The Before Times
Sunrise like a nosebleed
Your head hurts and you can't breathe
You've been tryin' to throw your arms around the world
How far are you gonna go
Before you lose your way back home?
You've been tryin' to throw your arms around the world
Every week I sit down to write this post and fish through the virtual pile of papers that clutter my virtual desktop, littered with hundreds of drafts and nearly finished drafts and partial drafts and notes for drafts. Every week I think This time I will do it the easy way; I will post something that's already finished, something I filed away months ago for moments such as these.
But 'moments such as these' were not the moments I anticipated when I wrote those posts.
It's not that the more polished posts, the stuff I wrote and sensibly filed away for moments such as these wouldn't work; it's that I've never witnessed moments such as these. I anticipated things like getting sick, falling behind, getting stuck. I didn't anticipate the problem of scale. I didn't anticipate the constant, nagging sense that I, and we, have passed through everything that came before and are hurtling toward the edge of now, beyond which lies a future we can't see or foresee.
I wrote those posts in case I had a shitty writing week, not in case I found myself riding shotgun, watching the speedometer climb as my country floors it and heads for a cliff.
I am acutely aware of the feeling that we are on the verge of some kind of irrevocable cultural shift, the kind that cultures only recognize after that shift has taken hold. And I am haunted by the sense that while I cannot tell the whole story, and nothing I write or say can begin to encompass the true scope of the subject, and the best I can do is sketch, in the most rudimentary lines, what I see of these times as we hurtle out of them and into who knows what fresh hell, it is nevertheless necessary to try.
So I roll out of bed, lace up my boots, put my knife in my pocket, clip my keys to my belt, and set off again to try to throw my arms around the world.
The first time I heard someone use the phrase 'the Before Times' is still lodged in my head, the moment frozen in place, fixed and immutable, the way I'm told things are preserved by volcanic ash: a dog mid-scratch, a man about to show a good hand of cards, the wife of Bath with her head still turned.
It was the summer of 2020, just a few months into the shutdown, and I was hiding in plain sight. I'd stashed myself in a crappy apartment, where I sat in a chair by the window with Zeke and Alex, my beloved creature companions, who've since gone on ahead to smoother roads. There were boxes stacked in the living room; I never really unpacked. A friend came by to help me put things in the kitchen cupboards; another friend insisted I'd feel better if I put some clothes away. The mattress on the bedroom floor stayed on the floor, but I never really slept there anyway; the table in the dining room had a wobbly footstool on which I never sat. Instead, I sat in the chair I'd named Miss Havisham, who had her back to the far corner of the room. From there, I could keep an eye on both the door and the nearly silent city street below.
Someone said to me the other day, "Paris is a rough old lady under silver paint." I'd wager most cities are. I'd known that silent city I watched through the window in several of her eras, guises, disguises, masks. From my corner, I could see a building where I'd lived almost 25 years before, newly married at 23; I could see a building that used to house the bar where my mother and I met at 5 o'clock on Fridays for a glass of wine while both of us were mid-divorce. I could see the cathedral where I'd watched childhood friends’ children baptized and seen my own beloved mentors laid to rest; I could see the sculpture garden where I'd gone on a dozen decent dates, the park where I'd been both kissed and mugged, the theaters and bookstores and nightclubs and gay bars and pool halls that I'd known like the back of my hand since I was kid sneaking into poetry slams and late-night shows to which I'd arrived by city bus with my big black boots and kohl-lined eyes and not even a fake ID, just a pool cue and a smart mouth to get me in.
By the summer of 2020—30 years after I took the bus to college, straight down Franklin if you took the 2A and right up Hennepin if you took the 6—the city had changed.
George Floyd had just been murdered. Minneapolis was choked with rage and grief. The world was eerily silent, the streets mostly empty between eruptions of unrest. The tension in the air was palpable, almost an audible hum. I'd have sworn I could smell it on the wind, the way you can smell coming snow.
One night that summer, Lora and I were on the phone. Maybe we were talking about the news; she's a reporter. Maybe we were talking about teaching; I was still teaching at the time. Almost certainly we talked about poetry; we always do. Maybe we talked about the fact that the word "unprecedented" already suffered from such overuse it had become a joke about itself. We talked about what it was like to be in lockdown with a family, as she was, as opposed to in isolation, as I was; she wondered if I was lonely, I wondered if she was going mad. I told her I wasn't lonely so much as aware of the stark difference between the solitude I'd chosen and the isolation that the shutdowns enforced; the difference was the presence or absence of agency. Isolation was imposed; solitude was a choice. Back before all this—I gestured, as if she could see me, as if anyone could, as if I was still visible, as if any of us were—it was easy to be alone, up in the woods. Now I feel like a sardine, stacked end to end in these apartments but with no way to connect; I can hear strangers breathing on the other side of the wall.
That's when she said something about the Before Times.
I still remember the flicker of delight I always have when I hear a word or phrase that seems just right, that captures both the connotative and denotative essence of a thing with precision and exactitude. There's such a joy to just the right word; a piece snaps into place.
And I still remember the chill that ran through me, the hair that stood up on the back of my neck.
In the summer of 2020, we didn't have any sense of the scale or scope of the transformation that would occur over just a few years. We still don’t. Things have changed; we know that. Any one of us can look around these various landscapes we all occupy—the inner and outer, political and personal, global and national, cultural and familial, professional and spiritual, creative and intellectual, relational and individual—and see the wreckage plain as day, the result of one unprecedented event after another, each one coming too soon on the heels of the last, a wave pattern that has picked up both velocity and force over time.
In a recent post here on Going Solo, I asked a rhetorical question: what would I have told myself about full-time road life, if I had the chance? And if I'd known it would be this hard, would I have had the guts to go?
As I think about that conversation with Lora, and that vivid moment when I heard her describe the world as it was, and the way we were, as the Before Times, I can't help but wonder what I'd say to the woman sitting in the corner, in Miss Havisham, a blue wingback chair.
Miss Havisham was the sole remaining chair of a pair I'd bought on Craigslist back when there were two people in my home, two people who sat reading in matching chairs, set at a slight angle facing the window, so both could see the lake but also to suggest there might at some point be an exchange of words between their occupants—perhaps the readers might look up and notice each other and say something—perhaps Hello or How is your book? or What would you like for dinner? or Who the fuck are you, anyway? or Why are you still here? or why, indeed, am I—in any case, when I cleared out the house, I took only one of the chairs, believing it might help me forget that it had once been part of a set, a pair, and also forget the fact that the set, the pair, the other person, the entire life that involved the presence of another person, the entire premise of the kind of life that takes as given than another person is necessary or even desirable, was now gone.
That kind of life, that other person, that set of chairs, even the one chair I bothered to keep—all of that belongs to the Before Times as well. I don't know where any of it went, or in what fashion or by what means it was lost, or who shoulders the burden of those things these days, who carries the weight of it now.
I've been sitting here trying to come up with any other answer, but the truth is that I'd tell her to ditch the boxes, grab a coat, load the cat and dog into the truck, and run.
But I waited. I sat by the window, watching the leaves. Occasionally a siren screamed by.
There are very few moments in history where it's clear that something is about to change; usually, we can only see the Before Times as such in retrospect, in light of whatever happened that changed the world.
As winter moved in over Lake Superior in 2019, carrying ice floes and ice storms that slicked each tiny needle on each black pine bough with ice, I was busy with the small and quiet offices of a solitary life: I shoveled when it snowed, I made a meal, I burrowed down into my blankets and watched the sea-green luminescence of the distant Northern lights. I was preparing for something, I think—not just winter, something else.
I wasn't preparing for what happened. I wasn't preparing for this. Nor, I think, am I really prepared for what’s next.
For the next few weeks, I'll be posting about some of the places I've been and the people I've met as I've traveled from California to the Upper Midwest, through the Northeast and now into the South, on assignment for the San Francisco Chronicle. I've been talking to soldiers and sailors and welders and lawyers, people who've fought wars the world over and people at war with themselves. I've been talking to elders, and I've been talking to people young enough that they'd fairly be called 'kids,' but whose wisdom and insight—and exhaustion, and anxiety, and fear—suggests they no longer are, if they ever had the chance to be.
I had dinner with a young woman last night—a college student and a first-time voter—who remembers going to the polls with her father to vote for Obama in 2008. It’s one of her earliest memories; she was just three, and doesn't remember details—just that her father told her they were voting for Obama, and she got an 'I Voted' sticker, and "everything about it just seemed happy and good."
Now, she says, she's tired.
She's 19.
I wish this was the kind of world in which I’d smile knowingly, a little bemused by this young woman's world-weary gaze, and that I was the kind of comfortable older woman who could feel certain that whatever keeps this girl up nights now, she's buffered against the struggles ahead by naiveté and youth.
But this is not that world; it hasn't been, not for a long time. And I'm not that woman; I never was. She isn’t naive, and she might never have been young. I had no reassurance to provide. I dropped her in front of her dorm and told her to rest up.
These are the Before Times. She's going to need everything she's got for whatever comes next.
Have read and re-read. This is sobering and brilliant. I feel it in my bones -- the before times, "a wave pattern that has picked up both velocity and force over time."This feeling of constantly preparing for something -- something 'unprecedented', never knowing what that 'something' will be is endlessly unsettling and true.
Marya, I read this piece twice in a row. Its resonance, like an echo. Like sitting inside a rock cathedral and hearing the beat of my heart.