Bearing It
Dear foremother,
In the very first few days of this year, an astrologer told me that since I had experienced starvation as a 12-year-old child, I had lived my whole life in relation to scarcity. Running from it, building levees against it, and still always carrying it in my gut where the intuition lives. Like any response to trauma, this one both protected and curtailed me.
(I hope you’ll forgive me for telling you a little bit about me, though it’s possible you already know. I am still figuring out how to address the pandemic without having to pass it all through my own body.)
Because of capitalism—do you know it?—and professional despair, I came to this astrologer depressed and furious. Through attention to my midheaven in pisces and Jupiter in the second house, she helped me begin to visualize a life fueled not by scarcity, but by the possibility of abundance. This should have been easy, given the abundance I’d already found through poetry, friendship, and the nonhuman world. All told, my life was full. But it took an ingenious scorpio to bring those things into the light, which I think is true of every epiphany I’ve ever had.
For the first two months of this year, then, I was fed on possibility. The world seemed to open itself. I was not going to starve.
Now, in this time of systemic, undeniable scarcity, when very little feels possible, I witness my body in response. A week and a half into quarantine, when the initial panic had given way to a flood of mourning for future losses, an old pain came surging back. It was a familiar if newly angry, throbbing pressure in my head and neck, the product of decades of living with a curved spine. With massage therapy, osteopathic treatments, and daily exercises over the preceding months, it had become manageable—at worst a dull ache. Now, suddenly, I was in the worst pain of my life, the kind that makes you vomit just from the shock of it.
Loved ones were concerned, suggested I call a doctor, but what does it even mean to call a doctor right now? When your “doctor” for the past six years has been a randomly assigned stranger at the campus clinic? The only things that had helped milder versions of this pain had been the physical touch of healing professionals—a medicine incompatible with social distancing. The other thing that had helped was what the astrologer gave me: the feeling that I would be safe, I would not starve. In the absence of both of those things, all I could do was bear the pain.
And that’s it, isn’t it? The deepest kernel of agony in plague times is how we are asked, over and over again, to bear it. We move through time not knowing whether we will be able to bear what the next moment holds, while also knowing that “bearing it” isn’t a choice.
This “we,” of course, is specific and differentiated as always: it is the “we” of the distanced but deeply socially embedded, the ones who have sacrificed comfort and income and sanity for the sake of protecting each other. Some of us bear it more than others: those who show up to the grocery store cash registers and nurses’ stations and delivery trucks and testing pop-ups and pharmacy counters, they all bear it in ways I do not. Those of us who are disabled and immunocompromised, who wake up every day to a new eugenicist imaginary from the mouths of politicians who believe our lives are worth less than the economy, we bear it in ways the “young and healthy” do not.
I try to have compassion for at least some of the ones who can’t bear it, who turn away from information and responsibility to others mainly because of fear and a lack of practice in facing mortality (rather than their bottom lines). It is not always easy. One of my brother’s roommates has symptoms and another one refuses to practice self-isolation because, she claims, having to follow any rules whatsoever is detrimental to her mental health. This brand of fear is a brand that could very well kill me and millions of people like me. If I cannot reach compassion in this case, I can at least reach an anger that transcends an individual target. This woman’s personal ignorance will not kill me, but the predatory housing systems and lack of healthcare infrastructure that trap symptomatic people in tight spaces with irresponsible narcissists—those things just might.
We have, for better and worse, entered an age in which the Big Pictures are in clearer focus. Rent is evil. Unequal access to health care will be the death of the world. The long-flimsy demarcations between valued and degraded forms of labor simply cannot hold. At the same time, we are seeing how a population-level focus does not always result in revolution. For the sake of saving as much of the population as possible, the eugenicist strands of contemporary medicine are being granted unprecedented power. People with lupus are being denied refills of life-sustaining medications so they can be used to treat COVID. The New England Journal of Medicine has just released ethical guidelines suggesting that U.S. doctors follow Italy’s lead in prioritizing young, otherwise healthy people when hospitals run out of ventilators. In my state, New York, where the hospitals are already overwhelmed, it is legal during times of resource scarcity for hospitals to take away ventilators owned by disabled people who need them for everyday life.
Disabled activists are now expressing fears not only that they will die, but that they will watch a large part of their community die in just a few months’ time. This is far from the first time human beings have witnessed an epidemic take the shape of structural oppression—not even the first time in living memory. And so I find myself in company with a number of friends of my generation who are turning to ancestors—whether living or dead, biological or cultural or spiritual—for guidance, or at least to feel less alone.
I write to you today because you have faced death. Have died, in fact. You are the one I imagine lived with a great pain, like mine, that you could not always easily distinguish from the violence of a history that both benefited you and manufactured your death. I do not know who or when or where you are, or ever were, what gender or profession or culture you claimed during your time as an earth-thing. But I am chasing a maybe delusional hope that through writing to you, I might know you better.
When Rilke wrote that “Angels (they say) are often unable to tell / whether they move among the living or the dead. The eternal / torrent whirls all the ages through either realm / for ever, and sounds above their voices in both”—I felt that. Do you?
Yours in the eternal torrent,
Liz