"To pluck the quills from ancient raven's wings..."
Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (line 949)
1
My wife practices as a psychological counselor. She likes her office to be cheery, welcoming and decorated in a fashion consistent with the season. At this time of the year, this means that the room in which she counsels her patients must be adorned with Easter bunnies, eggs in baskets overflowing with green plastic grass, and other Spring decorations. My wife ordered these items from Pier One in Rochester and, so, I drove to that store to pick up her decorations.
The government and media were recommending that people stay home due to the pandemic. But these sorts of warnings don’t apply to me – at least, that’s how I experience the situation. Apparently, many thousands agreed with me: the stores in Rochester, at least those selling grocery and household items were crowded with people and the parking lots were full. Pier One is a little confounded. Nation-wide these stores have all closed but, somehow, the Rochester outlet is an exception and the store was still humming when I went inside, announced my name, and received Julie’s order in a plastic sack.
It was odd to see people coming from sushi places and gyms. Couples were shopping for ottomans and bean bag chairs at Pier One. Don’t these people know enough to stay home when a potentially fatal virus is stalking the land? A bright turquoise jeep, glistening with moisture, came from a car wash. On the side of the jeep, the word was written Rubicon. It seems frivolous to be washing a car when there is a lethal pandemic underway. But there’s no accounting for human nature.
2.
We know that people disregard most signs of impending disaster. In the gospel of Matthew, we read: ...about the day and hour, no one knows, neither the angels of heaven nor the Son, but only the Father. For as the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood, they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they knew nothing until the flood came and swept them all away, so too will it be with the coming of the Son of Man. So two will be in the field and one will be taken and one will be left. Two women will be grinding meal together, one will be taken and one will be left. (Matthew 24: 36 - 41).
3.
I went into Barnes & Noble to buy a couple magazines. People were sipping coffee in the café and a few desperately ill patients on day-leave from the Mayo Clinic were eating in the mall Food Court with their family members, a last meal, perhaps. I observed that the cheap paperback versions of Dickens and Dostoevsky were all sold out. It was as if people were hunkering down to wait out the epidemic with thick novels.
But I also noticed in the grocery store that all the bins containing toilet paper were empty, consumed by hoarders. Novels printed on cheaper paper have soft pages.
4.
Strange to go outside at dawn, feel the soft breezes, and hear the elaborate songs with which bird’s praise the sunshine, and, then, think that this Spring is tainted, infectious, contaminated. Or better said: the contamination is in us and the Spring goes about its business indifferent to the afflictions of mere men and women.
5.
My sleep schedule is affected. Napping too long during the day reduces the capacity for sleep when it is obligatory – that is, late at night. After I went to bed, odd pains perplexed me and my wife’s breathing was labored, each painful breath, therefore, arousing fear, and my mind meandered down many paths, most of them unfortunate – life is long, but much of it is sorrow. I wouldn’t have admitted such a thing when I was merely forty, but, now, at 65, I see things differently. And it’s sorrow to remember past follies and crimes and, even, moments of happiness, remembered at a time of misfortune, can be a torment.
Around three in the morning, I gave up efforts to sleep, went downstairs, and watched a movie saved on my DVR, Frank Borzage’s 1938 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel Three Comrades. The film is, more or less, unendurably sad and I shed a few tears, something that cheered me up a little. Then, I went to bed and, just after dawn, dreamed.
I had gone with companions (possibly wife and children) to the Museum of Modern Art. For some reason, I thought I had a pass or a coupon or something and, so, I didn’t enter. Instead, I haunted the bookstore, a place where you could browse without passing the admission desk. I had the vague sense that I was supposed to send a text message to my wife (or whoever was with me) when it was time for us to meet. I encountered an old partner in my law firm in the bookstore. The man had left our partnership to become a Judge many years ago. He was a tall man and looked very fit and tanned, but it was odd that he was working as a clerk in the store. I had seen an article about a female judge who had been reprimanded recently by the Supreme Court – it had something to do with her text-messaging rude remarks about counsel and parties to her law clerk. (There was also something about falsifying applications for over-time – this clerk, who, as I construed the facts, had ratted her out, had worked too many hours without corresponding work product or justification.) I had trouble explaining this to my former partner because he was interrupted by people buying silk scarves and stylish hats that were displayed in the corner of the book store. At some point, I had to surrender my cell-phone by putting the device in a plastic bucket. But, later, it was restored to me.
The bookstore was closing. I went out through an exit that didn’t open into the museum. It didn’t seem to me that I could enter to look for my companions. I pulled my phone out of my pants pocket. The screen was shattered and the phone’s case was white not blue like my device. Somehow, I must have picked-up someone else’s cell-phone when the devices were given back to us. Outside, on the sidewalk, shadows were lengthening. It was the end of the day. I thought I should send a text message but couldn’t because I didn’t have my phone. Presumably someone else was walking around with the thing. Then, I felt a flat tablet against my thigh – I thought that it must be my cell-phone. I set the wrong phone on a window sill where some succulents were growing in gravel. The object in my pants pocket turned out to be some kind of gas manometer, a pressure gauge that was reading in the red or dangerous zone.
Then, I woke up.
6.
In happier days, the City maintained a swinging bridge over the Cedar River. This bridge was about fifty feet long, suspended by metal cable from concrete pylons on the river’s edge. As you crossed the bridge, it rebounded under your footfalls, springing up and down with a pleasant enough motion, nothing too scary or alarming, but, nonetheless, a slight adventure on your way to the ball park.
On the east bank of the river, a concrete shell houses a baseball field. Austin has supported minor-league baseball from time to time and the bridge was built, it seems, to afford access to the field. A neighborhood of houses probably erected in the late 1950's occupies the hill above the river. Three streets run east-west in that neighborhood tucked into a triangle-shaped tract of land between the Waste-water Treatment plant, some vacant land behind a nursing home, and the main north-south thoroughfare, 4th Street. This housing development was built behind a mansion with Tudor-style exterior beams that once was associated with an egg-laying facility on the edge of town. The egg barns are gone now, replaced by other huge houses on the ravine-scored hill above the river – highly paid Hormel executives live in those big homes protected by eight-foot cyclone fences and motion sensors at their gates.
The neighborhood on the high ground above the river and the swinging bridge consists of 10th, 11th, and 12th avenues. Twelfth Avenue fronts the vacant field behind the nursing home and some featureless low-slung structures, completely enigmatic and without windows that are part of the sewer plant. Tenth Avenue runs along the premises of the old egg-farm – it’s screened with trees that hide the homes where the wealthy men live. But Eleventh Avenue runs level and straight from 4th Street along a tree-lined lane for two blocks, the road set between modest residential houses with garages on their lots and barking dogs and trees shading sidewalks and front doors. The second block dead-ends at a steep wooded slope that drops down to the road that runs curving and parallel to the river. That road rests on a terrace where the concrete pylons for the swinging bridge were once located. The river runs brown and swift between banks that are ordinarily about eight feet above the flood. On occasion, the water brims over and pours over the terrace next to the wastewater plant which is on higher terrain.
Eleventh Avenue, where it dead ends at the hillside, is blocked with a railing of heavy pipe embedded in concrete. This pipe railing is interrupted by an opening where a flight of concrete steps, also lined with an utilitarian metal pipe railing drops about thirty feet down to the roadway on the terrace. These steps are across the terrace road from where the pylons of the swinging bridge were once located. The purpose for the steps was to provide access from the hillside neighborhood overlooking the river so that pedestrians could conveniently make their way to the baseball field. The notion was that baseball fans would descend the steps at the cul-de-sac of 11th Avenue, cross the road running on the river bank (I call this the lower terrace beside the Cedar), and, then, make their way over the river to the baseball field.
I have said that this was the arrangement in happier days. Kids vandalized the hanging bridge and would, sometimes, lunge up and down on the suspended span so that it would swing dangerously. On a couple of occasions, drunk kids jumped so violently on the swinging bridge that they managed to make it bounce like a trampoline, flinging people up and over the rails and into the river. In the summer, when this sort of thing was wont to occur, the river isn’t very deep and the its bed is clogged with big slabs of concrete from god-knows-where and, therefore, serious injuries could result if the bridge catapulted you into the Cedar River. So, the powers-that-be, learning that accidents on the bridge would be uninsurable, tore the thing down and smashed the pylons to bits. The sidewalk leading to the river bank where the bridge had been was also jack-hammered out and its footprint re-seeded with grass.
But the hillside amenity of steps leading down from above the river terrace, built to accommodate passage over the swinging bridge, was not removed and remains to this day. The hillside is wooded and the steps are generally buried in fallen leaves, but they were built to last, and remain embedded in the slope and, similarly, the heavy-duty pipe railings are still in place and completely intact. The pipe guardrails atop the steps also remain where they were built, funneling pedestrian traffic that no longer exists to the twenty-five or so steps leading down to the road below. The survival of the steps on this hillside is an odd artifact, a relic from the days when the bridge was still in place. The baseball field remains beyond the river, but, now, there’s no way to reach that place except by following roads over a bridge about a half-mile away. Our city was built before cars were prevalent and many of its neighborhoods preserve artifacts of the days when people had to walk to reach destinations important to them.
7.
Blaise Pascal’s Pensee 139 is much-quoted by more “thoughtful” commentators on this plague. The aphorism is supposedly apposite to social isolation – that is, staying at home to avoid infecting (or being infected) by others. Pascal’s words are quoted: “I have discovered that all of man’s unhappiness arises from one single fact – that they can not stay quietly in their own chamber.”
The aphorism is much cited as prescriptive: we should stay quietly alone at home. Although this probably good advice during a plague, Pascal’s words are really descriptive, and not an admonition – he is articulating his understanding of human nature. The passage cited belongs to a relatively lengthy essay on “diversion”. Pascal observes that if we were left to contemplate our nature, without any recourse to self-deception or diversion, we would be appalled at our failings and terrified by the inevitability of death. Therefore, Pascal remarks that human beings necessarily seek diversions. The error that Pascal identifies in this lust for diversion is not the desire to evade our own calamities and fears, but, rather, the mistake that some make in believing that diversions are adequate to our needs and will console us. Rather, Pascal asserts that people are always set upon successfully prosecuting their diversions – success in love or war or, even, algebra (one of Pascal’s examples in 139 is mathematician who has completed a proof) always leads to the conviction that the diversion was not worth the effort required to bring it to fruition. “We like the chase better than the quarry,” Pascal says.
In fact, Pascal’s metaphor for diversion is hunting. He notes that a nobleman will spend six hours chasing a hare that he could acquire for a few pennies in the marketplace. A man who has lost his son, Pascal says, finds solace in chasing a boar. Once he has killed the boar the man discovers that he is not consoled and his grief returns to him, perhaps, redoubled.
It would be admissible to reverse Pascal’s dictum and observe that all human achievements arise from man’s inability to sit quietly alone in a room. Science, mathematics, theology – all of these endeavors arise from restlessness that is an unavoidable aspect of our humanity. Goethe’s Faust is not far from Pascal’s Pensee 139, a text that provides a sort of program for the German poem. Pascal’s point is not that we must necessarily forego the vain endeavor that characterizes human beings – more importantly, I think, he counsels us that all human activity, no matter how beneficial or beautiful, is meaningless sub specie aeternitatis and that we should beware of according to much importance to such things.
8.
I have a stake in my extended description of the hanging bridge and its environs. It’s part of my past – as a young lawyer, I worked on tort case arising when some hoodlums trampolined the poor span into an aborted loop-de-loop, a thrill ride that pitched its participants into the drink where submerged masonry blocks inflicted severe injury (a compression fracture in the lumbar spine if memory serves). Perhaps, my legal opinions were instrumental in the decision to tear down the bridge, a monument in Austin so well-known and picturesque as to be featured on post-cards, hand-colored and predating the First World War. The ornate description above is just a diversion from more dire subject matter.
On Thursday evening, March 19, 2020, my step-daughter who lives in Rochester sent us a text-message reporting a terrible accident about ten blocks from my home. The details were unclear but a car was said to have crashed off the road and burst into flames with “multiple fatalities.” The location of the crash was 11th Avenue SW – that is, the street that ends in a dead-end where a steep slope drops down to the road that runs by the waste-water treatment plant; this is the place where steps embedded in the hillside once linked the neighborhoods above to the swinging bridge over the Cedar and the baseball field. I immediately knew the location and wondered how this accident could have occurred.
I walked my dog along the side of the river. This was three days after the crash. The river was high, bearing twigs and even branches downstream on its taut, muscular current. Farther upstream, at the dam by the power-plant, the river lunged ferociously down the slanting apron and poured through its little rip-rapped gorge with plumes and banners that would have been whitewater except for the extreme muddiness that made the torrent a disheartening and dismal brown from bank to bank. The sky was overcast and there was a cold bite to the wind. From the river road, the crash scene was marked by a round patch where the leafless sumac had been crushed and burnt to black, spiky sticks embedded in the muck. Tires had gouged furrows in the grass across the way, the edge of the road where the sidewalk had once led to the swinging bridge. Some debris was stuck in the mud where the car had burned and there was a single surgical glove lying on the roadside like a light blue fallen leaf. The place where the car had landed was on the hillside and didn’t intrude onto the traveled portion of the river road running uphill to the Sewage Treatment Facility. Furthermore, the iron pipe guard-rail at the top of the slope wasn’t battered or bent and didn’t even seem to have been scraped. The vehicle must have gone off the dead-end to the south of the iron barricade made from the poles posted in concrete around the stairs. I didn’t seen any obvious damage to the trees – none of them had been sheared or knocked down. Higher up the slope there was one tree that seemed to be slightly scuffed but the injury to the trunk and branches was less that what I would have expected. To all intents and purposes, it seemed to me that the car had been aimed – that is, the driver had piloted the car between the trees on the brink overhead, of course, also steering to avoid the pole barricade around the steps. Someone had attached silvery helium balloons to one of the trees next to the place where the car had plowed into the thicket and gone over the edge. The helium balloons strained at little at their leashes of string in the cold wind.
The balloons marked the fact that two children had died in the crash – kids one and three-years-old. At the press conference, the Chief of Police said that it seemed that the people killed in the crash, a 28 year old man, a 25 year old woman, and the two children “comprised a family unit.” I walked up the hill to the Sewer Treatment entrance and, then, walked down 12th Avenue to where I could turn to my right and enter the neighborhood. It’s only two blocks from the main thoroughfare to the pipe-metal barricade and the trees marking the steep drop-off at the end of the avenue – indeed, the second block is truncated, shorter than the first, and marked with a yellow dead-end sign. From this vantage, I could see the silver helium balloons crucified on the tree to the south of the metal barricade. This perspective only enhanced my sense that the car must have been aimed to drop between big trees and the guardrail that would have otherwise caught the vehicle and kept it from falling the full distance to the road below.
The crash was reported at 6:02 pm when it would have been light outside. Visibility shouldn’t have been an issue.
So while the contagion rages, we must recall that the underlying continuo of human misery persists. People still quarrel and threaten one another; old ladies break their hips, and hearts stop or fibrillate and the tumor continues its dark growth, reckless cell by cell; girls get pregnant and babies are born and loyal old hound dogs die – although life feels suspended, with no one working much and the bars and restaurants and theaters all closed, and history, it seems, come to a stop, the growling, moaning bass line of human misery that underlies our experience of the world continues unabated.
9.
In fact, just this morning, when I stood in my backyard in the wet, moldering leaf litter watching my dog sniff the earth, I heard a loud quarrel underway, a man and woman bellowing at one another with a real sense of threat and peril in the tone of their voices (the words were indecipherable). Then, the shouting stopped. A woman smoking a cigarette across the alleyway dragged some bags of garbage to a can. The bird-song, which I had momentarily ignored because of the shouting down the block, hadn’t ceased and remained vibrant in the air, fluid and tremendously eloquent, alert with meanings that I didn’t understand, although my old dog cocked and ear seem to listen carefully.
10.
Syria – what’s happening in Syria? What horrors? The blood freezes. And for two reasons – first, at the misery undoubtedly underway in that unhappy place; and, secondly, because we are so easily distracted by our own woes.
11.
When the car crashed over the embankment, the family’s dog was with them. The dog wasn’t belted into the car, nor locked, like the children, in car-seats. Only slightly injured, the dog ran yelping from flames bursting from the shattered vehicle. A few hours later, someone caught the dog. According to the newspaper, the dog was returned “to members of the family.”
12.
I’m listening in my car to one of Van Morrison’s songs over and over again. It was recorded first, I think, on Morrison’s The Healing Game (1997). The song is called “Rough God Goes Riding.” The song has unyielding, enigmatic lyrics. “The mud-splattered victims” are accosted on “ancient highways” and “victimized.” But they mount “counterattacks.” “A gaping wound” will not heal and people in glass houses throw stones. There’s a dog in a manger – that lyric illustrated on the You-Tube videos with one of the musicians in Van Morrison’s band yipping and howling like a dog. Morrison asks someone to get him a Bible and sings that there “will be no more heroes/ They’re all reduced to zeroes.” When the Rough God goes riding, there’s “no hiding” from judgment. The Rough God is implacable – he just keeps “riding on in.”
The song has a stately beat and a chord structure built like fate itself. But it’s surprisingly jaunty and there are some tremendous horn breaks in the tune. A version of the song filmed in 1997 (apparently before the record was released) contains a transcendent raw duet between the tenor sax Leo Green and Pee Wee Ellis on baritone saxophone. While the two are playing, the pianist keeps looking over his shoulder, probably to measure where they are in the chord progressions, but, also, obviously amazed by what is transpiring. (After the break, the two saxophonists high-five one another.) You can see this on Youtube. There’s also a 2015 version of the song with a woman playing sax, Candy Dalfer – she’s great as well.
The “rough god” is a reference to W.B. Yeats’ “The Second Coming” – the “rough beast” slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.
13.
I’ve been guarding my pantry against the inevitable day when quarantine traps me in my house. The grocery stores are depressing: empty shelves in the bread aisle, among the potted and canned meats, no laundry or dishwashing detergent (I wonder if you can use shampoo on dirty dishes – I seem to have a lot of shampoo stockpiled in my house), hamburger mostly unavailable, cheap hot dogs sold out and so on. People don’t hoard produce and, so, I can get as many onions, potatoes, oranges, asparagus and brussel sprouts as I wish. Cauliflower is selling at reasonable prices, $2.99 for a nice, big snowy head, as is cabbage. Fresh mushrooms and lettuce for salad are a bit iffy.
In any event, the situation at the grocery store makes me anxious and I’m concerned that food not be wasted. I have a vision of ravaged people wrestling over heels of bread from loaves already consumed and this concerns me to the point that I am taking careful stock of my food supplies, making subtle adjustments, and buying stores of things like brown sugar (white cane sugar can’t be had for love nor money), cooking oil, and SPAM.
After gathering some groceries today, I was putting bags in the trunk of my car when I observed, tucked away deep in the recesses of the vehicle, a plastic sack plump with food purchased almost a week ago. Within the sack, I found some bratwurst, probably still viable, a pack of pork chops spoiled by this time, and some bacon, also questionable, I suppose, after being left in the back of my car for five days. I’m perpetually angry about food being wasted, but find myself the chief culprit – thus, the effects of nerves, hurry, and distraction.
14.
“Fake news” is a term that I used advisedly because I despise Donald Trump and don’t wish to endorse anything remotely similar to anything he has tweeted or said. But...there’s an argument to be made that the media is coastal-centric and promotes liberal perspectives to the point that even a reasonable person might protest. A case in point is an interview with Jerry Falwell, Jr., the President of Liberty College, a fundamentalist Bible school founded by his father, the infamous televangelist. Alyson Camerota, a host on CNN’s New Day, a morning show, spoke with the junior Falwell. During the interview, Camerota was pretty openly contemptuous of Falwell, obviously dismissive, curt, and impolite – on several occasions clearly offended by what Falwell was saying she added her own gratuitous rejoinders contradicting her guest. Falwell, a porcine good-ole-boy, is pretty obviously a moron, although he seems well-meaning. And, as a Southerner, he’s been raised to be polite to women and remained resolutely courteous despite Camerota’s condescending approach to the interview. She was rude to him but he was polite to her and, even, meekly thanked her for having him on her program.
Early in the interview, Camerota challenged Falwell about the plan to re-open Liberty College on April 1, about a week from the day I am writing this note.. Falwell gulped and flickered his little eyes and said: “Of course, we know you can’t take this disease too seriously.” The transcript of his remark is bad, but, from context, it was obvious that Falwell was attempting to say something like: we are required to take this disease with the utmost seriousness (“can’t be too serious about it”). He certainly was not minimizing the disease or suggesting that people not regard it as “too serious.” Camerota squinted at Falwell when he spoke these words and you could see her parsing his syntax in her mind. She understood what he meant in context, pouncing later. Ms. Camerota waited until the end of the interview, when Falwell had moved onto other subjects, and, then, chastised him for saying that people “shouldn’t take the disease too seriously” something that he didn’t mean to say. Falwell looked baffled and, then, said that he and his Christian evangelist friends were taking the virus “very seriously” indeed.
To any fair-minded person, Alysin Camerota mistreated Falwell and willfully misconstrued his words. It’s purely cultural – there isn’t even any ideology involved, just contempt by an elite directed against a hillbilly. After all, Camerota came to CNN from Fox cable news where she fit in quite comfortably with the brand of journalism practiced on that network.
15.
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, appears on television to tell viewers that the entire United States should be locked-down for 6 to 8 weeks. Everyone listens respectfully. After all, Mr. Gates is one of the world’s most wealthy men. He lives, I think, on a private island near Seattle. Obviously, his opinions on medical issues matter. (And, as a wag in my office, noted: since his company designed Windows, he’s certainly an expert on viruses.)
16.
Julie’s Mercedes has a left rear tire that keeps deflating. This has to be fixed. She arranges for the car to be inspected at Wangen Automotive, a shop on the edge of town near the road that runs out toward the Echo Lanes Bowling Alley and the Twister Lounge in that place. (Twister Lounge is so-named because of a tornado that ripped off the roof of the bar and the bowling alley sometime around 1985.)
I reach a point about one block from Wangen Automotive to encounter a line of cars backed-up behind a flashing railroad signal. On the tracks, a train comprised of long, black cylindrical cars, all of them identical, is stalled. The cars lurch forward, then, back up, then, roll forward again a hundred feet before stopping dead on the tracks. In the intersection. I can’t see the front of the train or its last car – about ten black cars are visible.
After a minute and no motion from the train pulled like a black curtain over the road, I make a u-turn and drive through downtown to another road that accesses Wangen’s from the north. But the railroad tracks, normally unnoticed in this part of town, slice through the neighborhood of small white houses and smaller white garages at an oblique angle and this route is also blocked by the hearse-like cars of the train, completely immobile as the semaphore flashes its raw, red warning.
I think of another route and this time drive to very edge of town, go south on the State Highway toward Iowa, and, then, turn back in the direction of the town on the road that runs past Echo Lanes. The train is still stalled on the track, but the road here allows me to turn before the black barricade, and with Julie following me in the crippled Mercedes, we can reach the service station. A few minutes later, the long black train (neither locomotive nor caboose visible to me) has mysteriously vanished. A screw, as it turns out, is embedded in Julie’s tire but the slow-leak can be patched.
Perhaps, we can imagine that the train is carrying respirators or hydrochloroquine on a mission of mercy. In this case, we can’t object to the sepulchral cars stalled on the railroad tracks blocking traffic. But there is something more than a little eerie about this train suddenly appearing, lingering, then, disappearing with the mysterious contents of its shiny black cars.
17.
Madrid is overwhelmed with casualties. The bodies are taken from the hospital and kept at the Palacio de Hielo, the ice-skating rink in the city. Photographs show the loading dock at the Olympic-sized skating rink (2153 square feet of ice) with a distinctive blue arch over the door. Hearses are within the loading dock garage guarded by soldiers in pale blue hazmat suits. Palacio de Hielo is, in fact, a popular shopping center, arcades and galleries that seem to be under the rink. The web-site for the shopping center and its Dreams movie annex says that everything is closed now except for a pharmacy in the mall.
18.
Video games and computer virtual reality simulations confirm what Bishop Berkeley suspected: nothing is real – so if stricken with the corona-virus just remind yourself that this isn’t real, that it’s all just a sinister simulation.
19.
Video games and computer virtual reality simulations confirm what Bishop Berkely suspected: nothing is real. Critics say that Berkeley would be refuted if you punched the philosopher in the nose or, if he were to kick a boulder, thinking it imaginary, and, thereby, end up with a broken foot. This proves, I suppose, the reality of pain. Perhaps, pain is the only thing that is reliably real.
20.
When the Covid-19 strikes, some report a sudden, and complete, loss of sense of smell and taste. Is this true or some kind hysterical conversion syndrome?
21.
In happier days, I enjoyed grocery shopping. It was a pleasure to join the crowd in the marketplace, to see the Latino families with their small children obviously delighted with the treats that they were going to wrangle from their parents, a pleasure, as well, to select fruit and vegetables from the fresh produce, to inspect the meats glistening in their transparent membranes of plastic, the planks of bright pink salmon and, less pink, the parenthesis-shaped cooked shrimp, and the plump loaves of bread of all kinds on the shelves, a joy to survey the cornucopia of different products and brands – twenty types of pasta, including bronze-cut from Italy, a hundred varieties of soup, a thousand different kinds of candy and potato chips, whole coolers stocked with cartons of ice-cream. The grocery was kind of a luscious paradise full of wonderful things.
But with the onset of the virus, there has been in the groceries an equal onset of panic buying. Now, I detest the grocery stores. Their aisles are crowded with people leaning like Sisyphus against vast overfilled carts, carts blocking the narrow passageways and people quarreling in high-pitched voices with one another, some carts packed so completely with cans and packages of noodles and bags of rice that with every shove, something falls to the aisle and rolls listlessly down the narrow, grimy corridor between shelves denuded of product. The stocking clerks are kneeling on the floor, pulling cans and sacks and bottles from pallets around which shoppers hover seizing the goods before they can even be placed for sale. Chaos reigns also in the parking lot with cars proceeding against the flow of traffic, people defiantly driving the wrong way down one-way lanes to snap up available spaces close to the door, an exercise in greed and rapacity as if in preparation for the turmoil within the store.
And there is something utterly abject about the steel shelves of a grocery store stripped of product, barren posts and metal plates, desolation so complete that the shoppers, themselves, pause in their hysteria for a moment to aim cell-phones at the empty places where food used to be.
I didn’t come for the goods that everyone seems to have purchased – I don’t need hot dogs today or bread or spaghetti sauce. The empty shelves shouldn’t mean anything to me. But what if I were shopping for those items now entirely sold, missing from inventory? I can’t avoid the thought and the abjection expressed in the empty steel shelves, those aisles devoid of product – this fills me with a kind of horror.
23.
It would make a pretty irony to contrast the bright advance of Spring with flowers and warmth and the trees suddenly misted with green budding leaves and the blue skies reflected in puddles and the song birds merrily trilling in the trees with robins playing on the lawns, all of these things contrasted with the slow, icy onslaught of the contagion. But this would be untrue to the circumstances.
This Spring, at least at Austin, Minnesota, has been cold with wind wailing in the eaves and chimneys and bleak grey days following one after another. It rains or drizzles or there is a cold fog that grips the terrain. The earth is desolate with rotting leaves, dog shit, the detritus of blizzards in the form of a million shattered twigs and branches and boughs, some of them big enough to simulate half-charred and crooked staves and lances, all lying athwart the sidewalks in gory disarray. Then, the sun appears but not as anything other than a metallic glow occupying a quadrant of the heavens with a generally uniform pale white light that intensifies around a shapeless glaring void. This glare is theatrical if viewed from the right perspective, like a Klieg light, a comfortless, indifferent illumination best calculated, it seems, to display in the most sinister way imaginable the gaunt, bare trees reaching skyward.
24.
It’s supposed to snow. The rain falls in icy torrents. After ten p.m., lightning brightens the upper stories of the old houses in my neighborhood and the windows beckon to one another in the blasts of light aghast and appalled.
25.
Shakespeare retired from London when the plague closed the theaters around 1593. He was already well-established as a playwright. His Tudor trilogy had been a great success. To pass the time in exile from his theatrical pursuits, Shakespeare wrote two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. I’ve been improving the time by reading these works, verse that I haven’t attempted until this weird hiatus from many of my customary activities.
Isolated in the country, Shakespeare seems to have taken refuge in febrile sexual fantasies. This is not surprising. The seven young women and three men closeted in the country to escape the plague in Boccacio’s Decameron amuse themselves by telling erotic stories, one-hundred of them as the title tells us. These stories range from the comically obscene through different modes of what today we would call melodrama encroaching, in fact, in some instances on the tragic. The point is that those self-isolating to avoid pestilence tend toward masturbation or idle carpe diem sexual experimentation to pass the time. And Shakespeare’s two exuberantly erotic verse epics display this tendency as well.
The two poems are highly polished and very repetitive. They are also clearly symmetrical in form and structure. In Venus and Adonis, the ludicrously lecherous Venus importunes the petulant Adonis for hundreds of lines in an attempt to seduce him. Adonis resists her – only when she faints from desire, will he bestow a little peck of a kiss on her. Instead of agreeing to a tryst with the aroused goddess, Adonis indulges himself in hunting wild boar – with the effect that this tiresome lad is gored to death. Venus sheds a few tears at his comeuppance and nature produces a flower to memorialize the dead youth. The Rape of Lucrece turns this story on its head. The virtuous Roman matron, Lucrece, is importuned by her wooer Tarquin, a tyrant, for hundreds of lines. Lucrece remains steadfastly faithful to her husband who is off fighting in some obscure war. Frustrated, Tarquin, like Venus, throws himself on the object of his desire (Venus at one point in the companion poem wrestles the huntsman to the grassy sward). Tarquin consummates his assault leaving poor Lucrece defiled with his “load of lust”. After 1000 lines bewailing her fate, Lucrece commits suicide. Collatine, Lucrece’s absentee husband, returns belatedly, and, before she stabs herself, the heroine obliquely tells him what has happened. The troops at the garrison, Brutus, and Collatine all agree that Tarquin’s vile act deserves vengeance. But, as the poem ends, Tarquin is only exiled from the Eternal City.
As will be observed, the two poems, written in elaborate rhyming stanzas, anatomize lust in its female and male aspects. Both poems are psychological in nature, although their sometimes acute observations about love, lust, and shame, are concealed, at least, for modern readers, in prolix rhetorical argumentation. In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare writes effectively about the shame of the rape victim, how she internalizes the physical assault upon her – the depiction of psychic trauma arising from rape is carefully observed and can be appropriated, in fact, to modern feminist ideas on this subject. Lucrece is moved to blame herself for what she wrongly perceives as her complicity in the rape. These notions are expressed in an intricate inner dialogue that Shakespeare presents as an impassioned, if dignified and scholastic, debate. Indeed, Lucrece’s sense that her body was somehow complicit in an assault that her mind both detested and rejected leads to philosophical debate on the mind-body problem, an important topic in the last third of the poem. The conflict in Venus and Adonis is worked-out in a similarly rococo manner – most of the poem involves long colloquies about the role of desire in society and the well-ordered human life.
There is very little action in both poems. In a sense, the two writings partake in a kind of paralysis, perhaps, equivalent to a late 16th century “shelter-in-place” order. The actors in the poems are basically immobile, imprisoned within their own minds. Although the poems both feature sexual encounters, they are essentially hermetic, everyone is sealed within his or her own imagination – the characters argue, at length, but it is all futile: no one’s point of view of changed by the arguments advanced to the other participant in the debate. Furthermore, the sense of arrested motion in the poems, the feeling that nothing can really happen because everyone is fettered in place by ornate chains of words, creates an oneiric impression of slow-motion. Events occur beyond a velvet, jewel-encrusted curtain of words that is very heavy, ponderous, and that moves only slightly when brushed against. In The Rape of Lucrece, the reader is afflicted by the sense of inexorable doom – something horrible is about to happen and it all occurs in a voluptuously protracted languor. The basilisk approaches rhyme by rhyme, stanza by stanza over hundreds of lines but nothing can be done to avert the catastrophe. Both poems produce this effect and it seems wonderfully in keeping with idea of confinement and exile from one’s ordinary occupations. The violent cinematic impulse of Shakespeare’s early plays is here diffused into a static homeostasis in which equal and opposite arguments are elaborated, fail to persuade, and result in nothing. (In fairness, I should note that one of the chief obstacles to reading Chaucer’s equally psychological Troilus and Cressida is the vast elaboration of inner discourse into complicated rhymed stanzas of verse, the sense that nothing can progress because the characters are drowned in endlessly replicating and gorgeous oceans of argumentation. And, as far as I know, Troilus and Cressida doesn’t document any particular plague.)
The Rape of Lucrece exemplifies another aspect of plague-mentality – that is, the projection of contagion onto aspects of life unrelated to the actual infection. Pestilence is totalizing. Imaginatively, it expands its dominion until everything is encompassed within the spreading plague. How many references to contagion do you now detect in old movies, in TV shows made years ago, in pictures and advertisements, even art works. All things are held in the force-field of the trauma which expands to embrace everything. This is illustrated by bizarre (if psychologically apt) details in Shakespeare’s poem. Lucrece sits down to write a letter to her husband, Collatine. Strangely, her anguish is immediately diverted into considerations relating to style, certainly odd in the context of a freshly damaged, suicidal rape victim. Her “quill” hovers over the page: “Conceit and grief an eager combat fight / What wit sets down is blotted straight with will. At first, Lucrece masks her agony in “conceit” (that is, clever metaphors” and writes with “wit” – although, she “blots” this initial effort as “too curious-good” (over-elaborate) and resolves to write in a style “blunt and ill”. It’s exquisitely Shakespearian that Lucrece’s first impulse is to conceal her trauma in cleverly contrived rhetoric, although she rejects this style. The point seems to be that Lucrece’s mind races to distract itself from representing the crime committed against her and confronts the actual facts only with painful hesitation.
Then, the message “blunt and ill” penned, Lucrece again looks for distraction. Near her, there is an image of some kind, perhaps, a tapestry depicting the siege of Troy. Lucrece stares at the image and, slowly, converts it into a representation of her own plight. The ekprastic description of the painting of Troy comprises fully 11% of the entire poem, running from 1366 to 1582, a length of 216 lines. The passage is a tour de force demonstrating Lucrece’s conversion of mythological materials, very remote from her own misfortune, into a mirror for that misery. The descriptions don’t exactly fit her plight and, ultimately, her identification of elements of her own story in the Fall of Troy is not at all convincing. The story of Troy is not, actually, apposite to her own situation. But, in the victim’s mind, the connections are poignant, piercing, and persuasive. The metaphor fails objectively – but the assertion that the rape of Lucrece equals, somehow, the Fall of Troy is an index to the disorder of the heroine’s imagination. Everywhere she looks, she sees reflections of her misery. Her misery is a contagion that spreads to encompass the whole world. So, similarly, the present plague is like 9 - 11, like the Spanish flu, like World War II, like a death in the family, like a divorce or the break-up of a family, like any number of thing – the comparisons are not apt, but, imaginatively, they feel pertinent and persuasive.
26.
Rumors, unsubstantiated gossip, omens, portents, signs and wonders. Anthony Fauci, the physician managing the crisis from the White House says that the death total in the United States will be likely between 100,000 and 200,000. The term “managing” is used advisedly – there really isn’t anything to manage. The phrase should be amended to read: “the physician reacting to the crisis from the White House...”
27.
A lot of people, particularly the elderly, are addicted to Cable News. This may be attributed to Donald Trump. For most of our lives, politics has been a dull business, a sort of low-grade fever revived every four years but otherwise not too important to anyone’s daily existence. Trump made politics entertaining for everyone: instead of sober policy debates, Trump just insulted his opponents and called them names; instead of making proposals for governance, Trump demonized immigrants and the media, made ludicrous promises that everyone knew couldn’t be performed (“we’ll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it”); where character issues of probity, consistency, and honor once were relevant, Trump degraded the discourse to pay-offs to porn stars and sexual assault. Of course, it was all wildly amusing, the greatest show on earth until the man was elected President of the United States.
But by this time, the damage was done: Cable News had become funnier, with more satirical comedy, than Late Night TV. And, even, if you wanted to opt out of this opera bouffe, Trump had wriggled his way into your brain, colonized your thinking with his antics, so that it was hard, well-nigh impossible, to turn off the show.
And, then, the Big Show, which had featured a longstanding Commedia dell’Arte Punch-and-Judy impeachment routine, much sound and fury, but signifying nothing, turned deadly serious. People were dying, makeshift morgues were being set up in ice rinks and parking lots, doctors were collapsing from exhaustion, and the low-grade fever suddenly worsened into deadly high temperatures as the elderly began to drown in their own fluids – and not just the elderly, but also younger people as well. If you were addicted to Cable News, suddenly, the dosage was lethal: a full-time 24-7 parade of actual horribles suffered by real people. Of course, you should ration your consumption of this stuff – but the real is always more fascinating than the fictional and, now, we’re living (if you adhere to the News Cycle and its coverage) in a 24-hour, around-the-clock horror-show and, like gawkers at the scene of a deadly crash on the highway, we don’t have the will to look away.
27
John Oliver, a British-born comedian, who hosts an HBO satiric news show (a rip-off of David Frost’s That Was The Week That Was, but who remembers that nowadays?), fulminates against Trump’s incompetence. Oliver is intelligent and his show is sporadically well-written, but it’s the same old East Coast hypocrisy on display.
Oliver’s show features, with some degree of admiration, footage from India featuring burly cops beating people with long sticks who aren’t practicing “social distancing.” Oliver thinks that the Federal government should override the States, silence the mob of petulant governors adopting inconsistent measures against the virus, nationalize big industry under the Defense Production Act to produce masks and ventilators, and, indeed, call out the Army. In other words, Oliver implies that a dictatorial, authoritarian response to the virus would be most efficient.
But all of this federalization of response would be under the aegis of the Trump administration, probably the most corrupt and toxic administration in American history. If Trump calls out the Army, for instance, will Oliver applaud when the commander-in-chief deploys additional units to the Southern Border to keep out the virus infecting our nation from that point-of-entry. Indeed, the current situation is a weird materialization of Trump’s most rabid rhetoric: a foreign virus is attacking our country and it is coming for you in your houses in Poughkeepsie and Topeka and Mankato – so best to act now to shut down the borders and exclude the foreign scourge.
I understand valid distinctions can (and should) be made. But consider this point: the late-night comedians and influencers want the very man whom they have been deriding for folly and condemning for abuse of power to call-out the army, seal the borders between the States, nationalize businesses – isn’t there, at least, a whiff of inconsistency here?
28.
Trump can, indeed, be blamed for many things. But it’s deeply unfair and hypocritical to blame him for the Nation’s unpreparedness in the face of this health crisis. Of course, Trump minimized the risk, downplayed the misery suffered in other nations, and did nothing as the virus inexorably approached the United States. What would you expect? The man is a fool.
But where was Nancy Pelosi when northern Italy crashed and burned? I don’t recall her making speeches in the House about the need for ventilators and masks and additional ICU beds. Where was Chuck Schumer and Andrew Cuomo? They could see just as clearly as Trump that millions of people were endangered in China in January and early February and, yet, they did absolutely nothing. And, even more alarming, what did the CDC do? What did the Mayo Clinic or Johns Hopkins or any of the other famous health care facilities in the United States do? Did they sound the alarm? Did they plead for industry to produce masks and respirators and Covid 19 tests? Of course not. No one paid much attention to the emerging crisis until after Valentine’s Day when arguably it was already too late. We all knew what was happening in China? There were hourly reports about the virus on Cable News. Furthermore, everyone knew that the virus would inevitably spread – after all, that’s what viruses do, it’s their raison d’etre. There is no policy-maker who can legitimately say that the current situation wasn’t fully foreseeable – in fact, it was always merely a matter of time. But no one did anything.
Trump can be blamed for many things, but he’s no more blameworthy that the loyal opposition, the media, the fabulously wealthy health care institutions in this country, the Center for Disease Control, or, even, the World Health Organization. This development of this plague has demonstrated the prevalence of magical thinking in human affairs. Everyone looked, but no one really saw.
This is a remarkable instance of the tragedy of human life: inevitably, we interpret events in retrospect, that is, with hindsight. But, of course, we are condemned to live with a future that is (or seems) always unknowable.
29.
On the way to Chicago, I think, we had stopped in central Wisconsin for snacks at a place called Cascade City. We were traveling in a sort of caravan of cars, three or four vehicles, but I can no longer recall who was in the other cars. I don’t remember how long we were in Chicago but enough time lapsed for the weather to be warmer on the return trip than the wintry day when we had driven to the big city.
On the way back home, we stopped again in Cascade City. At first, we paused to look at the waterfall. The river was turbulent with meltwater bucking and roaring through the gorge. Initially, it seemed that there were two rivers flowing parallel to one another, but, in fact, it was only one stream engorged with snow run-off. Somehow, the river encircled the village. On an island, a State Park sign under a little shelter described the geological features of the river gorge. We got out of the cars and stood in a grove of bare trees, still leafless, next to the river. Apparently, the spectacle in the gorge made us a little indifferent to our immediate location. When we looked down, we saw that the water was flowing almost knee-deep over our feet and pouring in a white linear cascade down the bank and into the river.
This was alarming and so we went to the Convenience Store in Cascade City for some snacks. It was all very familiar because we had stopped here on our way to Chicago. The place was an old-time grocery with fans whirring overhead among embossed zinc ceiling tiles and creaky wooden floors underfoot and ancient shelving with foodstuffs like pickled herring and oysters in tins and canned meats and beans on display. The store was at the apex of two lanes that met at an acute angle. You could park on one side or the other with the store building between the lots. My car was parked in such a way that I couldn’t see the other vehicles in the caravan that had stopped at the snack shop.
The woman at the cash register was named Malina. I knew this from our previous stop on the way to Chicago. I was aware that she had an African-American husband. Earlier, we had seen him lurking in an entryway, surveying the store and its customers. The snacks were all overpriced. In a bottom drawer that I opened in a sort of cabinet, I found small aluminum boxes, long and narrow – what was inside? I opened one of the boxes and, then, remembered that I had done this before and discovered that narrow silver caskets contained an array of treats, little bottles of alcohol from all around the world except that the bottles were also cookies, potato chips, packages of pretzels and almonds and peanuts. I thought I could buy a box and share it with the people in my car. But the box of snacks was outrageously expensive, hand marked with a tag that read $19.95. A lot of things in the store were priced $19.95. Clearly, the proprietors were price-gouging travelers stopping here on their way to and from Chicago. I bought a little package of Oreo cookies and some chips and, because I was also lugging about a twelve-pack of Coca-cola, I had to affix the cookies and chips to my wrist with bracelets so that they dangled from my hands. In a time of plague, you’re supposed to pay with a credit or debit card. But, instead, I handed Malina, at the cash register, a twenty-dollar bill. Her Black husband emerged from the shadows with a canvas banker’s bag full of cash. She made change from that bag. It was the sort of bag that stage-coach drivers for Wells Fargo lug around in Westerns.
I was now alone. The others who had been in the store were gone, presumably they had left ahead of me and were already on the freeway. I thought that I would text message them. I had bought some of the treats to share with the others but, now, they were nowhere to be seen. The odd thing was that I hadn’t seen them depart but, then, I recalled that the C-store had two parking lots, one on each side of the road, and the building blocked the vantage between the two lots. It wasn’t a problem. I would text message the others once I got on the freeway. But do I have my cell-phone or did I misplace it in an earlier dream?
30.
There’s pretty much no benefit to watching cable news at this stage (March 31). The hosts on CNN and MSNBC are convulsed with impotent fury and spend three-quarters of each hour of broadcast time blaming President Trump for the contagion. This is childish and, in fact, only enhances the execrable Trump’s prospect for re-election. Trump’s supporters like nothing more to see their media opponents reduced to stuttering and bellowing in impotent rage.
As I have earlier observed, the gist of this anger is that Trump unconscionably delayed efforts to oppose the virus’ spread and has balked at supplying (in timely fashion) items such as respirators and personal protective gear. This accusation is unjust. Everyone ignored the steady advance of the virus until early March. Trump wasn’t alone in this. I would wager that, if a survey of cable news reporting was conducted during the months of January and February (when it is claimed that there was a window of opportunity to somehow resist the Covid’s advance), most of that coverage would have been devoted to stories other than the ravages of the disease in faraway China. What did Neville Chamberlain say about Czechoslovakia when he appeased Hitler in 1938: it is a “far-away country of which we know nothing.” (In fact, Czechoslovakia is four hours by rail from Berlin and at the very center of Europe and European culture, far closer to Rome than London). The media and most of us, I assume, thought about China and the virus, if any thought occurred at all, as a “far-away country of which we know nothing.” Therefore, it rings hollow for CNN commentators, for instance, to shriek that Trump did nothing until the grim Reaper was literally knocking at our door, the “golden door” in the words of Emma Lazarus, at New York harbor. None of these commentators was sounding the alarm in January or February – the story about the virus in China was relegated to back pages and short sound-bites.
I detest defending Trump but fair is fair. Hindsight is always 20-20 and the majority of Americans will view the media’s ceaseless hounding of the president with dismay. This will assure Trump’s success at the polls in 2020.
In mid-February, before I departed for Arizona, the Mayo Clinic announced to its staff “that if you can hear or receive this message, you are in no danger at all.” Of course, this has proven to be manifestly untrue. Try this simple thought experiment. Think back to Valentine’s Day and, then, see if you can imagine the present circumstances – the make-shift morgues in New York, the lock-downs across most of the country, businesses shuttered and empty streets. In your wildest imagination, you would not have imagined our present circumstances. Dear Reader, most of you are wiser than Donald Trump. If you couldn’t imagine what has happened in a mere five or six weeks, why do you think the fool in the White House would (or should) been more prescient than you. Six weeks ago, around Valentine’s Day 2020, the afflictions in China, and the beginning of the virus in Milan, were tiny irritants pushed far back into the recesses of your mind.
This media hysteria, exactly when the news should be reported dispassionately and without emotion, arises from two factors. First, modern news is configured on the idea of blame. If a bridge collapses or a tsunami knocks down a tower or an earthquake flattens a tenement, then, surely someone is to blame. We live in an indemnity culture – if someone is hurt, then, the party who is at fault must pay compensation. And causation is so loosely defined that there is always a party at fault. Trump is a detestable person, therefore, somehow he must be to blame for our current misfortune. Someone has to be punished and pay indemnity – and, absent any other candidates for this role (since the media will never blame itself for missing the onset of what will be one of biggest stories of this century), the horrible, deplorable Donald must be to blame. But this is simply puerile. No one is to blame or, in a larger sense, everyone is to blame. It’s human nature to not respond to misfortune in a country “far-away of which we know nothing”. People don’t pay attention until the tragedy has taken up residence in their own neighborhood.
And this brings me to the second factor: America’s media elite live in New York City. The best addresses in the country overlook Central Park. Anderson Cooper, who is a Vanderbilt, undoubtedly lives in a penthouse on Central Park West. (I don’t know this for a fact – but use Cooper, whom I like, as an example.) The army is now erecting tents to house the sick in Central Park. I presume that the media elites can see these tents from their skyscraper windows. What happens in New York City is regarded as a template for what must happen in the rest of the country – although this isn’t necessarily always true. Both literally and figuratively, the frenzy of terror and detestation visible on TV’s cable networks arises from the fact the view that the media elites enjoy from their home windows has now been spoiled.
From the Midwest, things look different. I always thought that the terrorists on 9 - 11 made a horribly self-destructive mistake targeting Manhattan, the center of the media network in the United States. If the terrorists had attacked Topeka and killed an equal number of people, the media would have been swift to shrug this off and, soon enough, would be blaming Topeka and its repulsive Methodists for its misfortunes.
31.
We were driving to Mankato. My wife had to get some items from a Hobby Lobby. This seemed strange to me because my wife has no interest in crafts. Probably, her idea was a way to pass the time during confinement because of the pestilence.
The road was hilly and, after we passed over a crest, the road deteriorated to a grassy track. This seemed odd. Perhaps, the world had ended during our drive and we were traversing a post-apocalyptic environment. I asked my wife if she knew where she was going. “I do,” she said.
We reached a room that was like a school cafeteria with the chairs and tables cleared away. Handsome older women, all wearing widow’s weeds, were socially distancing –each seated six feet away from the other. Younger men danced with them in succession. The younger men were attorneys with a law firm in Mankato that advertises heavily. The dancing was decorous and, after a turn on floor, the men returned their partners to the chairs where each sat isolated, with downcast eyes in stony silence.
For some reason, it seemed like a good idea to me, but I couldn’t tell you what “it” was.
32.
Now the skies have cleared and it’s warm with temperate breezes and, soon enough, the grass will be green and trees pink with buds. This morning when I let out my dog, I stood in the backyard and admired the bird songs warbling from hidden places in the surrounding trees.
It was a few minutes after dawn, the sirens from the meat-packing plant about to signal the day-shift at seven a.m., but everything still strangely quiet – no traffic rushing by on nearby streets, no sounds of children calling to one another as they walk to school, no dogs barking and the trucks on the freeway a mile away also oddly subdued. The sky overhead was completely, brilliantly blue. At the zenith a long con-trail marked the sky’s apex – perhaps, it was a jet plane from Des Moines or Kansas City or St. Louis flying north over the Pole to China or Japan. Lower in the sky, I could see an airplane, pink like a fleck of rose-quartz also northbound, this jet presumably on the downglide to the airport in Minneapolis. Then fifty feet overhead three birds shot like arrows across the heavens, also aimed to the north. The sun gilded the gaunt, weather-ravaged facade of the home of the suicide next door so that a golden glow colored the peeling white paint on the eaves and fascia of the haggard old structure.
Inside the jet bound for the airport at Minneapolis, the stewardesses are drowsing and the sliding windows have all been pulled down over the side-portals so that the cabin is dim. Only a few people are traveling, heads slumped forward, but torsos suspended by seat-belt. The people wear masks cupped around their faces. The passengers are all asleep. It’s still 100 miles to the airport. The rising sun bathes the wings of the jet with warm pink light. Then, the pilot announces that the stewardesses should prepare the cabin for landing – the plane will put its tires to the runway in twenty-five minutes. “It’s a nice morning in Minneapolis,” the pilot says on the intercom “Forty-five right now with clear visibility. This will be a beautiful day.”
March 20 - March 31,2020
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