Fragment #2
This time last year I washed a man’s feet. We had known each other only a few months and it felt presumptuous, brazenly intimate, but we had found ourselves one night last Easter week, neither in active practice of any religion, in the middle of a religious community, and it seemed the polite thing to do. And I, at least, felt the reverence of the moment, as a little girl carefully and a little sloppily bathed my own feet in a basin. Then it was my turn.
I looked at the man sitting beside me. “You ok with this?”
I think I wanted to make visible the power dynamics in play in this ritual, which in Christian tradition marks the moment at the Last Supper when Jesus exhorted his followers to “love one another the way that I have loved you.” To make it clear in a few words that while I saw that this was totally awkward, I was choosing to perform this ancient act of devotion and it was his choice whether or not to accept it. I was leaving the next morning for a two-week trip to Puerto Rico and I was falling in love.
I’ve been remembering lately what it felt like, this time last year, to realize I was falling, had fallen in love. It was not something I had been seeking and it felt sudden and a little reckless. But fall I did regardless. I would wake up in the early morning and wonder at this person, who had seamlessly woven himself into my life without warning. I would watch my new love bike away to work, receding in the distance, long legs slightly pigeon-toed on the pedals, and feel not exhilarated but freakishly calm. The future stretched out before me suddenly richer, more saturated, remarkable in its promise and thick with potential. How did this happen? A year before this time last year I had no way of conceiving I would be where I was a year later. I wasn’t paying attention; I never saw it coming. There was no language for it. It was inconceivable.
My love affair did not last, and the future I had started this time last year to barely permit myself to image did not become reality. It remains hanging in the bardo of what might have been. But one year later I am again, as are you, at the center of a life unimaginable this time last year and I am here to tell you it does little good to mourn what might have been. Mourn what you have lost, of course—how can you not? But the might have been—a world without disease, with vaccines and adequate testing, ample PPE, and Medicare for All—these things were never our reality. They are as evanescent as vapor, as promises.
The weeks that followed in Puerto Rico last spring were themselves, I know now, a liminal space: after Maria but before the earthquakes, before the pandemic and its curfew. Then life was finally being rebuilt; a new normal was taking shape: damaged and halting, cautiously optimistic, like the new normal warily taking shape in my heart. Over those two weeks, as my reporting partners and I interviewed people in San Juan, trekked around Loiza, and took the night ferry to Vieques, shooting stars falling brighter than imaginable over the darkened ocean, I marveled again. Was I building this life or had I tumbled into it by accident? Was it some spooky magic? All I knew was that at 51, after a tough decade, and years of clawing my way to some semblance of stability, I had, somehow, the things that I wanted: meaningful work, love, adventure. It had taken a long time. It was happening all at once. To inappropriately quote Lenin, “There are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks when decades happen.”
The anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla has written beautifully about the “temporality of disaster”—of the warping effect of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Ricans’ experience of time. I’m paraphrasing, but under normal circumstances, she says, if such a qualifier can be applied to a catastrophe, there is a natural instinct to move quickly: to fix, to restore, to repair, and to move out of the current state of emergency and into recovery. But after Maria, this urgency was met with crushing indifference and inaction, resulting in an extended state of emergency characterized by only delay, decay, and the forced act of waiting.
The present did not expand in its eventfulness, she writes, but in its persistence. Time passed, and nothing changed. Gone was what Reinhardt Kosselleck once described as the “otherness of the future.” The present no longer felt ephemeral, quickly dissolving into something new. Instead, the present lingered longer than it should. This created a frenzied state of repetition in which each day felt eerily like the last.
Sound familiar? She continues, in a sort of Beckettian register:
Temporal delay operates as a governmental technique and an assertion of state power. However, as some anthropologists have suggested, waiting also implies the existence of a certain horizon of expectation, a faith in the chances of an arrival. Waiting (esperar) implies hope (esperanza). It involves anticipation, a form of thinking and living towards the future. But what happens when you stop waiting? What happens when you give up?
In the aftermath of Maria, in the midst of this eternal waiting, death forced some to give up. Most of the estimated 4,645 deaths were due not to the ferocity of the storm but to mundane post-storm frustrations: without any power, people were run over by cars in the dark, because the street lights were out. Others choked at home in their beds, their CPAP machines silent and useless, their refrigerators unable to keep their insulin cold. Some contracted diseases from water fouled by dead animals, or rat droppings in backed up storm sewers. Some committed suicide.
But others gave up by no longer agreeing to wait. Rejecting the government’s timeline for rescue, which would clearly never come, they formed community kitchens, they tended to their own sick and birthed their own babies. They built generators out of lawnmowers and MacGyvered chains of PVC pipe to tap mountain streams of crystal-clear water. They set up mutual aid centers and work brigades, and they were not exhilarated but calm; they knew what to do.
They washed each others’ feet, and in doing so laid the groundwork for revolution.
After Maria, but before the earthquakes, before pandemic, the community bonds created during the disaster of 2017 allowed for the breathtaking popular uprising of 2019, when more than a million Puerto Ricans took to the streets and forced the resignation of the governor in the wake of an ever-expanding scandal in which he and his cronies were revealed to have mocked Maria’s dead and perpetuated the endless wait for personal gain. This, says Bonilla, is a different temporal disruption – one in which “The slowed down and expanded space-time of disaster suddenly gave way to the sped-up time of a social struggle.” One in which Lenin’s famous words are inarguably true.
I am as wary of the euphoria of disaster as I am of the promises of men. Like the flowering of love, the immediacy of crisis generates an abundance of energy and color, as pain and fear become the common language of previously siloed communities, and give rise to a new shared vocabulary of joy. This euphoria does not last; as in love it easily runs afoul of bad actors, discord, and fatigue. But I do full-throatedly believe that in a crisis something more durable can be built once the urge to FIX IT falls away.
We’re in the moment this week—week four?—when the urge to fix it, the sweet faith that the government and the banks will ride to the rescue, is falling away. The confidence of applying for unemployment has been ground away by the endlessly unanswered phones, the crashing website. (And, sorry, why did you think a previously dysfunctional system held together by paperclips and COBOL would suddenly work under unprecedented stress?) The promise of the PPP is derailed by last-minute changes to the rules that make it clear that the system is set up to benefit the biggest on the block. (Again, this is … a surprise?) The leadership vacuum in DC is a howling void. The masks you ordered don’t stay on your ears.
It is exhausting; despair is only a fingertip away.
So stop waiting. Give up, and wash each others’ feet instead. Make some food for a stranger. Exchange PPE on your porch. It’s weird and awkward and you know what, you might never see that person again but, regardless, you will be building the foundation for a life you cannot begin yet to conceive of this time next year.
***
My mom has been tuning in to Holy Week services at the church she attends in Seattle, so, to “go to church” with her I’ve tuned in a bit as well this week. Seeing this huge empty space—where I was baptized, where my sister got married, where my father sang and my mother worked—populated only by a few priests in full vestments and a socially distanced choir of four speaks to this unprecedented moment in a whole new bizarro visual language. It’s absurd and performative, and also moving in its sparse minimalism. At the end of the Thursday service, when the celebrant ripped the cloth from the altar and flung it to the ground, I got chills. There’s a whole new dynamic to ritual when you are kept at such an aestheticized remove that I’m struggling to understand. Also, interesting note, my mom, who is pretty deaf, is actually loving these televised services because she can actually hear and engage with the liturgy better than when surrounded by a bunch of other people.
What I’m reading: this 2017 essay by Aleksandar Hemon, which introduced me to the lovely phrase “the ontological blankie of reality inertia.” What I’m listening to: the news, of course, but mostly ping-ponging between what I call “Brian Eno Pandora” and, this week, a lot of disco and new wave? Because, mocked though it was (and is), don’t forget disco provided a critical space for collective joy and expression for a community besieged by plague. I also love this beautiful video by Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble.
I hope you’re hanging in there. Happy Easter and all else.
Martha