A Sudden Vertigo
For the last eight months, though really for four years, my world (our world) has felt like it was spinning out of control. Yes, the coronavirus, in its seemingly endless cycles throughout the U.S. and beyond, which has seen more deaths and cases per population than the rest of the world, making America the present leader in a category we’d prefer not to be. The repeated changing of instructions by our leaders as we grapple with how to live with Covid-19, continues to surprise us, and then there are the aftershocks people previously infected are experiencing. The vicious cycle of hopes and disappointments over treatments and vaccines is simply overwhelming.
But there are so many other plagues that we are suffering from in America—political and cultural divisions, increased sales of guns and ammo, the appearance of militia men who want to take the law into their own hands, a president and at least one of his counselors who advise martial law, a president who threatens not to accept the results of an election or to leave office peacefully; the emboldening of white supremacists who threatened armed violence; the explosion of conspiracy theories and QAnon, which (like right-wing white supremacists with their mistaken notions of what liberty means) foment suspicion rather than trust, hatred rather than love. So many expressions of venom and threats of violence makes me sick.
No longer do Americans agree that there is a difference between truth and falsehood (let alone good and evil). Some of the same people who announce they are “pro-life” when it comes to conception hold the lives of others in little regard, sometimes don’t even regard people of different races, ethnicities, or religions as fully human beings. The times, and America, feels vertiginous. It has lost its balance, and I can only hope it will regain its equilibrium and sanity after November 3rd, and move to become the place where all humans can live freely, though lately that seems like a distant dream.
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by all of this. I work hard to keep steady, focused and hopeful. I show up. I do the work I believe I am supposed to do in this world. Even after so many decades of teaching and mentoring young people, I still love my work and feel a sense of purpose in my life. But then, unexpectedly, last week one morning, I was felled by an attack of vertigo!
I’d gotten up, sent a brief prayer of gratitude out into the universe, and had my cup of green tea. I began my pilates session with my wonderful trainer, Alexandra, breathing deeply, centering myself, only to become profoundly dizzy when I lay down on the floor to continue. The room spun, my head spun, and I could find no center. As John Donne said in “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World” (1611) lamenting the decay of the world,
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone,
All just supply, and all relation.
Our world seems sick, falling apart. And now suddenly I felt sick. I was so dizzy and nauseous that only after a time, was I able to slowly get on my hands and knees and navigate through the rooms of my apartment to find a bottle of water. One minute I had been fine, and strong, exercising, ready to begin my day. The next minute, I was flat on my back, the room spinning. I could talk just fine and think, so I knew this wasn’t a stroke. It was probably crystals that had gotten loose in my middle ear causing vertigo as it had four or five years ago. But right now, I was terrified. Would I survive this if it continued on?
For several days I was incapacitated, stressed by the anxiety of my condition, anxiety that maybe I was plummeting towards my end and not healthy, but also anxious because I had so many papers to grade. Soon I’d have to teach on Zoom. Was all that internet and computer activity damaging me or was it something more? Or maybe was more symbolic, like a mirror of everything that was going on in the world, my crazy America, spinning out of control, all while on the heels of an historic election. Now this, on top of the anxiety I’d suffered for several years as my husband was slowly dying of multiple system atrophy? Even MSA seemed a symbol of America, its multiple systems atrophying!
At the moment though, struck by vertigo, I thought of Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which I had been teaching in my 17th Century Prose and Poetry class only a month earlier, a proper introduction teaching in the year of our plague. Donne was suffering from the plague and unsure whether he would survive. Donne’s words describing his experience almost four hundred years ago, when he was stricken, dizzy, confined to his bed, sounded as if I could have written them myself.
“Variable, and therefore miserable condition of man! This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute. I am surprised with a sudden change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name. We study health, and we deliberate upon our meats, and drink, and air, and exercises, and we hew and we polish every stone that goes to that building; and so our health is a long and a regular work: but in a minute a cannon batters all, overthrows all, demolishes all; a sickness unprevented for all our diligence, unsuspected for all our curiosity; . . .
We attribute but one privilege and advantage to man's body above other moving creatures, that he is . . . of an erect, of an upright, form . . . Other creatures look to the earth. . . This is man's prerogative; but what state hath he in this dignity? A fever can fillip him down, a fever can depose him; a fever can bring that head, which yesterday carried a crown of gold five feet towards a crown of glory, as low as his own foot to-day, seizes us, possesses us, destroys us in an instant.”
Thankfully, my vertigo eventually stopped. I’m fine and went to vote last Sunday. I’m hopeful for a good outcome (for myself, and for the nation). I remain cautious, fearing a relapse, but pray every day that America too will soon regain its balance, and become stable and healthy again.