Ten Years' Change in a Week

"Ten years' change in a week," the NY Times headline reads this morning about how doctoring went to telemedicine in an instant.  Apply to our whole way of life times three weeks equals 20 or 30 years of change.  That feels about right.

All the switches flipped in an instant, like an infant taking first violent suck of oxygen from lungs.  Ebbs flowing and flows ebbing.  Households emptied by the daily drag of work, school, appointments now full of human energy.  Streets and office hives of activity now empty.  Video conferencing compresses social distance while a physical distance of three feet at Plainfield Store is uncomfortable.  A record low unemployment flips to record high.  Zoom conquers even the generation who hoped to cruise out of here without bothering, defining the new aesthetics and etiquette of culture.

This week our experimental "live" theater on Facebook Live with Parish Players friends migrated to Zoom with The Spoon River Anthology.  The production went next-level, with lighting, costumes and finessed transitions.  The audience was "in the (Zoom) room" with the performers; conversation afterwards was rich.  A perfect Saturday night gathering for 90 minutes, no driving, no stumbling on the ice in the dark.  The performers looked me in the eye in close-up.  I forgot the medium and was genuinely moved.  The creative wheels are spinning for what we can do next.

More on creativity unleashed... I've been working this week on finding a new role for WRIF (White River Indie Films).  The festival isn't happening, but we see a chance to serve as a virtual gathering place for film viewing and making. I'm composing weekly newsletters with links to the myriad of new ways to watch new release films online.  (I'm writing this down so we will remember how it was "before" when festivals fought for premieres, filmmakers and distributors guarded streaming rights, and audiences felt some urgency to move their bodies in order to see what's new.)  New still matters, but less? And geography suddenly doesn't.  Plus, Old is relevant again because shelf space is unlimited and at the moment nothing new is being made.  Curation is the name of the game.  

This was happening already, a consequence of on-demand and a.i.-drive viewing and listening?  Current to the boys are '80s music and movies, '90s and '00s TV series (The Office!).  Novelty still matters, but quality and zeitgeist matter more.  There's time for circularity.  Watch parties are a thing now via Netflix, etc.  We haven't surrendered the social aspect of viewing; we've just distanced it, which was always kind of true about movie-watching anyway: From the Nickelodeon and peep show to the megaplex, the dark theater aimed to eliminate the outside world for a more perfect suspension of reality and transportation to the imaginary.  Honestly, we've always been ambivalent about other audience members anyway – good if friends or someone you want to sneak an arm around or when their reactions amplify our own; bad when they text or talk or smell bad.  Movie theaters were dying before all this.  

And do I care?  Last summer (i.e. a lifetime ago) I came back from LA in a crisis of faith about it all anyway.  I wanted to make movies to help us love the broken world more; meanwhile, the over-cranking content machine seemed to feed escapism and an ever darkening view of reality.  I get it.  Our dystopian fixations reflect the crushing anxiety of climate change, social-media aggravated social isolation, a broken politics, abandoned by God, consolation in sharing hopelessness.  It's centuries in the making.  (I am teaching 1984 at the moment.  Good timing.)  It's just not the story I'm made to tell, and if my stories aren't fit for our times, I have other work to do for now.  Something to do with getting unstuck, moving beyond consumption of anesthetizing entertainment, toward connecting with others again, growing in consciousness, finding our way out of this mess together.  Conversing with all the prophets, from Jeremiah to John Lennon.

In this light, WRIF glowed with new purpose. The movies are the means; community is the goal.  The festival's plus factor would be the human interaction, conversations sparked by shared viewing, new filmmaking made possible by bonds forged.  And now this... It should be a defeat, but it doesn't feel so.  I'm thrilled. I feel the synapses of caring people here and everywhere sparking with activity. Where and how we will gather (physically) again is TBD, but the collective reach for good storytelling – whatever the access–to save us heartens me.  And when we do gather, we'll appreciate it all the more.  My favorite idea so far is to hold a spring screening at the Fairlee Drive-In!  Alone together.  (Personal poetry in this, having fond memories of Saturday Night Fever and other '70s classics in their first run at the old White River Drive-In.)   

Leaping forward and back.  We ordered our chickens.  People are playing board games.  Home cooking is back.  People are baking bread and sharing strategies for making their own sourdough starter when yeast isn't available.  People are taking walks just because.  Families are making music videos and performing plays in their living rooms.  The boys invented a baking contest this week.  Duncan applied learning from his woodworking class to fix a cutting board. Reeve has a new routine of morning bike rides, returning yesterday to report on the "most beautiful ride of (his) life," noting the morning sun breaking through mist on Blow-Me-Down creek and a duck with an orange headpiece.  Jordy and Tucker are making up for all the chess games and bedtimes lost these past seven years of weekly separations.  Boredom opens the negative space.  A new relationship to time.  

As the weeks pass and work carries on in the new way, it's tempting to impose structure on time, grab the old goals and ambitions.  It's helpful.  We're marking it on the kitchen wall in pencil and are shocked to see how much has already passed.  Grateful for Shabbat as an axis for the wheels of weeks to spin on, holding onto the "week" as a thing to keep us in synch with each other and the outside world.  We remember what was always true and Einstein proved – that time is relative, and we play a part in constructing it.  Freedom brings terror.  Even as we hold on to routines (=activity/[time]x[space]) created in the old physical order for comfort, I don't want fear to narrow the possibilities for re-imagining everything.

One telling place where the new time doesn't work is live music.  Zoom delays and lagginess frustrate synchronized play.  Recordings and solos work fine but remind us of what's lost in asynchrony.  Networks will get faster, delays imperceptible.  Soon thunder will move as fast as lightning. Sound at light speed. Is it too much to ask for both/and?  I want to feel the vibrations of live music in my skin again, and I want to be able to play from afar in something like "real time." 

My mind sifts what I want back, what I never want back. All seven billion minds alive on earth right now are sifting the same.  I missed so much before because it was all passing in such a blur.  The exquisite cardinal before me as I type strutting his red stuff for the ladies.  Trees on the trails I never took the time to meet.  Fields within sight I literally never noticed.  Being with the boys throughout the day.  Things I never want back – hours upon hours of driving for color-coded activities overlapping in a Google calendar, habitual exhaustion a sacrifice to the ego gratification of "productivity."  Learning shackled to school days serving parents' work schedules rather than children's physiology and social needs.  Work schedules shackled to quarterly shareholder earnings rather than parents' physiology and social needs.  Frivolous travel made fast and frequent by carbon we dare not even account for.  Impulse-purchases of plastic items in the check-out line, destined to live for eternity in a landfill.  Drive-through lines of lonely people in atomic automobiles feeding hunger for shared company with fast food that's killing them.  The substitution of consumption for presence.  

I want to sustain this connection with all living beings.  I never want to forget  our ability to act together in concert for the greater good.  I want to translate this to a new sustainable way of life on earth.  I want the equality with which this disease strikes to renew our faith in the best of our old ideas, the truths we once held self-evident, so we can see them to fruition.

We may have leapt twenty, thirty years in a few weeks, but it won't all stick however much we want or don't want it to.  Normalcy will return in some form, the parts I miss – meeting friends at cafes, performing together, voting, farmers markets without face masks, kids' sports games, museum and concert going – and the parts I don't.  Fears of change for the worse are swirling – sustained economic depression, Native American communities at risk of being wiped out by Covid19,  the election derailed, authoritarianism, the end of democracy.  While we were imagining the worst in broad strokes, we failed to anticipate the specifics.  (As one of my students said on a conference call this week, "It behooves the prophet to speak in generalities.")  Yet in a simple, specific strand of DNA has been revealed all that we've neglected.  May our creativity save us. 

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Hannah Senesh's "Eli, Eli" came to mind this morning as I wrote:

O Lord, my God, I pray that these things never end:
The sand and the sea

The rush of the water

The crash of the heavens
The prayer of the heart.