“It is 126 miles to Chicago. We have a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re both wearing sunglasses.” Elwood says to his brother Jake Blues. “Go,” the other replies to him.
It is one of the most famous lines in the arch-famous “The Blues Brothers,” and it is so for a variety of reasons: because it describes a condition of life on the edge (the brothers have to escape from the greatest manhunt in U.S. history – cinematic, of course – and they have a mission to accomplish: to take the proceeds of the concert they just played to the tax office in Chicago to avoid the closing of the boarding school where they were taken in and educated as orphans) and because it is surreal. What does the fact that they have enough cigarettes and especially that they are both wearing sunglasses, moreover at night, have to do with the success of the mission? Nothing, but it is a movie and fiction sometimes exceeds reality. Perhaps the meaning is that the most unthinkable and irrational answers are the most guessable when life is indecipherable.
Are you getting the hang of it?
I don’t know why that line came back to me. I suppose because I was looking at the pantry, wondering when I would have to get something to eat again. Even an act as simple as grocery shopping is no more. Until a few weeks ago at least it was, simple I mean, but now it requires planning and some gamble.
Now, in this strange March, nothing is the same as before. We can no longer leave the house, we can no longer run when we want and where we want, we read in the newspaper the daily count of the dead and the infected, and we get a knot in our throat. If we could have a time machine and read these lines a year ago we would wonder if we are talking about a movie, and even one of those American disaster movies. The ones you see to then walk out of the movie theater and find that everything is normal and there are no aliens. Tomorrow you go for a run and the usual people are around. Everything is normal, it was just a movie.
No: that cinema became our life, and we never left that hall. That (closed) space is the movie we have been living in for weeks. Momentarily, of course, but for how long no one knows. Outside, the film goes on and it is bloody real: there is an invisible contaminating agent and there is no one left on the street. Just the police and someone walking the dog. Either those who are authorized for business purposes or those who try to force the permanent blockade. In short, useless to describe what you know very well.
If there were no network and social media, we wouldn’t really know what people are thinking or even if anyone is still around: if we couldn’t talk or write to each other, isolation might make us think we were left alone. No one can be seen anymore, so who can assure you that they haven’t all disappeared?
Instead, we are still (almost) all there. A week has passed since the total blockade. For a few days we argued animatedly about whether or not we could play sports while respecting the distance, or we said to each other that it was not so bad being housebound: we have a thousand million movies to watch and then the books, the virtual visits to museums, the food to prepare, the friends to hear, the discovery for many of living with other people. We started talking to human beings who, unbelievably, lived with us.
Life has turned-for those who do not have to keep working, it should be specified (and they should be thanked, one by one, because they keep the engine running for all of us)-into an interminable weekend. One of those where you don’t feel like going out and then you watch 3/4 movies and then you read and then you sleep and then you bake a cake. With the difference that Monday does not come. Each day becomes similar to another, and after a while you have serious difficulty telling at first glance what day of the week it is.
After a few days have passed so you realize you need some normalcy: you start dressing normally again, you get back on a normal schedule, you keep yourself in some decent shape. You are even more dedicated to yourself than you have ever been: eating better, sleeping more, methodically trying to have some kind of routine. You need a program.
Here: I think the thing that is making us think the most is the fact that we don’t have a well-defined program, except to get to the evening and then, in a last stretch (the only one allowed) until bedtime. The time horizon has shifted radically because everything depends on the resolution of this emergency, which has unknown timescales because no one had ever seen anything like this before.
How are you, really?
I follow the news for a few minutes a day. I work during the rest of the day, looking a lot at the trees I see from the window. You would say I’m thinking even though I don’t know exactly what I’m thinking about. I couldn’t say. I read the discussions on the net and notice that we are already dividing between those who are loyal to government impositions and those who say it is all a machination, that they want to control us. I don’t know, I don’t take sides, the dead seem very true to me and the conjectures very labile, so I look at the dead and when I am in a good mood I think they are understandable, when I am not in a jolly mood instead I think they scare me. Even one scares me because it shouldn’t be there, it shouldn’t be on that list, or at least not now.
We live in an immense out-of-program, don’t we? An off-program that is not even a program.
The simplest question is the one we are always asked overthinking in our daily lives when we meet: how are you? One always replies “Good,” because it is courtesy and habit.
Instead, these days we should answer ourselves honestly: how are we? It doesn’t count not being able to train, it doesn’t count not being able to go for a walk without a patrol asking where you are going and why. I mean yes, that matters too but not now.
The question requires an answer: not because of the answer itself or because it contains a solution but so that we do not feel that we are the only ones who are lost, apprehensive, afraid. Not being able to run and the resulting anger is a symptom, not an explanation. It is a metaphor for what we have to give up for now. It is nostalgia for a normalcy that we took for granted until a few weeks ago.
Now nothing can be taken for granted. Therefore, perhaps it is time to tell each other honestly how you are. Without making predictions or inferences, without saying “He told me this that his cousin told him his daughter’s uncle,” etc.
This thing that is happening to us has put us for the first time in front of ourselves, alone. We do not know as a community how to deal with it, and as individuals much less. Maybe we are just figuring out how to relocate and find a new dimension. Perhaps we are under the illusion that we are just waiting for everything to go back to the way it was before (and my personal wish is that everything does not go back to the way it was before, that is, that this is an opportunity to change not as individuals but as a collective).
I still don’t know how – who knows anyway? – so I’m not going to finish writing by telling you that you need to do half an hour of skips and push-ups and sit-ups and even some yoga and then everything comes back together. This is not the case and we know it. I do, almost every day. They help but are not the answer. We have to find the answer ourselves. Mom won’t tell us or the state.
The answer is the most honest answer you can give to the question, “How are you doing, really?”