Twenty-nine days into isolation and this is the first time I’ve sat down to write about it. I wonder where to begin and I am certain this gives way to an amassing aversion, my own stone rolling downhill collecting hesitation as a spool. So I begin where I am: feebly caffeinated at the kitchen table on an overcast Easter Sunday, having just returned from a long walk through the neighborhood where nearly every yard is in enthusiastic germination. I took a photo on my phone and simpered at the screen, my inability to capture the wild more evident than ever. Things begin long before we believe them to and end long after. Look at the world in which we live. Nature will outlive us all; how nice to be part of it for a while, or ever.
Each day I make lots of lists. Lists of exercise to do and to teach. Lists of small projects around the house, undoubtedly an attempt to feel some semblance of control in an uncontrollable period. Lists for launching an album from an apartment with no concrete plans to tour or celebrate it with other people except for “after this,” which feels like hurling sand at the ocean. Lists of times I feel dissonance, as in ending a phone call with a friend and feeling grateful for the virtual connection, and so sad at the bizarre feeling that it denies their tangible absence in my life. Lists of things to practice in my head and my heart. Lists of the times I’ve cried since this began (five: once the morning my record came out and I lay in bed dreading the remainder of the day; once listening to The Daily episode where the woman describes being the only child of her remaining parent who is un-visitable in the ICU across from her apartment building; once while noticing my own vital laughter watching Hamish Blake’s “Zoom For One More”; twice in the last two days while feeling so lonesome). Lists of things to write about pinned to my fridge, carried in my coat, saved in iPhone notes, attached to the enduring pedal of my brain’s very own Rumpelstiltskin. This for that. SPIN.
The lists are helpful until they are not.
I am thinking now of how my favorite moments so far in life have been encountered and not enumerated. It reminds me of a poem I love, Emily Dickinson’s “The Props Assist the House.” In it she describes the components that go into building a structure, from the raw goods to the tradespeople using them. She describes how when the house knows it is adequate, erect, “the scaffolds drop affirming it a soul.” I think of all the things we are using to scaffold ourselves - a past of plank and nail and slowness - only to reveal our truest nature to ourselves in these long days, the mirror held up whether or not we approve of the lighting. How will we continue to affirm our souls? What props will we use and what will stand upright when this is over?
Begin another list.
What comes to mind first is not what will be chosen, but what will be harder still to avoid. The exhaustive marketing structures employed by corporations will work well beyond their usual overtime to assure us that we have missed out on so much in their absence, and that we are overdue their products to fill the gaping holes in ourselves, the endless hamster wheel of lack. They will lie through clenched teeth at the time lost, Hand over what money you have and we will give you back your worth. These corporations will see five times the money that hospitals see from the taxpayer-funded stimulus bill.
People keep talking about how much better our environmental structures are doing without our usual activity but we are nowhere near reversing the potential effects of global warming. It should not take a human intermission to hear birds sing for the first time in fifty years some places. Didn’t they teach us how? Cleaner water for those who breathe it is a right we’ve long denied them. Our hand was forced. A pause in our crimes towards nature does not a global crusade for more life make. Still, seismographs are offering new insight without the pressure we exert on the Earth through our daily movement. Our physical reverberations have been replaced with echoes, reminding me of something I heard once about how we know more about the Universe by interpreting space rather than its mass. So too, are we composed of more room than matter. The nuclei of our human atoms are scaled relative to the size of a peanut and a football stadium. If we got rid of the dead space in these glimmers, we could fit the whole of the human species into the volume of a sugar cube. It’s outrageous. I am lost again.
Never before have we been given the opportunity to see what would happen if the world stopped, and how it would feel to drop into our own consciousness from the top down. Our current power structures work to deny us this experience. This is their nightmare for the same reason that money runs offices. Who are you if you are not your work? What are you afforded if you are not part of a machine benefitting the majority rich, aging, white men at the top? A very simple exercise anytime you feel shitty about the way you look or the thing you’re doing is to ask, Who benefits from this feeling? Who gets richer from the hate I cultivate for myself? Nine times out of ten, it will lead you back to leadership so afraid to lose an ounce of its power that the people behind it work tirelessly to set up a daily obstacle course of contempt and self-loathing. Look at the way we deny our communities education, healthcare, compassion, seats at the table. This country has never offered freedom for all. It is paralyzing to consider, save for the glaring opportunity revealed in this moment: a pandemic illumines the possibility to change life as we knew it. It already has. What now?
There is empathy in all of us, and if you deny this, tell us of your pain. I know enough to know I cannot make an absolute claim about intrinsic good or evil in our species as a whole. I think we are presented with choices at every turn, some by virtue of circumstance and others by the prospects we create – the schools of thought we foster and grow; the scaffolding we are born with, destroy, re-establish. These expand and contract in ways we will never fully understand, but we have the opportunity to watch them as we do our own thoughts from moment to moment, from our own corners during these long days. It is not another task so much as it is an invitation. We do not turn on each other before we turn on ourselves. We do not deny the humanity of others before we deny our own (see also: GHOSTING). For this reason, I believe the best thing those who are not on the frontlines of this virus can do is cultivate their own peace and reserve; the world needs that kind of warrior right behind those who keep us breathing.
It does not need to be perfect. It cannot be perfect by virtue of its humanity. Noble effort, hopeful for the return.
The Props Assist the House
Emily Dickinson
The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House support itself
And Cease to recollect
the Augur and the Carpenter -
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected Life -
A Past of Plank and Nail
And slowness – then the scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul -