Meditation 49

30 April 2020

Open or closed: door, window, business, nation. Travel away from the literal and words begin to dissolve. She doesn’t know what she thinks of the doctor’s suicide staying in the news for four days, and I don’t ask what she doesn’t know. It’s a feeling, I suppose, that some are privileged even after their dying. The Bronx EMT who shot himself garnered a half hour. That’s what a cv will get you these days, the right to die on page one, repeatedly. Her father says she put on the harness and went to work. She was in the traces, but collapsed after her last shift, like an overworked animal. There was more about horses, too, a barnyard of them. An Iowa sheriff’s voice cracks; the public health director stops to gather herself. To grieve publicly has no resonance beyond the news cycle. We grow jealous of those who cannot remember us, even our parents. When I ask my students about their feelings, they tell me they avoid the news. Do you know to stay inside? I ask, and they say yes. “Ignorance is bliss,” one says from between headphones. The pressure of reality is registration for the Fall. I am of two minds: there’s comfort in their small rooms, tucked away. Who would take that from them? Climate change renders trees in Minnesota unable to reproduce; the trees of upstate New York will need to migrate northward to survive. If we don’t know a tree can’t reproduce in a forest, does it fail or not? If we don’t know “vulture” modifies “capitalism,” are we not carrion? Do we evade ethics, if we simply never knew? The Israeli officer was liable because he forgot, not because he never knew. If meat workers aren’t counted as sick, are they not well? The supply chain takes on new resonance. There’s a chain around the monkey pod tree by the parking lot. Its roots wrecked the cement pad on which our mailboxes sit. So they’re moving the boxes to the other side of the same tree. The other day, a neighbor said, they cut out a root the thickness of a large pipe. No wonder the monkeypods make such clatter on the road when they fall. The neighbor who tells us about the tree drinks Monkey Shoulder. It’s whiskey. Meat workers are mostly immigrants, documented or not. By executive order, they will kill and be killed. They cannot be contained to the killing factory, because their roommates and friends are nurses, bank tellers, waiters. It’s a chain of being, being chained to labor. An undocumented woman in Texas gave birth before she died of COVID-19. The hospital won't say anything about the baby. Someone’s privacy might be violated.