Saturday, May 16, 2020

Cain Removes His Mask in Public


When we first decided to stay in our homes in order to protect each other from the unmitigated spread of Covid19, there was a sense of solidarity, a sense each and every one of us carried some of the responsibility of keeping each other safe. We were—briefly--like a big, global family. There were, of course, outliers (the toddlers of the family) who didn’t quite seem to understand the basic principles behind the stay-at-home orders, but for the most part, that came across as whiny and lacking self-discipline or as a lack of understanding and access to reliable information.


Two months later, the atmosphere has changed, but, given that over 88,000 people have died of Covid19 as of May 15, not in the way that I would have predicted. Two months ago, 88,000 deaths and counting would have scared the shit out of almost everyone. We’re still losing 1,500 Americans every day to the virus, but the prevailing attitude is not one of fear and caution but of belligerence.


Before I go further, I should acknowledge that I am speaking from a position of safety and privilege. Yes, I am working many hours a day in front of a computer doing a fairly frustrating, nebulous task. But I am doing it from a comfortable home in which each of the four of us who live here can be in a separate room. We each have devices that connect to the internet, which falters surprisingly infrequently given its heavy use. We have enough food. We have paychecks and health insurance. We are fine.


That said, most of the people in my immediate daily circle who are complaining about being “done” with this for a variety of reasons also live in comfortable homes with internet and food and one or two paychecks. People are just growing anxious about the uncertainty, about the inconvenience, about the stress of seeing the same people constantly for two months. We miss our luxuries, our routines, our friends and our families. I get that.


What I do NOT get is that we seem to have shifted from a society that was collectively alarmed at the prospect of 100,000 deaths (almost a certainty at this point) and resolute in its determination to keep that number as low as possible to a society that is angry that it is being asked to save each other’s lives. People are showing anger that in order to get back the things they miss—opening the shops, visiting friends and family, getting back to the business of daily life—they will have to wear masks. They are furious that the government suggests that we could return to a more normal and productive version of society if people agree to be tested for a potentially lethal illness, have their movements tracked and then agree not to spread a potentially deadly disease if they have been exposed to it. People are waving guns at the people trying to make sure as many of us live through this as possible. It’s weird. They’re posting false news articles about the government stealing children away from parents and about masks causing carbon-dioxide poisoning. They’re taking assault rifles into government buildings. They’re hero-worshipping those who actively flaunt recommendations for NOT KILLING people. Why? Because they are being asked to stand six feet away from each other and wear masks to save others’ lives, and they are disgusted with this mandate to really try not to kill each other. THAT I do not understand.


In thinking about this shift in attitude, I suddenly thought about the story of Cain and Abel and Cain’s question to God: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Essentially, that’s what people are asking now, the Biblical question “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Is it MY job to keep HIM safe?


The context of this question in its original story, though, provides the answer. When Cain asks this question of God, it isn’t a lament. It’s a response to God asking him about Abel, which was an invitation to confess and beg forgiveness. It’s a response uttered even though Cain knew he’d killed Abel. He knew God knew he’d killed Abel, and he knew God knew he knew God knew. In essence, it was a ridiculous, peevish, childish, selfish, unGodly thing to say. Not only does the context imply that yes, at the very least you ARE responsible for not killing your brother, it points out that even asking the question is a decidedly jerky move.


We could, of course, follow the line of questions and answers into the New Testament. Well, who is my neighbor that I’m supposed to “love?” I’m sure Jesus doesn’t roll his eyes any more than God does in the Old Testament, but his answer also makes clear that the question itself is absurd. Answer: even the people you don’t like, even your “enemies.” Everyone. You don’t get to only love the people you already love. And then there’s the rich young man who asks what else he can do, thinking he’s done it all, but walks away sad when Jesus tells him to sell everything he has, give the profits to the poor, and follow Jesus. The answer is always going to be to wear a face covering if that will save someone else’s life.

We can hide behind our cries of “freedom” and “rights” and “not my problem,” but somehow I’m pretty sure that if I can see that these lines are petty, childish cries of “but I shouldn’t have to not kill my brother! You’re violating my freedom to kill my brother!” then God isn’t fooled either, as God never has been.

Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Immortal Poems of the English Language

Even as a well-acknowledged nerdy English teacher, I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of people I know who regularly read poetry and who would claim that they really "get" it. I used to want to be one of those people. I just...wasn't (with the notable exception of Shel Silverstein, whom I loved and who, I thought, didn't count.) In high school, I decided to change that by reading poetry anyway. When, on a road trip, my parents offered to buy me any book in the bookstore to entertain me (before cars had TVs and any of us had cell phones) I reluctantly turned away from the novels I could have polished off in a few hours and bought Immortal Poems of the English Language. It seemed reasonable to start with the best, right?
 
It's arranged chronologically, which means that the first poems were written by "anonymous." Shakespeare didn’t appear on the scene for over seventy pages. Truth: I had no idea what I was reading. I didn't like it. But for some reason that, many years later, I must confess that I admire about myself, I kept going. I read/skimmed/looked at the whole damned boring book. Hundreds of pages of poems I didn’t really understand. I could read all the words, but I felt like I was missing something--the thing that makes poetry worthwhile. There were a few spots around the romantics that made me pause, although I really only READ the shorter poems. (I still prefer a poem to be under two pages, honestly.) There were several that seemed not worth rereading just then, but maybe turning down the corner of the page to read later. Every now and then, I'd go back to Immortal Poems of the English Language and read a bit. I still didn't love poetry, but sometimes, for a second or two, it sort of meant something to me.
 
I took the book with me to college. I wanted to want to read it.
 
One very cold night when my roommate was off-campus and my heart was broken and I couldn't sleep, I remembered one of those poems. I REMEMBERED a poem I hadn't realized I'd learned in the first place. I got up and turned the light back on and flipped through The Immortal Poems of the English Language, looking for it. But while I looked for it, another poem caught my eye, and I read that. Huh. I still didn’t fully understand it, I still felt like I was missing something that I didn’t know how to truly see, but even so, I FELT the poem. It clicked. It spoke to me. It went beyond liking.
 
Heart pounding, I kept looking for the poem I thought I remembered. I read a few other poems along the way. I felt a couple of those two. Awed, I read the poem I had wanted to find. I was lonely and heartbroken and trapped in a small room at 2 am, and the poem said what I needed it to say exactly the way I needed it to say it. It dropped a little something solid into what felt like a deep, howling, swirling hole in my center. 
 
I turned the light back off, opened the curtains, and stared out into the sub-zero night through the crystals that had formed on my window. I repeated the words of the poem. I felt like I was really seeing nighttime for the first time. I felt like I was seeing ice for the first time. My life simultaneously zoomed out into a long, still-empty mystery and focused in on that particular, specific, fully-known moment: that particular scene, those particular words. That was the first moment when I felt both deep gratitude and yearning hunger for the right words.
 
I’d say I still don’t “get” more poems than I do “get,” but that energizing mix of gratitude and hunger for poetry has become regular and familiar, if no less comfortable than that first night I felt it. Every year when I take a deep, trembling breath and try to teach poetry to teenagers, I start by telling this story and showing them my now tattered copy of Immortal Poems of the English Language. It’s one book I never loan out, partly because it means so much to me and partly because it’s actually kind of a dumb place to start reading poetry. 

Immortal poems of the English language (1952 edition) | Open Library

Monday, May 4, 2020

The magnificence of small

I had a low-electronics high-outside weekend. It meant I had to stay up to midnight last night getting things ready for this morning and that I woke up with a decent (but subsiding, so no worries) headache. I actually feel really good about how much better I've gotten over the past six weeks at riding the waves of living. Granted, the waves right now are small in my little world. Manageable. There are really big tsunami-sized waves in the bigger world that aren't really my job other than to be ready to deal with the impact when/if they arrive in my own little life. But learning to accept my little waves is a good start at being ready for any waves, right?
 
I was thinking, on a bike ride, about how when I was young, I assumed my life was going to be big. I guess I thought I would be "important" in one way or another. Then the reality is that while I am very important to a smallish number of people in a local sort of way, you could also turn that around and say that I'm just your ordinary suburban English teacher--sort of a nobody from nowhere.
 
And then I look at trees budding and ride my bike in the slanting late afternoon sunshine and notice the day on which both the spring frogs and the summer frogs are making their music. There is a moment when my daughter panics because Mother's Day is so close and a moment when my son waits for everyone to finish their s'mores before he goes inside to retrieve a sweatshirt so that he can put away the marshmallows at the same time. 
 
I reworded my vision for myself this weekend. My life might be smaller than I thought it would be, but it's also more precise. The moments are tiny, but they are like those teeny pictures painted on grains of rice or like snowflakes or butterfly wings when you magnify them: small enough to throw away, to miss entirely but, if you look closely, every bit as beautiful and miraculous as anything else in the world.
 
Small, I decided, is also OK. No, more than that. Small is also valuable. Worth slowing down to look at closely. Worthy of reverence and gratitude and awe. My existence looks and feels smaller than I had dreamed, but if examined carefully, if magnified and admired with a sense of appreciation for the endless capacity for life to be more and more magnificent and complex the closer one gets to the details that make up reality, scale reveals itself as irrelevant. 
 
I was reminded of an idea I read in an L. M. Montgomery book (I believe it’s Rilla of Ingleside, if you’re looking for a good piece of historical fiction): in order to be infinitely great, God must also be infinitely small. A God that sees only mountains and celebrities is limited. A truly infinitely large, omnipresent God must also know the microscopic organisms that live in streams, must see the trajectory of every single rain drop, must care as deeply for a fragile baby (even one born in a barn, an expendable subject in a mighty empire?) as for world leaders and sports stars. A truly infinite God must, it seems, care deeply about even the small ripples of my life. And so shall I.