Searching for inspiration in promising yet uncertain times

I have been suffering from writer’s block. Like… a major mental obstruction.

I also have painter’s block and motivation block too. Basically I think I have ‘everything block’. It’s complicated.

For eight weeks I have been incapable of conjuring up a single compelling idea that I think readers might find stimulating or intriguing enough to spend six minutes of their life reading.

This is not a good thing. I am unable to stitch together coherent sentences to convert my daily musings from mere brainwaves to the keyboard symphony that I usually strive for.

I am music-less.

Every time I pluck a string, it twangs rudely back at me. The clever dancing musical notes that are usually sprinkled on the stave-paper in my head have become clumsy and badly choreographed. There is only dissonance.

It feels wrong to write about insignificant frivolities when we are all knee-deep in a slushy quagmire, covered in muck. I reckon that if I encountered a gruesome Caravaggio in a museum right now, I would feel entirely un-moved with a curious indifference to the brutality depicted. I suspect this is because all that chiaroscuro has recently been painted into my own heart and so the grim masterpiece and I would find ourselves in a dawn pistol duel where both parties end up misfiring.

Even Rachmaninoff isn’t doing it for me anymore.

On the phone recently, my mother mentioned that she is feeling infuriatingly phlegmatic. Technically you can only be calmly phlegmatic, but clearly there are undertones of vigorous irritation there nonetheless. I gave her a massive virtual telephone-hug to express my gratitude for voicing something that she is far from alone in feeling.

Are we not all currently existing in an absurd, freakish suspension of disbelief that we are, by and large, not mentally equipped to poeticize our way out of? We have become Alices, free-falling down the Covid-19 rabbit hole, but sadly without the trippy psychedelia that our young blue-frocked protagonist. And we can’t quite make landfall.

We seem to be in a perpetual trip-aftermath nursing a shocking comedown that has rendered us quite incapable of functioning properly — and no amount of Spirulina concoctions can fix this one. It feels as though the only panacea is to go back to sleep and wait for the next morrow when we shall awaken fully compos mentis once more — the only problem is that our mentis doesn’t quite know how to compos this horrendous nightmare.

I mean…I have never been so tired in my life. My quasisomnambulism initially triggered a tsunami of hypochondria, I was convinced that I harbored some great sickness within me. Thousands of dollars of doctors’ bills later, I was relieved to be in excellent health but no closer to discovering the source of my debilitating fatigue. Then I went through the phase of woundedly limping along waiting for the spinal adjustment and re-alignment of our precious earth which has morphed into a Barbapapa-shapeshifting place of danger and fear and darkness.

And currently I am in the ‘riddle me this’ phase of wearily trying to unravel the mystery of our Brave New World and why our humanity has to be tested so.

In Singapore ‘Corona Life’ is really very manageable, indeed almost euphoric, compared to the little German toy-town where my mother lives. She tells me tales of frosty tumbleweeds rolling down the pedestrian zones where no one utters a word to one another anymore (even the ducks in the stream have stopped quacking at each other) and where masks, sunglasses and woolly winter hats disguise all distinguishable facial features of old friends so one has to rely on a familiar gait to tell friend from potential foe.

At 82 she has spent the last year wondering whether the world will return to normal within her remaining lifetime. That’s a pretty horrid thought. And yet we laughed yesterday about the astonishing phenomenon of the lockdown sourdough-baking brigades, and we discussed the fact that it’s totally ok to say that you feel devastatingly alone (not necessarily lonely), overwhelmed and sad about the cruel twist of fate that has thrown mankind into chaos and isolation, in particular, of course, her generation.

And then we talked about the fact that, despite having all the (uninvited) home-time in the world dumped unceremoniously on our lockdown doorsteps, we are still somehow unable to perform even the simplest of tasks. Like sending a short text. Or like my mother writing down her life-story (ok, that’s a gargantuan task, but still…) or me penning a comparatively diminutive 800-word article every month.

Being fully compos mentis frankly seems like a magical fantasy right now. First we have to figure out how to shuffle past that cheeky chaise lounge winking at us for a little healing nap…