Tough Times

...the old is dying and the new cannot be born

Antonio Gramsci, circa 1930

Emerging from the latest round of Covid-19 lockdown feels like exiting a dark basement. It’s been safe but suffocating. Now I’m taking hesitant steps around my scarred neighbourhood. Which shops are still standing? Who’s been destroyed by the catastrophe? Where’s the street energy? I’m blinking in an uncertain light, wondering what’s next, relieved my favourite Italian restaurant is still there.

The world feels wobbly, tentative. The virus is tamed (for some of us in privileged countries). But it will lurk, hidden and potent. Other bacterial disasters will occur. And we will get used to living with them. As we are used to living with climate catastrophe. Taking in only what we must (I should recycle my plastic) and denying the huge reality of the earth approaching its melting point. I have new routines when going out: Wallet, check. Keys, check. Mask, check. With the world heating up, I will need to add: Water, check. Protective clothing: check. Body heat monitor, check. Avoiding acres blackened by fire, check.

I review the crises I’ve experienced in my lifetime, considering what can be learned from events I’ve already endured. The Coronavirus is not a personal threat. It’s a generalized destruction of a sense of well being. I’ve been here before. What’s different is that I’m an elder now, and my own sense of mortality is hard to separate from the latest assault. When I was younger, there were infinite openings. Not so now. I can’t go about my own affairs so quickly, putting behind me a set of fears. I wonder if this particular impersonal assault will be the one to catch up with me.

My first recollection of global catastrophe was when Mrs. Packard, my second grade teacher, explained to us seven-year-olds what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. We should go under our school desks and cover our heads. Just so, she demonstrated, crossing pale arms across her kindly face. We should huddle there until the all-clear sounded, and follow the instructions given by our school principal, Mr. Watts. Under no circumstances should we panic nor cry out for our parents. They would arrive when they could. I nodded, fearful and not reassured, hoping my dog Cappy would be okay.

The nuclear attack didn’t come, though the Cold War with Russia continued. As it still does, with cyber weapons as potent now as uranium enriched ones. Amazing how solid long-standing enmities are, flourishing unabated over changed times and circumstances. Rooted in Moscow and Washington, DC, blooming still, even as other hatreds arise which equal them in destructive rage.

The fears I felt as a young girl about dying in a nuclear attack faded. The residue is there, though hard to pinpoint except as I consider how little prepared I can be for exterior events. This sense of futility was reinforced during two US wars: the one in Vietnam and the other in Iraq. Both of these conflicts tore America apart. Their impacts continue to fuel hardcore assumptions about what the mighty United States of America has the ‘right’ to do. And they demonstrate how groupthink can pull others into a sinkhole. Vietnam intensified the culture wars that now rage in infinitely more destructive form. Those of us on the Left were horrified to discover that our distress at the catastrophic destruction in another country, a country the US government insisted we had the right to invade, wasn’t shared by all citizens.

For many of our fellow Americans, Vietnam was a just war, keeping the commies at bay and protecting our god given rights.

When the Twin Towers were bombed on 9/11, I was on an airplane travelling solo from London to San Francisco. Watching the flight indicator on the seat back in front of me, I was confused. Even someone as map-challenged as myself could see we were heading in the wrong direction. Soon four uniformed flight attendants appeared, arms akimbo. The pilot’s voice came on, announcing: ‘I have grave news. There’s been an emergency. We’ll be landing in Edmonton, Alberta.’ He told us of the New York City attack along with the bombing in Washington. Passengers were calm, a number of British travellers commiserating with me as an American. One woman screamed out, her cries filling the 727. Her daughter worked in the Towers. Permitted to phone, she learned her family had not been killed. Landing, we were greeted by the Canadian Red Cross, making sure we knew where to go and giving us donuts and coffee. Like refugees everywhere, relying on the kindness of strangers.

That catastrophe was somehow easier to face as I was in transit, neither here nor there. It became more real back home in Berkeley. I travelled over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco twice weekly for work. Due in at 7 pm, I left my house at 2 pm so as not to be on the bridge during peak drive time. ‘They won’t blow up the bridge, I reassured myself, when there are so few of us on it. They’ll do it during rush hours. This crazy magical thinking continued for months, the general atmosphere in the fourth largest American urban area tinged with unease. In public spaces, I sometimes heard an eerie announcement: today’s threat level is yellow (not so bad); red (not so good). And the US President, George Bush, definitely not so good, dumbly leading us into another global mess, the war in Iraq.

I went to protests, wearily carrying my banner. I knew the struggle to stop the invasion was doomed. The powers-that-be had decided upon their course, lying about weapons of mass destruction. Even the British endorsed the Iraq war, their prime minister sucked in by an insane camaraderie with Bush. The Iraq War would happen, as had the Vietnam conflict, until massive and sustained outrage finally cut it off, until the profiteers had what they needed.

Most difficult living through this latest global teeter-totter is the sure and certain knowledge of powerlessness. It’s a struggle to remember that this sense of limited control is true and limiting. But it must not be paralyzing. When I was younger, I felt certain my resolve could alter events. Along with like-minded people, I could shift the direction of the world, definitely help move it in another direction. Living now in a time of profound shifts to the Right, with demagogues and destroyers from the US Republican Party to the UK’s Tories, leaders as corrupt as Boris Johnson and Vladimir Putin, corporations as godlike as British Petroleum and Amazon, I’m flummoxed. I don’t give up my shrieks of protest. But I have to ignore the tinniness of the sound. I’ve always told my young friends that futility is not an option. Now I get to see if I can put my efforts where my mouth is and not be overwhelmed by despair.

I don’t want the Coronavirus, the unimaginable dangers of climate catastrophe, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the venality and corruption of world leaders to pull me under. Living with ambiguity and doing the right thing is what counts, right until the last syllables of my recorded time.

…………………..

Share your response to this feature by posting in the Subscriber Salon.

Chronicles of an Elder: Rivers of Time

“And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Little Gidding. T.S. Eliot

I measure time by my years on earth. I measure time by the restrictions of lockdown, trying to peer beyond the curves of confinement... I measure time by wondering what events I’ll live to see my grandchildren celebrate. I measure time by the Jewish calendar when the new year begins in the fall.

I wonder about time, how much I have remaining. I fear time, its inexorable passage. I love time, its endless twists and possibilities, the way it loops back and mushes together past and present. I’m awestruck by time, how it’s real though intangible. I move through time, calculating it via my daily rhythms. (How odd, that notion of moving through time.) Perhaps it’s a thin tissue of undulating threads, shifting with the winds of my temperament.

I beseech the gods of time, requesting more of their precious cargo.

It’s not original with me, though I cannot find the source of the idea that the present determines the past. But that is how I experience it. I’ve always lived beside the shadow of my mother, both when she was alive and after her death. Hers was not the kind of shadow under which I cowered in fear; rather, I was cautious about coming into the light. My mother was a fearful, uncertain person. Towards me, the eldest of her two daughters, she exhibited mainly impatience and anger, threatening to send me away if I didn’t behave. I was then, as I am now, a reactive, emotional, sensitive type. Intensely curious, I wanted to understand everything. She couldn’t deal with me. I asked too much. All my young years, I longed to burrow through her anger and find respite. Growing up, I gave up, replacing my longing to connect to her with the desire to stay away. And with the fervent hope not to emulate her in any way. Let me not behave nor look nor feel as she did. Her shadow pursued me, pushing me to be different, pulling me back into itself.

Years passed, as they do. (There’s that time thing again, moving, flowing, receding, expanding.) I look in the mirror and see the lines of her face etched in mine. I hear myself respond to my life partner in the voice she used with my father, angry, demanding. I recoil from others, unable to feel worthy of love as she didn’t teach me how to receive it. I remember my cruel indifference to her in her later years, and shrink from the possibility I’ll get what I gave her--nothing.

That’s the dark side, the scrim of memories made up of absent feelings. But now, I re-make the memories of my mother, changing our relationship. This occurs despite her having died years ago. Time, that strange mechanism, is at work. It’s elastic, magical shape-shifting meddling with what was fixed, changing it to a present narrative.

In the story now, I understand how difficult it was for her: the middle child of an overbearing Russian matriarch who shouted orders from her bed in the back room of our house. Marriage to a man with a depression which burdened them both. A demanding older daughter who was difficult to soothe. Relatives blaming her for her husband’s malaise. And yet she persevered, spending the last nine years of her life as a teacher’s aide. That was the pay-off; finally a classroom of her own, a dream realized. And that eldest daughter who forged a life of connection, that daughter now comprehends her mother’s sadness and finally, weeps for her.

Time not only heals wounds; sometimes it erases them.

Time is not linear, though it’s what we’re led to believe. One doesn’t go from point A to point B in a straight line. Days are round, not long. And time is not hierarchical, forcing us to look up to where ‘He’ is (and it’s always a he) at the top: father, god, ruler. We’re trained to look up instead of around; we’re told to keep our eyes on the prize, not on the person next to us on the bus. We’re instructed to conquer time and not waste it. Meanwhile, time flows all around us, pushing us towards memories past, re-making old truths, beckoning us to the present moment, merging us with that thing called space, and finally, calling us to enter into its eternal river.

……………………………...

Chronicles of an Elder: Teach Us to Number Our Days

If I live to my next birthday, I’ll be the age my mother died, forty minutes short of hers. My mother’s memory looms over me, as it has all my life, along with the fear of dying at the age she did. This is a good time to reflect on my life as I’m not sure how much more I’ll have. I’d like to insert something cheerful here, but it would be a diversion from this elemental obsession. Writing about these matters gives me a sense of mastery over what’s inevitable. That’s a fundamental reason to write, the delusion that getting the words right means you’ll be immortal. Scrawling on cave walls came from the same impulse. I’ll leave my mark, and you won’t forget me. Although sometimes the marks I scratch on my computer are scary, and I have to remind myself that thoughts are not realities.

Not being forgotten is another obsession. I think about Hamlet’s father’s ghost, exhorting his son as he goes back into the shadows, ‘Hamlet, remember me’ and Hamlet’s dying words to Horatio, ‘draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.’ To be mourned, to be unforgotten throughout the eternity of death, is a strong urge. I argue with my needing self, trying to cheer myself up by recounting the good deeds I’ve done, the people whose lives I’ve influenced. Surely they’ll remember me, I say to myself; surely there’ll be some trace of the fact I was on earth. Yes, but: after two generations those traces will be gone. Yes, and: traces are all I can offer. Remember, my Jewish loved ones, to say Kaddish for me; remember me, my non-Jewish loved ones, in the ways you commemorate loss.

I’ve lived my life in many settings within diverse formations of people, each with their own customs around honouring the dead. In my family of origin, it was photographs. Notable is the picture of my great-aunt, Rose Lila Sasloe. I was anointed with her first and second name. She was the family heroine, world traveller and author of a book for young students. Beautiful, regal, unhappy; she died young after a short, unhappy marriage. I have a stack of letters she wrote in the early part of the twentieth century. I tried reading them, and gave up. They were boring, full of details like ‘please send me a button for the coat I bought in Newark,’ and ‘will you see that my small red valise arrives safely from London.’ In vain, I struggled to find flashes of brilliance from the family icon, but to no avail. Sometimes even the anointed avatar doesn’t come through. But her memory remains, seared into my brain. I was expected to honour her gift of writing with my own. Another way of not forgetting: follow the trade of the ancestor.

For twenty years, I was part of the Jewish community in Berkeley, California. Oddly enough, a place as out of the mainstream as Berkeley has a thriving traditional Jewish presence. Within this culture, I found grounding. California’s boundless sense of possibilities overwhelmed me, and the communal affiliation was a stable marker. Jews do transitions brilliantly, evolving rituals which uncannily mirror psychological realities. When my mother died, I sat on a low stool, wearing a blouse with a large rip in it. All the mirrors were covered with soap, so as not to distract from the task of mourning. People brought me food, and when visitors came, I was enjoined not to act as hostess but to allow them to comfort me. For one week, my sole job was to remember my mother and to absorb the fact that she was dead. After a week, released from the intensity of death’s initial shock, I got up from the stool and slowly began moving back into everyday life. The week of mourning acknowledged the profound absence death brings, helping in the chore of absorbing a forever blank space.

When I contemplate my demise, I’m not sure exactly what I want of my current family. My partner, David, and my stepdaughter, her husband and my two grandchildren are not Jews. They do not mourn in ways I understand. As they are not religious, there is no inherent conflict with the customs with which I’m most familiar. It’s customs, not beliefs, which concern me. I am a Jew by birth and custom, not belief. The absence of a coded response, which is what ritual is, leaves me wondering how I will be mourned and remembered. I play and instruct and adore the children, hoping they’ll find a way to keep me alive, that my desperate attempt to leave my mark will not go unheeded.

Rose Levinson