It’s a weird time. When there is something that threatens human beings on a global scale, my first instinct is to say, good, we deserve it. We don’t, and I know this. And yet there is an enormous scattered sensation within the collective, an unraveling of the different threads woven into all our countries, cultures, and creeds in their own discrete way, for their own particular reasons. Not to mention those sons of Ares, Phobos and Deimos, twin specters of Fear and Panic, are alive and well and always will be, eternally trailing behind their father on the battlefield.
The way this world breathes and pulses is a communal rhythm and we walk through it on sea legs. Sea legs take the form of boundaries, eating well, limiting exposure to social media and bullshit people—you know, keeping one eye on the ground and one on our demons. We all have them. My sea legs are the constant management of the nodal relationship between my emotions and how I icily perceive humanity from on high; you’re well acquainted with yours, right? We’re all hyper aware of the specific entities that endanger our sea legs, developing intricate safeguards, moats around the castle. Each storm passing over our own boats has a name.
But now we’re all on one immense boat, and the storm does have a name. If I were to create an animation of this scenario, it would be of one looming black cloud with the eyebrows of a disgruntled Cossack and all the other grumpy, stormy, smaller-yet-scrappier clouds banding together to face it, wielding sharp lances forged out of bright golden thunderbolts. (Zeus was the only other god Ares truly feared.) Cut to the underdogs winning, resolving their petty differences in the aftermath of this mini war in the sky. If I were to animate the bluer version of this tale, it would show our clouds gently expelling their mournful watery defeat over the waiting, helpless ark, drops falling on cheeks both sallow and rosy, until the cinematic pièce de résistance: a close-up of one raindrop slowly drawing closer to an existing human tear and finally, their magnetic melding before traveling down the beautiful downy cheek of a child, together as one.
That would be cool. But while our sea legs are doing their best, they aren’t prepared to handle a giant storm. They’re worried about one castle, fortifying one moat. Maybe the solution lies in not having sea legs at all. Maybe it requires stripping bare, chopping off countless useless limbs until we all stand on two enormous earth legs.
In Madeleine L’Engle’s A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the Murrys are facing possible nuclear war. One passage from this book has etched itself onto my psyche—this is after Mr. Murry, a renowned scientist, has received a phone call from the President of the United States informing him that the dictator of a fictional country is threatening world peace. The entire Murry family is contemplating this possibility, when Mrs. Murry says:
“I remember my mother telling me about one spring, many years ago now, when relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were so tense that all the experts predicted nuclear war before the summer was over. They weren’t alarmists or pessimists; it was a considered, sober judgment. And Mother said that she walked along the lane wondering if the pussy willows would ever bud again. After that, she waited each spring for the pussy willows, remembering, and never took their budding for granted again.”
I have absolutely no idea what my words mean, but it did make me feel better to write them.
I hope you have enough toilet paper.
And don’t call your boat a dinghy—she’s a stately Norwegian Cruise liner goddamnit.
Image is of the two moons of Mars—Phobos and Deimos
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