What the house shelters

Except for solitary walks now and then, a trip to the grocery store once a week, like so many across the globe, I am confined to home. I am rereading Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. He writes of the protected intimacy of the house we have dreamed or lived in: “The house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace."

I worry about the children like a boy I once taught for a short time – he arrived in November and was gone again in April to yet another school, his eleventh before he was twelve. He lived in a small apartment with his parents, four younger brothers, one older sister and her new baby. Most of his stories were about groceries, about walking to get them, about his father coming home in a cab with them, about how they were all going to get them the next day. Sometimes he talked about not sleeping, about the crying baby, his wiggling brother, the noise from the TV. 

What peace, I wonder, does the house shelter for this boy?

And yet, for children, the groceries arrive like Christmas. The noise is the hum of intimacy and, who knows, no doubt when the baby is asleep, and the littlest are watching TV, there is a lull for staring at the ceiling and tracing the crack into daydreams.

How difficult it is to disentangle the common experience – this poetry – from the rest of it, to rest here for a moment before worry blooms again.

Thinking poetically about fear in the time of Covid 19

I have been busy, busy, busy and set aside this blog to hurry, working late and early, promising to come back to writing soon, that old saw.

And now it is quiet.

Strangely, I had been thinking about fear when I left off and have notes in my journal from my recent reading of philosopher Simone Weil who lived through two wars. In her reflections on the needs of the soul, which she argues are as vital to us as our physical needs for food, warmth, shelter, she writes:

Security is an essential need of the soul. Security means that the soul is not under the weight of fear or terror, except as the result of an accidental conjunction of circumstances and for brief and exceptional periods. Fear and terror, as permanent states of the soul, are wellnigh mortal poisons, whether they be caused by the threat of unemployment, police persecution, the presence of a foreign conqueror, the probability of invasion, or any other calamity which seems too much for human strength to bear.

Our soul needs, Weil argues, are “arranged in antithetical pairs and have to combine together to form a balance,” just as we need rest and exercise, warm and coolness. Thus it is that, while we need security, we also need risk:

The absence of risk produces a type of boredom which paralyses in a different way from fear, but almost as much….Risk is a form of danger which provokes a deliberate reaction; that is to say, it doesn’t go beyond the soul’s resources to the point of crushing the soul beneath a load of fear.

Thinking poetically, we remember fear, feels its weight, this common soul need for security; we do not measure fear, weigh it, plot it on a graph, find the average and develop action plans and strategies based on this analysis. We do not quantify the “normal” load of fear a soul should be able to carry. 

I have known children whose eyes fill with tears when math books come out, who stare blindly at the pages of a novel and shrink into themselves, who, holding a pencil tightly in hand, regard the blank page as though it were a wild animal ready to spring. And that fear poisons even the games at recess; away from the laughter and play, these children huddle, yearning, in dark corners.

What they need, a colleague said, tall, white, robust, middle-class, a man who found school easy by his own admission, is a push, a prize, a punishment, something to motivate them.

And today, what is all the fuss, someone said to me recently, about staying home during this pandemic and watching TV or reading books. It’s a holiday! This someone, I know, doesn’t have three children under five, bills to pay, rent due, cupboards bare and that gnawing fear that poisons every moment, even the early morning, when the sky just begins to lighten to pale yellow.