We Are Legend
By Josh Webster
These times are neither unimaginable nor unprecedented. History chronicles pandemics, disasters, and depressions as well as the tides of community, kindness and courage that rose to meet them. Simultaneously, artists craft tales of social collapse, doomsday diseases, kingdoms in ruin and rebellion, wasteland warriors, and limited utopias growing from the rubble of fallen civilizations. Perhaps times are unprecedented in the sense that one can never dip a toe in the same river, but if we insist on the uniqueness of every situation, then we have no use for stories, either recalled or imagined, and can learn nothing from them. If we fail to learn, nothing lasts, nothing improves. Stories matter.
As a lifelong fan of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, I’m more than familiar with tales of quarantine, disease, and apocalypse. One of my favorite works of the apocalypse genre is Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel, I Am Legend. Inspiring the films The Last Man on Earth, The Omega Man, and the eponymous I Am Legend, the novel details the existence of Robert Neville, sole survivor of a plague that transforms the human race into mindless vampires. Neville spends days fortifying his home for nights of endless attack and nights fortifying himself against loneliness, depression, and the terror of a world seeking to destroy him.
Matheson’s novel, an early prototype of the last man trope, possesses an evergreen appeal. Its surface structure of one against many and self against other grants it an allegorical flexibility to address issues ranging from Cold War politics, racism, religious intolerance, class warfare and, of course, plague. The reason I Am Legend resonated with an eighteen year old in 1998, a horror fan in 1954, and a lockdown reader rests in the fact it resonates with an assumption lurking beneath the surface of many individual and social behaviors: the enemy is out there, so stay inside.
*
As I’m writing this, for the third week in a row, protesters pack the streets of cities across the world to protest police oppression of Black Americans. Some sources attribute the duration and intensity of the protests to the claustrophobic precedent of COVID-19 lockdowns, which makes some sense. The pandemic made tangible the tentative, fraught nature of our relationships to others, be they strangers, coworkers, caregivers, or loved ones. But for the people protesting, and those victimized by authorities across the world, such dangers are daily reality, and one they can no longer, and should no longer, tolerate.
COVID-19 drove us inside, the death of George Floyd drove many outside, and in between and beyond the politics of inside and outside and class and race and gender and sexuality play out in stark definition. For the privileged (I count myself among this group), the transition to working at home brought few of the perils faced by service workers, medical professionals, caregivers, and other people who ensure, with their physical presence, the day to day of civilization, not to mention those who simply lost their jobs. The people forced to remain outside are often the same people pushed to the outer edges of our society, underrepresented and overlooked in modern narratives of prosperity and success.
Critics of the protest denounce the oppressed and their allies for taking to the streets to protest the violence and the injustices heaped upon them, but ignore the hours they spend delivering our food, stocking our shelves, caring for our elderly, and maintaining the modern world. The right-wing message is simple: go outside, but only when we tell you to, in the proscribed behaviors dictated by economy and the narrative of American prosperity we put forth. Don’t take to the streets, unless you’re planning to bring us food, clean our homes, fill our prescriptions, or simplify our lives.
In the end of I Am Legend, a group of evolved vampires, founders of a new society, capture Robert Neville and imprison him. Thanks to his daytime practice of driving stakes into the hearts of his former neighbors, Neville has become the boogeyman of a new world, as monstrous as the supposed monsters surrounding him.
In a world of hardship and loss, the last thing we need are boogeymen, especially false ones created by systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, and the other phobias and –isms we use to denigrate others. In regards to people, distinctions of inside and outside create divisions we never needed in the first place, and certainly need no longer.
*
I am an inside person by proclivity rather than necessity. I suspect this is true of most writers. The price of reflection is often solitude, and writing demands reflection.
When the pandemic hit, little changed in my days practically, aside from the fact I no longer taught classes in person and couldn’t pursue some of my hobbies (I miss going to movies). The largest personal inconvenience was the obligation to attend meetings from home, as the blurring of the line between work and home made my home less of a sanctuary, a disturbing prospect for any introvert. I like my coworkers, but not in my living room.
The constant, unyielding anxiety and sadness made for unwelcome company, of course, but I suspect most of us are sharing our homes with that dismal guest. Sometimes, depression and I order takeout, sometimes we watch the mounting travesties and sorrows on the news, and sometimes we play Final Fantasy VII. I see no signs of it leaving, so I make do. Maybe I’ll name it Robert.
*
I often teach classes online, and I’m used to not seeing my students. When the lockdown fell on Nevada, though, I felt the isolation of all my students to a degree I didn’t expect. I should have; I suspect English teachers wind up armchair psychics from reading student papers, doubly so for creative writing. Between submitted stories, poems, and weekly writing journals, I wind up with a pretty good sense of what’s on their minds.
In my mind, the pandemic mounted slow, first a low-level hum of concern then a silent alarm as the case numbers across the nation and in Clark County, only an hour or so from home, began to spike. I stocked up some food, cancelled travel plans, and waited for the doors to close. I think it hit many of my creative writing students the same way: e-mails fell silent, submitted work read tense as a piano wire waiting for symphony. When the announcement of lockdown came, no one spoke, no one asked questions. We simply went inside.
Despite never meeting many of my online students, I worried about them, some of whom write with particular, unnerving insight about depression, anxiety, and fear in the best of times. I decided to reach out, so I sent this message:
Hey, Folks,
I'm sending this announcement to my all my creative writing students this term, as I think it's important (though perhaps a little self-indulgent). It's been a hard week for the world, and it is quite possible there are more to follow. Some of you may feel depressed, anxious, panicked, or powerless, and those are all legitimate feelings, except for the last one.
Writers, artists, musicians, and people in general are never, in fact, powerless. We may be powerless in certain contexts or situations (i.e., we may not be able to make a vaccine or change global policies) but we are never without power to do decent, helpful and kind things for others, or, in the case of the artistically inclined, make beautiful things for the world. The trick to not feeling powerless is this; do the wonderful things you have the power to do.
Some of you may be avoiding social situations or finding your social plans fall out from under you. But here's the silver lining; you're a writer, you're a reader. Free time is free time, so use it. Write poems, write stories. On the nights you can't sleep, get out of bed and make things with words. Write elegant lines about vaccines and Vikings slaughtering bacteria monsters in a jungle; write whatever you need to in order to get through, write things that make you feel triumphant and hopeful about tomorrow. Words, in the end, are bridges. Bridges between yourself and your feelings and thoughts, bridges between you and others, bridges between you and the future. When you feel isolated and powerless, build bridges. Tell stories. Make beauty. Write.
And read. Take the time to pick up that massive book you never had time to crack and go to it. If you can't get out, get out of your head and into someone else's. Go to whatever world you want to on the page, but try to avoid too much doom and gloom. Read stories that remind you that life goes on, that people will still live and breathe and fall in love and care and hurt and all of the other things that make us human, because we do and we will (always keep in mind that Gabriel Garcia Marquez's brilliant Love in The Time of Cholera is ultimately about love, not cholera). And if you have kids, this would be an amazing time to read with them and to them. Give them good stories, because a lot of what they'll be getting in the media won't leave them with the sense of wonder and hope they need.
As the graphic novelist Eleanor Davis said, "Find the stories that make you strong." Or the poems. And if you can't find them, write them. Other advice; help where you can, be kind always and take good care of yourselves and your people. Do and make the things you can, because light is still there, just hidden, and when it shines again, it should shine on wonders.
A bit Pollyanna, in retrospect, but good advice. I’m still trying to take it myself.
*
“Few things amplify silence like a closed door. ”
The knowledge of the separation between yourself and another sharpens isolation to a knife point. And, in such isolation, overwhelmed with sorrow and fear for the world outside of my door, I fell silent.
This is the first non-work writing I’ve completed since COVID-19 arrived. I’m not alone. I’m sure many find themselves hollowed out and unable to think past the grim delirium of the present days. I can speak to moments, to the current events, but when it comes to the larger questions, I don’t have words. And we need them, as a question lingers: What will we, and our communities and our world, become now? It demands an answer, but not one ready on our tongues or in our pens.
Even though we don’t have an answer, we are finding a story, I think. The Black Lives Matter protests; activism for economic, medical, and individual equality; and acts of kindness and care throughout the pandemic point to the a coalescing, powerful narrative for a humane world, a story of humanity based not in authority or wealth but in shared community, respect, and resources. This tale of an egalitarian world is growing, and while no storyteller starts with all the details, we trust we will find them as we go. On this road, expect loss, work for joy; expect failures, work for triumphs; expect conflict, work for concordance. The future isn’t yet written or spoken for. Inside or outside, to ourselves and to others, we need to tell a humane story of the humane world we will make.
No one is Robert Neville. There will be no last man, and no enemy beyond our doors except our inclinations to fear, ignorance, confusion, and the atrocities such inclinations drive us to if we don’t accept their presence in our lives and strive for better. There are no heroes but ourselves, and our immeasurable capacity for compassion, kindness, and tenacity in the face of injustice and disaster. Regardless of the times, with or without precedent, we have nothing but each other, but on the last page and all the pages along the way, that is everything.
We are legend.
Josh Webster writes fiction and plays, reads too many comics, and knows the Green Lantern oath by heart. He lives, writes, and teaches creative writing, literature, and composition in Pahrump when he’s not watching movies.
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