It should come as some relief that fucked up dreams are the collective consciousness of this pandemic, but it does not. Relief would be waking up rested, and not, as one finds oneself this morning, in a pit of night sweats and despair.
This - the business of existing - should not be so tiresome, I think, choked with blankets as I slide headfirst off the bed.
It is.
I have taken to sleeping upside-down and over the covers because a month or seventy-two weeks ago as it may be, however far into these endless days of shelter-in-place, a hefty spider unabashedly scrambled across my pillow and very near to my face as I lay scrolling about on my phone. It made a scratching sound on account of the weight of its sturdy legs on the brushed cotton sheets, and then I lost track of the spider entirely when I tried to convince it to run toward the door. It, or, “Wilhelm,” as all spiders are named, instead took a detour to the wall behind my bed where it will probably live forever and get quite fat on all the bugs I’ve scorned before.
So we’ve worked out a deal wherein I leave the lights on, I don’t use any of the objects I’ve seen him touch, and I try not to move in my sleep, and Wilhelm gets the run of the place. It’s not a great deal for me, but I’m not a keen negotiator.
And with this, I have become increasingly worried about taking up the mantle of an Order Muppet. As in, not the Chaos Muppet I know I am at heart. Chaos Muppet Theory is something I read several years ago and have never been able to shake. As with most things-Muppets, it both explains something non-Muppet in a way I never would have heard otherwise, and also speaks to me on a deep, personal level.
[See also: the song, “Tenderly,” which, as it turns out, was NOT written to be shout-sung on a singular note.]
I blame the nightmares and the not sleeping-right-side-up, but I suspect my toddler-sized attention span has to do with all the screen time and working every single day. Not like eight hours of typing sort of work, more like rolling around on the floor in front of a camera while shouting out instructions for correctly rolling around on the floor, which is just as odd as it sounds.
Occasionally the screen time is less about me, staring at my own face and wondering at the angle of my head, and more about the interactions with others in the screen. What is the appropriate amount of time to scan the gallery of faces before you answer a question? In the world of before, with real faces, one can gather a lot of information in a short amount of time. This is to say, I am usually quick to answer things. I’m what you might call a “good student,” or “annoying.”
I say this not to be self-aware, but because I can usually beat out the men for a hold on a conversation. In my new online world, however, I, and every other woman in the room, are slower on the draw. The men answer first, for longer, they take up all the space on the screen. This is by far the most unscientific un-study of all time, but my suspicion is that the lag time is the subconscious women’s work of scanning the room that we can’t do in the virtual realm. What I’m used to, as an affable Order Muppet, is to make quick eye contact to see who’s ready to answer and how fast I have to be or who might have a better or more disruptive perspective to allow for, all in the span of a flash around the table. And the men aren’t doing that. They never were. It’s just more obvious now because here I am, fumbling with the fuzzy internet connection and the dog noises and the chaos of flat figures and I lost my entry.
At which point I usually shut down and get quiet instead of what I’d like to do which is rage loudly in a shout-singing match to a Nat King Cole song.
In the worst dreams, regardless of plot or themes, there’s usually a moment wherein I’m trying to scream at the top of my lungs, and it doesn’t work. The words are wrong or I’m not loud enough, or something is stuck. Whisper-shouts when only a prickly soprano note will do.
It’s a little too on-the-nose, don't you think? The same way dreaming about buying Lysol wipes is a little too real, but that happens too so I’m not really in charge of the script here.
There’s a duck who lives outside my apartment who laughs, but only at night. That raspy voice that ducks have, but instead of a quacking sound, it’s, “AHAHAHAHA.” It, or “Mervin,” as ducks are named, is mirthful really. Like he’s hosting a party and having a time at it with all his favorite friends. It makes me hopeful to be near my people again sometime. Away from the flatness of the internet and the ever-present Wilhelm. You know, Order Muppets need a Chaos Muppet as their foil. A resistance to bring them into the fold of dynamism. A change agent.
And this is where things get interesting, or at least more relevant. For one, Chaos v Order speaks to this sense of duality as a constant and vilifying structure that we can’t escape. And within this, or for seconds, it speaks to an agent of change as a predicated process. An ordained, prescriptive thing.
We, as humans, like to have meaning, even if the meaning is absurd or terrifying. It’s the reason we have religion, various addictions, and trouble with the concept of time. We, as not-computers, do not do well with randomness. When random things happen that we cannot explain, we ascribe meaning to it in the form of, “everything happens for a reason,” or “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” There is value in the ability to learn from anything, or to apply a sense of wonder at even the abject terror of a time. But here is where we are foundering as a society right in this very moment: when an accident of pandemic proportions occurs, there is no actual blame to cast.
Let’s be clear, there are true failings on the response side of things, and there are many ways this could have been handled better, but much of what we are seeing on a personal level is that we, as humans and not computers, cannot quite get on board with the randomness of it all. It MUST mean something, it must have come planned from someone, surely someone is wrong somewhere and we can pin all the chaos of this on the blame over there. Contain it. Make it make sense.
It doesn't make sense. It’s chaos.
Does this make us collective Order Muppets? Are we a whole society of Kermits, sighing heavily and buying into cult theories about shadow governments? No. We, as humans and not actually Muppets at all, are not Order v Chaos. We are Order AND Chaos. Both. Constantly and all the time. We change our makeup and our pants and our minds. We have our favorite foods and TV shows and phrases we like to say. We have our routines and sometimes we need a little shaking up. Or we do not like being told what to do even though a little structure keeps us productive. We’ve been thinking about ourselves this whole time as if we are paint when really we are light. We are the combination of everything without measure, and even in the darkest of despair what we are looking at it is absence. We cannot make sense of negative color; It doesn’t mean it cannot be.
It is tiresome, this pandemic, with the endless, amorphous weeks, fever dreams, and general doom. It should come as some relief that we are all so similarly deranged and dissatisfied, but it will not, because we are dissatisfied and exhausted from all the fever dreams. Our only non-Zoom friends are Mervin and Wilhelm and they are agents of delusional stasis. But somewhere on the other side of this current is a place of more “and” than “but,” less of the binary and more of the well, more.
Then you and I came wandering by
And lost in a sigh were we
The shore was kissed by sea and mist tenderly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywWZlMPko-Y