Who are you? Putting a face on Covid-19

One of the strange and unusual features about the Covid-19 pandemic and its toxic seepage into our lives, is that we’re rarely given the names of those who have died from it.

In a way, this is understandable. In our brave new world of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and a technology in which everyone is connected to everyone else in screen cyberspace, we’ve seen that anyone who has a nametag and a signature photo is fair game for the spiteful, the sorehead, the lunatic and terminally begrudged—a small percentage of whom will translate bitter resentment into dangerous action. Add to that the pandemic fear that reaches farther than the disease itself, and how that fear can trigger anger against the victims and their families – and even Asian-Americans – and you’d have to agree that public officials are obliged to exercise prudence about releasing names.

But this goes against custom, of honoring the dead and placing a lapidary stone over a burial site: this person lived, this person died, these are the dates of that life and a few words to link it with perpetuity, even if they’re merely spoken and snatched away by the wind. Our names are ourselves; they confer selfhood. In Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible,” John Proctor vigorously argues for the protection of his name as linked to his oath of innocence and honor. Take my name away and you take me away. My name is who I am.

In one of Athol Fugard’s plays, reference is made to a murdered infant, a casualty of political and racial strife.

“I want to know that child’s name!” cries the anguished protagonist. A name establishes ineluctable personhood in the human community. It rescues the individual from the rubble of history. It puts an obscure Zulu child on the earth with Jesus, Socrates, Alexander the Great and everyone you’ve known or can find in an archive.

Unclaimed coronavirus victims are buried in New York.

“Who’s there?” is the first line of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” The absence of a simple reply strikes fear and turmoil in the court of Elsinore. Shakespeare also asked, elsewhere and rhetorically, “What’s in a name?” The rose would indeed smell just as sweet, but naming it gives us the capacity to share it and thereby widen our knowledge of the world.

In the basest and most barbaric failure of civilization, war, soldiers wear their ID in dog tags; if they don’t make it out alive, chances are we’ll still know their names. Among of the most poignant expressions of that failure, incidentally, are the tombs of unknown soldiers, as if not knowing who they were seals their lives in utter loss, metaphoric as well as real.

You could argue that the numbers are too great for daily or weekly publication, and that family, friends and clergymen will know anyway who the Covid-19 casualties are and will honor them one last time with ceremonial love and grief before sending them on. It’s the numbers that are changing how we deal with things. And their immediacy. No one really wants to think of what it’s like to drown from inside your own lungs, or know it’s happening to a loved one you’re barred from comforting. It’s enough to jack our nerves into high alert and ruin our sleep. And the numbers keep piling up.

There’s no question that Covid-19 represents the greatest challenge the world has faced since WWII, made more ghastly by our knowledge that it didn’t have to be this way. We neutralized AIDS, SARS MERS, Swine flu, Legionnaire’s Disease, Ebola, and Zika. “Mismanagement and grief,” wrote W.H. Auden in his definitive WWII poem, “September 1, 1939,” “Do we have to suffer them again?”

The answer is clearly yes. We were warned. Our self-serving political leadership in Washington dithered and then made, and continues to make, excuses for itself while lying to us and parceling out blame in its ongoing dysfunction.

So here we are, unable to know who among us carries a deadly virus characterized by the swiftness of its contagion, and without a vaccine to protect us. All we know for sure is that this condition, along with a collapsing economy, will last, in varying degrees of crisis, for years, with no way to predict how bad this is all going to be. For a lot of people, it’s plenty bad already.

The challenge isn’t just what we’re going to do by way of medical science and economic policy to get a handle on this thing and resume some semblance of normality; it’s who we’re going to be, as a society, a culture, and in our sequestered selves, once we discover how much that normality has changed.

We’ve already been moving into greater and greater individual isolation as the virtual world crowds out the real one and our sense of personal touch and ambient experience—the mysterious and unique atmosphere that links performer with audience, painter with viewer, poet with reader, the individual with nature and people with each other—becomes lost in transmission. I’ve read of young people in close proximity to each other who prefer to text rather than look up and read the infinite subtleties of face and flesh. This, to me, represents a death more insidious than any virus.

Photo by Joey Bird, Flickr, Creative Commons License

One thing we learn as we mature—the universal, timeless lesson—is that change is changeless. It never exactly recurs, despite patterns. As the poet Joseph Brodsky said, “Nothing ever happens the same way twice.” So maybe in time we’ll find a way to exploit the considerable, even miraculous benefits of modern technology while rediscovering the ineffable value of the human touch and the understanding what it is to be alive in the only moment that’s given us: the eternal present.

The question follows: what will we make of our world?

It may sound perverse, but the Virus has given us new challenges beyond survival and physical health. It’s given us the chance to reconceive our society. It’s redistributing financial resources. It’s reintroducing us to the meaning of privation and community, as the mantra goes around, “We’re all in this together.” We’re celebrating the right people, not for money and empty fame, but for courage, expertise, and devotion to service, from medical professionals to cops to food bank volunteers and grocery store checkout clerks. Outside of Washington, state and local politicians—in our case Governor Gavin Newsom and L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, have come through for us. So has Downey Mayor Blanca Pacheco, who’s proven steady at the helm.

Now that we’re stuck at home—no sports, no live performances or exhibitions or standup laughs—we’re finding that binge-watching Netflix and the whole boredom-killing business of TV and entertainment is no longer feeding our hunger for meaning and connection. A lot of writers lately have been mentioning the Old Masters and their understanding of suffering, and how that has given us a more sober appreciation of our impermanence, as well as knowledge and wisdom. Maybe this is all forcing us to get a little more real.

Maybe, too, this will lead us to rethink the moldering empire that’s become the American experiment. One of our great and definitive American musical achievements is Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” with its lush and stirring evocations of pastoral beauty harvested out of the struggles of immigrant Pilgrims in search of a new land free of decadence and oppression. One of the piece’s themes is based on an old Shaker hymn:

“’Tis the gift to be simple, ‘tis the gift to be free,

‘Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,

And when we find ourselves in the place just right,

We’ll be in the valley of love and delight.”

We’ve always dreamt of finding a new Eden, of starting out all over and this time doing it better. Once we get out of lockdown, wouldn’t it be nice if we found ourselves willing to try again?