corona virus

on Writing

COVID-19 Diary: Not Working





This edition of my COVID-19 Diaries features a two-part

anecdotal poem on ‘not working’, combining fragments of conversations and dialogues collected over the past three weeks.




 


1st July 2020 – PART ONE




“I hate work.”


“I love working.”


“I love work but it’s killing me.”


“I hate work but it’s saving me.”


My friend is 30 and being awarded her ‘Ten Years of Servitude’ new year from the bread company she works for. “I don’t know what it means”, she said.


servitude /ˈsəːvɪtjuːd/ Learn to pronounce 


noun

noun: servitude


1. the state of being a slave or completely subject to someone more powerful.

“you’ve got thousands of years of peasant servitude to make up for”


The Freelancer is receiving ‘Ten Years of Serfdom!’ from Fiverr. A special badge, shaped like a gold star and bursting with shards, that they can put on their platform portfolio to make it “really stand out”. For ten days it will appear as the top search result. After that, it’s back to the whim of the algorithm.


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				 on Writing			
		        
Teen Tonality: A Letter From 1918

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		
Imagine being a teenager nursing soldiers during the 1918 pandemic. It’s near impossible. Six months ago, such a task of the imagination would have been of no interest. Just as an online exhibition held in early 2019 by the National Archives (USA) titled ‘The Deadly Virus’, which surfaced a letter from a 19-year old nurse named Lutiant Van Wert, would have been far less interesting. Or relevant.


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				 on Writing			
		        
COVID-19 Diary: All Roads Lead To Lofi

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		
In this edition of my COVID-19 Diaries I try to cyberflâneur, only to end up at lofi beats. Again, and again, and again.




 


5th April 2020:


“Our very existence has turned into a question mark.”

–Nishitani


“I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.” 

― John Cage


 The future is cancelled. We know this by now. It’s not ‘postponed’, that sweet word being politely touted in exchange for the hard truth. Here in Zurich, posters remain in loom for a festival put on by a youth theatre that was to run from January until June – ‘The Future is Cancelled’ they jest in their title. These word still hang on the empty streets. When they were designed last year they would have appeared rebelliously tongue-in-cheek. Those who concepted the title may have felt antagonistic and playful. Running on the funny provocations that ‘youth’ knows it is allowed. Imagine that? What we thought was our future has been broken into fragments of oblivion. Eaten away until it doesn’t even matter. No need to ponder too hard on it. It’s gone. The slow cancellation of the future was not slow at all. … →

	    		
 

	



			
				


		    

        			
				 on Writing			
		        
COVID-19 Diary: Silence is Impossible

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		


In this edition of my COVID-19 Diaries I question the possibility of silence, design the sound of our resign, and pay attention to deliveries.




 


29th March 2020: 


‘… when you’re buying books, you’re optimistically thinking you’re buying the time to read them.’

― Arthur Schopenhauer


Bought time. COVID-19 is the gift that keeps on giving. All the deadlines have been extended. Tax returns, application dates, returns and special offers. If you weren’t a procrastinator before, you’ll be a convert to the bliss of delay now. Wait long enough and you’ll be afforded an alleviation. Like those clocks that were an hour behind before, overdue tasks that sat undone long enough to come back around nothing wrong.


Where does this sense come from that time as been protracted? Where there were not enough hours in a day before now stand an infinity of days, weeks, months(?). How long we will be here we do not know. The unknowing is the infinite. The ongoing. ‘I’m taking an extended break’ is what they say in offices. Code for a longer-than-usual holiday. Or for when somebody doesn’t know they’ve been fired.


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				 on Writing			
		        
COVID-19 Diary: Take It Easy Baby

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		


 


Take It Easy Baby




In this edition of my COVID-19 Diaries I interrupt empathy-talk, question the romantic power of streamed TV, and learn about ‘Explainerism’.




 


29th March 2020:


 If I stage that drama inside me,

all it does is make me difficult to live with.

– Dougald Hine on living in Sweden during the corona crisis.


Empathy is everywhere. Except, not really. Today when I was trying to play Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon in full on YouTube I had to wait for an ad by Masterclass, who seem to be really capitalising on the stuck-inside-moment. This one was for Natalie Portman’s acting classes. Learn to act with Natalie Portman! “Your job is to imagine somebody else’s life. It’s the act of empathy” she tells us amateurs. I knew empathy was trending.


Later on Twitter I see Ms. Portman is interrupting the lives of others. @jesslbergman ‘instagram explore, brimming with satanic energy in the best of times, will not stop showing me videos of natalie portman preparing awful bird meals in a professional grade kitchen’


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				 on Interview			
		        
Interview with a Designer at Calvin Klein

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		
Cameron Foden is Senior Denim Designer at Calvin Klein. We spoke on the developments of his job and noticable impacts on the fashion industry so far, under the circumstances of COVID-19.


 


22nd MARCH, 2020


(Ruth, pictured left) So, fashion…




(Cameron, pictured right) So, fashion. Obviously this is going to be very, very interesting. How all aspects; so a) consumerism as a whole, and b) fashion itself, will be effected. The luxury goods industry is going to be devastated, especially as people re-evaluate their priorities and their spending. With so much uncertainty people are going to have a complete change in their spending habits. I don’t think we can even begin to comprehend yet what it’s going to look like. Some people are saying we are looking at half a year (for recovery), other people are saying we are looking at up to two. Let’s see where we end up be next week, or next month. I suspect prospects are only going to look more and more grim.


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				 on Writing			
		        
COVID-19 Diary: Goodbye To All That

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		


 


Goodbye To All That




In this edition of my COVID-19 Diaries I traipse from a viral theory of the earworm, through new possibilities of doing nothing, into an account of my first ‘Pair Up’ call.


 


24th March 2020:


 


I went to the supermarket with a wheely suitcase today. I don’t have one of those grandma shopping bag/carts, so one must be resourceful with what one has. Nobody else seems to be doing this that I have seen. Perhaps because the sound of those suitcase wheels is so disturbing you have to play music through headphones on the way there and back just to drown it out.


Another recovered word; piety.


Devotion. Strong belief in a religion that is shown in the way someone lives. A conventional belief or standard.


Corona piety? We are renunciating and we are trying to love thy neighbours. Never before have so many smiles been exchanged with those in the surrounding apartments. The virus is making us nicer.




 




 


There is a poster on this wall that is starting to really bug me. The previous tenant left it here. It’s by a Swiss artist, and he said we could take it down if we want. There are days when I don’t see it, and days when it is all I see. The phone bothers me far more than the penis. That gross device manifesting all over his naked languid pose and pointing towards the room. I should really take it down but every day I tell myself ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’. There are lots of procrastinations now. Because now (which is really no different than before) we have an excess of healthy tomorrows to put task to. All the time in the world to do chores or make work or achieve those niggly actions that one avoids until it’s too irritating to bear. This poster must not have become totally unbearable yet. Perhaps soon enough it will be too much a part of this room, and this time, to say goodbye to. ‘Goodbye To All That’, Joan Didion’s title for the last piece in her Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection of essays. Those four words ring and ring in my head like an earworm.


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				 on Writing			
		        
Premonition: Pessimists & Slackers

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		
This is the third post in my Premonition series. 


Premonitions are a series of critical foresights by Ruth Les. The scenarios and ideas are concerned with possibilities, not probabilities. ‘…We should not be confined by the probable. We should discover the possibility hidden in the present.’ – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi


 


 


Permission for Pessimism






 


‘PERMISSION GRANTED. BUT NOT TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT’

– John Cage


 


‘Two kinds of pessimism: “The end is near” and “Will this never end?’

― Eugene Thacker


 


A Premonition for Pessimism


In our emergence from life during COVID-19 we will see new found respect for Pessimist thought. Long thrown from the scene, Pessimist philosophy will be taken seriously, and prior tyrannical ‘positive thinking’ taken in bad taste.


When we all became precarious cognitarians, freelancing our lives away in knowledge work, the abstraction of our worlds was all consuming. Though we were workers, we were not standing in lines of industrial production. What we produced was immaterial, and abstract. The main thread of capitalism’s own evolution is ongoing abstraction. We communicated not offline or face to face, but through abstracted means. The angle of this communication took pronounced ‘positive’ positions. Something Positive is a site set up during the pandemic to present solely positive news about it. Click the button ‘More Positive Vibes’ for continuous hits of feel-good developments; Apple says contractors will be paid during COVID-19 shutdown (Wall Street Journal), or, A rockhopper penguin at Chicago Shedd Aquarium makes unlikely friends with three Beluga whales (The Guardian).


Particularly speaking from experience in the creative industries, to not be explicitly positive was an employment death sentence. In the social scene too, negativity was not allowed. Who wants to hang around with Negative Nelly when you can be with Optimist Oli?


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				 on Writing			
		        
COVID-19 Diary: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

        
        	

        		
			

			
	     
    

	


		


 


Should I Stay Or Should I Go?






 


20th March 2020:


 


Empathy! Solidarity! Togetherness!


We are shouting from our balconies in between the intervals of clapping. Buzzwords of the brink. But do we really care beyond the growing walls of our personal void? Have you got the energy to give a shit about everyone else – in a practical and meaningful way? Most of us are too busy constructing our individual coping routines.


 


8AM: Wake up, thanks to my alarm in the adjacent room. I’m trying to break up with my phone at this time. It’s sort of working, when I don’t get up in the night to listen to a podcast.


8:15AM: New yoga routine. Just fifteen minutes a day but it seems to set up the morning well.


8:30AM Shower. Breakfast. Radio.


 


I was on a train from Hamburg to Zurich when I had to make a quick decision on whether to abort mission and head back to Amsterdam or not. In 10 minutes I would be in Hannover where I could change onto a train to my current city of abode. A few years ago I immigrated from New Zealand to the Netherlands, where I met my now-boyfriend (a Colombian Swede) who has since moved to Switzerland. When I left Hamburg at 8:30am, I had word from the boyfriend that he had been sent home from the office as a colleague was possibly a positive case. Fuck. This is the closest we have come. Should I stay (on the train Zurich-bound) or should I go (back to Amsterdam, in case a lockdown occurs)? I stayed.


Now I wake each day in a city I do not though. Although that doesn’t matter. We could be anywhere.


 


‘It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.

Here we are now.’


– John Cage




 


It’s Day Three in Zurich. The day rolls on in an oscillation between knowing exactly what I am going to do, and not being sure due to an overabundance of options. In a moment, everything can be possible and everything can matter – and in the next, nothing matters at all.


 


I’m bored


I’m the chairman of the bored

I’m a lengthy monologue

I’m livin’ like a dog




– I’m Bored, Iggy Pop (1979)




 


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