by Nina Schuyler
I’m watching Woody Allen’s movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo, again. Tom Baxter has just stepped out of the film and waltzed right into the darkened, popcorn-infested theater. Picture gum under the seats, on the floor. Mia Farrow, who has been in a lovely trance watching Baxter on the screen, looks alarmed as Tom makes a beeline for her.
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Right out of one world and into another.
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Heidegger says for the most part we’re all actors playing some sort of role. Well, he doesn’t say it exactly like that.
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It’s May and it’s raining in Northern California. It rarely rains in May, but when I look on the Internet, I see it did rain this time last year. So much for that. Oh, and we’re in the middle of a global pandemic.
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Last year at this time, we were planning a trip to Berlin. We bought tickets, found an apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. We learned basic German. Danke. Hallo. Hallo Getz? Ich wonne in California. My husband polished up his college German. We had our passports.
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One day in Berlin, we followed a tour guide around the city for five hours, soaking up history, all the savagery and goodness, the horror and light. Monuments and museums, pieces of the Wall, sections of which are now paintings, created by artists from around the world. Sitting around a nondescript little sandbox, tucked in the middle of ugly, tan apartments, our guide pointed to the sand. “Hitler’s bunker was right under here,” he said. He told us Berliners want to talk about it so it never happens again.
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You can find many things on the Internet. What you can’t find is a certain future. Also, I can’t imagine getting on an airplane ever again.
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We’ve been sheltering in place for weeks now. Me, my little family, two sons, my husband. We’ve carved out our little spaces so we can retreat when we’ve had enough of each other. This happens at least once a day.
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We’re all Tom Baxter, out of our movies, fired from our roles. No longer working in an office or no longer working. Kids not at school but on screens trying to learn. The possibility of death on a doorknob, a handshake, a sneeze, lingering in the air from a spoken word. The grocery store clerk is a hero. The nurses and doctors are gods.
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Unlike Tom Baxter, we were forced out. And we’re not rushing anywhere. We’re on pause. A button held down for days and days.
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Another image: our previous lives have been smashed to smithereens. We’re at the mercy of brainless packets of RNA and DNA.
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Heidegger writes about being. With so much stripped away, I feel the only thing left is my being. But what is being? I don’t watch movies anymore. I read Heidegger’s Being and Time. And I listen to an eighteen-hour and forty-minute lecture by UC Berkeley Professor Hubert Dreyfus about Being and Time.
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The lecture is audio, no live stream, so on my computer screen there’s only a photo of Heidegger and Professor Dreyfus. My nine-year -old son looks at my screen. “Why are you looking at those same men? Every night you’re looking at them?” My husband on the other side of the bed asks, what are you listening to? I tell him and he rolls his eyes. I can’t explain it to him, but I think it has to do with the need to understand what the hell is going on. Somehow pandemic=being=time.
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I tell my friend my young son is doing OK with the pandemic. I mean, he does his schoolwork on Google Classroom, he jumps on his pogo stick on the back patio, he races matchbox cars on an orange track and plays his ukulele. My friend who is a therapist says he may have accommodated to living without friends, but it isn’t good for him. I ask: What am I supposed to do? My friend doesn’t have an answer.
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I look longingly at photos from Berlin. There we are, standing in front of the Neues Museum, the four of us. Even the 17-year-old is smiling. And there, at Kathe Kollwitz sculpture, the light beaming down on it from an opening in the ceiling, a mother holding her dead son. Our guide said in the winter, she and her son are covered in snow.
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My therapist friend says the patients who are doing well—under the circumstances—are those who are not trying to replicate the past.
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Descartes said we are subjects that are self-sufficient, rationally observing objects in the world–I think therefore I am. Edmund Husserl, who was Heidegger’s mentor, said humans are transcendent consciousness; whether the world exists or not doesn’t matter to being. Heidegger says baloney.
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The last pandemic involved influenza. Pandemics happen. Like rain in May. We forget these things. The first case of influenza is said to have occurred in Kansas in March 1918. The war was going on and the American government downplayed the epidemic, (sound familiar?) which helped it spread. Almost 700,000 people in the United States died, at a time when the population was 103 million.
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I go into the backyard and stare at the white rose bush. Long enough and quiet enough for a shimmering blue and green hummingbird to come to the flowering maple and dip its long beak into the orange flower. Later my young son tells me a hummingbird’s heart beats 1,200 times per minute. We don’t say anything for a long time. I feel my heart racing.
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Heidegger says we’re not detached from the world at all. We’re not pure consciousness or some sort of metaphysical being, transcending the world. He says: world and being are intermingled. We’re in direct contact with the world. We’re swimming in it, our being caught up in a vast network of worldliness.
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It’s warm today and my young son who made the swim team this year would like to go swimming. But the swim team was canceled, the pool is closed. He can’t be in direct contact with the act of swimming, with chlorinated water, with fellow swimmers. What happens to a being that is out of contact with the world? A being not swimming?
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My 17-year-old son breaks down at the dinner table. He misses his friends, he misses school, in an actual classroom.
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According to Ubuntu philosophy, which originates in ancient Africa, a newborn baby becomes a being through interactions with other beings and having experiences over time. We are forged in the crucible of community. That seems Heideggarean.
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My friend’s husband was laid off. Five years at the company. He’s at home, trying to find a job. My musician friend has no work—her gigs disappeared. We’ve disappeared our faces behind masks, behind windows, doors.
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My son is in his room taking an AP Composition test online. 45 minutes, to show the Collegeboard what he’s got. First time this has ever been done. Last week the newspaper reported glitches—students unable to turn in their exam. Sorry, you missed the deadline. Ding!
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If being and world are intertwined, no wonder we’re a mess. With the pandemic, we’ve lost our world. We’ve lost ourselves. Everything has become theoretical, something to be looked at from a distance as an object. Or, as my friend says, everything feels flat.
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My young son is lying on the couch under a ten-pound blanket. I ordered it because a study says it helps a body relax. He says he’s relaxing. I ordered one for my teen—a 20 pounder.
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I go outside and jump on my son’s pogo stick. I’m on hour six of Dreyfus’ lecture. He’s a charming man. He died in 2017, but his voice is alive and well on the Internet. Heidegger loved Husserl’s Logical Investigations so much he checked it out from the university library and kept it for two years. He became obsessed with the physical actuality of the book. “The spell emanating from the work extended to the outer appearance of the sentence structure and the title page.”
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I head back into the house, turn on the Dreyfus lecture.
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FYI: Heidegger was busy with being in the world. He had an affair with Hannah Arendt. He was married, a professor, 35 years old; she was a student, 18, and brilliant. They snuck around a lot. Dark hallways. Empty classrooms. He also became a Nazi, which is hard to reconcile, but humans are complicated and right now I’m grappling with a global pandemic.
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It’s one thing to contemplate a hammer (or think about swimming in a pool) and another thing to use a hammer (or actually swim).
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I wrote a pandemic poem and the editor said my bio should answer the question: what is the color of this time? The grayish-blue of fog with occasional strikes of searing lightning.
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Write a bio: What is the sound of this time?
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What is the smell?
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The taste?
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The feeling at 3:00 am?
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When you’re using a hammer, you aren’t thinking, I am using a hammer and what I’m holding is a hammer. You don’t even think about you. You’re hammering. You are being in the world.
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I tell a friend what I’m reading and listening to and he says in the ’60s, when he was trying to become more aware—it was the ‘60s, remember—he saw a therapist. When he described his day, the therapist noted my friend spent a lot of time reading newspapers and watching the news on TV. He told my friend to cut it out for a month. Excise it, a Gestalt technique. After one month ask: do you miss it?
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Heidegger says there’s a downside to being in the world. We get busy and start to listen to “They”– what “They” say. Get a job, get married, have kids, wear this not that, buy this, read this, etc. He calls it Ver-fall, or ‘to fall away,’ meaning humans fall away from their authentic being. Fallenness is when we live unthinkingly imitating others. We forget our authentic being.
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My son is Zooming with his friend. They are showing each other their favorite basketball cards. My son’s favorite colors are pink and purple. He tells me not to tell anyone.
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A lot has been lost in the pandemic, but a lot was lost before the pandemic. Maybe because we listened to “They.” Maybe because we haven’t understood being. Being and Time is 589 pages long, written in convoluted German philoso-babble. So we followed Descartes’s definition and have looked at everything as objects: other human beings as objects, animals as objects, the air and water and forests as objects. What we think about the environment and the world depends on what we think about ourselves in relation to the things around us.
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In New York City, instead of the roar of traffic and the clank and clatter of garbage trucks and subways trains, now you hear birdsong.
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Heidegger says it’s possible to seize your potential from the lostness of They. It’s possible to live authentically. To be in relationship with the world that makes you feel alive.
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Being and Time. The time part of his book: we’re not infinite, we’re finite. Being is in time. Basically, we’re all going to die. At some point. But here’s the good news from Heidegger: by grasping the “finitude of one’s existence,” you can free yourself from the shallow “multiplicity of possibilities” that life presents us.
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In China after the lockdown, filings for divorce went sky high. Maybe after weeks of togetherness the ‘They’ fell away. Hey, who the hell did I marry?
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My friend says she likes her pandemic life. In her pre-pandemic life, she worked at an office 8:30-5:00, raced to get the kids from aftercare by 5:00, or pay the late fee of $1 per minute. Cooked dinner, gave baths, read a story, put them to bed, then worked more. Now, she works from home, she’s helping her two boys with school work. She’s gardening, jogging around the block.
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When Tom Baxter stepped out of the movie, he moved from a black and white world into a full- color world.
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What I don’t miss: The frantic pace, the rush to get children here or there, the traffic, the air pollution, the dirty water, all the ways we treat each other as objects—and how easily that turns into cruelty, savagery, heartlessness.
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What I miss: The roar of a basketball stadium, children playing in the park, the clatter of dishes from a restaurant, music spilling from a symphony hall, museums and standing in awe, people around me speaking in a different language, meandering through a bookstore, a foreign city, dinner at a friend’s, a long conversation, closer than six feet.
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Write your bio: What don’t you miss? What do you miss?
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With the world on pause, we don’t have to go back to the way things were. We have time to do some basic thinking: what kind of world do we want? What kind of relationship with the world?
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How do you want to be in the world?
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My young son is outside on his pogo stick, wearing a purple shirt.
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Heidegger says: a boundary is not that at which something stops, but that from which something begins.
“Wrestling Heidegger” was first published in Boomer Lit.
Category: Featured, Nonfiction