Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Among The Trees

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: I've loved the company of trees all my life, their singularity and community, their slow growth and decay, their extraordinary diversity of lifespans, their changing seasonal colors of leaves and intertwined rootedness, their hospitality to other lives, their responsiveness to breeze and wind. As a child I loved to climb them, swing from their sturdy branches, find nooks in which to contemplate, read, find refuge, soften my soul, allow my imagination to wander.

[I wanted to be a forest ranger, living atop a tower in a room of, say, 200+  square feet, with a 360-degree view, caring for the forest that surrounded me on all sides, forest trails open for exploration, resupply and companionship. Hiking forest paths is still my favorite form of recreation. I was born and spent my earliest childhood years in the Pacific Northwest, and came especially - virtually lifelong - to admire the wonderful tangle of California live oaks and to stand in awe of redwoods and giant sequoia, of which the oldest recorded lifespan was an astonishing 3,200 years. Now in my later adulthood, after too many and too stumbling - but also nourishing - moves, I am settled again in the land of my birth, grateful to have come full circle.] 

[See "Comments" at the bottom of this post.]

 

Among The Trees

by Carl Phillips

Emergence Magazine: Ecology, Culture and Spirituality (https://emergencemagazine.org)

In this extended meditation on the relationship between place and intimacy, the body and the word, Carl Phillips walks among trees to explore what can and cannot be known.

What happened back there, among the trees, is only as untenable as you allow yourself or just decide to believe it is. It happened, and now it’s over. And the end feels—to you, at least—both like the end of a long pilgrimage and like the end of a well-reasoned, irrefutable argument, which is its own form of pilgrimage. Don’t both depend on stamina and faith, in the right proportions? Wasn’t the point, at the end, persuasion?

I used to speak in terms of shadowlands, by which I meant, I think, some space where what transpires between two bodies and what gets transacted almost look the same. I’d say a thing like

There’s a kind of shadowland that one body makes, entering

another; and there’s a shadowland the body contains always

within itself, without resolution—as mystery a little more

often, perhaps, should be …

and I’d call it a poem, and it looked like one, but how it felt was more like saying aloud the words “rescue me” long enough that it almost seemed plausible that mere saying could turn the light to twilight, and the twilight dark. I lived in the world that, for lack of a prettier word, I’d call tangible, where risk meant risk, it seemed, and violation meant violation, not psychological but solid things, for they each cast a shadow as only a solid thing, so I’d been told, could, though I had tried to touch them—violation, risk—and each time my hands touched nothing.

MY EARLIEST MEMORY of trees is of a particular fig tree in the yard of the first house I remember, in Portland, Oregon. I was five, at the most. Sometimes what I remember is playing in the shade of it, and at other times the bees that seemed to bloom from inside the windfalls—though it seems now to have been less the wind that brought the fruit down but the weight of ripeness itself, as if sweetness, too much sweetness, meant mistake, punishment therefore; for hours, I’d watch the bees enter and leave the split-open sides, and how the figs looked lonely, once the bees had gone, as if to be plundered meant at least not being alone …

One evening, instead of coming inside when called, I climbed the fig tree, wearing only a tee shirt and underpants. It seemed
like a game, to be up in the tree, and my parents not able to find me, calling my name as they wandered the yard. And then somehow, I fell, and then suddenly stopped falling: my underwear had caught on a branch, saving me from hitting the ground, but holding me in midair, unable to get down. The way I remember it, my mother told my father to get a ladder.

What’s very clear in memory is my father saying I should hang there in the tree for a bit, to learn a lesson about disobeying my parents.

I find no evidence, in my sixty years of knowing him, that my father is particularly attentive to historical resonances when it comes to our daily lives, but I can’t help thinking about the place of trees in African-American history, as the site for lynching. How strange for my father, an African American, to find it a fitting punishment to leave his son hanging in a tree at night.

My earliest memory of humiliation is of a particular fig tree in the yard of the first house I remember. Who can say how related this is to my refusal, all my life, to believe forgiveness exists?

Some trees are compasses, and some are flags. If a flag tells you where you are, a compass can potentially tell you how to get there or how to find someplace else. A flag, in marking a spot, seems more definitive, a form of punctuation; a compass implies movement, navigation. I know a man who, whenever he needs to write, or cry, or think—really think—goes to a
willow in his local park and hides beneath its draped branches. He goes there so often, you could almost say he’s become part of the willow; he seems a willow himself; he marks a place in my life where I stopped to rest, once, but I couldn’t stay. Then there’s another man, long ago now. His body a forest when seen from the air in a small plane, so that it’s possible to get close enough to see where the oaks give way to poplar trees, or where, if you follow the pines far enough, they’ll open out to a field across which you can see the ocean. I couldn’t have found my way here without him.

DESPITE MY CHILDHOOD mishap with the fig tree, and despite fairy tales, in which the forest so often contains danger—witches ready to shove children into ovens, wolves masquerading as harmless grandmothers—I’ve had a love of trees all my life. Throughout high school, I lived in a house in the woods in Massachusetts, and even on the darker mornings of winter what kept me from being frightened was the trees themselves—mostly scrub pines, as we called them there, with struggling oaks scattered among them. Unlike the kids at school, the trees remained silent as I passed, and I took this as a sign of acceptance. Irrational, sure—but in my feeling so unlike everyone else at school, in my confused wrestling with what I felt was real but I couldn’t name precisely, why not take silence for acceptance? Among the trees loneliness could be itself, in the open—so could strangeness—even as both remained hidden from the rest of the world for the time it took me to pass through the woods to the bus stop. As I walked, I’d sing to the trees, loudly at first, then more and more softly the closer I got to where the woods gave out, until all I could hear was whatever wind there was through the leaves and needles. A sound like the trees unable to sing back, but trying to.

As with myth, fairy tales often seem designed to explain something very real in surreal terms. The story of Red Riding Hood might as easily be a way to warn about the fact of dangerous animals in the woods as to suggest that potential criminals might be encountered. The secrecy that a forest provides makes it the perfect setting for crime. Also for intimacy, which has often been deemed a crime. It makes sense that woods and forests have long been a queer space. Queer, not just in the sense of strangeness or alienation—going back to my relationship to the woods in high school—but in terms of sexuality, the woods as a space in which to hunt for sex. What is cruising, if not a form of hunting, if not to pass, as animal (the act of sex is perhaps our most animal manifestation, as humans), in pursuit of another human who has chosen for the moment to yield more entirely to the animal that each of us carries inside?

Was like when the body surrenders to risk, that moment when an unwillingness to refuse can seem no different from an inability to, though they are not the same—inability, unwillingness. To have said otherwise doesn’t make it true, or even make it count as true. “Yes, but what does the truth matter now,” I whispered, stepping further inside what, by then, was night, almost. The tamer animals would soon lie down again, and the wild go free.

It's not just the convenience of the woods—its ability to conceal, to keep a secret—that makes it a likely site for sexual behavior that isn’t societally condoned. Trees are utterly natural, or the collections of trees called woods and forests tend, anyway, not to have been artificially constructed (as compared with parks or public gardens). And this natural context for sexual intimacy can give, if not a sense of wholesomeness exactly, then a sense of permission, at least, to what can feel like—what we’ve been made to feel is—transgression; if only temporarily, the trees erase the shame that drove us to seek hiddenness in the first place. Or if shame didn’t drive us there, a reasonable fear likely did. And then—remember?—that well-worn path where we found one another, the trees to either side like a lengthy convoy of fears that kept diminishing, the more south they shuffled—until there was no fear.

 

At this point in my life, I’m not always sure how much of what I think about my life among trees—in forests, in woods—actually happened, how much is imagined, and how much is what I’ve read and somehow superimposed over my own actual experience—everything from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—the forest as the site of quest and conquest, riddle and answer—to those passages in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings where so much travel is done under cover of night through forests. In the Tolkien, especially, while there is plenty of potential danger, so many of the scenes have to do with camaraderie and trust and an intimacy that isn’t sexual at all. Or I think about Randall Jarrell, whose poetry often revisits fairy tale, and seems especially fascinated with what goes on in the woods—specifically, Jarrell seems to want to rewrite fairy tale and the psychology of it. The forest is an example of “the lost world” that he’s always seeking, where the witch who would kill children is transformed. Here’s the end of his “The House in the Wood”:¹

Here at the bottom of the world, what was before the world

And will be after, holds me to its black

Breasts and rocks me: the oven is cold, the cage is empty,

In the House in the Wood, the witch and her child sleep.

The house is held by the wood, the mother and child are held by the house, perhaps the mother is holding her child. Which is to say the poem’s in part about enclosure as a form of security, and about nurture, the very opposite of what the witch conventionally stands for. The wood, in effect, reverses evil to the good it began as, or that’s the wish, a human one, with which the wood in the end has very little to do. In that same poem, Jarrell reminds us that

… after the last leaf,

The last light—for each year is leafless,

Each day is lightless, at the last—the wood begins

Its serious existence: it has no path,

No house, no story; it resists comparison …

So there are the trees of literature, floating somewhere in my head, always. Then there are all of my actual adventures and misadventures among trees throughout my life. And then there are the stories that maybe began with a shred of fact but got transformed in the course of my making a poem. Jarrell, again: “Which one’s the mockingbird? which one’s the world?”

They moved together in groups, and singly.

They moved among the trees as among the parts of a language they’d forgotten they knew.

Pitch pine, sycamore, maple, oak, and birch.

Humiliation, loneliness, permission, sex, and shame.

Memory, innocence, forgiveness. Willow. Willow.

Another way of thinking, though, about this interplay between reality and imagination when it comes to memory is that I’ve lost track of what happened, versus what serves as camouflage for what happened—camouflage in the form not just of trees but of the context they become for the stories that I tell in poems. In a sense, the poems themselves are trees, or tree-like, in that they become a place where what’s difficult and/or forbidden can have a place both to be hidden and within which to feel free to unfurl and extend itself. Here’s how I spoke of the forest once:

 … I lived, in those days, at the forest’s edge—

metaphorically, so it can sometimes seem now, though

the forest was real, as my life beside it was. I spent

much of my time listening to the sounds of random, un-

knowable things dropping or being dropped from, variously,

a middling height or a great one until, by winter, it was

just the snow falling, each time like a new, unnecessary

taxonomy or syntax for how to parse what’s plain, snow

from which the occasional lost hunter would emerge

every few or so seasons, and—just once—a runaway child

whom I gave some money to and told no one about,

having promised …

 

And here is a different way since then:

There’s a forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow.

Regrets find no shelter there.

The trees, when they sway,

sway like the manes of horses when a storm’s not far.

There’s no reason to stay there,

nothing worth going to see,

but if you want to, you can pass through the forest

in the better part of a long day.

Who would want to, though?

Story, versus information. Lyric, versus didactic. Long, periodic sentences, versus clipped, straightforward ones. Catalpa trees aren’t hawthorns. I’m not the man I was.

They lay where they’d fallen, beneath the forest’s canopy. And at first when they woke, it was as if the forest, besides containing them, was itself contained, as in a snow-globe when it’s been shaken and just now set down, except instead of snow, just shadows falling, like snow, in pieces that it was as useless to try to hold on to as catching snow on the tongue—“to catch us is at once to know us and to lose us,” said the shadows, falling like snow, gathering in shadowy, steep banks on which the light, being light, depended.

To know where we came from—and what we came through—doesn’t have to mean we know any more clearly where we are, except not there, anymore. The forest begins where civilization ends, so I’d been told. Past here be monsters. Past the meadow; past harvest. Past daylight into forest light—for it’s never all darkness, beneath the trees, not even at night; not even on a moonless night. Song travels differently in forest light. Everything’s different.

That the forest itself contains no apology doesn’t mean you’re not hurt. Or I’m not sorry. Or I didn’t hurt you.

Toward the end of Marilyn Nelson’s poem “My Grandfather Walks in the Woods,” the grandfather asks the trees a question, and “They answer / with voices like wind / blowing away from him.” That’s one way of putting it, for their voices can sound like wind. What matters more, I think, is that in the language of trees there’s no grammatical mood: questions, statements, commands—it’s all song, stripped of anything like judgment, intention, or need. This makes translation especially difficult. Though I know parts of many of their songs, I’ve only three by heart: “Yes, you can tell me anything,” and “No, even we can’t help you,” and “If I were you, I’d be the lostest, lostest boy I know.”

In the dream, I’d bought a large house in a large city, a house that came with a backyard so thick with trees that by summer, by then in full leaf, they blocked all views of the high-rises to the north, of the neighbors to the west, while to the east through the leaves of an old pear tree I could see the cathedral dome, on top of it a cross caught the sunlight and tossed it back. Besides the pear, there’s a high-rise-sized pin oak, two dogwoods, two catalpas, a chestnut, before the yard ends in a stand of bamboo I’ll eventually lose almost all of, as the dream continues. When I wake, it’s as if to another dream, though it feels no different: I become briefly silver, as in what the leaves mean, beneath. Bells are ringing. No, the leaves are falling. Now the bells start ringing. Sudden scattering, all around me, of leaves, all gold.

 

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips (1959 -)

Carl Phillips is the author of Wild Is the Wind, Reconnaissance, Silverchest, and Riding Westward. His collection The Rest of Love won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Lambda Literary Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

 

Jane Hirshfield: A poem about finding life while we shelter in place

A poem about finding life while we shelter in place

Jane Hirshfield 

March 23, 2020

 

 

Award-winning poet, essayist and translator Jane Hirshfield lives in Mill Valley.

Editor’s note: In the days following the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place order, The San Francisco Chronicle contacted poet Jane Hirshfield, asking if she would write about this rare and unsettling experience. The celebrated Mill Valley writer replied by offering a poem she’d already written, that morning, reminding us that sometimes poetry can summarize a moment with great poignancy.

 

Today, When I Could Do Nothing

Today, when I could do nothing,
I saved an ant.

It must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.

A morning paper is still an essential service.

I am not an essential service.

I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.

It must have first walked
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.

Then across the laptop computer — warm —
then onto the back of a cushion.

Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.

Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?

It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through swiftness and air.

Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom—
how is your life, I wanted to ask.

I lifted it, took it outside.

This first day when I could do nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.

 

• Jane Hirshfield's ninth book of poems, Ledger, has just been released by Knopf.

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: Rebecca Solnit is a freelance writer who has written more than 20 books on subjects including hope, feminism, the environment, politics, place, art and human rights. Among her awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and a National Book Critics Award in criticism.

[Readers will see that my postings on the climate crisis often in these last months have come to focus as well – almost inevitably – on the coronavirus crisis as well. Together they are the two preeminent challenges of our times.]

 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/14/mutual-aid-coronavirus-pandemic-rebecca-solnit

The Way We Get Through This Is Together

The way we get through this is together: the rise of mutual aid under coronavirus. Amid this unfolding disaster, we have seen countless acts of kindness and solidarity. It’s this spirit of generosity that will help guide us out of this crisis and into a better future.

Rebecca Solnit
Thursday, 14 May 2020
The Guardian

People behaving badly is a staple of the news, and the pandemic has given us plenty of lurid snapshots. In the US alone, we have seen protesters with guns in Michigan’s capital demanding an end to lockdown, anti-vaxxer women in a frenzy at California’s capitol, opportunists stockpiling hand sanitiser to resell for profit.

One of the biggest cliches about disasters is that they reveal civilisation as a thin veneer, beneath which lies brutal human nature. From this perspective, the best we can hope for from most people under crisis is selfish indifference; at worst, they will swiftly turn to violence. Our worst instincts must be repressed. This becomes a justification for authoritarianism and heavy-handed policing.

But studies of historical disasters have shown that this is not how most people actually behave. There are nearly always selfish and destructive people, and they are often in power, because we have created systems that reward that kind of personality and those principles. But the great majority of people in ordinary disasters behave in ways that are anything but selfish, and if we’re stuck with veneer as a metaphor, then it peels off to reveal a lot of creative and generous altruism and brilliant grassroots organising. With the global pandemic, these empathic urges and actions are wider and deeper and more consequential than ever.

A dozen years ago, the term “mutual aid” was, as far as I can tell, used mostly by anarchists and scholars. Somehow it has migrated into general usage in recent years and now, in the midst of the pandemic, it is everywhere. Mutual aid has generally meant aid offered in a spirit of solidarity and reciprocity, often coming from within struggling communities, empowering those aided, and with an eye towards liberation and social change. Generally it meant volunteer coalitions doing work such as rebuilding or food distribution or supporting resistance camps. One of the most striking aspects of this global crisis is how many forms of aid and solidarity there are. These new forms of generosity we are seeing – organising, networks, projects, donations, support and outreach – are numerous beyond counting, a superbloom of altruistic engagement.

This work has been made more difficult by the great withdrawal – the empty schools, shops, streets and offices. And that withdrawal is itself altruism in action – a withdrawal carried out by billions for the benefit of their communities, as well as their own safety. In the initial phase, we withdrew from the spaces we share out of solidarity: we moved apart to come together. We intentionally produced, in the form of business and school shutdowns and staying home, an unprecedented economic calamity as an alternative to accepting mass death.

In March, many small business owners and service workers in the US willingly shut down their enterprises, and thereby their livelihood, even before the official orders came. In April, 50 restaurant owners in the Atlanta area publicly rejected the Georgia governor’s invitation to reopen. Together they took out an ad in a local newspaper and wrote: “We agree that it’s in the best interest of our employees, our guests, our community and our industry to keep our dining rooms closed at this time.”

For some, staying home may be a strain, but for others it means financial ruin. Sacrificing your own financial security for the common good was a solemn commitment that people made across the world. It was one of the things that made this crisis distinct: how often refraining, not doing, not going anywhere, not continuing activities, was also an act of public-spirited generosity. This is willing sacrifice for the public good. But people have been doing more than that.

In March, the UK’s National Health Service called for 250,000 volunteers to sign up to help seniors, people who were isolating and medical staff who needed deliveries. More than three times that many signed up. Appreciation for the NHS grew even stronger, and the widespread weekly rounds of applause for its workers became one of the welcome interruptions of isolation. In mid-March, a website was launched listing several hundred new mutual aid groups across the country, so people could search their local area.

“In my area in London, we have had so many [mutual aid groups] that we’ve spun off down to street level,” one Londoner told me. “Our two-street collective has done shopping, picked up medicines, created an Easter-egg -in-the-window hunt for kids, all to help one another.” Another wrote: “Hackney in London has all the usual stuff like grocery buying and support, plus people are sourcing donated phones for people in hospital, laptops for kids who need them to access home learning and cars for healthcare staff redeployed to the makeshift Covid-19 hospital.”

A few weeks ago, I heard someone complain that Lexington, Kentucky, had four mutual aid groups – they were concerned that so many volunteers would be redundant; I was awestruck by the abundance. In the course of writing this piece, I looked at various new mutual aid projects: meal deliveries to the elderly in Paterson, New Jersey; the Twin Cities Queer and Trans Mutual Aid group in Minneapolis-Saint Paul; projects to aid the Hopi, Zuni and Navajo on reservations in the US south-west; a Washington state project to support the undocumented; sex workers organising to raise emergency funds.

I saw people stuck at home in isolation teach dance and drawing classes, tell stories, play music online to encourage others quarantining in place; Italians singing together from their balconies and Iranians reciting poetry from theirs; a young native Nevadan going fishing to feed members of her Pyramid Lake Paiute tribe. Most of us have seen, or performed, one-off acts of kindness – running an errand for a frail neighbour, chalking a cheerful message on the pavement, picking up the shopping bill for the struggling couple at the checkout, donating to a fundraiser for an acquaintance who has been laid off or taken ill. But such individual actions are not enough to address this triple catastrophe of a viral pandemic, a financial collapse and the emotional, educational and other consequences of the great withdrawal.

Thus there are also people building organisations to provide broader, ongoing practical aid – such as the young people in more than a dozen US cities delivering groceries and supplies to older and immunocompromised people via a network called Zoomers to Boomers – and others organising emotional support for those who feel isolated, including the UK’s adopt-a-grandparent programme. There are new groups, projects, organisations and networks, and old ones retooling for the crisis.

Fiji-based climate organiser Thelma Young-Lutunatabua told me about the return of traditional Fijian forms of equitable, cooperative food distribution to make sure no one was left out. “The way we get through this is together,” she said.

Fifteen years ago, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a mutual aid organisation called Common Ground Relief was founded by a handful of people inside the damaged area, including the former Black Panther Malik Rahim. (In the US, perhaps the most famous past examples of mutual aid are the Black Panther party’s 1960s-era food programmes to assuage hunger in inner-city neighbourhoods.) The group’s slogan was “solidarity not charity”, a phrase inspired by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano: “I don’t believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.”

As a definition of mutual aid’s ideals, “solidarity not charity” surfaces constantly today. Charity often implies that the afflicted population is powerless or incompetent to address its own needs. Sometimes, it can take away confidence and pride even as it gives tangible aid. Solidarity is, first of all, an affirmation that we are in this together, and mutual aid demonstrates that even in crisis we have strength and capacity to care for ourselves. The term comes from the anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin’s 1902 book Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution, which argues that aiding and protecting others and serving the needs of the group rather than the individual has been essential to the survival of many species, and is evident in early and traditional human societies.

In the time of coronavirus, mutual aid has been used to describe myriad new volunteer cooperative projects that have arisen in response to disaster. But the landscape of outreach is complex and varied. Take, for example, the creation and circulation of masks. There is a whole spectrum of mask economies from corrupt profiteering and outright theft – including by the US federal government– to the very different world of creative mutual aid. Many of us, myself included, have made a few masks for those we know. Others have gone into bulk production.

San Francisco local government supervisor Matt Haney fundraised and organised the distribution of thousands of masks for the impoverished, densely housed – and houseless – residents of the city’s Tenderloin district, which he represents. Adriana Camarena, a lawyer from Mexico City, realised that the undocumented day labourers near her home in San Francisco’s Mission district had few supplies and little access to health information to meet the crisis. So she began making and distributing cloth masks and hand sanitiser, and giving brief educational talks to go with them.

Meanwhile, the artist and art professor Stephanie Syjuco settled into mask mass production to meet the needs of people in Oakland and Berkeley, starting with masks for a group working to address food insecurity among UC Berkeley students. By late April, she had personally made 700 masks. And the Auntie Sewing Squad, founded by Los Angeles performance artist Kristina Wong, now includes more than 500 members, and has produced more than 20,000 masks, by Wong’s count.

The aunties (and uncles, but mostly aunties) began by making masks for hospital workers, and then for farmworkers, people released by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) or getting out of prison, immigrant communities and other vulnerable groups. It’s a model of decentralised, volunteer-driven organising: whoever finds a need obtains pledges from makers until the required number is reached, and the beautifully made masks are gathered and shipped to their destination. Many pay for their own materials and shipping, and donations support others. This week, the squad is sending a van full of supplies, including masks, materials and three sewing machines, to the Navajo nation, which has been hard hit by the virus. The Navajo is just one of several indigenous communities they have reached out to.

The Auntie Sewing Squad even expanded to include cooking to support those who sew. “When you’ve been bent over a sewing machine for 12 hours, a nice order of pad thai is really welcome,” one auntie told me.

The US mask-makers, like donors to food-distribution programmes, are in part compensating for governmental failure. Had the federal government prepared for crisis, and supported the scientific advice on how to respond to pandemics, the need for these mutual aid efforts could have been smaller. There has been much talk of the underlying health conditions that make individuals more vulnerable to Covid-19. The US as a whole has underlying conditions – systemic racism, poverty and financial precariousness, lack of access to healthcare and the internet for rural and poor families – that have made this crisis far worse than it should have been. The old conservative argument against social programmes was that these needs should be met by individual and independent institutions’ generosity. In unequal societies, these were never enough to meet the need.

What is noteworthy for me about this crisis is that there is no clear distinction between purely volunteer- and donation-driven projects, and a host of other endeavours trying to meet the needs of the moment. There are many ways that businesses and workers are stepping up or shifting what they do and how they do it, out of altruism. A Buddhist group in Tallahassee, Florida, raised $500,000 to purchase masks from China for medical workers in their area. The jet belonging to the New England Patriots football team brought 1.2m masks directly from China to circumvent the federal government’s outbidding of Massachusetts on personal protective equipment (PPE).

Elsewhere, the New York Times reported on Amish families who, as other jobs dried up, turned to mass-producing cloth masks, face shields and other PPE for the Cleveland clinic, which urgently needed them. (This, like the California government program that lets otherwise shuttered restaurants deliver meals to isolated senior citizens, is when aid becomes literally mutual, meeting needs on both sides of the interaction.) Then there are the 43 Pennsylvania factory workers who chose to isolate themselves in their workplace for a 28-day marathon of 12-hour days, during which they produced tens of millions of pounds of polypropylene, the raw material from which a lot of PPE is made. Like the Amish, they were paid for their work, and were working in intense new ways, fuelled by social commitment, to meet an urgent need. One of the workers said: “We’ve been getting messages on social media from nurses, doctors, emergency workers, saying thank you for what we’re doing. But we want to thank them for what they did and are continuing to do. That’s what made the time we were in there go by quickly, just being able to support them.”

During the final 1,000 days of the second world war, shipyard workers in the San Francisco Bay Area produced 1,000 warships – a warship a day. Something like that epic, urgent industry seems to be at work now, but outside the federal government, or any government. In early April, the Bay Area branch of the news site Hoodline reported: “On Thursday morning, two tons of rolled sheet plastic arrived at a warehouse in Alameda. By the end of the weekend, it had become 16,000 plastic face shields. That remarkable turnaround is entirely owed to self-organisation by Bay Area makers, who have transformed maker spaces, universities, fabrication shops and almost anyone with their own sewing machine, CNC machine or 3D printer into an ad-hoc corps of medical supply manufacturers.” The report called the self-organised effort involving industrial-design students and teachers a “distributed factory”. Such decentralised efforts, organised without top-down authority, are exemplary mutual aid.

In April, 14 nurses and seven doctors from the same institution set off for a one-month assignment on the Navajo reservation, whose residents are facing high levels of infection. They were coordinated by the existing UCSF Heal Initiative(Health, Equity, Action and Leadership), which works with impoverished and vulnerable communities from Haiti to Nepal. Its mission statement is: “We seek to embody solidarity and contribute to the movement for global health equity led by communities themselves.” This initiative, based on the principle of “solidarity not charity”, has been working with communities under stress for six years, and will still be there when the immediate crisis is over.

During “ordinary” disasters – a hurricane, an earthquake – there’s a phenomenon called volunteer convergence, whereby people eager to help gather in the impacted areas. Sometimes so many people and so much donated material shows up that they pose management problems for those at the centre of the crisis. This is not an ordinary disaster – the impacted area is all over the world, and convergence is banned – but people are showing up in many ways. Some of this work is always going on – there is always suffering and injustice to assuage, and there are always people trying to do so.

Even ordinary disasters never really end. There are many ways in which Hurricane Katrina’s impact on New Orleans and other parts of the gulf coast lasted – though there are, at least, some positive aspects to this lingering impact. The Common Ground Health Clinic spun off from Common Ground Relief. Fifteen years on, it’s still delivering free medical care in the New Orleans region.

The Covid-19 pandemic and economic crisis will not end – if ending means things going back to the way they were. Whatever “normal” meant on 1 January 2020, it will never return, and neither will millions of the jobs financed by the disposable income that has just dried up. It’s worth remembering that, in the past few decades, the return to 19th-century robber-baron capitalism – via the dismantling of social safety nets, and the transformation of education, healthcare and other basic human needs into for-profit schemes that served shareholders first – meant that everyday life had already become a disaster for too many billions of people before this crisis.

There is a long, rough road ahead. Without radical change, the way food, shelter, medical care and education are produced and distributed will be more unfair and more devastating than before. It seems likely that conservatives will argue for brutal austerity and libertarian abandonment of the most desperate, while the rest of us are going to have to argue for some form of post-capitalism that decouples meeting basic needs from wage labour – perhaps the kind of basic income that Spain is planning to introduce.

The devastating economic effect of the pandemic will make innovation essential, whether it is rethinking higher education or food distribution, or how to fund news media. The Green New Deal offers a model for how to move forward on jobs and leave fossil fuels behind as that sector founders and climate catastrophe looms. Protests in many fields – including nurses demanding PPE, and warehouse, delivery and food-service workers protesting against exploitative or unsafe working conditions – suggests that workers’ organisations may be gaining strength.

I believe the generosity and solidarity in action in the present moment offers a foreshadowing of what is possible – and necessary. The basic generosity and empathy of most ordinary people should be regarded as a treasure, a light and an energy source that can drive a better society, if it is recognised and encouraged. Mostly, it’s overlooked, undermined and sabotaged. Capitalism, and its octopus arms of entertainment, advertising and marketing, endeavour to reduce us to consumers. This means making us the kind of miserable, selfish, lonely people who seek fulfllment through buying stuff, and believe in competitiveness as a basic social force. Competitiveness, that driving word behind free-market ideology, means we are rivals and there is scarcity; each of us gets more by seeing that someone else gets less.

Competition is the antithesis of mutual aid, which is not only a practical tool but an ideological insurrection. The fact that even in places like the US, where these competitive, isolating messages have bombarded us for at least 150 years, millions still reach out in generosity, and are still moved to meet the needs that become visible in moments such as this, is testament to something about human nature and human possibility. Those urges are strong and deep, and they can be a foundation for something different. Indeed, they often have been before, when European social welfare was built up, when US social safety nets were created, and when people self-organised on smaller scales to take care of each other.

Some of that sense of urgency and shared destiny will fade away, as it often does after a disaster, but one of the important things to remember is that some of it was here before this pandemic. I sometimes think that capitalism is a catastrophe constantly being mitigated and cleaned up by mutual aid and kinship networks, by the generosity of religious and secular organisations, by the toil of human-rights lawyers and climate groups, and by the kindness of strangers. Imagine if these forces, this spirit, weren’t just the cleanup crew, but were the ones setting the agenda.

What I have seen after earlier disasters is that a lot of people aspire to “go home” and “back to normal”, but some find in the moment a sense of self and a sense of connection so meaningful that something about who they were and what they did in the crisis carries forward into how they live the rest of their life. Sometimes this is as intangible as a change of priorities and habits, and a new sense of agency; not uncommonly, it’s as substantial as a new coalition, a new network, a new set of policy priorities, a new political career or a decision to go into work that supports the whole. And even those who want things to get back to normal often find they are changed permanently in their sense of who they are, and what matters most. The pandemic marks the end of an era and the beginning of another – one whose harshness must be mitigated by a spirit of generosity. An artist hunched over her sewing machine, a young person delivering groceries on his bicycle, a nurse suiting up for the ICU, a doctor heading to the Navajo nation, a graduate student hip-deep in Pyramid Lake catching trout for elders, a programmer setting up a website to organise a community: the work is under way. It can be the basis for the future, if we can recognise the value of these urges and actions, recognise that things can and must change profoundly, and if we can tell other stories about who we are, what we want and what is possible.

 

It Could Happen Any Time

[Preface by John R. Boettiger: This is not the first time that my son Joshua has contributed to Reckonings, as you will see if you seek his name in "Search Reckonings" on the lower right of this page. I have plucked the following poem by William Stafford and Joshua's commentary from the website of his current congregation, Temple Emek Shalom in Ashland, Oregon (https://emekshalom.org/). What Joshua writes below, though written seven years ago on December 1, 2015, and in a different season, seems deeply appropriate to the time of crisis we are now experiencing. I also realize that today is the day of shabat in the Jewish weekly calendar, so I will close this preface with a longstanding prayer addressed to readers: Shabat Shalom. The traditional translation is “Good Sabbath.” This is a decent translation, but the phrase is very nuanced. ... So when someone wishes you Shabat Shalom, they are saying to you “May you dwell in completeness on this seventh day."]

 

It Could Happen Any Time

Rabbi Joshua Boettiger

12-1-15

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon.  It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could, you know.  That’s why we wake
and look out — no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

– William Stafford

 

Sometimes the world feels like a very scary place; sometimes we don’t know what to do with the rush of horrific news in our world that we may receive in the course of any given day. And we feel the truth that, as Stafford writes, “it could happen any time.” So that is true. We cannot deny that it is so. And we wake up and look out and know that there are no guarantees in this life.

And yet there is more that could befall us at any time, and is in fact, is extraordinarily more likely to actually happen: sunshine, love, salvation.

We look out our window now. Sometimes our fear for our world and our loved ones in it clouds and darkens our vision. This is just what it is to be alive. And every generation feels it and has felt it and will continue to feel it.

And yet there is morning, noon, evening. Each of them an indescribable miracle; a gift staring us right in the face. We cannot deny that this is true – the gift that is this life; the miraculous in what we call the mundane.

May we have the courage to be who we are and to be in the world as it is. Hanukah is a season of miracles. May we have the courage to meet the miraculous half-way.

The Coronavirus Is Rewriting Our Imaginations

[Prefatory note from John R. Boettiger: Bill McKibben wrote recently: “If there is one essay from the weeks of pandemic I wish I could make everyone read, it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s offering on The New Yorker’s Web site. No novelist has engaged as long or as successfully with the climate crisis.” Robinson’s essay is reprinted below.]

 What felt impossible has become thinkable. The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change as a civilization.

 By Kim Stanley Robinson

New Yorker

May 1, 2020

The critic Raymond Williams once wrote that every historical period has its own “structure of feeling.” How everything seemed in the nineteen-sixties, the way the Victorians understood one another, the chivalry of the Middle Ages, the world view of Tang-dynasty China: each period, Williams thought, had a distinct way of organizing basic human emotions into an overarching cultural system. Each had its own way of experiencing being alive.

In mid-March, in a prior age, I spent a week rafting down the Grand Canyon. When I left for the trip, the United States was still beginning to grapple with the reality of the coronavirus pandemic. Italy was suffering; the N.B.A. had just suspended its season; Tom Hanks had been reported ill. When I hiked back up, on March 19th, it was into a different world. I’ve spent my life writing science-fiction novels that try to convey some of the strangeness of the future. But I was still shocked by how much had changed, and how quickly.

Schools and borders had closed; the governor of California, like governors elsewhere, had asked residents to begin staying at home. But the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal. It was a change in the way we were looking at things, and it is still ongoing. The virus is rewriting our imaginations. What felt impossible has become thinkable. We’re getting a different sense of our place in history. We know we’re entering a new world, a new era. We seem to be learning our way into a new structure of feeling.

In many ways, we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it.

Now, all of a sudden, we’re acting fast as a civilization. We’re trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve—to avoid mass death. Doing this, we know that we’re living in a moment of historic importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives.

Actually, we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants. Now we feel it. The shift has to do with the concentration and intensity of what’s happening. September 11th was a single day, and everyone felt the shock of it, but our daily habits didn’t shift, except at airports; the President even urged us to keep shopping. This crisis is different. It’s a biological threat, and it’s global. Everyone has to change together to deal with it. That’s really history.

It seems as though science has been mobilized to a dramatic new degree, but that impression is just another way in which we’re lagging behind. There are 7.8 billion people alive on this planet—a stupendous social and technological achievement that’s unnatural and unstable. It’s made possible by science, which has already been saving us. Now, though, when disaster strikes, we grasp the complexity of our civilization—we feel the reality, which is that the whole system is a technical improvisation that science keeps from crashing down.

On a personal level, most of us have accepted that we live in a scientific age. If you feel sick, you go to a doctor, who is really a scientist; that scientist tests you, then sometimes tells you to take a poison so that you can heal—and you take the poison. It’s on a societal level that we’ve been lagging. Today, in theory, everyone knows everything. We know that our accidental alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, and that we need to move fast to dodge it. But we don’t act on what we know. We don’t want to change our habits. This knowing-but-not-acting is part of the old structure of feeling.

Now comes this disease that can kill anyone on the planet. It’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. Instantly, we’ve changed. As a society, we’re watching the statistics, following the recommendations, listening to the scientists. Do we believe in science? Go outside and you’ll see the proof that we do everywhere you look. We’re learning to trust our science as a society. That’s another part of the new structure of feeling.

Possibly, in a few months, we’ll return to some version of the old normal. But this spring won’t be forgotten. When later shocks strike global civilization, we’ll remember how we behaved this time, and how it worked. It’s not that the coronavirus is a dress rehearsal—it’s too deadly for that. But it is the first of many calamities that will likely unfold throughout this century. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel.

What shocks might be coming? Everyone knows everything. Remember when Cape Town almost ran out of water? It’s very likely that there will be more water shortages. And food shortages, electricity outages, devastating storms, droughts, floods. These are easy calls. They’re baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.

Imagine what a food scare would do. Imagine a heat wave hot enough to kill anyone not in an air-conditioned space, then imagine power failures happening during such a heat wave. (The novel I’ve just finished begins with this scenario, so it scares me most of all.) Imagine pandemics deadlier than the coronavirus. These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that we’re writing together—that’s another sign of the emerging structure of feeling.

Science-fiction writers don’t know anything more about the future than anyone else. Human history is too unpredictable; from this moment, we could descend into a mass-extinction event or rise into an age of general prosperity. Still, if you read science fiction, you may be a little less surprised by whatever does happen. Often, science fiction traces the ramifications of a single postulated change; readers co-create, judging the writers’ plausibility and ingenuity, interrogating their theories of history. Doing this repeatedly is a kind of training. It can help you feel more oriented in the history we’re making now. This radical spread of possibilities, good to bad, which creates such a profound disorientation; this tentative awareness of the emerging next stage—these are also new feelings in our time.

Memento mori: remember that you must die. Older people are sometimes better at keeping this in mind than younger people. Still, we’re all prone to forgetting death. It never seems quite real until the end, and even then it’s hard to believe. The reality of death is another thing we know about but don’t feel.

So this epidemic brings with it a sense of panic: we’re all going to die, yes, always true, but now perhaps this month! That’s different. Sometimes, when hiking in the Sierra, my friends and I get caught in a lightning storm, and, completely exposed to it, we hurry over the rocky highlands, watching lightning bolts crack out of nowhere and connect nearby, thunder exploding less than a second later. That gets your attention: death, all too possible! But to have that feeling in your ordinary, daily life, at home, stretched out over weeks—that’s too strange to hold on to. You partly get used to it, but not entirely. This mixture of dread and apprehension and normality is the sensation of plague on the loose. It could be part of our new structure of feeling, too.

Just as there are charismatic megafauna, there are charismatic mega-ideas. “Flatten the curve” could be one of them. Immediately, we get it. There’s an infectious, deadly plague that spreads easily, and, although we can’t avoid it entirely, we can try to avoid a big spike in infections, so that hospitals won’t be overwhelmed and fewer people will die. It makes sense, and it’s something all of us can help to do. When we do it—if we do it—it will be a civilizational achievement: a new thing that our scientific, educated, high-tech species is capable of doing. Knowing that we can act in concert when necessary is another thing that will change us.

People who study climate change talk about “the tragedy of the time horizon.” The tragedy is that we don’t care enough about those future people, our descendants, who will have to fix, or just survive on, the planet we’re now wrecking. We like to think that they’ll be richer and smarter than we are and so able to handle their own problems in their own time. But we’re creating problems that they’ll be unable to solve. You can’t fix extinctions, or ocean acidification, or melted permafrost, no matter how rich or smart you are. The fact that these problems will occur in the future lets us take a magical view of them. We go on exacerbating them, thinking—not that we think this, but the notion seems to underlie our thinking—that we will be dead before it gets too serious. The tragedy of the time horizon is often something we encounter, without knowing it, when we buy and sell. The market is wrong; the prices are too low. Our way of life has environmental costs that aren’t included in what we pay, and those costs will be borne by our descendents. We are operating a multigenerational Ponzi scheme.

And yet: “Flatten the curve.” We’re now confronting a miniature version of the tragedy of the time horizon. We’ve decided to sacrifice over these months so that, in the future, people won’t suffer as much as they would otherwise. In this case, the time horizon is so short that we are the future people. It’s harder to come to grips with the fact that we’re living in a long-term crisis that will not end in our lifetimes. But it’s meaningful to notice that, all together, we are capable of learning to extend our care further along the time horizon. Amid the tragedy and death, this is one source of pleasure. Even though our economic system ignores reality, we can act when we have to. At the very least, we are all freaking out together. To my mind, this new sense of solidarity is one of the few reassuring things to have happened in this century. If we can find it in this crisis, to save ourselves, then maybe we can find it in the big crisis, to save our children and theirs.

Margaret Thatcher said that “there is no such thing as society,” and Ronald Reagan said that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” These stupid slogans marked the turn away from the postwar period of reconstruction and underpin much of the bullshit of the past forty years.

We are individuals first, yes, just as bees are, but we exist in a larger social body. Society is not only real; it’s fundamental. We can’t live without it. And now we’re beginning to understand that this “we” includes many other creatures and societies in our biosphere and even in ourselves. Even as an individual, you are a biome, an ecosystem, much like a forest or a swamp or a coral reef. Your skin holds inside it all kinds of unlikely coöperations, and to survive you depend on any number of interspecies operations going on within you all at once. We are societies made of societies; there are nothing but societies. This is shocking news—it demands a whole new world view. And now, when those of us who are sheltering in place venture out and see everyone in masks, sharing looks with strangers is a different thing. It’s eye to eye, this knowledge that, although we are practicing social distancing as we need to, we want to be social—we not only want to be social, we’ve got to be social, if we are to survive. It’s a new feeling, this alienation and solidarity at once. It’s the reality of the social; it’s seeing the tangible existence of a society of strangers, all of whom depend on one another to survive. It’s as if the reality of citizenship has smacked us in the face.

As for government: it’s government that listens to science and responds by taking action to save us. Stop to ponder what is now obstructing the performance of that government. Who opposes it? Right now we’re hearing two statements being made. One, from the President and his circle: we have to save money even if it costs lives. The other, from the Centers for Disease Control and similar organizations: we have to save lives even if it costs money. Which is more important, money or lives? Money, of course! says capital and its spokespersons. Really? people reply, uncertainly. Seems like that’s maybe going too far? Even if it’s the common wisdom? Or was.

Some people can’t stay isolated and still do their jobs. If their jobs are important enough, they have to expose themselves to the disease. My younger son works in a grocery store and is now one of the front-line workers who keep civilization running.

My son is now my hero: this is a good feeling. I think the same of all the people still working now for the sake of the rest of us. If we all keep thinking this way, the new structure of feeling will be better than the one that’s dominated for the past forty years.

The neoliberal structure of feeling totters. What might a post-capitalist response to this crisis include? Maybe rent and debt relief; unemployment aid for all those laid off; government hiring for contact tracing and the manufacture of necessary health equipment; the world’s militaries used to support health care; the rapid construction of hospitals.

What about afterward, when this crisis recedes and the larger crisis looms? If the project of civilization—including science, economics, politics, and all the rest of it—were to bring all eight billion of us into a long-term balance with Earth’s biosphere, we could do it. By contrast, when the project of civilization is to create profit—which, by definition, goes to only a few—much of what we do is actively harmful to the long-term prospects of our species. Everyone knows everything. Right now pursuing profit as the ultimate goal of all our activities will lead to a mass-extinction event. Humanity might survive, but traumatized, interrupted, angry, ashamed, sad. A science-fiction story too painful to write, too obvious. It would be better to adapt to reality.

Economics is a system for optimizing resources, and, if it were trying to calculate ways to optimize a sustainable civilization in balance with the biosphere, it could be a helpful tool. When it’s used to optimize profit, however, it encourages us to live within a system of destructive falsehoods. We need a new political economy by which to make our calculations. Now, acutely, we feel that need.

It could happen, but it might not. There will be enormous pressure to forget this spring and go back to the old ways of experiencing life. And yet forgetting something this big never works. We’ll remember this even if we pretend not to. History is happening now, and it will have happened. So what will we do with that?

A structure of feeling is not a free-floating thing. It’s tightly coupled with its corresponding political economy. How we feel is shaped by what we value, and vice versa. Food, water, shelter, clothing, education, health care: maybe now we value these things more, along with the people whose work creates them. To survive the next century, we need to start valuing the planet more, too, since it’s our only home.

It will be hard to make these values durable. Valuing the right things and wanting to keep on valuing them—maybe that’s also part of our new structure of feeling. As is knowing how much work there is to be done. But the spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change. It’s like a bell ringing to start a race. Off we go—into a new time.