We Must Remember This: On the Edge of the After Times

Logo for the KC zoo.

As of Wednesday, the 14th of April this year, Edgar and I are fully vaccinated. We received the vaccine at a surreal drive-through event taking place in the parking lot of Kansas City’s Swope Park Zoo, in the shadow of an outdoor theater my family saw the Prairie Home Companion recorded at several times. The vaccine was accompanied by traffic direction from the national guard, involved paperwork that I had to fill out while operating a motor vehicle, and a funk band.

In short, it was the sort of surreal experience that most of the past year has been characterized by, a jumble of elements that don’t really seem to have much to do with one another all jammed up one atop the other into a confusing melange. While the past year has been full of anxiety, and many unnecessary deaths, the moments where these elements are far from my mind seem to be characterized by this sort of mostly-benign irrealism.

You know the group I’m talking about when I mention the “thank god that’s all over” contingent — the brunch crowd.

Of course, this is because the time we don’t live in “normal” time. The normal times that existed previously are being only semi-ironically referred to as the “before times,” which suggest certain things, including the existence of an “after times” – a term that I can’t help but think of as the name of a bar in a magical realist story. Everyone who turns their contemplation to these after times thinks of them as a return to normal, a reassertion of the pre-Covid order, albeit one in which we have to grapple with the habits formed during this crisis.

For some people – and for some other people at certain times – this brings a feeling of relief, a premonition of a well thank god that’s all over. For others it brings fear, because we have had to adapt our habits to survive in the current environment. Some of this is, assuredly, the mental habits of those who enjoy being the best at following the rules, but for others it’s clearly a learned response from a full year of calendar time when just about everything went wrong. This, I feel, is largely a matter of historical perception – as in, our sense of history as we are living through it.

The “after times” don’t begin at the same time for everyone. For certain, irresponsible people, they’ve been going on for almost a year. For others, they will not begin for a long time. For some people, they can’t ever really begin. It’s not an all-at-once thing, not a switch that can be flipped on. It’s more like something bubbling up through the floorboards that slowly overtakes the rooms in which we have situated our cognitive furniture: this is now normal.

There have been a number of excellent pieces written about this, from a number of outlets and writers I generally enjoy, that seem to be preparing to take a sigh of relief. There’s the sense that it will all be over soon, and that we can relax, but there are still important lessons to take away from our plague year (so make sure you underline that in your journal and mark the edge of the page so you can find it). I have a different worry.

I fear that we are going to forget all of this.

The Waters of Lethe by the Plains of Elysium, painted by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope in 1880. In Greek mythology, the river Lethe had waters that caused its drinkers to forget.

From the standpoint of culture, the pandemic never seemed to happen: there don’t seem to be any films or books about it; new television doesn’t seem to reference it. If anything, it’s a mere hiccup on the production side of the equation, something that will be ignored once enough time has accumulated to bury it. Perhaps, in the long run, it will be no more notable than the 2007-8 WGA strike.

I remember the 2007-8 WGA strike mostly because I spent too much time trying to watch the show Heroes, and it frankly wasn’t worth the effort.

You might disagree with me on this point, but I would like to ask how much you knew about the Spanish Flu outbreak before March of last year. How widely known do you think it was? Perhaps it was there, but like a disused table, covered in a dustcloth and forgotten? Perhaps, however, it was completely absent. Can we really say, now, given the fallibility of memory?

The sad fact of the matter is that life feels very different now than it did in the early days of the crisis. I say “sad” not because I want to relive the horrible anxiety, or through last summer’s protest season, or continue to teach online: all of those things were terrible. I say “sad” because, for a brief moment, alongside the anxiety, there was the sense that we could take advantage of the crisis and break free of the consensus that has reigned since the Reagan Years, and which only grew more entrenched after the 2008 Financial Crisis.

But, of course, that didn’t happen. The fact of the matter is that the American government – and, as an extension, it seems, the American people – are mired in what I called a “politics of can’t.” Our state apparatus grown so sclerotic and impotent that the only two answers it has to any problem are “use the police” or “give a tax break,” which, notably, are completely useless in the face of a disease.

I don’t mean that it will be completely gone, but we will feel pressured to put it aside, to try to short-circuit the traumatic loops it’s engraved on our identities. To try to move on. This, fundamentally, means that we’re supposed to just get over the fact that we were abandoned by our government, which is run by people who accept as an article of faith that it should shrink down to the size of a police station.

Remember This

How are you going to narrate the past year? This is a question implicitly asked by Melissa Fay Greene, writing for The Atlantic, for the article “You Won’t Remember the Pandemic the Way You Think You Will,” which mixes autobiographical and biographical information with cognitive psychology to form a picture of how memory works.

For me, I learned that everything changed on the Wednesday of Spring Break. Edgar and I were in Lawrence, working on emptying out a storage unit we had inherited. I received an email that said that classes were not going to resume on the following Monday, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about that, because all of the information we were receiving was saying that it would no longer be safe outside of the apartment.

Banner for the page on Lawrence from Wikitravel, uploaded by Harland J Schuster in 2009. Lawrence is a great little town, where Edgar and I met for the first time, and where I spent most weekends from 2013-2014.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t safe inside our apartment. We had discovered evidence of a bed bug infestation shortly before then.

So: die of the disease outside, or have our blood drank inside. It was not exactly the best decision.

Edgar still had to go to work, so I set about creating a safe space within the apartment. I covered the bedroom in diatomaceous earth, a powerful desiccant, and disassembled the furniture in there. I washed all of the clothes, drying them at the highest setting for half an hour, and thoroughly inspecting each article of clothing and bedding.

All the while, I was trying to think through how I would reformat my class to work online. I learned to use the software, but my students were listless and disconnected: I didn’t know what I was doing, and it showed in the way the class was built, trying to cleave closely to the syllabus I had built.

For the past few years, we’ve lived in a variety of third-story walk-ups in these six-stack-style apartment buildings that you find everywhere in the Midwest. They’re all 100 years old, and have the exact same floor plan. They also all have more personality than the newer one-plus-five style that’s everywhere.

Edgar and I slept on the daybed we use as a couch, sweating in the swelter of late spring and early summer. When the temperature in the bedroom hit ninety degrees consistently in the afternoon, I knew that the pest was dead, and I set about the necessary work of searching through each and every book, carefully bagging up the small library we kept in there – bagging up anything I could, in fact, to go on our third-story balcony and bake in the sun.

All in all, my world shrank from seven rooms to (effectively) three, I had to spend my free time trying to manage a situation that, by all rights, I shouldn’t have had to manage, and I spent the whole summer unable to find gainful employment, because my normal second job disappeared. This is around the time I wrote the article “Everyone’s a Depressive in Quarantine.” I was grateful that I had the self-awareness to realize that I probably wasn’t really depressed this time: I was simply forced into a situation where I had to behave the same way as a depressed person, and human brains aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

So, 2020 was the year that the blood in my veins became a valuable commodity for at least two inhuman agencies that sought only their own benefit (and, for once, I’m not talking about capitalism. That one’s all too human). This perhaps primed me for my more resentful stance towards those who were rejecting the lock down. My reasoning was simply this: if I could stand to be quarantined in such unpleasant circumstances, then clearly those people were experiencing an abject failure of will.

Which, I admit, was unfair. Different situations put different stresses on people, and everyone has different thresholds.

But, despite it all, faced with the prospect of the after times, of going back to normal, I find myself nostalgic for the early days of the pandemic.

Reentry Anxiety

The anxiety that I feel is, specifically, reentry anxiety, the anxiety of rejoining society. For myself – and for not a small number of other people, I would wager – there’s also a hauntological dimension here. A sense that things might once have been able to get better.

The more I learn, the more I realize how important the history of Chile is to understanding the modern world.

It’s so rare for the left to use the shock doctrine, as described by Naomi Klein. This is the strategy of social change that, essentially, works as follows: a group – sometimes a very small group – builds up an ideological infrastructure. When a crisis happens, this infrastructure then becomes incorporated into the standard operating procedure of the state because it’s already on hand. This is what free market fundamentalists did in Chile in 1977, and what kicked off the Reagan and Thatcher Years. It’s also what happened in 2008. All of these came from the right, with a tendency towards greater and greater atomization.

Usually, this is done to open up new markets, creating a new horizon of extraction, but there is no actual ideological cargo to the basic strategy – though, of course later refinements do involve creating the crisis that serves as the shock, which is less defensible. When Bernie Sanders emerged as a leader in the early days of the pandemic, pushing for direct aid to individual families, that was a form of this shock doctrine. It’s simply unfortunate that more people in positions of power weren’t able to push for more policies that were able to do this.

For a brief moment, it seemed like something else was possible, even if it was just the implementation of social democratic programs and a test flight of modern monetary theory to pay for it.

That window that was opened for a moment feels as if it is closed right now, and this is a textbook example of hauntology: a nostalgia for what might have been.

To an extent, I want to go back to those early days of the pandemic, because there was a brief flicker that something else might have been possible. To the same extent, I hate the fact that I feel this nostalgia – while I think we need to remember the pandemic, I don’t want to feel nostalgia for any moment within it.

But, since going back is impossible, going forward is compulsory. The fact that this is forced on us – and, sitting as I am in Kansas City, Missouri, the pressure to go out and do things is high, since our lockdown ended a long time ago and just about every business is open – is the source of reentry anxiety. It isn’t the fact that we are going back, it’s the fact that we have no more choice in the matter than a steer running down the chute. The anxiety is because we will have our agency taken away from us at a future point in time that is relatively fixed.

Anyone who tried to say that workers had the right to stop working if they were afraid of the virus fundamentally misunderstands service work.

Now, some people will no doubt argue that we have a choice in the matter, but these people are incorrect. The choice doesn’t exist because we aren’t completely self-sufficient: we still have to pay our bills, after all.

Still, I can’t help but think back to the way the air outside smelled cleaner from all of the cars off the road. The way that Edgar and I walked around our neighborhood, listening to people play music on their porches, or watching them play squash against their garages. The small, whimsical bits of public art that clustered around the bases of trees. The hours-long afternoon meetings with friends, where we sat at one end of a table and they sat at the other, and we shared ciders and conversation. As uncertain as everything seemed, it felt like a brief visit to a calmer, gentler world.

I know that others were suffering intensely, and I wouldn’t want to revisit those moments on them, but I don’t see why we can’t carry forward the better parts of that other world we visited into the after times. I know, also, though, that we probably won’t.

Pestilential Hauntology

A big part of this frustration comes from what those of us who pay attention to the rest of the world already know: most countries with control of their own fiscal policy paid the wages of their temporarily unemployed workers and controlled the costs imposed on their people. We know that this is possible, because others have done it. But just like with universal healthcare (something that would have been very useful), we assume it’s impossible for reasons.

What this all means, especially in my area, is that the pandemic has basically already ended as a social event. Many people behave as if there’s nothing to worry about, despite the fact that there is no real reason to breathe easily.

The reason for this is that politics is downsteam of culture, as per Andrew Breitbart’s restatement of Antonio Gramsci. If our politics are sclerotic and unable to adapt, what does that say about our culture?

If you take from this anything but that our culture is similarly rigid and incapable, then I don’t know what to tell you – but I’m also not going to give much credence to your stance.

Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand have already gone on to the “after times”, as Penny describes in her article mentioned here. Image it a concert in New Zealand, from January of this year.

As much as I rhapsodize about the calm, gentle moments of the early quarantine, I very much feel a quiet form of the anger that Laurie Penny mentions in her piece “A Report from the After Times,” the impotent fury at the fact that none of this had to happen. Alloyed into it, though, is the feeling that I was able to find some comfort within it and I’m frustrated because that’s going to recede: it will become less possible as people return to the speed at which they lived before and I get dragged along with it.

We have to remember this time. There will be a collective forgetting: I worry that, a few years after it ends, no one will speak about it. It is essential that we do not allow this to happen, though. All too often, entire spans of time slide into the shadow of history and end up forgotten when they shouldn’t be.

But this time is important, because it showed us that a different way of living – a different world – was possible. That is exactly what we tend to erase. We are told that nothing else is possible, but we have evidence that this isn’t the case, seeping in through the cracks of the old order.

What We Carry With Us

Memory is something that we carry with us, and this isn’t just the autobiographical details of our lives, but also the practices and habits that we have. I’ve heard it takes about two weeks to form a new habit, and we have had more than a year to form them now.

A homeless encampment, located in Westport. Image taken from Kansascity.com.

There are habits that we need to keep with us as we move forward, and we need to keep things with us. After the state failed to care for us, we made mutual aid networks and bail funds. In many cities – not just my own hometown of Kansas City, but also in Los Angeles, quite notably – there’s discourse about the rights of the unhoused population, and it’s my hope that this continues and strengthens.

On this website, we often refer back to Deleuze’s instruction that “there is no need to hope or to fear, but only to look for new weapons” – over the past year, we have been given a full panoply of new techniques to approach our situation. It’s unfortunate that we didn’t – perhaps couldn’t, given the world we had before – push it further.

But abandoning these tools is something we mustn’t do.

The old world is burning down around us already. The sitting president ran on the slogan “build back better”, but you can’t do that by just recreating what was there previously. Instead, let’s embrace the old socialist and syndicalist rallying cry: we will build a new world in the ashes of the old.

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