Notebook

I look forward to midnight when the day’s insults and stresses recede into their proper places. I feel more present in the world at midnight, most like myself. My routine has become more aestheticized over the years: a single lamp, a candle, and something gloomy on the radio, usually Bohren & Der Club of Gore. I keep a snapshot of my parents on my desk, impossibly young in the overheated color scheme of the 1970s. I chew nicotine gum and drink a cup of powdered Malaysian instant coffee. I write with pen and paper until, beyond the pool of the light, the rest of the world disappears.

The cult of the morning person has become so hardwired into our culture that I sometimes feel sheepish about my late-night tendencies. I’ve read countless profiles of prolific writers who rise before dawn like monks, not to mention the thought leaders and faith dealers who preach the gospel of the morning routine. But in the light of day, my brain feels as if it’s performing rather than being. Late-night thinking tends to be more honest. I felt a little vindicated when I read that Obama writes between 10pm and 2am. In a recent interview, he said, “I find that the world narrows, and that is good for my imagination. It’s almost as if there is a darkness all around and there’s a metaphorical beam of light down on the desk, onto the page.”

I like this image of late-night solitude as “the narrows.”

Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Midnight Radio 6

Midnight Radio | Epistrophy, 1995 | More

Three thousand Americans are dying each day from the coronavirus, and two hundred thousand more are infected. The numbers numb. Sometimes I worry I’ll forget what they mean, that they’ll blur into an abstract metric like the stock market. Maybe it’s because these tallies are burned into our screens, a dark scoreboard with the logic of a record to be broken.

Looking through the early days of this year’s journal, I’m startled by how I dutifully jotted down the numbers each morning as if this might provide some insight or control. The first hundred infections. The first dozen dead. There was a week in early March that I remember as the Days of the Westchester Lawyer, a time when we knew the profession, daily commute, and family situation of a specific person who was infected. We understood the virus was in the city, yet we still crammed into trains and classrooms. We washed our hands more often but did not wear masks. We waited for instructions that came too late.

This week, the coronavirus is the number one cause of death in America. I am lucky and grateful that my understanding of the pandemic has been largely buffered by screens. But these tallies, statistics, and curves cannot become familiar or abstract; each number represents a life that radiated out to so many others. When I dart through the supermarket, I’m likely passing someone in the frozen food section who lost someone. Perhaps we would be better off if we all treated each other as if this might be the case.

Three years ago on a Saturday night in rural Pennsylvania, I saw a vision of the future that I cannot shake. I visited an elaborate recreation of the Virgin Mary’s appearance in a French grotto in 1858. A narrow footpath led through a forest to a candlelit statue of the Virgin in a shallow cave. The scene was illuminated by dozens of telephone screens that floated in the gloom like devotional candles.

Hanging back, I watched a strange ritual unfold among the men attending a weekend Catholic retreat. They formed a line in front of the statue, and when the first man knelt to pray, he handed his telephone to the man behind him, who would photograph him praying. After the man finished his prayer, he retrieved his phone and reviewed the image. The next man repeated this process as he knelt before the statue. The photo had become the meaning, the reason for this pilgrimage to kneel before a simulation of the appearance of a ghost.

I took a photo of the statue, too. Our technologies have taught us to document every activity, no matter how personal or sacred; our screens are becoming the way we see the world and ourselves, and it looks like they’re even more potent than religion.

Each time I visit the museum, I seek out this thousand-year-old ceramic statue. Known as an arhat, or protector of Buddhism, he sits on a high pedestal and looks down with a stare as bottomless as time. Never have I felt so judged. Or wanting. His gaze leaves me questioning my life choices and entire personality. And I keep returning to him for this sensation.

Rafael Anton Irisarri – A Thousand-Yard Stare

Daydreaming |Miasmah, 2007 | Bandcamp

Electric signs on the highway flashed messages telling us to stay home and stop the spread. Small cars zipped past me tonight as I drove to the megamarket, their drivers’ faces illuminated by phones and dashboard screens. Strange how we’re so hell-bent on speed rather than slowing down, perhaps a misguided defense against decay. I passed a church sign that said, “Jesus paid the price, you keep the change.”

Do I believe in Jesus as a man, myth, or concept? I’m not sure. (But I hear a jangly echo of the Byrds singing that Jesus is just alright, oh yeah.) I recently learned the origin of Jesus’s chest wound: a final stab from a lance to ensure he was dead. The violence of Christianity still startles me, although it probably shouldn’t. Is suffering always a prerequisite for faith? I also learned the word “gospel” comes from “god spell,” an Old English phrase for “good news.”

Idling at a light, I glanced in the mirror and did not recognize myself. I’m still becoming familiar with the mirror-shock that signifies middle age. I have so much more grey hair this year.

The Byrds – Jesus Is Just Alright

The Ballad of Easy Rider | Columbia, 1969 | More

Even when I put my telephone in a drawer, I am acutely and sometimes painfully aware of its absence. I catch myself patting down my pockets while feeling phantom vibrations, seeking synthetic communion. A liquid crystal shadow tints my thoughts; I never feel truly alone.

There’s a moment in Neuromancer when the hero descends into a labyrinthine brothel in search of his partner. He races through corridors of steel doors that lead to sound-proof rooms for every sensual pleasure imaginable. When he finally finds his partner behind door #43, he is surprised to discover that she is alone. Being alone, she tells him, has become “the most expensive special service of all.”

Basic Channel – Radiance II

Radiance | Basic Channel, 1994 | More

Five years ago this week, my father was released from the hospital with a new lung, and we drove home from Wisconsin to New Orleans. We aimed for the Mississippi River, speeding past the world’s largest truck stop on Interstate 80 and flashing billboards that advertised the best deals in the Quad Cities. My father told me that he laid sandbags in Dubuque when the Mississippi flooded back in ’65, which was something I never knew. I cannot picture my father in Iowa in the sixties.

I often return to that night in the car. Had I know it would be our last drive together, I would have asked him more questions. But I’m so grateful for one memory from that drive: my father quietly nodding his head to Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” while we rode down Highway 61 just before midnight.

They say George Clinton told guitarist Eddie Hazel to play the first half of the song as if he found out his mother had just died, then play the rest as if he discovered she was still alive. And I’m learning to carry my dead with me, to ask them questions while pacing the kitchen or driving to the supermarket as we wait out this season somewhere in the Midwest.

Funkadelic – Maggot Brain

Maggot Brain | Westbound, 1971 | More

Monoliths have been appearing and disappearing in Utah, Romania, California, and the United Kingdom. But there is no mystery or wonder; nearly every event these days feels like a stunt aimed at our screens. If aliens landed, I’d probably mistake them for a guerrilla marketing campaign.

More mysterious are the young men who dismantled one of these metal obelisks and replaced it with a wooden cross while chanting “Christ is king!” and “America first!” According to various reports, they wore night-vision goggles, camouflage outfits, and chugged energy drinks while they broadcasted conspiracies and slurs. These are the new religions and sects the future will bring: internet-rattled zealots with caffeine nerves who confuse politics with faith and are looking for any excuse to outfit themselves in militarized tech.

Cindy Lee – Heavy Metal

What’s Tonight to Eternity | W.25TH / Superior Viaduct, 2020 | Bandcamp

Nearly three thousand deaths from the virus yesterday while we wait for a vaccine and a new president to appear. Questions have emerged about whether the government can prohibit religious gatherings in the interest of public health. Are our spiritual needs as essential as groceries? Where are the lines drawn between a funeral, a restaurant, and a protest?

Walking through the parking lot of a strip mall, I caught a glimpse of people eating inside an Olive Garden or maybe a Red Lobster. I gaped like a hermit suddenly confronted by society, floored by the sight of middle-aged couples, toddlers, and grandparents laughing and chewing and gabbing at waiters. All those mouths looked violent. The infection rate has crossed 15% here in Ohio. Maybe it’s like smoking: the damage is hidden, so far so good, and it’s easy to pretend we’re taking a personal risk while overlooking the effect on others.

Last year, C. and I drove across Nevada. We were starving as we sped through the dark, but we held out for a well-reviewed buffet on the edge of Vegas. We later learned a man shot himself in the head on Easter Sunday as a gesture of revenge after losing his lifetime pass to eat there for free. He had won it in a contest. This feels like a very American story.

HTRK – Eat Yr Heart

Work, Work, Work | Ghostly International, 2011 | Bandcamp

Shortly before he died, I took my father to the museum. I watched him drag his oxygen tank through curtains of plastic string that dangled from the ceiling of an empty room. We diligently consulted the explanation on the wall, which described how these “multi-sensory penetrables rendered our passage through space fully palpable.” I will never forget the look on my father’s face when he said, “I guess this stuff is over my head.” How tragic to enter a museum hoping to feel dignified and ennobled, only to walk away feeling like a fool.

Midwife – Language

Forever | Antiquated Future, 2020 | Bandcamp

The first day of the last month of this nightly journal, and I’m thinking about the value of this exercise. Back in January, I’d planned to write each night about aesthetics, loss, and faith for one year and see where it took me. Instead, this journal has become a garbled catalog of memories, ruminations, and each day’s insults. Maybe it’s a result of writing through a uniquely terrible year, but I have a hunch this would have happened anyway.

I’d hoped this ritual might help me reclaim my attention span and reckon with my anxieties about writing. It’s done some of this. After 336 nights, I’ve cut a new groove of writing for an hour at midnight. I’ve also come to appreciate pen and paper, the aesthetics of candlelight, and I’ve rediscovered many old tracks in my music collection. So it’s been fruitful for me, if not the reader.

There’s snow on the ground tonight, just enough to cover the grass, and I’m trying to savor it while it’s here. Feels like I haven’t seen proper snow in years. Strange that this was my biggest concern in January during those weeks in Finland when everyone was complaining about another black winter and phrases like “social distancing” were unknown.

Lately I’ve been listening to electronic music from twenty-five years ago, focusing on a specific neon-synth that sounds a little chintzy but gleams in a particular way. Autechre, Polygon Window, B12, etc. I struggle to separate my nostalgia from whether these songs are objectively fantastic. Probably a little of both. Perhaps there’s something to be said for parameters, the same few synthesizers being pushed beyond their limits in very different ways.

Autechre – Yulquen

Amber | Warp, 1994 | Bandcamp