The Doom of Zoom by Sandra Horn

 

That’s it! I’m done with Zoom. A murrain on it! Bad cess to it! I’ve always had an edgy relationship with it, beginning in lockdown when our choir went online. We had to mute everybody because the time-lag turned the singing into an unpleasing sound-swill, so each of us could only sing at our machines alone. Not a choir by any measure. I gave up on it after one or two sessions because it made me so sad – all those dear faces in some other place I couldn’t reach. It felt like a bereavement.

 

Worse was to come, with workshops about poetry. Group chats in which I was largely ignored. Looking hard at the image of myself on camera, I began to see why anyone who didn’t know me might have been expecting Nurse, hovering just out of sight, ready to wheel me off to the third bathchair on the right. I know from the mad-looking picture on my City smartcard, taken by a woman sitting down while I was standing up, that the up-the-nose shot really wouldn’t fill anyone with confidence in the mental capacity of the cardholder. On the other hand, my camera was set too high, and the down-from-the-crown shot didn’t do me any favours either (Nurse!), so I piled cushions on my chair to be more face-on. Better, but not much. Next, I looked around at what the camera could see of my study. Perhaps moving the cuddly toys out of shot would help? (Nurse!) They were a little fluffy white goose, the gift that inspired Goose Anna, and a little fluffy baby reindeer, from school visits based round the picture book Suvi and the Sky Folk. Off they went. I couldn’t think of a way to make the boxes of books look like boxes of books rather than just boxes, but I did straighten them up a bit. I put my knitting stuff on the floor, out of sight. My background now looked a bit more like a working environment. Did that help? No. I tried sharing what I think of as my punchier poems when it came to it – a bit modern, perhaps a bit edgy – for example:

 

How to paint a snowstorm

 

Cover your ears against music,

Chatter, noises of the town,

Aim for an almost-silence,

a soft feathery swish.

 

empty your mind of sunsets,

scarlet poppies, apricots

 

contemplate  goosedown, tundra,

iced sherbet, moon.

 

Take off your shoes, walk

through frosted  grass until your blanched skin stings

 

mix china clay dust from the docks at Par

 with melt-water from Hofsjökull

 

Pick up your brush:

(Bleached-bone handle, swansdown tip)

 

Dip into the white clay slip,

Then flick, flick, flick.

 

It was met with a puzzled silence. I panicked, and later re-wrote it, taking out the lines at the end. (I’ve now un-rewritten it, as it is what I meant to say in its original form and it is how it was published in Artemis.). The next time I tried a Zoom poetry workshop, I started to share a poem about having two fathers. It begins, ‘My fathers, who art in heaven’ but it didn’t get very much further, as there was a twittering of ‘The Lord’s Prayer!!’ and we moved swiftly on, as if they thought I was about to deliver a sermon.  Far from it, although it is about forgiveness:

 

My fathers, who art in heaven

(the one who gave me breath,

The one who gave me a name)

May you rest in peace.

Time and the vagaries of war

Have forgiven you your trespasses.

Rest easy, rest in peace.

I, the product of your all-too-human urges –

Neither the best of them, nor the worst,

But something in between,

Am grateful for this life,

Lacking, as it does, the evils of power and glory.

Interesting, bumpy, full of unexpected pains and joys.

Much love.

 

Then my screen went blank! You might think I’d give up on the whole idea after that, but no. There were two workshops on offer, one about insects, the other about what goes on in the earth beneath our feet, and I’m very interested in both – slime moulds, mycorrhizals, etc. so I signed up. By now, I was fed up with being treated like a poor old duck, as I saw it, and made the mistake of being a smartarse to try to counteract my image. One of the first pictures put up by the workshop leader was of a spider, so I wrote, in the chat box, ‘That looks more like a spider than an insect.’ Nobody responded, but my screen went blank again. Is this a fault in my apparatus, I ask myself, or… anyhow, although I could hear other people and respond in the chat, I left at the break, feeling grumpy and wanting to shout, ‘I’ve been published, you know! I’ve even got letters after me name, too!’ 

 

 

See?

The next one was the following week, and much as I thought I wanted to be part of it, Papa Freud intervened and I forgot about it until 40 minutes in. And that, folks, is that as far as Zoom and I are concerned. I’m off now. Nurse!