plague notes—my cocoon tightens
In my high school English classes we read the standard dick lit, the "real" literature, and the works of two women—Emily Dickinson & Sylvia Plath. They were conspicuous in their not-maleness, and whether it was intended or not, the message I received was that women writers were anomalies. Something was wrong with them, as women. And the wrongness was connected to their writing.
I had to look up Plath just now to remember the title of the book we'd read. Of course it was The Bell Jar. But I remembered only the sad rose on the cover of the small, cheap paperback. I don't recollect anything about that reading, or the name of my teacher, or the Dickinson poems we read. But I do recall the recrimination and judgement. Crazy. Suicide. Recluse.
Recluse. Generally I remember feeling confused. My only discrete memory is the moment I wondered: What is so terrible about not wanting to leave your home?
Here we are. Sheltering-in-place. Social distancing. Or, as one of my Facebook pals daily implores the world at large: Stay the fuck at home.
Yesterday I finished listening to the novel Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks, which I bought during my time recovering from Mortal Peril and then forgot about. Scrolling through my Audible library, I did not remember the plot, either, when I fired it up. A year of plague, 1666, England.
At first, I thought it might have been a mistake to read, during a pandemic, about plague—the brutality, the devastation. I listened to the first two hours in the garden, under a dark, threatening sky, the reader's voice rhythmic and musical in the early morning quiet.
Then I moved on to Washington Black. Again, in the garden, this time in the late afternoon sunshine, I listened while digging out bindweed under the plum tree. The long, thick, white roots are maddeningly prolific, but it is satisfying to feel the gentle resistance as I trace their wanderings in the cool soil.
When I went inside for my dinner, I was sore and spent and deeply content. So content that I wondered... am I at risk of coming out of this pandemic like some of those folks in Wuhan, who, after so many weeks of quarantine, are afraid of leaving their apartments? Will I come untethered, preferring to remain on this rectangle of land, immersed in fine fiction?
Probably not.
I remind myself that we will all be changed, the survivors, and the world will be changed. And I try to be brave.
It is likely no accident that when I am not listening to fiction, when it is quiet, the first poem I memorized flits through my mind, My cocoon tightens, colors tease....
Before the poisoning lessons in English class, one Christmas I received a slim blue volume of poems by Emily Dickinson. Later, my grandfather's eccentric wife gave me the complete works. I love the inscription inside, the distinctive handwriting of a woman I did not really know, but who loved books and presumably loved me.
When I found my Emily collection this morning and looked up that poem, "From the Chrysalis," I smiled. Young Nicole had underlined "concedes." A word I had to look up in the dictionary.
My cocoon tightens, colors tease,
I'm feeling for the air;
A dim capacity for wings
Degrades the dress I wear.
A power of butterfly must be
The aptitude to fly,
Meadows of majesty concedes
And easy sweeps of sky.
So I must baffle at the hint
And cipher at the sign,
And make much blunder, if at last
I take the clew divine.
It strikes me now as not one of her best. But in this time of tightening, constriction, the reminder of easy sweeps of sky, of transformation, power, is so important.
To live alone during pandemic, alone in that tightening cocoon, even with electronic crutches, simulated connections—it is hard. Not 17th-century-plague-level hard, but raw. When an audiobook ends, finally, I am thrown upon myself, baffling and blundering in the silence, and one need not be a chamber to be haunted.
We are still at the beginning of this time apart. That one year in Year of Wonders contained exquisite darkness, that plague year, just as in our time. But it was the right book to read, because the mildly improbable ending was deliciously reassuring—there was an after.