Day 8: Social Distancing is a Cruel Misnomer
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. Thank you, Charles Dickens. Could there be a better opening sentence to describe our current situation? Only this one a friend sent me from LitHub.com rewriting first sentences of great literature for social distancing. My favorite was, “FaceTime me, Ishmael.”
On Day 6, I wrote an essay entitled Social Distancing and the Wearing of Masks. That afternoon a long-time subscriber to Seeds wrote me a one-sentence email that made me laugh out loud. She said:
Physical distancing, social connection.
I wrote her back and acknowledged that it had taken her four words to say what took me three pages. I don’t think she writes haiku professionally either. Let’s say it again:
Physical distancing, social connection.
And who, exactly, reached out in immediate social connection to people the world over despite physical distancing?
The Artists of the World.
Yes, those whose livelihood is, for the most part, based on gatherings of people in one place so that they may share their God-given talents.
Yes, those whose appearances, gigs, concerts, performances, shows, operas, recitals were cancelled. No, had to be cancelled in order to keep the world safe and healthy.
Those are the people who said, “Okay, let’s Zoom.”
Furthermore, they did it immediately, sometimes instantly. They did it quickly. They did it freely.
Yo-Yo Ma playing his cello.
Melissa Etheridge playing live daily at 3 pm.
The Berlin Philharmonic streaming all its concerts for free.
The Indigo Girls are performing a live free concert tonight.
They also reached out to those young performers whose hearts were broken because they’re the up-and-coming artists of the world, and they wouldn’t get to have their final projects—be they art exhibitions, high school musicals, final voice recitals, graduation dance performances, poetry slams, or any other kind of Ta-Da! opportunities that Commencement brings.
Laura Benanti inviting high school musical kids to sing their songs and tag her on Twitter.
Commencement. Such an odd name for an ending. I’m sure whoever coined it did it on purpose. Here’s its history. “In medieval times, a person needed a license to lecture, and just like many other trades at the time, teachers formed a guild. Once they received a license, they were initiated into this masters of arts guild through a ceremony called commencement (or in Latin inceptio). They were beginning their careers as masters of arts; they were being initiated as teachers.”
The entire planet is facing a collective commencement, aren’t we?
We’ve each just received a permanent license.
For what?
In shorthand, a license to care for one another.
And what are we commencing?
The awareness that we’re all the same, despite our differences.
The awareness that we all need the same things now.
The awareness that our governments, despite what they say, do not always care equally for all their people.
The awareness that those who have cried “Wolf!” on decrepit infrastructures for decades, and been dismissed and minimized because of it, were one hundred percent right.
The awareness that the effect of the CoronaVirus on our economy has barely begun, and will most likely, be devastating.
Artists of all kinds have been showing us these themes for years. Because that’s what artists do. They reflect us to ourselves. That’s their job.
A friend of mine who’s an accomplished theatre director is known for saying, “Theatre never shows you your best day. The drama is in your worst day.”
Sloane Crosley had an Essay in The Times this morning called, “Someday, We’ll Look Back on All of This and Write a Novel.” In it, she said, “For writers, as the tentacles of the coronavirus unfurl each day, everything is copy.”
I had to laugh again. I’m a novelist. She’s right. No one and nothing is safe from a novelist. In the midst of a novel, everything is fair game. I’ve “borrowed” (and mostly asked permission to do so) car names, actual personalities, a singer’s career, a professor’s position, shows friends have directed. You name it. It’s fair game in the name of art.
Until Broadway was shuttered last week, there was a thriving musical called Come From Away about to celebrate its third anniversary. It tells the story of what happened in Canada for those who were stranded there during 9.11. See? Not the best days, the worst days.
The thing is, it’s often the worst days that bring out the best in us. Sometimes, it takes a bad day to do so. That’s sad, if we’ll let it be.
On the other hand, I have a client who is stranded in Kenya with her ten year old son. She can get out of Kenya probably on an emergency flight. The Canadian university where she’d doing her Ph.D. has provided the funds to get them home. But the country she needs to go home to just shut its borders to everyone. Her visa expires in six weeks. The university is moving heaven and earth to get them back home.
An article in this morning’s Times featured hundreds of U. S. citizens stuck in Morocco. Our government has done nothing to get them home. All flights are cancelled. The Embassy has asked that everyone email them. No one has heard a word back. They are running out of money. The hotels are closing. One woman is pregnant and ill. We are doing nothing.
There’s a set-up for an evening in the theatre. A worst day.
But, or, and is better, bad days don’t last forever.
Jan-Werner Müller, a professor of politics at Princeton, wrote an Opinion piece in The New York Times this morning called, “We Must Assist One Another or Die.”
If that doesn’t say it all, I don’t know what could.
Yesterday, a wonderful man I know who lives in New York City went to see his doctor. The doctor gave him two masks. His mother had already sent him some. Walking home, he saw two octogenarian persons of color, obviously a couple, waiting for the bus. They had no masks. He approached them respectfully, and offered them his two extra masks. They thanked him profusely.
He is a perfect example of assisting one another. You will note carefully please that he did not give away his own mask, he gave away his abundance of masks. That is the assistance we are all called to give.
Like the artists who are awash in levels of talent most of us don’t even dream of, the artists who are giving what they can out of their abundance, despite the fact that their incomes have appreciably disappeared because we cannot gather. They are giving their artistry anyway as are the high school theatre kids tagging Laura Benanti on Twitter.
There are several things I want you to remember, Beloved.
First, we all have a new license to care for one another as best we may.
Second, we all have some kind of abundance, something extra we can give. Whether we feel that way about it or not.
Third, give it. As the founder of Methodism John Wesley was known for saying:
Do all the good you can,
by all the means you can,
in all the ways you can,
in all the places you can,
at all the times you can,
to all the people you can,
as long as ever you can.
Barbra Streisand, as I am so fond of saying, is right. People who need people are the luckiest people in the world.
We are people who need people, Beloved, because it is the best of times, and it is the worst of times, and we are the only ones who can change that starting right where we are.
Follow the artists. They’ll steer us right.
Dr. Susan Corso is a metaphysician and medical intuitive with a private counseling practice for more than 35 years. She has written too many books to list here. Her website is www.susancorso.com
© Dr. Susan Corso 2020 All rights reserved.