Altered Space in Altered Times

The lockdown is doing strange things to time. Time in lockdown is moving both faster and slower; boredom is simultaneous with an inability to keep track, to keep on top of, to keep up with. More time has meant less time. The time for what one used to do has been taken up by what one ought to be doing: reading more, making bread, learning new skills. New shoulds for old shoulds. Yet friends report that they find it harder than ever to concentrate, to hold on to threads. It can take weeks to reply to an email. I’m forgetful over drug doses, much more than usual.

Less acknowledged, it is doing strange things to space too. Confined to my house for two months now, I crave landscapes and architecture. Rock formations, walking between buildings, horizons, enclosures, passages and transitions, arrangements of things.

I think about other spaces I know well – the walk to my son’s school, my studio, the river, a familiar beach, a woodland, London Bridge – and my skin tingles erotically with the feeling of different walks, the airs of other rooms.

Another landscape: on Friday a friend held a birthday party, DJing in his garden for about 30 people. A glimpse, electronically mediated and Zoom-chambered, but I drank it in. My friend and his wife dancing in their garden; a space I know; watching and listening to them in it, now, at the same time as everyone else on that 5×5 grid of screens; people dispersed in space but together in time; a landscape, flattened.

I’ve found myself listening more structurally to music in recent weeks. I wonder if this comes from the same longing for landscapes? Musical space substituting for actual space? Or is it an illusion? Lockdown has burdened everything with significance, saturated the world with too much meaning. As our experiences – day by day, person to person – start to lose definition, so every difference starts to stand out. I appreciate the spaces of my home more than ever, but I am also exhausted by them. Perhaps this is why I’m hearing things with greater clarity and force: everything is foreground now.