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Pandemic Virtuosity Journaling the Pandemic

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Mariella Scerri at University of Leicester
Mariella Scerri
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PandemicVirtuosity
JournalingthePandemic
Citethisarticleas:ScerriM.JournalingthePandemic.RHiME.2020;7:14750.
Received:09MAY2020 Accepted:09JUN2020 Published:22JUNE2020
www.rhime.in      147
One thing is certain. The COVID19
pandemichascreatedhavoc inourlivesand
has changed us in ways we could never
imagine. We found ourselves at home trying
tokeep sane in a world which hassuddenly
goneinsane onus.Allof us havewitnessed
something similaron socialmedia, in public,
or in our personal relationships. Everyone
has their own way of reacting to this
pandemic and its emotional and
psychological complexities. For this reason,
a Facebook group titled Journaling the
Pandemic has been created to encourage
members to share with each other art
contributions whether in writing, poetry,
paintings, drawings or photography with its
principal aim being to document the
members’experiencesduringthepandemic.
I am the administrator of this group; as a
former nurse and a PhD candidate with a
special interest in medical humanities, I
encourage members to post relevant works
of art inspired by the current situation. The
idea of this group occurred to me after I
carried out research on the collective
narrative of the Spanish 1918 pandemic.
When multitudes of subjects are affected at
once by painful events that disrupt secure
frameworks of normality, subjective
specificity is hard to find. The silence that
surroundsthe 1918 pandemicmay nothave
been due only to the normal erasure of
selective memory, but “there may also have
been a refusal or inability to describe a
trauma that might still have haunted its
survivors.”[2] Perhaps the flu overwhelmed
languageinwaysthatwaratthetimedidnot.
For this reason, few references to the 1918
pandemic exist in literature, popular culture,
oreven in historybooks.[3]Therefore, in the
stilluncertaingripofanewglobal COVID19
pandemic,itmattersnowmorethaneverthat
weholdontothestorieswenarrate.
Members of the Facebook have eagerly
respondedandwithinthreeweeksthegroup
reached over 500 members and amassed a
good number of posts. Poems penned to
express feelings of isolation, baking ideas,
and a shared connectedness were posted.
VictoriaCalleja,anEnglishteacher,shareda
Mariella Scerri, MA
Teacher of English, PhD Candidate, University of Leicester
Corresponding Author:
Ms Mariella Scerri
18, York, N. Caruana Dingli Street, Mellieha MLH 1709, Malta
email: mariellascerri at hotmail dot com
"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.
Muchthatoncewasislost."
TheElvenQueen,LadyGaladriel.[1]
poem capturing the feelings of many during
selfisolation(Figure1).
Doris Scerri, a mother of four and
grandmother of two, penned her feelings of
distress and hope for freedom once this is
over (Figure 2). Young teens also shared
theirexperiencesthroughpoetryandhowthe
pandemic is affecting their social lives away
fromschoolandfriends.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our
lives any longer, some of us find solace and
meaning in painting. Being an artist and
being in quarantine, people have always
worked wonders out of limitation, privation,
and boredom. They illuminate the universal
through the tiny aperture of the deeply
personal. The result is often beautiful works
ofart as canbe illustratedin these paintings
(Figures37).
Fear of the unknown and global pandemics
are not the perfect combination. Our lives
have dramatically changed and we had to
adjust to a new normal overnight. But life is
mostly what you make of it, and during this
stressful time our weaknesses can often be
transformed into our biggest opportunities.
Blogger and writer, Jessica Micallef shares
her experience with the group. In her blog
shewrites:
“I spent the first few weeks of my self
enforced lockdown feeling guilty and, I’ll say
it, useless. While I’ve never really been
affected by FOMO, I have always been
driven by the need to achieve. My social
media newsfeed has had a constant stream
of images, videos and articles by and about
people who have used this time to achieve
theirfitnessgoals,learnanewskillortakeup
a new hobby. Shakespeare, one post said,
wroteKingLearduringtheplague.KingLear.
Letmesaythatagain:KINGLEAR.Andhere
Iwas,finishing my workdayfeelingstressed
andexhaustedfrom the runningcommentary
aboutcontagionandhygieneinsidemyhead,
letting my eyes rest on the kitchen counter
and the thawing chicken waiting to be
www.rhime.in      148
Figure 1: Alone Together
Figure 2: COVID-19
cooked, the load of blankets in the washing
machinewaitingtobehung…”[4]
After two weeks struggling through writer’s
block, Jessica found inspiration. All of a
sudden, she “opened a new document, got
[my] formatting down and chose a working
title. Last Monday, at around half past six in
themorning,[I]completedmyfirstdraft.”[4]
What emerges during these fraught times is
that physical documentation from ordinary
peopleisasimportantasever.“Ashistorians,
we rely on daily reports to figure out what
actually happened on the ground”, claims
Victoria Cain, an associate professor of
history. “It really offers us insight into how
society and culture worked at a time of
tragedy,orcrisis,orjustchaos.”[5]
www.rhime.in      149
Figure 4: Pomegranates by Simone Fiott
Figure 3: Faith by Ruth Borg
Figure 5: Flowers by Simone Fiott
Figure 6: 3D Design by Emily Scerri
This collective narrative can serve as
documentation for future generations and a
reference point to science and history. As
time unfolds, we are writing history and
offeringasnapshotofourlifeinatimethatis
absolutelyunparalleled.Italso allowspeople
a space to deposit stresses and worries as
wellasinspirationsandhopes.
This collective narrative will eventually
present a rich portrait of how people coped
overthearcof thepandemic and oftheday
today impacts of policy interventions.
Narrative is a medium that carries and
communicates the lessons of past suffering.
Withoutnarration,thepastbecomesabstract,
and deceptively simple. Without the
subjective embodiment of fact that produces
meaning, narration falters. The plight of the
general public provides a rich texture for a
collective narrative which will reverberate
acrosstimeforcenturiestocome.
www.rhime.in      150
Figure 7: Ginger jar,
Mandarins, and Cinnamon
sticks by Emmanuel Bonnici
1. Jackson P. The Lord of the Rings: The
FellowshipoftheRing.NewLineCinema;2003.
2. Belling C. Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction
andthetraumaofpandemicinfluenzain1918.Lit
Med.2009:28(1):55–81.
3. Davis DA. The Forgotten Apocalypse:
KatherineAnnePorter's"PaleHorse,PaleRider,"
Traumatic Memory, and the Influenza Pandemic
of 1918. The Southern Literary Journal.
2011:43(2):5574.
4. Micallef J. King Lear, the Plague and How I
WroteaNovelinLessthanTwoWeeks.JMRose
Writes;May2020.
5.BergM.Journalingduringthepandemic,for
yourselfandthehistorians.BostonGlobe;Mar
2020.
References
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Overwhelming the Medium: Fiction and the Trauma of Pandemic Influenza in 1918
Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2009
Few illness narratives have been published about the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic. This essay links this silence to representational problems posed by mass trauma that happened before response to the Holocaust began our present era of attention to the narrative testimonies of suffering. In a pandemic, the collective replaces the individual as protagonist, and the health of the public takes precedence over the particular and subjective. History turns to statistics. Beginning with Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider, her novella about her experience during the pandemic, and speculating on the entanglement of Virginia Woolf's accounts of influenza with Porter's strategies for recounting her sickness, the essay then examines two 2006 novels—Thomas Mullen's The Last Town on Earth, and Myla Goldberg's Wickett's Remedy—to show how narrative representations of the 1918 flu grapple with recounting the experience of sickness, a struggle repeatedly troped as waking from and remembering a nightmarish sleep. The value of these fictional accounts lies less in their historical accuracy than in the attention they draw to the representational demands that pandemic disease makes as it threatens to overwhelm the narrative medium.
View
Lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring
Conference Paper
  • Jul 2002
Visualising JRR Tolkein's Middle-earth involved creating CG creatures, entirely digital environments, armies of tens of thousands of soldiers, each driven by his own artificial-life "brain" and simulated senses, as well as coming up with a bag of tricks to solve the problem of making fullsize actors appear at hobbit scale. The scope of the task ranged from vast battlefields where everything in frame was created with CGI to the smallest of things, a digital version of "The One Ring" itself.
View
The Forgotten Apocalypse: Katherine Anne Porter's "Pale Horse, Pale Rider," Traumatic Memory, and the Influenza Pandemic of 1918
Article
  • Mar 2011
  • South Lit J
As Katherine Anne Porter's short novel "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" opens, Miranda fitfully endures a vivid nightmare. She sees herself on horseback desperately racing from Death, the pale rider, who has already taken her grandfather, an aunt, a cousin, her "decrepit hound, and [her] silver kitten," and when he reaches her, she realizes that "he is no stranger to [her]" (270). Her nightmare tangles images of life and death with images of remembering and forgetting, and the relationship between survival and memory is a recurring motif in the story. Porter's allusion to the apocalyptic horseman described in Revelation proves to be appropriate because the story takes places during the influenza pandemic of 1918, the greatest public health catastrophe in modern history. The interplay between death and memory in "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" gives an aesthetic dimension to the pandemic's horrifying consequences and raises questions about literature as a form of traumatic memory. In the spring of 2009 fear of a swine flu pandemic and ongoing fear of a potential avian flu pandemic awakened dormant memories of the 1918 influenza pandemic. Global health officials mounted a campaign of contagion preparedness, and many officials still see another human pandemic as inevitable, if not imminent. To mitigate this potential disaster, scientists, epidemiologists, and government officials worldwide are looking to the 1918 pandemic as a worst-case scenario as they develop contingency response plans. Before the emergence of the current virus, however, the 1918 influenza pandemic had largely disappeared from cultural memory. Few references to the 1918 pandemic exist in literature, popular culture, or even in history books, which makes Porter's story an important record of the outbreak. In the story, Miranda, a reporter for a Denver newspaper, enjoys a whirlwind romance with Adam Barclay, a young Army officer, until she collapses from the virus. Adam nurses her as she comes near to death, and while she recovers, he returns to his unit where he dies from the virus. Porter based "Pale Horse, Pale Rider" on her personal experience as an influenza survivor, and it is the most significant American literary work set during the pandemic. The novella illustrates the varieties of traumatic experience—personal trauma, cultural trauma, historical trauma, and aesthetic trauma. The story takes place in a unique and profound historical context, both because of Porter's personal traumatic experience and because memories of the pandemic have faded. In Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Cathy Caruth describes trauma as a "wound of the mind—the breach in the mind's experience of time, self, and the world—[that] is not, like a wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that . . . is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor" (4). Most trauma theorists locate trauma's impact in the individual memory, where the unsettling experience disrupts the victim's identity, but when a disruptive event affects a large population simultaneously, a collective trauma occurs. The influenza pandemic of 1918 complicates the distinction between individual trauma and collective trauma. One might stipulate that collective trauma merely consists of numerous individual traumas, but collective trauma amplifies the individual's experience by taxing the network of social resources that ordinarily stabilize the individual victim. Massive events such as wars, natural disasters, and pandemics have different dynamics than personal events such as crime, accidents, and illness. In both individual and collective forms of trauma, the event's impact lies not in the immediate experience but in the survivors' memory of the event. Exploring the distinction between individual trauma and collective trauma leads to an explanation for how and why the pandemic has virtually disappeared from collective memory. Katherine Anne Porter survived the influenza pandemic of 1918. She worked for The Rocky Mountain News during the outbreak, and she contracted influenza as the epidemic reached its peak in Denver. By that time, all of the hospitals in the city were filled beyond capacity. Her landlady, fearing infection, threatened to have her evicted from...
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King Lear, the Plague and How I Wrote a Novel in Less than Two Weeks
  • May 2020
  • J Micallef
Micallef J. King Lear, the Plague and How I Wrote a Novel in Less than Two Weeks. JM Rose Writes; May 2020.
Journaling during the pandemic, for yourself and the historians
  • Mar 2020
  • M Berg
Berg M. Journaling during the pandemic, for yourself and the historians. Boston Globe; Mar 2020.