Letter from the Other Shore

“Beyond right and wrong there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”
—Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi

They’ve constructed tent hospitals in Central Park across Fifth Avenue from Mt. Sinai Hospital and the foreboding is so palpable to me, the sense that what’s coming can’t be prepared for so visceral, that I can barely stand to consider it. New York used to be home, at least for the better part of most weeks when I’d commute in from small-town northeastern Pennsylvania to stay with my now wife while she was completing a residency in the city.

Every decent person loves New York, and some indecent too, but that it stands as the greatest of American cities is so axiomatic that I care not to even make an argument on behalf of it. Central Park is the great lung of Manhattan; when my wife was at work I’d wander the paths, the ramble, the Great Meadow were now medics work. There are few places—for many of us—as evocative of what a better world could look like. Think of it, unlike all of those royal pleasure palaces in the world of old, Olmsted’s lush urban garden is free and open to all. And now the dying too. All I will say is that I’ve heard from those who still live in the city (for anyone in publishing knows a lot of New Yorkers) that right now the sirens are deafening, that there are refrigerated trucks parked outside the hospitals because of the morgue overflow, and that EMS is working longer and harder hours than they did during 9/11. Speaking of that seminal event that inaugurated adulthood for those of my generation—for that was a disquieting year to be an 18-year-old man—sometime this week our nation will begin to suffer deaths equivalent to the World Trade Center attack every single day until this burning stops.

According to the almost certainly sugarcoated predictions of the man with the unenviable task of being the chief epidemiologist for our current, cankered administration, this pestilence could see 200,000 Americans die in the next few months—more than four times as many men who died in Vietnam. If one consults the terrifying Imperial College of London report, the reality—if nothing was done and social distancing was ignored—would be closer to 2.2 million women and men. That’s more than twice as many Americans who died in the four years of the Civil War. When the rebels fired on Ft. Sumter and Washington D.C.’s precarious position too many miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line made it an obvious target for Confederate invasion, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the capital to be heavily fortified. And in a few months, it became the most solidly protected city on Earth. Lincoln was not necessarily an optimist, but he was a hopeful man, and that is a difference. One thing that he wasn’t was a denialist; when he refused to abandon Washington, he knew what the score was, capable of seeing from the balcony of the White House a massive Confederate flag flying from an Alexandria hotel across the Potomac, the pestilence already infecting the body politic. Regardless of the city’s fortifications, there were still incursions into the District of Columbia. The Battle of Fort Stevens, late in the war during 1864, occurred when Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early invaded just over the northern border of the city from Maryland. When remembered at all, it’s sometimes configured as just an unsuccessful scouting mission. But almost 1,000 men died. The same number as the average losses we’re about to suffer every day.

Washington D.C. is my home now; spring really is prettier here than it is further north, albeit perhaps less earned after the warm winters. The cherry blossoms bloomed early this year; I gather they’ve been doing that more frequently of late. I haven’t been to the National Mall for a few weeks, even though it’s less than a mile away. We’re new to the city, so I still don’t totally intuit that this is where I live. When boredom compels me to go for a brief drive, the neighborhood looking nothing so much like the bougie Mid-Atlantic neighborhood of my Pittsburgh upbringing, I’ll occasionally turn one of those narrow, brick-lined rectilinear alphabet streets and suddenly see the Capitol dome. The experience always strikes me as strange and dreamlike, since I’d forgotten where I was for the past few weeks. All that dysfunction, all that callousness, all that refusal to see what we face while giving people the bandage of a one-time $1,200 check, mere blocks from where I’m in quarantine.

Not far from the site of Early’s rebellious perfidy, and there’s the National Arboretum maintained by the Department of Agriculture. Though a poor substitute for Central Park, the space is not without its charms, not least of which is the surreal spectacle of the National Capital Columns, an arrangement of 22 of the original Corinthian support columns from the United States Capital, looking nothing so much like some abandoned temple in a field. They’re uncanny, eerie, unsettling—like seeing the debris of a lost civilization that happens to be your own. A few weeks ago, before social isolation became de facto policy, my wife and her brother drove with me throughout the arboretum to see if we could see any of the cherry blooms from the car windows. The bonsai museum and the visitor’s center were closed, but the paths were packed with people meandering in groups, as if nothing was different here, as if there was no need for fortifications at all, as if they couldn’t hear Jubal Early moving in from the north.

The sirens are not yet deafening here, though I hear them more frequently. More medivacs flying low over Capitol Hill, too. Whatever is coming is coming. It no longer feels like we’re on the Potomac, but waiting to cross the River Styx. I figure it might behoove me to gather some of my thoughts in an epistle here from the opposite bank of that river. Because I fear that none of us are prepared for what’s coming; none of us can truly comprehend the enormity of the changes that will take place, even if some of us had our ears to the ground and could hear those hoofbeats coming months ago. Anyone who isn’t an abject denialist, somebody enraptured to false paeons of positivity or an adherent of the death cult that currently masquerades as this nation’s governing party, can intuit the heat in the atmosphere, all that horror and sadness that’s already happened, that’s waiting to come. Those people dead in New York, around America, around the world. All those stories, all the narratives brought to an end. If you’ve got your empathetic radio tuned into the frequencies that are coming out of every corner of the land, then the songs you’re hearing are in a minor key. Obituaries are starting to fill up with mentions of the virus, and those strange icons of celebrity have it: Prince Charles, Tom Hanks—and most heartbreaking to me, the death of brilliant folkie John Prine. There’s an unreality to the whole thing; as those seemingly unassailable of the rich and wealthy succumb to the pestilence. I wonder if it will soon seem more real to those blocking up the road in the arboretum?

Never forget that less than a few weeks and several members of the chattering class of columnists who bolster the delusions, lies, and taunts of the junta were “simply considering” the possibility that it might be worth it to have a few million Americans die—the elderly, those with preexisting conditions, and a bunch of the unlucky of the rest of us—to jumpstart the economy. As if an economy that demanded a blood sacrifice of citizens was an economy worth having. If we remember our villains after some of us have survived, then the pharaohs of the supply-side cult governing from the White House and the Senate should forever be emblazoned as a travesty, whose intentions were a cruel pantomime of their self-described “pro-life” positions. Some commentators described them as offering the populace up as if infants to the Canaanite deity of bull-headed Moloch who immolates the innocent in the fiery cauldron of his bronze stomach. It’d be an overwrought metaphor if it wasn’t precisely what they were doing.  Anger is my most reliable emotion; I can convert sadness, depression, anxiety into its familiar and comfortable contours, so for at least a few hours of the day I let myself feel that hatred towards the ghouls a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue. Otherwise I’m like the rest of you, little idea what soundtrack to put on as you rocket towards the singularity. I’ve no clue how one prepares for something like this, what one expects April, or May, or June to look like when you’re facing that abyss that feels like the end of the world every day. Right now, I’m adhering to that old Program mantra of “One Day at a Time” and that seems to work while I’m white-knuckling it through the apocalypse. That means steadfastly following social distancing and getting proficient with disinfection. What one should also do, of course, is believe the science, believe in medicine, listen to the doctors and the epidemiologists who know what they’re talking about (no matter how disturbing) and ignore the pundits, politicians, and talking heads who trade in masturbatory, sociopathic tweets while people die.

I’m under no illusions that what I’m doing right now makes a contribution, for the best thing that all of us can do is to exile ourselves from this world. The woman I love more than my own heartbeat goes off to deal with this on the frontlines every day, so I know that anything I offer is paltry. Good Romantic that I am, I of course adhere to the power of words, the transcendence of poetry, the power to reach out and connect to others that are suffering. That’s not just lip service, I do believe that, even while I think that washing your hands can be as immaculate as a poem, staying inside as triumphant as a novel. So, what I want to make clear is that right now I’m writing for myself, and should any of that be useful to some of you than I am grateful. But I’m fundamentally offering a non-essential service, and it does no harm to my ego to admit that. What’s difficult is to know what to turn to when facing something this unexpected, this enormous. Peruse Facebook and Twitter right now, there’s a way of talking that’s expected of late-stage capitalism, or post-modernity, or whatever the fuck we’re supposed to call it. Snarky, outraged, absurd at times, perennially aggrieved, concerned with piffling bullshit. I suspect that by summer many of us won’t be talking that way anymore. I think, if we can, we should try and turn to something a bit more permanent, a bit more real, to help us hold our heads above water for a few more minutes even while the water is burning our lungs.

In the coming weeks, the coming months, this whole damned year, there will be death. This will be a season of death. All of us will lose people we know, lose people that we love. The famous will die, and the unknown will too. Both the poor and the rich; the powerful and the powerless. Unless you were witness to atrocities in Syria and Iraq, unless you are a refugee from El Salvador or Honduras, or a survivor of when this government let young men die by the thousands simply because of who they loved, then little will prepare us for such staggering loss, I think. This devouring reminds me of a poem of crystalline beauty by the underread Irish poet Eavan Boland from 2008’s New Collected Poems. In Boland’s appropriately named “Quarantine” she writes, “the worst hour of the worst season/of the worst year of a whole people” during the Great Hunger in 1847, when the potato blight and its attendant famine decimated Ireland. A million women and men dead, a million more forced into exile across the ocean. Victims of potato mold, yes; but more approximately humans killed by negligent or actively murderous government policy from the colonial rulers. Into that abyss, that cacophony of numbers and statistics, she reminds us that all of those millions were human beings, that each death was the conclusion of a unique story, placed into a mass grave and dusted over with soil.

Boland writes of “a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. /He was walking—they were both walking—north.” Across this broken world, this scarred earth, Boland describes that the wife “was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. /He lifted her and put her on his back. /He walked like that west and west and north. /Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.” As a poet, Boland is no fabulist, she is no nostalgist, or sentimentalist. She does not give into the charming narcotic of optimism, and abides not by keeping spirits up. Boland is, however, resplendent with grace—in the full religious implications of that word. She writes “Let no love poem ever came to this threshold. /There is no place here for the inexact/praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.” Romanticism is a luxury that Boland can’t countenance for her characters, not in Ireland, not in the black year of ’47. This is a poem about “what they suffered. How they lived/And what there is between a man and a woman. /And in which darkness it can best be proved.” She writes not of happy endings, but of the possibility, the reality of love. In her third stanza, the middle one, Boland writes:

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

What I’m saying to you is that I know not who among us shall live or die, but Christ I pray that we all have the ability to be the breastbone.

I’ve decided to write an obituary for our dying world while I’m still well, while most of you are still well. The world is convulsing. I’ve no idea what it will ultimately look like, nor does anyone else for that matter. Jeff Sharlet and Peter Manseau wrote about the aftermath of 9/11 in Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible, asking “How many times can the world end? How many times can it begin again? As often as you survive. As often as you tell the story. The apocalypse is always now, but so is the creation.” This seems right to me—the world is ending now. But something else is coming out of it. Possibly it could be a far worse world, the authoritarians and aspiring dictators using pandemic as an excuse to further tighten the noose, the obscenely wealthy retiring to their palaces as inequity grows even starker and the people who bag our groceries are forced into a virtual death sentence as disease runs rampant. Or, perhaps our current moment of unlikely solidarity, our new consciousness on what work is, what work requires, will continue unabated; maybe there will be a new demanding of justice, new victories for equity, for fairness, for fundamental human dignity. In our current touchless epoch it’s impossible to know. All that can be offered is the breastbone, the reminder that you must give to those you love, even as the world ends.    

I can list what I do know will be on that other side, what will be there after the world stops ending. Whenever we emerge, whenever we’ve buried our dead, whenever we’ve mourned the losses and tabulated the incalculable grief that we can barely comprehend in this darkest of Lents, I say to you that the following things shall be waiting: A plate of half sours at the Second Avenue Deli. The way Manhattan looks at sunset when first espied from a bus as it turns around the cliffs of Weehawken toward the tunnel. The perfumed scent of a magnolia tree at dawn. Primanti Brothers sandwiches. Calloused hands of strangers grasped together in a church basement as they utter the Serenity Prayer. Roadside rib festivals where flimsy napkins do literally nothing to sop the mess up as you eat. Corny and wonderful beachside art festivals where everything is pastel and painted on drift wood. Baseball (but the Pirates will sadly still suck). Dog parks where the concentrated joy is almost unimaginable. Refreshing summer breeze and spray rolling off the forks of the Ohio River. Scorching hot sand at the Singing Sands Beach in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and the attendant mystery-meat hot dog purchased from a bored teenager. Ridiculous small-town music festivals where you can pay bottom dollar to hear classic rock warriors on their epic road downward, and yet they still absolutely shred it. Pittsburgh’s skyline when you first emerge from that tunnel. Ice cream trucks. Cheesesteaks made with the worst meat but with the best of intentions. Cannoli. The Metropolitan Museum of Arts alabaster gleaming Roman room. The old men playing chess in Washington Square Park. Holding hands. Falling in love. The cherry blossoms. Central Park. The world on the other side of what’s coming will not look exactly like this one. But there will be a world. I hope that most of us can meet there.

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