Talk about the “end of the pandemic” has been peppering conversations and newspaper print more confidently as of late. I’m cautious to get excited while my borderline feral state of being persists. Still cooped up, I’ve been thinking a lot about what everyone has been thinking about: how life has changed, what we’ve lost. Next to actual lives of loved ones, the everyday has left a noticeable void. The anonymous, mundane, insignificant everyday. The things we don’t write home about and all that which never keeps us up at night. I’m talking about the random interactions, strangers and street corners that make up our lives but play no great role in it. The humdrum tasks and actions that allow, by comparison, important things to have consequence. Supporting characters. What story writers call ‘exposition.’ Context, I suppose. Much of our lives now lack supporting context to its existence.
I find myself often struck with a deep yearning to watch a stranger order coffee — to observe the way they perform a globally understood action. It’s those interactions that remind me that, to quote Kilgore Trout, “it takes all kinds of people to make up a world.” Including me. I’m just a person making up someone else’s world. An extra. A background body. Credited in the movie of their life as “cycling woman #3” or “woman behind man at taco truck.”
There is something to the significance of being insignificant — the communal act we all participate in of filling space. There are two books that consistently orbit my mind space and reflect on this phenomenon with accuracy and nuance. I’ve consulted both quite often during the time of corona: M Train by Patti Smith and The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. Smith’s is a eulogy for the fleeting things that gave purpose to her present; Pessoa’s a reverence for simplicity and a shore for unrelenting waves of philosophical doubt. Recently, I skimmed through both and picked out quotes I’ve underlined or dog-eared that seem appropriate for now. I find they address the experiences I (we all?) achingly long for, recreating them with words that feel like lingering eye contact from a stranger. I have found much solace in reading these snippets again and again. I share some with you here.
F. Pessoa:
I went into the barber’s as I usually do, experiencing the pleasure I always get from being able to enter places known to me without suffering the least distress.
Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel dead; yet they mean nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.
If I were knocked down by a children’s bicycle, that bicycle would become part of my story.
Everything that was ours, simply because it was once ours, even those things we merely chanced to live with or see on a daily basis, becomes part of us...Everything that happens in the world we live in, happens in us. Anything that ceases to exist in the world we see around us, ceases to exist in us. Everything that was, assuming we noticed it when it was there, is torn from us when it leaves. The office boy left today.
I have indigestion of the soul.
...the artificial has come to seem natural and the natural strange. No, that’s not quite it: the artificial has not become natural; the natural has simply become different.
Everything interests me and nothing holds my attention.
---
P. Smith
Without noticing, I slip into a light yet lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand as if it were a planet, streaked in shadow, impossibly blue.
...shelving real time…
Half-empty paper coffee cups. Half-eaten deli sandwiches. An encrusted soup bowl. Here is joy and neglect. A little mescal. A little jacking off, but mostly work.
— This is how I live, I am thinking.
*A whole chapter called “Clock With No Hands”*
I hate being confined, especially when it’s for my own good.
I was glad to be going somewhere else. All I needed for the mind was to be led to new stations.
We want things we cannot have, we seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.
Feeling strangely detached, I wondered if I was about to engage in a meaningless ritual.
Home is a desk. The amalgamation of a dream.