Soon It Will Be Easter

F. N. Souza: The Deposition (1963)

Oil on canvas (138 x 170.5 cm)

Soon, it will be Easter ...

And this year, Christ's period in the tomb - post-crucifixion / pre-resurrection - will have a terrible significance and reality for us all, in this, the Age of Coronavirus and the Great Confinement, as we lie suspended between life and death, frightened even to cough or touch our faces.  

Of course, sooner or later, we will have to wake from our viral slumber and leave our domestic isolation. Even if our bodies are numb and full of hurt, we will have to move; assuming we're still alive and haven't perished behind the stack of quilted toilet rolls where we sought safety and reassurance, but which became at last a 3-ply prison.   

But it won't be easy moving back into life and returning from the land of the dead - particularly as the idiots in government have crashed the global economy. It might be spring and the natural world may be "thronging with greenness" [1], but things are, I suspect, going to be difficult for a lot of people for a long time to come.  

And, of course, we won't really be moving back into the same world, or the same life; but a different world, a different life (even if it has the appearance of the same). Sickness changes us and changes everything.

Indeed, what D. H. Lawrence once wrote of the flu is perhaps something we might say of coronavirus, namely, that it's a transformative disease: "It changes the very chemical composition of the blood." Hence, the fact that even when one does finally recover, "one has lost for good one's old self ..." [2].

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Escaped Cock, in The Virgin and the Gipsy and Other Stories, ed. Michael Herbert, Bethan Jones and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 126.

[2] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. VI, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy, (Cambridge University Press, 1991), letter 3995, to Mabel Dodge Luhan, [14-15 April, 1927], pp. 36-38.