The Year of The Plague
April 16 2021
I am writing this
in the year of the plague,
a time capsule
to anyone in the future
who is curious or cares
about the long ago dead
and the distant past.
A time when we learned the hard way
how much history matters.
Here to tell you that pestilence, war, and disease
have been with us forever.
And the era of peace
in which I grew up
and in which we thought we'd conquered want
contagion
and our lesser angels
was brief, and delusional.
When what we called "the new normal"
was actually the old status quo,
breathing through masks
and fearing our neighbours
and taking to our beds,
sweat-soaked and shivering.
Such hubris
such foolish presumption,
our conceit
that we were too advanced.
William Faulkner wrote
that "the past is never dead
— it's not even past."
So it serves you to imagine
those who came before,
because you, too, are not exempt
from history
contingency
the sudden unexpected.
Which is what happened to us.
Because we never looked back
and surrendered to complacency,
living for today
and mortgaging tomorrow
and disrespecting the past.
Unable to grasp
that it's always
a time of plague.
Which starts small
and overlooked
and inconsequential,
then grows exponentially.
When you feel perfectly well
until the second you don't.
I haven't written much about the Covid pandemic. I guess it has become to us like water to a fish: we swim in it, and it becomes unnoticeable. Which is the theme of the poem: the tendency toward “presentism”; the habituation to whatever circumstance.
Habituation is obvious. It's what makes it possible to sit and after a few seconds not having to be bothered by the sensation of pressure on the back of your legs. It's also what makes material possessions ultimately unsatisfying: the initial surge of excitement wanes quickly, the novelty wearing off and the thing soon taken for granted, a part of the background of stuff and technology.
By presentism, I mean the presumption that everything is as it's always been. When in fact, the notion (or, more accurately, the hubris) that we can be free of infectious disease only dates back to the introduction of penicillin. And even the climate we enjoy and that we consider a given – the unprecedented warm spell in which the short history of human civilization has occurred – is a kind of presentism, even though it is both temporary and quite exceptional in the climatological history of the planet. I also think of presentism in terms of our ignorance of history and patronizing attitude to past generations. This came up in my previous Covid poem, in which I referred to how quickly the Spanish flu of 1918 was forgotten by its survivors, and how since then it almost completely disappeared from our collective consciousness: as if a life-altering world-wide event that happened not that long ago had never happened at all.
So this event that is at the centre of
everyone's life and a cause of great suffering will mean nothing in a
generation. And whatever lessons learned will have been forgotten, just as we
never seem to learn from history in order to prepare for the future either.
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