Traumatis Personae: Writing Through the Bad Times (Patreon)

 Greetings, all you who are dear and darling and distant.

It hardly matters what the first cough of spring feels like in Maine right now. Did it snow? I suppose. Did the snow stay? Not for long. I suppose it’s cold. I suppose it’s bare. I suppose there is mud without flowers, and red birds without sun. But I look out the window and I don’t see any of it. And I certainly don’t go outside. 

Who does, anymore?

The weather is my four walls. The world is my ceiling. I am bounded by the borders of my bed.

But of course, I am a freelancer. I have worked from home for 17 years. This is no different, right? No adjustment to my lifestyle?

Except that now I am not allowed to leave. Except that I have been overseas, so I must wait 14 days to see if I or any of my family have contracted the new plague—every cough and sneeze noted with fear and worry, every breath evaluated for shortness or pain. Except that there are fewer and fewer boats to the mainland. Fewer and fewer sounds outside. The world feels like it’s turning out the lights, one by one, and of all the things we expected of the plague, this quiet apocalypse is one no one ever thought of. This introverted armageddon, all of us watching from our windows and arguing over the strict meaning of the word “quarantine” and staying away from every other human being strict under orders from the government to exhibit extreme social anxiety in order to save the planet.

Who knew social anxiety was the superhero we needed?

Three weeks ago, no one had any idea you could just…turn the world off. Slowly, like a mother going from room to room at ten in the evening, clicking off lamps and putting away toys and locking doors and setting the heat to come on again just before everyone wakes up tomorrow. Only tomorrow has been postponed indefinitely.

A whole civilzation on power-saving mode.

So how the fuck do you keep writing while the world is putting up the end of programming screen and signing off due to technical difficulties?

How the fuck do you keep doing anything much more than surviving and watching awful cold numbers move inexorably up on a dimming screen?

Ha ha it is fucking rough, my friends. 

This is the why lie? I need a beer of the artistic life. We all want to put on a Big Brave Artist face and be Picasso making Guernica or some shit but most of us are just as broke and scared as everyone else and no matter what black-turtleneck-wearing skinny-jeans-huffing harrassment-accusation dodging douchebags in college try to tell you, deep, abiding sorrow and pain that flows cold and dark as seawater straight down to the core of your being IS FUCKING TERRIBLE FOR CREATIVITY. It is not the font of True Art, it is crippling depression, KRISTOFF. 

Trauma is great clay to make art out of—after the trauma is over. After. AFTER. It’s really goddamned tough to do it while you are constantly being re-traumatized. This is why the great Trump-inspired dystopian SF novel hasn’t come out yet. It’ll come out when we all get a minute to breathe. Until then we’re all processing horrors from five years ago so hold your horses.

What I’m trying to say is—feel fucking free to ignore that tweet about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined on account of plague so you should be similarly productive. GET OFF MY BACK LADY EAT YE OLDE SACK OF TURKEY LEGS. 

First of all, plague was SUPER FUCKING COMMON in old Billy’s time. Buggering off to the countryside because the city poors were coughing too much was An Entire Thing. It was not a massive trauma that stopped all commerce and social interaction. You left the city, you were mostly good to go because A. You mostly buggered off WITH YOUR MATES to the “countryside” which had magical healing powers according to rich people and B. THEY KNEW PRECISELY MUCH ADO ABOUT FUCK ALL WHEN IT CAME TO VIRUSES. My man Will knew a lot about a lot but he did not know about incubation periods, he did not know about droplet infections, and he absolutely did not know about asymptomatic carriers. Quarantining meant rounding up your buddies and going to a nice country house where there wasn’t any arsenic in the wallpaper or angry tavern-owners who didn’t ever wash their hands shitting in your shepherd’s pie and you all told each other stories and got drunk for a few months until enough poors died that you could go back to the city. THAT IS FUN. THAT IS NOT WHAT WE ARE DOING. We are literally not allowed to do what that talented-as bougie fuck did. We can’t leave. Plague was out of sight out of mind by the 1600s. 

“Dear me, the buboes are certainly large and pustulant this spring, don’t you think Master Burbage?” 

“Right-o, let’s leg it, Billiam!”

And then they make the Scooby-Doo sound and try a fresh vegetable in Devon for once.

Except it wasn’t Devon mostly. Do you know where people really liked to go when the plague hit England? THEY WENT TO GODDAMNED ITALY DO YOU WANT TO GO HANG OUT IN ITALY RIGHT NOW AND STEAL THEIR COOL-ASS STORIES FOR YOUR PLAYS NO YOU DO NOT YOU WILL DIE.

In fact, my state is currently absolutely freaking out over the idea of New Yorkers (read: London playwrights with rich friends) coming up to Maine to ride out the disease in comfort, you know, the Shakespeare Method. And he ALSO didn’t have to deal with his kids or unemployment filing or figuring out how to use goddamned Zoom and he could safely keep ignoring his wife while she dealt with everything practical back in Stratford-Upon-Patriarchy just like always. 

I could write a lot too if I had a big country house and friends and beer and surety that this would be over in a couple of weeks and some lady back home taking care of absolutely everything and a big fat cheerful ignorance of aerosolized infections.

MY POINT IS. This is not like that. It’s just not. Shakespeare couldn’t turn on the news and watch the numbers go up every night, watch epicenters creep closer and closer to him, hear instantly if a friend died. He didn’t have to stop seeing other human beings at all. He didn’t have to stop working. He didn’t have to wait to hear what his government had made a new rule about not doing anymore nearly every day. It wasn’t global. It wasn’t everyone individually staying inside indefinitely. It wasn’t informed by any knowledge of how disease spreads or you know, a century of horror fiction about outbreaks.

He also didn’t have video games, so there’s that too.

You don’t have to write King Lear, baby. Neither do I. We just gotta live through this.

It is so hard not to feel frozen and paralyzed when the world itself is frozen, must be frozen, is under orders to stay frozen as long as it can stand it. Ice spreads, and it is hard to resist the creeping whiteness of that still unmoving sleep.

But if you want to write…if you want to make things while we’re all locked up tight…well. Let’s talk about that. Because I want to write. I want to make. I want to be more than the pit in the peach of this house.

I keep thinking back to the last horrific economic crisis we all had to go through together and what I did then. Because “what I did then” was fucking Fairyland. I was so scared and so stressed out and somehow I did manage to write something good in the middle of all that. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that I was 29 and young enough to think magic could beat a global financial crisis. Maybe it’s that Obama got elected a few months beforehand so I felt like someone in charge wouldn’t let it all burn because he liked the pretty colors. Maybe because people fucking math in the ear is a fundamentally different existential problem than the bloody plague.

Something invisible is waiting out there to steal our breath. 

It’s not exactly the same as when everyone’s mortgage barfed.

But all the same, I feel that pressure too, because last time I kind of did make my King Lear, and I have no idea how to do that again when I’m so scared I don’t even want to walk my dog and I know for a fact the virus is already here on this little island, this exact place where people are coming to escape it, and it is such a very little island after all.

So I will tell you what small things I know about making magic when the world curdling. Funny word that just popped out there. Curdling. That’s one of the things fairies were good at, back in William’s day. Curdling the milk, spoiling the beer, keeping the bread from rising. They brought magic and luck and beauty but they also… interrupted natural processes. Kind of like a virus finding a cell. Kind of like a plague leaping continent to continent. There is something so very fairylike about a stranger whose name we will never know buying a forbidden beautiful animal to eat at an odd market and being punished all out of proportion to the transgression. About an invisible mote floating on the wind, waiting take our breath away. 

Bad fairies, of course. Unseelie. But fairies all the same. 

And that, right there, is how you do it. 

The world outside has gone straight to shit. So you go inside. Into your own interior world. Into that place where stories come from and where they go, too, to mingle and dance. The things you make and the things you experience, read, see, hear, touch. Where books go when you finish them, and where everything else you make comes from. Where King Lear and September meet at a ball and throw crabcakes at Boccacio. Where myth and folklore are not background players, but as important and applicable to reality as the nightly news. Where everything is fine, and you have enough time and energy and self to fix yourself a plate of magic and see how it sits with you.

You know, the font of True Art. 

KRISTOFF.

No one can touch your interior world. Not Presidents or Governors or Prime Ministers or Rapid Response Alert Systems. Not paperwork or looming dates on a calendar or sheer dread. That world belongs completely to you and cannot be stolen or darkened or broken or even bruised by anything or anyone. In the worst of living, that universe inside is where the best of you is safe from predation. 

People have been telling you all your life to use your Inside Voice when they want you to be quiet. But I’m here to tell you your Inside Voice is the loudest of all.

And in that interior space, you have enough time and calm to see how fairylike the story we are living right now is. Connections spring up—Rosetti’s Goblin Market, Persephone eating the pomegranate she oughtn’t have and living in the kingdom of the dead for six months, just as we may, the wolf at the door of the three little pigs who must, must stay inside to be safe, that Pestilence in Revelations comes bearing a crown, the very meaning of the word corona, people wearing masks like Carnival has decided to last all year, and those little invisible creatures who steal our voices, steal our breath, but mean us no ill because they are beyond morality as we understand it—practially the definition of fairies.

Now, it may seem as though that is making light of it all, but it is the opposite, to make these connections is to take this plague terribly seriously, to integrate it into the Great Tale humanity is always telling, always revising. And in that interior world, where nothing outside can get in, you can see how this piece fits, and make something of that. But outside that still, happy, glowing place, there is only chaos and distraction, and it is hard to see anything but pain.

If I were trying to talk to you about science rather than magic, I would call it compartmentalization. 

But that’s not very inspiring, is it?

We are told the way to live and let others live is to stay home, stay inside. 

The way to make art out of this colossal global trauma is also to stay inside. To go further inside than your front door, to go all the way into that interior world we all have, whether we are writers or artists or actors or crafters or cooks or readers or movie buffs or parents or coders or any one of us that interacts with creation which is all of us. You know that place—you’ve been there. When a book is so good you get all still and thrilled at the same time, not forgetting yourself, really, just being yourself and the book all at once, truly yourself, and truly inside the book. When you look up and hours have passed at the canvas or the needle, and the paint or the yarn is nearly gone, but something else has taken its place, something cohesive and new. Again, you didn’t forget yourself, not really. You became a quieter, louder, all-vibrating version of yourself, unified with the painting or the scarf. A hybrid being. When you and your child were so in sync that you flowed from one game to the next with no tears or struggle. When your code did what you wanted it to do, and the hours were nothing, but you were everything.

When the writing spun up to high speed and you somehow were all those characters in your head interacting, and you were also the world they moved through, and also still yourself, the best version of yourself, directing all of them without interruption, without hesitation, without self-doubt.

That is the high-energy version of that little interior landscape. But it is also always simply there, collecting experience, becoming mulch for future creation. Future yous. Trauma can only make it harder to get there. It cannot touch the place itself. 

So in the end, you can do as Shakespeare did. You can flee the world for the countryside full of magical powers, for a warm house full of friends and beer and potential. It’s just that you have to flee inside yourself. And those friends might be people you made up in your head, or that others made up in their heads. (They are at least less likely to steal your wallet or your horse). The beer, at least, is usually real.

And I will meet you there, my friends. In the burrows between our interior countrysides. In the connections. Cozy little wombats, all of us. Maybe we will make a Lear out of the mashed potatoes. Maybe we will make a fairy out of the salad greens. Or maybe we will just enjoy the fire and the evening sky and the kind of invisible togetherness that technology and the heart can make nowadays that a certain man in doublet and hose could never dream of. 

And maybe in a few weeks, it really will all be over. Maybe in a few weeks, the spring will warm the world and we can go back to the city, walk the streets we took for granted, see people we never realized were quite so beautiful and charming, eat joyously at cafes we once found too noisy, dance at clubs we though we were too old to attend, see each other without masks and without fear, and find our seats at the theater, exactly as we left them.

And if not, well. We will speak with our Inside Voices, and it will be a song for the ages.

Meet me inside. I have a warm cup and a warm seat waiting for you.