Sharing silence near the ends of our worlds

 In the first week of COVID-19 isolation at home, I found myself as many did: checking news updates and then getting outside or reading poetry or staring through the window as an antidote to the noise, wondering if I had enough of various essentials, being a bit unnerved by the lines outside the grocery store, and by the empty shelves, and by the reports from Italy of elderly sick being left to die. I have also been deeply moved by moments of compassion, empathy, thoughtfulness, and by wonderful humor. This week I also had the pleasure reading Ilya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic, and of being moved by the vision of a people who have chosen a collective deafness to the commands of the soldiers occupying their town, and by this line, from one of the many beautiful verses in this masterpiece, in the voice of one of the “Deaf” townspeople: “Our hearing doesn’t weaken, but something silent in us strengthens.”

“It’s the air,” one speaker observes, “Something in it wants us too much.” The townspeople lock arms and form a circle to keep the soldiers away from the dead body of a murdered boy.

And in this moment, I am moved and inspired at the idea of listening in this spirit, while resisting the urge to respond obediently when expected. And also, as many I know are, wondering about the difference between what is and what officially is; and feeling deeply at certain wavelengths that are often undetected, noticing what tends to escape standard qualification as legitimate observation.

Among these observations, a recognition that the moment at hand is a global event, that the people living through it are those for whom it will become a defining hour in various ways, and that I — as one of them — can’t help but notice how fitting it seems, how like something I had long suspected was just around the corner. I sense that I am not alone here. I fall into that strange category of generation that is a bit too young for the utter disaffectedness of Gen-X and a bit too old to catch any millennial confidence. (As a child, I was deeply moved by the appearance of Reagan’s sincerity. It would be another decade before I could begin to understand the problematic moral crisis that his policies presented, and when this happened, R.E.M.’s “The End of the World as We Know It” was playing at a constant loop.) My natural melancholic strains have long been tempered with a wild-eyed sense of living at a tremendous time, and this in turn is equally tempered by a natural mistrust in professions of progress. It was clear that some bottom had fallen out somewhere, and like any family secret this became the thing that no one would discuss.

There was a deep sense, which grew like a hearty weed resistant to slogans on optimism and positive thinking and the virtues of technological progress. It grew in the pit of the stomach, tainting our abilities to receive such messages with anything better than a forced smile and willingness to do our best to be (to use a catchphrase of the moment) a "team player," or if we couldn’t do that, to aim at being the next one to “break the mold” (in the name of progress, of course). By the time we were old enough to read Yeats, or to come to him by way of Joan Didion’s famous Slouching Towards Bethlehem, in which she quotes the poet’s “Second Coming” which we first read in certain formative years, many of us would be stunned by the way that such a moment that seemed so particular to us in its strangeness, and so defiant of words, had already been foretold: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer —. . .”

"Falconer's Bird" by Steve Herring on flickr 

We were born after the listening stopped, but our hearts were crowded anyway with vestigial memory of what it had been like in the days before there was so much relentless noise or deadening speed.

There is something here, I think: in the days of Corona isolation, in-between impromptu homeschool math lessons and physics experiments and reading poetry and making food and playing tennis and sharing conversation with fellow isolated;  in between moments of relief at being off of the schedule of the machine, and deep into a deeper kind of work, and I’d like to take some time to think about it more before I try to share. But, observing that the organic nature of the busy-ness of these days at home makes it unlikely that I’ll be doing this any time soon, makes me want to offer this observation up to neighbors in isolation in the same spirit that I would offer a half-empty travel-sized bottle of hand sanitizer, some cans of tomato paste, a bag of beans, a bar of soap, or a half-empty pint carton of half-and-half. This is what I have right now.

I used to want to give when I had enough to offer, but it turns out that when shortages become real, the impulse to give persists anyway, but more desperately and with fewer restraints, and it’s all I can do when I see you, stranger: hold out this half of my sandwich and say “Here” so we can listen as we chew our simple meal in silence, staring at the sky.