Bewildered

On death, autumn, and reading Fanny Howe

Back in March, in that frenzied week when it became clear that the Coronavirus was not just a distant threat happening overseas but a presence already among us, I tried to calm my students’ worries as they braced for the news that the college campus would be closed and we’d have to finish the semester at home. We had just come back from spring break, but the normal energy that usually surges through the campus—that happy friction of “welcome back” and “it’s almost over”—just wasn’t there. Before anyone could speak it, the early end of the semester somehow felt inevitable.

It was in those deflated days that I tried to offer reassurance. My mantra was two fold: first, let’s all acknowledge that this is not ideal (though I might’ve just said that it “sucks”). And second, “this too shall pass.” This was the main thrust of my encouragement, but there was another thing, too. As the week came to a close and we made preparations for classes to go online, the weather outside was changing. There were early glimmers of spring in the New England mid-March. Looking out the classroom window, I told my students that nature doesn’t fear Coronavirus. Nature will go on being nature—spring would come, and then summer, and while every human being on the planet altered our lives in ways big and small to accommodate the virus, nature needed to do no such thing. The virus was and is, after all, a part of nature. 

While I always like to be a source of reassurance for my students, I’m not always so self-assured myself. But this time, on just this one thing, I felt like I could make a difference for them. The previous week, death from a virus born overseas was the least of my concerns; I was bearing witness to death here. On the Monday before the Monday when I returned to campus from spring break, my Dad passed away from Parkinson’s Disease after weeks of decline, first in a hospital and then in hospice care in a nursing home. The weekend before he died, my mom, my sister, and I kept a near constant vigil, and it was on one of the mornings before he left us that I sat by him and looked out the window as the sun came up, silhouetting the still-bare trees, and saw three massive turkeys perched on a branch. It felt like a miracle. It felt like a joke. Inside, we were standing by, waiting for death. Outside, nature paid no mind. Death, like the virus, is a part of nature; it doesn’t need to stop to notice. The turkeys in the tree seemed miraculous, but they weren’t. They were just turkeys.

I thought of those weeks in March—when, as my sister astutely said, Dad died and the whole world stopped—this morning as I walked my dog around the neighborhood and felt summer giving way to fall. I could feel it in the cold around the edges of my ears. I could see it in the steam wafting off the roofs of houses as the sun warmed the morning dew and in my own breath steaming away from my face. I was, for a moment, inside that feeling of change as I intentionally shuffled my shoes through fallen orange leaves. 

Back in March, when I attempted to reassure my students by reminding them that nature doesn’t care—the seasons’ change would be visible on campus whether we were there to see it or not—I didn’t anticipate that the seasons would change again and again and again before we were back there. But change they did, and they will probably change a few more times before we humans settle back into anything like normal life. I hope now, and, if I’m honest, I fantasize, that by the start of this March we will be through this. My mind wants the neat closure of one year. A year that, for me and my family, was always going to feel lost. But now, a year that everyone else has lost too. 

But I don’t know. I think I did a good job reassuring my students, right up to the point where I didn’t, where I lied—where I tried to act like I knew more than I did because at least I knew something. I did know that even when the unimaginable happens, nature doesn’t take notice, that non-human life would go on as normal, and in some ways, it turns out, it would benefit from our lives disrupted. But I didn’t know what it would mean to move on. I couldn’t see past the first part.

This might be because there really is no moving on, no leaving behind. I’ve begun re-reading Fanny Howe at night when I’m looking for excuses to not sleep. I read her novel Indivisible years ago while working on my dissertation as a way to unthink the thoughts that were keeping me awake. That is to say, I like Fanny Howe particularly because I usually don’t know exactly what she’s talking about, but I like the way she sounds. And, of course, I like the maze. I like feeling lost and then a bit less lost the next time I read her until she loses me again. 

It turns out, this feeling that her work generates is intentional. She holds “bewilderment as a poetics and politics.” Bewilderment, she writes in the essay of same name from her collection The Wedding Dress, is “an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.” It is a “walk into the wilderness” that is “full of falls and stumbles and pains.” And here’s the magic part: “strangely one tries to get in deeper and to get home at the same time.” Later she writes, “You are progressing at one level and becoming more lost at another.”

This is what it felt like for me to stumble into the beginning of last March. To be so knocked off my axis by the loss of my dad, and yet so clear on how this loss could help my students deal with the loss that was coming their way and yet so fully unprepared for what it would mean to keep walking beyond March and into Summer and into Fall and yet…

This morning, I was looking up at the crown of a big old tree whose leaves had already mostly changed. I blinked into the sun shining through the tree’s bare spots where the leaves that couldn’t hold on any longer were the first to let go. It was magnificent, as trees always are. Looking, I traced the branches down to the trunk and finally to the ground where the tree’s damp leaves messied the sidewalk. There, the roots of the tree cracked and wrinkled the pavement, as they do all across my neighborhood. But usually the sidewalk succeeds at keeping the roots hidden beneath the concrete. Not here. This tree’s roots burst out through the pavement and asserted themselves into my path. I had to step over the ankle-high rift and I had to notice the chasm full of tree. 

I had before me the physical manifestation of the assurance I tried to offer my students. Nature doesn’t care. It’s not afraid. Even where we’ve attempted to tame nature, to make it strictly ornamental, it refuses. It breaks through the ground and reminds us that we are temporary, but it is not. I stopped to take a picture and I thought again about how my assurance can only go so far before bewilderment sets in. I can see a thing and know that life goes on. But beyond that truism, I’m just making the rest up. I’m progressing, but I’m also getting more lost.