Back and forth by email all day pretty much with AK from my Saturday morning poetry reading group. From what I can understand he believes – and belief is the appropriate word – that the pandemic is not serious, that the 200,000 plus deaths are not accurate, that mask mandates, social distancing, prohibitions against gathering indoors are not only unnecessary but intrusive and part of some sort of left wing conspiracy, possibly to undo Trump. He is sincere. But he also takes an obvious glee in staking out a position contrary to the prevailing…I would say “facts,” but he would say (I think) narrative. As in fiction. He takes glee in hinting at his alternative facts to our fiction. He’s been dropping small bits of this glee into our 2 hours of poetry discussion. Just enough to let us know that we are all being hoodwinked, and that he, behind his Cheshire Cat smile, is willing to engage on the subject at any time and what are we so afraid of?
I feel….contaminated. He will think what he thinks. This is what his mind is like and he can’t do otherwise. He needs to think like this. But I don’t want to be part of his need, to take part in it. Up until now, AK’s most annoying quality was his need to find something positive in even the darkest poem. He approaches a poem like a social worker, bent on saving it from itself. He simply cannot spend time in a real, human place. And I imagine the pandemic is on some deep level unacceptable to him. He cannot let it in. It must be diverted at all costs.
Me, I’m drinking a musty Malbec, surely a cure for contamination.
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