More notes on now from the author’s Facebook page…
In this moment, the installation of Trump by humans feels like a more horrifying calamity than the occurrence of the pandemic, caused by a virus that in and of itself bears no interpretive weight. I know as do you of the death toll we await and the transformation of society if society as we have known it will continue to exist. And yet, in this moment, as the wave approaches, Trump and the things that spun and conjured and enabled the seizure of sanity and goodness, feel immeasurably more dispiriting. We can’t stop the fact of the virus—although with our collective practices we may alter its deadliness. But we can unite across what only minutes ago felt like knots in our political understandings. A meteor has struck or a spaceship has landed rather than the bleakest and ugliest parts of ourselves.
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Why don’t people use the term “reactionary” or “conservative” or “right wing” instead of “neoliberal”? These days? Why is this term sustained and often gleefully hurled as invective? Yesterday a poster on Facebook described the recommendation to self-isolate as neoliberal harassment, as if the slowing of contagion chiefly serves economic markets? This is a real question. In other news, feeling love for my fellow humans as together and inescapably we witness the viral apocalypse.
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Working on the premise that tragedy plus time is comedy, let’s say right now, in a crisis, we speed up the lag between tragedy and comedy and find ways to laugh together. It would be a shame to quarantine our dark snd gallows humor along with our fragile existences. Richard is prompting me to give you an example. Here goes: Dear virus, you know what you need to do. I sent you the address and navigation instructions. Come on. Be a pal. You owe us.
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In virus-apocalypse gardening news. Richard said, “I want to plant all the things my father grew in his garden. I remember the groaning sound of rhubarb as it was growing.” I said, “Let’s go to Agway,” and we put on our gloves. We looked at shovels. The only one the right size felt too heavy. There were boxes of rhubarb starters or bulbs or kits, I wasn’t sure what was inside the boxes. A man said to the woman behind the counter, “Yeah, the bars are all open. The problem is the old people.” I put the rhubarb box down and said to Richard, “Let’s get out of here.” We drove to a nursery that was closed. We came back to the house and I made sculptures out of cedar logs, slate, and moss. Friends came by and looked at the work we’d done on the grounds. We stood on the deck, each in a corner, like a demented cocktail party with no drinks or food. My friend advised we grow lavender because deer don’t like it. At some point before the collapse of everything we have previously known, we will have a downstairs bathroom (maybe). But it no longer seems anyone will come here and use it.
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Of possible general relevance. Richard was 23 when he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. At that time, his life expectancy was many years shorter than the amount he has lived. There were no continuous glucose monitoring pumps. He had to inject himself with glass hypodermics that had thick needles he would boil in a pan. He had to learn a regimen of compliance to the disease or die slowly of organ damage or die quickly of high or low sugars. He did not fight the diagnosis. It was his new reality almost as soon as he learned what he was up against. He did not see compliance in this context as a form of capitulation. He was not angry. He did not pity himself. As new technologies became available, he quickly learned how to insert catheters into his body as well, in time, a subcutaneous sensor. He doesn’t complain about doing these things. There is no cure for his disease. There are no treatments, really, other than tight control of blood sugars. Our temperaments are very different. When there is a choice to fight or not fight, I will fight. Right now there is a broken and fraudulent government to resist, but I find I’m not fighting the new reality we’ve entered. How best to adapt? Creating forms of new togethers, I should think, as we are doing here and IRL. Richard, although in a group with a high risk of death from covid-19, is less rocked emotionally by the prospect of contagion than I am. He has already lived most of his life in the atmosphere of a disease.
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Everything has changed. No one has changed. Every day you wake up in a strange room and learn the rules. One minute there was muffled news over there. Where? The planet is a lifeboat. In other news, my poison ivy has resumed. I think I am recontaminating myself. I pick up leaves. I wash my gardening gloves and change my socks. Today I went to the CVS to buy Zertek and glucose. Then I went to the Lowe’s and bought a forsythia bush and a flat of purple pansies. I was scared all the time. As we clear away brush and fallen trees, we see the shape of the land like a skull after a haircut. It’s frowned on in some quarters to joke about the virus apocalypse because so many people will die, and grief and disbelief will grip us for the rest of our lives. But the situation of the virus–enormous, unstoppable, sudden, and world-changing–has a comic element that’s ineluctable because it’s meaningless. It’s absurd. We are like tame creatures unsuited for self-sufficiency suddenly released into the wild.