Commencing countdown, engines on
Apparently, for astronauts re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere in a Soyuz space capsule after a stay on the International Space Station, the experience is a very bumpy ride, like a series of car crashes:
For those of us who have experienced living through Covid-induced lockdowns it can feel like you’re off the planet, “sitting in a tin can far above the world,” as David Bowie so memorably put it (and Chris Hadfield famously covered aboard the ISS):
I am currently in the middle of the sixth lockdown that Melbourne has gone into since the beginning of the pandemic. Last year we were in lockdown for 111 days, one of the longest lockdowns in the world. When you’re in this kind of situation it can feel like “planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.”
In the midst of lockdown you long for that re-entry to the world, to a return to seeing friends and family in the flesh once more instead of the facsimile we get on our computer screens. But when the time comes, as it will once again for the sixth time, hopefully soon, it can feel like that series of car crashes: you’re no longer at ease in the world in the way you feel like you once were and you need to reaccustom yourself to the weight of gravity.
As a teacher, work plays a big role in my re-entry to the world. I’ve been lucky enough to have secure employment during this period and to be able to work from home, but teaching has been a particular flashpoint during the pandemic. Parents who are suddenly at home with their children all day have been forced to juggle their own work while trying to keep an eye on the learning that their offspring are supposed to be engaged with. For some, this has led to a greater appreciation of the difficult job that teachers have (I see more than 120 students on any one day and try to keep track of where they’re at while keeping them engaged and inspired with challenging material). For others, it reinforces feelings of contempt: how hard is it anyway? The kids just sit in front of their computers all day, after all.
At various points when we’ve come out of lockdowns over the past year it’s been a staggered re-entry, returning to school with some students while others remain home. This liminal state, hovering in and out of lockdown, can lead to a lot of anxiety: the government have deemed it’s not safe for everyone to be out in the community, but teachers are being told “it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare” so that senior students don’t miss out on their opportunity to gain university entrance.
Now that vaccinations are available some of that anxiety eases, but while I’m old enough to have participated in the slow and bungled vaccine rollout in Australia not all teachers are and until this point they have not been prioritised as essential workers. My niece is a primary school teacher and last year contracted Covid while at school, looking after the children of essential workers during the long lockdown. Luckily, she recovered well, but re-entry involves some significant car crashes for some.
Everyone — teachers, students and parents — wants schools to be open and re-entry to be complete. I’m fortunate to teach in a public school that is well-resourced and with students who are largely self-motivated and very able. Remote learning for the most part runs very smoothly and students do the work that they’ve been set, often producing material that stuns me with its insight and complexity. But completing work is not all that school is about: it’s a social experience that only works really effectively in person. And of course in other school contexts and for some of the students I teach remote learning is a disaster: removing the only things (personal contact with friends, a teacher who can read their facial expressions, extra-curricular activities) that keep them connected with education at all. We need to return to earth and engage with other people without the mediation of screens.
Part of my lockdown routine is to take a break during the middle of the day and go for a long walk as part of the two hours exercise I’m allowed. I usually read a book while I do so (walking and reading is kind of a thing for me), but I also pay attention to my surroundings. One of my regular routes takes me through Melbourne’s Royal Park, a vast area that includes sports grounds, a golf course, a zoo, grassed areas, wetlands and plenty of trees. It also includes a kind of wasteland area that I walk through that includes a pile of rubble that has become a habitat for the White’s Skink. Nearby, someone has over the years been making found object sculptures that slowly change over time. They make me think of alien or futuristic artefacts whose meaning and purpose I struggle to decipher:
They kind of remind me (on a much smaller and more rudimentary scale) of the old Soviet monuments that Jóhann Jóhannsson repurposed as future constructions in his magnificent film adaptation of Last and First Men, which I watched as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival in lockdown last year:
When we’ve re-entered the world I don’t find the time to take these kinds of walks, so I guess that’s something that lockdowns offer me: a chance to reengage with my local environment that the hustle and bustle of regular life takes away from me. It means that regular life starts to seem a bit irregular after all and re-entry requires an adjustment of your vision and a recognition that maybe things don’t need to be the way they’ve always been. It’s not quite the same as the overview effect, but after seeing the world from a different angle you do start to appreciate it in a different way.
The book that I was reading on my lockdown walk today is Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai’s masterpiece The Melancholy of Resistance, which was adapted into one of my all-time favourite films, Werckmeister Harmonies, by the great Béla Tarr. It has this passage near the beginning, extracted from one of his extremely long and meandering (and wonderful) sentences:
… all normal expectations went by the board and one’s daily habits were disrupted by a sense of ever-spreading all-consuming chaos which rendered the future unpredictable, the past unrecallable and ordinary life so haphazard that people simply assumed that whatever could be imagined might come to pass…
If there’s a better description of our current moment in time I’ve yet to come across it. The novel was first published in 1989, though, so maybe there’s something timeless about the crisis that we’re in. At any rate, the ever-spreading all-consuming chaos of the world at the moment means that re-entry into is necessarily fraught.
One thing to bear in mind is that I’m writing this from Australia, which, along with New Zealand, has managed to ride out this pandemic so far with a tiny amount of Covid infections and deaths compared to the rest of the world. The current significant outbreak in New South Wales and the smaller one here that has caused this current lockdown notwithstanding, I feel so lucky to be here and to have my family in New Zealand safe from the misery that has ravaged most of the rest of the world. I don’t have any friends or family members who have died or even been hospitalised due to the pandemic and for that I am very grateful. The lockdowns that I’ve been through are the reason that I’ve been safe and why my state of Victoria has been able to drive down several waves of Covid in a manner that no other region in the world has been able to do.
Of course, one of the reasons that Australia and New Zealand have remained relatively safe in the pandemic is because they’ve closed their borders to the rest of the world. In effect, both countries have removed themselves from the rest of the planet and we’ve been floating in space for the last year and a half. What will re-entry be like for us as countries once the borders are open again? Will it be the same thing that I’ve experienced on a larger scale? What will the car crashes feel like for us as we plummet down to earth and hope that our parachute opens in time to ease our descent?
In terms of re-entry to the world after Covid, there is some certainty that the world will never actually be the way that it used to be. As the latest IPCC Report makes clear, humanity is in a ‘code red’ situation with climate change and we have already irrevocably changed the world in ways that will be extremely difficult to pull back from. We need to look at the Earth differently and change the way we go about things, especially in Australia, which has held back on effective action on climate change for far too long. If we don’t, we might be getting this message from Ground Control: “Your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong.”