My brilliant friend's essay
(DATELINE: Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, CA)
My brilliant friend had made the connection between thoughtlessness and rightlessness, invoking Hannah Arendt, which I interpretively parlayed in my own simple way while walking in Golden Gate Park yesterday, into following a course of action wherein thinking as a human activity is a form of political power and not thinking the most direct path to giving up any thought of having any political power whatsoever, or of even being deserving of such power.
And what a beautiful day it was to take a walk! The cherry trees in blossom, little backyard birds taking baths in small puddles the morning rain had drawn for them. So interesting to me to see cell phone use so greatly dimininshed, so that the people out walking looked to me like people who were trying to make connections with themselves first and then with others. Of course the big thing--the virus--hung over all our heads but not necessarily in a bad way: the park's big trees were hanging over our heads too. And as one who has seen and heard the limb of a great tree break suddenly without warning, falling where I'd been standing a split second before, I know the vaugeries of chance, accident, fate and have counted many times those times in my life when I could have been dead, the number now exceeding the fingers on my right hand.
What I don't know is what I don't know. And it's not that I don't want to know whatever that might be--I'm most interested, I think about what I don't know quite a lot, perhaps I overthink it. It occured to me that those out walking, many of them with young children, might be thinking the same thing I was thinking--that thinking is a divine human activity even if thinking may not lead to knowing. For in this case, the time of the pandemic, how could it?
My brilliant friend's essay merges, toward its conclusion, poetry and thinking--poetry presenting the world 'as it is' and thinking as an awareness of a society "increasingly built on thoughtlessness and the destruction of human rights." As much as there is not to know about this current situation--and it is a political situation as well as everything else it is--we can think, we can come together in private and in public, having collected our thoughts, and reassemble for the purpose of having our voices heard, our right to good leadership clearly declared.
Cherry tree, Golden Gate Park, March 29, 2020. Photo by author.