Wednesday night: I attend a friend’s 50th birthday party via videoconference at the same time The Girlfriend sits shiva for a friend’s mother via videoconference. The experiences are simultaneously helpful and alienating, connecting and isolating: in short, deeply strange.
My friend turning 50 is an artist, smart, fun, deeply engaged in the artistic and development communities where he’s lived, from San Francisco to lower Manhattan, the Central Valley to the Hudson Valley. The Zoom party highlights his array of connections, with guests from five or six time zones, including folks from Amsterdam logging in at 3 a.m.
My friend has promoted his party on his social media feeds (“Pandemic in the Disco Zoom Boom Bam!!!”), and after a few technical snafus it launches. A DJ creates a mix in real time to which guests can link, so we’re all listening to the same music. My friend has set up four breakout rooms, each with its own host; he mixes and matches rooms and guests every 15 or so minutes, managing our virtual spaces. More than 60 guests log in, each wearing yellow to honor his favorite color. Love for him is palpable.
I last about 45 minutes. Mostly I sit and watch. I bring my daughter’s stuffed yellow pig; at some point I make the pig dance to the DJ mix, to fill my Brady Bunch square with activity. As they mingle, a couple of people apply drag makeup; one keeps putting a finger over his camera; one covers his face in a yellow scarf. One woman cuddles a glitter ball; others hold pets. Some sit in front of backgrounds (the Golden Gate Bridge; maybe Hong Kong?), others white walls. Some are lit as if on a movie set, others barely visible. Some screens are blank; some show empty rooms (they’ve gone to the bathroom?). One is filled with a photo of a woman in a tank top and a pert moue.
It’s odd to be at a party with no geographic center. I hear conversations about the Castro, Minneapolis, the East Village, Death Valley. Within the party’s “chat” function my Upstate Friend private messages me to say a guest told him a funny story about drag queens in my hometown; I message for details, but he’s apparently busy. He uses the storyteller’s name, but I can’t find her. Meanwhile I’m not chatting with the guests in my party room.
At an actual party I’d pursue several conversational threads. For instance, two guests in early March left their home (in the Bay Area, I think) to travel to Death Valley; they’ve stayed on the road since, are camping (so it appears) in Auburn, Calif., north of Sacramento. What a quarantine story! But I have no chance to pursue, as the conversation shifts, then either they or I are moved to another virtual space.
At some point my Connecticut Friend (not attending this party) texts about Stephen Sondheim’s 90th birthday party, which we both watched last night but haven’t discussed. Now I have multiple windows open, and I’m not chatting with the guests in my party room. I think about a couple of emails I could return before bed. I jump back to the main room, wave to the host, wish him a happy birthday, log off.
I ask The Girlfriend about her shiva:
“My friend’s mother had been in a Long Island nursing home for four years. Her death, not officially from Covid-19, came suddenly. She was a very social person, in her previous life and at her facility: she organized groups, made lots of friends. She was completely with it mentally. In quarantine she had to be shut in her room for seven weeks with no visitors. She was getting care, but the situation was so abnormal. She lost energy, enthusiasm; it was too compromised a way to live. It sounds to me like she decided to die, as people do. Her decline was very quick. In the last 48 hours one child was allowed entry. She spoke to each of her four children, her 13 grandchildren, various sons- and daughters-in-law; that all took 14 hours. Then, on Monday, she died.
“The funeral was on Tuesday. I attended. It was the way things on Zoom are, very powerful and very weak, mediated by technology and almost overwrought because of technology. The rabbi had to figure out how to use the system; a few old people had to learn how to turn their microphones off. The rabbi had to get family members into a breakout room to do private rituals — it was hard to figure all of that out. A lot of it was about being patient and understanding with this alienating technology. Unlike any funeral I’d ever attended, you could see the faces of all of the mourners, so it was less private. Typically visitors are in the background, in support; now we were all equal on the screen, which was weird, but also beautiful, to watch all the faces.
“Then Wednesday evening my friend invited me as part of a group of eight of her college friends to sit shiva. It was the second time I’ve sat shiva in CoronaWorld. I’m not particularly religious, but I’m happy to oblige. Another college friend lost her mom to dementia, which had nothing to do with Covid-19, but CoronaWorld had begun so the shiva occurred online. It was very early in the crisis, and for me it marked the new normal.
“Sitting shiva is an odd mix. I suppose it’s like a wake: the mood can be fun, funny, social, mournful, religious; parts are boisterous, parts are quiet. All that’s the same. My friend was with her wife and child, so she’s getting physical comfort. But not being able to hug someone who’s in grief — that deep embrace of a person in mourning helps people feel connected. And there was no food. Food and drink helps, in all kinds of ways. It acknowledges the needs of the body; it greases conversational wheels.
“My friend’s wife is very shy, and Zoom made it so she had to speak, because that’s what you do. She might not have done it if we were all in the same room; we could have communicated by touch or body language. She initially said she didn’t want to, and then she did, and it was an important gesture on her part.
“Like everything else in CoronaWorld, it all feels a little unreal. I know I went; I know it happened. But it feels like maybe it didn’t. And I don’t know what that means in relation to someone dying. Shiva, funerals, wakes: rituals help acknowledge that death is real. I don’t know if Zoom can help with that. Everything’s sped up. This took an hour. Hard human things demand time, but you can’t ask much time of people on that platform. Two of the guests had already been on Zoom work calls that day for about 14 hours. When we went to your friend’s mother’s funeral in January we spent a whole day; the day had different chapters. We moved from place to place: the church, the reception, their house afterward; each place had different rules, different behaviors; there was a variety of experience, opportunities to connect. We had to drive there and back. The event had a presence, a weight. All of that gets minimized, blurred.
“On the other hand, I’m endlessly moved by people’s best efforts in these very modified and diminished forms. People work to surpass the limits of the technology, to provide comfort and love, to be expressive with words. We honestly shared with each other, and that felt moving and real and beautiful and intense. Then I had bad dreams about it, which I couldn’t remember in the morning. And now it’s like it didn’t happen.
“I've focused a lot of my writing and teaching on YouTube since its beginning. And one of that project’s core ideas is that internet experiences are organized around blurring binaries that had previously seemed clear to us. (Whether they were actually distinct is another matter.) But the internet experience is about making binaries unclear. Fake/real. Expert/novice. Corporate/DIY. There’s a journalist who’s blogging; there’s a blogger who’s become a journalist. That you can experience both elements at the same time — that’s what the net is like. In the beginning we found that unsettling of binaries pleasurable: ooh, it’s cool, it’s funny, it’s contemporary. It’s unsettling but safe.
“And in this era, marked in part by this presidency, that unmaking has stopped feeling pleasurable, because we understand that it’s dangerous and not entertaining. The thing I’m describing — about using Zoom to do all the things we used to do as humans — is putting a clear light on my current beliefs about the internet. We know that we as humans have lost many things to technology. In a different scenario, we’d have more control over making some of these decisions. Sometimes that lack of control is fun. But the loss of control should be in our control.”
(New York state numbers on Wednesday: 299,691 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 1.1 percent; 377 dead, to a total of 18,105, up 2,1 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 2,452, to a total of 54,938, up 4.7 percent.)
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