I watched Joni Mitchell deliver a powerful rendition of “Both Sides Now,” her iconic, signature song, at the Newport Folk Festival on July 24. At 78, Mitchell has had a lifetime of illnesses, beginning with polio at the age of nine and, most recently, a brain aneurysm in 2015. Many had assumed that her storied and rich career was behind her, so it’s not surprising that videos of the performance have gone viral, along with justly deserved accolades from thousands.
When I say I watched Mitchell, I mean I watched her from the safety of my living room and on my laptop. I was struck by how strong her voice and performance were. I was also struck—and shocked—at her unmasked proximity to so many on a packed stage, including Brandi Carlile who chimed in occasionally. The singer sat facing a crowd of what might have been all of its 10,000 attendees, all of whom shouted and screamed and cried in her direction.
I know I’m supposed to be swept away by the beauty of this performance but all that came to me was the question repeating itself in my head, “What are they thinking?” We’re nowhere near the end of a pandemic and new variants are far more transmissible, even outdoors. If you’re walking unmasked on your own in a mostly empty park or on a not very crowded street, fine. But packed in with ten thousand people, nearly all unmasked and breathing in your direction? Not so fine. And now we have monkeypox: the WHO has just declared it a global health emergency.
As I’ve written countless times before, there are no guarantees about the effects of Covid on your particular body. You might be vaxxed and double boosted and still be infected and be fine, or suffer its debilitating effects. You might—and for some this is far worse— end up as one of those suffering a lifetime of Long Covid, which has been termed a “mass deterioration event.” As for monkeypox: the symptoms are disturbing and include pus-filled sores in several deeply inconvenient areas including genitals and eyes, yes, eyes. You would imagine that a world faced with the prospect of literally bleeding and pustulating from the eyes, a world that is now faced with the horrifying realisation that “pustulating” is an actual word would be, what’s the word, careful.
Instead, here we are, screaming and breathing hard into each other’s faces, regularly packed in with thousands or millions of other humans. Death, we’re convinced, is a meaningless piece of fiction: the more it encroaches upon us, the more we believe we can escape it. Or that “living in the moment” is more important than fearing something we’ve never experienced so, really, who cares? Carpe Fucking Diem, we scream out loud.
I imagine a planet devastated and in ruins a hundred years from now, and that’s if we’re lucky. I see something that we might call a ship, a silvery bullet-like thing that is not quite a thing, an amalgamation of matter both physical and yet not there, that hovers above our wasted planet. I see inside it alien beings trying on the tattered remains of concert-going wear, ranging from tie-dye shirts to goth vestments, pointing to a screen that’s playing footage of the Newport Folk Festival, over and over again, and laughing. Says one to another: Can you believe this? They were told they could die and they went ahead anyway. The other chortles and picks up a torn book, pointing to a page: No, wait, you’ve got to hear this: “I don’t care if I die, if it means living in fear.” Behind them, a third, not the brightest in the bunch, is trying to put on a t-shirt that says “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” and not succeeding, in large part because it lacks anything resembling a head.
Some of you have never died, and it shows.
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Image: Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette, Vincent Van Gogh, c. 1885.
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