Apocalypse Cabaret Diary, April 10
Apocalypse Cabaret Diary, April 10
By the time of the 2016 presidential election, it was clear that political satire was no longer possible: reality had overtaken it. There was simply no hypothetical excess that could be postulated to illustrate the absurdity of the politics, because politics was already exceeding, becoming more and more absurd without any need for comedy.
Under quarantine, the same thing has happened to our social fabric. People are now trying to create video chat versions of everything they used to do, from happy hours to sex parties … things that, were they proposed in other circumstances, would have been seen as parodies of our digital alienation from one another. But now, we’re so desperate we’re serious. Once again, grotesque reality has rendered parody useless.
The first truly global pandemic of the digital age is also the world’s first post-modern plague. We are all so separated that we are truly living in our own little semiotic worlds, constantly spinning and spiraling away on our own, with little hope of somehow reaching through and connecting. And the thing about post-modernism is, for all our study of it, for all the ways in which both triumphant academics and angry anti-intellectuals have said for decades that post-modernism has arrived, it is actually much, much, easier to theorize about post-modernism than it is to live it. As a way of diagnosing social ills, it had its merits, but as a way of life it was mostly just a pretension that we put on because it let us get away with things.
Now … forced to live in a post-modern world of isolation and spinning narratives, we can get away with nothing.
We are trapped.
Staring through windows and screens at a world that goes on without us.
I left my apartment for the first time in a week. After a day spent able to hobble around my floor without using crutches, I walked down the stairs to the lobby, carrying a load of garbage for the bin, and then hobbled outside into the sunlight.
My walking was wobblier than I’d wanted. I couldn’t go more than three blocks before I had to turn around. But the world was still there, and the sunshine on my skin reminded me that life in the body has its pleasures.
Post-modernism is a very useful set of tools. But tools are not the reality they manipulate. That’s as true for continental philosophy as it is for technology. Reality is always bigger than the tools and concepts we use to navigate it in the moment.
Often, this brings us tragedy. Covid-19 is a perfect example of the way in which the world will surprise us with something big and unexpected that most of us never imagined.
But for those who are suffering, this is also a route to salvation. To break through to reality is to break through to the unexpected, and the possible. Right now it is our torment and our deliverance. There is always something more that can be reached.
The last few days have brought a torrent of collapse, as person after person I spoke to melted down, wailing in their lamentations. I, too, still suffer from acute episodes of despair, but even with my recent injury my mood has been much more even keeled recently. Almost as soon as the quarantine came down, I knew how hard this would be on me, and broke down. Other people seemed so much more capable of enduring. Now, it seems, after a few days in which person after person confessed, crying on my metaphysical shoulder, that they didn’t know if they could endure this, that I’d hit the point of shocked horror early. I wasn’t handling it any worse than other people, I was just prescient.
That sounds like a backdoor brag, but honestly — there is nothing more humbling than hearing people articulate their deepest personal struggles, and realizing that some moments are almost word for word duplicates of your own deepest personal struggle. It really takes both the glamour and the edge alike off your pain. We are so absurd. It’s wonderful.
But still lost. Still alone. As the people I know have begun to collapse into their own acute suffering, the tentative support network I’d put together my first few weeks has collapsed: I have had to acknowledge that I cannot rely on the people I was relying on. I also still have a strange, wary, relationship with my own art, which at these moments is skittish and uncertain. It refuses to pretend that something hasn’t changed, but we don’t know what we’re doing yet.
I keep telling people “it’s okay to be suffering right now. This is the time for it. It’s okay to feel that. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other.” I have such great respect for people who are actively trying to save and support the world right now, but I still have no patience for people who say “this crisis is an opportunity!”
I find myself returning to poetry. The best poetry is not wildly emotive declarations, but perfectly condensed and crafted language. Clive James’ distinction between “poetry” and “prose” bears repeating here: poetry is language that cannot be paraphrased. That level of craft seems to suit me right now.
I have in my home the complete works of both Philip Larkin and Louis MacNeice — thick volumes that I have thoroughly enjoyed skimming over the years, pulling out bits and pieces at random, but that I have never truly read through, end to end.
Two days ago, I started that process.
And I find far, far, more comfort in the stark beauty of Larkin’s poem on the nature of grief than I do in any of the shouted silver linings of the people whose optimism is so thick it keeps them from seeing funerals:
If grief could burn out
Like a sunken coal,
The heart would rest quiet,
The unrest soul
Be still as a veil;
But I have watched all night
The fire grow silent,
The grey ash soft:
And I stir the stubborn flint
The flames have left,
And grief stirs, and the deft
Heart lies impotent
(Philip Larken, XVIII, from “The North Ship”)
That is a dark message. But the fact that it can be stated to beautifully is the light I orient to, all the proof I need of the world’s grace.
And it is far, far, more comforting that the parodic attempt to simply recreate the world we have lost only through screens.
