More than a decade ago (ugh), the city I lived in was hit by what they called “a 100-year ice event,” the kind of thing we seem to be seeing all the time now. The ice came down like a fury, and all over the city you could see the flashes of transformers blowing as tree limbs came down. The next day the whole landscape looked like WWI, and in the wake of the ice came a frigid cold that lasted for days. Stuck without electricity, half the city holed up in Barnes & Noble to charge their phones, and fled to the homes of friends who either were lucky enough to have power or who had gas stoves in their kitchens. I can’t bear the smell of cheap candle wax to this day.
But it was about that time that I became able to articulate a state of mind that is almost too elusive to describe. I call it “the sense of fait accompli.” It’s when you understand clear through that the time for panic is in the rearview, when you suddenly find it acceptable to calmly term the situation a disaster, a horror, or a fustercluck of massive proportions. It’s not just an event in the amygdala, when the terror of reality has burned out your circuits for feeling it: it’s a decision to embrace reality that steals upon you until you grasp it.
It’s possible to embrace the sense of fait accompli in one’s own personal disasters. But the One Hundred Year Ice Event of 2007 revealed to me what it’s like when a whole town does it. Sure, some folks were hoarding toilet paper (yes, it seems to be a thing whenever disaster strikes); but most folks were joking with one another and forbearing with the jostling proximity of fellow sufferers camping out in Panera.
And now, I’m fascinated with the sense of fait accompli unfolding on a global scale.
It’s particularly strange because we can’t all congregate in Panera and make jokes. We do it in group texts and cell phone videos posted to Facebook and email chains passing along links and stories and PSAs. Someone on my building’s group text offered to leave toilet paper at the door for anyone who was out and couldn’t find it at the store. Another volunteered to give the common railings and doorknobs a thorough scrubbing. The sewing adepts in my book club are making masks for local hospitals and quarantined loved ones. Art is being made; paywalls have tumbled down; the lowliest workers in our society are being recognized as the heroes they are — or they damn well better be.
And meanwhile the eye of the hurricane is passing over every hospital and clinic in the land.
I haven’t been able to write much during this time. For one thing, advocacy work is, you may imagine, pretty intense right now, and a lot of things are up in the air. I went to bed a few nights ago with a free-floating tearfulness, despite the fact that I normally love an excuse to hole up in my sanctuary. I’m deeply anxious about the vulnerable people I love. I’m angry at my back neighbors who decided a patio party was the thing to have early last week. I feel put to shame by people who have more generous instincts than I do.
Yet all those feelings, disturbing as they are, don’t disturb the foundations of our global fait accompli. So much can be brought to cohere within it: yep, the federal response is a fustercluck. Yep, some people are spectacularly showing their ass. Yep, I buy black beans regularly to make for dinner, and suddenly everybody’s a fan. (Y’all go back to your Hot Pockets, for heaven’s sake.)
I’ve taken to lighting a fresh candle in the morning for those I love and care about, for those are burdened with the tasks of triage and risk and who suffer those traumas so I don’t have to. This light is for you. It’s already lit. It’s done.
And here’s a fragment of a prayer by John Donne, who has paced this path before us:
O most mighty God, and merciful God, the God of all true sorrow, and true joy too, of all fear, and of all hope too, as thou hast given me a repentance, not to be repented of, so give me, O Lord, a fear, of which I may not be afraid. Give me tender and supple and conformable affections, that as I joy with them that joy, and mourn with them that mourn, so I may fear with them that fear.
From Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
I’m planning to try to post more from seclusion; but I can’t promise to encompass it.
I can burn lights, though.