Recourse
To begin to write about this present pandemic time is a challenge in tone as much as in content. Alarmist can be cruel. Reassuring can be insensitive. No complete remove is available; we are all embedded. My intention here is simply to share some of my thinking as an individual living through these days, looking back to before as well as forward to more unknowns, out to others and into the impressions that animate my head, heart, memory, and regularly revised modes of operation.
A regular, daily or weekly or seasonal practice of sifting through and clearing out our email inboxes, our recycling bins, or our stack of well-worn t-shirts can be a satisfying clearing of the decks, a preparation or prelude to begin again the accumulation that will lead again after another interval to another clearing.
Seasons or the structures we’ve built around them to highlight and celebrate some aspect particular to each, have provided familiar rhythms through years of changes that we may have experienced as progress or loss, retooling or recommitting. The winter and summer solstices mark the two extremities of the sun’s angle across our tilted, orbiting planet. Given the large portion of my life in which I have been associated with schools in the United States – as a student or a teacher, I have racked up so many mid-June moves, the summer solstice always brings to mind moving — house, apartment, town, state, and once, continent. Midway between these solstice extremities lie the vernal and autumnal equinoxes – balanced equilibria fleeting, noted in passing if at all. This is where we are now – approaching the vernal equinox. Buds thickening, pussy willow branches piled into terracotta basins, just enough to coax us forward, harbingers of spring. Mardi gras passed, Lent, Passover, Ramadan, introspection and preparation approach us.
The months of the pandemic have turned into a year, and the election into a new administration; and nonspecific suggestions of a return to normal have been uttered.
And 500,000 people have died
in this country in this pandemic time
The custom if not the need of making pronouncements about what is now past and predictions about what is to come edges into our consciousness. The phrase return to normal gives pause, along with hope, pressure, uncertainty, and fear. Imagining normal is problematic given so many present unknowns. Simple pedagogy instructs us to begin where we are. Experience suggests fear is rarely an aid to thinking. How to look and move forward from an incomplete knowledge of where we currently find ourselves has been the persistent question of this time for me. To what do I have recourse?
The question leads me to the small rectangle of books and papers that is my study and in particular, to frame my understanding of the question, to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.
The word recourse is derived from Old and Modern French (courir) to run, and (recourir) to run again and slips easily into meanings and metaphors arising from water — currents forward and currents running back toward the origin of the movement, lending a feel of natural laws to the word’s usage. When the COVID-19 trajectory across our planet was starting in December of 2019, when it reached terrible strength in the Spring of 2020 and continued and surged again and changed and continues still, to what have we had recourse? What has flowed from us back out into this world? What have we turned to, held fast to, steadied ourselves with?
Some have been accommodations — simply things we did when our options had so drastically changed that they were no longer options. We found the wherewithal to adapt. A recourse to Zoom when work could not happen in person. To living alone for safety. To forgoing usual celebrations during holidays. Many of the adaptations involved relinquishing, giving things up. Some recourse involved a daily dialogue with terrible news — so much worse than previously imaginable – and yet so close to us, so searingly devastating, how could we turn away?
For me, honoring and allowing lament anchored these days of devastation. Zoom worship services, book studies centering on those I really wanted to read alongside readers I knew I would learn from. Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, the books of Job and Habakkuk, and Lamentations. Each of these read slowly and more than once. Keeping up with the experiences of neighbors and the community programs serving hunger, housing, and health and information needs. Together with millions, we watched and witnessed. Knowing generates a specificity to the desire to live, to stick around if possible to help effect change. It brings an acuity to the present reality. Specific hope and taking an inventory of what we have recourse to are warming to our chilly late winter selves. We have seen once-assumed truths fall – again. Again. Disparities, injustice, long histories hidden, distorted, the world, shaken and broken; we have witnessed. We have known that the whole world is watching. And we know that concern cannot stop with what we see. How urgent are the needs still of so many not seen!
Will we remember what we’ve witnessed when we come to the next phase? Is working toward equity one of the strongest reasons for making it there?
Whatever we choose to remember from this time, whatever we’re motivated, determined or inspired to hold onto and to do something with, if we’re fortunate to have the time and means to, will say as much of us and our time as the pandemic time itself.
More aware, of inequity and injustice, are we ready to take on what Amanda Gorman captured in “The Hill We Climb”? To Rebuild, reconcile, recover.
Each of these words presumes a before; we stand on the shoulders and stumble through the pitfalls of those who have gone before to build again, reconcile again and recover again. The inaugural poem suggests purpose rather than perfection in reconsidering this country’s tried and found wanting central principles. In a pandemic, late pandemic, or post-pandemic, still-divided world, discernment of the enlightened from the obfuscators continues to call for attention and hard work. Our demons are dancing with us still of course. Post-pandemic is no panacea. We prepare, each in our own way with our eyes also on the collective.
For the last ten months, I have lived alone, not far from family and friends, but solitary. Living alone is not new to me, but this alone, enforced as it is, by daunting, life-threatening concerns just outside, has very different aspects. Many I love near and far – extended family and dear friends have been as available as any of us could be to one another via phone and video. Though mostly alone, the world has been very much with me during this time. The numbers, the news, the suffering. What to make of it all, of our world, our places in it. My making sense of things that are important (to me) has often come in conversations interspersed with reading and study. Conversations during this pandemic time have, of course, involved sharing of information to stay safe, and sharing cheerful news when possible, as we’re all beleaguered. I have had work that I can do from home and time to read, exercise, cook, and sleep. In-depth, in-person conversations and just being with other human beings are two aspects of life I yearn for! Hope for!
Inquiry is to me a serious commitment to see a query if not to its ultimate resolution, at least as far as you could go with it before depleting energy, possibility, time. It is both forward-looking and at the same time typically founded on earlier work. Weaknesses, incongruities and discontinuities in the earlier work, cracks in the foundation are identified and repaired, even if the work is demanding and time-consuming. The process implies multiple and ongoing investigation, close study, and repetition, going forward, perhaps indefinitely, and more knowledge-derived questions, some inductive.
Often implied in research is a fair amount of solitude. You become a generator and devotee of questions. You coax them into shape and then run with them, check their suitability for various hypotheses and revise as needed. You sometimes experience surprising leaps in what questions deliver.
The books in my small rectangular study are question generators and recourse for me during this time. I sit many hours these days in the rectangle of books and papers that could be called a study. The ultra-thin yellow pages of my recycled paper legal pads are satisfyingly easy to tear from the pad, to tear into pieces for revisions, and to tear again before tossing into the recycling. In my mind the yellow sheets contain impressions hoping to become thoughts, maybe eventually ideas. As they migrate from pen on paper to marks on my computer screen to saved documents, perhaps sent on to another, I hope they are progressing.
The books on my shelves and in stacks next to the shelves are of course more fully formed ideas: poems stories, novels, essays. Some are to me as full as lives or great goals of life, some as satisfying as a good trip, some offering up tremendous wisdom or beauty as a whole, others allowing me to dissect them and take only a part or two. Eugenio Montale reminds me of the “second life of art” in his essay of that name. He has already succeeded in his instruction to render to the reader (me) the same frisson that compelled the artist first to put brush to canvas. Writers then are challenged to take the art yet another turn farther from what we gather from each work of art we see, hear, or read to a new expression in the world. And on and on, from the making to the streets to the making again and again to the streets. There is no expiration date on that directive. There, literally and metaphorically, is something to take forward with us into whatever this new time is. Expression, communication, story, what we make to be remade again and again.
A favorite novel reminds me instantly of the irrefutable power of place, of physical setting, how some places scream out the story to be told. Brilliant companionships speak with clarity and precision from essays; wild risks, iconoclastic victories, redemptive transgressions from so many poets. The memoirs of artists. the wonder of genius, the abiding company of a generous heart. The energy of energy, and propulsive dialectic. The sturdiest companions on my shelves are from those whose works I know through and through, that seem now to be among the component parts of who I am. Many are ones that interact with me because I’ve not fully consumed them. I’m still in conversation with them. A few volumes will always remain “out there” where I need them. My Fantasy and Science fiction books. Essential Imaginations.
In all groups, many are works that shine light on humanity’s margins.
On the tragedies of our violence
On the wideness of caring
On the power of creating
On the beauty of even a moment
On the wonder, real wonder, of surprise
I hear my own longing – for human connection.
Inquiry, study, and reflection come into fuller form when taken into the world, to others, shared, deployed, discussed, changed.
I turn to the closing line of Paul Valery’s engaging work, Idee Fixe, in which the protagonist, who more than anything has sought and defended his solitude, is seemingly on the verge of giving in to the pleasantly persistent intruder. They pick up their items from the beach and prepare to leave.
The intruder remarks to he who would be solitary,
“one who keeps to himself is in bad company”
last line.
a starting point
Madge McKeithen writes nonfiction and teaches creative writing at the New School. Links to some of her published work can be found at https://www.madgemckeithen.