A Memoir of Dwelling in the Pandemic

It has been almost three years since everything went back to business as usual, and the pandemic period feels like it has been washed away with sanitiser. Although everything lingers in the head, memories are all intact, but a strong resistance from the mind to revisit those is equally present. For this essay, I will try to recall them and assemble them with ,sociological and literary texts. It will also be the first digitally written record of those days. In the middle of my board exams for twelfth grade, shocking news about a strange, deadly virus was spreading everywhere like fire. On a phone call with my friend, we discussed a weird sci[1]fi novel that closely resembled the situation in China’s Wuhan city and were hopeful that it would only be confined to that part of the world.

A week later, in my exam hall, I noticed some classmates wearing black masks over their faces. By then, the virus had reached Kerela, far from my homeland, but it created some terror. I thought it might be some new type of H1N1 flu or a few degrees worse than swine flu. But this time, the unnamed virus decided that it wanted to destroy lives and bring life to a halt for the time being. I vividly remember the 20th of March 2020 when my Geography exam was supposed to happen. We received communication from the examination body only a day prior that remaining papers were postponed until the next date.

A serious threat lingering over everyone was coming close; it was the mysterious and contagious nature of this virus that made everyone feel insecure. Peter Szendy, in his “Viral Times”, points out the complexity of such an event (pandemic), which he compares to a wave that is winding around itself.¹ (Szendy:2021) He raises the question of whether coronavirus will be just another crisis or perhaps more memorable than others. The text urges us to keep alive the experience of the heterochronies that wove the medical texture of the event.

I read this piece only last year, but the way it was drafted retrieved all the images of loss, ambiguity, uncertainty, anxiety, the struggle for being and fragments of joy altogether in my head. I personally was privileged enough not to go out for roughly sixty days and need not worry about my daily bread or survival, but this was not the case with a huge chunk of the global population, including those in India. One thing for which I would like to thank the virus because it made me more observant and sensitive towards the outer world and, at the same time, enabled me to take a step back, pause, breathe and think about what and why the choices I made so far and will be doing in the near future. It also helped me build a nice fitness routine and be more conscious than ever about healthy eating, strong immunity, and the inner strength gained by doing yoga and meditation (though I am now again struggling to maintain that same exercise routine and easily fall prey to the delicious cravings of the mind). The theme that we are exploring here is not just the pandemic; it cannot be isolated from that of dwelling. It will be useful to bring in what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger says about dwelling. He builds an idea around the same in his seminal essay titled as “Building, Dwelling Thinking”.²

Heidegger tells us that the Old High German word buan means literally “to stay in a place” or “to remain”. Going by the literal meaning, the pandemic indeed was a dwelling experience, confinement, and staying in a single place, in my case – home. From a translated version of this essay, establishing a preliminary understanding of the term has been attempted here. Adam Bobeck writes: “We usually imagine, when we talk about dwelling, an activity that humans perform along with many other activities. We work here and dwell there. We do not only dwell – that would be almost inactivity – we work, we do business, we travel and dwell in the process. Building originally means dwelling. Where the word bauen still speaks in its original sense, it says how far the essence of dwelling extends.”³

Back then, if we were not going to work or on the move, were we actually dwelling? The answer is Yes! The reason is we were engaged in building an alternate lifestyle, work habits, and executing tasks underhand through digital mediums. This was the case with some of us; a large part of the workforce indulged in their everyday routine work. Be it those in healthcare, sanitary workers, police forces, house help, vendors of essential services, those in the administration, transit labour, journalists, and associated staff who went to work every day, ready to face dangers outside their homes. I was deeply moved by the large-scale migration of workers in the gig economy. Leaving one’s occupation and city to return to their village because the city they had given their sweat and labour can no longer feed them is also a dimension of the process of building and dwelling.

In a footnote, Bobeck points out that in his essay “Heidegger, Aalto, and the Limits of Design”, Jeff Malpas contends that dwelling is not the ideal translation of wohnen, because dwelling is an unusual word in English, whereas wohnen is an everyday term. Malpas argues that a better translation would be living or residing.⁴ I am not entirely convinced by this argument because residing or living would not incorporate entirely the essence that Heidegger must have intended when he wrote fondly about wonhen and the ‘Fourfold’ in which mortals dwell.

Tim Ingold helps us to understand dwelling more clearly; he writes, “Dwelling, by contrast, is intransitive: it is about the way inhabitants, singly and together, produce their own lives, and like life, it carries on. Critically, then, dwelling is not merely the occupation of structures already built: it does not stand to building as consumption to production. It rather signifies that immersion of beings in the currents of the lifeworld without which such activities as designing, building and occupation could not take place at all. As individuals produce their lives, Marx and Engels had declared (1977: 42), so they are.” (Ingold: 2011)

Ingold, by developing his dwelling perspective, is trying to unite the approaches of ecology and phenomenology within a single paradigm. He further explains – “I would not myself go along with such a sharp division between human and animal, world and environment, being and existence. To the contrary, one of my aims in developing the dwelling perspective was to show that organism-and-environment and being-in-the world offer points of departure for our understanding that are ontologically equivalent, and in that way to unite the approaches of ecology and phenomenology within a single paradigm. Heidegger’s human, it seems to me, remains trapped in the dilemma of a creature that can know itself and the world of which it is viscerally a part – in which it lives and breathes – only by renouncing its very existence in that world.” (ibid.)

However, he believes otherwise; to him, the inhabitants themselves go through the world and gain knowledge about it, conducting themselves skillfully, being attentive and responsive to their surroundings, and having been embodied through practice and experience. His use of the term ‘lifeworld’ (Lebeswelt), inspired by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological analysis, opens up larger possibilities to the way we can understand ‘dwelling’ through everyday mundane experiences that surround our life and channelise it. It encompasses sight, sound, smell, touch, and sensations that make a familiar environment, shaping our perceptions and influencing our understanding of the world. (Beyer:2016) ⁵

The ‘lockdown’ came as a blessing in disguise for my family because, for the first time in four years, everyone was at home for more than a week. Deep inside, I never wanted this time to end because of the company at home, though a sense of insecurity and uncertainty was lingering around all outside this safe space where we ‘dwelt’. In my personal capacity, I utilised the time to binge-watch Netflix, Disney Hotstar, documentaries and read as many books as I could. The suspense thriller series Money Heist (2017-2021) and a sitcom based on the geek of scientist subculture called The Big Bang Theory (2007-2019) caught me up late at night. Out of many, the one novel I remember that is relevant to our theme here is called “The Fault in Our Stars” (2012) by John Green. It explored themes of mortality, existentialism, and the human condition. I was, in a way, revising all the Harry Potter franchise films (2001- 2011) and rereading these books just to keep the kid inside me alive. All kinds of fiction, non-fiction, and academic texts, which I longed to read after exams, replaced the dog-eared NCERT textbooks and other reference material. I also started reading more self-help books and had escapist tendencies. I am unsure whether it was just my idiosyncrasy or if others out there tried the same?

I did this to keep myself sane and to avoid watching news channels. In the absence of our gardener during lockdown, I was also responsible for tending to the little kitchen garden that we have. I realised how peaceful and relaxing kitchen gardening can be, and its produce never failed to impress us. Apart from fun, I was also supposed to spend some time daily preparing for the Common Law Admission Test (CLAT), which was postponed at least three times before one could finally appear for it. After the second delay, I lost interest in studying seriously. Eventually, I cleared it but with a lower rank, and I could not end up in the law school of my choice.

Arthur Kleinman, in the introduction of his book “What Really Matters” (2008), proposes that uncertainties and dangers are an inescapable dimension of life and define what is it to be human.6 I agree with this idea now, when I think about it in terms of the pandemic experience. How valuable is everything around me, a mere breathing disorder heightens the utility of our olfactory senses and lungs. Dysfunctioning tastebuds can remind us of all the things we used to cherish with a sensory organ, our tongue. In the absence of certain things, does their true value come to surface?

When I think about it, I had all seven members under one roof for a pretty good time. We used to sit together and watch repeated telecasts of Ramayana and, later, Mahabharata. We all enjoyed trying new recipes on YouTube and baking new stories with love together. My elder sister and I played songs at a loud volume while working in the kitchen. As I write this essay, over six hundred kilometres away from home, so much has changed. I have already lost my grandfather, and my eyes glisten with tears about how much we all miss him. The rest of the family is scattered once again. One anxiety that soon occurred after the first lockdown was lifted was that my father had to go back to the office.

Work from home did last as long as the transportation was shut down; being in the administration, he had to show up. He worked in a different city, which was also a cause of concern; who would take care of him in case something happened, these dreadful times lifted masks from the faces of those around us. Who our actual well wishes are and who we care about equally became crystal clear.

A few months later when it appeared that things were becoming better, it became all the more gruesome. The second wave was actually terrible. It became difficult to now ignore news of increasing morbidity rates and death of kin in the extended family. Newspapers recorded death like they were IPL scores. My chirpiness turned into dullness. I wanted not to feel sad or overthink all the time, but the external environment that I was surrounded by wanted otherwise. Meanwhile, I also took admission to a college in my hometown itself and started attending online lectures. They were pretty good and had an attendance criterion. Recorded lectures were uploaded to our Moodle accounts, The internet connection can become unstable, a device can go out of battery, and n number of possibilities were there as excuses not to attend a live class. However, I personally preferred to attend them in the morning itself so that I am done with them and can plan the rest of my day accordingly.

In my first year only, I was introduced to the discipline of Sociology. It was and still is a fascinating subject to me. (Some things never change!). I was also studying English Literature then, so poetry and prose together kept me a busy bee and sane. We also went to take our endsemester exams (in person) in the month of December. I don’t know whether the question paper was dangerous or the exam hall, but it was kind of weird not to go to college the entire semester but show up for exams directly. I did question the educational system at that point in time. I also became worried about the increasing learning gap between those in rural and urban sectors, privileged and deprived. Later, when I was introduced to the writings of Karl Marx and his ideas, I could totally picture what it is like when he describes the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.⁷

In January of 2021, I was affected by the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. It was then the horrors of the virus landed in my little head; though the wave was not deadly, it kept bothering me until I tested negative. For me personally, it was more of a mental burden that occupied my thoughts and how much of a walking virus and potential threat to others I became. Slowly and steadily, restrictions were eased again, and we faced a third wave, which witnessed hues and cries about a short supply of oxygen cylinders and a medicine called Remidisivir. Slowly, the first vaccine doses were rolled out for those over fifty, followed by eighteen and, at last, children. Things became stable and improved with time. My dwelling experience at home became a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It can neither be erased nor repeated ever in the same way ever. It just remains “The emergency of being at a standstill”.⁸

Works Cited:

1. Beyer, Christian. 2016. “Edmund Husserl (Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy).” Stanford.edu. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/.
2. Bobeck, Adam. n.d. “Building Dwelling Thinking by Martin Heidegger (Translation and Commentary by Adam Bobeck).” Www.academia.edu.
3. Heidegger, Martin, and David Farrell Krell. 1977. Basic Writings : From Being and Time (1927) to the Task of Thinking (1964). 2nd ed. New York Etc.: Harper & Row.
4. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive : Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. Taylor & Francis Ltd.
5. Kleinman, Arthur. 2008. What Really Matters : Living a Moral Life amidst Uncertainty and Danger. New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press.
6. Szendy, Peter. 2021. “Viral Times.” Critical Inquiry 47 (S2): S63–67.
7. doi:https://doi.org/10.1086/711438.
8. Wolff, Jonathan, and David Leopold. 2003. “Karl Marx.” Stanford.edu. Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. August 26. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/.