When and if we ever get the chance once again to socialize miles away from our homes outside the safety of virus quashing sunlight, while standing or sitting mere inches apart, perhaps the first question we might pose to a soon to be former stranger is “how did you spend your pandemic?”
I’ve endured this mandated time-out, alone, in my semi-tastefully appointed home, trying to be very measured. Sometimes I’d be sad for those whose lives had to end on the business end of a ventilator. Then, I’d find myself getting angry over the many ways this pandemic has been handled and how lawmakers are behaving, regardless of which side of the extremely politicized battle lines upon which they find themselves standing.
But as the norm returns and we all venture out into what we can hope is a more sanitized, but a still welcoming world, we must apply what we’ve learned, whatever we’ve learned. I’ve said this before and I still mean it: we’ve lost too much as a society not to have learned something. We must always learn something. We must always move forward. We must learn that moving forward isn’t an option. It’s a necessity.
Decades ago, I read a book by Italo Calvino. While in college, books such as Calvino’s Atlas of The Invisible Cities, were must reads. The 1972 novel is a book about the constructs of architecture although it’s not about architecture or style or design, Or travel. Rather, it focuses on culture and how citizens exemplify that as perceived by ol’ Marco Polo in the process of conveying stories to Kublai Khan: stories Marco amassed as he pillaged his way through city scapes.
“Those who arrive at Thekla can see little of the city, beyond the plank fences, the sackcloth screens, the scaffoldings, the metal armatures, the wooden catwalks hanging from ropes or supported by sawhorses, the ladders, the trestles. If you ask “Why is Thekla’s construction taking such a long time?” the inhabitants continue hoisting sacks, lowering leaded strings, moving long brushes up and down, as they answer, “So that its destruction cannot begin.”
Wow. I remember thinking Calvino and I must be related. This passage resonated with me. Hell, he could’ve been writing about the widow Winchester and that crazy house of hers that she never stopped building for fear if she stopped the ghosts of those killed by the bas guys brandishing the Winchester rifle (the gun that helped win the West, the very same gun invented by Mrs. Winchester’s husband) would haunt her and ultimately, do her in. Or something like that.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”
As I see it, Calvino wrote about about the lunacy of those who bury their heads in the sand. Those who eat candy while convincing themselves it’s really a vegetable. Dysmorphia at its finest. The eye doesn’t see things, but images of things that mean other things. Denialist views are always 20/20. And so it is with life, love, war, politics and what will inevitably become pandemic revisionism
