Stop Moving
Dear great-grandwreck,
I took a walk in the sun. At the bottom of the uptown cliffs I was stopped in my tracks. I had seen the turtles there before, but never quite like this: piled en masse on a rock with their smooth heads all lifted in the same upward direction. I looked across the pond and realized dozens of turtles had gathered there, all doing the same thing, still as statues. They were waiting, was the only way to see it. They had called something into being and were waiting for its arrival from the bright gash of city sky.
I couldn’t stop laughing. I loved them so much, with their splayed back feet and hot leather domes. Since I’ve been reading Rilke I thought they must be waiting on angels. Then I thought, you loopy bitch, it’s just the sun they want.
As if there were a difference! As if the word “just” belonged before “the sun.”
But even the sun, it turns out, can’t deliver me from the ordeal of maneuvering as a body in New York City right now. In any other year, this day would have been one of the first that I walked outside and felt better. A step out of the seasonal affective swamp. But now a beautiful day means the runners are out, most of whom have adopted bewildering interpretations of “6 feet apart.” And in a rebuke to our new rules of life, everyone has decided their dogs can be off-leash pretty much anywhere, so the paths that are usually safe for our reactive rescue dog are now more risky. (In a similar vein, I’ve heard the West Side Highway and BQE are now whirring with drag racers.) After a short time with the sun and the turtles and some psychedelically pink magnolia blossoms, my chest began to tighten with each breath.
So much for the angels of the outdoors, then. But there are plenty inside, where everyone seems to be reaching for them through their books. More than one friend tells me they’ve sent their students lines from Angels in America: Prior’s blessing in the end for “More Life,” or Roy Cohn’s diagnosis of the U.S. as “no country for the infirm.” I keep thinking, though, of the angel herself, how she warns the humans that in order to prevent life on earth from becoming “completely unbearable,” they must “STOP MOVING!” According to this angel, humans must abandon their drive for unfettered progress, migration, and exploration, through which humans “cannot Understand, … only Destroy.” There’s a troubling universalism to the angel’s command that foreshadows today’s environmentalist discourse: telling rich people, corporations, and imperial powers that their travel is destroying the earth is one thing, while telling migrant workers and refugees to stop moving is quite another.
In the end, the play rejects the angel’s command wholesale, deeming it impossibly repressive and anti-humanist. But I’ve always thought the play imagined more complex worlds than its ending, and I think we are seeing one of them now. Humans are indeed being called on to stop moving, at least those of us who are capable of doing so. We are building an ethics around not moving, in order to protect the vulnerable ones who do not have the option to stay put. It has never seemed so true that if we venture out unnecessarily into this now-uncanny world, we cannot Understand, only Destroy.
The turtles, still as statues, are our teachers.
And the limits of understanding are so visible now, aren’t they? Red and angry. Outside the cities, people believe the president when he says hospitals are lying about how many ventilators they need. In the cities, healthy pedestrians keep packing the parks. Everywhere, people are unable to understand the suffering to come. Too afraid to feel their fear, unpracticed in living with death—or perhaps so practiced in it that nihilism seems like a refuge.
My disabled or just intuitive friends are no strangers to feeling like Cassandra when it comes to health injustice, but the unrelenting rate at which we are now being proved right is hard to weather. We said to stay inside. We said not to hoard. We said New York would become a death machine in a matter of weeks. I cry every night now, wishing we had been wrong. I have a feeling you’ve cried over your visions, too.
I think of you and try to remember that being acquainted with one’s own mortality can be a gift, if a backward and cutting one. In the good moments, I can bear uncertainty and relinquish the fantasy of control. For 18 years I’ve been learning to forgive myself for not being able to control an illness that gets called “manageable” by everyone who doesn’t have it. For many of those years, I went to sleep every night not knowing what might happen to my body while I was unconscious. I’ve never lived through a pandemic (and it shows), but at least I am practiced in the art of living with death in the corner of my eye.
There are many reasons one might have that kind of practice that have nothing to do with illness and everything to do with the violence of colonialism, racism, transphobia, and poverty. The United States does not teach people to live with death, though it forces many to do so. And so it’s easier for some people to find meaning in that practice than others. Still, as I watch the people in my life who have faced death in its various guises come together to behold one another, the hard edges of our moment’s strange new distances seem to soften.
Diane Seuss wrote an essay a few days ago called “I Don’t Want to Die,” in which she says the prospect of death by pandemic has put the brakes on her practice of writing about life by writing about death. “How wrong I was,” she admits. “Death is not an artificial boundary.” She goes on: “All of my favorite writers speak to and from the dead. Now, now that I’m facing the fact of it, I’m not sure I want anyone talking to or from me.” This all strikes me as eminently real and true, and I wonder how it is that my response is so different. Plague arrives and I write to the dead for the first time in my life.
A difference, I think, is that I never want people to stop talking to me. No matter how much dirt and fungus I’ve become, and no matter how unready I was to become it. But there is, as Seuss points out, the risk of projection. I hope this writing is OK with you, and that you’ll let me know if it isn’t.
The other line from Angels in America I wanted to work into this letter is a stage direction: "No freezing; even when one of the couples isn't talking, they remain furiously alive."
I think I’m writing because, in the depth of this still-dawning trauma, I need things to go the other way, too. Even when we’re not alive, we remain furiously talking.
Yours in the sun,
Liz