By L. John Harris
How would quantum physics or Dr. Fauci explain Covid time?
In the year of our Lord 2020, when the Covid pandemic transformed our lives into something out of a surreal dystopian thriller, I drew images, snapped photos, and posted them on social media. My subject was a cascade of horrors: lonely streets and shuttered shops; hospitals filling up with Covid cases; burning forests and towns with thick smoky air that turned our visual world into impressionist paintings; restaurants and cafés imploding, many never to open again; educations and careers canceled; social lives and love lives interrupted; and politicians and institutions inept in the face of it all.
New words and expressions crept into our daily discourse–shelter in place, lock down, quarantine, shuttered. They all added up to the same thing—life as we knew it was coming to a halt. And for how long nobody knew. Had I fallen into a darkly absurd sitcom like South Park, or the tragic plague-ravaged Thebes of Sophocles in Oedipus Rex?
It was clear that time had suddenly been altered by a virus–an act of God as the ancients might see it. Call it panic time, or in this case, pan-dem-ic time. In the grip of this dark, confusing and lonely new time, I began hoarding food and essentials like everyone else—water, bagels, coffee, toilet paper, canned goods, hand wipes, masks (if you could find them) and a nutritionally rich and long shelf life root vegetable I love but normally avoid (high carbs)—the potato. I ended up with more russet potatoes than I could eat in a year, perhaps in a lifetime.
I put one of them on the windowsill above my kitchen sink to dry after scrubbing it, fully intending to cook it in the coming days. When the spud suddenly began to sprout, I left it on the sill, concluding it was not entirely fit to eat.
One couldn’t avoid thinking about Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters, though it could have just as easily been titled The Coffee Drinkers. Note that exactly half of the painting is focused on coffee pouring (right) and half on potato eating (left). This is a portrait of my bifurcated diet in Berkeley as Covid took hold, or so I feared–coffee by day, potatoes by night.
To my eyes, Van Gogh’s peasant family even looks like potatoes. This is an observation supported by Van Gogh himself who wrote to his brother in May of 1885, “the colour is something of a really dusty potato, unpeeled of course.
Documenting My Potato
By May, the green sprouts were in full display and I took a photo and posted it on Facebook with a short explanatory text about my spud as a measure of time. Exposing this absurd concept on social media was prankish fun for me, and fun was in short supply. Thus began the ritual of photographing and posting my potato’s changes over the course of a year. I had begun to think of my special tuber as a “potato clock,” marking the progression of the pandemic as the months rolled by. It seems oddly appropriate that Covid would become symbolically embodied by a possibly poisonous, slowly rotting potato. Aren’t we all living underground—rotting in place like potatoes?
My potato clock ticks at variable rates. May’s potato expressed my sense of time slowing down—I could see the potato sprout as if in slo-mo and the lonely days seemed long and uneventful–tedious. Then, with a burst of energy after a minor health scare, time seemed to speed up, becoming more generous. The potato’s sprouts were spreading across its body and I began doing things I seldom had time for pre-Covid: cleaning out closets, organizing my desk and making mayonnaise from scratch. Now, in August, my potato clock has changed tempo again and Covid time feels neither slow nor fast, an extended duration, a timescape that may, like the pandemic itself, never end. Potato eternity. How would quantum physics or Dr. Fauci explain Covid time?
Like many bachelors, I stopped shaving, let my hair grow and spent whole days in my robe and PJs in front of a TV and computer. When I dressed in the morning, if I dressed at all, I put on the same clothes I’d been wearing for a week. Living alone, socially isolated, would anyone care? Did I care? This was not a healthy frame of mind, and I noticed unpleasant symptoms. First, weight gain around the middle and aches and pains in joints and muscles. Then, lethargy and ennui. I was turning into a couch potato. A sad sack of potatoes.
Things got even worse. One day I noticed something growing on my upper lip, under my moustache–a tiny “thing”. More potato identification and panic ensued as I watched the thing grow to the size of a tiny diamond. It hurt the way small unwanted things hurt, like paper cuts or splinters. Was my thing turning green like my potato’s sprouts, indicating, perhaps, infection? No, thankfully not. Eventually, I masked up and braved my skin doctor’s office. She removed the thing, pronouncing it benign. Covid had turned a routine dermatological evaluation into a brush with death.
As my skin continued to sprout in the fall (another little thing grew on my eyelid), my hair was growing inexorably closer to my shoulders. I observed in the mirror that my overall hair length seemed about the same. How could this be? Because, I reasoned, my hairline was moving farther up my forehead. In other words, my scalp was shifting upwards, over and down the back of my head towards my shoulders, taking with it my thinning patch of gray.
Below Mr. Potato Head and his pandemic potato clock. October 2020.
The Biochemistry of rot: During a pandemic, one’s mind runs to the grim. I began reading about the biochemical phenomenon of the potato, a member of the deadly nightshade family, along with tomatoes and eggplant. Ironic that the birth process of potatoes—sprouting—produces its own protective chemicals—glycoalkaloids— that can, if ingested or inhaled in quantity as a gas, render potato eaters sick, even dead. The chemicals protect the potato from its predators (insects and rodents) but, ironically, not its human lovers. The potato’s curious biology, the strange magic of its dangerous greenish flesh when damaged by excess exposure to light, co-existing with the deliciousness of the flesh when cooked — is more vivid to me now. My expectation, here in the late summer of our Covid nightmare, is that my rotting potato will run itself into the ground along with the Covid pandemic sometime in mid-to-late 2021. If we are lucky. Is this Dickens’ best of times and worst of times? No, far more the latter.
Speaking of Victorian Dickens, he missed London’s last deadly bout of bubonic plague chronicled by Daniel Defoe in his A Journal of the Plague Year, but he lived through and wrote about London’s “Great Stink” in the mid-19th century. The term refers to the crisis of raw sewage dumped into the River Thames during one particularly hot summer (1858), creating not only a stink but a breeding ground for cholera. Drinking water in London came from the sewage-laced Thames, despite warnings from scientists and governmental authorities and the appearance of modern sanitary inventions. Many Londoners still thought late into the 19th century that “bad air” was the culprit, a vestige of the ancient miasma theory of disease.
A Pent-up Flaneur
It’s March, 2021, one year into my potato pandemic and I have adjusted. A veteran flâneur like me, locked down at home by a raging pandemic, morphs from a freewheeling urban caterpillar to a caged butterfly. Out of necessity, this solo lord of the manor becomes his own butler, in service only to himself. The daily tasks – flitting about his cage – are monotonous and seemingly endless, but not inconsequential.
Watching again The Remains of the Day, the film based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel: There is a key scene where Stevens, the butler in service at Darlington Hall, takes a cloth and walks around the perimeter of the room’s massive billiard table, wiping down its thick wooden frame. Lord Darlington has just been snookered in Darlington Hall’s billiard room by a group of pro-Nazi sympathizers. Lost in thought, Stevens, played by Anthony Hopkins, removes smudges and dust from the polished wood, but also wipes away, in my interpretation, the grimy residue of Lord Darlington’s pre-war betrayal he has just overheard. Stevens’ life as a butler is a tightrope walk between denial and survival, his lord’s betrayal and his own acquiescence.
Limited more or less to the boundaries of my gilded cage, like Stevens, and denied my usual rambles in Paris and Berkeley, I have embraced the lifestyle Covid has delivered: Overseeing a year-long remodeling project started before the pandemic, the keeping of a journal, endless cooking and solo eating, and the repetitive chores of a butler and staff. As both the lord of the manor and its loyal servant, I’ve made my peace with domestic service and a shuttered life. Again, as with Stevens, it’s part denial, part survival—the pursuit of happiness in an unhappy time.
On Pandemic Reading
Time to tidy up: The amount of housework one must accomplish living alone during a plague is daunting, both the daily chores – dishwashing and laundry, sweeping and dusting, shopping and cooking – and the deeper deferred maintenance obligations of closet organization, cobweb removal, garden weeding, window cleaning, desk organizing, and bookshelf arranging.
In love with real books, I spend a lot of time in my library as both lord and butler. I love my books, all of them, read and un-read. So what’s with this current decluttering trend inspired by Marie Kondo in her 2014 bestseller, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, that suggests getting rid of books? Silly nonsense! To reduce a book’s status to “clutter” is a crime against literature and the rich history of the library. But I do hate the affectation of domestic libraries shown in luxury home and design magazines, where shelved books are organized by size and spine color or wrapped in identical creamy dust jackets. I want the random colorful spines of my books lined up dead even along the edge of the shelves in thematic groupings. Mine is, after all, a working library, a resource for writer and reader, not an interior design focal point that turns the art of the book into a showy accessory. Let the books’ colorful identities speak out on the shelves, but line them back up after use for a sense of order. Call me anal; call me, yes, a butt-ler.
Coda
June 2021: One day I began to clear my desk of clutter that had accumulated while working on a drawing. There, under a pile of sketches, was my potato clock. I must have left the incredible shrinking spud on the desk after drawing it last December. I note the body has shrunk to the size and texture of a very large irregular peanut, and the sprouts have turned a woody brown with only hints of green. It’s as if the élan vital of the thing – its soul – has transmigrated. To another potato? To me?
Documenting the progress of the potato’s decline has added, like my chiming clock and butler’s chores, a sense of order to my Covid days. In The Decameron, set during the Black Death of 1348, one of Boccaccio’s characters explains the required daily rituals to her young friends who have left plague-ravaged Florence to live in the country and tell bawdy stories in privileged safety, “Things that lack order will not last long.” We are fortunate that our nightmare, though real, pales by comparison to that of 14th century Florence. And I am fortunate that more than a year after the arrival of Covid, my aging at-risk flesh is alive and well, despite the “things” that sprout from it.
L. John Harris is a Berkeley based artist, writer, and filmmaker and a frequent contributor to Reinventing Home. This article was adapted from My Little Plague Journal, available from Villa Books and Amazon in March, 2022.
