Covid Robot Hours

I had the misfortune this week of coming down with a second bout of COVID. Its effects have generally been quite mild, except that I’ve almost completely lost my sense of taste. This has turned out to be surprisingly unsettling for me, not least because “regularly enjoying food that tastes good” is a central pillar in my strategy for living in my body and not experiencing myself as a brain in a vat.

I wonder if I shouldn’t have noticed the onset of symptoms earlier; in the two days prior to testing positive I was convinced that I was just having a run of really shitty coffees and — is there actually any coffee in this latte? Huh, ok, colour’s right but it doesn’t taste like it — baristas are busy, not worth serious worry or attention unless they’re always making bad coffees, not like there aren’t dozens of other coffee shops I could go to within walking distance. I observed the following morning that even my own notably mediocre cold brew was tasting off, with none of the pleasantly round, earthy aftertaste it usually had.

My loss of taste has two features that make it an especially strange experience: first, I still have at least some sense of smell, but when this doesn’t correspond to any flavours, it feels much more at a distance from the world (I once again find myself a brain in a vat, dispassionately cataloguing experiences and observations that have no effect on me); and second, I can still taste salt, but its flavour manages to be both metallic and rancid. I am living in the realm of pure mouthfeel this week.

It’s interesting to observe how much these smaller shifts in phenomenological experience shape everything else from other body signals, to behavior, to my sense of self, to my experience of the passage of time. My experience of hunger is distant and more intellectual: “Oh, it is an hour when I would normally eat something. I should do that” — but there’s no real anticipation in it, just that I feel nebulously unpleasant and can offer a probable solution. This morning I spent an hour wondering if I might not want to eat something before I made toast with peanut butter, which I ate without any of my characteristic enthusiasm: “I should eat more because this is the normal amount of food I want to eat and eating is not making me feel appreciably bad.” It doesn’t taste like anything, no reason to eat it, no affective push for more of the experience. I’m starting to feel like a robot (the robot-bodied woman from C.L. Moore’s “No Woman Born” comes to mind), or one of those people Antonio Damasio writes about who lack certain affective cues due to brain injuries and thus are completely untethered from normal capacities of judgment and decision-making. If I can’t enjoy a snack between work periods, how do I have any idea time has passed? How can I step out of the work-induced fugue state (not that I’m even getting terribly much done, my brain is one step up from being completely jell-o, which seems to dovetail well enough with my views about embodied cognition)?

Again, my central takeaway from this experience is that it’s extremely unpleasant and self-alienating. I feel like there’s some connection I could draw to all of the vibe shift/heroin chic/ozempic discourse and their elevation of the feminine virtue of not feeling or wanting things, but I’ll leave it at this for now, as I don’t currently have the mental acuity to make my point better: not being able to taste things, being set outside the passage of time (at home, outside of the hustle of daily life, the grey sky outside with no sense of where the sun is) does not feel like living well, or even like being alive at all.