"Life and Pandemic" - Spring 2020

What, Then, Will Be Left
your hands with work and play, you may try to embrace your brothers
and sisters and keep them to your arms. But you forget that these are
empty. You must remember or you will be proved wrong. Warm yourself
with memories, occupy your hands with keeping your body still, and
embrace only death. Build your arc, yes, but sail in the waters that surround
you, one eye on the horizon and the other on the waves. Dwell in
the empty for your time, and then move on. There are laws that we must
abide by and this is one of them.
Hear me, I know as I have lived it. And those that came before
me lived it as those who came before them. The world has ended many
times. In her time, in my time, in your time, there was a great silence
that hushed the thundering of fools, brought peace in death, and lured
our minds only to its song. There are bodies, strewn across the valleys,
locked in prisons of fear, and frozen by uncertainty. There will be time,
a still time, a frenzied time, and still more time. We feel it in our bones,
we live it, we are there, with no glimpse of light from within our darkness,
with no concept of any other kind of being, only what we feel. We,
humanity, hungry, tired, cold. We, families, impoverished, ground down,
isolated. We, you, me, dead, gone, buried. And yet the words you hear
are not the whispers of a ghost, but the ramblings of a persistent life, the
cloudy recollections of an ancient mind. A memory remains, and those to
remember it. A scar remains, and those to ache from it. A body remains
and those to mourn for it. Come famine plague war death there comes
after. And you wonder why.
It will not be the end because it can’t be. No, we won’t be freed
that easily. You will live because you have to. Death cannot overcome
life because without one there is not the other. And so you will keep
running towards one and away from the other though as time goes on you
lose certainty of which. But the running will never cease. We run like
roots in the dirt, proliferating, searching, fighting. We run like scavengers
in the wilds, hungering, stealing, scrounging. We run like fevers in the
bodies of the dying, burning, climbing, driving. We are weeds, parasites,
a sickness on this world, uprooted, cut off, eradicated, returning. This
world is a sickness in us, fevered, struggling, fed. Yes life is pandemic. If
there is breath to catch, blood to let, there is life. And let it spread.
Let it fill you. Stop running, just for a moment, and let it fill you.
Let the sight of darkness fill your eyes, let the sound of tears falling fill
your ears, let the fear and distress of all fill your mind. And your heart.
Fill that too, but with something new. Not what is around you, but what
Caitlyn Johnson