COVID Chronicles XXX. It’s not dead yet!

 COVID, psychoanalysis, psychology, resurgence, post pandemic, endemic

I thought perhaps I had written the last of these COVID Chronicles, but the virus itself had a thing or two to say about that. If I wrote a piece, I thought it would be a wrap up and I imagined writing about the palpable excitement in the classroom this fall, as the students seem to have returned with a new level of enthusiasm – perhaps even a notch or two above pre-pandemic levels.  A fellow faculty member, talking with his students about AI, was told by the students that they had heard that some of us were afraid we were going to be replaced by AI bots, and they reassured him that they had experienced remote learning, and they were really glad to be in the classroom with living breathing professors.

At my annual physical this summer, I asked my PCP whether it made sense to get a third dose of the last inoculation or to wait until the new dose came out this fall, which would include active defenses against more recent variants.  He counselled to wait, which I agreed with as a strategy until fellow faculty started reporting on the number of students that were showing up sick with COVID in their classes.

I started feeling a bit sick on Tuesday night of last week, and wore a mask to class and with my patients on Wednesday, just to be on the safe side.  I tested negative on Wednesday and thought I just had a head cold, until I got into bed that night feeling bone tired and then was us up frequently through the night to cough before falling fitfully back to sleep.  By morning I was too congested and weary to think about seeing patients or teaching.  This was the first time in our seventeen years together that my wife had seen me cancel a class.

Cancelling classes and patients took about all of my energy and I was not surprised to test positive in the middle of the morning.  Though I did remotely teach a couple of classes at the institute on Friday (it was the first day of class for the school year and for some students, their first class – and it was too late to find a substitute), I cancelled the rest of my day on Friday and spent the better part of four days sleeping or watching a little mindless TV between naps.  I barely had the energy to do much else.

By Monday, I was well enough to teach class remotely – the rest of the class was in the classroom, and I resumed some of my clinical duties remotely.  People were very interested in the quality of my experience and I gave them essentially the details that I have reported here.  I think, though am not certain, that we have all kind of come to think of the endemic stage of the pandemic as the period when COVID is no longer a thing – or if it is a thing, it is not a dangerous our threatening thing.

While I don’t think I was in danger of death – not even close – it was a much more powerful hit than I had imagined would be the case.  The Reluctant Wife, who was also infected, also experienced tremendous fatigue and flu like symptoms, including muscle aches.  We both registered low grade fevers at various points that we treated with analgesics.

One interesting thing about the state of being in an endemic stage is the reporting.  We had been exhorted by our chair to report our COVID status to the powers that be at the university throughout the year last year.  When I sent an email to the designated place, they responded that they were only interested in hearing about students and that I should contact HR.  I reached out to our HR department and they reported that they were not accepting information about faculty and referred me to our website which, in turn, referred me to the CDC page for how to handle quarantining. 

At this point, as both the CDC website and my physician pointed out, there is a recommendation to isolate for five days and then to wear a mask in public for the next five days.  I have let my students know of my diagnostic status, and some have chosen to be masked in class or to zoom into the classroom, which I have set up for them as, for instance, they are caring for immunocompromised family members.

It is interesting that the very close oversight that the university offered, including telling me exactly what kind of alternate classes to offer if I was unable to teach, has simply evaporated and we are in the situation that was in place pre-pandemic, though with guidelines and various technical opportunities that are available in the classroom that weren’t there before the pandemic.  We now use the zoom screens and cameras for a variety of purposes and have become as reliant on them as any other classroom technology – so I assume we will be maintaining that technology as we move forward.

What we seem to have lost is the oversight.  I won’t know which of my students have been diagnosed and whether they are following the isolation and masking protocols or not.  I hope that we have not lost CDC interest and following of the bug – we need to keep coming up with new vaccines and also to know if there are long term effects in various systems – cardiovascular and neuro systems seem to be the most likely candidates.   

I am hoping that my illness and the disruption in meeting has not dampened the enthusiasm of the students.  Attendance continues to be excellent and the students are doing the assignments at a rate that perhaps I have never seen.  I’m not sure that we ever quite value something as much as we might until we have lost it, and having regained the experience in the classroom, I am hopeful that we can hang onto some of the enthusiasm as we navigate changing health patterns and the normal disheartenment of the semester turning into a bit of a slog.

There has been a kind of dark cloud hanging around the edges of my classroom, my consciousness, and my experiences with various people in my life.  I am hopeful that, while I don’t think we can banish it, we can, on more days than not, appreciate the largely blue skies that are encouraging us to recommit to addressing the various ills and joys that are part and parcel of the lives we are currently living.

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Oppenheimer: Good versus Evil can be confusing and enlightening.

 Oppenheimer, power, atomic bomb, movie, psychoanalysis, psychology

I have been pleased and surprised that Oppenheimer – along with Barbie – has been a blockbuster hit this summer.  Who would have thunk it?  The New Yorker characterized it as a history channel movie being told with flashbacks instead of in straight narrative form.  Actually, I think it is much more subversive than that.  I think it is a story of good and evil, but our American expectations of what is good and what is evil gets stirred up in ways that are, in the American Exceptionalist Lexicon, heretical.

Oppenheimer, played by Cillian Murphy, is a brilliant, but therefore otherworldly person.  He can feel his way into the quantum world of the atoms that make up our world.  Elements that give the illusion of solidity to a world that is, in actuality, mostly empty space.  Atoms deceive us, apparently, by the speed of their revolutions and the intensity of their bonds with other elements.  Oppenheimer can feel the intense, energy filled field that gives us the illusion of a pleasant, serene landscape.  But he is also smart enough in the world of symbols to be able to learn a foreign language in two months to a level of mastery that he can deliver a complex lecture on physics in that language, so he is not stuck in the world of feelings and intuition, but can function in a world of politics and problem solving. 

So, in some ways, its not surprising that this hero, who is labelled as exceptional from the get go, has novel ways of approaching both personal relationships and political ones.  He imagines, at some point (and the movie is taken to task for dramatizing this moment with less historical accuracy than most of the other moments) that he can eliminate someone through poisoning them.  Fortunately (which is a matter of perspective), the poisoning does not take place, and (again in something that is not included in the movie’s narrative) the authorities who discover this aberration decide that his virtues outweigh this lapse of judgement and allow him to move forward in his life without punishment.  But we know that he is both exceptional and has an odd sense of judgement – and an odd faith in his ability to allow his feelings to inform his actions, even to the point of engaging in what traditional values would categorize as immoral activity.

For example, we are asked to evaluate his morality when he woos a married woman and steals her away from her husband.  The marriage he breaks up seems to be one of convenience and he seems to genuinely be interested in the woman.  She is not fleshed out in the film except as an alcoholic who is not a very capable mother and she is someone who is humiliated when Oppenheimer’s affair is brought to light in the inquest that is set up by his one-time supporter but ultimate nemesis Strauss (pronounced Straws, and played by Robert Downey Jr. who gets to show off his acting chops) who sets up a kangaroo court to get Oppenheimer removed from the Atomic Energy Commission because they disagree, and to get Oppenheimer back for having publicly made a fool of Strauss.

If that last sentence was too much – whether or not you’ve seen the film – it clarifies that there are many moving parts here.  One of the reasons that Oppenheimer’s wife’s character is not fleshed out, I believe, is that there simply isn’t enough room in this film for all of the historical characters who are portrayed and who are necessary to the creation of a world changing instrument.

The Atom bomb was not created by a few tinkerers applying Einstein’s theory to bomb construction.  There were hundreds of minds, and many more people working to get the raw materials – the fissionable uranium – to come together in a highly crafted package with multiple complicated systems leading to detonation - with uncertain effect.  And there was a cataclysmic shift in our relationship to the universe and to each other when they successfully accomplished their task.

The task that this movie set for itself was to help us be able to feel as viscerally as Oppenheimer did, what that shift means to us.  I think it succeeded.

We saw this film on vacation at a run-down theater in a relatively small town where every seat in the theater was sold out.  We were just down the hall from the theater showing Barbie, and some pink clad kids snuck in to catch the double feature (they must have had some kind of pass or paid for both films because all seats were assigned and filled).  When the bomb exploded – and I don’t think that is a spoiler – we do have nuclear weapons and used two of them in the Second World War – the silence in the theater was deafening.  I don’t know that I have ever been in a room with that many people who were that rapt.

Of course, the silence of a nuclear explosion is followed by a deafening roar.  Sound doesn’t travel as fast as light, but when it gets there, it is as loud as the explosion was bright – and then there was more noise at the raucous celebration of the success held by those who had worked on the task.  That celebration felt out of place to me – and clearly to Oppenheimer – the orchestrater – the person who had the greatest right to feel proud and even jubilant about their shared achievement.  But he did not.  He felt not just the room shake from the applause cascading down from the wooden bleachers, but the world itself vibrating with the realization that a new power had been unleashed on top of it – a power with the potential to annihilate everything else of beauty that this world had created in the billions of years since it first started spinning as a molten rock around another nuclear reaction at the core of its planetary system.

I want to go back and watch the film again.  We had hoped to see it in IMAX, the medium that was used to shoot it, but those screens were sold out until the end of the run by the time we returned from vacation.  But it was not the spectacle that I want to return to.  This is a complex film with hints about how to decode it.  Strauss’s perspective on events are shot in black and white.  Oppenheimer’s are in color.  But we had to figure this out in real time – no one gave us a program that explained that.  There were competing ideas about how best to accomplish the goal of the weapon – fission versus fusion.  There were children not being tended to and spies being protected and things going on all over the place.  The fog of war seemed to be not just on the battlefield, but in the preparation for it, and in deciding how to manage the aftermath and the specter of living in this brave new world.

I think I got most of the pieces, and probably could have written a cogent summary closer to seeing the film, but what sticks with me a month and a half later is the affect, not the politics.  It is the feeling that we are no longer masters of the world precisely because we have mastered one of the world’s great secrets.  Yes, this group of people needed to work on a doomsday device to prevent a very different kind of doomsday, but having the destructive power that we now do, it feels not like whether we will use our doomsday devices again, but when.  And that is chilling.

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