Meditation 41

16 April 2020

It was the age in which everything was New, mandatory prefix to the old. We suspected that the New was more sound than substance, that these fresh ways of thinking were being advertised like shampoos or skin care lotions. There is nothing but surface now, a friend writes. That’s true, so long as we stay put.

Stay put is a double verb. Watch the menacing faces through glass of people protesting stay at home orders. In protest of staying put they stay put in their pick-up trucks, blocking ambulances. It’s a new amendment, the right to spray sputum on one’s fellow citizens. The right to carry your viral load without a background check. Open carriers.

The virus as malevolent rhetoric. Breath exchanged. It used to be communication, now it’s communicative. One more image of the virus and its spikes and she’ll stop reading the newspaper. Almost as bad as the graduation photos from the 1970s, which are supposed to make our kids feel better about not having them. Image was anodyne; now it’s the antithesis of care.

It is not I who am suspect, it’s my bodily functions. Do not sneeze or cough dryly. It’s my carrier that’s guilty, like a car made responsible for a wreck after the driver falls asleep. A new containment policy, not against the Soviets but the self. I keep myself away to protect your self. So who then protects me? The old tapes begin to run again. Like Krapp’s, except it’s hardly the last, these notes to self spoken by voices we no longer remember except as rubber stamps.

The Alzheimer’s home was always already a waiting room. “Get me out of this morgue!” her mother yelled, presciently. “When we get out, will we live together?” an old woman asked her lover on the couch. No, the same refrigerated container will come for you both.

Our work is watching. Watching screens, watching numbers climb, watching the parking stall next door, watching the press conferences. In her old age, my mother watched an empty street through her dining room window. Watching is surface attention. The screen is already socially distanced; we’re now at two carts’ distance away from it at the so-called Safeway. Do not attend services of any kind. In French the word is to assist. I will assist at your concert.

I can attest to that. Fewer are being tested than there were last week. If you don't test, you can't get results. The curve flattens of ignorance. Michigan trucks carry Trump stickers. A mother carries her child. It can't be the same word.