Intimations Read online

  Death has come to America. It was always here, albeit obscured and denied, but now everybody can see it. The “war” that America is waging against it has no choice but to go above, around and beyond an empty figurehead. This is a collective effort; there are millions of people involved in it, and they won’t easily forget what they have seen. They won’t forget the abject, exceptionally American, predicament of watching individual states, as New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, memorably put it, bidding as if “on eBay” for lifesaving equipment. Death comes to all—but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.

  One potential hope for the new American life is that, within it, such an idea will finally become inconceivable, and that the next generation of American leaders might find inspiration not in Winston Churchill’s bellicose rhetoric but in the peacetime words spoken by Clement Attlee, his opposite number in the House of Commons, the leader of the Labour Party, who beat Churchill in a postwar landslide: “The war has been won by the efforts of all our people, who, with very few exceptions, put the nation first and their private and sectional interests a long way second. . . . Why should we suppose that we can attain our aims in peace—food, clothing, homes, education, leisure, social security and full employment for all—by putting private interests first?”

  As Americans never tire of arguing, there may be many areas of our lives in which private interest plays the central role. But, as postwar Europe, exhausted by absolute death, collectively decided, health care shouldn’t be one of them.

  Something to Do

  IF YOU MAKE things, if you are an “artist” of whatever stripe, at some point you will be asked—or may ask yourself—“why” you act, sculpt, paint, whatever. In the writing world, this question never seems to get old. In each generation, a few too many people will feel moved to pen an essay called, inevitably, “Why I Write” or “Why Write?” under which title you’ll find a lot of convoluted, more or less self-regarding reasons and explanations. (I’ve contributed to this genre myself.) Only a few of them are any good* and none of them (including my own) see fit to mention the surest motivation I know, the one I feel deepest within myself, and which, when all is said, done, stripped away—as it is at the moment—seems to be at the truth of the matter for a lot of people, to wit: it’s something to do. I used to stand at podiums or in front of my own students and have that answer on the tip of my tongue, but knew if I said it aloud it would be mistaken for a joke or fake humility or perhaps plain stupidity. . . . Now I am gratified to find this most honest of phrases in everybody’s mouths all of a sudden, and in answer to almost every question. Why did you bake that banana bread? It was something to do. Why did you make a fort in your living room? Well, it’s something to do. Why dress the dog as a cat? It’s something to do, isn’t it? Fills the time.

  Out of an expanse of time, you carve a little area—that nobody asked you to carve—and you do “something.” But perhaps the difference between the kind of something that I’m used to, and this new culture of doing something, is the moral anxiety that surrounds it. The something that artists have always done is more usually cordoned off from the rest of society, and by mutual agreement this space is considered a sort of charming but basically useless playpen, in which adults get to behave like children—making up stories and drawing pictures and so on—though at least they provide some form of pleasure to serious people, doing actual jobs. The more utilitarian-minded defenders of art justify its existence by insisting upon its potential political efficacy, which is usually overstated. (Artists themselves are especially fond of overstating it.) But even if you believe in the potential political efficacy of art—as I do—few artists would dare count on its timeliness. It’s a delusional painter who finishes a canvas at two o’clock and expects radical societal transformation by four. Even when artists write manifestos, they are (hopefully) aware that their exigent tone is, finally, borrowed, only echoing and mimicking the urgency of the guerrilla’s demands, or the activist’s protests, rather than truly enacting it. The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art. As a consequence, art stands in a dubious relation to necessity—and to time itself. It is something to do, yes, but when it is done, and whether it is done at all, is generally considered a question for artists alone. An attempt to connect the artist’s labor with the work of truly laboring people is frequently made but always strikes me as tenuous, with the fundamental dividing line being this question of the clock. Labor is work done by the clock (and paid by it, too). Art takes time and divides it up as art sees fit. It is something to do. But the crisis has taken this familiar division between the time of art and the time of work and transformed it. Now there are essential workers—who do not need to seek out something to do; whose task is vital and unrelenting—and there are the rest of us, all with a certain amount of time on our hands. (Not to mention an economic time bomb, which, for many people, exploded within the first few weeks—within the first few days. One of the radical political possibilities of our new, revelatory expanse of “free” time—as many have noted—is that it might create a collective demand to reassess and reconfigure, as a society, how we protect the rights of those whose work exists only in the present moment, without security or protection against unknown futures, the most obvious unknown future being “sick leave.”) The rest of us have been suddenly confronted with the perennial problem of artists: time, and what to do in it.

  What strikes me at once is how conflicted we feel about this new liberty and/or captivity. On the one hand, like pugs who have been lifted out of a body of water, our little limbs keep pumping on, as they did when we were hurrying off to our workplaces. Do we know how to stop? Those of us from puritan cultures feel “work must be done,” and so we make the cake, or start the gardening project, or begin negotiation with the other writer in the house for those kid-free hours each day in which to work on “something.” We make banana bread, we sew dresses, we go for a run, we complete all the levels of Minecraft, we do something, then photograph that something, and not infrequently put it online. Reactions are mixed, even in our own hearts. Even as we do something, we simultaneously accuse ourselves: you use this extremity as only another occasion for self-improvement, another pointless act of self-realization. But isn’t it the case that everybody finds their capabilities returning to them, even if it’s only the capacity to mourn what we have lost? We had delegated so much.

  It seems it would follow that writers—so familiar with empty time and with being alone—should manage this situation better than most. Instead, in the first week I found out how much of my old life was about hiding from life. Confronted with the problem of life served neat, without distraction or adornment or superstructure, I had almost no idea of what to do with it. Back in the playpen, I carved out meaning by creating artificial deprivations within time, the kind usually provided for people by the real limitations of their real jobs. Things like “a firm place to be at nine a.m. every morning” or a “boss who tells you what to do.” In the absence of these fixed elements, I’d make up hard things to do, or things to abstain from. Artificial limits and so on. Running is what I know. Writing is what I know. Conceiving self-implemented schedules: teaching day, reading day, writing day, repeat. What a dry, sad, small idea of a life. And how exposed it looks, now that the people I love are in the same room to witness the way I do time. The way I’ve done it all my life.

  * * *

  • • •

  FOR ME, THE cliché is true: only way out is through. Trying to preserve some “space for yourself” in the crowded domestic sphere feels like obsessively cupping your hands around thin air. You carve it out, the time you need, after much anxiety and debate, and get into the separate space and look between your hands and there it is—nothing. An empty victory. At the end of April, in a powerful essay by another writer, Ottessa Moshfegh, I read this line about love: “Without it, life is just ‘doing time.’” I
don’t think she intended by this only romantic love, or parental love, or familial love or really any kind of love in particular. At least, I read it in the Platonic sense: Love with a capital L, an ideal form and essential part of the universe—like “Beauty” or the color red—from which all particular examples on earth take their nature. Without this element present, in some form, somewhere in our lives, there really is only time, and there will always be too much of it. Busyness will not disguise its lack. Even if you’re working from home every moment God gives—even if you don’t have a minute to spare—still all of that time, without love, will feel empty and endless.

  I write because . . . well, the best I can say for it is it’s a psychological quirk of mine developed in response to whatever personal failings I have. But it can’t ever meaningfully fill the time. There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love. The difficulties and complications of love—as they exist on the other side of this wall, away from my laptop—is the task that is before me, although task is a poor word for it, for unlike writing, its terms cannot be scheduled, preplanned or determined by me. Love is not something to do, but something to be experienced, and something to go through—that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly. Here is this novel, made with love. Here is this banana bread, made with love. If it weren’t for this habit of indirection, of course, there would be no culture in this world, and very little meaningful pleasure for any of us. Although the most powerful art, it sometimes seems to me, is an experience and a going-through; it is love comprehended by, expressed and enacted through the artwork itself, and for this reason has perhaps been more frequently created by people who feel themselves to be completely alone in this world—and therefore wholly focused on the task at hand—than by those surrounded by “loved ones.” Such art is rare: we can’t all sit cross-legged like Buddhists day and night meditating on ultimate matters.* Or I can’t. But I also don’t want to just do time anymore, the way I used to.

  And yet, in my case, I can’t let it go: old habits die hard. I can’t rid myself of the need to do “something,” to make “something,” to feel that this new expanse of time hasn’t been “wasted.” Still, it’s nice to have company. Watching this manic desire to make or grow or do “something,” that now seems to be consuming everybody, I do feel comforted to discover I’m not the only person on this earth who has no idea what life is for, nor what is to be done with all this time aside from filling it.

  Suffering Like Mel Gibson

  THE MISERY IS very precisely designed, and different for each person, and if you didn’t know better you’d say the gods of comedy and tragedy had a hand in it. The single human, in the city apartment, thinks, I have never known such loneliness. The married human, in the country place with partner and children, dreams of isolation within isolation. All the artists with children—who treasured isolation as the most precious thing they owned—find out what it is to live without privacy and without time. The writer learns how not to write. The actor not to act. The painter how never to see her studio and so on. The artists without children are delighted by all the free time, for a time, until time itself begins to take on an accusatory look, a judgmental cast, because the fact is it is hard to fill all this time sufficiently, given the sufferings of others. And besides, now there is no clocking off ever, and no drowning of artistic anxiety in a party or conversation or frantic exercise. Married men are confronted with the infinite reality of their wives, who cannot now be exchanged, even mentally, for a strange girl walking down the street. Her face, her face, her face. Your face, your face, your face. The only relief is two faces facing forwards, towards the screen. New lovers for the first time wonder about love. Is love enough? Perhaps a dog should be added to this endless pas de deux? Or some other living creature? Young people hunger for the touch of strangers—of anyone. Club kids go to bed at nine. Older people, surrounded by generations of family, dream of exactly the same empty couch that is, elsewhere, right now, at this very moment, the purest torture for some lucky, desperate, fortunate, lonely, selfish, enviable, self-indulgent, privileged, bereft student. Married divorce lawyers go to war over who will work when. The children whose parents’ divorces these same lawyers once arranged now move through the silent streets being driven from one isolation to another and back again, a metaphor for the folly of human relations they are unlikely ever to forget. The night-shift worker with three children under the age of six stops marking the border between days and nights or between one week and the next. There is only: work. The single mother with the single child finds the role of child and adult passing fluidly around their small, shared space, with more ease and fluctuation than either party had ever thought possible. The widower enters a second widowhood. The pensioner an early twilight. Everybody learns the irrelevance of these matters next to “real suffering.”

  * * *

  • • •

  JUST BEFORE THE global shit hit the fan, we were in a long, involved cultural conversation about “privilege.” We were teaching ourselves how to be more aware of the relative nature of various forms of privilege, and their dependence on intersections of class, race, gender and so on. As clarifying as this conversation often was, it strikes me that it cannot now be applied, without modification, to the category of suffering. The temptation to overlay the first discourse upon the second is strong: privilege and suffering have a lot in common. They both manifest as bubbles, containing a person and distorting their vision. But it is possible to penetrate the bubble of privilege and even pop it—whereas the suffering bubble is impermeable. Language, logic, argument, rationale and relative perspective itself are no match for it. Suffering applies itself directly to its subject and will not be shamed out of itself or eradicated by righteous argument, no matter how objectively correct that argument may be.

  Everyone has an anecdote about privilege they like to tell, a moment when they realized they, or somebody else, were seeing through a veil of assumption and/or relative ignorance. Mine is minor but I like it. Once upon a time when my kids were still small I was standing in line for a sandwich at Subway, with my son strapped to my body. In front of me, two women—whom I took to be African-American and South Asian respectively—were having a conversation. Nosy as I am about other people’s lives, I was listening in. To my ear they were obviously working-class women, both with a robust sense of humor and plenty of lively opinions. They were great to listen to. And they happened to have landed on one of my favorite subjects, over which, back then, I frequently liked to ride my high horse: technology and children.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” the black lady said to the brown lady, “I’m walking down 8th and here’s this white lady with a kid in a buggy, couldn’t have been more than nine months old, and here’s this kid just sitting in there and he’s holding an iPad.” The brown lady laughed, groaned and rolled her eyes: “Oh my God. These people are really something.” “Can you believe that shit?” asked the black lady, and it took everything I had to restrain myself and not join in this horrified assessment of the incompetent parenting of rich people, too lazy or busy to relate to their own babies, giving damaging, mind-altering technology to infants. Infants! “Nine hundred dollars!” cried the brown lady, with real disgust. “Imagine giving something worth nine hundred dollars to a baby.” “These people got rent money to burn,” confirmed the first lady, and together they laughed ruefully at the profligate fools of 8th Street.

  The profligate fool behind them hung her head in relative shame. And then laughed at herself. In my privilege, I had mistaken one kind of ethical argument for another. An especially bracing experience for me, as only a few years earlier I would not have made such a mistake. Class is a bubble, formed by privilege, shaping and manipulating your conception of reality. But it can at least be brought to mind; acknowledged, comprehended, even atoned for through transformative action. By comparing
your relative privilege with that of others you may be able to modify both your world and the worlds outside of your world—if the will is there to do it. Suffering is not like that. Suffering is not relative; it is absolute. Suffering has an absolute relation to the suffering individual—it cannot be easily mediated by a third term like “privilege.” If it could, the CEO’s daughter would never starve herself, nor the movie idol ever put a bullet in his own brain. Early on in the crisis, I read a news story concerning a young woman of only seventeen, who had killed herself three weeks into lockdown, because she “couldn’t go out and see her friends.” She was not a nurse, with inadequate PPE and a long commute, arriving at a ward of terrified people, bracing herself for a long day of death. But her suffering, like all suffering, was an absolute in her own mind, and applied itself to her body and mind as if uniquely shaped for her, and she could not overcome it and so she died.

  * * *

  • • •

  AROUND THE same time that I read that news story, I was sent a meme that made me laugh out loud: a photograph of Mel Gibson, in a director’s chair, calmly talking to Jesus Christ himself. Jesus (also in a director’s chair) was patiently listening while soaked from head to toe in blood and wearing his crown of thorns.* The caption read: “Explaining to my friends with kids under six what it’s been like isolating alone.” As a rule of social etiquette, when confronted with a pixelated screen of a dozen people, all of them inquiring, somewhat half-heartedly, as to “how you are,” it is appropriate to make the expected, decent and accurate claim that you are fine and privileged, lucky compared to so many others, inconvenienced, yes, melancholy often, but not suffering. Mel Gibson but not Christ. Even Christ, twenty feet in the air and bleeding all over himself, no doubt looked about him and wondered whether his agonies, when all was said and done, were relatively speaking in fact better than those of the thieves and beggars to his left and right whose sufferings long predated their present crucifixions and who had no hope (unlike Christ) of an improved post-cross situation. . . . But when the bad day in your week finally arrives—and it comes to all—by which I mean, that particular moment when your sufferings, as puny as they may be in the wider scheme of things, direct themselves absolutely and only to you, as if precisely designed to destroy you and only you, at that point it might be worth allowing yourself the admission of the reality of suffering, if not for yourself, exactly, then in preparation for that next painful bout of videoconferencing, so that you don’t roll your eyes or laugh or puke while listening to what some other person seems to think is pain.