A Lockdown Autoethnography: Notes on the senses and practice

The alarm chimes at 8:47am and I slowly open my eyes, the light peaking through the slits in my blinds rendering into compact, distinct bubbles as my sight begins to focus. I roll over onto my side, hitting snooze on my phone, buying myself another eight minutes of the half-asleep lull. When my phone chimes again, I contemplate another slight detour into the beginning of the day before pushing myself onto my feet and pulling down on the taut chord running up parallel to the right side of my window frame, allowing my sluggish force to turn the invisible set of gears which draw the exterior blinds upwards, revealing a patchwork of puddles wavering gently in the street as drops from the grey sky. Rain again.

I open the hatch of my window and wrestle with a sharp gust of wind as I open the frame, conceding after a second or two and allowing the gust to push open the window at its will. A thick billow seeps into the room, a misty freshness that simultaneously reveals the presence of the stale, dry air that has been accumulating in the room over the course of the night. The mist quickly occupies every crevice, expelling the night air and leaving a glistening residue on the surface of the furniture - a desk, a bed, a bookshelf and a nightstand - that leaves the room, and myself, feeling lighter, lucid and clear.

I walk slowly from the window to the door of the bedroom, shaking off the remnants of sleep as I turn the handle and pull. As soon as the door swings open I’m met with a sweet, warm air that cuts through the dewy cool of my bedroom, the familiar smells of cinnamon, vanilla and a hint of almond wafting in from yet another batch of banana bread that my roommate has made in the fourth week of the lockdown. The cycle of purchasing bunches of bananas, eating one or two of them, forgetting about them for a week as we move onto other flavours and leaving them to spot, brown and soften seems to recur week after week, or half week after half week... day after day? The days blend together like the batter.

I move into the kitchen and cut through still warm banana bread, steam billowing upwards towards my face as I lay a slice into a shallow bowl and admire the contrast between the texture of the painted blue clay and the airy brown pockets of the bread. I take a bite – soft and fluffy, but it could use a little more sweetness – I look in the refrigerator and find a can of maple syrup, pouring a drizzle on and watching as it is absorbed by the bread. I take another bite – wisps of memories of home in Canada briefly enter my mind as I taste the melded flavour of the maple- ized banana bread. Placing the blue bowl onto the kitchen table for a minute, I slide over to the stove and lift the coffee pot off of the burner, unscrew it, discard yesterday’s grinds into the bin, rinse it and refill it with fresh grinds and water before setting it back on the stove and turning the burner on. Foregoing my usual routine of making eggs and toast for breakfast (the banana bread will be enough), I pick up the blue bowl from the kitchen table and move back into bedroom, situating myself at the desk.

I flip open the screen of my laptop, catapulting myself directly into the midst of my e-mail inbox, refreshing after a few seconds to reveal a flurry of new messages as the computer tethers with the omnipresent signal of the apartment wi-fi. “Convite...”, “Lembrete...”, “Status Update...” – I’m not ready for this yet. I switch browser tabs and begin to type “N”, “T” before my cache kicks in and completes the URL for me – I give it a final push by clicking “enter” on my keyboard, bringing me to the morning show of my online radio station of choice. The celestial sounds of a Theo Parrish track mumble through my laptop speakers, the cadence and rhythm merging effortlessly with the gentle sound of the rain outside removing the bolded blast of e-mail subject headings slowly dissipating from memory.

Picking up a book from a pile on the desk, I flip through to the bookmark, remove it and begin to read. At the conclusion of the third paragraph I realize I’ve been looking through the words – my mind suddenly aware that it was skimming over the words without any register, lost in the sounds of the radio show and cars driving through the puddles of rain outside. This sudden awareness is instantly jolted by a loud thud from the ceiling – the neighbour upstairs is awake, commencing his morning ritual of pacing back and forth indefinitely, the drops of his heels sending the thuds of footsteps reverberating and bouncing off the walls of my room. The cacophony above doesn’t mesh well with the rain and the song, a counterpoint that leaves me slightly irritated with both. Another sound starts to crackle softly behind me in time with the arrival of a bittersweet aroma – the coffee is ready. I put down my book, hoping for better reading conditions later.

After retrieving a cup of coffee from the kitchen, I return to the room to find a more upbeat song playing through the speakers. I drink half the cup of coffee and move to the space on the other side of the bed and take some time to exercise – a rotating routine of push-ups, sit ups, and dips in the constricted space, using the edge of the bed as an aid for some of the movements. I take breaks between sets of movement, allowing my mind to drift off into ideas of outside places... 11:11 says the voice on the radio. How have more than two hours gone by since waking? I remember now that I have a Zoom seminar with my research group and hurry over to the other side of the bed to join the conversation.

The sounds of voices enter my room – I listen in as the group discusses the dread of lockdown life, at once dismal yet comforting that everyone else is on the same page. We jump into discussions of the topic of the week, bouncing through abstract theories and concepts of social life but we suddenly become distant, lost – life is now too abstract to ponder abstract theories of sociality that no longer presents itself to us on a daily basis. We decide to stop and leave our academic discussions for another day.

We finish our Zoom meeting and I flip back to my e-mail inbox – “Film shoot cancelled...”, “Concurso...”, “Webinar...” – I still don’t have the energy. I close my laptop screen, pick up a few journal articles and sit on the carpet on the floor in front of my bed, sifting through the papers and laying them in piles around me as I decide which one to start reading first. “Urban Soundscapes...” this looks light, I think, reminiscing about the orchestra of the street interplaying with the radio program earlier before. I get into a roll, breezing through a few pages of the article, but come to a roadblock when a sentence reminds me of a comment a colleague made in the online seminar minutes (hours?) before. The thought of the seminar comes flooding back into my room – the voices, the opinions, the discussions – seminars are my room, work is my room – THUD! I’m snapped out of my internal diatribe by what sounds like a bowling ball dropping on the floor above my head. Defeated, I get up off the floor, pick up my laptop and headphones and move along with them to my bed. Ambient, ambient... Jon Hassell? No, I go with a David Behrman album today, putting in my headphones and closing my eyes, allowing the soundscape to drift me to an elsewhere with a hope that my colleagues, classroom, neighbours and e-mails will excuse themselves from my room by the time I return.

Words by Matthew Tristan da Silva. Theoretical portion of essay in edits for publication consideration.