History reminds us that we are mortal.
Cristina Rivera Garza / Grieving

We were assured, we were certain that the body was always working to heal itself.

A child falls and opens his knee but soon enough the wound stops bleeding, soon enough the flesh has grown a scab. A woman trips and breaks an arm or a wrist or a leg, or worse, a hip, but in a few hours her body begins to form fibrous tissue and cartilage around the fracture. That we know: we have lived through it ourselves. Fevers ceasing. Cough spells dissolving in the air. Sprained joints regaining mobility. And those headaches. Even that broken heart.

The Red Parts: Maggie Nelson explains that blood rushed to heal the injury produced by a bullet fired at the head of her aunt, when Nelson’s aunt was just twenty-three. Left unassisted, she would never recover.

“The body hurries to heal itself, even as it is dying”, the author reflects. The bodily resolve to heal. The impossibility to heal alone.

The truth is, our bodies are always in need of other bodies. When sick or in pain, someone is called to assist us – a parent, a partner or a friend, a neighbor, a nurse – someone is expected to listen, to hold our hand. To clean our wound. To prescribe a treatment and a cure. Someone: hands rolling a wet plaster cloth that will dry into a healing cast around our limb. Someone helping us stand up.

Judith Butler warns that we can never stand alone. We have convinced ourselves that we are able to stand without help, she says, but we seem to have forgotten that someone taught us how to do so. We have missed the comfort of being helped. The joy of helping. The pleasure of standing with others. Because, as Butler has argued in so many of her writings, even as individuals we are never alone: we join in a community with others. Insisting on our radical dependency, she asserts that not only should we concern ourselves with what makes our lives liveable but also with how the liveability of each life makes our living together possible.

We are charged with mending our fractured communities – broken as bones as we are.

We now have been told, however, to stay away from others. To confine our bodies at home, alone. To work from home, alone. To sleep alone. To eat alone. It is now, in our radical loneliness, in our radical dependency of those who provide our food and our security, that we realize we are, above all, bodies.

We, the frail scared bodies suddenly woken by the peril that surrounds us.

Cristina Rivera Garza tells us that until now we  have lived under the delusion of being incorporeal. “The contemporary means of capitalist production, that cold, calculating machine, has accustomed us to living under that illusion”, so that we could work endlessly and endlessly consume without ever stopping to care for our bodies and the bodies of others. All of a sudden we are collectively forced to accept we are corporeal beings, because we, as so many others around us, are faced with the fact that we are all mortals, that we could become infected with a mortal virus. We have become painfully aware that there are unknown hands growing what we will eventually consume, that there are many hands harvesting the fruits and the vegetables we will buy at the store, that other hands will package and deliver what we will cook and eat; all those hands made present to us now that we fear their touch, the possibility of our food fingered by others who could be ill.

Those bodies full of working hands, writes Rivera Garza in her magnificent Grieving, those bodies risking their lives in order to keep on living.

Those hands –latex gloved hands– at the hospitals, helping us heal while exposing themselves. Health workers who are, as us, made of skin and muscle, of blood, brains, lungs. Who are treated as if they were as disposable as the gloves they wear, as their protective gear once it is infected.

For weeks and months we will all open our windows, we will open them at the same hour to applaud those who are assisting us and saving us; we will clap, we will dance, we will cheer and chant, we will make our gratitude collectively heard. A standing ovation.

Had we forgotten that our healers and helpers were always there, waiting for us to fall so that they could assist us in standing up again? When were we instilled with this indifference for them, this indolence? Why did we disregard their generous giving, their burden, their communal will, their fundamental role, their precarious but essential existence?

Indolence, in Latin, means the absence of pain. Indolent is one who does not suffer with or for others. One who lacks empathy even while regarding the pain of others. We had been inoculated with a terrible indolence.

Many now say that before this virus we had been infected by the disengaged logic of our capitalist society that puts profit over care, which exploits the most vulnerable bodies, which extracts their blood and sucks their marrow until they can no longer produce any value. Many now say the lives of workers were and continue to be considered a “cost” to the system. Many tell us the time has come to care for others as those others care for us, to heal others with our own hands even if our hands can no longer be close. Many now demand that we express our newly found concern for the lives of others, that we hold a pen to mark an option on a piece of paper, to extend our vote and choose to change this system that disregards kindness and care for all. Because we, frail and scared, are also strong together, and we can- we indeed must- begin to heal our world.

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