I woke before dawn on Christmas like a little kid, pop-eyed with excitement because C. and I were exchanging presents, something we haven’t done in years. But first, I spent an hour in silence watching the fresh snow whip below the streetlights. I sat before the glow of our artificial tree with its fake pine perfume and savored this peculiar ritual of wrapping up packages of socks and tea. It was a moment of grace and cheer in a year that has felt like living in somebody’s bad dream, and I know I’m damned lucky to have it. Remember this, I thought, because it won’t always be this way. And it’s an odd sensation to get caught between wanting to be entirely present for a rare moment while also trying to commit every detail to memory. I heard C. padding down the hallway. “I can hear you waiting,” she said.
My first concept of god came from It’s a Wonderful Life. I was four or maybe five years old, and I remember sitting on an orange-rust shag carpet with my parents’ knees behind me, all of us watching the pulsing globs of light that functioned as angels. Even today, it’s an unnerving sequence for me, far too existential for a Capra film. But I’m grateful that my first image of the supernatural was so abstract, rather than someone’s punishing god. Perhaps it’s fitting that it came from television.
This year’s holiday soundtrack is a collection of hymns and carols from the Welsh mines recorded in the village of Rhosllannerchrugog in 1959. These slightly haunted voices sound like my smudgy childhood memories of old black-and-white specials.
My memories tend to pile up around the holidays, fogging my thoughts with the textures of Christmas seasons from the past. Today I’m in a kitchen somewhere in Ohio, teaching myself to make crepes while I think about last year in Finland, where I remembered thinking about a sunny Christmas in New Orleans, where I was thinking about a strange holiday in Vegas when I watched a cowboy behind the sliding doors of the Sahara, eating an ice cream cone like he wanted to kill somebody.
That cowboy still shows up in my dreams. Salvador Dali described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs,” and I often think about that phrase. Last night I dreamt I was walking down a corridor of rooms with the names of the people I’ve lost on the doors. A woman stood before a door with my father’s name, her hand on the handle. “The objects inside this room are this person’s true identity,” she said. “Do you really want to open the door?”
My attention span feels like gripping a snake these days, wriggling and squirming in all directions. Tonight it wanders through the living rooms and dim sum parlors of past holidays, mostly happy scenes that are slightly shaded by the melancholy of time and people lost, the regret that I didn’t savor the moment when I was there. I remember a drowsy version of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ playing to an empty banquet hall at midnight, which seems to capture the holiday gestalt in this year of isolation. And I’m going to do my best to remember every detail.
A billionaire was on television this morning, and he’s concerned about our social fabric. He told us not to buy Christmas presents this year; he said we should donate to our public services instead. This was followed by a senator who thinks we ought to invest our $600 pandemic checks in the stock market after we pay off our debts. America’s billionaires vacuumed up another trillion dollars since the pandemic began. “Their wealth growth is so great,” says Frank Clemente, the executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness, “that they alone could provide a $3,000 stimulus payment to every man, woman, and child in the country, and still be richer than they were nine months ago.” How does this get unwound? The image of a billionaire on television worrying about civil unrest feels significant.
I remember making terrible small talk at an airport with a cheerful man from Houston or San Diego who invented the McGriddle. “We watched our customers roll up their pancakes and stuff them with syrup and bacon,” he said. “So we just gave them what they wanted.”
Heavy rain beats against the windows. It’s the longest night of the year, one of my favorite moments. I love these long nights when the world contracts to a few pools of light and time gets slippery. Someday I’d like to spend a winter far up north where the night stretches into months.
A year ago, C. and I arrived at a ferry house on an island in the Baltic Sea where the sun barely rose above the horizon before setting at three o’clock in the afternoon, a suspended twilight. We felt furtive, almost apocalyptic as we pilfered the unoccupied flats for salt, blankets, and power adapters. Although we couldn’t know it at the time, that remote winter became a kind of preparation for this long year of isolation. Now we’re holed up in the Midwest, trying not to think too hard about the headlines that say the virus is becoming more contagious.
But the sky continues to go about its business, creating situations that inspired our ancestors to invent gods, feast, recite poetry, sit in silence, and take hot baths. Thirteen hours and forty minutes of darkness in Ohio tonight before we begin inching back towards the light, and the winter stillness feels almost holy.
I often think about an article I read late one night, a study that suggested we might be aware of our own deaths. That consciousness may linger after the last beat of the heart, our minds still working even when blood is no longer washing the brain. “The evidence thus far suggests that in the first few minutes after death, consciousness is not annihilated,” says Dr. Sam Parnia, who studies this phenomenon. “Whether it fades away afterwards, we do not know, but right after death, consciousness is not lost.”
This unsettling idea decimates the best argument for making peace with our mortality: the Epicurean assurance that we needn’t fear death because we will not be around to witness it. Science might tell us otherwise. According to Parnia’s research, a significant number of patients who were declared dead reported hearing things they could not have known unless they were conscious in the minutes before they were revived. They heard the last efforts of doctors and nurses, the wailing of lovers and children.
If there’s any truth to this study, it seems like it should be the most discussed story of the decade, perhaps the century. How would knowing that consciousness lingers while the body goes cold change the way we reckon with death—or bear witness? How would it affect the way we behave in a hospital room? We would need to hide our terror and grief long past the terrible moment we once thought was singular and fixed. New ceremonies would develop. Soundtracks and incantations. An extended score for the dying. I can’t help but think of the weather in the room after my parents died, the animal noises I made after the nurse turned off the machines and closed the door.
And how would we prepare for our own death, knowing it would be elastic and uncertain, that those last minutes could be terrifying or transcendent? It would require a strange kind of training, a preparation like no other. The fact of death would no longer be as easy to bury under the clutter of appointments and headlines, no longer a thought that could be tucked away like an overdue bill beneath a pile of catalogs and magazines.
C. and I once sat in an old monastery where a February wind rattled the stained glass while a physicist and monk named B. Alan Wallace described his meditation practice as a preparation for dying. “Am I a short story that can come to an end at any moment?” he asked with a smile. “If so, I can live with that. But is it true?” Although our bodies will rot and our minds will disappear, he said, some level of awareness might persist. If we do not identify with our body or thoughts, but only pure awareness: what then? “Train yourself to keep the light on,” he said.
That night we silently returned to our spartan room and laid down on our cots, listening to the sleet ricochet against the window. I fell asleep thinking of a candle that remains lit long after the lights of the mind slowly flick off one by one like the windows of a skyscraper as midnight comes and goes.
Tomas Jirku – Idiis Mortii
Touching the Sublime | Silent Season, 2020 | Bandcamp
Lately I’ve been wondering what my brains would be like if I grew up without a television. Would my reference points for the world be more dignified and sensible? What would replace my head’s soupy mess of laugh tracks, jingles, and catchphrases? For no reason I can identify, this afternoon I remembered an upsetting episode of Silver Spoons in which Ricky killed a deer. I absorbed so many forms of 1980s sitcom trauma: Punky Brewster’s friend trapped in a refrigerator, the Maytag man as a sexual predator on Diff’rent Strokes, and I swear there was a dead girl in a rocking chair on a special episode of Webster. And the entirety of Small Wonder and Mama’s Family, which have the sticky memory-feel of a sickbed or fever dream. I don’t remember consciously watching any of these shows; they were just on.
In an interview with The Paris Review, Chris Ware detailed the aura of network programming. “I was sensitive to the broadcast vibe of ABC versus CBS versus NBC versus PBS and to how their particular programs made me feel, even how the particular resolution of each channel was different,” he said. “ABC always felt sharp and acidic, for some reason, and NBC softer, and I’d associate or think of real moments in my life as being more ABC or NBC, as if they were adjectives.” He goes on: “I realized that if I was ever going to do anything meaningful, I had to completely detox from TV, so I quit watching it altogether, and I also very self-consciously tried to eliminate any influence it had on my drawing.”
During this year of indoor living, I’ve been watching a stunning amount of television while working, doing jigsaw puzzles, thinking about writing, and feeling crummy for not writing. So now I have a resolution for the new year.
We’ve entered a season of revised death projections and hospital bed trackers. Meanwhile, our elected officials debate whether to give Americans six hundred dollars or shut down the government instead. It’s like they want us to believe they’re from a different planet.
Today I watched videos of government officials getting shots, wearing stoic smiles as they tried not to flinch when the needle entered their arms. It was good television. And for some reason, I watched footage of anti-mask protestors marching through a discount department store somewhere in Arizona. They shouted, “Free your face,” and waved American flags. They were a shambling collection of people in athleisure wear, motorcycle gear, and sensible blouses. The internet brought them together and delivered them here, united by the delight they found in antagonizing the masked shoppers who stood nearby.
There are no microchips in the vaccine. There are no tracking devices of any kind. Authorities are doing their best to make this clear. Several years ago, I listened to a midnight preacher sermonize across my dashboard, detailing the arrival of the antichrist. “But I’m working on a special microchip that will block the signals of all demons and devils,” he said. Consigned to the margins of AM radio, his craziness was contextualized. Now this sort of thinking needs to be debunked on the front page of the New York Times.
Apollo and Daphne at The Galleria Borghese | Rome, 2017
So much thinking about death these days, yet I rarely think about my own. Maybe it’s the silence in this room tonight or a certain quality of the light, but thinking about my own ending unexpectedly brought to mind an incident in Rome four years ago.
An elderly man collapsed against the base of a Bernini. There was the slap and shudder of a body hitting the floor, followed by the split-second of shocked silence after a medical event. We gathered around him, not knowing how to help yet needing to bear witness. I did not know the Italian number for 911. His wife sat on the floor and cradled his head; the authorities arrived quickly. He was breathing and nodding as we drifted away to give them privacy. And I remember thinking that if it’s necessary to leave this world, dying in the arms of someone I love at the foot of a Bernini might be the best possible place.
Light snow today in Ohio, and a nor’easter is moving up the Eastern Seaboard, promising as much as two feet in some areas. I find myself craving snow more intensely as I get older. I cheer like a child whenever flurries fall. Maybe it has to do with the silence it brings, how it tranquilizes the world for a while. Or because a snowstorm is one of the few remaining shared events that cannot be misinterpreted or denied. Perhaps my attraction is more symbolic: the blank slate, everything buried and wiped clean. Maybe I savor this weather because I know it’s becoming more rare as the world overheats. No matter the cause, my hunger for snow grows each year, and I nurture increasingly elaborate fantasies about Greenland’s snowfields and the Siberian Express.
Tonight I’ve started reading The Terror, Dan Simmons’s haunted variation on Captain Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated quest across the Arctic where it gets so cold your teeth can explode.
Nowadays we hide our dead in antiseptic rooms but not too long ago, we displayed their bodies in our homes. Sometimes we covered the mirrors, the legacy of an ancient belief that a reflection of the departed might trap their soul in the house, preventing passage into a better world. Those were days when our images were honored, even feared. We believed echoes and reflections were the sounds and sights of our souls. Today we grin in front of mountains and breakfast sandwiches. We traffic in faces. We crave our reflections, which brings to mind one of the oldest mirror stories: the tale of a young man who fell in love with his reflection and stared at it until he lost the will to live, eventually plunging a sword into his chest because he would never have the object of his desire.
A dull grey Monday here in Ohio, thirty-eight degrees with a sky like a stone. The first vaccinations were administered today as the American death toll crept past 300,000. In Taiwan, seven people have died from the virus this year.
Images of health workers rolling up their sleeves for injections were intercut with live-feeds of masked officials sitting six feet apart in legislative buildings across the country as they cast their electoral votes for president. This process is a vestigial relic of our creaky democracy, a perfunctory duty that usually occurs without comment. This year, however, some state officials faced “credible threats of violence” from the president’s supporters. They had police escorts and met in secret rooms. Is this a blip, the last gasp of a cult, or is this a harbinger of America’s future, a society where every governmental function, no matter how mundane, is met with denial or a threat?
Thankfully, there were no surprises; nobody caved to the president’s demands. I’m reappreciating the joy of mundane events this year, the delight in everything happening as expected.
