Social Distancing

Social distancing, as opposed to self-quarantining, is an interesting concept. It promises company but denies the possibility of relationship. Across the way from me now, in the condo complex beyond my deck, an older couple (well, perhaps close to my age, but then who is my age really?) having brought out their patio furniture sit drinking red wine and reading (their phones or iPads), sometimes commenting to each other but having an intimate moment. I sit on my first-floor deck having disinfected my furniture and sip a glass (or two) of white wine,. I am (now) writing this blog post having first glanced through my New York Review of Books, and I am eating potato chips (a much greater quantity than the recommended daily portion) and listening to Folk Alley. From the couple across the way I am fifty- or sixty-feet distant—a safe space given the onset of the coronavirus in our time. Were this not a moment of self-distancing I could call out and offer an invitation (that likely would be politely refused because their environment has greater sun) but maybe they would offer me a chair at their cocktail hour and we might establish the beginnings of some relationship that would continue through the blossoming Spring and extend into the Midwest summer and even into Fall months. Next winter we might sit before our respective fireplaces bemoaning or celebrating the season. But now is a time for outdoor cocktail hours, and in this time of pandemic the social time has been given the designation, quaran-tail hour. Ah, now I see that another obviously couple has joined the first—they brought their own cooler and glasses!), but they are sitting at appropriate social distance limits. It looks odd. And in the absence of my blue-tooth speaker playing the radio I could hear every word they speak.

     Of course, self-quarantining would refuse all potential nearness. Hence the developing ubiquity of the on-line quaran-tail hour.
     I am considering that social distancing was created by Henry David Thoreau. He writes, “If we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possible hear each other’s voice in any case.” On the one hand ,Thoreau suggests that our sentences need enough space to roll out to their full length, but on the other hand sometimes he means that our thoughts just ought to remain within us to ensure their purity. Hence, we remain silent. Interestingly, D.W. Winnicott in the next century suggested that the existence of what he refers to as the True Self requires that the individual person know that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality. “Each individual,” Winnicott writes, “is an isolate, permanently non-communicating, permanently unknown, in fact, unfound.” Paradoxically, though that self remains hidden it would be found. Wendy Leeser refers to this paradox as “hiding in plain sight,” where the artist in her work produces something that communicates but that protects the privacy of the completely subjective relationship the individual enjoys with objects without really having to attend to reality. Winnicott says, “I suggest that in health there is a core to the personality that corresponds to the self of the split personality. I suggest that the core never communicates with the world of perceived objects, and that the individual person knows that it must never be communicated with or be influenced by external reality.” Rather, that private self’s voice, defended by what Winnicott calls a false self, might be heard in the creative work of the individual as s/he enjoys the materials of the world because they are there to be found.  Social distancing par excellence!