Days of the Virus: The Cost of Paradox

You know, I'd rather see this on TV.  
Tones it down.
- Laurie Anderson, from "Sharkey's Day" on the album Mister Heartbreak

I'm very fortunate.  As I've described elsewhere, I live in an easily protected place with family I care about and get along with and am able to continue my work.  By almost any standard outside the US, I am wealthy (in the US, I'm solidly middle-class).  My house is in a safe neighborhood; I have nice toys; my family has plenty to eat and we get both our groceries and takeout delivered.  We are all reasonably healthy for our age and able to care for ourselves and each other.  We are about as well set up to weather the pandemic as could be wished. 

In contrast, am also free of many risks and stresses.  I don't have to make my living doing things that regularly expose me, and therefore the rest of my family, to the SARS-Cov-2 virus.  I'm not working in a hospital, retirement or nursing home, or dentist's office; I'm not a police, firefighter, EMT, or other first responder.  I don't work in a grocery store and I don't deliver groceries, takeout, or packages.  I'm also not unemployed:  I'm not a restauranteur or server or cook; I'm not an artist or performer; I'm not a retailer.  I'm also not homeless nor am I living in a crowded, underserved and over-policed neighborhood lacking basic infrastructure services.  As of this writing, no one in my family or network of friends or in my patient caseload has died of COVID-19. 

For all these reasons and more, I consider myself and my family lucky.  And therein lay a problem. 

As I've been chronicling in this series, the pandemic has been difficult.  The loss of physical contact, of variety and novelty, the ongoing uncertainty and fear of dying or of someone close dying -- all these are things that normally cause pain and would be normal to grieve.  In a normal world, when we suffer a loss, our family and friends rally around us for support; they witness our pain and tell us it will be okay and reassure us that they are and will always be here for us.  They can do that because it's very likely that they are not suffering a similar loss at the same time.  Conversely, we, who are in pain, feel free to be so because we know our pain, relative to our loved ones in that moment, is significant. 

That's not true now.  The burnout, depression, anger, disorientation, etc., that any one of us is experiencing right now, while significant on the scale of things, is not greatly different from most others in our community.  Everyone is struggling, laboring under deficits imposed by the pandemic. 

Grief -- the process we go through when the world changes around us -- requires permission, welcome.  To grieve, we must accept our grief, the pain of it, the inconvenience of it, allow it to bubble up and wash over us when it chooses to.  In grieving, our bodies and our minds process the losses and accustom us to this new world, absent of the things or people we lost and different from the world before. 

The ubiquity of loss and grief in a pandemic -- it is a pandemic after all -- makes this permission difficult.  How can I "complain" about how hard it is when there are people dying alone in plastic isolation bubbles with no more human comfort than an iPad screen can provide?  How can I "indulge" my anger or sadness at my lost privileges like a private office and a gym membership when folks in my city have no safe shelter of their own, let alone safety from the virus? 

To be able to grieve in times like this requires we tolerate this paradox.  It is true that I am very fortunate; it is true that others suffer horribly.  Yet those truths do not make my suffering untrue.  If I am to be well, both for my own sake and so that I may be of service to others who suffer beside me, I must grieve my loss, feel my pain. 

This is what is required of us:  to grant ourselves our pain.  Humans' greatest strength is community (even if Americans aren't especially good at it).  Not only do we serve each other better when we can accept our own grief, but we grieve best when we grieve together.  In permitting ourselves to be in pain, we permit each other; in permitting each other, we permit ourselves.  And with permission, we can grieve and disencumber ourselves and be of service. 

Days of the Virus: Pacing Oneself

Last Saturday marked the end of nine weeks of quarantine for my family and me.  The first month-plus wasn't too bad.  We have been fortunate to be able to continue to work; we live in a safe suburban neighborhood in which it's easy to isolate ourselves; our children are safe and we have remained healthy.

Starting about four or five weeks ago, the isolation began weighing heavily on me.  For two or three weeks, I ended each day just a little more exhausted than the one before, despite doing what I knew to do to keep my energy up -- making music almost every day, hanging out with my wife in the evening, working on household projects together with her and my mom on the weekends, keeping my sleep schedule regular.  I couldn't figure out why I felt like I was losing ground.

After talking with my wife and my therapist (yes, a lot a shrinks have shrinks), it became clear that I was suffering from burnout.  This was, while obvious in retrospect, a surprise and a bit of an embarrassment, as I have plenty of experience with burnout both personally and clinically, so I felt like I should have recognized it.  I left my last corporate position and turned to private practice specifically to avoid burnout; I felt like the institution I was working for was using me up and I would eventually be tossed aside as a desiccated, cynical husk.  In private practice, I began to grow again, my compassion and love for my patients rejuvenated and I felt grounded anew in the inspiration that had led me to this path eighteen years before.  How could I be burning out?

Then, on a videoconference with colleagues discussing our respective practices, a friend shared poignantly his insights about the emotional cost of conducting clinical psychology via a computer screen.  As "talk therapists," the intimacy of our work creates a deep and powerful channel of energy that we experience when sharing a physical space with a patient.  Conducting psychotherapy with an animated image of our patients robs us of that sustenance, leaving us feeling drained -- and, in my case, wondering why.  The group consensus enthusiastically endorsed and validated our fellow's experience and I confronted my failure to recognize the loss' affect on me.

With this new understanding, I've been able to get my scales rebalanced.  A few patients have completed and I'm not refilling those slots.  I'm taking more rest time over the weekend, sometimes moving my work schedule around to consolidate time off, and prioritizing "shouldless" time -- hours when I do what feels good to do in the moment that it feels good to do it, whether it be washing the car, making music, taking a nap, or baking blueberry pie.

For the last two weeks, I have felt ready at the beginning of the workweek, rested and present for my patients.  By the start of this weekend, I've even felt like I had space for my family, able to be present for them, like I have enough of the compassion and care that, as a therapist, I've previously had to steward so carefully, but now I can "spare" some to be a husband and father and son again.

Of course, I'm not 100%; I don't expect to be nor do I expect others to be for a long while yet, but things seem to be working well enough.  I've had several creative projects going:  I have a new composition I hope to publish soon.  I sampled a tubulum I've had for years and made a very serviceable digital representation of it.  I designed and received delivery on the materials for a workbench in my basement; as I write this my legs and back ache (in that good way) from schlepping said materials into said basement.  I purchased a sketchbook and have actually put pencil to it twice.

These things to me are not only acts of repletion but evidence of balance and sustainability:  when I'm burning out, I can't even lift myself up to engage in them.  And preventing burnout critically depends on awareness; having been shown that, even when things seem ideal, it's possible to have more going out than coming in, I can stay alert for that debtward trend and, hopefully, catch myself when (not if) it happens again.

Two Years

Two years ago about 2:40 MDT this morning, my father was declared dead.  He actually passed closer to midnight, maybe even right at midnight, but it had taken the hospice nurse a few hours to get back to my folks' home from visiting another patient.  When I had arrived about 7:00pm that evening, after an anxious 4 1/2 hour flight from Baltimore, his breathing was spectacularly labored and loud.  "That's hypothalmic breathing," the nurse had said.  "The last parts of his brain have shut down; there's almost nothing left."  She predicted he'd go that evening, most likely once the family that had gathered had left and Mom and I went to sleep.  "People need to be alone to die," she exhorted.  And that seemed to be the case with Dad:  as I was drifting off to sleep, just a few minutes after Mom and I had headed to bed, I noticed the absence of his breathing.

In the days and months since I held his cold and stiffening hand in mine and kissed him good-bye, my family's collective life has changed dramatically.  My wife and I bought a house with my mother and we share our little serving of suburbia together, building gardens, cooking for each other, caring for and worrying about members of our blended and extended family, and coming together or going off into our respective corners as we can and need.  Old friends of Dad's have become new friends of ours and allegiances long steadied by his influence have withered or failed.  The hot steely longing of being unaccustomed to his absence has cooled to the familiar hardness of a world without him.  Dream visitations and habitual thoughts of "oh, I should ask Dad about that" have fallen out of mind, leaving the what's so of those who remain.

Of course, Mom and I still actively remember and memorialize him, if more purposefully now than before.  As I write this, I am wearing a favorite ring of his; today Mom carries on her neck a small chain with an elephant pendant that he wore in a photo she has with him.  Tonight, we'll order in Red Robin:  Dad loved hamburgers and opted for meals from the chain when he couldn't find a local place.  We'll make a communion of beef and onion rings and, for a moment, feel his presence.  But our day to day lives are much more about living forward than they were two years ago, which is what he wanted.

I sometimes wonder what Dad would make of our current crisis.  I imagine he'd be his usual circumspect, gentle self, even as he would probably be enraged by our Federal government's response and by the more radical individualist behaviors.  Having lived through several wars and fought in one, I expect he would contextualize current events very much within the ebb and flow of civilization.

Which seems like a good lesson.  Things are serious, but sometimes things get serious.  Do what you can and let go of what you can't.  "We come in in the middle of a movie and we go out in the middle of a movie" -- something his friends told me he said to them a lot.  I might think of him as a 20th century Taoist Farmer.  He was a smart guy and a class act and a model I'll never equal.  But I don't mind trying.

Parts of Ten

On a roll from my last piece, I decided I liked working with a more orchestral palate and went browsing through my files for an old idea to play with.  I found a piece I had originally started in Logic 9 (so it had to be at least four years old) and spent the next month building on its stem to create this short piece for chamber ensemble.



The original bit was nominally for ten pianos, but that was simply out of the happenstance of messing about with grand piano samples and having come up with ten short loops that all fit together.  I had really liked the motifs and how they summed together, but at the time didn't really know where to go with them, thus mothballing the project for a future date.  Upon review, the collection seemed ripe for orchestration, so I went through each voice and assigned instrument samples according to what I auralized each one to be.  The resulting ensemble was comprised of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, marimba, piano, violin, viola, and 'cello.

The main challenge, though, was to figure out where to go with the basic loops.  The piece was written in a syncopated 9/8 and, after much experimentation, I decided to build sections out of subsequently reduced time signatures:  8/8, 7/8, and finally 5/8.  I skipped 6/8 mostly because I couldn't come up with any interesting syncopations; everything ended up being some version of either 2x3 or 3x2.  Next, because all my original motifs were confined to the octave and below middle C, I widened the original pitch range of the piece to take advantage of the highs and lows of the expanded ensemble.  There's a longer story here, but the short version is that this basic rule of orchestration ended up resolving a problem I've had for a long time:  why much of what I write sounds muddy.  It was embarrassing that I had not remembered this principle from my years of music theory and being a symphonic musician, but, well, there it is.  The rest of the composition process involved creating variations of the original loops in shorter meters and experimenting with how these new versions fit together.

The piece has almost no intentional vertical structure.  Although it is "in" two sharps and phrases and motifs tend to come down on D, E, or G, it has no key center as such.  Although I studied and understand verticality in music (chords, harmony, tonality, etc.), it has never been intuitive for me; put it down to being a violist rather than a pianist or guitarist.  Something I came to appreciate while writing this, however, is that that doesn't really matter, at least for the purpose of creating music.  Nearly all contemporary Western music -- whether it's jazz, pop, folk, or what we think of as "classical" art music -- is fundamentally based on vertical structure and highly vertically organized, so I've had this sense all my adult life that I "should" make my music that way.  But I never have.  It's always been linear, always about where a given part is going rather than the harmonic context it creates.  Of course, once you have more than one line, harmony is a necessary consequence, but, for me, trying to write lines based on how they stack up has always felt labored and I end up making very stiff and uninteresting music.  In this piece, I found myself able to surrender to a horizontal orientation and discovered that the happy vertical accidents that arose from that were far more interesting than anything I could make on purpose.  I plan on continuing in that vein (sic) in the future.

I also learned more about making expressive orchestral music on a computer.  Some things are far easier on a computer than with live musicians:  if, in the midst of a rehearsal, I realize that two sections should trade structures, making that experiment with an in-person ensemble would be impossible, but on the computer, it's just cut-and-paste.  On the other hand, dynamic expression and intragroup balance with musicians is as simple as saying "more clarinet there, please" or "as legato as possible in the viola, please."  Getting a computer to do the same thing, though, requires hours of tweaking velocity and volume parameters -- and that's assuming that the dynamic resolution of the sampled instrument is deep and fine enough to make the subtle changes you're seeking.  In the end, though, I'm essentially pleased with the result; the casual listener can hear enough of what I intended to get the idea and I learned enough to feel more confident in whatever my next project might be.

Technical notes:  This piece was written and performed in Ableton Live 10 Suite using their Orchestral Strings, Orchestral Woodwinds, Orchestral Mallets, and Grand Piano sample packs and Valhalla VintageVerb for concert hall reverb effects.

Days of the Virus: Blursday

What Fassbinder film is it?

The one-armed man comes into the flower shop and says: "What flower expresses, 'Days go by, and they just keep going by endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future. Days go by endlessly, endlessly pulling you into the future?'"

And the florist says: "White Lily."
- Laurie Anderson, "White Lily," from Home of the Brave

Someone I was talking to the other day said, by way of explaining his loss of focus, "...because it's Blursday."  Even for me, as someone who is fortunate enough to have a regular work schedule, the days are blurring together.  I might know it's Thursday because of the patients I see on that day, but somehow the Thursdays -- and Mondays and Saturdays, etc. -- are much harder to distinguish from each other than prior to quarantine.

Quarantine and social isolation are hard on us for at least the following reasons.  First and foremost, we are social animals; being forced to be apart from each other reveals this to a degree impossible to appreciate when in each other's regular and free company.  Even more introverted folks, when separated from their trusted others, suffer.  Too, the loss of structure and routine, especially for those out of work, can be disorienting and thus emotionally burdensome.

What stands out for me, though, is the loss of novelty.  Away from home, we have more we can do -- go to the gym, go out for dinner, go for a walk or a drive, go (somewhere else) to work.  Yes, we can workout at home, cook for ourselves, walk around our yard or neighborhood, but even a large and ideally-equipped home can only replace so much of The World, no matter how small a piece of it we typically wander in.

Perhaps more importantly, I hadn't noticed before how much variations in my routine that arose just out of interacting with other humans, even strangers, adds to my sense of the passage of time and so to my sense of existence.  One day I am able to get right up to the stoplight at Perring Parkway and Taylor Avenue on my commute; another day, I'm stuck behind someone playing with their phone when it turns green.  One day, a suite mate's patients fill the lobby and I greet them as I navigate through, while another it's empty and I stay in my thoughts.  One evening, my wife and I strike up a conversation with other folks waiting for a table at a restaurant, another we keep to ourselves.  Even my two-block walk to the gym after work varies depending on who else is on the sidewalk and traffic on the busy street I have to cross.

My relationship with my wife and mom has deepened in this time we've shared together, appreciating each other more and more for what we contribute to each other and how precious we are to each other, but our day to day life changes very little and the domestic stage on which it is currently playing out almost not at all.  We three wear our daily paths and deviate from them only slightly and rarely, simply because there are so few randomizing forces to influence our vectors.  Impetus from ourselves to do something different can only be so effective because it comes from ourselves.  We need outsiders to knock us off our trajectories and cause us to course-correct:  without them, we have no markers by which to track the passing of time. 

For now, our interactions with strangers must remain restricted to waving in gratitude through the door at delivery folks and hello to neighbors in our respective lots.  I work to increase the novelty in my life by being creative where I can, trying out new things, home improvement, etc.  Sometimes the best I can muster is finding whatever fits through the fiber optic cable.  I remain very fortunate -- safe, secure, with an income, healthy -- and very aware of the plight of those much less blessed than me.  My challenge is to stay well enough, mentally and physically, to be able to continue to care for my family in our time of collective isolation, so I fight Blursday with novelty.

Days of the Virus: Creeping Malaise

Gotta stay awake
Gotta try and shake off 
This creeping malaise. 
If I don't stand my own ground
How can I find my way out of this maze?
- Pink Floyd, "Dogs" from the album Animals

Today I struggled more than previously to stay connected, to feel grounded in myself.  It wasn't the whole day; sessions with patients went well, which always feels good.  But by the time I closed out my last video chat, I felt drained, disconnected, and hungry for something unnamed.

Changing out of my work clothes and coming downstairs, I became more conscious of an absence that has been inching its way into my awareness, but still couldn't get my hands around.  I plopped resignedly onto the couch.  A copy of BMoreArt lay on the coffee table, a new subscription I've been excited about; I opened it to where I left off, but couldn't concentrate.  I thought about a piece of music that I'd started working on recently, but my mind cringed at what seemed like a pointless expenditure of energy that I didn't have and that could only end in dissatisfaction.  Same response to the thought of picking up Lynda Barry's comics workbook.  Finally, lacking any better idea, I grabbed a bag of pretzels from the pantry, returned to the couch and turned on Netflix, picking up where I left off in the fifth season of Twilight Zone.  Two episodes ("Uncle Simon" and "Probe 7, Over and Out") of Serling's sparkling, indulgent, thesaurus-busting dialog later, normally a tickle for me, I felt worse.

By this time, my wife had finished her workday and came to join me on the couch; she saw plainly that I wasn't myself and asked about it.  We talked, unpacking the difficulty we had both been having over the last twenty-four days trying to sort out the best recipe for self-care -- how to recuperate-in-place, how best to use the limited energy we have when work is done, how to stay connected with each other.

Part of the balance I've been trying to strike is spending time with my wife versus making time for creativity.  Being married to the woman of my dreams, my best friend, my partner in business as well as life, we seem never to run out of things to share, discuss, even debate; being with her is a delight and a repletion.  When circumstances keep us separated for an extended time, we both feel the loss and the cost of reconnecting; our quarantine has felt like a boon in that regard.  On the other hand, I have some of that "gotta dance" creative drive; I feel a need to make stuff, whether with sound, words, images, wood-and-screws, or what-have-you.  If I don't do something with it, it kind of stagnates and spoils and that spoilage can give off a noisome fume that thickens my mind and mood like the blue cannabis smoke filling the car I first heard Animals in.

At the end of a day's navigating a sea of troubles, I often don't seem able take up my creative arms in opposition and instead settle into the comfort of the company of my wife.  Not a bad thing, but if I do this frequently enough, the miasma from the putrefaction of my creativity starts to cloud my sense of self.  This can feed back on itself, making it harder to push myself upstairs, into the studio and the uncertainty of invention and away from the comforting presence of my partner and the numbing reassurance of Netflix; a few loops of this and the haze thickens until a find myself drained, disconnected, and namelessly hungry as I did today.

But, this evening, my wife and I sat on the couch and chatted, holding hands, cuddling.  After the sun went down and we discovered our lamps wouldn't turn on, we actually had fun figuring out why (there was a wall switch we'd never used).  We lay together some more, her scrolling through her social media and me reading that article in BMoreArt I couldn't start earlier.  We were present, just being, and it seemed what we both needed.  After a while, I said, "I'm going to go write a bit" and came up to my studio and she picked up her current British character drama where she'd left off.

We both cope with the stress of quarantine differently, but we each recognize and respect our differences.  It's easier for me to trust her way than my own, but when I remember, I can remind myself that it's okay and go do my thing.  And when I do, that creeping malaise blows off me like someone opened a window.

Days of the Virus: Ceci ñ'est pas une ami

Like most of us who, in our social isolation/quarantine, are fortunate enough to have the household infrastructure to do so, I have been spending a lot more time on videochat than I normally would.  Much of this is professional:  my psychotherapy practice is now exclusively online, so I'm spending as much as six hours a day looking at the faces of my patients as they manifest on my computer screen.  Talks with family and friends are also limited to phone or video; no in-person connections allowed, let alone hugs, yet, it's still better than nothing.

Patients, friends, and family alike have almost universally emphasized how much better videoconferences are than talking on the phone (one-on-one or in groups).  I agree:  the screen often quickly melts away in the same way it does in a movie theater and one becomes immersed in the interaction with the person.  The mediating machinery disappears, leaving our perception filled with only the parts that represent the Other.

From time to time, though, this suspension of reality is interrupted.  Sometimes it's due to glitchiness in the system; I've frequently been reminded of what "long distance" telephone calls were like when I was small, with the routine salutations of "Can you hear me okay? -- I can hear you fine" or talking about the quality of the connection with the same casualness one might take discussing the weather.  Today, bandwidth and software issues in videochat have replaced copper wire and exchange switch problems from the days when Ma Bell was queen.

But technical challenges are not the only interruptions to the illusion.  I've been increasingly aware of a kind of uncanny-valley-ness to videochat.  I can, without prompt or warning, become profoundly aware that I am looking at a shimmering constellation of pixels carefully arranged to resemble my interlocutor, a two-dimensional simulacrum composed of 1s and 0s, teleported electronically into my monitor, my own personal Truman Show-reality that I am expected (and choose) to interact with.  I can, for moments, feel profoundly self-conscious talking to a picture on a screen that, bizarrely, appears to respond to my responses to it.  I feel hyperaware of the Magritte-ness of the proxy with which (with whom?) I am interacting:  "This is not a friend" my heart tells me and I am afraid, fearful that I've been duped, that what I trusted to be real is a lie, and perhaps a malicious one.

Fortunately, I can also recognize the moments for what they are, paradoxes of perception, the irony of knowing that the image is false but also knowing that it represents something real.  I ground myself in the trust that my friend or patient is real, sitting somewhere in their own bubble of isolation, the camera in their machine capturing and communicating their visage across cables of wonder to the magic mirror into which I gaze; it isn't actually them, but it's enough to reassure me that they are there and hopefully vice versa.  After a few more moments, the illusion reseats itself and I can again interact as if the person were here with me and feel the intimacy we share, attenuated though it might be by the media through which it is exchanged.

I am grateful to live with others, sharing our isolation.  Walking away from my computer and being able to kiss my wife, to hold my mother's hand, reassure me that they are real, that this is real, that I am real.  It seems that it would be terribly easy to lose grasp of reality if I had no confidants but pixels.