A book I've contributed to has just appeared! (Well, it's print-on-demand so it will appear in 12-15 business days after you order it.) The project, called Decameron, emerged in the heady early days of the covid-19 pandemic, a reprise of the plague storytelling in Boccaccio's eponymous book of the same name. While it's not quite Boccaccio's 100 stories, there are enough - especially as the moment we were writing for has itself been in some ways superseded. Here's how the editors mark its slice of time:This book was conceived in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown. The medieval book from which it takes its name—Boccacio's Decameron—was a prompt and a point of departure; perhaps we could keep each other company in writing, even as we were all confined to our separate places of quarantine. This collection contains poems and fragments, reflections, narratives and images produced between March 18 and April 10, 2020. It is a cross-section of a moment in time, and in the time that has elapsed since submissions closed, the world has become yet more complex. While the uprising sparked by the death of George Floyd in May was yet to come, many pieces in this collection attend to the underlying structural inequalities that impacted populations during COVID-19. Together, these pieces convey a breadth of human responses to extraordinary circumstances, from loneliness to fantasy, anxiety to mortality, and from hope to silence.
My piece, a short fable called "Comforters," is a riff on (what else) the Book of Job. But returning to it I feel that it's from another reality, a different pandemic. At that point, you may recall, we thought the virus would decimate every part of society. It wasn't Boccaccio so much as Camus or Saramago. I looked at each zoom grid I encountered with the certainty that sometime soon one or more of the tiles would go dark. Family, friends, church, work, no circle I moved in would be spared; I tried not to think about the preexisting conditions among those I know and love, but was sure the virus would find its way to some of them. Or me: every few days a personal panic was brought on by an unexpected cough, a flash of fever, a fleeting headache. Or through me: "sheltering in place" was needed because each of us was potentially a vector of the pandemic, might unwittingly kill others.
But my zoom grids are doing fine. The 130,000 lost Americans, some of the more than half million who've so far died internationally, mostly didn't move in the circles I do. We're more like Boccaccio's Florentine galants, escaped to the safety of the country while the plague ravaged their city, than we knew.
Seen today, the pandemic - at least in this country - looks like something different entirely, preying on preexisting conditions, yes, but preexisting conditions distributed along lines of deeply entrenched social and economic inequality. Back in March I thought about how American fatalities, in comparison with those of other lands, would expose our preexisting conditions as a nation - the absence of a national health system, the grotesqueries of privatized medicine, our distrust of expertise, our weak understandings of the common good - but didn't guess the half of it. Spared in at least this phase of this pandemic I have discovered myself to be a vector of other pandemics.
