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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Only those who go too far know how far they can go, plus: writing condolence notes
By
Published: Apr 13, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
CAPTION: The statue of Abraham Lincoln in front of the New York Historical Society
When the United States was the most richest and most powerful nation, the middle was safe. In just three years, we have become a Third World nation, and the middle is rapidly in danger of becoming .. less. The middle class: on life support. Middle management: first to be fired.
People talk about “radical change” ahead. I’ve written about the utter stupidity of invitations to take a deep dive .. relax… reflect. Yes, do it, but not at the expense of honing your survival skills.
Butler used to be a cultural site “for people with more taste than time.” Since the plague hit, it’s morphed into something else: a place where I think hard about what I’m feeling, on the odd chance you’re feeling something like it. And sharing news that isn’t fully discussed on CNN/MSNBC/whatever. And, most of all: a gym.
I appreciate your thank-you, you-really-help emails. I hope I’m doing something useful. But these dispatches are in no way altruistic — I’m 100% selfish. The giver always gets more than he gives. And what I get is: ideas, plans, projects. I try to go out with my daughter and walk 5,000 steps a day. Here, I want to do the same: to focus, think aloud, get smarter and stronger, and, on the far side of the plague, be more likely to survive, even prosper. And that’s what I want for you.
For example, over the weekend, chatting with a friend, we came up with an idea. I put this on Twitter:
Please forward to Tom Hanks: Tom, remember the Hollywood Canteen in WWII? (Bette Davis was President.) As America’s Dad, could you launch the 2020 version? Virtual, of course. My thought: you and other celebs sign 100s of masks, auction them to benefit food banks.
If you have a more direct path to Tom, please let me know: HeadButlerNYC@AOL.com. Or just do it.
A Silicon Valley genius said: “A smart community is smarter than the smartest person in it.” Over the years, I’ve come to know some of you, and I know this for a fact: They are smarter than I am. Thinking together? Perhaps we can make things better, save our lives and families, and, yes, help others.
You have ideas? Want to share them here? This is your invitation to go for it.
THIS IS LEADERSHIP: TAKE 5 MINUTES AND WATCH
In The Vanity Fair Diaries: 1983 – 1992, Tina Brown wrote about her experience of a young, ambitious liar: “Boris Johnson is an epic shit. I hope he ends badly.” He almost did. But after a week in the hospital, where it was touch-and-go, he’s back at 10 Downing Street. This is his Easter message. Shit though he may be, you will wish our head of state could speak — and feel — like this.
“THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS” AND “NO WORDS” MEAN YOU DIDN’T FEEL ANYTHING
Life and death don’t call for “like” clicks on Facebook. They require more. Take a crash course from the master: Rainer Maria Rilke. The book is The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation. From my review:
When he died, aged 51, in 1926, Rainer Maria Rilke had written more than 14,000 letters. They’ve been collected. There’s the 270 page Letters on Life. And at some point in your romantic life, you have given — or received — Letters to a Young Poet. Among Rilke’s correspondence are 23 letters of condolence. Now, for the first time, they’ve been collected into a 94-page book.
Letters were important for Rilke. He didn’t dash them off; he considered them equal to the poems that made him famous. These letters of condolence are more than smart ways to say “so sorry for your loss.” They’re meditations on loss and pain — and a road map to acceptance and healing. Rilke is a big believer in time. It doesn’t console, he says; it does “put things in order.”
Above all, he sees death as a key event that makes us live more fully. To a grieving friend: “When things become truly difficult and unbearable, we find ourselves in a place already very close to its transformation.” You’ll mark this book often, you’ll turn many pages down. And you’ll never write clichés to grieving friends again — you’ll quote Rilke. Or be inspired by him. Or just… take a moment before dashing off a note. [To buy “The Dark Interval” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
Here’s a sample, to Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín (1885-1950). She first met Rilke in 1906 and maintained a long friendship and correspondence with him. Her brother Johannes Nádherný von Borutín committed suicide in 1913. Rilke wrote her right away:
On the one hand, I want to encourage you in your pain so that you will completely experience it in all its fullness, because as the experience of a new intensity it is a great life experience and leads everything back again to life, like everything that reaches a certain degree of greatest strength. But on the other hand, I am very concerned when I imagine how strangled and cut off you currently live, afraid of touching anything that is filled with memories (and what is not filled with memories?). You will freeze in place if you remain this way. You must not, dear. You have to move. You have to return to his things. You have to touch with your hands his things, which through their manifold relations and attraction are after all also yours. You must, Sidie, you must continue his life inside of yours insofar as it has been unfinished; his life has now passed onto yours… All of our true relationships, all of our enduring experiences touch upon and pass through everything, Sidie, through life and death. We must live in both, be intimately at home in both.
TODAY’S POEM
Sharon Olds, from Strike Sparks
The Race
When I got to the airport I rushed up to the desk,
bought a ticket, ten minutes later
they told me the flight was cancelled, the doctors
had said my father would not live through the night
and the flight was cancelled. A young man
with a dark brown moustache told me
another airline had a nonstop
leaving in seven minutes. See that
elevator over there, well go
down to the first floor, make a right, you’ll
see a yellow bus, get off at the
second Pan Am terminal, I
ran, I who have no sense of direction
raced exactly where he’d told me, a fish
slipping upstream deftly against
the flow of the river. I jumped off that bus with those
bags I had thrown everything into
in five minutes, and ran, the bags
wagged me from side to side as if
to prove I was under the claims of the material,
I ran up to a man with a flower on his breast,
I who always go to the end of the line, I said
Help me. He looked at my ticket, he said
Make a left and then a right, go up the moving stairs and then
run. I lumbered up the moving stairs,
at the top I saw the corridor,
and then I took a deep breath, I said
goodbye to my body, goodbye to comfort,
I used my legs and heart as if I would
gladly use them up for this,
to touch him again in this life. I ran, and the
bags banged against me, wheeled and coursed
in skewed orbits, I have seen pictures of
women running, their belongings tied
in scarves grasped in their fists, I blessed my
long legs he gave me, my strong
heart I abandoned to its own purpose,
I ran to Gate 17 and they were
just lifting the thick white
lozenge of the door to fit it into
the socket of the plane. Like the one who is not
too rich, I turned sideways and
slipped through the needle’s eye, and then
I walked down the aisle toward my father. The jet
was full, and people’s hair was shining, they were
smiling, the interior of the plane was filled with a
mist of gold endorphin light,
I wept as people weep when they enter heaven,
in massive relief. We lifted up
gently from one tip of the continent
and did not stop until we set down lightly on the
other edge, I walked into his room
and watched his chest rise slowly
and sink again, all night
I watched him breathe.
BUT ENOUGH ABOUT YOU: UPDATE ON MY BOOK
Readers of the paper paper know that the NY Times Sunday Book Review — the biggest deal in American book reviewing — published a full page review of two Mary Meyer/JFK novels yesterday. It’s the same review the Times published online in February, when the reviewer slammed the other book and praised mine. Results were immediate: My book, JFK and Mary Meyer: A Love Story, was drifting down to 100,000 on Amazon, it’s now 5,000. Another difference: Amazon has de-prioritized books. All books. Buy my book now, you may not get it until April 21. But really: what’s the wait of a week now? [To buy the hardcover, click here.] The publisher, like others, has taken steps to sell more books — the Kindle edition is now a give-away at $1.99 [To buy the Kindle, click here.] It’s not quite the same experience; in the book, the footnotes, which are like a character in the story, are on the same page as the event described in the diary. In the Kindle, they’re at the end of each chapter. The book is a better reading experience. But really: what’s a better reading experience now?
In TV/streaming news: Thanks for your suggestions. My list is based on power, nothing else. I’m not Stephen King; the streaming companies are not going to snap to attention when they see my name. Or even JFK’s name. So I need an actor who has production deals, not necessarily the actor I’d choose if I had a deal and I were the producer. Here’s the simple sequence: Jesse –> actor –> Netflix/Hulu/etc. Viewed that way, my choices are, in no order: Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst, Ann Hathaway. Naomi Watts, Robin Wright, January Jones, Michelle Williams.
11 MINUTES OF LEONARD COHEN
At the 92nd Street Y, in 1966 (yes, before the release of his first album), he reads some poems and sings “The Stranger.” To listen, click here.
TODAY’S IDIOT: GEORGE STEPHANOPOLOUS
George Stephanopoulos has tested positive for COVID-19. Stephanopoulos said it was “no surprise” — his wife has the virus — but said he has been asymptomatic. On Facebook, someone posted a picture of George trespassing on the Maidstone golf course in East Hampton on Saturday. He was not wearing his mask. There is also this report: He was picking up prescriptions at a pharmacy that delivers and does curbside pick ups. He wore a mask, but it is said he stood several feet away from others for ten minutes while he talked to the pharmacist.
TODAY’S HERO, AGAIN
The most senior officers under Brett Crozier on the USS Theodore Roosevelt wanted to co-sign his letter. Fearing for their careers, he took sole responsibility. This was not a man panicking and overreacting.
MY TWITTER FEED
– STEVE SCHMITT: 108 years ago today RMS Titanic received her first ice warnings
– My shoes think I died.
– ROBERT REICH: We can afford to give airline companies billions in bailout even when they’ve spent billions on stock buybacks, but we can’t afford to bail out the postal service?
– Good news: No school shootings in a month.
TODAY’S MUSIC: JASON ISBELL
Jason Isbell is from Alabama. His songs are mostly about “people who aren’t leading the same kind of life that I am, people who might not get the same kind of rewards for their work” — country people, Southern people. Translation: People who trade time for money.
He drank: “I had it timed where, by the very end of the show, I’d done just about all I could do standing up. I knew I needed two or three before I went on, and then during the show, we’d just pass a bottle around between the band.”
By the end of a show, Isbell figures he’d have drunk a fifth of Jack Daniels. Then her met Amanda Shires.
“I would usually drunkenly tell her that I needed to go to rehab,” he says. “I only got to do that twice, I think. The second time she said …”
“You’re telling the wrong person,” Shires said.
“Yeah, that was it,” Isbell says. “‘You’re telling the wrong person. If you say this again, then you’re gonna be held to it.’ And, sure enough, the plans were made. She called a few people that I respect.”
I’ve written about Isbell twice: here and here. Songs are on those reviews. Every one is an arrow to the heart. There’s a reason he wins award after award.
“24 Frames” — there’s a great video. But this, recorded remotely last week, is the one to share now.
This is how you make yourself vanish into nothing
And this is how you make yourself worthy of the love that she
Gave to you back when you didn’t own a beautiful thing
This is how you make yourself call your mother
And this is how you make yourself closer to your brother
And remember him back when he was small enough to help you sing
You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that’s all for show goes up in flames
In 24 frames
This is how you see yourself floating on the ceiling
And this is how you help her when her heart stops beating
What happened to the part of you that noticed every changing wind
This is how you talk to her when no one else is listening
And this is how you help her when the muse goes missing
You vanish so she can go drowning in a dream again
You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s something like a pipe bomb ready to blow
And everything you built that’s all for show goes up in flames
In 24 frames
You thought God was an architect, now you know
He’s sitting in a black car ready to go
You made some new friends after the show
But you’ll forget their names
In 24 frames
In 24 frames
NIGHT MUSIC
Nina Simone, “Here Comes the Sun.” Because it’s a rainy day in New York. An inch expected. High winds. Don’t miss the piano solo, starting at 2:10.
