The Hum of the Universe

“Hunger is an emptiness. That’s why art is necessary. To remind ourselves of our solitude and our silences: that’s our original state. That’s what it comes down to again, then, that art is the practice of our original identity. And our original identity is that universe mind, right?”

– Li-Young Lee

I’m quitting the pandemic to attend to the hum of the universe, to get back to universe mind. And when I say quitting, I mean, I’m really just going to try to stop talking about it, and to stop being traumatized by it. (I say that like it’s possible but of course we all know it’s not). The pandemic is different depending where you live and right here, in my humble opinion, it’s not pretty. But it doesn’t really matter what I think when others are declaring that the world must go on. So.

One of the first articles I read a year ago, when this whole thing really started to sink in in a big way was “How Pandemics End” by Gina Kolata in The NY Times. An excerpt:

“When will the Covid-19 pandemic end? And how?

According to historians, pandemics typically have two types of endings: the medical, which occurs when the incidence and death rates plummet, and the social, when the epidemic of fear about the disease wanes.

“When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ they are asking about the social ending,” said Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian of medicine at Johns Hopkins.

In other words, an end can occur not because a disease has been vanquished but because people grow tired of panic mode and learn to live with a disease. Allan Brandt, a Harvard historian, said something similar was happening with Covid-19: “As we have seen in the debate about opening the economy, many questions about the so-called end are determined not by medical and public health data but by sociopolitical processes.”

Endings “are very, very messy,” said Dora Vargha, a historian at the University of Exeter. “Looking back, we have a weak narrative. For whom does the epidemic end, and who gets to say?””

I guess that there will be a myriad of books and essays about this subject. The messy end of the pandemic. But I will not be writing them. I’ve pledged, as a step toward saving my battered soul, to just poetically say, screw it. Not one bit of my worrying has helped anyone. And I’m not saying that I’m giving up precautions — no. But like Hafiz, I’m looking for a better job.

Find a Better Job

by Hafiz

Now
that
all your worry
has proved such an
unlucrative
business,
why
not
find a better
job.

(translated by Daniel Ladinsky)

And so the job I’m applying for is one who praises. From, again, Li-Young Lee:

“Praise is the state of excess, ecstasy. We counted up all the deaths; we counted up all the dying: we counted up all the terrible things in life, and guess what? There’s still Van Gogh painting sunflowers, there’s still morning glories. There’s an excess in the universe, a much-ness, a too-much-ness.”

So I’m turning to Van Gogh, to the sunflowers, and to the morning glories. I’m going to change the station, flip the dial, change the channel in my brain, and devote myself to the hum of the universe. The mess is going to continue, I know that, and it totally sucks. I’m so beyond exhausted from heading into the fray (both physically with the day job and mentally). So I’m just setting it aside. I’m going to be a fool and turn back to the beautiful; I’m going to fix my broken hearing and maybe my broken heart. I’ll end with another passage of Li-Young Lee speaking about the hum:

“I think it’s bad when poets say, “I don’t believe in the beautiful anymore. Look at the world.” Well, I say, “You’re looking the wrong way. You’re looking at the past. Poets should traffic in the ideal. You don’t traffic only in the past.” For me, as far back as I can remember, I was trying to hear a kind of hum, trying to feel it, and if I could hear or feel that hum, then the words just came and perched on that hum. If I don’t hear the hum, then I have to make the poem out of words. But if I’m hearing the hum and I hear it very clearly, the perfect words like birds will come and perch on that line. They will be the perfect words. But if my hearing is off — if it’s a little broken — and I’m faking it, then I’m putting the words in there, making the illusion there is something underneath. No. I’m interested in the frequency under those words.”