On Melville, ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and art of self-care
Sometimes in life we should aim for specificity in our aspirations
The cherry tree in my front yard was bare when the pandemic began. It blossomed in May when it felt important to think it would all be over soon. I hosted near daily distanced visits with friends on my porch, sipping coffee under its defiantly vibrant pink and white flowers. My lover, an essential worker, made a plastic contraption so that we could hug.
When the blossoms fell later in summer, and the cherries grew Viva-Glam red, passersby filled their pockets. When they bruised purple and burst rotten, the COVID-19 numbers sunk to single digits. My lover and I got tests that we waited only twenty minutes in line for, with negative results in less than 12 hours. Then we went to the beach for a week.
While I was swimming in Sandy Lake, near Lakefield, the water glowed a type of turquoise I’d only ever seen in the Caribbean Sea, an illusion from its shallow, sandy base. We bought roadside corn and cozied up in a rented cabin. We felt normal. The only issue was we’d gotten so used to sleeping alone that we lay awake at night unsure how to handle the closeness of another person.
I now think of August with a tender nostalgia normally reserved for college drug trips and poetic, pre-internet love affairs. Because now the tree branches on my street are bare again, and it is just me for lockdown round two. I knew it was coming but knowing ahead of time isn’t always as soothing as you’d expect.
A few years ago, while promoting my last novel, I told a Maclean’s magazine journalist that my singular goal was to be able to spend every day writing in a room by myself. In the photo they used for the article I am sitting on my ex-partner’s red couch, looking out the window of our shared home. You can see a hole in my cardigan that I didn’t realize was there. A shoddy, hack detail that nonetheless nails quite symbolically the state of my life at the time the photo was taken. But in 2020 I have an entire apartment in which to be alone, writing, every day of this sickly slog of a year. I know that I am extremely lucky. But perhaps I should have been more specific and ambitious with my aspirations.
I begin every pandemic day by playing phone Boggle with my friend Matt. I am terrible at it. I don’t even scroll to the stats page to glimpse the tally of how many times he has beaten me. One would think Boggle would be a suitable game for writers, but winning is less about being a wordsmith and more about spatial intelligence, of which I have very little. But accepting a
small, insignificant daily loss while connecting to a friend has become a pleasant routine, and in keeping with the larger themes of 2020.
Like most people, I’ve had several big losses in 2020, too depressing to write about, and I would prefer not to.
The act of rereading, rewatching, playing a repetitive game, or doing any activity that runs lightly over existing neural pathways, has in itself become routine for me. (I reread Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby: The Scrivener” one day when I could not take in anything new. It still, as the kids say, slaps.) Now, I prefer reruns of shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,” whose predictable moralism and inane expository dialogue feels like a comforting hug when a real one is forbidden. Which is good for self-care, but bad for art.
What literature is going to come from this moment of pause, this collective fear? It’s a curious question to ponder in the semi-final stages of preparing a book manuscript, especially since everything I write about is, at its core, about anxiety. With this new book I found myself shifting the story to stagnant places. Why should my protagonist have an emotional arc, when that idea seems from the Before Times? Why are these crazy people I invented in 2018 allowed to kiss?
“But Proust wrote “In Search of Lost Time” in bed, did he not?” I ask my kitten, who responds by climbing me like a tree with his little knife hands.
To write well one must have a flourishing inner life, an ability to sink deep into an esthetic project and live in that pretend world. But for me it also helps to have real connections to the present moment. I palm handfuls of potting soil, trying to keep a geranium alive that my kitten insists on hollowing out every morning, because he knows it will rouse me, usually from a nightmare about standing in a crowd without a mask. (This dream has replaced the one about having to go back to high school naked.) My hands in the soil feels grounding, but sometimes I rarely speak for days, and connections to voice and spoken language fray, which can fracture a relationship with the present moment.
For example, the other day I blurted out something personal about my diet to my barista, because she’d noticed I’d changed my order. She is the one person I speak aloud to every day, so perhaps the misfire was appropriate. A comedy sketch aired that I wrote for “The Baroness von Sketch Show” about the daily emotional arithmetic of being an introvert. And while it did I texted a friend about how I longed to be dancing, sweaty, arms-raised and hair swinging loosely back and forth, bookended by strangers. Is COVID-19 going to make me over as a bubbly extrovert, ready to network my way back into an in-person career?
But there is something about this time that feels familiar. I grew up on a farm in the ’70s and ’80s, a time when childhood was largely unstructured, and my brother and I were encouraged to be imaginative and independent. Sometimes I catch myself staring out my window, watching my cityfaced neighbours like a TV show, the way I used to watch the worms in our driveway, or the sheep in the pasture when I was a child, when the pace of life was slow and real TV was forbidden.
I chat late into the night with my friend Dean in Iowa about our broken hearts and screenplay ideas. I make plans to meet a couple in Philadelphia I’ve only met over Zoom, but who fill the interstitial moments of my work day with warmth and connection. My writer friend Jen in Vancouver sent me beautiful skin care products to soothe my broken heart. A friend from Instagram sent me brownies, another few sent flowers and cards when they knew I was grieving. No one is exactly OK, but we are finding what comfort we can this way, and for those of us who live alone, it feels life-saving.
So I encourage you to scroll your Netflix re-watch list or thumb through that well-worn paperback novel, play a losing game of Boggle, send some roses to your Instagram friend whose dog videos make you smile, send a hug emoji to the group text, and in the immortal words of the prophets vocal group Wilson Phillips, hold on for one more day.