I am hoping that if I jot down a few words, a few more will follow, and if i let them flow out of me maybe i'll find a way to take in what is going on, inside me and outside me. This is British Summer Time weekend. The hour springs forward as if nothing has changed but everything has changed. Everything is strange. This afternoon i thought "its Sunday, what am i doing on Monday ?" but one day is not so different from another. I will try to pull my next week into a more work-shaped form because i think it will help me to re-orientate myself to how things are now. 
This week past tho' has been about absorbing and assimilating. I had tutorials on Wednesday with my uni, the first one reduced me to tears because the tech didn't work and so for twenty minutes we tried until i broke down and said that all i wanted to do was cry and it was hard to see the point of learning outcomes. Full credit goes to my tutor for being patient and understanding and sending me a helpful email and letting me answer it in my own time. I think everyone responds to stress and/or change in different ways i have needed to go inside myself to find out what is happening there before venturing into the big wide world of zoom chats and video link-ins.
My MA is now to be done online and it feels all wrong. A communication  design student from the RCA made an instagram post that was about online art school not being art school and i'm inclined to agree with the gist of what was said. I know that what my course leaders are putting together is the all they can do, that corvid 19 is circumstances beyond their control, but a cobbled together online course is unlikely to be worth £2.5K, the value of the course was for me access to equipment, expert technicians and material resources at an affordable price, also interaction with other students MA and BA from first year to third, we learn from each other, its a creative network that cannot be replicated online. I hope that the university will find a way to compensate students who stick with them rather than leaving or deferring. Perhaps they will offer students what they have missed out on for a further term or 6 months maybe after their course ends. This would be fair and honourable tho' I doubt that they will offer this if students don't ask so next week i shall have to write to ask. Thats assuming that i'm here next week because the scary thing at the moment is no one really knows what the next few weeks and months will bring. 
The ideas and processes i was previously working on are mostly in arrest at the moment, the planned creative trajectory stalled.  The new work that needs to be done for me to get through course units is cataloguing and writing up which makes my heart sink, handing in a digital folder rather than a body of physical work, feels dry, cold and stiff. I am trying to think of ways to do this that allow me to own my submission to love what i'm giving to my tutors to assess rather than dutifully ticking the boxes which is how i feel at the moment. 
Oh listen to me, people have lost their friends and family to date well over a thousand people have died from this virus in the uk alone how can anything be more important than that ? And world wide it goes into tens of thousands and is set to rise steeply for some time. Trapped inside today I have been watching Born into Brothels a documentary about a photographer who went to live in one of India's infamous red light districts. As she photographed the women's lives she got to know the children there, a group of whom she became particularly fond of through teaching them to take photographs. I would recommend this film, it is humbling on many levels. 
Last week i was speaking on the phone to my godfather and we were of course talking about the virus, it was why i phoned. We agreed it was scary, it is. And then he spoke of India and called to my attention the horror of Covid in the slums of India where people live cheek by jowl, then an instagram post came up on my facebook thread saying much the same thing, how self isolation is in fact a rich person's luxury and so it feels. 
Those on the inside are fussing about cleaning their houses, entertaining children, occupying time and feeling the weirdness of their strange incarceration, it is strange, it is uncomfortable. Meanwhile the essential workers, nurses, doctors, shop workers etc are on the outside with letters showing they are essential  There's a new them and us, the inessential workers safe but imprisoned, and the essential workers, heroic  in their activities. we are living in different worlds. I wonder how we will reconnect when all this is done.  Surely it has to be the beginning of a new world order, a new understanding that the values we have been living with can no longer be tolerated.  
I hope if you've read this far you'll forgive me for returning to my journey through the stations of the cross. At the beginning of the week my meditation which has lasted some months now had me with Jesus dying on the cross and then being taken down, with his mother holding her lifeless son in her arms after he was taken down, then the man, the body, the corpse, laid in the tomb. This is where the stations end tho sometimes they are finished with a resurrection scene. Here in my necessary solitude i could be Jesus in my tomb. We could all be. Our time entombed could be a time for contemplation. A meeting of grief, the emptiness, the loneliness, these feelings give way to change, there is no choice, change will be. 
I think this week i amongst others have been preparing myself for grief, i don't know if i'll see people i love again and it hurts, i want to be able to give my mum a hug, even if she and i fight passionately, i still love her, she can be sweet and funny and wise. Likewise my dad and my stepmother and my godparents and oh my god my children and my grandchildren, please may they pull through and my ex husband, and my friends and all the people they love too and so on and i imagine most are thinking along these lines. Please let my family be safe, please let them be well.  
I step away from the stations because the moment takes over. Art is just art, to be relevant it must meet the moment i think. If the moment changes then the art must change too which means that as i look at the body of work i have made this term, and there is good work, i need to see if the good work still stands as work that meets today or if it is still good work but good work that belongs to yesterday. How do i know if it still stands only time will tell. The wheat is being sorted from the chaff. The chaff will blow away in the wind only that which is good and of worth will remain.