Meditation 34

6 April 2020

A spectator’s disciplined trauma, mediated by screens. Turn on, turn off: the president promises death, hisses its syllable into the mic. The surgeon general calls it Pearl Harbor. The governor refers to the apex. We need to flatten the curve, make a literal reading of the graph’s symbolic ascent and fall. To a child, it might resemble a roller coaster. We learn to read pandemic. Someone said he was horrified that characters in old movies failed to practice social distance.

I live beside the palm at the end of my lanai. It’s like being in a poem, where I watch the thing before it clangs into metaphor. I watch a television that shows me trauma’s edges. A doctor, a nurse, a family member, a friend. All gesture at a horror we cannot see or smell from here. The patients are sicker than any patients he’s ever seen. We watch and watch but do not see them.

What happened to the act of meditation? Performance of thought on a narrow stage, or slack line pulled taut between two trees. The mist forgot for us. But space was only apparent. Only a parent can live through this with a small child. Not ideas in things, but things insulated by the moss of ideas. (We are humid creatures.) Binaries grow together, their seams green. Corruption and new growth are one.

The language doesn’t do synchronicity well. We need to place one thing before the other, another after. Time is a well set table, though the silver platter’s covered with roaches. The past is left, the future right. Put a fork in it. To live inside history is still not to see it. Like walking inside the walking mountains.

Still a sharp blade pricks when another dog walker crosses the street to avoid me. My breath might contain death. I am but a carrier; the virus is agent, and we its subject. Grammar’s authoritarian. This sentence doesn’t happen at once. I reconstruct cause from effect and keep walking the dog.

Age simplifies, mandates touch. I had wanted to reach out at the moment abstraction imposed itself. If we’re lucky, we live in thought. If we’re essential, we cannot. "They" still work in public: in a bus, a train, at a cash register, a gurney. To be essential is to be in danger. I wanted to choose proximity, not have it imposed. This will be the death of urban living, one writer opines. And what then? The rural areas sit and wait. An essential thought stinks of diesel; it dissipates. Remember you are not important.