Noli me tangere (Albrecht Dürer)
Come ye faithful, raise the strain
Of triumphant gladness,
God hath brought his Israel
Into joy from sadness.
Zoom or Skype this blessed day,
Singing with perfection
Celebrate His mighty deeds
And virtual Resurrection.
“Resurrexit, He yet lives!”
On-line voices rang out.
As we shared the joyful news
In our Google Hangout.
Now He dwells in cyberspace
Yet praised throughout the land,
Or at least those parts thereof
With sufficient broad-band.
John of Damascus (8th c.)
trans. By John Mason Neale (d. 1866)
You are only as old as you think you are. Says who? Actually you are as old as other people think you are, especially if they happen to be your children joined in deep conspiracy based on the shared opinion that you no longer have the good sense to come in out of the rain. We have three very accomplished adult children who, professionally busy as they are, still spend a good deal of quality concern on the APs. The solicitousness is heart-warming even if its cost is grudging toleration of the diagnosis on which it is based.
Last Wednesday marked the beginning of Passover, and we began our bizarre cybernetic adventures via brief Zoom participation in a seder being held by members of my son-in-law’s family in Jerusalem. Zvi himself was zooming from New York, but I had no idea of who most of the other guests were, aside from his parents. Many happy smiles, endlessly welcoming good will, and nearly total incomprehensibility as to substance during our brief visit. But it definitely put us in a virtual mood, and encouraged us to push the envelope of social isolation.
This we did on Saturday, when we entertained our son Richard’s family to a Distance Lunch in the backyard. Rich, Katie Dixon, and their daughter Ruby have fled Brooklyn and are magnificently sequestered in their rural paradise on the Delaware near Frenchtown. Simon Stylites would have to be impressed by their heroic isolation. You have to drive a quarter of a mile from their digs before you can even see another building. We had orchestrated a little egg hunt for Ruby, limited in ambition but enthusiastically appreciated. As they downed their light but elegant lunch of salad and chunks of Jarlsberg, the two generational families sat at separate tables on the lawn, at least twelve feet one from the other but still in good conversational range.
"Please don't pass the mustard"
Later on Saturday our son Luke, an anthropologist at the University of Montreal, came up with a suggestion for Easter morning. It has been the custom for his family to join us for Easter. It is a rather grueling drive with two still young children in the van, but—quite apart from other motives of familial love--the two said kids get such unmitigated joy from searching for artificially panchromatic chicken eggs in our large backyard that the Easter visit has become as the law of the Persians and the Medes. But this year it is the Law of Coronavirus that has triumphed. The lockdown in Quebec is ferocious, though perhaps not so ferocious as that in New Jersey, where an aide to our governor told our bishop that anyone joining in a communal Easter religious service would be subject to arrest by the police! I suppose I should be encouraged that Christianity is still sufficiently threatening to require persecution, but still... A virtual egg hunt being beyond our technical prowess, Luke, who is quite musical, suggested a symbolic gesture for Easter morn: that we Zoom-sing a hymn together. I even got to choose the hymn: “The Strife Is O’er,” Luke Fleming on keyboard in Montreal, Joan Fleming on pianoforte in Princeton, all of us singing, sort of, with yours truly marvelously out of tune and out of time. The Latin original of “The Strife Is O’er” is probably medieval, though first recorded in a seventeenth-century Jesuit collection. One mainly hears it at funerals, which is of course what Easter started out as, until the defunctus began walking around in a gardener’s outfit. Our international sing-along was pretty weird, but no more so than other aspects of our New Weird World, and it softened us up for our full-scale official virtual service later in the morning. That event was actually very moving, with great music, solo performances by individual singers in their own homes. The preacher made the salient observation, which for some reason had not occurred to me earlier, that the first words of the risen Christ (spoken to Mary Magdalen) are the famous noli me tangere, or in English “Stay six feet away and wear a mask!” And that’s on authority higher even than the Governor of New Jersey.
There was now only the one major virtual Easter event to go: the Family Dinner of the Zoomed, scheduled for 4 pm. The word virtual was a fairly late arrival in English. It comes from Latin virtus, “power” or “capacity”. One hopes for good power, as in the virtues as opposed to the vices; but its indifferent if redundant form still exists in officialese: “by virtue of the power invested in me by blah blah…I blah blah…” Its computer-talk meaning, for all intents and purposes, is “for all intents and purposes.” In my old-fashioned view of things a major intent and purpose of a meal is the food, our local portion of which I was still busily preparing when four o’clock rolled around. But of course the main part of a Zoom event, in my admittedly limited experience, is a cacophony of voices babbling about the technology. “Oh, look, there’s Aunt Katy….There, in the corner…How do I get into Gallery View?” etc., etc. I remember in the very early days of cell phones one would overhear in railway carriages loud halves of conversations consisting mainly of “Hello, I am on the train. I am on my smart phone. I am talking to you on my smart phone, on the train!” Et cetera. You see, the speaker was on the train, and he was talking to somebody on his cell phone. Loudly. I suppose that every advance in our methods of communication must be broken in in similar fashion. And I have to admit that it was a jolly, heart-warming event; and I eventually even did get a few bites of the roast chicken, which, if I say so myself, was delicious.
That is my Easter report. By the time the dinner festivities were over, the day was done, virtually, and so was I. It remains only to send my very best and most festive greetings to all my readers.
