The Virus as Muse

Poetry, song, and diaries during a pandemic.

Over the years, patients have offered me various gifts: homemade cookies, coffee mugs, theater tickets and Yankees tickets. I’ve received invitations to weddings, bar mitzvahs, a baptism. A dowager, who was a trustee at a local museum, offered me a work of art (didn't accept it). A professional baseball player sent tickets to his playoff game (wanted to go but couldn't).

It’s natural to want to give back to someone who is helping you. Patients think about me personally – even apart from what I represent to them – and our relationship resonates beyond our once- or twice-weekly sessions. It comes with being part of people’s lives. So, of course, I’m grateful. While patients understand the need to maintain a certain professional distance, they sometimes feel the need to test the limits, or even breach them slightly, if only to acknowledge our relationship with something more tangible than just showing up and talking. Yet despite all these tokens – really gestures of goodwill – I was unprepared for the outpourings I’ve received during this pandemic.

Patients have begun giving me their poetry, songs, diary entries and, in one case, a novella about surviving the Holocaust. These are often works-in-progress, which patients find a hedge against isolation and despair. One patient, who studied Renaissance poetry, is writing a crown of sonnets or sonnet “corona,” an interlocking series of sonnets that elaborate on a single theme, in this case the eponymous virus. The form dates back to the 15th century. But where the sonnet conventions usually address love and its loss, this current corona extends into scenes of suffering, chaos, and death. “No one else has seen this corona,” she says. “I write them for catharsis.” It’s okay.

This woman’s gift to me is very personal, an attempt to share aspects of herself that she could not describe – or bear to describe – in a Skype session. She reads some sonnets out loud, then looks up, expecting that I will have construed the lines into meanings that transcend words. What can I say? At a literal level, I have heard an avowal of deep pain; fear that we are headed into crazy-making times; disgust at institutional incompetence. But there is more, and I reach for an adequate response. “I understand,” I say. Old poetic forms can give shape to the present. They announce endurance, mixed with pain.”

I’m not often called upon to be a critic of poetry, and that’s not what she was looking for anyway. My patients are imposing new demands – even by their gifts. This woman needed me to hear her through another, unaccustomed medium, so that I might access feelings that she could not otherwise express. In effect, she was telling me that there are limits to psychotherapy, which is conducted in prose. She needed poetry to articulate her most acute, most disturbing responses, and to share these with me. I am beginning to realize that as we proceed through this pandemic, the conventions of my profession – not just of 15th-century poetry – will be upended. Patients will ask that we listen with different capabilities to different forms of self-disclosure. Their gifts may do double duty as primers on their sense of themselves.

I am a little bemused if not concerned by this development (am I up to it?), but I also see it as a hedge against complacency. Patients can teach us how to expand ourselves as therapists, and respond with new abilities that suit altered circumstances. It’s humbling, of course, since patients look to us for guidance. But I must remind myself that in the long run, at least part of my role is to help them find their voices, to speak candidly and live authentically. If that takes responding to poetry, or some other medium that’s congenial to them, then I should be up to it.

My patients have various temperaments. Apart from the deeply thoughtful, some are whimsical, albeit with a Charles Addams twist to accommodate COVID-19. A grim humor is creeping into sessions as patients use funky, alternative media to express themselves. One patient, a woman in her 70s, likes to give pop tunes new lyrics, turning disco, rock, and Afrobeat into conspicuously off-kilter dirges. She took an old Bee Gees’ standard, “Stayin’ Alive” (1977), and weaponized it as a cry: its “Barely Alive” lament targets the government, the virus, and the misplaced optimism of anyone predicting a vaccine within a year. “Just drink Clorox then wash your hands. . .” goes one line, as the refrain keeps wiping out the logic of each claim. Actually, it’s pretty good.

There is a tradition of assigning new words to old songs, where memory of the original jars ironically with the revision. Tom Lehrer, a celebrated practitioner of this (minor) art form, raised it to such heights that he became a hero to the ‘60s anti-establishment set. But my patient just needs an outlet. She sings the lyrics while she cleans her apartment, since the maid is furloughed indefinitely. She wishes for a karaoke back-up, then laughs at the improbability. Yet beneath the whimsy, there is worry, a growing awareness that her cushy life is fraying. During our last session, she told me that the maintenance staff in her tony Manhattan building are not allowed into apartments except in the direst emergencies. (“I’m glad we have two bathrooms,” she confides). She frets about her investments; about when she can resume physical therapy; about her declining bone density for which she receives (or, rather had been receiving) injections. For the first time in a long time, she feels unsettled.

The songs, however, help her to express her fears so that they don’t just fester. As she sings a few lines to me, I see her brighten rather than turn grimmer. The songs are coping mechanisms. She sends them to friends, and they sing together on the phone, impromptu duets against despair. In this time of pandemic, shared creativity, shared complaints, shared anything become bulwarks against feeling isolated, static, stoppered up. Also, creativity is a riposte against sameness and boredom. If you can invent, however modestly, you change the reality around you. Don’t feel embarrassed. “If it feels good, do it,” by the Canadian rock band Sloan (2001), never had a better title . . . my patient may discover it next.

Another trend I’ve encountered in this period, one not so much creative as confessional, is the renewed interest in diary-keeping. Suddenly, my patients have time, and it seems that the less that’s going on to fill that time the more they want to explain how they feel about the emptiness. Old yellow pads with neat blue lines, which lawyers use to take notes, are repurposed as repositories of daily reflection. Some patients have ordered blank notebooks on Amazon, and are filling them up – even, occasionally, with illustrated versions of their semi-pointless days. If they bake bread, there is a description of kneading it, maybe even a drawing. It’s interesting that there are no photos. Only old-fashioned, retro art forms: careful handwriting, nice pen-and-ink images. People know it’s quaint. But, for that reason, they find it oddly soothing.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Puritans kept diaries. If you wrote enough, God’s purpose for your life would be revealed. In the 19th century, women kept diaries, especially if they were literate and not in the work-force. It was a way to fill the day, more acceptable than reading novels and a private refuge from the chaos of large families. But what I find now is that old forms of creativity and self-revelation, or at least forms that do not require any technology, are resurfacing. They provide, I think, direct contact between the individual and language in ways that allow language to be shaped more exactly to that individual’s feelings. If anything positive emerges from our current siege, this recursion to basics may be one such a development. I think that the importance of all this writing extends beyond any one writer’s life. In whatever genre, we are writing history.