Red Hook, New York, April 13, 2020
Like a dream that keeps coming back and has a grip on your consciousness, our reality is slipping through our fingers.
The days seem to be merged, the mornings are late, the nights are longer, and time has become blurred, with dates no longer having a meaning now that they lack any activities or take place in a different format, online.
The meetings, the discussions, and the lectures through Zoom are also characters in this dream and do not have that invigorating, energizing influence of face-to-face encounters.
The faces have become thumbnails that flicker in small squares across the screens with metallic voices, which reminds me, more than anything else, of Alice's psychedelic experiences in Wonderland.
The occasional short walks outside don't strengthen my grip on reality. It is eerily quiet, it is not healthy, it is surreal.
Traffic is light; I see a vehicle every so often, a single vehicle, or a man walking his dog or a woman who determined to go jogging. We exchange tense looks, and even a slight "hello" gesture with our hands, and that's it. We go about our business on our own, maintaining a safe distance from each other. This momentary disruption of the quiet disappears very quickly and that total, almost threatening, silence once again sets in all around.
The flames of the Forsythia lighten the still-grey grass and the bare trees. This overwhelming yellow-phosphorous blossom does not create a sense of being in control of reality, not even the massive and sensuous flowers that have suddenly adorned the bare branches of the Magnolia trees, not even the nauseating pink blossom of the citrus trees that have suddenly awoken from their winter hibernation as if our world has not become frozen in time and turned into a quicksand of a permanent present.
The heart does not get filled with joy in the wake of these blossoms; what would normally be a breathtaking sight no longer penetrates the mind or lights up the soul. A big cloud of uncertainty hovers above everything: a cloud of constant worry and helplessness.
Now that time has lost its meaning, the near future suddenly looks like a distant horizon, and the colorful seasonal rites of passage – and nature itself – is devoid of meaning and has become grotesque.
It is not just the gap between reality and imagination that has become blurred, but also that between reality and fiction.
The effort to create an alternative reality on paper – an effort that in normal times would be an absurdity – is twice as ludicrous in a dystopian reality that has emerged on its own, as if it was taken from science fiction novels.
What am I supposed to do now? How can my writings compare to the impossible situation we have found ourselves in without preparation: A strange pandemic that arrived out of nowhere and grinds the world to a screeching halt; cities are on full lockdown; roads are empty and skies have no planes.
I don't write science fiction, but even if I did, I would not come up with such a manuscript so fast, as this would just rehash the worn-out movies in this genre. What can I add to this? That bats are allegedly the source of this disease and caused the world to stop in time for an unknown period? Such a plot would be ridiculous. Who would sign a book deal with me with such a storyline?
But surprisingly, despite what I concluded through common sense – and despite the impossible conditions that are supposedly around me – my ability to focus on writing has actually improved.
I make sure to use my daily quota and write on things that have nothing to do with mysterious viruses, pandemics, bats, or cities on silent lockdown.
Ironically, it is in these realms of fiction that I have found my solid rock of reality. In a place where time has gone haywire and stopped moving in the right direction, the prose is once again putting it back in linear motion, more or less.
In this situation, where meaning cannot be distilled, prose enforces its convoluted logic and rearranges things in a way that might be comprehensible once again.
Reuven (Ruby) Namdar has lived in New York for the past 20 years. His novel "The Ruined House" (2017) won the Sapir Prize, Israel's most prestigious literary award.
