Requiem
Breath
A billboard on I-25 north of Santa Fe reads: “7.8 billion of us are breathing together.” The billboard is trying to remind us to share the air.
<Inhale>
We breathe in, and swallow a miasma that is pregnant with invisible maladies of biological, psychological, and cultural origins. Past and future are suspended in fog, frozen at the point of collision.
It has been twenty months since January 9, 2020, when the WHO first suggested a link between a mysterious pneumonia and a novel coronavirus in Wuhan province. In Tarot practice, the twentieth card of the Major Arcana deck symbolizes judgment, absolution, awakening, rebirth. Across those dark and stagnant months, we’ve invoked the four horsemen and tasted the nine circles of hell, condemned ourselves to judgment and begged for absolution, hoping all the while that it’s not too late to catch a piece of redemption from angels above.
Death, Famine, War, Conquest; Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, Treachery.
In the beginning, each COVID-19 death was another point of shock for all of us. As the numbers climbed, disbelief bled into statistical numbness, punctuated by the specificity of individual griefs. We have been assaulted with images of bodies lingering on this or that side of eternity, waiting in makeshift parking lot trauma centers or refrigerated trucks, because there is no room in the ICU or the morgue. We’ve learned more than we ever wanted to about machines that breathe for us, but we haven’t been able to hold the hands of those who need them. While covid patients languish in overstretched hospitals, our asylum-seeking neighbors languish in cages on the southern border, 2100 children still separated from their parents. US billionaires are 62% richer now than they were at the start of the pandemic, while eviction moratoriums expire, tent cities flourish on highway medians, and 42 million people face food insecurity. The streets of US-American cities run with the blood of young Black men, intimate partner violence increased exponentially in lockdown, covid fatalities in indigenous elders threaten extinction of entire languages and histories, and Texas just declared a citizen-enforced abortion ban, an insidious victory in a larger war to colonize the uterus. We ended our occupation of Afghanistan last month, one tragedy melting into another that was ready and waiting to take its place. And Bezos bought a rocket, blasted off, hovered at the edge of the atmosphere for ten minutes, and returned to thank us for gilding his path to the stars.
<Pause>
In the space between the Before and the After, we collect our collective unconscious, wondering what to make of these absurd moments of exaggerated humanity and primordial volatility. The COVID-19 pandemic has extracted us from our patterned reveries and forced us to face that which we share with history. The ideological shifts, plague logic, fatalistic conflicts, factions of competing conviction -- these are the constants of our mortal condition. We are kneading our myths and waiting for them to rise.
<Exhale>
We breathe out, and release a deep, sourceless sadness. We don’t know who we are.
The wrong protests are multiplying, and freedom isn’t what it seems. Anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers have seized the commons, spilling conspiracy and doubt into its cracks. Our politicians vaccinate in secret while their constituents take tonics meant for horses and call the rest of us sheep. The world looks on in disbelief; variants lie in wait while privilege becomes obsolete, a snake that eats its own tail and poisons itself from the inside out.
The wind from within, our tired breath, falls like shrouds over interrupted dreams.
<Gasp>
Some of us can’t breathe.
Millions have been intubated, ventilated, kept alive with mechanical lungs, their last breaths alone and veiled, as families say goodbye on iPads or struggle in parallel in the room next door.
Some of us haven’t been able to breathe for a while.
Emmett Till couldn’t breathe, the last time this country took a moment to acknowledge its apocalyptic tragedies. Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice and Michael Brown and Eric Garner and Freddie Gray couldn’t breathe. And last summer, when George Floyd and Breonna Taylor stopped breathing, the country took to the streets once again, seething behind masks of cloth and confidence, reclaiming the right to inhale.
<Cough>
Some of us are choking on smoke, grasping for air that has dried up and turned to ash (Blue River, Lytton, Tahoe, Evia, Kalemli). Smoke crowds out our oxygen, toxic particulates trespass upon our lungs and brown our bloodstreams, as our forests burn, our landscapes are razed, and whole towns are offered up as food for flames.
Some of us are choking on gunpowder, tear gas, chemical waste, and other noxious fumes of accidental and intentional explosions (Lagos, Hong Kong, Beirut, Minneapolis, Nagorno-Karabakh, Washington D.C., Tigray, Gaza, East Jerusalem, Kabul).
Some of us are choking on rain, drowning in floodwaters that rise to rooftops and flush away our legacies (Maharashtra, Liège, New Orleans, Philadelphia, New York City, Tennessee). Rivers are raging through our subways, and Greenland is melting in the heat.
<Sigh>
The arc of the moral universe has the impermanence of a rainbow. Justice, that great, monolithic myth, shimmers in and out of consciousness, in and out of reach. The locus of pain lives in another dimension, one that we can access only as it refracts.
<Repeat>
Sometimes, inside all of this, I forget to breathe.
We are reeling like drunkards on the edge of a precipice,
suffocating, hyperventilating, aspirating, asphyxiating,
and I wonder whether the halcyon days slipped past us,
unsung and uncertain,
while we mourned.
Greek Duolingo teaches me to say, Η ερώτηση σου δεν έχει απάντηση.” “There is no answer to your question.” We await our awakening, which is still deciding whether to emerge.
“There are two occasions when the sacred beauty of creation becomes dazzlingly apparent, and they occur together. One is when we feel our mortal insufficiency to the world, and the other is when we feel the world’s mortal insufficiency to us.”
Time
The zeitgeist is heavy, sticky, stuck.
“Time was making the visual world shrink so that it becomes a line on the horizon that lets itself be stretched more and more slowly, til the world is just a vaporous thing.”
We are rapid-cycling through the phases of creation-preservation-destruction. Mortality seems closer now, for some of us, than we were accustomed to admitting, thrust to forefront with bludgeoning force. A spectre of possible nothingness hangs over an otherwise excessively monotonous time, claiming new corners of our shared psyche. For many, the spectre claimed flesh and future as well.
“Tangled, we are entangled…
… we do not know where are to-day our tears in the undergrowth of this eternal wilderness. We neither wake nor sleep, and passing our nights in a sorrow which is in the end a vision, what are these scenes of spring to us? This thinking in sleep of some one who has not thought of you, is it more than a dream? and yet surely it is the natural way of love. In our hearts there is much and in our bodies nothing, and we do nothing at all, and only the waters of the river of tears flow quickly.”
Ceremonies and seasons, our familiar time markers, blurred into melancholy and remembrance. The late spring lilacs of 2020 still arrived, blooming with the veiled effervescence of what should have been graduation season, but we felt like we were smelling them through a black and white photograph.
“Memory is the process of organizing what to forget, and what we’re doing now, you and me, is organizing our forgetting. We talk about things and forget other things. We remember in order to forget, this is the essence of the game.”
Minutiae
School, cancelled. Offices, closed. Restaurants, a pipe dream. Open season on toilet paper. Is the world really grinding to a halt? Can it do that? Is this really happening? Are we dreaming?
In March and April of 2020, the country shut down, state by state. We looked to China and Italy, hoping (unsuccessfully) to avoid the scenes of destruction that inundated our news feeds from afar.
We clung desperately to myths of return as bleak days merged into each other, tedium punctuated by fear. Flatten the curve, wear a mask, just get through these next few weeks, we told ourselves. Each new Atlantic article required a reassessment of risk. Cloth masks, double masks, N95, KN95? Inside and outside? Is six feet enough distance? Maybe twelve? Should we disinfect our groceries? Which vitamins should we take to ward off infection? Is wine an essential food item?
We ricocheted between shared tragedies and private monotonies, between hope, despair, and sluggish numbness. My days were filled with parades of wild turkeys on the tryptophan speedway outside my front door, conversations with overfed hummingbirds, and the celebratory transition from daytime pajamas to nighttime pajamas each afternoon. I whispered sweet nothings to cilantro seedlings and remembered the refuge of books. So many of us learned how to bake bread that sourdough starters now boast their own TikTok category. Everyone became very interested in mRNA replication and polymerase chain reaction science, and our high school biology teachers felt vindicated. Trips to Whole Foods became as adventurous, for some of us, as transatlantic flights. When we dared to drift outside, we stepped around abandoned masks, an emerging category of litter and an enduring reminder of new obstacles between us.
Our memes became surreal (Bernie’s ubiquitous mittens) and macabre (the PPE-bruised faces of nurses.) Wellington the Penguin, our national celebrity, toddled through the Shedd Aquarium’s barrier reef exhibit, delighting us with his cavalier enthusiasm for oceans unknown. (He was less impressed with the Shedd’s gift shop.)
Digital concerts exploded, and virtual composite recordings went viral. For a few months it seemed like music was alive and well in a new online form. People streamed these free performances, marvelling at the sudden and stunning accessibility of the global arts. The Metropolitan Opera offered free nightly broadcasts (while dragging their heels in collective bargaining and orphaning their musicians.) Eventually, the novelty turned to despair, our patience waned, zoom fatigue settled into our bones, and many of us stopped watching. An insipid timelessness descended upon our summer.
For a while, some of us experiencing the suffocation of isolation banged on pots in celebration of the daily sacrifice of those working to keep the skeleton gears of our world turning. Essential was, momentarily, redefined, but over time bled into a vapid essentialism and settled into a wasteland of righteous indignation and misplaced resentment. We offered up our wait staff to hordes of angry karens, coughed on our grocery store workers, and insulted our medical providers by insisting on getting sick.
Early solidarity gave way to factions.
Stella Immanuel, the succubus whisperer, was anointed by a sitting president as an “expert” to rival the forty-year career of Dr. Anthony Fauci. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called Ted Yoho to account for misogyny unbecoming of even the most egregious politicians. We lost John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Kamala Harris reclaimed our space with a simple phrase, “I’m speaking,” and a fly landed on Mike Pence’s head. We felt redeemed, for a moment. I bought a “Smash the Patriarchy” face mask and wore it to work.
I had hoped that the daily digest of absurdity would settle out a bit as the narcissist-in-chief left office and lost his twitter account, but it seems that drinking bleach was just the beginning. We witnessed an insurrection in real time through our social media feeds, apogee of the catastrophe that began with the rise of Sarah Palin and Joe Six-Pack. In the aftermath of a coup that was far too close to successful, Steny Hoyer offered closing remarks for an impeachment trial with a nod to the warning words of Benjamin Franklin: “...a Republic, if you can keep it.” Are we doing enough to keep it? We continue to accommodate the treachery of willful ignorance, and the Civil War rages on.
As we celebrated the demise and departure of a trumped-up administration, and cried over the rollout of the first vaccines, we became cautiously optimistic. After months of being disturbed by the sight of naked noses, and learning to read emotions through eyes alone, new hope emerged. Was this year-long nightmare finally coming to an end? What have we lost? What have we learned? What have we gained?
The hope was short-lived. Daily scaremongering in the press continued, and vivid stories of infection, illness, and death from the early days gave way to an onslaught of highly technical articles about variants. Our optimism was suspended, with new fears of covid strains that vaccines might not protect us from. We hit a point of collective exhaustion in February 2021, as though everyone in the country said at the same time, “Enough. I can’t take it anymore.” (But we did.)
After a summer that for this privileged country was almost...normal..., we succumbed to the delta variant and felt the crush of déjà vu. Mu lurks on the horizon. Nonetheless, we have decided to send our children, too young to be vaccinated, back to school. Sometimes it feels like sending them to war.
“We store our sorrows in our jars, lest
the soldiers see them and celebrate the siege…
We store them for other seasons,
for a memory,
for something that might surprise us on the road.
But when life becomes normal
we’ll grieve like others over personal matters
that bigger headlines had kept hidden,
when we didn’t notice the hemorrhage of small wounds in us.
Tomorrow when the place heals
we’ll feel its side effects”
Before and After
In eras of excess historical heat, there are moments for each of us when it dawns on us that our cultures, our lives as we understood them, our imagined futures, have been permanently and irrevocably altered.
A few years ago, while wandering through San Francisco’s Castro District, I felt a palpable antiquity permeating the streets: vibrant murals of Harvey Milk, rainbow-patterned sidewalks, pamphlets for pre-exposure prophylaxis on display outside of mobile HIV testing units, anatomically correct pastries on display in storefronts. These twenty-first century commemorations offered a stark contrast to the early days of the AIDS pandemic, when a new global disease was politicized because of where and in whom we first noticed the symptoms, and the battles fought across these neighborhoods for the rights to access medical care, fund research, and sustain life were relegated to the sidelines in a larger battle between love and hate.
Randy Shilts, an award-winning journalist whose investigative reporting gave voice to the early years of the AIDS pandemic, framed much of a 605-page narrative around lynchpin moments that separate the Before and After in the lives of individuals as AIDS emerged. As we passed through so many one-year-with-covid anniversaries last winter (a year since the last party, the last concert, the last dinner with aging parents, the last day of in-person school), I wondered how many of those moments would come to represent each of our final breaks with another phase of Before times, as this latest pandemic and the accompanying culture wars settle into the fabric of our futures.
In May of 2020, George Floyd was murdered and the country erupted, forcing the whitest of us to contend with the fact that slavery’s legacy was alive and well. The twitterverse installed itself as a new locus of social religion, every institution put out a cliched diversity statement, internet activists became overnight experts on oppression, and even my favorite sock company came out with a Black-designed, African-inspired sock line. (When anti-racism becomes a pawn of the capitalist-industrial complex, it’s worth considering whether we have missed the point.) We shamed people for leaving their houses, unless they were protesting racism, which didn’t sit well with the racists who equated mask mandates with Nazi policy while banning critical race theory from schools. Meanwhile, many communities of color are still reluctant to trust vaccines, as heirs of long histories of unethical experimentation, medical neglect, and denial of pain.
This is not our first cultural reckoning with polarization in the wake of a pandemic. Shilts wrote of a “traitor’s list” in 1984, when the gay community polarized around bathhouse closure, against a corollary cultural polarization that held gay identity in the balance. Sexual freedom and public health were at odds, all within a larger, shared context of justice for a historically marginalized population. Many on the traitor’s list were themselves fathers of the gay liberation movement in San Francisco.
As we begin to explore the psychological impacts of our current era, I’ve thought often of the pandemic babies. Introduced to life in an anti-social world, surrounded by masked humans and the upper limits of stranger-danger, these babies are imprinting on phenomena we don’t yet understand. What will this mean for them? While reading Shilts’ narrative, I realized that I, too, am a pandemic baby. In July of 1983, the world was barely beginning to reckon with a dawning reality of a disease that wasn’t going away, a disease that would wreak havoc for decades to come. Consciousness of that possibility was just emerging, mostly behind closed doors and concentrated in the gay communities of large cities. On the day I was born, just under two thousand US-Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS, the NCI and the CDC were fighting over viral samples, and news stories were rare beyond the gay press. Funding was in short supply. AIDS came to define critical aspects of my development, and that was merely as someone on the edges of that pandemic’s real impacts. While my parents came of age in the glory days of sexual liberation in this country, I came of age in the shadow of monsters lurking in dark corners of blood and body fluids. By the time I was in elementary school, AIDS had settled into “respectable” heterosexual contexts, making it publicly palatable and a worthy component of health classes. By fifth grade, my prepubescent consciousness had inextricably linked the concept of sex with the concept of disease.
AIDS, after forty years, is now fairly controllable, but it continues to plague poorer countries and marginalized populations in ways that betray deep global inequities and the staying power of harmful colonial narratives. We are continuing in that trend, as Israel offers a third booster shot for COVID-19, the USA considers the same, and much of the global south has yet to receive a single dose of vaccine. Meanwhile, an embarrassing percentage of our privileged population would rather take ivermectin, and vaccine batches expire in our freezers.
We are nearing the point at which COVID-19 death counts exceed forty years of AIDS deaths in this country, and we have not yet cleared the two-year mark of the coronavirus emergence. We are also approaching the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 bombings, another event that defined a poignant Before and After for the culture of this country; during many single days in this pandemic, as many people died of COVID-19 as died in those bombings. The comparisons are staggering, yet we continue to run around misappropriating the concept of freedom and extricating it from any sense of responsibility toward the public good. Much of the United States appears to be bored with the pandemic, but the pandemic is not yet bored with us. While the governors of Texas and Florida embrace the rugged individualism of denial, and fail to will the virus out of existence, we are losing opportunities to make a real dent in its global spread.
Have we yet reached our tipping point? (Current trends indicate no.) Can we yet conceive of what we’ve lost, and the losses still to come? Shilts wrote, of the 1985 Gay Freedom Day Parade in San Francisco:
“There was a different mood to this parade, as well as to the community it represented. The depression that had marked the penultimate phase of a community coming to grips with widespread death was beginning to lift. In its place was acceptance. There might have been a time Before, but it was no longer the moment that people longed for; it was gone, everyone understood now, and it would never come back. Life would forevermore be in this After. It was cruel and it wasn’t fair, but that was the way it would be, and at the sixteenth annual Gay Freedom Day Parade it was clear that most gay San Franciscans understood this.” ”
In the post mortem of those early days of the AIDS pandemic, the vagaries of human avarice, as well as the ultimately more damaging ignorance of well-worn convictions, were on full display:
“The numbers of AIDS cases measured the shame of the nation, [Cleve Jones] believed. The United States, the one nation with the knowledge, the resources, and the institutions to respond to the epidemic, had failed. And it had failed because of ignorance and fear, prejudice and rejection. The story of the AIDS epidemic was that simple, Cleve felt; it was the story of bigotry and what it could do to a nation.”
Reconstruction
Once again, we are trapped in a labyrinth of ruinous contradictions. It is poignant that the cicadas chose this summer to emerge, a momentary renaissance after seventeen years underground. They must be trying to tell us something.
“Inwardly, however, numbness seized his heart, wiping away signs of joy, like melting snow erasing the footprints of life. He was losing his faith in his workmanship. Little did he know, back then, that the worth of one’s faith depended not on how solid and strong it was, but on how many times one would lose it and still be able to get it back”
With faith often comes gratitude. But where do we look for the gratitude that is expected of us? Gratitude that we live in an era where the human genome has already been mapped and mRNA vaccines are possible? Gratitude that there is still beauty in unexpected places? Gratitude that within this landscape of depletion, we have learned to love more deeply in moments, in those spaces between futility and promise?
Rather than giving thanks, I call upon hope. Hope, as gratitude’s more practical sister. Hope, as the embodiment of an agnostic, deontological gratitude not so sure of its telos, but worthy enough through effort alone. With hope, nothing is settled, nothing is certain, nothing is fully known. Action is required.
The reluctant dawn of a new world settles into our fissures, illuminating our past, and our promise. As new norms approach stasis, we are called upon to avoid constructing them to be as impenetrable and unyielding as the old ones.
In Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino speaks of the inferno of the living:
“There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
It is Zozobra season in Santa Fe.
How does one cast off the gloom of such an era?
How does one eulogize such a comprehensive miasma of loss?
The United States death count as of September 9, 2021: 651,000 souls, departed;
each of them a universe, collapsed.
“...no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody. The urgency of the moment always missed its mark. Words fluttered sideways and struck the object inches too low.”
Quotes and Citations
Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt, 1974. (165)
Darwish, Mahmoud. “A State of Siege.” The Butterfly’s Burden. Trans. Fady Joudah. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2007. (136-137)
Khoury, Elias. Gate of the Sun. Trans. Humphrey Davies. New York: Picador, 1998. (161)
Motokiyo. Nishikigi. Reproduced in translation in The Noh Theatre of Japan, Ed. Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. New York: Dover, 2004. (132-133)
Nooteboom, Cees. The Following Story. Trans. Ina Rilke. San Diego: Harvest, 1991. (65-66)
Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004. (245)
Shafak, Elif. The Architect’s Apprentice. New York: Penguin, 2014. (321)
Shilts, Randy. And The Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, 20th Anniversary Edition. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1987/1988. (349, 445, 569, 601)
Woolf, Virginia. To The Lighthouse. San Diego: Harvest, 1989. (178)