Category Archives: Current events

Waiting

Posted on by

I sit on a log at the bay, seek words for a strange and unexpected time. I’ve resisted words until now, words on paper, that is, — real or virtual — for there are many words already. Into a new kind of silence, a constant bustle of noise. It’s like everyone is talking at once. News, zoom meetings, invitations to Ted talks and re-configured choirs and spoken poems, virtual museums to visit, prompts for writing, prompts for art, tips for productivity, soothing reminders that productivity is not required. Words for information, words for grief and uncertainty and craziness.

The daily cacophony of pot-banging and honking and shouting at 7 p.m. seems about the truest we can do, word-wise. And the constant true refrain: we’re in it together.

Except that this is hard to believe. We can’t touch. We veer away from others’ breath. We’re in it together, we say, but each of us is keenly, separately Body now and our individual skin aches for contact and disbelieves assurances of together.

The tide is out. There are people on the mud flats. Putting floaters into distant water. Walking dogs. Everyone careful in their social-distancing zone. I step on to the flats, walk water-ward too. I have new shoes, grey Skechers with pink laces, blissfully comfortable, no breaking-in necessary, and then I notice their imprint in wet black sand and suddenly I notice many marks of other shoes. (Bare feet too). Crisscrosses, vertical lines, circles. Each brand unique. Who knew the underside of shoes had such variety? For a while I am thoroughly absorbed in the moment.

But eventually one needs to find language for the moments we’re in.

Waiting, that’s the word. That’s the sum of it. No wonder it’s hard to read or write with any kind of focus. The kind of waiting you undergo in a waiting room, like maybe the doctor’s office, some place where you have an appointment and you pick up a magazine and browse, listlessly, for you can’t concentrate, you’re alert to your name being called and everything is running late and it’s a watchful waiting laced with anxiety.

For about a week, I wasn’t well. I was afraid then. The inspiration of well people irritated me then. In my fear I wondered what I needed to still do or say. Just in case. Do: nothing. Say: a note in my journal to my children and grandchildren. I’m halfway embarrassed about it now, halfway ashamed. I was tested for Covid. The test was negative. In retrospect, I had an ordinary flu, an ordinary migraine. This time is strange and unexpected and I couldn’t see my ill-health clearly for what it merely was. I was continuously conscious of my breath. All I needed was air in my lungs, and I had it, but what if I lost it?

I’m surprised now how desperate I was over the possibility of not having it. Haven’t I considered myself a person of equanimity?

Waiting. It’s not the present that disappears, but the future. The main question on our lips is when?

C98DFCF3-3910-4E3A-AF6E-FC84E4C107A9_1_201_a

With the granddaughter. Before Covid.

The nine-year-old granddaughter texts: “COVID-19 is a nightmare, it is the worst thing in the world I’ve ever heard of. [Weeping emoji] But I’m somehow surviving it all. [A cluster of happier emojis.]” In her short world, definitely the worst. No school, no playdates. Yes, I say to her, the worst thing in the world.

But I’ve lived longer. I make myself read, make myself think into the past. If the future is failing us, or the assumption, at least, that the future is ours for the taking, perhaps I can be wiser, more robust, about the past. I read Katherine Anne Porter’s novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider, set in the time of the terrible influenza plague after the First World War. I finally read Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo, and think, that was worse, a siege so long, and hatred woven into it. Hatred and killing is worse. I have to find my reading among the unread books on my shelves, so I also finally read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and I’m touched by the old couple Axl and Beatrice and their tender love and the courage it takes to remember. The courageous necessity to remember. 

The lives of we two in our apartment aren’t, ultimately, so very different than before. We haven’t lost jobs, don’t have a house lively with children to teach and console. Nevertheless, we’re in it, we too, even though our skin, scrubbed clean more often than ever before, aches and finds it hard to believe together.

I remember Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl’s words and they orient me: “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

And these, encountered in an interview at Paris Review with Marilynne Robinson: “One thing that comes with the [religious] tradition is the idea that you’re always being posed a question: what does God want from this situation? It creates a kind of detachment, but it’s a detachment that brings perception rather than the absence of perception.”

 

 

 

Susan Orlean on libraries

Posted on by
1

Yesterday a friend and I went to hear journalist Susan Orlean, staff writer at The New Yorker and author of eight books, talk about her latest, The Library Book. The event was held, fittingly enough, at the Vancouver Public Library, a place I find compelling and enjoy spending time in even though its Colosseum-look seems, to my eye, somehow incongruous in this dynamic and contemporary city. But never mind, the book isn’t about this library in particular but about the Los Angeles Public Library and its devastation by fire in 1986, though it’s also, by extension, about libraries in general. download

My friend read Orlean’s book; I haven’t yet, though I listened to her in conversation with Eleanor Wachtel. She’s a dynamic and articulate presenter, which isn’t necessarily the case with (us) writers, so the evening–to a packed hall–was both entertaining and informative. She’s been speaking about her book a lot, so I’m sure that helps; it’s down to a fine polish.

Orlean has a reputation for landing on unusual topics–a taxidermist competition, for example, or the dog Rin Tin Tin. And now a library. She arrives at them, she said, by “responding to an authentic curiosity I can’t shake off.” She’s delighted, she said, by two “species” of stories: 1. “something familiar I realize I know nothing about” or 2. “a story hiding in plain sight.” Her exploration of the L.A. library and its history combined those two.

IMG_7216

Susan Orlean, VPL Mar. 6, 2019

It took her six years to learn and write that story. “I see myself as a student,” she said. “The moment I feel I could teach [the material] is how I know I’ve learned it.” The book is “meticulously researched,” interviewer Carol Shaben noted, and, I gathered, the book wanders about considering almost everything imaginable concerning libraries. Orlean’s answer to the question of how she worked a topic so sprawling into a structure was interesting. The experience of the narrative, she suggested, was like being in a library, you might pull a book off the shelf about arson and then another on, say, shelving, and then another about something else. But always it circles back to: “there was this this terrible event, and why does that matter?”

download (1)It matters, she said, because libraries matter: physical, communal, shared spaces, one of the few public places left without commerce. They’re the memory of a culture or civilization. And, they’re not without vulnerability. As with the Los Angeles Public Library in 1986 and on numerous other occasions in history, they can be burned.

My rush to judgment

Posted on by
6

I saw the short video of the Covington Catholic School student face to face with the drumming Indigenous Elder. I believed what I was told, and watched as it echoed around my social media chamber, read the comments as they piled up, agreed that it was reprehensible. I listened to what the Elder said he felt in those minutes of his song.

Later I read the student’s statement and watched a longer video with more angles and discovered there was a bigger story. As counter-claims emerged I sensed embarrassment settle over the viral landscape. Clearly there’d been a rush to judgment. My first reaction was relief that I hadn’t re-tweeted or shared the video, that apart from a single “like” to someone’s comment I’d kept quiet. But then I remembered that I’d believed everything I was told and was plenty disgusted at those boys with their MAGA hats.

I also remembered that watching the first video I’d wondered about the student’s face. I was puzzled by his strange smile which didn’t actually seem jeering, though it did seem nervous and stubborn and maybe uncomprehending. As that video panned to students behind the Elder, I thought they seemed unsure what was going on, laughing uneasily like adolescents caught in something stupid. I remembered these tiny doubts about what I saw but I’d kept quiet about them too, because I was afraid if I voiced them I would be shouted down by the Comments crowd, and that just makes me more unsure of myself. Besides, by then I’d abandoned all doubt as I rushed off to absolute judgment.

     Maybe the speed of viral is simply too fast. Too dangerous.

Is there room for judgment here? Of course. But oh that it could be slow and measured. Weighed. Maybe the speed of viral is simply too fast. Too dangerous. Some of the people I follow and most trust and respect are acknowledging their own rush to judgment and asking good questions. Some media are attempting to investigate further and thus add nuance. But it’s still pretty loud and lively out there.

Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. I’m not re-parsing this situation or rushing to some illusory other side, or even saying my doubts were right. Just that they were there, which might have been a signal to me to pause and wait! I’ve now seen both ugliness and dignity in this scenario, but I honestly do not know what happened. I’ve realized again how quickly I join the rush and wish I’d hung on to the “benefit” of doubt a while longer.