Doesn’t this feel like science fiction? I suppose life has always been like this—surprising its way into whatever’s next. Being human, I would like to survive, myself. Then of course the virus would like to survive also. It highjacks the cell, releases its own RNA into the cell, orders the immune system to allow this foreignness. The way any self-respecting space invader works.
Meanwhile, as Stephen Colbert says.
As he also said last night, “All this couch-sitting Americans have been doing has actually been training to save the world.”
Meanwhile, we can’t hibernate on the couch indefinitely. “We,” since we are social creatures. My writing group and my sangha are going to use Zoom. That helps a lot, seeing each other in virtual person. Restaurants are offering to deliver. Bookstores say they’ll bring your order to your car for you, or ship it to you.
I also admit I feel a bit like I did when school was suddenly dismissed for a snow day. Wow, guilt-free, unplanned time! However, I’ve already more of that than I wanted. Two trips cancelled recently. I’ve found that too much unplanned time causes a sluggishness of spirit. What helps is to organize. To keep a schedule of sorts. I have a tendency—I know this after all these years—to fall into a pit. There is a pit. I have fallen into it off and on, and clawed my way back up its walls. I will be so presumptuous as to claim that I’ve never known a writer who wasn’t on a first-name basis with this pit.
I think we all have it, actually. Some of us respond to the feeling of it in one way, some another, although I think it’s possible to go one’s whole life and never see it. It’s the vast space where our constructed meanings go silent. Job (the one in the Bible) saw it. He refused to conclude, as his friends urged him to, after a multitude of disasters, that the nature of things is oppositional. (They told him he should just “curse God and die.”) He understood he needed to basically shut up and deal with his abysmal fortune, trusting that the universe knows what it’s doing. Not in the way of having a “plan” for him. That sounds too anthropomorphic to me. I mean the universe is simply living/being in some inexplicably grand way.
“From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we — I mean all human beings — are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”
We humans construct the heck out of what we see to construct. I watch us deal with this crisis. I watch us improvise, write, Zoom, text, paint, read, take long solitary walks, etcetera. I watch us notice again that we all need each other in a more basic way than we’ve felt, maybe since we were children.
I wonder when the full force of grief will hit us. When our businesses can’t go on with few buyers, when our restaurants can’t make it on take-out, when our savings are all gone. I think of what we’ve built as being like a giant ant-hill, like the one that used to be beside the birch tree at the lake. So huge you had to respect it. No one wanted to destroy a whole miniature metropolis. But the tree was dying and would have fallen on the cottage, so we took out the tree, trunk and all, and destroyed the ant hill. The survivors, surprised by the space invaders, must have gone somewhere.
All right, I know the earth is doomed. The elephants will die out, the sun will burn up, all the seas will gang dry (Bobby Burns, you know). In the meantime, we have the amazing good fortune to be born human. To have these brains. It’s also a terrible grief, because we’re able to imagine both forward and backward. We can remember our beloved grandmother. We can watch people being tortured on TV. All that.
We may find a way to suck up carbon emissions, we may cure viruses. The business of being human feels wonderful and exciting and horrible and mundane.
Meanwhile, I am going to finish my coffee, read some poems, and figure how I can best use this day.
