Anticipation of the unknown

Vastavikta Bhagat

We at SEA believe that the pandemic has a granularity of meta, non-linear narratives that become useful in making sense of the relational complexities of the pandemic and society. Thus, we set out to collect stories of fears, joys, agilities, fragilities, friendships, networks, collectives, home, work, infrastructures, entrepreneurship, privileges, marginalizations, migrations, desperation, gender, equity, etc. The glossary as a method became useful to reflect on this granularity of experiences and account for slippages during these times. These spatio-temporal stories, when read together or as individual instances produce a new sense of the emergent contemporary. This framework also allows us to speculate on the kind of world we will inhabit once the storm has passed. We draw on multiple readings to bring out the nuances and patterns of social life produced in a pandemic. This we hope would allow us to collectively reflect on the restructured ideas of the self, the collective, society, space, and time. On the pandemic, staying locked in and the anticipation of the unknown.

A feeling very close to anticipation has riddled me throughout this period, irrespective of whatever I was going through. At some point it was the return to a normal, at another, it was a vaccine or even the worst I had ever seen.

When a screen becomes your window and things happen so unexpectedly, it felt like a sane act to expect and anticipate, only to fail.

I like this poem to talk about the pandemic world.

It is written by a Slovenian poet - Cicaran O' Driscoll-

Vulnerability has withdrawn

to hospitals, confessionals, bedrooms

It needs the nearness of death

helplessness, or at least a short term loss of dignity

It needs the uncomfortable silence of imposed intimacy

inebriation or stonedness

to betray words that

like a letter opener

rip open

the belly of daily life

and save that

which makes life seems real

What ended up happening is that I just anticipate the unknown only to be proven wrong on what will happen next. One long day - (loss of temporal demarcations-loss of spatial demarcations but also an attempt to tighten them) - one long night.

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