To rise in the dark, is to wonder where the dog is. Illuminated curtains suggest a moon that she’s forgotten about. The mending of sleep these days lies only in its amnesia, its removal from news – like images of troops in American cities or arrests of Congress people (extra points if they’re Black apparently). Reprieve is not the same as rest, nor is it the same as regeneration, but she takes her pauses from horror where she finds them. This time she doesn’t trip over the dog.
She asks the cards over and over — is my mother gone (yes), is my sister gone (no)? Seven o’clock rolls around and the day begins with all its notable absences. There are three cats buried in the backyard. That pin cherry came down years back, but the massive copper beech was only recently chopped up, sections as big as trees hoisted up and over her neighbor’s house to a waiting chipper. Now she can see Michael on his deck. Also, late afternoon sun fills the new room, a benediction to loss.
The black walnuts begin their percussive rain. Watch out! They set off car alarms. They’d really hurt if they pelted arms or head. The squirrels use a big rock near the side gate to open them up, no easy task, she knows. She’s tried. She broke the nutcracker.
Time was, at walnut–artillery–time, she’d be looking forward to snow — not to hastily run through the season of scarlet maples and rusty, rattling oak leaves, but as a knowable return of a certain kind of silence, a sheltering silence.
But now? Seasons seem lost. And when the seasons lose all semblance of regularity, a whole region starts to lose its collective mind.
Meanwhile the ugliest people are in charge. She finds herself listening to an expert** on resistance, who analyzes the use of violence in times like these.
“I’m Irish,” she said last night in a poof of sitting down. “I don’t have a problem with violence.” She felt compelled to clarify though her husband already knew. “For the right ends, of course.”
The expert said, “Don’t shoot the architect of the Final Solution. Shoot the clerks issuing the deportation orders.” He also pointed out that the Third Reich had to break institutions whereas American institutions are collapsing in advance. “What took the Reich four months,” he said, “is happening here in hours.”
Good grief! No wonder she needs pot gummies to sleep!
“Who’s gonna feel what when?” could’ve been the title of the conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates — Klein feeling exempt from all costs of regaining power, Ta-Nehisi Coates not. She admits to her husband that she will not listen. I loathed Ezra Klein before it was cool, she says as if there was a point system. But seriously, if only the morality and intellect of a Ta-Nehisi Coates, if not the man himself, was in charge of the press. You better believe we’d be hearing about the huge multinational flotilla nearing the coast of Gaza.
Half the time? No, now and then, she wonders about an alternate reality – all those newly unearthed Carlos Castaneda books perhaps needing a reread? It isn’t useful to imagine otherwise, but she does.
Most recently: What if we’d arrested Netanyahu yesterday while he was in DC? Or when he touched down in New York? What if this year’s Nobel peace prize was awarded to Harris or Biden or even, god love her, Jasmine Crockett? Why not? A clear and scathing snub is in order.
He’s stopped seven — or is it ten or is it eight — wars, you know, between countries he can neither pronounce nor locate on a map.
Make that: Greta Thunberg for the Nobel Peace prize.
Meanwhile, she posted a picture of the sour cream coffee cake baked over the weekend — because someone asked. You know those posts – show me something good? And it was good, above average delicious, but where is her moral authority?
The calendar got clobbered. Whoops! A run to Schenectady planned, followed by a day at the Clark Museum. But that Saturday is October 18 – the next No Kings Day rally — so they may be protesting at the Pittsfield Common instead and maybe that’s appropriate since both she and her husband were born there — six months apart. She’s older, if you must know.
Going to the Clark is like going home — not a pilgrimage, but a return to something known and familiar. Hers was a family with coffee table art books. Boxes of pastels. A family with a shared love of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent. To see The Woman in White is to notice her own feet connecting to the floor. Hello again! To see that bearded man on a hillside in the Homer exhibit is to feel her chest open. But now?
You can’t go home, she thinks. Remember — your mother is gone! So are decency and honesty as core values. Gone is an interest in governance. Gone is a willingness to follow the god-damned Constitution.
Maybe the Constitution is damned. She thinks no amount of swooning at Sargent’s renderings of cloth will get them out of this mess.
Not one of those 800 generals saw fit to get up and walk out? They sat there silently – some say itself a kind of rebuke – with their stern visages. Don’t they all have stern visages? Making Hegeseth’s cringey advice on how to be more manly all the more laughable.
It would all be funny if the fall of the Roman Empire wasn’t one of their closest historical parallels.
We’ve had a good run, is one way to look at it. Two hundred and fifty year runs are typical, after all, some are saying — but not Louise. Louise sews and thinks about threading needles. A narrow chance, but not impossible. Though if she had to predict, there will be blood and it may come sooner than any of them are ready for.
* uttered by CC in writing workshop on Tuesday
** Tad Stoermer here. It’s an Instagram link.
