Not There

"Whenever a new science achieves its first big successes, its enthusiastic acolytes always fancy that all questions are now soluble by extension of its methods of solving its questions."

Gilbert Ryle, philosopher of language

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Dear Kate,

In the spirit of staying home as a way to bring humankind home, sitting this one out as a way to stick our foot in, distancing and isolating and quarantining as a path to planetary solidarity, we ask today's question, which is a question about the question we always asked each other when life as we knew it was normal and time held her breath to hear our answer: "What do you not do?"

When everybody we knew was supposed to be doing something with his/her life, a person's doing is the first and most important thing for us to know the person: a job, a career, an interest, a hobby, an endeavor, a plan, an ambition, a dream, a next conquest, a vacation a summer later, and with it some rules of self-definition we wanted--and assumed--the listening party to adhere to when they attempted to define us.

What rules? you say.

Well, for example, if someone at a party is to ask you, "Soooooo...what do you do?" and you are to answer, "Ummm...why?" then you are certainly not playing by the rules, whatever the rules might be.

But now.

How about now, now that jobs are evaporating, and with it a career, an interest, a hobby, an endeavor, a plan, an ambition, a dream, a next conquest, a vacation a summer later, maybe it is time for us to ask each other the more important question that we should have asked each other before: What do you not do?

And more negative questions would and should ensue: What would you not say about life?  What would you not do for money and fame and self-interest?  What would you resist and deny and stand against on a final bloody hill?  What do you think may not be said about God?  In the final analysis, when there is nothing more to do, nothing else to prove--death?--what are your life's undoings that will do it for you as a human being?

Here is a poem by Rowan Williams, on Piero della Francesca’s fresco painting "The Resurrection," about what is there, and not there, in Christ's resurrection.

“Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro”

Today it is time. Warm enough, finally,
to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
the shoulders sag. Here is the world again, well-known,
the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
winter everyone prefers. So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

Yours, Alex