Quarantine

Do you have your pantheon of saints, real saints who are really yours and who help you and guide you? This afternoon while I sat on the couch looking at the sky going down between two buildings, Henry Moore came and said that the important thing about drawing is to keep doing it. I feel grey and useless today and without much mind, but I'll write.

Pink and green sleepers, 1941. In the Tate, which is closed.

Australia's pandemic isn't the world's. This country has continued its decades-long run of stupid, undeserved good fortune derived from the geography of the continent. The authorities were able to close the borders early enough to prevent the arrival here of the monstrous nightmare of disease and death inexorably crushing Europe and America. Four weeks ago I more or less stopped reading about what's happening overseas. There's nothing I can do about it. I'll grieve eventually. Australia's going to feel the economic/social catastrophe just like everywhere else, though. Everyone will suffer but some people will suffer much more than others. I don't know yet which end of the scale I am on.

It really, really, really fucking kills me to say this, but shutting the country down, and just hurling this enormity at us millions of unprepared hapless unsteady citizens, knowing how bad it was definitely going to be for so many of us, was an act of huge, breathtakingly huge political courage.

I couldn't cope with what's happening. The cascading disasters, the strain, the grief, the uncertainty, the referred tensions rippling through the days and nights, the punch-drunk mental fog which descends, the sudden vulnerability or outright loss of the carefully collected pieces of bright precious treasure in my life - all this, too much. So I thought sometimes of laying the burden down, and soon I thought about it all the time. Fortunately the intervention came. In the emergency department I lay on a trolley and remembered the stranger on the beach in Bermagui and how my long dress had felt sodden and clinging with cold sea water. I have accrued debts in my life which can't ever be repaid.

Time drags in hospital. I was not there very long, but it felt long. It took me out of my home where the rooms are light and bright but the air is dense and thick with my solitary inner life. It removed me from my plants and books and pictures and careful cooking and the poetry and dreamlike intensity of the music I listen to all day and all night. It brought me into an efficiently lit linoleum world full of human bodies working, masked and gloved, talking, poking each other, standing too close to other bodies and touching every surface, lying still, shouting and swearing, bleeding, snoring, complaining. I spoke quietly, smiled, said thank you every time, and I meant it. It was overwhelming. My task was to lie down and be overwhelmed. Perhaps one reason I am writing again is because I had to tell so many different people why I was in hospital. Twenty-three different hospital people, maybe a dozen people outside - half of them by text. After the a long spell in the emergency department I was kept in a large room by myself, supposedly just for the first 24 hours, as a sort of irrational gesture towards quarantine. In the event they did not ever move me into another room. When people came asking to hear my life's story they stood in the doorway and did not stay longer than fifteen minutes. All that narrativising and yet there was time to listen to nine episodes of Dolly Parton's America, read the last half of The Lost Boys of Anzac, do a four-hour yoga session, and sleep 9 + 8 hours across two nights, thanks to temazepam. I was a voluntary patient in the interesting way that one can be voluntary in a psych ward: if you want to go but they don't think you should, you won't be a voluntary patient any more.

Thanks mostly to class privilege and being able to handle myself, I was invited to go home almost as soon as I got to have a proper conversation with a senior psychiatrist. One thing I told him that made him smile, in the way that psychiatrists smile at people who they've decided are basically OK, and which I felt uncomfortable about because while admittedly I'm not in as bad a way as most people in that ward, I'm not really OK, was that most days since Stay Home began I have gone out walking or riding and taking pictures of things I see through the lens of living in a shrunken and depopulated world. So I feel I have to keep on doing that, vaguely in the spirit that fifty years ago women who'd given birth were instructed by their doctors to put on lipstick and powder. I don't mind. It doesn't make any difference.

I went home on the tram.