Early morning, Kings Mountain, CA. Shelter in Place: Day 1: March 17, 2020
To say that the dire nature of the current COVID-19 situation calls for immediate action is putting things lightly. But given the shelter-in-place order and containment measures being put forward to combat the spread of the virus, confronting the pandemic also calls for a measure of inaction: a purposeful pause that might foster a moment of (collective?) reflection. Today, gazing out at an eerily still landscape from my desk in Northern California, it seems clear to me that the radically interconnected and ecologically enmeshed nature of our precarious existence pushes in upon us all and demands reflection.
Reflection is often understandably enough interpreted as a purely intellectual endeavor—the word stems from reflectere, which connotes bending back, turning inside, and ultimately, turning away. Yet, as our lives are now unfolding within a radically transformed context, perhaps reflection has the chance to blossom into contemplation, a paradoxical act of attentive inaction through which our awareness is dragged outside of the small circle of day-to-day concerns that normally transfix us, and opened up to a larger reality.
Here the past comes into focus within the strange horizon of the present. The concept of contemplation is rooted in both Greek philosophy and religious practice; historically contemplatio was used to designate various practices that cultivated inner visions and communions with the otherwise invisible and transcendent presence of the divinity. Once more the notion of inwardness crops up, which might seem opposed to the idea of connection. But contemplatio in this context is fundamentally a relational practice: it describes an attempt to open oneself up to what is fundamentally other. In its original Christian context this would point to the capital O Other of God. However, for the time being, I'd like to bracket the precise theological significance of the term and employ it in a looser, less rigorous sense. In doing so, I want to suggest that, in a time when reality for many people is in itself becoming radically other, contemplation may be a fitting first step in responding and relating to the collective call to active inaction.
Contemplative questioning, if so actualized within this fissure of inactivity may contain within it the possibility of conceiving and enacting new modes of adopting and adapting to the reality of interconnectivity. The virus, itself both microbial and what might be described as a hyper-organism,[2] is a herald of this interconnectedness; and yet on multiple levels its virulence impels us to fear the very linkages it brings to light:
Our connections to our environment.
(Wait—is this a closed system! Why haven't our metaphysics moved us beyond the reach of physics? All this technology, and we're still subservient to our bodies—even in Silicon Valley? Is mother earth trying to kill us?)
Our connections to other species.
(Transmission of viral pathogens between species! Should I pet that dog? Do bats hate us?)
Our connections to each other.
(Wait, did that person just walk closer than he should have? Where can I buy a quick guide to the ins and outs of social distance shaming? Do viruses have nationalities?)
And viruses such as COVID-19 "go viral" as well; they not only permeate our biologically shared reality, but they also saturate the sphere of the social imaginary. There in the dynamic realm of the virtual, merged with the projections of our hopes, fears, hatreds, and loves, viral outbreaks live on in a host of simulacra, which both mirror and distort their terrestrial existences. (No links given; for this, I don’t wish to be a conduit. Explore at your own risk, but beware: hic sunt dracones!)
"Nature" again disturbs our collective social dreaming and the imaginal ecology in which we move and have our being shifts once more.
On the levels of both culture and nature—two categories that the theorists of the anthropocene tell us can no longer be thought separately from one other—pandemics bring to light both the strength and the fragility of our enmeshed reality. As the etymology suggests, they create a shared reality of their own because they are a dark revelation of interconnection between all (pan) people (dēmos).
If we imaginally zoom either up to afford a cosmic vantage point, or in to adopt a microscopic vision, this interconnected state is what the ecocritic (for lack of a more concise term) Timothy Morton calls "the mesh." He writes:
This is a thought that is both all too easy and all too difficult to grasp. The idea that “everything is connected” has become so commonplace that it sounds trite, an example of philosophy displayed between the taillights of a Tesla. But most of us don’t live as though this was obvious; at any rate, by and large, our society is certainly not wired to reflect this reality. How do we dust off this pat image to see the radical vision beneath the words? How can we really ask the question of who we are collectively within a wildly shifted horizon?
As California was rudely—and slowly—waking up to the magnitude of the current crisis, I happened to be reading the Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani (西谷 啓治) in preparation for a lecture. Given the context in which I was reflecting upon his Religion and Nothingness (originally: Shūkyō to wa Nanika), the following passage lit up as I read it: "in order for [something] to become a real question, one that is asked with the whole self, body and mind, it must be returned to reality itself. The question that asks about reality must itself become something that belongs to reality.”[1]
Nishitani writes of a contemplative experience he refers to as "the self-realization of reality," a moment where we "step back to come to the self." This step of stepping back is however not solipsistically self-centered; rather it is an act of shining light upon "what is directly underfoot" while undergoing a "conversion from the self-centered mode of being, which always asks what use things have for us [...], to an attitude that asks for what purpose we ourselves [...] exist." This form of contemplation affords a reconnection with the real that re-centers by de-centering; it does not lead us back inward toward the safe quarantine of a buffered subjectivity, rather it throws us on to the highway, in the midst of dangers, into the dazzling light.
Nishitani envisions breaking down the illusion that we are simply isolated subjects peering out from within "the citadel of the self" at a world of objects, in order to realize that we are not in any meaningful way separate from that reality. Otherwise he opines, we sit with Plato's prisoners and simply watch "shadows pass to and fro on [a cave's] walls." This "self-realization of reality" entails being aware of and acting in accordance with our radically interconnected reality, both culturally and physically. And yet it does not unreflectively embrace the mythology of triumphalism that is arguably complicit in birthing the very attitudes of ecological domination and economical disparity that both fosters and feeds pandemics. As Plato himself was aware, it is not enough to bathe in the pure light of contemplating the ideal, one must enter back into the shadowy cave of the real where viruses ravage flesh and blood bodies, where violent divisions between buffered identities gape, and where the state with the largest economy in America ponders what to do when the sickness spreads amongst its 150,000 + homeless inhabitants.
A call to contemplating radical enmeshment must not deny the beauty of our fragile interconnectedness, but neither can it lapse into a misty vision of weightless white light pop mysticism; too much light can blind us. Our state of enmeshment is fundamentally ambiguous. But in times like these that can be so divisive and isolating, the words of Simone Weil, a fearless explorer of the shared territory between contemplation and revolutionary action, might serve as a point of departure for contemplating a shift in attitude that balances both the hope and horror of our quarantined present:
[1] Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1983). All quotations excerpted and adapted from pages 5-6.
[2] Here I am playing on both superorganism (a term used to describe a unit of eusocial animals) and Timothy Morton's notion of hyperobjects (which denotes n-dimensional non-local entities). Truth be told, I'm not entirely convinced that we need yet another term; but here's my argument in nuce: although viruses exist somewhere in a gray area between living and nonliving, they are referred to with as microbes (which hides bios under it hood) and infectious agents; furthermore, once they enter into the cultural imaginary and are perceived a phenomenon that has some sort of semi-unified existence, they can be thought of as hyper-organisms, which is to say, non-local organisms, in so far as they both act upon the "world stage."