EPISODE 605: THE REVELATION OF WHAT WE CAN BE
On Wandering Lonely Clouds
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Have you had the conversation yet? Even if you haven’t participated, I bet you’ve heard it.
It begins like this: “So it’s March 19th, 2020.” Or the 17th. Or the 12th. “We were at lunch at this sushi place we like. And when we came back they told us we should pack up our desks, because the government just shut the city down.”
“We’re halfway through spring break when the dean writes to say you can come back to get some stuff, but then you have to leave campus and preferably the city for the rest of the semester.”
“Suddenly there was no toilet paper in Australia. How could there be no toilet paper in Australia?”
“My uncle called to say his city had just locked down. I was like, That’s hilarious.” (At the time things were first getting serious here, my middle-school-age niece told me that every kid at her school in the upper Midwest wanted to get covid so they wouldn’t have to come to school any more.)
For me the “moment” that stands out was Sunday, March 15th. We were already hearing and thinking a lot about the pandemic – I actually just looked back at what I wrote the week before, and it is pretty wild. But we weren’t in lockdown yet. So I spent a few hours at a coffee shop, my normal Sunday pattern in the Before Times, reading and probably also trying to gauge reality. Are we really doing this thing?
But the longer I was there the more I found myself feeling guilty about the choice to be in a public space. There was no reason for me to be there; what if I got it and brought it back to my community and killed one of the old giants of the Society that I live with?
So I got in my car, drove down to the beach and took a walk. In my mind it’s near sunset, and there’s this meditative quality to the moment, like I’m taking the whole world in before things change.
But in truth that memory is completely false. It was mid-afternoon, kind of hot, and I spent most of the time clumping around in the sand trying to suss out paths that would allow me to walk with intersecting with anyone else. I wasn’t panicking, but I was definitely not “taking it all in”.
Except, maybe on some level I was? I don’t know.
When I came home, I decided I would stop going to community events for two weeks, in case I had infected myself at that Starbucks. I had actually already bought a ton of food for our little sub-community – and gotten yelled at by the guy in charge of it for doing so without asking his permission. So I had plenty to draw on.
And that’s how it started, for me.
It doesn’t feel like it was a year ago that all that happened. I feel like I was on that beach walking just a few weeks ago, in fact.
I mean, some things do seem long ago; like travel in a plane, that seems forever ago. Also, weirdly, a lot of the stuff I’ve watched over the last year seems like it must have been years ago. Those British detective stories that I was always mentioning here, that must have been like 2010, no?
(What does it say that my main metric of time at this point is When did I watch that show?)
I have the sense of things changing now, things opening up. It’s apparently a pretty widespread feeling, if still premature for most of us. Still, I seem to know many people who have been vaccinated. It’s kind of amazing.
I think it’s that possibility, that things could finally be changing for the better, that most brings me back to the memories of a year ago. I keep seeing me on that beach, in the distance. He kind of seems like a little brother to me, no clue what we’re in for, or really how lucky he’s going to be. And maybe about to make some choices where he might have zigged instead of zagged.
But the thing I love about him is that he set sail and made the best with what he knew. I find myself feeling for him and the choices he’s making. And also kind of cheering him on, like somehow I’m seeing him at the beginning of the movie, rather than from the perspective of maybe getting closer to the end.
A great idea that I read this week that feels kind of adjacent to all this:
“The internet is non-linear”. You live your life start to finish; you read a book or watch a movie the same way. “But when you create content on the internet, you have to imagine it being consumed in four dimensions, front to back, but also out of order, and also without whatever greater context it was created in. Something you posted 10 years ago is just as alive on the internet as something you post today.”
It strikes me that life is actually non-linear too. You think about people being called out for choices they made decades ago. For all you or I know, they’ve spent all the time in between trying to learn from those mistakes or became a different person since then. But their start-to-finish life trajectory is different than our experience of them. Old information told to us now affects us now. You don’t get to tell people there’s a statute of limitations on how long they can be shocked or upset by what you’ve done, or to define how long your actions continue to have consequences for you, even if you have made amends.
Memory functions the same way. I’ll hear a song or be in a place and suddenly it will take me right back to past experiences with them. Sometimes I’ll even discover something new about what happened back then in the process of remembering.
Which is insane, if you think about it. You have an experience, but actually the more important version of it came later, when you were able to step back and see some things that you didn’t then. That’s nuts. And A lot of life is like that.
We’re all time travelers, really. The past, the present, the future...it’s all happening now.
Random pop culture thought I had this week: I wish that WandaVision and Mrs. America, Hulu’s fantastic docu-drama about the fight to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed in the 1970s, were shown back to back. Because fundamentally they are both about women and what roles they are allowed to play.
I cannot recommend Mrs. America enough. Cate Blanchett plays ERA-enemy Phyllis Schlafly – whose last name is literally impossible to spell, hs + ls + fs are my kryptonite, y’all.
Rose Byrne plays Gloria Steinem. Their incredible cast of co-stars play amazing humans like Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. It’s just an insanely talented group of actors, and for sure one of the best scripted shows of the year.
From that same great newsletter that gave me the story about the internet and time:
Shout out to my niece Meggan, whose life is captured in this music video.
And from Britain, here’s actor Simon Russell Beale reading the Keats poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”.
I have loved so many little performances like this in lockdown.
Under the topic of articles that I loved: Dear God, This is where I want to get vaccinated, and while it’s happening this is what I want to hear:
Also, I don’t know if I loved this profile of Zack Snyder, the guy whose fans have demanded the release of his version of the finale of his series of nihilistic ultra-violent reinterpretations of heroes, but I did appreciate the ways it humanized him. His take on the DC Universe has been catastrophic, imho, but he’s still a human and a dad and an artist.
(Halfway through Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice I started to get really sick, vertigo and nausea out of nowhere. And I knew with absolute irrational clarity that the movie was literally killing me.
I cannot begin to express how convinced and devastated I was not that I might be dying, but that my last experience on Earth was going to be watching Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice.)
From the ending of Mrs. America:
“What will keep us going is the revelation of what we can be, what the people around us can be, without the crippling walls and prisons into which we have been forced.”
Who will be without a few of our crippling walls and prisons?
I don’t know, but I’m cheering you on.
It’s March, y’all. See you next week.