capitalistic graveyard
This Week in Reading
Severance by Ling Ma
I ordered a copy of Severance at the beginning of the pandemic, and then put off reading it—unsure if it would feel apt, or overwhelming in the given moment. In Severance, the majority of the world’s population has contracted Shen Fever, a fungal infection that originated in China. The fever brings on a zombie-like state of being—those afflicted continue to perform their daily routines as they lose brain functionality and eventually die. The novel jumps between Before— Candace watching the fever spread across New York City, and After— when she joins a band of survivors raiding suburban homes and Walmarts for supplies.
Before the pandemic, Candace worked as a project manager overseeing the printing and importing of Bibles from China. When the outbreak begins, her boss gives them a tip sheet about Shen Fever and an N-95 mask branded with the publishing house’s logo. When the pandemic worsens and upper management starts to flee the city, the company offers Candace an astronomical amount of money in exchange for continuing to man the New York office. Quickly, the printing presses in China shut down, and soon enough there isn’t anyone left to buy books at all. There is no work to be done, yet Candace fulfills her contract, returning to the office each morning, eventually moving into the glass office building in Times Square when public transportation stops running. She has not fallen prey to the fever, but her actions are not dissimilar to the fevered Juicy Couture saleswoman obsessively folding and refolding t-shirts, or the neighbor that spends her day unlocking and relocking her apartment door. The fevered are trapped in routine, but so is everyone else.
In Los Angeles businesses are reopening, but no restrictions on social interactions have been officially lifted. My company, which exclusively makes wooden crates to move art for private collectors and galleries and museums (which are still closed indefinitely), technically falls under the classification of a “shipping company” and is allowed to operate, despite our stay at home order being renewed for another two months. Our mayor has instructed us to wear face masks whenever we leave our front door, which means technically I am supposed to wear a face mask for nine hours a day while hoisting full sheets of plywood onto a table saw in an non air-conditioned woodshop. For this, I earn $1.10 less an hour than I did before the pandemic and significantly less than I was receiving in unemployment.
It sounds like I am complaining, and I am! I am not handling this well. It feels like we are attempting to return to normal, but exclusively the part of normal that pertains to capitalism. I am allowed to go to work, perform my role in the labor economy, and return home. Officially, I do not exist as a friend, a loved one, a community member—I exist solely as a worker.
As it is impossible to fully disentangle oneself from consumerism at this time, I had settled for removing my emotional center from my role within capitalism. I allowed myself to stake my fulfillment and joy to intangible, unprofitable concepts—friendship, love, art, learning. Going back to work without being able to see my friends reduces my purpose in the world to the part of my life I care about least. It underscores that the government only sees me as a pawn within an economy, that our purpose as humans is to preserve and perpetuate business, rather than be part of a community or have any kind of self-defined value outside of capitalism.
After Candace flees New York in yellow taxicab, she joins a group of survivors off to start a new life at The Facility, an abandoned mall outside of Chicago. They take up residence in the abandoned stores—Candace claims a former L’Occitane store as her bedroom, sleeping amidst the remaining inventory of luxury hand cream and bath oil. The world has ended, leaving the survivors to haunt the graveyards of capitalism.
My job feels like the premise for an absurdist play. We are all miming our pre-pandemic careers to prop up an illusionary system literally invented by humans. I am a ghost haunting the graveyard of capitalism, at the grocery store in my face mask with all of the other ghosts, hovering six feet away from me. I’m exchanging goods and services, ordering take out for curbside pick-up, buying things online— a ghostly breeze stimulating the economy.
Instagram is full of gentle reassurances, hopeful missives that this time will teach us something— make us better. Instead, I feel myself becoming worse, testier, more stressed, less patient.
I’m lucky, of course– that goes without saying. I’m alive, and healthy, and the few people I know that have fallen sick have avoided hospitalization. This is the default disclaimer for any discussion about the pandemic. I’m sick of feeling like we need to be grateful all the damn time. When I was unemployed I was supposed to be grateful that I was out of harm’s way; now that I’m working I am expected to be grateful that I have a job at all as unemployment numbers hit record highs. I’m supposed to be grateful that my grandma, who lives in assisted living in Seattle, remains safe, even though everyone who works there only speaks her third language, which she has forgotten. 100,000 Americans are dead and we are supposed to be grateful that we aren’t one of them, grateful that things aren’t worse, grateful that worse things are happening to other people instead of happening to us.
I want to do my part, and I am—securing my mask over my nose, ducking into the street to dodge my neighbors that, like me, circle our block day after day. I want to do the right thing but I’m increasingly demoralized. I feel like my humanity has been stripped away from me. I Facetime friends that live 3 miles away from me who might as well be on the Hubble Space Station. I miss my friends, and my freedom, and now, even the ability to take a deep breath of fresh air that hasn’t been filtered through two layers of fabric. I’m grumpy, and compliant. Despondent and passive. Articles remind us that we don’t need to use this time well, which is to miss the point that for some of us, productivity is a coping mechanism more than anything else. I don’t need to be productive, but I want it, a consolation prize for everything else I have lost—eating dumplings in a Chinese restaurant, wrapping my arms around a friend’s chest, the sound of the Fox Searchlight theme booming in a dark movie theater.
This isn’t a hopeful missive, but it’s honest. It’s how I feel, right now, anyways.
Studio-ing
I finished all! 78! Of my jock tarot cards! It took me probably a year and a half—it’s been a long haul. I’m figuring out how to get them printed now, so if you have been wanting to snag a deck (or an individual card or two), stay tuned. I’ll write more about this project once I get them back from the printers.
Further reading:
If you can handle eerily relevant fiction, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is the obvious choice, and The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker is another apocalyptic choice.