Month: March 2020

The Coronavirus and Its Gifts

T. S. Eliot famously enumerated the three gifts of old age. I believe old age does have gifts, real gifts. And perhaps so does this horrific period we are going through – at least for those of us fortunate enough to be fearful but yet untouched, those of us lucky enough to have homes to shelter in and food in the cupboard. Without minimizing the pain and fear of this plague, it might be worth thinking about what unintentional gifts it might be strewing in its wake.

For one, there is the gift of time. I must admit that I miss the ritual of my weekly meetings and errands. I miss regular exercise at the gym, and the mental and physical energy I garner from the women I do yoga with. I miss concerts and movies and travel. All of a sudden days yawn wide, and it is up to me to see that as suffering or opportunity.

Time allows for depth. Our generation has seen our opportunities to read, watch, experience, travel and meet people multiply. And yet, there is less and less time to reflect on what we read, what we see, what we really think. Auden was worried about this over fifty years ago:

Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paper-backs, first-rate colour reproductions and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused – and we do misuse it – can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb; and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday’s newspaper. (“Words and the Word” in Secondary Worlds)

I have often talked about the joys of “re-reading” (for another view on this see Vivien Gornick’s Unfinished Business – Notes of a Chronic Re-reader or my story “Nothing New”), and now we have the time. The books we love are probably in the house or loaded on our Kindle, and their very familiarity may provide both comfort and surprise at how  different they seem as both we and the world are in a different place.

A second gift of Covid-19 might be an increased cognizance, a more visceral recognition, of our own mortality. The virus reminds us that we are “knocking on heaven’s door.” Most of us have never lived such times; we have been singularly fortunate. For other generations in other places, it was a situation they were intimate with. I am reminded of Freud’s “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” Freud is speaking about World War I, but he could easily have been talking about the coronavirus:

We were [before the war], of course, prepared to maintain that death was the necessary outcome of life, that everyone owes a debt to nature and must pay the reckoning – in short that death was natural, undeniable and unavoidable. In reality, we were accustomed to think it were otherwise…. It is evident that war is bound to sweep away this conventional treatment of death. Death will no longer be denied; we are forced to believe in him. People really are dying, and now not one by one, but many at a time, often ten thousand in a single day.

The world has not gotten to 10,000 deaths a day yet, but over 60,000 people (an undercount assuredly) are being diagnosed every day. Mortality will rise.

Cultures through the ages have understood that people know that they are mortal and yet act otherwise; Sartre said that our own death was “unrealizable.” Yet, in the denial of truth there is no freedom. In the Katha Upanishad, the young Nachiketa goes to Yama, the God of death, and says “O king of death… I can have no teacher greater than you.” In the ancient Mesopotamian myth Gilgamesh, the hero is devastated by the death of his friend Enkidu and goes off on a search for immortality. And when he finds the answer (a magic plant), a snake steals it from him (sound familiar?) and he has to face… his own mortality and the mundane concerns back in his kingdom of Urdu.

The third lesson would entail the virus  waking us up (does it have your attention yet?) and making us realize that we’re part of nature – for better or worse – and we had better start acting like it. Like death, this is something we know cognitively but not viscerally. We are also part of each other and need to do what we can to help. Jung said that “Everything could be left undisturbed did not the new way demand to be discovered, and did it not visit humanity with all the plagues of Egypt until it finally is discovered.” (Thanks to Paul Levy at the Buddhist Global Relief web site for this citation.) Let’s hope it does not take “all the plagues of Egypt” to make us find a “new way,” and let’s pray this particular plague winds down sooner than expected. But let’s also hope that this liminal experience teaches us something about our vulnerability, about our place in the universe. That it humbles us.

Here is a story about a plague/flu that I wrote about a dozen years ago. It is not the coronavirus, though it does come from China. My fictional plague is not often fatal for the individual, but it may be for the species. Just a thought experiment. But doesn’t life feel rather like a thought experiment these days? Be safe and use your time well.

Emily Dickinson, Publication, the Dumpster, Covid-19, and Two Questions

I recently (but pre-Covid-19) had to have a medical test done. Because the procedure took a while, I got chatting with the technician. When I mentioned that I had (in an earlier life) taught literature courses, he effused about what a great writer his wife was – she wrote whole novels even – but other than a few short stories, his beloved had never been able to get anything published. He felt bad. He said a few of her friends were also great writers, but they had not been published either. It was a familiar story and the litany of every writing group I have participated in. I assured him that it was still a wonderful thing that his wife wrote – publication did not matter as much as the process. He looked dubious and sad despite my reassurance. Of course, I was also reassuring myself, reminding myself not to mind about those novels in the bottom drawer, not to look at the statistics on my blog, not to dwell on the thought of reams of my stories ending up in a dumpster when someone cleans up after my existence in this realm.

But these musings led to bigger questions. Would Emily Dickinson’s life have been any less worthwhile if her poems were never found and appreciated? What if Kafka’s instructions had been followed and all his manuscripts had been burned upon his demise? These, in fact, are monstrous questions – but worth thinking about. And how many Emily Dickinsons have we lost because the heirs had to get the rooms cleaned out to avoid paying another month’s rent?

And it is not just writers who face obscurity. There are many artists who face the same problem. I watched my son, who studied opera (but saved his financial future by also getting a degree in computer science), perform with his classmates – some of whom seemed to us to be very talented. At this point, most of them are lucky to be performing occasionally at weddings or at community Gilbert and Sullivan productions.

Two questions: Should a capitalistic framework tell us how to think about everything in life (think the demise of amateur athletics and the monetizing of human lives in all kinds of ways)? Should the artist feel compelled to keep producing (and I hope she does) – what should be done with the results?

First on capitalism. It creeps in everywhere. I go on the internet to look at a meaningful poem and an ad for my favorite brand of sneakers pops up. (They know me so well!) Sellers distract me for their advantage. And don’t get me wrong – I’m not sure that capitalism is inherently evil (but also not sure that it is not), but in the days of global communication, production, and marketing, everyone has access to what society considers the “best” (the most marketable). Recordings of music mean there is less demand for local performances, movies mean local theater is less attractive, and those bestselling books mean there is less need for a neighborhood storyteller. Everything has a price and an approval rating. Even human life is monetized; we might not be slaves but if we die in an accident, the insurance company can tell us what our lives are worth. It was not always so. Capitalism is a form of trade, but I think it must have bounds as to methods and scope. (More on this in another blog.)

And then we have the question of what to do with the art if it is not a livelihood, not part of a financial transaction. Lewis Hyde in his wonderful book The Gift reminds us that talent is thought of as a gift, and that many of the oldest cultures operated on the basis of gifts (think potlatch). Pablo Neruda wrote a wonderful piece about an exchange of gifts in his childhood that gave him the basis on which he wrote and shared his poetry. Both Hyde and Neruda eventually backed off the idea of “free” exchange, but it is an ideal worth nurturing.

Until recently I shared very little of my writing. I have cabinets full of work, for some of which I am the only reader. Sometimes I would send someone a story for which she was the inspiration (if it portrayed them positively); some stories I shared with writing groups. A couple of years ago I gulped hard and started this blog. But this blog only works for me if I don’t worry about the statistics that my provider pushes out to me on a daily basis. Sometimes those statistics are gratifying, but other times discouraging. And yet, I am sharing more than I ever did and that feels like a good thing.

The internet has given us all access to an audience – but while the audience may be almost infinite, so are the creators. I have lost track of so many good blogs because there just isn’t enough time and attention. In the end the real joy must be in the doing.

All of this reminds me of one of my favorite Kipling poems, “The God of Things as They Are,” where he imagines creativity in heaven:

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

As I was writing this blog, the coronavirus/Covid-19 spiraled into my consciousness. It got me thinking about mortality and time. In some ways, mortality has come to the door at the same time that our sequestration leaves us with time… and perhaps a year’s supply of toilet paper (please don’t hoard!) In the midst of this, this snippet of a conversation with Wendell Berry came to my attention (thanks to Contemplify):

It was the Shakers who were sure the end could come anytime, and they still saved the seeds and figured out how to make better diets for old people. Thomas Merton was interested in the Shakers. I said to him, “If they were certain that the world could end at any minute, how come they built the best building in Kentucky?”

“You don’t understand,’ he [Merton] said. “If you know the world could end at any minute, you know there’s no need to hurry. You take your time and do the best work you possibly can.” That was important to me. I’ve repeated it many times.

It’s important to me too, and reminds me a little of Thoreau’s Artist of Kouroo. The Shakers continued to work and create and improve things, even under the shadow of the apocalypse, even though there might never be people to reap the harvest or sit at their wonderful tables. So we should do what we are moved to do and do it the best we can. As the Bhagavad Gita says, we must attend to the work but not to the fruits of the work.

I once wrote a novel about a pandemic, an abstract of which can be found here. Interestingly, I also wrote a story about ten years ago about a flu originating in China that I am reworking and will post next time. Truly, I had no premonitions. I always thought that if we ended up hunkering down like this it would be due to war or a hazardous waste spill, and not to a virus. How little we know. Take care of yourselves out there.

Metamorphoses, Reason and Another of Life’s Paradoxes

“My intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms; the gods, who made the changes, will help me–or I hope so–with a poem that runs from the world’s beginning to our own days.” Ovid, Metamorphoses

While my stories are generally realistic (at least they are about the kinds of things which occur in my reality), I have also written many tales of wondrous changes – young men turning into dogs, old ladies into songbirds, middle-aged women into foxes. I have been inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and impelled by the need for profound metaphors when words themselves don’t seem comprehensive enough. Most of what is below was written as a tentative introduction to a never-completed collection of those stories, and yet it seems to have a lot to do with old age and so here it is.

We know that life is change; we see it all around us. Yet, we value permanency, dream about the forever after. Marriage promises that we will always love each other. Children mean that there will always be someone there for us, someone to remember us. We go to the doctor to preserve our bodies and to the dentist so that we can keep our teeth. We celebrate great birthdays, long tenures at jobs, endurance in marriages. Individually, we want to remain the same and we want the people in our life to be unchanged. Our fairy tales end with life happily ever after and our doxologies with world without end. But, of course, life is not like that, and our beliefs and desires for constancy set up a basic paradox which is the cause of much anxiety.

Intellectually, of course, we know that things change. After Darwin and Lyell, we know that transformations happen on such large and slow scales that we can’t even notice them. (Global warming may be speeding such transformations up to the point of getting our attention.) But we also know from our own observations that people grow up, have children, age, suffer tragedies, cope or fail to cope, suffer good fortune or bad, age, and die. Yet, we choose to worship the illusive stability rather than the pervasive change. In our culture we have very few metaphors for the benefits of change; it is good to be as solid and stable as a rock, but it is not usually a compliment to be a chameleon or a shape-changer. And woe to the politician who admits to changing his mind – flip-flopper comes to mind. Would we really want to live a life where we never change our mind? (Think of your first spouse.) Perhaps the wise have always known that sometimes only change can save us.

Ovid, of course, knew. He was at the end of an era which internalized myths wherein physical metamorphoses were used to demonstrate the power – for good and bad – of change. His tales are full of transformation, starting from the changes that formed the earth and ending with the alterations in his own world and contemplations of the changes that death will make in his own body. He puts the most direct sermon on the subject of change, however, in the mouth of Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher of music, vegetarianism, and reincarnation, who admonishes us:

                                                    Remember this:
The heavens and all below them, earth and her creatures,
All change, and we, part of creation, also
Must suffer change.

Ovid relates tales of change, and while they may begin as stories of psychological or spiritual change, they end as stories of physical change. The intangible becomes manifest. He believed that to truly understand the change that happens to another person, we readers need a material phenomenon. Why? Again, perhaps we need such a transformation because we are programmed to look for, to hope for, to believe in permanence. It takes powerful evidence to remind us that stability is an illusion. Perhaps the fantastic is necessary for us to comprehend that reality is a constantly metamorphosing world around us. And sometimes it takes a fantastic view of the world to make us take a fresh assessment of normality.  (Think of Gulliver’s Travels.) It is a paradox.

While comprehension of such extraordinary changes requires use of the fantastic, the fantastic requires metaphors.  By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the “enlightened” western world lost one set of metaphors, but soon replaced them with new ones. The void must be filled. Metaphors of progress replaced those of redemption. (Think the Wall Street bull vs. the sacrificial lamb.) We tend to think we are in the Age of Reason; reason would figure everything out and solve our problems. But maybe that hasn’t worked out so well. We might remember that even Milton calls the imagination (fancy in 17th century language) the most important faculty serving reason:

But know that in the soul
Are many lesser faculties that serve
Reason as chief, among these fancy next
Her office holds.

This is something that even the ancient Greeks knew, but we seem to have forgotten.

This week’s story is “What Crime Is There in Error?” Other stories in my Metamorphoses series available on this site include “Every Winged Bird According to Its Kind,” “Gift to the Widows,” and “Fable About a Soccer Mom.” Let your fancy roam and then see if it can bring anything back for your reason.