Meditation 33

4 April 2020

A constant need to be on-line, to click, to link, to follow the spokes that, deprived of their rims, resemble buds of the corona-virus, or a dog's toy. To burrow in, to figure out: no, there’s none of that now. Just the dailiness of pulling moss off the lanai, walking the dog, speaking at a careful distance. Zoom: the impression of intimacy without the intimacy. Someone asks what smells make you feel nostalgia. I think: diesel exhaust as I walked home to my drafty flat in London. Chestnuts cooked on the streets of Grenoble. Just off H1 near Nimitz, I smell those chestnuts without signifiers. Free-floating senses, like anxiety, pressure wash the present down to its concrete bone. The cat comes up, sniffing. He too does research, stares at the cracked door.

I number this meditation in order to save it. I call it a meditation because I’m trying to think. Think through. Confront the map, its measles-like dots across a continent and some islands. I remember the domino effect, how I tested it with black wooden blocks, dots like inverse braille. All fall down. Now it’s the domino of breath. The bus driver who worried about a woman coughing is now dead. Mouth to mouth resuscitation now deals death. Incompetence and malevolence are one. Even to save is to stay away.

One of the questions is how to write. “Write it!” No question of righting the ship. The captain walked to the dock alone, his socially undistanced crew cheering for him. We shed our titles, as writers or as officers. Self-promotion is a skeleton. I see a dinosaur skeleton gaze out from a window down the street, which makes me feel oddly happy. Children inhabit the age of extinction, but in a good way. The skeleton appears to smile, but who knows what dinosaurs felt, especially when the earth started to go against them.

In New Orleans, you felt the violence of the slave market. In Cambodia, you sensed the bones. The missing limbs were evidence enough. Captain Cook’s men took no precautions. #RESIST, a neighbor’s sticker reads, while another neighbor flies his American flag, lighting it from below at night. Chiasmus of symbols, a conflict foretold. The poor believed soothsayers during the Plague, Defoe reports. They wanted readings. The readings would reassure, or they would not. I read plague literature. Camus begins from the ordinary. This is ordinary, not normal.

Oregon sends ventilators to New York. Interstate treaties are signed. The vents will return to Oregon when New York is done with them, or done with. The governor loves his little brother a lot. The little brother speaks to us from his swanky basement. He feels guilt for having breathed en famille. We cannot catch that virus on-line, though Zoom can easily be hacked. We will go with the impression of proximity if it no longer exists. We don't put our dead on carts, but in refrigeration trucks lined up against hospital walls. There’s a chill in the air.

Is this how it’s done? Seated at home, far from the madding crowd, the ICUs and the ventilators and N95 masks and the constant struggle to breathe, or not be breathed upon, the sirens that fill the night, the homeschooling, the homeless sleeping in parking lot stalls when thousands of hotel rooms are empty, society as a skeleton whose flesh is tearing off, of corruption that cannot feed us, the huge lumps beneath the skin into which they thrust knives, the gnashing and wailing on the streets. Defoe walks down 5^th Avenue and marvels at how things remain the same. The rest of history is but punctuation. This the throbbing of lights on the Empire State Building, the call of civil defense sirens, the mutation of silence into a mechanics of noise. Stand on your balcony at 7 p.m. and clap. You are audience to history, last responders rising to cheer its first.