Alternatif vu
The Clock Test is a common tool for testing cognitive decline in executive function (advancing planning, attention, etc) and visual spatial deficits. Constructional apraxia is the inability to copy a spatial pattern and construct elements in the correct fashion to form a meaningful whole; not just drawing a recognizable clock but marking time on it.
Liz Bowen, describing Johanna Hedva’s installation, The Clock Is Always Wrong, writes: “A piece titled The Clock Is Always Wrong (Mouth) consists of an hourglass filled with black ink that will take four months—the length of the exhibition—to drain into the bottom, and then never function again. The Clock Is Always Wrong (Ink) deposits a spoonful of ink onto a piece of paper every day at the precise moment of sunset.”
The pieces, housed in glass box vitrines, come from or are in response to historical objects in the Wellcome Collection, puportedly largest “health” related archive in the world, gathered initially by Sir Henry Wellcome of Burroughs Wellcome pharmaceuticals between 1890 and his death in 1936, notable for trademarking medicine in tablet form instead of powders or liquids and starting the practice of gifting doctors samples.
In an instagram post introducing the exhibit, Hedva writes: “i wanted to make things that would speak the same language. the language was a material one, how material lives in time, specifically in kinds of time that cannot be quantitatively counted, but which are qualitative, cyclical, fated, haunted. each object in my room is a kind of clock.”
In the height of Long COVID cognitive impairment, I was plagued with jamais vu: my own clothing, neighbourhood, and groceries fever-fringed with unfamiliarity; names hanging presque-vu, not on the tip of my tongue but stuck to the roof of my mouth. My most common communication error was forgetting what letter words began with, making them near-impervious to autocorrect. I woke uncertain of the date or hour, unable to orient underground.
I am still finding items I purchased in that era and have no recollection of selecting or was too sick to assemble or use — a bedside table, coffee grinder, alarm clock, art supplies, and workout clothes — a personal art exhibit of my over-reach and miscalculated ambition. In the grey-out of pre-faint or the reprioritization of a health crisis, the world tunnels down to the problems and objects directly in front of you, time looping like a noose around the tasks of daily survival. The muscles of your eyes, deprived of blood, lack the control to shift your vision or wing open a lid.
In Year 4, my memory palace is now haunted by what I’ve been calling alternatif vu: The camera tilt-shots up away from the intimate to establish the greater scene, or switches to another lens, a section of the video game map unlocks, and you can see past events not just through your own narrowed line-of-sight, but parallel streams teeming with activity, the whole moving landscape of the city around me. I think often of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series: each book written from a different perspective but often from the same body, a river of death running through them.
I get flashes of alternatif vu when I see photos or news headlines from earlier in the pandemic, or talk to friends about their adventures, and realize time did not stop outside my sick room, that the world unlocked for nearly everyone. Whole relationships launched from pursuit to heartbreak; babies dreamed up, conceived, birthed and raised; companies and communities founded and dissolved; homes purchased and renovated; while I was stuck in the time loop of doctor’s appointments and moving gingerly from bed to bathroom to balcony.
In Hedva’s How to Tell When We Will Die, they write, “The blast radius of disability’ is a phrase that will make demolishing, bone-deep sense if you’re in it already.” In an interview with Emily Dupree they say, the blast radius is “a way of trying to account for how totalizing a change disability is when it arrives for you. Some people are born into it, so maybe they don't have that. But I think for those of us who have disability arrive, there is a haywire transformation that upends. It destroys the entire world that you knew…..disability makes you have to rearrange yourself in relationship to your past and who you were then. The blast radius of disability is another way to think about time.” Time in illness is sometimes measured symptomatically rather than numerically — how long I could stand upright before fainting; how many days a week I could leave the apartment — or is measured in waiting — appointments and dosage changes.
It is only through alternatif vu that I’ve understood my experience of deep isolation was the high-risk exception, even in the early pandemic; friends and loved ones and medical professionals dipping in briefly to visit me at the bottom of the river where the clocks had stopped but able to surface untouched instead of drown with me. My texts and phone calls to the outside world landing like calling cards from Hades, where death had stopped for me. Through alternatif vu I’ve reviewed the mystery bundle of ill health indicators my doctors couldn’t name pre-COVID, wasting time better spent on interventions, and understood what plagued me. I’ve returned again and again to pivotal moments I would have handled different had I been in the world of the living.
My blast radius is not just my own sick bed and upended life but my relationship with the physical and human world around me and it’s linear time and ordinary objects; the people who could not bear to see the changes up close, or offer the grace of making up time lost. I am still wrapping my head around what it means to lose whole years and people with them; to shift cameras and reshoot every pivotal scene from above ground, to see through the eyes of my friends and loved ones and medical team as they struggled to understand what I was saying underwater, unable to conceive how narrow my vision had tunnelled while they roamed the surface.
The Impairing Curse is a long-form, serialized experiment in personal essay, science journalism, policy analysis, and poetry. To start at the beginning and read it in order, go to the first essay or read about the aesthetics and labour of illness, the science of salt, and the failures of public health. To support this project, share it online or subscribe. The series is intentionally not behind a paywall, to ensure broad access to patients and timely circulation of information in our evolving public health crisis, but paid subscriptions are welcome.