In March, we organized ourselves against contagion. I walked from Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy to Clinton Hill with a friend, admiring the first of the spring flowers opening, while we searched for the elusive: counter wipes to ward against germs; gloves; Tylenol; fizzy packets of vitamin C blend. I traveled with these items in my suitcase on the day I flew from my home in New York to my partner’s home in St. Louis. Seven months later, I finally find myself reaching for those lemon-lime vitamins -- not to ward off illness, but hangover. There is a particular ruefulness that accompanies, in the middle of a pandemic, a self-imposed sickening. Swallowing the gesture I made in the early days towards an anxious preparedness, there followed a lingering taste of you’re an idiot.
What I left: an epicenter. Why I left: an epidemic. The prefix epi has a diverse and rangy meaning, which oddly includes both “before” and “after.” How to plan for such a containment of time? While neither before nor after includes right now, taken together it’s hard not to feel them as always. Epi’s other meanings offer the pairing of “on” and “near,” an infuriating never-touch that’s too on the nose for this moment.
Life with loved ones seems to come in two phases: one in which the jealousy of the time you don’t, or didn’t, have shadows whatever moments are in front of you; the other in which the intense demands of presence leave you biting at air, seeking the nourishment of solitude. The first phase is most often connected to grief: we won’t have time together any longer, whether through death or separation. Another, more complicated version of the first phase is the quiet, twisting rage I feel when I consider how many years my partner was on earth before we knew each other, and all of the experiences he had that I can only hear about, and never live.
The second phase is often just called family life.
I have a way of not seeing things until they’re explicitly presented to me: a gift, an offering, a gesture. J. leaves a book on the kitchen counter with a note addressed to me, and I pointedly ignore the surprise until I find it in my hand: oh! Wow! For me? how nice. I can’t say the same about losses: sometimes I keenly feel the disappearance of any small thing, or even the threat of its diminishment; in other moments, the walls close slowly around me and it’s only just before full darkness that I notice my narrowed view of light.
When the world shut down and you suddenly had to provide everything, what did you find yourself making: money? Meals? Meaning? My feeling is that if I can’t think, I may as well cook. We all started to write about our houses, and our bodies, because suddenly nothing else was left. In terms of loss, these Inside Days held their own kind of abundance: the true lack of clarity is not found in an emphasis on home, but in its absence.
In the bath, I find myself suddenly hesitating to wet my face, ignoring my ability to hold my nose as I dip myself fully under the water, forgetting this is not my fear, but four-year-old P.’s. While the time at home has sometimes fallen into the category of far too much contact with each other (which is not at all to diminish the experiences of those whose isolation offers far too little), this particular moment blunders a different disappearance of boundaries: the merger of feelings that trends equally towards impatience as to understanding. I replay the common conversation in my head: “Let me rinse your hair now.” “No!” “It’s time.” “But the water will get in my ears.” Sometimes the most beautiful things we say are profound; other times, they’re simply statements that recall immediate facts: the body is made of holes, and some fillings, no matter how temporary, are too much to bear. I keep myself together through the maintenance of my boundaries: self-care advocates cheer in the background as my better self questions the link between my protective autonomous actions, and a seeming celebration of the nation-state.
Even taking organization’s failures and borders into deep account, disorganization can produce its own kind of hostage- taking. There’s that famous administrative assistant poster: “a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.” In its finest applications, I read this poster as an assertion of power: you think I work for you, but really, I control my own time. At the university where I teach, such a statement is wielded against undergraduate students and tenured professors alike as a warning: get your act together, or we can’t function. Particularly in the context of public institutions, small mistakes can add up to large consequences: a single student’s failure to register in time for the semester becomes a scalable offense if diminished registration numbers mean that classes are cancelled. The cancellation of classes can result in the last-minute layoff of adjunct faculty members reliant on school-provided health insurance (which is now, of course, rescinded). The repercussions ripple out from there. We have learned the meaning, and consequences, of “wave.”
This is not to blame the student, who may have registered late for any number of reasons: a lack of time due to caregiving demands at home; a lack of funds due to insufficient financial aid. It’s only to say that despite living under conditions that privilege the success of the individual, we are, in fact, all deeply intertwined. The exceptional moments and singular accomplishments that constitute history do not account for the relentless reorganization of disaster that impacts daily life over and over again.
The measure or depth of disaster depends on whose lack of planning is affecting us. At a governmental level, the lack of any plan to quell a tide of the pandemic we suspected was coming certainly constitutes an emergency on all of our parts. In the United States, we feel this acutely: the continuous denial of preparation to protect our citizens is perhaps the most profound quotidien symptom of our nation.
I suggest to P. that it’s possible that bad guys think they’re the good guys, and think the good guys are the bad guys, and he thinks about it and says, probably. But you’re the bad guy, he tells me, and I say no, you’re the bad guy, and he says no, you’re the bad guy, and I say no, you’re the bad guy, and we go back and forth like that until what feels like forever: no you, no you, no you.
We’re learning that public is something that quickly falls apart if we don’t participate in it. By late summer, a New York Times article suggested that what we need is fantasy. So I’ll offer this one: when, in our liberal optimism, we imagine a world where all our children can play together, this now means a dream that the children can leave the house, that enough of them, from all the many cultures we think we can imagine, will make it. Picture it again: a world where such contact is not based on permission, but survival. It doesn’t take a genius to know that repetition is a very different thing from sentiment.
Writing requires discipline but it also has its own kind of loose decadence. I’ve been writing in a very fragmentary way and hoping that later I can gather up all the strands and make them into something. But of course this is also how we live: bit by bit, in snatches, and it’s only these snatches that add up into a life. The narrative is the invention.
Now, looking back, it’s as if I spent time in the early days of this pause collecting my thoughts for a slow future because I knew by the time we got to the slow future, I’d be too exhausted to have thoughts. It would be nice if we were rewarded for writing about pain without clarity. But of course we are only rewarded for the clarity. The clarity leaves the pain behind. The clarity creates another, different type of “we”: a we who are always rewarded. How did it come to be that the ideal form of turning disaster into opportunity is to make poetry from it?
While I believe that love is an expansion of the bounds of what is individually possible for each of us, I do not mean that possibility is always its own reward. If this year has taught us any lesson, it’s that many things are possible that we never even imagined might transpire – and further, that many of these unimagined possibilities may have been silently set in motion by other, more long-term realities and failures (to act, to see, to judge, to be).
Walking between my immediate loved-ones, in my worst moments I find myself trailing separate paths: one a lack of legibility that indicates self-sufficiency, and the other a clamming up that, while it feels internally impossible to avoid, becomes its own kind of power move. Imagine a world where rules are known not through their expression, but through a telling chain of silences: omission or lapse as a vocabulary of expectation and disappointment. To me, this brainworm feels ominously familiar. We reject the mask offered for protection, but maintain those we live within daily: masked truths, masked requirements, masked outcomes.
I’m worried not about the things we admit we miss, but about the skills and truths we don’t even know we’ve lost. A few months ago, at Urgent Care, I realized that I’ve forgotten my ability to engage with a stranger. Nothing was amiss for the nurse who took my pressure: he’d been at work every day of the pandemic, and I was just another Monday patient. Are you stressed? he asked, removing the cuff, and I had no bearings to distill my feelings: yes, not by the needle, but by your body, by your nearness, by this room.
We were all always already forgetting so many skills we never stopped to consider. This time may be extreme, but as everyone has thoughtfully pointed out in a variety of ways, it isn’t new. What do you want me to tell you? Organization is going to be different now. I can’t see the future, but the present always tells us something about the protections we wish we’d had, and the laws we’ll impose later to get them.
How quickly life can shrink back to any size is, unfortunately, not quite the opposite of what it can open to allow. Still, I can imagine a world where we go on like this forever. I can imagine a world that goes on like this forever.
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Author’s note: this text, written for Paletten, is the third and final section of a series of intertwined essays about the history of image captioning, access to public space, the specific muscular tension of family life, and the intermingled challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortened versions of all three sections were originally presented as a lecture-performance for Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art on July 23rd, 2020, under the title Accessibility Caption (One). This expanded version of the third section, Continuity, should be read on the page, but imagined for the voice; the images could be seen, perhaps, as a flicker; the combined sensations of both text and image as a kind of living film. Unbraided from its partners (the prior two sections of the piece), this essay stands as its own work, but to offer a bit more context, the titles of the other sections are Going Outside, and Death. The images that accompany the text were presented as background slides during the lecture-performance, and were all taken in outdoor locations in St. Louis, Missouri, and its immediate vicinity. The other two essays, Going Outside and Death can be found in MARCH: A Journal of Art and Strategy, and CSPA Quarterly #34, respectively.