Culture

In a word ... Obsession

I have no peace until I get rid of the thread-like pieces. It has become a contest

Patsy McGarry's face
Patsy McGarry
Sat Feb 27 2021 - 00:30

The pandemic reigns and it reigneth every day. Things that heretofore I never noticed in my place now make their presence loud and attention- seeking as never before. Such as dust. It’s everywhere.

Over the past year I have even realised that dust is a four-letter word, with all the emotional clout of the more familiar kind. Nowadays, I even get angry about dust. Though dust is my destiny, I feel no kinship.

It’s probably because I have been spending so much time indoors, incarcerated by depth-of-winter days and pandemic restrictions.

Worse however is a fluffy mat on the wooden floor in my front room. It had been there for years but I never noticed it until the first lockdown last Spring. I had not noticed before, either, that those thread-like pieces that appeared everywhere out of nowhere in that room originated from that mat whose existence used have as much relevance to me as Wuhan before Christmas 2019.

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Now, like Wuhan, it threatens to overwhelm my existence. I mean there I am languidly watching the neighbours amble through their boredom outside my window when I see threads from the mat making their way to the sofa.

I have no peace until I get rid of them. It has become a contest. I am coming to the conclusion that mat it is out to get me, shedding inexplicably and making its threads visible on the floor every time I get comfortable, or sit to watch a film or whatever on the TV.

It is then too that dust on the TV stand shouts across to me "hey sucker, I'm still here." Just a week before I got rid of it. So I thought. Indeed the pandemic has taught me that competing with dust or my shedding mat is like King Canute on the seashore taking on the waves with his sword.

Yes, I am as Sisyphus in that great Greek myth who was doomed to roll a boulder to the top of a mountain for it to roll down to the bottom and then begin the whole futile process again.

I am a pandemic Sisyphus condemned by dust and a mat to futility. It will take more than a vaccine to end this existence. My local will have to open.

Obsession, `anything which engrosses the mind', from Latin obsessionem

[ inaword@irishtimes.com ]

King Canute