Time, Space, Isolation

Every week feels endless but goes by so fast. Space feels limited, contested, crowded, but isolation penetrates us all. We are tightly connected by the unremitting demands of the pandemic, no matter where in the world we live, and yet the particular demands on each of us, our communities, our continents, vary wildly, so much that understanding one another becomes a mirage, an illusion built on hope.

We are interrupted; going-on-being cannot be taken for granted. And yet—it is in the very acts of daily taken-for-granted lockdown life that we rediscover living and loving, body integrity and holding.

Paradoxes everywhere. I have turned again and again to Winnicott and the wonderful elaboration of his ideas in the writing of Stuart Pizer: Paradoxically, in this time when nothing is stable and everything must be reset, revalued, recrafted, it is the idea of paradox that has become my stability.

As well as paradox, there are contradictions and stucknesses, conflict and a strange quiet. There is no single path forward, no right way, no clear beginning or ending. Roads are empty, houses are full. We are locked down, and also locked out of a gathering-in. And here in South Africa, we have contradiction and paradox amplified hundreds of times over by inequality, division, and generations of trauma. Apartheid with the precarity it spawned will never be done. The isolated middle classes in quiet suburbs with space and time on their hands. The crowded informal settlements where isolation is a luxury, and where waiting for days to pass is simply impossible: queuing to collect water, walking to buy food, to collect a social grant, to ask for a food parcel. “I would rather die of the virus than of hunger,” said one Cape Town resident in a long queue. No time to wait.

Strict and early lockdown has prevented South Africa from exponential growth in COVID cases, and allowed for medical facilities to be made ready for the inevitable wave of infections predicted for our winter. As we have wa