I have not been able to write since Omar Mateen walked into Pulse early last Sunday morning. There did not seem to be anything I could contribute to the keening over the bodies of the mostly young, Latino, gay men who perished in Orlando, even though I was feeling it in my cells. Even now, I certainly have nothing to add to the shameful, deafening second amendment brawl we are forced to listen to. I feel unworthy. What can I say in my state of secondary bereavement that could possibly comfort the mourners, allay the fears of people in communities under siege, gay people, Muslims in this country who are not extremists or psychopaths? I understand, quite suddenly, the awareness suffered by the children of Holocaust survivors. You experience the horror deeply, but at a remove. You weren't there.
At the same time, I am weighed down by the suspicion that things are going to get much worse before they get better in this homeland holy war. America, smugly distant from the rest of the world, an ocean away from the fighting in the Middle East, the refugee crisis in Europe, is eating itself alive. A daily fusillade of hate rhetoric rises to a pitch until it explodes into real automatic weapons fire, the whole country a fragmentation bomb. On the Right, there is a story that people tell each other about good guys shooting bad guys. In this fairy tale, a salsa dancing reveler reaches for the gun strapped to his ankle and takes down the terrorist with the AR-15. Never mind that under other circumstances these same second amendment junkies would probably not be in a hurry to defend the rights of gays or brown people. They just want more guns. They can never get enough guns. On the Left, there is another story. In this beloved sentimental fiction, a tragic event, the slaughter of twenty children or forty-nine Latin music fans, proves to be the tipping point, the moment when sanity finally prevails and the culture begins to dress its wounds. Never mind that gun sales go up dramatically every time there's a mass shooting. Never mind that several bills proposing minimal attempts at gun control have already failed. You know I want to believe the redemptive vision, but some days, forgive me, I just don't. If Chris Murphy isn't standing on the Senate floor day and night, I waver. I seem to be a person of little faith.
You can see why I've been reluctant to write this past week. The day before the assault in Orlando, I was sitting up in bed trying to read Don DeLillo's latest offering, Zero K. The book is a chilling, kafka-like fable about mortality. Out of nowhere, my eyesight became fragmented, as if the normal optical mechanisms had gone on vacation. Objects in my field of vision were shattered like the pixelated images on TV of criminal associates in the witness protection program. Everything looked like broken glass, nothing cohered. It was an ocular migraine which passed in a half hour, but during that time, I recognized clearly that things fall apart. I understood that this fragmentation is one aspect of both the natural order and its poor relation, the social order.
It is easy from this point of view to become a teller of the third tale, the one that takes place in a despond of cynicism, a place to be avoided if possible. So far, I have encountered two living artworks that have had the power to rescue me from this swamp. The first was the sight of a woman I care about deeply beaming at me from twenty-five feet away in the produce aisle near the strawberries. I beamed back. We never spoke. Our connection was a bridge of endearment, not engineering. Chris Christie has no authority over that bridge. The second was the discovery of a sheep farm on Seekonk Crossroads in Great Barrington. I haven't been on that road in a long time and apparently missed the arrival of more than a hundred sheep, milling around in all their biblical wooliness, making their consoling, reassuring sound. It turns out that sheep have a bad rap. These sheep were not falling in line, mindlessly conforming to expectations like Republican congressmen. They were a peacefully congregating community of equal beings, absent any scent of blood lust, the living antidote to cynicism. Meeting them unexpectedly allowed me to breathe. I exhaled fear and inhaled hope and remembered for a moment, as Howard Zinn has written, that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage and kindness. It is all those things.