A Bodily Reckoning Amidst Coronavirus
By: Katie Tandy
Tags: Quarantine, Covid 19, Coronavirus, Isolation, Disease

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee found that novel images of snakes and flowers provoke more amygdala activity than repeated images of snakes and flowers.

“…this need to evaluate novel stimuli for threat signals is influenced both by the content of the stimulus and by the context in which the stimulus is presented. Under safe conditions, the amygdala evaluates only ‘biologically-relevant’ novel stimuli, while in unsafe conditions, the amygdala evaluates all novel stimuli.”

In short, our brains are madly ringing the alarm in warning of other people’s bodies. And our own. The result is a kind of perpetual low-grade exhaustion in which we pine for control over a situation that by definition we can’t solve or mitigate any other way than being as physically isolated as possible. But this cloistered life is in direct opposition to our fundamental need for physical contact and community and so we’re left in a kind of liminal strain between safety and sanity.

A body suspended.

Quarantine — despite all the introverts quietly deriving a tremendous if quiet joy from this mandatory respite — is traumatic. It’s predicated on trying to mitigate danger, but the very thing that will kill you is the very thing you’re housed inside.

Quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta giorni — forty days — which in turn stems from the Venetian policy of keeping ships hailing from plague-ridden countries off its port to assure no cases were aboard.

United Christian Hospital psychiatrist Ivan Mak Wing-chit says that many SARS patients developed PTSD as a result of being quarantined; their bodies healed, but the mind continued to suffer. Here the body and brain combine in a kind of haunted memory palace — the pain of once-lost breath and the pain of loneliness drag their iron chains round and round the mind as mournful and noisome as Marley’s ghost.

The body as prison. As enemy fire. A sweeping sickness of this magnitude is a recognition of our collective bodily weakness. Our constant proximity to death. Our lack of bodily control even as we tell it to walk forward, lie down, and compulsively wash itself with hot soap and lysol.

And of course, when we invert this strange dialogue we find prisons — heaving cement and curled barbs of wire — as a means of punishing criminalized bodies through isolation. Yesterday Harvey Weinstein tested positive for COVID-19 — while in prison — which reminds me that we not only penalize bodies with social suspension, but by subjecting them to unsanitary conditions poised for the mass-spreading of disease.

The profound inhumanity of the 10 million people incarcerated worldwide is further compounded by their forced physical vulnerability; jail officials expect the number of infected inmates to rise exponentially.

Bodies imprisoned by other bodies.

As a lifelong and dogged nail biter, my gut has been rendered a tangle of knots. And I’m anxious so I am biting even more. I’ll feel my hands rise to my mouth as I linger in the cheese aisle considering my options — trying to delight in a rare outing and proximity to other humans — when my boyfriend shout-mumbles, Katie! his eyebrows pinched.

And I’m frozen in a grimace, the sharp tang of my pink-raw cuticle stinging my mouth. My tongue lingers at the edge of my fingertips, and I’m thinking fuck it, it’s already too late.

Akiko Busch’s book also talks about all the different traits we imbue invisibility with — many of which are negative, even as every one of us has longed to disappear, to dissolve into the ether or prowl our earth unseen.

“Invisibility is often believed to be about transgression,” she says, “the ability to wrong, to get away with something, to cheat, lie or steal.”

We emotionally anthropomorphize the disease, we take it personally. We’re suddenly at war and the body count rises.

COVID 19 marks the third zoonotic coronavirus in the past three decades — it joins SARS and MERS — to leap from animals to humans. Coronaviruses are divided into four groups: alpha, beta, gamma, and delta. Gamma and delta primarily infect birds, while alpha and beta mostly reside in mammals. It’s believed that the virus originated at a “wet market” in Wuhan, China where animals are butchered alongside the living.

There’s something darkly prescient there. And cyclical.

Cell bodies poisoning animal bodies that infected human bodies that were trying to consume the animal bodies. Those human bodies will perish and return to the earth body to be eaten by their own bacterial body.

And I’m reminded that there is nothing unnatural about what’s happening at all. But that makes me all the sadder somehow. The solace of that cycle has yet to pierce my survival instinct. My love for all these human bodies.