shared and personal conceptualizations, directions, and commandments of time have changed since March 2020. The simplest example might be our very unique internalized clocks that can differ by seconds between each person on a “normal morning.” I know quite well how much time I need each morning, for instance, to prepare myself for work or class in a “normal world.” There is no special formula. We know our habits from experience and set our digital alarm clocks to ensure our internal ones can function on schedule—a kind of symbiotic feedback loop.
Now, with Zoom meetings and limited travel, those subconscious practices have become almost obsolete. I no longer need to check the morning weather report unless I am preparing myself for “the great outdoors,” which now simply refers to the sidewalk. Those pesky minutes I used to factor in as a cushion for unexpected delays on the streets are of no concern to me, given my 6ft commute from room to room, bed to office, coffeepot to desk, sleep to waking.
My pandemic commute has, in many ways, melted my previously polarized understanding of rest versus productivity. If rest is confined to the home, productivity is restricted to the workplace, I thought. Remember when your bedroom was the most exciting place to come home to after a long day? My bedroom is now my office, lunch lounge, library, and commute, all wrapped up into an incredibly uncomfortable architecture.
Yes, time and space have collapsed. I hoped to only ever use that phrase ironically, or as a provocation, in a paper on fifteenth-century Italian paintings of ancient Alexandria in which a narrative prolepsis was something to yearn for, not run from. Yet here I sit, staring at my bed from my office-library-dining table-living room.
I am not the first nor will I be the last to say that this pandemic has been incredibly challenging, but I want to highlight the privilege with which I am afforded the luxury of writing about this from my live-work capsule. This is not to say, however, that examining one’s experience and well-being in these newly defined spaces is unimportant. The spatial meaning of my bedroom has been flipped upside down. It is no longer a place of rest, but “simply” stress.
The divisions between labor and leisure are, in my room, one in the same.
Returning to the meme… I laughed some months back, but now I feel anger, disappointment, fear. I cannot even remember if I baked banana bread, or worked out, or loved my “bubble.” I remember a sense of excitement. I once thought, “This is going to be great! I will have so much more time to work on my thesis and coursework!” That was short-lived. What month is it now?
We use memes and other digital media to commiserate, and this “Coronacoaster” is a perfect example.
Let us imagine the dreamer: in the midst of the illusion of the dream world ... he calls out to himself: “It is a dream, I will dream on” ... [and in so doing] he must have completely lost sight of waking reality.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872); abridged and paraphrased by Aidan Flynn.
This proleptic confusion seems dream-like and illusory—a painful parasomnia. Memes are virtual machines, like clocks, through which I have been able to rediscover time in a new, isolated sense, while simultaneously losing all “sight of waking reality.”
Viviane Sassen, Parasomnia (2011), from Sassen’s Parasomnia photography series. Note the exhaustion, confusion.
[1] My deepest gratitude goes out to Gillian Strahlendorf for her kind editing and advising. Friend, colleague, and Honors graduate from the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON, Canada, Gillian is interested in abnormal, developmental, and evolutionary psychology. Without her, this article would not have been possible.