COVID19: Seismic Shifts and Aftershocks
Maurice Whelan
3 August 2024
For many people the COVID19 pandemic has come and gone. Life is getting back to normal. Now and again reference is made to variants of the virus still in the community but the news cycle spins and our attentions are required elsewhere. Life has moved on. There is a new normal.
There is an alternative point of view. It is built of the belief that the pandemic caused seismic shifts within us and changed lives in significant ways; that embracing a ‘new normal’ is a mistake; that we ignore the hidden aftershocks at our peril. While our physical health may be on safer ground, our social and mental well-being may be under threat from that age-old human tendency to forget. I will be raising lots of questions and making observations. I am only certain of one thing, the need to think and talk.
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In his book Pandemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present, emeritus professor of the history on medicine Frank M. Snowden explored pandemics, plagues, and pestilences through history. In the Dublin Review of Books, July 2021 a reviewer Eoin O'Brien wrote the following,
'The devastation caused by past pandemics can be attributed more to the incompetence of government and the misuse of available preventative treatment measures than to the virulence of infecting organism. Historical examination of pandemics...illustrate repeatedly that the behaviour of the most intelligent species on the earth, when faced with annihilation is often downright stupid'.
Today, to understand the behaviour of the most intelligent species on the planet, I place three events side by side. WWI, the Spanish flu, and COVID19. And I place them together for several reasons. They are recent history. Some people here had parents who were children in the Spanish Flu and WWI. Many people had grandparents who were alive in both the Spanish Flu and WWI. Some had grandparents who died in the Spanish Flu or WWI.
I ask how are these events remembered. And my enquiry is based on the simple belief that it is important to remember significant things that happen to us and to the society we live in. If good things happen, we need to claim them. If bad things happen, we need to think about and understand them. If not remembered and thought about and understood they do not vanish and dissolve in the ether. They vanish and remain within us. And between us. They remain active in that part of the human mind we call the unconscious.
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So let us start with WWI. It began in 1914 and ended in 1918. 20 million people died.
How it is remembered? Some of you in the room may have come here over the ANZAC bridge. On my way here I passed The Garden of Remembrance in Chatswood. A mile from here there is a memorial of WWI. We can visit the Hyde Park War Memorial here in Sydney or the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. On April 25 ANZAC DAY rituals of remembrance take place all over Australia. A few weeks ago, the NSW Premier announced new restrictions to trade on ANSAC Day and said he made the changes to protect the sanctity of the day.
Do you know how many places where war is remembered in Australia? Between four and five thousand! North Western France and Belgium are dotted with graveyards full of small white tombstone for the WWI fallen. You can visit the Somme. You can step inside a recreated trench. In Messines there is an Irish Peace Park and an Irish Round Tower that commemorates all the Irish who died, the wounded and the missing in WWI. And all these numerous graveyards are continually cared for. The grass is cut regularly. There are flowers and plants and information about those buried. There are organisations, there are funds, there are many people whose daily work, whose life’s work is to assist the world in remembering. Lest We Forget.
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When reading accounts of the war I came across the story of George Scrivens. George Scrivens was a British army sergeant: He was sent out on a night raid at Arras on the Western Front, on 21st May 1916. He did not return. He was presumed dead or captured. Ten nights later stretcher bearers heard groans from a shell hole. George was alive. He was dehydrated; he was rat-eaten; he had significant blood loss and raging septicaemia. Twelve days later, on 11 June he died. He was 21.
The WWI poet Wilfred Owen wrote poem called Dulce Et Decorum Est. He was using the Latin words by Horace dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, which translate as, ‘It is sweet and right to die for your country.’
I wrote a poem called I, Goerge Scrivens, which is my imagined ten nights in a shell hole in no-man’s-land. I placed some of Wilfred Owen’s words at the beginning of the poem. His words describe soldiers dying from mustard gas poisoning.
If in some smothering dreams you too
...could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori, Wilfred Owen
I wrote the poem to give this forsaken and forgotten man a voice.
“I, George Scrivens
You, who think war glorious listen to my plea,
Who tell young men – dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,
Come to my Gethsemane and watch one hour with me.
For me there is no peaceful death, no churchyard eulogy,
In foreign mud and sludge and grime I’ll die,
Tell me if war is glorious when you listen to my plea.
Shot and paralysed, alone in a deathly hole in deathly
No-man’s-land no man hears my sigh. Please, by and by
Seek out my Gethsemane and watch one hour with me.
Through ten fevered days and icy nights my body
Sweats and shakes. Above the shells and bullets fly.
Is your war still glorious? Can you heed my plea?
Caked in mud and excrement the rats with me make free;
They drink my blood, my flesh they eat. Before I die
Lay down in my Gethsemane and watch one hour with me.
I see frail failing shadows; the boy I used to be.
I hear a voice, singing, a lullaby.”
Young men, for peace stand vigil. Heed his plea.
Remember his Gethsemane. Now, watch awhile with me.
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An influenza pandemic overlapped WWI and swept the world in four waves between 1918-1920. It came to be called the Spanish flu because Spain, not having press censorship during WWI recorded it publicly. There it was called the French flu. It went under different names. In Senegal the Brazilian flu; in Brazil the German flu. It originated in Kansas. It was brought to France by American soldiers. It was the most widespread pandemic in human history.
No vaccine was developed. The mortality rate in the Spanish Flu was between 50million and 100million. The morbidity rate: one in three people in the whole world were infected, or half a billion human beings.
Do you know of any organisations for those who died in the Spanish flu? Any effort to foster remembering? Are there any rituals? And the question is asked not just for those who died. The flu disproportionately killed men and women in their 20s and 30s thereby leaving countless children who lost one or both parents. Pregnant women were particularly vulnerable.
Do you know how many memorials there are to Spanish Flu victims around the world? Five. And only one was built in 1918. The most of the others around 2018. Spanish flu victims in many ways just disappeared from public consciousness. Of course, they were spread all over the world and died in their homes and hospitals and buried all around the world. They seem to have disappeared from memory.
But if we turn back to WWI, those who disappeared, the soldiers who died and whose bodies were never found, they are remembered. In 1927 the Menin gate was built as a memorial to the missing. The monument that is Menin Gate is dedicated to the 55,000 British and Commonwealth soldiers, including 6000 Australians, who were killed, whose bodies were never recovered, many of whom died in the third battle of Ypres also called the battle of Passchendaele. It is extraordinary experience to stand within the huge structure and look up at all those names. And every single day of the year, at 8.00pm the traffic is halted and there is a ceremony of remembrance. And there is another instance of how the disappeared are remembered. In the war memorial in Canberra, you can view Menin Gate at Midnight, a painting by Will Longstaff painted when the gate was opened in 1927. The Gate structure is in the background. The foreground seems like a cornfield but of closer inspection, instead of little cornstalks the field is full on tiny soldiers on the march, or rather the ghosts of marching soldiers, those who disappeared into the earth. Art calling to mind those 55,000 whose bodies were never found.
And there is The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a symbolic grave for the lost and unidentified warrior. Numerous countries have them. Many have a flame that burns 24hours a day. In Arlington cemetery in Washington DC since 1937 it is guarded 24 hours a day every day of the year, rain, wind, or shine. A ceremonial gesture that says, never forget.
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Turning back to the Spanish Flu. Can I ask you to use your imagination and become George Scrivens? But you are not in a shell hole in Arras. It is 1918 and you suddenly have a sore throat, a chill and fever. It becomes hard to breathe. You feel starved of oxygen. If someone could explain what is happening, the cells of your lungs normally air-filled are filling with fluid. You are literally drowning in your own body fluids. You are dying from the Spanish flu. Back then, a person from first having symptoms, could be dead in hours. Autopsies showed hard, red lungs drenched in fluid. The virus mutated rapidly and no vaccine could be developed. It was called the ‘purple death.’ And so starved of oxygen sometimes people’s faces turned purple and their feet could turn black.
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Who feels the aftershocks of the Spanish Flu and the millions who were no longer there? Who listens? Who registers the silence and says there is something wrong, something out of place? Why is there silence with the silent, invisible killer? Why did the worst pandemic since the Bubonic plague in the 14th century drift out of memory?
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I want to clarify the line of thought I will be following for the rest of this presentation. We could, like a historian or a sociologist continue exploring why the devastation of the Spanish Flu was forgotten and ignored. I want to shift our minds forward to 2020 to COVID19 times. But I am not focusing on fact and figures. They are not useful currency where I am suggesting we go. I am concerned about the consequences of forgetting.
George Scrivens was stranded in a nowhere place. I believe we sometimes need to move into a nowhere place if we are to find something new. It is a challenge. Let me try to convey what I mean by a nowhere place by using poetry. I wrote a poem called Far Side Of Time. Here are the first four lines.
See you on the far side of time.
It is not a place.
There are no signposts.
You walk alone.
You may be familiar with Wilfred Bion words to put aside memory and desire. Doing that is not as simple as it may seem. Because, if it is primarily an act of will, if we instruct ourselves to do it, it will most likely fail. Neville Symington used to remind us that if there is a competition between the will and the imagination, the imagination always comes out on top. To increase the chance of success, and therefore receive something that is new as new, we must make use of the imagination. To try to make it a bit clearer, hopefully not more opaque, I will read you a poem that I have recently written called
I Thought I saw a Passing.
I thought I saw a passing
Bird in flight.
I saw the wind
A space in air
The shape it left behind.
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While the behaviour of the most intelligent species on earth when faced with annihilation may sometimes be defined as stupid, I think our species demands and deserves more attention, more understanding, when faced with death. Another analogy may convey my approach. Think of your mind as a net that gathers things. The mesh of the net is a certain size and objects smaller than the gaps in the net fall through. To catch certain objects a net with a finer mesh is needed. The work of perceiving in a new way requires alterations to the mind itself, live the getting of a finer mesh.
Therefore. If we approach a pandemic as we would a war, we will fail to catch hold of important things. Whether public monuments or rituals for the Spanish Flu exist or not is not my main interest here. To me it is like a symptom. I am trying to investigate, to explore our inner worlds; the world that lives in the space between us.
An appreciation of art offers a finer mesh. Art can create a nowhere space. Within literature, poetry has its own unique way to catch mysterious elements. I intent to spend the rest of the time moving in and out and around this space. Can you take yourself back in your life 1000days? There is a class of things, of experiences that can be recalled. Lockdowns. Illegal when out for a walk to sit on a park bench. A 5k limit of how far you could travel from your home. The State Health Officer suddenly a well-known figure who appears every day to give the latest information and news. In nursing homes old friends and relations dying alone. No vaccine in sight.
If you look back through the lens that I offer what do you see? When we had daily updates of how many were in IC, how many on respirators, did you imagine being one of those? And when we were regularly told of people who had COVID19 dying alone, forbidden to have their family or friends with them, did you in your imagination, see yourself in the same position? How were you present in your world at that time?
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When we came out of lockdown and it was possible to visit NSW Art Gallery I went and saw Art Express. It is something I have done every year for the past twenty. It is an exhibition of work done for the NSW HSC students, aged 18 or 19. The pandemic was a theme that ran through many works. One captured my attention. And when I looked at the short piece written by the artist which was on a piece of cardboard beside the painting, I read this.
A wise man once told me that the self does not exist without the reflection of others. For me, the year of 2022 has been a great cracking and reforming of the world. I experienced total alienation from my sense of self. And it was this that I realised: that the person that makes ‘me’ exists beyond the physical vessel of the body and confines of the individual mind, and lives within others. This year-long project has been dedicated to those others.
Who were you? Who did you become? Did isolation and the restriction of your usual movements and socialising cause you to suffer from loneliness? Or did you reap some benefits from being more alone? When the crisis passed who did you return to be? Who do you remain? Cannot remember? Never got around to listening?
When we struggle to remember, to listen, when something has moved out of our consciousness and now resides in that part of our mind, we call our pre-conscious or our unconscious, a writer like Marcel Proust can help. In In Search of Lost Time, late in life, he recalled an emotional event in his childhood which took place in the presence of his mother and father.
‘Never again will such hours be possible for me. But of late I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father’s presence, and which broke out only when I found myself alone with Mamma. Actually, their echo has ceased: it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round about me that I hear them afresh, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the noises of the streets that one would suppose them to have been stopped for ever, until they sound out again through the silent evening air.’
Remembering is not a simple recall. It is not like finding a diary entry you made 20, 40 years ago. To remember, in the sense I am using the word now, requires attention to one’s mind, requires an expansion of the mind. There is a type of remembering that I believe is a creative act. It involves the work of looking into the mirror that reflects the mind and watching how it works.
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My belief in the importance of not forgetting is shared by a colleague.
Fred Griffin is an analyst in Dallas, Texas. In 2022 he published a paper in the Psychoanalytical Quarterly called Writings and Readings of the Pandemic: The Shadows Left Behind. I urge you to get a copy, read and study it. He explores works of literature that arose out of the experience of the Spanish flu. He examines The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. They Came Like Swallows by William Maxwell. And “Pale Horse, Pale Rider, a novella by Katherine Anne Porter published in 1939. Like Woolf, Porter got the flu and was close to death and her fellow journalists had already written her obituary. She survived and made this comment,
I almost died. It just simply divided my life, cut across it like that... I was really “alienated” in the pure sense... Now if you have had that, and survived it, come back from it, you are no longer like other people, and there’s no use deceiving yourself that you are.
Listen to this passage: from the novella. The character who reflects what Porter experienced is called Miranda.
Oblivion, thought Miranda, her mind feeling among her memories of words she had been taught to describe the unseen, the unknowable...Eternity is perhaps more than the distance to the farthest star. She lay on a narrow ledge over a pit that she knew to be bottomless, though she could not comprehend it; the ledge was her childhood dream of danger... Soft carefully shaped words like oblivion and eternity are curtains hung before nothing at all.
Let me now read you some of Fred Griffin’s words from his article. Referring to the piece I read, he wrote,
‘This piece of writing captures fragmentation of consciousness, disruption of time and space, and disorientation of bodily experience in the manner of a childhood nightmare of oblivion. And it conveys something of the desperate search for language and meaning with which to transform unknowable and wordless terror into coherent symbols that provide solidity.
‘Trauma that undermines a core sense of security, safety and cohesion is compounded by overwhelming sorrow that comes in the time after. A process of mourning is complicated when losses cannot be truly grieved in a state of mind in which one has lost one’s moorings.
He concludes this section like this.
‘What remains is “spectral” memory, emotional states that are deeply embedded, that may be re-experienced rather than remembered, and that haunt one with a sense of dread (including flashbacks) that cannot be fully symbolised and that therefore remain largely unspeakable. Although much of the residual impact of the pandemic experience may remain outside of the writer’s awareness, some authors knowingly or unknowingly find their way into a means of representing it in their writing.’
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What comes across from Fred Griffin’s article and my observations suggest the same, is this:
After the Spanish flu, literature became a small place of remembrance. It is not a monument. Not a physical, geographical place, but space. For the unspeakable, for what has been forgotten.
I am going to mention two poets who provided such a space, but before I do, I will briefly mention works by two artists whose painting was shaped by the Spanish flu..
Edvard Munch, perhaps known to us all through his famous painting, The Scream did two works. One is called, Self-Portrait With the Spanish Flu and the other, Self-Portrait After the Spanish Flu. It was his attempt to deal with his experience of having and surviving the flu.
Munch said of his life: Illness, insanity, and death...kept watch over my cradle...and accompanied me all my life.
Egon Schiele was an Austrian painter. He had a very established reputation and style. In 1918 he was 27, married and his wife was pregnant. He began a portrait called The Family. It was a painting of himself, his wife, and their expected child. Before he could finish the painting his wife, who was then 6 months pregnant contracted the Spanish flu and died. Three days later Shiele himself also died of the flu.
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During and after the Spanish Flu some poets wrote poems that arose out of the experience of the Spanish flu.
T.S. Eliot. The Waste Land was completed in 1921 and had been in the making for about six years. Here are some lines from the poem.
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
William Carlos Williams in 1923 wrote the poem Spring and All.
It begins with the line,
By the road to the contagious hospital,
He proceeds through the poem talking about nature. He describes the cold wind from the northeast. It makes life hard for the trees that need Spring. His trees and vines, which represent people struggle to come back to life.
Leafless vines – Lifeless in appearance...
They enter the new world naked
Cold, uncertain of all.
The opening line is to me, like a Greek chorus that silently sounds in the background as you read through the whole poem.
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In 2019, just before COVID19 I gave a ten-lecture series called Summoned by the Tides at SIP. During COVID19 I used those lectures and the discussions we had to write the book which I called Thought: The Invisible Essence. The writing of the book was influenced by being in lockdown. Also, during COVID19 I wrote another book about writing poetry and about a third of that book is a section called Poetry in a Time of Pandemic. The book is called How to Write Poetry in How Many Chapters. I wrote a lot of poems in that time. They are about various states of mind, a type of record. At least, my record of a life during a pandemic.
The foundations of what I am saying today are in both of those books.
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Right now, if I return myself to the depths of COVID19 times I place myself in the presence of the young HSC student who turned to her art to shape her experience of alienation from her sense of self, who said I realised: that the person that makes ‘me’ exists beyond the physical vessel of the body and confines of the individual mind, and lives within others.
I place myself in the presence of Proust, who years later listened in the silence of the night and heard again the convent bells from his childhood, and found words for you and me to read, in the presence of Munch and Shiele as they try to find representation for the screams they hear inside. And in the presence of William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot.
As the only area of art that I have any talent in, is poetry, I will take my presentation to its conclusion by reading a poem I wrote during COVID19. Just as I wrote to offer a voice to George Scrivens, I wrote the next to offers a voice to someone, who died before their time. Death was a possibility for all of us during the pandemic.
This Situation
This situation I find myself in was not meant to be.
The old we are told are first in line to go, and you can
See old age has not yet wrinkled me. But now
I have been told I am shifted up the queue.
This has struck me as unjust, and the axes
Of my universe do not now align. But this is where
I find myself. Until I am required what am I to do?
Curse the fates, the gods, the elements?
Submit to grief? By sorrows be caressed?
Place me among trees and flowers,
Because its where the days and hours
I’ve left are better spent. There I’ll rest.
When my words cease, recall our first hello,
Our uncountable hours of talk, that we loved
And worked with zest. And when stock was low
How well we husbanded the interest.
Most of all keep mirth alive; we laughed more
Than we cried. And when my spirit re-presents,
Lift your eyes, forget your toils, and forbid not
Falling tears when they mingle with your smiles.
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I spell out in my book Thought: The Invisible Essence, that ‘thinking’ takes many forms.
I said literature was not a monument, not a physical place. To benefit from a novel, you need to give yourself over to the made-up world on offer. To receive something new from a poem you must take a leap of faith. To give yourself over, to take the leap, are actions of trust in two things. Trust in the imagination of the writer. Trust in your own unconscious.
What I have tried to do today is to make space to think. Or to encourage you to follow Proust’s suggestion, to let the mind work fruitfully upon itself.
Elbow Room
A bit of elbow room, the space to turn.
Time to open wide or squint
Or see beyond what's seen.
Indifferent ― to the words that twist and
Turn and race behind white-water rapids.
Patient ― to await the dancing songs
Which skip on streams to kiss
The scattered stones and sands.
Songs, that were sung by birds ten,
Twenty, thirty million years away
Drift ― like seeds with wings that float
Far off from trees ― through time.
I’ve always needed elbow room,
To open space, to step outside,
To feel the breeze refresh my face.
I have read you that poem because I have tried today to offer you some elbow room to consider the seismic shifts and aftershocks of COVID19. I have used facts and figures not as an end point but as a launching pad to allow your mind to wander, to find your way into the slipstream of Keats’s sustaining belief in ‘the truth of the imagination and the holiness of the heart’s affections.’
In the flyer for today’s event, I said ‘the language of poetry can enter and explore places other words cannot go.’ Over many years as an analyst and as a writer, I have tried to find the right words; to find and speak them myself, to assist others to find their words that reach for their truth. John Keats also said, ‘I am straining at particles of light in the midst of great darkness’. His words in my mind sit alongside Anna Smir, the Polish poet who said,
‘A poem becomes...an antenna capturing the voices of the world, a medium expressing his own subconscious and the collective subconscious.’
This presentation I know, and I expect you also know by now, is not going to end with a neat summary, a knitting together of all the strands to form a patterned whole. When we strain after particles of light, when we risk saying
I saw the wind/A space in air/The shape it left behind,
we may find ourselves in a space where silence is the only creditable response.
But until then, I hope we go on talking. And I draw what I have to say to an end by reading a recently written poem, and by telling you the story of how the poem came to be written. I was writing a poem about W.B. Yeats. Yeats has been in my mind as long as I can remember. At school I learned many of his poems by heart. For that piece of rote learning I am grateful.
But in the middle of trying to make a poem that was coming from a sense of gratitude to him, deep into the writing, in that messy phase with an A4 page that is filling with scribbles, there was a small section of the page that was not yet written on. There I wrote something, completely unconnected with the Yeats poem. When I looked at what I had written, I was shocked. I might even say frightened. I was in that state of mind, that experience of waking from a dream, half asleep, half awake. There are no firm boundaries and you are in an in-between space. What was on the page came with no name. It was words about words. It was the first time to write a poem directly addressing words. Simply words, words as living things.
My conscious mind had a very small part to play in its writing. Soon my apprehensions were balanced by a sense that I had caught something important. In fact, I later said to myself, I don’t ever need to write anything again. This tiny, 15-word poem seemed to be carrying a gigantic weight, the weight of a lifetime of talk, a long professional life as a psychoanalyst, and as a writer.
In other words: however much we may assemble words and fill the page of our mind with ideas, ideas in pursuit of understanding and the creative communication of that understanding, it is wise to leave an open space, a place, where, if we are ready to receive a gift, ready to listen inside the mysterious world of the unconscious, our very human being itself may speak to us.
I have called that collective of words I received, Untitled.
Words
Be not afraid
Like doves of peace
I capture you
To set you free.