On Crisis - Leah Kindler

The first time I thought the world would end was November 9, 2016. I was a junior in high school. It was a liminal space, the kind of day when nothing I or anyone else might do was off the table. After months of brushing off the possibility of a Trump presidency, everything we said and did ended up having consequences. At school, teachers were crying in the hallway. Assignments got pushed back. High school was the infrastructure of my life and it was suddenly weak and mutable. The performance of daily life doesn’t hold up, can’t be held up, in a crisis. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

Since then, those days have amped up in frequency. On March 10, 2020, my college announced classes would move online due to the spread of what was then called “the novel coronavirus.” When I got home from work after receiving the email, I ran to find my roommates and discuss the news. All of their rooms were dark, the doors half-opened. No one was home. For a moment, I entertained the idea that they had all left Boston already. I imagined I was the protagonist of a post-apocalyptic movie, left to fend for myself in a disaster.

In reality, all five of my roommates were still at work and rehearsal, busy with the activities that defined our lives then. Soon enough, Kayla would stomp through the door and pull out her alcohol stash. Any past reasons we might not have drank during the week were out the window. We had homework due the next day, but we knew our professors wouldn’t care if we didn’t do it. We would spend our last few classes sorting out the logistics of online school and reeling from the sudden changes in the world.

That night, I texted my ex-girlfriend to check in. We hadn’t spoken in three weeks and our attempts to stay friends after the breakup were failing. Confronted with the possibility that she would leave the city without saying goodbye, though, things were different. If everything went to shit, I knew with sudden clarity that our petty arguments meant nothing.

I know now that if I hadn’t broken the silence between us that night, we might never have spoken again. So many of my casual friendships were lost in the flurry of missed connections that year. Plans to meet up fell through and suddenly it was weeks before we remembered to reschedule. Reaching out through the sirens became harder and harder.

***

In his essay “On Becoming an American Writer,” Alexander Chee considers the power of writing in times of crisis, as well as the difficulty of it. He describes the morning after the 2016 election, trying to prepare to teach a class. All he can think is, “This is the end of the world,” to which he asks himself, “How many times did I think the world would end?”[1]

My answer to the question has been growing since that same election—now it includes the pandemic, the summer of Black Lives Matter protests, the 2020 election, the storming of the U.S. Capitol—but Chee’s list begins much sooner. He writes about the AIDS epidemic, 9/11, the Iraq War. I’m reminded that my first apocalypse was not everyone’s. And, of course, each one was someone’s else’s last, because people do actually die in these moments.

I grew up in a world compounded by disaster. I was nineteen months old when planes struck the Twin Towers, but I only learned about 9/11 from its depiction in a Disney Channel movie. “Recession” and “Iraq” were unknown words I scribbled down in my notepad while my dad took phone calls in the car. I remember adults stressing over the soaring gas prices in summer 2008, but I didn’t know what it all meant. For the duration of the Obama era, my life in a liberal Midwestern suburb was free of crisis.

Just because you don’t notice something doesn’t mean it isn’t happening, though. Writer Amitav Ghosh considers the “modes of concealment”[2] used in arts and literature to hide the impending threat of climate collapse. He asks why it’s so difficult to depict climate change in fiction, comparing it to the refusal of coastal cities to protect themselves against extreme weather events. It’s easier to ignore a threat until it’s imminent than to sacrifice profit. For example, the Seaport neighborhood of Boston may very well be underwater by 2050, but it’s still developing at an alarming rate. I find it hard to believe the city will institute the proper flood protections until it’s too late.

In a discussion on Ghosh in my environmental studies class, someone mentions the popularity of films about the apocalypse. What does it say about us that we enjoy watching the end of the world? Or more precisely, why can we only imagine the point of no return and not the process that brings us there? Many of the widely shared environmental campaigns these days rely on a sense of urgency. They pinpoint the year when the planet will become uninhabitable, when our efforts to save it will be fruitless.

“How many times have I thought the world would end?” Alexander Chee asks.[3] In response, I wonder, how many times will it feel like the world is ending before it actually does?

***

The scholar Rob Nixon has a term called slow violence, which he defines as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space.”[4] Nixon differentiates slow violence from the kind of spectacle we ordinarily associate with violence. There is no sonic boom, no flash of light, no moment in which the end of the world seems incredibly near and possible. Buildings don’t collapse. People don’t run into the streets yelling. Schools don’t close, or at least not without warning. Climate change is slow violence, as is deforestation and displacement and addiction. I would argue that mental illness is slow violence. Loneliness. Isolation. “The long dyings,” says Nixon.[5] I think we might be able to classify this perpetual state of emergency that we live in as slow violence. I wonder what it does to the body to be on edge all the time, as I’ve been for most of the last year.

Nixon also notes “the representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence.”[6] That is, it’s hard to write about because it isn’t tangible. I’d like to think that if anyone is up for the task, it’s writers, but Amitav Ghosh might argue otherwise.

After all, what is the point of writing in the middle of all this? Some days I’ll be in the middle of writing a story from my childhood when the thought jams itself into my head: No one cares. Or that old refrain, There are people dying. I am trying to find a way to pay attention and shut the world out at the same time. Maybe someday, the writer doesn’t have to just pay witness—they can prevent the crisis too. But I don’t know if I’m up for the task yet. “A novel, should it survive, protects what a missile can’t,”[7] writes Chee. I think I’ll sooner write a novel than stop the world from ending, but who knows?

***

At the very beginning of the pandemic, I found myself unable to consume any media that was made before March 2020. I couldn’t watch TV or movies or YouTube videos filmed before everyone retreated indoors. It didn’t feel real to me, these scenes of people laughing and hugging each other and attending parties. Instead, I spent hours of my day on TikTok, mindlessly consuming videos of people dancing and cooking and making homemade masks. Reality took over my mind, my imagination. Nothing felt pertinent unless it was current.

I think this could be the reverse of the phenomenon Ghosh observed. In “normal” times, no one wants to read about disaster. But in disaster times, there’s nothing else worth reading. I spent months trying to figure out how to be a writer as the world around me collapsed, but I’ve been writing (and living) in a collapsing world my whole life. I’m just aware of it now, forced to pay attention to the spectacles that bring the slow violence to the foreground. “It’s a strange time to teach someone to write stories,” Chee decides. “But I think it always is. This is just our strange time.”[8]

***

When I imagine the end of the world, it is always a quiet night in the city. I am lying in bed with someone I love—the face changes each time—and the world is still, even as it falls to pieces. There is no panic, no rush, and I’m grateful this is it, after a lifetime of fakeouts, and I’m grateful to have done it right this time.

When the world almost ended last March, I was with someone I was on the verge of dating at the time. They were irritating me. They told me a statistic: something like 75% of the world’s population will contract COVID at some point. To them, it was good news; why fear the inevitable? But I turned towards the wall and cried, struck with despair. I was 20 years old, but I wanted to lie down in my childhood bedroom. I didn’t want to be responsible for my own safety anymore. If the world ended, I didn’t want to be in this room, the floor covered in trash and dirty clothing and strands of other people’s hair.

I had previously planned to stay in Boston through the spring, but when I got home that night, I texted my dad and begged him to come pick me up. Two days later, he began the 18-hour drive from Chicago to Boston. Maybe he knew the world wasn’t actually ending, but I took it that if it was, he would have braved the apocalypse to get to me.

In the car on the drive home, we swapped anecdotes about our first few days of an officially declared pandemic. We complained about the presidential primaries and capitalism. What I remember best from that drive, though, is the landscapes: the green Berkshires, the mostly abandoned rest stops, the wide gray lakes beneath the highway. In upstate New York, I watched in disbelief as several military tanks drove past in the opposite direction. They were likely headed for New Rochelle, the town in which Governor Cuomo had placed a one-mile containment zone.

“Must be the National Guard,” my dad remarked, shrugging. “They get called in for these kinds of things.” He seemed unbothered by the sight, so I tried to move on. A strange time indeed.

[1] Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel 251 [2] Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable 11 [3] Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel 251 [4] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor 2 [5] Nixon, Slow Violence 2 [6] Nixon, Slow Violence 2 [7] Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel 276 [8] Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel 271

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Leah Kindler (she/her) is a poet and essayist working towards a BFA in creative writing at Emerson College in Boston. She has previously been published in Sonder Midwest and Burn Magazine. Her work is forthcoming in Respect the Mic, a poetry anthology edited by Franny Choi and Hanif Abdurraqib, and a postcolonial studies anthology celebrating Frantz Fanon.