The Mysticism of Covid

This week, I cycled through the deserted streets and squares of London’s central university district. The recently opening stores, with their queues, had made me forget how abandoned the city still is. I talked with one coffee shop worker, fearing closure; with their usual clientele absent – professors, students and office workers.

Like a J. G. Ballard story, it was a physical metaphor for our culture’s rotten emptiness. Or, like the writings of Mark Fisher, a site for the “eerie”, the “weird”. Drawing on the works of Jacques Derrida (“hauntology”) and Sigmund Freud (the “uncanny”), we perceive the opening of a gash, a wound, in our everyday reality. Our minds are destabilised, haunted by the monsters emerging from Goya’s Sleep of Reason; Lovecraftian beasts arising from our subconscious fantasies.

London is a modernist, rationalist city, organised, business-oriented; but only its surface. In this membrane a portal has opened, into the void, Das Nichtige. We are forced to confront “the outside”, the “boundaryless”; that which will not compute - the questioning, undermining, of all we assume. But this rupture produces deep fatigue, creating desperation for our previous lives: shopping, pubs and sports – to hide again the gaping maw beneath the façade/face of the mass. The result is a bifurcated city: half uninhabited, half full of queues - for clothes shops, take-away coffees, and gambling. Besides an economic necessity, however, our re-opening betokens an existential need, to restore our regular routines.

The stress makes us vulnerable to emotional outbursts, meltdowns, collapses; so we overreact, to any perceived offence - like my verbal attack last week on someone else. I responded with an anxious withdrawal from all activity, to recover my equanimity. But what goes around, comes around; what we sow, we reap. My flare-up was echoed today, in the stinging rebuke which a cyclist gave me, because they thought I was in their way in a crowded street market.

These are symptoms of the mental health concerns, which worried commentators and officials during the pandemic, as our usual points of psychic navigation disappear. But more than the seemingly well, the mentally ill frequently discern the contingency, the fragility, and the arbitrariness of the consensual social construct we call ‘reality’. We are always liable to fall headfirst, into the hole, opening up before us. In the best times, many fall through the “cracks” in the social fabric, as Neil Gaiman described in his novel, Neverwhere.

The thin skin, which makes us vulnerable to the slightest slight, perfectly corresponds to the thin skein, which covers over the darkness beneath our feet. Customarily, our one-dimensional society encourages to look away, whenever the abyss reveals itself in our fringe vision. As Laszlo Foldenyi writes, when the quotidian breaks open, the disorienting experience also embodies an encounter with the transcendent.

But the transcendent is a repressed element in our flattened, isophrenic, culture. Its frightening countenance must, however, be faced directly. Now is the time to accept the invitation, proffered during Covid, and enter afresh into the mystic vision.