Postcard From a Pandemic (With Apologies to Wallace Stevens)

Children visiting our bones
Will know that they were once
Nimble, motivated to movement

But in that fateful spring, fast with life
Had clustered in dull arrangement
Lessened to mere being, in place

And know that left with our bones
Was little more than what was
Felt and seen not by them, but by

Fractious, craven minions of an
Ignorance inaugurated in a world
Beyond our doors under beclouded skies

We knew full well the world that was
Once not merely known but grasped
By spirit and skin, but made an image

Empty of us, watched beyond barren walls
By shadows stretched by no sun
Spiritless and broken, left alone by all else


This is my creation, obviously derived from Postcard from a Volcano, a poem written by Wallace Stevens, that other lawyer who was a poet. Of course I'm being silly. I'm no poet though he certainly was a great one. But it seems adequate and to my purpose, which is to shamelessly borrow from him a theme, to the extent I can recognize it. His poem depicted the aftermath of what is ostensibly a natural disaster, presumably the eruption of a volcano, and children of the future viewing some of the remains of what had been destroyed; the bones of those disaster struck.

It's more than likely, of course, that Stevens wasn't writing about what seems to be written about. Perhaps he was inspired by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. or A.D. and the fascinating, uncovered, ruins of the cities it destroyed, Pompeii and Herculaneum. I found the ruins of Pompeii fascinating in a kind of macabre way when I visited them, even marred as they were by the placement of some huge, vaguely ancient looking sculpture and other objects created by some artist which were strewn, thoughtlessly I think, about the forum. Stevens may have had some cultural or societal disaster in mind, resulting from some cultural or societal deficiency.

Now we have our own disaster to cope with, and can if we wish use it as a metaphor, and I suppose I am in one way. But there's a sense of the unreal about it if the conduct of our fellows is any guide. We don't seem to take it all that seriously. Perhaps here in God's favorite country that's a result of the fact that we're presided over by a self-pitying, scapegoating narcissist. Perhaps we have the president we deserve, being for the most part self-pitying, scapegoating and self-involved ourselves.

Unreal, as well, as we're required to isolate ourselves from the real--that is to say, the rest of the world. But we now do that even in normal circumstances in the sense that we no longer experience it directly, or would rather not do so. No, I'm not referring to that peculiar philosophical doctrine that we never experience the rest of the world, only sense data, or the Kantian assumption that there is some unknowable "thing in itself" lurking behind every perceived rock and tree. Instead, I'm referring to the fact that most of the world is experienced by us in these times through some device like a smartphone, or PC or tablet, TV, etc.

In a way we do now in isolation what we would do in any case. Pestilence is pictured above as one of the infamous four horseman. The current pestilence is pictured by most of us as well, through various media. It won't become a part of our lives we take seriously until we or those we huddle with or think of while we huddle become its victims.