Between Two Easters

Between Two Easters

Each spring in North Carolina one participates in a ritual. It involves discussing the Day-Glo green pollen that covers all surfaces and chokes all sinuses. Windshields smear green. Eyes water. In the early days of quarantine, my normally sleepy neighborhood felt abandoned, which made for an interesting, if eerie, contrast to the riotous life in bloom all around me. I enjoyed grabbing one of my dogs and going for a walk, marveling at the tall trees swaying in the spring breeze, pausing to let myself feel part of the world’s movement. The few people I saw in these tense early days would generally cross the street to avoid others, though most would still wave.

As if to say, “we’re all in this together.” At risk. Uncertain. But always, always apart.

As Easter 2020 drew nearer, one felt ever more acutely outside the customary flow of one’s life, from where it is easier to notice the particular velocity that normally shapes one’s relation to time. Semesters tick by: we give opening lectures; we discover, with mild surprise, that we’re already at midterms; we are reminded of those letters of recommendation we agreed to write; and always there is the getting to and from, the entering and exiting of routine. There is rhythm, and boom, another year in the books.

So when the world went indoors, the sheer weight of the unknown brought the familiar, unnoticed velocity to a halt. New language began to come easily: viral load, social distance, mobile morgue, each utterance of these words a reminder of this unseen current of death. This, then, was a new condition. There was velocity, but a different one: how could there be so many guns in public all of a sudden? How could the institutions be collapsing in real time? How can we have sped two decades into this century with so little compassion? And how could the Capitol steps – so sparse and sunny when I biked down them in my boyhood – have come to this scene, this shitty MAGA Breughel tableau?

I thought of Henry Adams, who once wrote: “[I]f the automobile had one vitesse more useful than another, it was that of a century a minute; that of passing from one century to another without break. The centuries dropped like autumn leaves in one’s road, and one was not fined for running over them too fast.” Well, apparently, nobody would be fined now for any recklessness. Spit in a mask wearer’s eye. Plot to assassinate Gretchen Whitmer. Kill Breonna Taylor.

Things whirled furiously, and we told ourselves we just need to hold on, one more hour, one more Zoom, one more day of washing the mail and praying the virus does not get your loved ones.

***

Memory has loomed large for humans in the pandemic, more, perhaps, than usual. Memory of the dead, especially all those who died needlessly. I remember when I was a boy, trying – for reasons now lost to me – to imagine what it would be like to die. Feeling my own consciousness, probing it, knowing this was not a healthy thing to do but doing it because this is a thing all humans discover when they are young and you either lean in or trip along in ignorance.

Years later, though decades ago now, I had a very vivid and unsettling dream in which I encountered the grim reaper, who said to me, “Hello, kindred spirit.” Clear as day. Etched in memory forever. I was convinced, having had many family members die when I was young, that this was an ill omen. Or that I was destined to become a killer, or a death-seeker myself. The uninteresting truth is that I have a morbid streak.

But is this really so out of tune with how things have gone for the world? In the violent, fraught summer of 2020, as I watched protesters tear gassed, in a place where I have often protested in my life, and as I watched copters buzz crowds, and as I saw unidentified troops in American streets, and a man with a bazooka on his back casually ordering a lunch at Subway, I thought of Hawthorne’s “Journal of a Solitary Man.”

In it, he writes: “I passed not one step further, but threw my eyes on a looking-glass which stood deep within the nearest shop. At the first glimpse of my own figure I awoke, with a horrible sensation of self-terror and self-loathing. No wonder that the after-frighted city fled! I had been promenading Broadway in my shroud!” I think America can’t recognize its own shroudedness, and so we rage when the world doesn’t conform to the smile we are instructed to wear.

***

In the church I grew up attending, and in which I was baptized and was a sub-average altar boy, I cannot recall if there was a stained glass image of the ascension. There were multiple apostles to be sure. And above the altar was a huge, and quite beautiful, rendition of Jesus – bathed in light and robed in white – preparing to take up the cross on the walk towards Golgotha. This spring, during holy week, a noose was tied to a tree inside the churchyard. St. Mark’s Episcopal has always been proudly activist, basing its interventions on the ministry of Jesus, the carpenter messiah, the scorner of hierarchy, the healer and the peacemaker. So of course, in a city that for most of my lifetime has been majority black, the church hung Black Lives Matter banners. Twice they were taken down.

To witness these things from afar, in isolation, is to be reminded of one’s fundamental powerlessness. Against death’s inevitability. Against a system’s power to crush lives. To feel no way into this condition, while death stalks the air unseen, is to know that one lives through a world historical moment while being simultaneously paralyzed.

What can one do inside these tiny boxes when the country is on fire? Between two Easters there was so much material for reflecting on powerlessness and vulnerability.

I pulled herbs from the garden. I cleaned up dog shit from my incontinent old girl. I wearied of looking at the lines on my face on Zoom, worried for my immunocompromised wife.

Holding two places, or people, or times at a distance. Reflecting on the you-ness of the changes. Feeling one’s body respond to difference and time and stress and fear. Feeling the oddness of having been rewired so quickly to be on guard, to suspect and resent and fundamentally not to know. Is this, then, what transfiguration means? Is it not, after all, emptiness’s opposite but its apotheosis?

The stone rolled away and the tomb was found empty.

Things are still smoldering, coming apart in ways we still can’t appreciate. And I wonder, is this what it is like to live in a place that is “godforsaken”?

As I returned home from D.C. recently, thinking as the train rolled along of three transcendent days with lifelong friends, I thought of Proust: “The woods are black now, yet still the sky is blue . . . ” One supposes . . .