If you walked past a discarded facemask a year ago, would you have noticed it? If you had, what story would you have told about that object?
What about now? The stories behind these discarded facemasks- these most abject of objects - are diverse, and yet in many ways they are all the same. A year of loneliness, death, boredom, suffering and endless Netflix forms these objects as much as they comprise of fabric and elastic. I too am constituted of these events. I am formed differently than I was a year ago, composed less of compassion and eagerness, and more anger and apathy. I am of different humours.
Facemasks are made up of events, and I too am event, we are the same. My phenotype has extended to absorb the several facemasks which are regularly attached to my person, much like the way a mobile phone quickly went from a luxury item to an augmentation of my limbs. So too has the environment extended its boundaries to include this litter, perhaps soon they will be no more noticeable than a discarded coke can or crisp packet. Unsightly yes, but not surprising.
I communicate differently with half of my face, surprising myself by how quickly these new forms of language become like second nature. And yet, I still keenly feel the loss of free interactions – of conversations conducted without the mental arithmetic of just how far 2 meters really is, and without the endless, muffled “come agains?” and lack of visual cues for just how I’m supposed to respond to this particular quip. Paradoxically, the facemask – worn to keep us safer – has become an ocular reminder of the danger we pose to one another.
I have spent the last few months writing an essay about the spell craft of contemporary witches utilising discarded objects, banal objects, unsightly objects in their spells. Dr Alice Tarbuck speaks of litter helping a place to flourish. I wish I could cast spells with the events of last year, but as a very smart woman from my own faith tradition of protestant Christianity, Nadia Bolz-Weber said, “preach from your scars, not your wounds.” The events which constitute the facemasks are still fresh, and the sutures which bind them into our environment are not yet healed. Will the grafted matter take, or will it be rejected?
I consider the abjection of these objects specifically; recalling the words of Mary Douglas and Julia Kristeva, describing dirt as “matter out of place” and abjection as “that which perturbs an identity, a system, an order.” So, this is what I feel when my stomach churns at this litter, in a way that it does not when I see a crisp packet! The facemasks have become event, or have the events become facemasks? Either way, the disruption of my ordered life has become a discarded facemask, my tidily curated systems of living have been perturbed by little more than paper and wire.
The witchcraft that I read tells me that magic flows through everything, not merely the trees and blossoms which are my current friends – marking the days, weeks, and months by their budding, blooming and dying – but through the litter, even the discarded facemasks which crowd the environment buzz with magical energy.
Perhaps too, from my own belief system I can picture the Holy Spirit present in the facemask, the breath of God surrounding the fabric which contains my own breath. Mingling the divine with the mundane has always been the way of the mystics; and instantly to my mind comes the visions of Julian of Norwich meditating on creation, as small and unadorned as a hazelnut. Many comparisons were drawn between the small life of the anchoress and the restrictions placed upon us in lockdown some twelve months ago, so I will not re-tread well-worn ground. But so too comes to mind Teresa of Avila seeking God “among the pots and pans”
But, slowly, I do begin to look at the world through eyes which are influenced by the mysticism of the mundane, by the magic of the ordinary – these facemasks still give me a twinge of revulsion, for they are not only litter, but the discarded events of a year that I long to shake off. But for now, the facemasks and I are uncomfortable collaborators; it is my co-creatrix of a new reality, fresh from moment to moment.
Returning again, like the spiral of the year, to Teresa of Avila, I conclude through her words: “Let nothing perturb you, nothing frighten you. All things pass. God does not change. Patience achieves everything.”