Shock of the (Post-Covid) New

How distanced we are from faces with their expressive truths, how shocked by the lower halves of faces we’ve never seen.  Put these little jolts alongside big jolts, and you have emotional minefields.  It seems that everyone, upon emerging, is seeing things anew, reevaluating, having big heavy conversations.  Shock is reverberating everywhere — like 19th century poets all jolted and overcharged by subliminal messaging of the city, desiring to overwrite old realities in awkward shock-laden ways.

In a wonderful metaphor: scuba divers, who have accustomed themselves to splashing and exploring the depths of the ocean, must sometime come to the surface. They are told to approach with caution, otherwise they get the bends.  They get wobbly, rubbery limbs from bubbles in the ankles, hips, shoulders, elbows. They lurch, have an unsteady approach to regular ways.  

This lurching is exhausting. But at the same time, we are also recording sensitive changes to our emotional body.  Major concepts that are supposed to have held us are weak.  Our relations in every encounter, human and nonhuman, create worlds.  What is true in the morning might be overwritten by what is true in the evening.  Come to it gently. 

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