9 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
Good morning. Yesterday, Utah recorded its highest number of new Covid-19 cases: 722 with the death count rising. It is no consolation to find out we are just behind Brazil as one of the “hotspots” around the world, especially given Brazil, Russia, and America are currently banned from traveling to Europe. Canada and Mexico have also closed their borders to us. America is a contagion, with our feckless and tyrannical president continuing to spew massive droplets of hateful rhetoric into the global atmosphere.
Today: 3,067,780 confirmed cases in the United States and rising. Our death count is 132,979. Some epidemiologists say it will reach 200,000 before the election. We made a religion out of the tragedy of September 11 with 2,977 deaths. What are we making of this? These deaths from the pandemic remain an abstraction to most. But not to Jonah. Not to his family. Not to every individual in this country who has lost a beloved from the coronavirus, who most likely died alone or in the company of nurses.
The picture before me is tinted, tainted like Death.
On the back of this photograph you write, Night-walking in Benares, India, 2012. Another blanket on the ground, only this time it is not reserved for the living but the dead. One day this will be us.
Death will come.
Again, the haunting of this idea that plagued me throughout writing Refuge, “If I can learn to love death, then I can begin to find refuge in change.” This sentence never leaves me—It is my mantra spoken daily by the Raven who sits on my shoulder:
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there
wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals
ever dared
to dream before…
The Raven flies. He always returns. My sanity comes and goes.
Someone cared enough to cover one of the bodies in a paisley piece of cloth. The companion corpse with a bare foot exposed is draped and bundled in black. They are not sleeping, that is always my hope with the dead, that they are slumbering and will open their eyes if I stare at them long enough. This is the kind of hope I deplore, loathe, and find so cowardly because its roots are locked in denial—the kind of hope I never trust but want to believe. The quiet contemplative rapture that says Yes. No—these covered bodies are dead, left momentarily on a wool blanket of one stripe on the streets of Benares—to be burned.
I have some questions. Did you feel discomfort in photographing them, Fazal? Did you think twice or three times or four? Did I feel discomfort in writing about my mother, my grandmother, my two brothers’ heartbreaking deaths? Or is all our artmaking, no matter the focus, the artist’s mirroring of the self—our fears, our projections, our hypnotic walk toward beauty to transform our anger into sacred rage—as a way to survive our grief?
Or does Rainer Maria Rilke speak the unspeakable in the Duino Elegies: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying”?
Quoting Poe. Quoting Rilke. There must be a trilogy of wisdom here to distract me from touching pen to bone, delving too deeply in what is visiting America and the world in 2020: Death. Angels of Death are now attending to those who doubt their existence.
Let me consult Virginia Woolf: “Killing the angel in the house was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” This I understand. Give me a shadowed life over a life of blinding sunlight and innocence.
A writer, if she is to tell the truth, cannot stand on the pedestal of decorum and discretion made for her by the men who would choose to tame her. Loyalty to angels has no place in a woman’s study. The first line from our pen betrays their goodness. The day I killed the angel in my house was the day I wrote a letter to my grandmother’s father, Park Romney, a true Mormon patriarch. I said, in a handwritten script difficult to read, “I will not obey—as my mother has done, as my grandmother has done, and as my great grandmother has—It will kill me if I do, just as it killed them.”
These bodies in Benares, Fazal, are they the women who died by being good?
And so, my friend, it becomes imperative we transgress.
How do we transgress toward Death?
We live. We create. We endure.
But upon a deeper glance, with my grandmother’s looking glass in hand, what if these figures are not dead at all, but sleeping? What if your Night-walking in Benares is actually you, enveloped in the cloak of night, on your quiet wanderings through the streets, creating through the alchemy of your lens an astute rendering of the dreamtime? What if these bodies in repose wrapped tightly in cloth are not corpses at all, but sleepers—Call them the dreamers, the travelers, the pilgrims on their way to death waiting to attain Moksha, “across the waters of sor- row to the furthest shore from darkness”? I can hear your voice reciting this line to me in the ether. The line between sleep and death is thinly drawn with a breath.
What if, after you read this letter, you write me back, telling me these are your ancestors and mine, Muslims and Christians, who slept side by side through the generations and dreamed their lives into being and met their deaths with dignity and, in some instances, choice, as we will? You know them by name; you recite their names as a liturgy—your father’s lineage, your mother’s lineage—I would put your letter down and call you, too impatient to write, and I would say, “I’ll believe you.”
I am writing you now, Fazal, one last line for today, to let you know, I never take you for granted or fail to appreciate our unruly friendship that continues to surprise and soothe and stir my heart.
With love,
Terry