Fragment #11
I went out, on Halloween, to not one but two small outdoor events with friends and neighbors. Even with the masks and all the everything this felt like an atypical degree of socializing for These Times, with COVID-19 infection rates spiking in Chicago, with restaurants and bars forced to close up this past Friday after a brief surge of possibility, with the high winds of winter bearing down. Was it worth the cold toes? The sore throat from huddling around the smoky fire? Yes, in all its compromised muddle.
It was worth it to see the kids in costume trotting down the street, the house nearby blaring an endless loop of “Thriller.” “Werewolves of London.” and “Monster Mash” (of course). Despite the mayor’s scolding the trick or treaters were out in force—princesses and robots and Hulks and nurses and construction workers and zombies and Spidermen. They were not going to let the pandemic ruin their Halloween and they made my heart float a little.
It was worth it to do a witchy ritual, to “bind” Donald Trump and block him from doing harm. This involved passing a carrot and some thread around in a circle so that each person could wind the thread around the orange proxy, before J threw the whole thing into the fire. It was awkward and dorky and we were all very cold, but when before breaking the circle P took a moment to pour some oil from her kitchen out onto the ground as an offering to all living beings who have been hurt already, a healing salve for the soil, I was moved.
It was worth it to meet a few new people and see a few old ones, and to pretend for a moment that this was just a normal thing one did, talking at each other over the fire pit, trying not to get too close.
One person did get too close, and we kept shuffling back, and I don’t blame her at all she was just enthusiastic (and perhaps a little ... altered), but it was uncomfortable in more ways than one. She kept asking, over and over, “But what are you WORKING ON right now? What are you passionate about?” And I was forced to put words to my own silence.
Because I’m not working on anything. I am working, yes, all the time. Of course. I am lucky. But I am working in the service of the passions of others. I’m editing and selling their books, helping them craft their own stories. And you know what? I’m fine with that.
For me the pandemic has not proven to be a period of creative fertility. I worked and I worked for months this past spring and into the summer, and then sometime in June I hit a stone wall and I have, since then, been blocked. Inspiration blossoms up, sure, only to wither away before fruition, fried by the flashing lights in my mind’s eye that spell out, “What’s the point?”
Is this depression, I wonder? Perhaps—though in my personal life I am in truth content and then some. But I have no drive to create. It is not my passion, right now, and when interrogated by the fire I couldn’t help wondering if it was presumptuous to seek such a thing, or demand it of others. If we have learned anything from the neoliberal catastrophe of the past forty years it is that in the long run the cult of individualism serves neither the individual nor the collective good.
Earlier this summer I was whining to a friend about feeling creatively paralyzed and she asked whether I wanted to be writing because I had something to say or because it felt key to my identity. And the answer was honestly “neither.” I don’t really have much to say. And I don’t (right now) need the public validation that is so often the lonely writer’s sustenance. I have, for sure, created work in the past with a secretly shameful eye on the reception it might meet; the favor it might curry; the paycheck it might bring; the brand (gross) it might build. But right now?
If I long for anything it’s the time or just the non-frazzled attention span to create something utterly private, for the generative space for work that doesn’t need a reader. I long for space to play. To create without point or purpose. Politics and the pandemic have stolen that not just from children (who at least still have Halloween) but from all of us and restoring that to our lives, I realize now, may be what I’m passionate about, not my own boring voice.
This time four years ago I was in New York City, and on Election Day I went for a run from my friend’s house in Bed-Stuy to the Brooklyn Bridge. It was a bright sunny day and as I paused under the bridge to catch my breath and looked up at that majestic structure, and down the river to New York Harbor and the boats chugging along on the sparkling water, the Statue of motherfucking Liberty shimmering in the background, it was all so gloriously beautiful I started to cry—because I also had a bad feeling that it all was in imminent danger and at that point, on election day, there was nothing to do but sit in the gloriously beautiful uncertainty and peril of it all and wait. Hours later I sat on the steps of Bryant Park at midnight as I watched people, zombies really, make their way up 42nd Street from the Javits Center (site of the ill-fated Hillary party). I wasn’t crying then, because I was utterly numb. The uncertainty was over; reality was here and we had to deal with it.
Well.
We’ve been fighting against that numbness for four years. The past eight months we’ve been plunged into a reality far grimmer than any I at least could have imagined on the steps of Bryant Park. But this past weekend I also interviewed a woman in Englewood who’s fundraising to turn an old school bus into a mobile wellness center. She’s my age, maybe a little younger, and has had her fair share of struggles. She hadn’t been looking to make a radical life change, she said—she just wanted stability—but then COVID obliterated her income and forced her hand. Now she’s choosing to embrace uncertainty and make her big colorful solar-powered, incinerating-toilet-equipped, yoga and massage and arts center on wheels a reality. And it’s happening! She is looking head on at the ridiculousness of her reality right now and laughing in its face. She’s tickling her passion and she's ready to create space for play. In fact one of the teenage girls with her yesterday taught me then and there how to play “African hopscotch” (that’s what she called it). So I hopscotched on a bus parked in an empty lot on the South Side and joined with them for an hour in envisioning some new, happier, healthier future. And it must have worked because then I came home and started writing this.
Maybe, next week, I’ll have more. In the meantime, you don't need me to tell you to VOTE (I know you have already). And if you can, spend some time tomorrow in play.
Yours in uncertainty,
Martha