ON THE SLOW-MOTION 9/11 AND GENUINELY FEELING DIFFERENT ON DIFFERENT DAYS
Thursday March 12 and Friday March 13 2020
Dear Sarah,
It’s been a bit of a week! (Frankly, it’s been a bit of a year.) But this last week in particular has been shifting on its foundations by the minute, it seems. On Monday we talked and I was looking forward to our Friday departure to Tucson. On Tuesday I was still looking forward to that trip. On Wednesday my sister-in-law and her family were en route to Tucson and in the midst of the developing news about the COVID-19 virus, I was starting to have the nagging feeling that it might not be such a good idea to travel right now. On Thursday M and I decided that was the case, even though it was a difficult decision to make, and we cancelled our flights. Wednesday and Thursday I spent time at the grocery store getting some pantry staples, wondering exactly how much food one needs to live out of one’s pantry if the times call for it. As I shopped, in stores that were still peaceful and orderly to my eye (I have heard different things about Costco and Target!), I couldn’t help but watch others shopping too, see us all possibly considering the items we want to have on hand to while away the next couple of weeks if need be. For the moment, M is still going to his workplace, though he may work from home some days next week; we’re still going running outside, because the air is crisp and fresh and the days are slowly getting warmer.
But it is a strange week, and I have been grappling with the oddity of genuinely feeling different on different days, making different choices one day than I would have made the day prior. If we’d been leaving for our trip even yesterday, Wednesday, we would have checked in for our flight on Tuesday, and at that time it still seemed reasonable to go. This year so far has involved some planned and unplanned travel, as we went first to Michigan, then to San Francisco, then to New York, and as we moved around the country I had the subconscious feeling that we were surfing the front edge of the wave of this thing, this virus going around, that we were just ahead of its curve, and that we didn’t quite need to worry as long as we kept moving and kept washing our hands. Now it feels like we should all slow down a bit, back off the travel and the group activities. (Suddenly we are presented with all the ways in which we spend so much time together in large groups — at sporting events, in movie theaters and stage theaters, in airports and in planes, at shows and at symphony concerts, in schools, in churches, in offices, in buses. We are often together in fairly close quarters.)
I wonder now what this period of time will look like to our future selves when we look back (hopefully when we look back in the next month or two or three) from a position of some sort of return to normalcy. But what kinds of impacts will linger? Environmental; economic? How many people will we have lost? Will we do things differently? Will we all work a little harder to keep our bacteria and our germs to ourselves? Will we travel a little less? What will the long arc of this moment look like?
I’m thinking about your letter from last week and the ways in which the process of our letters freezes a passing moment in written form, and the ways the process fails to capture so much about those passing moments. When I am in certain kinds of meetings I fall into a near-transcription level of note-taking, trying to capture as much of a conversation as I can, as a way of processing dense information and also as a way of capturing language that I can pin down and puzzle around to my liking in the work of grant writing and other things. But I try to pause and just listen as well — note-taking can exist on a level that is separate from a real listening and hearing kind of interaction — and when I listen I sense how much I miss even when I am taking notes most diligently. You say we will never unpack it all — and this is true, we will never unpack it all in words on these pages of letters to each other — but how fascinating that we don’t exactly need to unpack it all; instead, we take in what people say, and we integrate it into our selves, consciously and subconsciously. Words find their way into our beings on a level that we may not be able to unpack. We’re capturing what we can and we’re storing the rest to fuel our bodies, brains, and hearts.
To continue the humor thread of my letter from two weeks ago, today I was particularly relishing my print New Yorker magazine — somehow it felt like a luxury from the outside world, even though I am still able to access the outside world and participate in its most necessary offerings — and there was a Personal History essay by Colin Jost that I quite enjoyed. It feels like a breath of fresh air to enjoy some jokes!
I hope you’re holding up across this long, weird week, and I look forward to reading your words later! Keep those hands washed and that pantry stocked with by-no-means-end-times-but-time-to-gratuitously-indulge snacks! Until soon!
Your friend in sickness and in health,
Eva
March 13, 2020
Dear Eva,
I just went back to reread our letters from last week. It was mildly surreal. How much has changed about our current realities and possible futures in just seven days! With the news about the pandemic growing more alarming each hour, this week has felt like a gradual unraveling of normal life, what one friend of mine called “a slow-motion 9/11.” Unlike 9/11 though, we cannot yet know the damage this disaster will cause, and we still have some control over the extent of it. It is both startling and heartening to watch plans changing, precautions taken, adjustments to daily life being made. I cannot recall a point in my lifetime when I have witnessed such a swiftly snowballing shift in individual, organizational, and institutional actions in such a short span of time. All of this happening, of course, in spite of the swirling cloud of misinformation coming from the White House.
I am certainly not the first person to say this, but it is a point worth emphasizing: a crisis like this one reminds us how interdependent we all are with each other, whether we like it or not. It is sobering to contemplate what may lie ahead. I’ll be doing a lot of reflecting in the coming weeks about what my own obligations are to help us—that is, the collective us—navigate this with as little damage as possible. As ever, the most vulnerable among us stand to lose the most.
I have been observing how the sunshine outside my window today has changed my mindset from where it was yesterday—grey, overwhelmed, irritable. It has me thinking about how much of our perceived realities is almost arbitrary. The same set of circumstances can go from feeling hopeless and dark to feeling manageable, maybe even hopeful. All because of a little sunshine and the sound of children playing outside? There is something to say here about how much we search for feelings of normalcy, and how feelings of normalcy are always just a fiction. These words haven’t captured it, but I’m keeping them here. I’ll keep thinking on how to better pin these feelings down into communicable language for a later time.
Which brings me to our non-debate about poetry vs. letters! I don’t actually think we disagree about anything on this topic, at least not anything I can identify so far. You’re absolutely right that you don’t need to know exactly what you need to say when you sit down to write a poem, or to create any piece of art. I did not mean to give that impression when I was describing the difference between our letters and poetry. What I was thinking about, and did not adequately convey, was the difference in the actual artifact being shared. My rambly letters begin without knowing where they will go and that is where they end. To use your terminology, I never make the transition from making mind to editing mind when I write these letters. I usually read them over before sending/posting, but I just make a few tweaks and unleash them. What struck me in reading Mary Oliver’s work about the craft of poetry was the amazing level of care it requires. Discipline is the word that comes to mind. Revisions and revisions and revisions! Every word matters, every sound, every pause, every line. I am not sure about you, but I certainly don’t put anything close to that sort of discipline into my letters. And, as I wrote in that letter, it would be strange if I did. In my mind, this is just a different sort of looser, casual form of writing. It is much closer to a conversation in that way.
With that, I think I may close this week’s stream of thoughts and send it out into the ether for your eyes! I hope you have a very cozy and contented weekend at home, and I shall do the same. More than ever, it is time to savor what we have while we have it.
Your friend,
Sarah