Light snowfall here in Ohio, and the weather report was mixed with grim coronavirus forecasts. I want to believe things are moving in a better direction, that these days of anxiety and pain might produce a better world.
Tonight I realized I hadn’t thought about the president in days, and the effect is like the relief when a pounding headache fades. I’m not sure if this is due to a healthier media diet on my part or if he’s temporarily disappeared to sulk in some gold-plated room, only to return in worse form. Pointing this out, however, raises the white bear problem.
The first days of the holiday season often remind me that I don’t have the type of family that appears in commercials and television specials. No parents, siblings, or children. Strange how our culture is so committed to a narrow definition of family that leaves most people feeling awful.
Jesus instructed his followers to leave their wives and children, to forsake their families and follow him—which brings to mind André Breton‘s exhortations in 1924 to leave everything in favor of Surrealism’s dreamlife: “Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads.”
C. and I bought an artificial Christmas tree today, another unexpected development in 2020. We haven’t celebrated the holiday in years. This wasn’t a conscious decision, more of a gradual drift as the hassle of storing boxes of ornaments and trying to guess what to buy one another faded into a preference for end-of-year travel or logging time in dim sum parlors and movie theaters. But these options are no longer available this year, and we need something to anticipate, so we bought a fake frosted spruce from the superstore, twenty-five percent off and fully loaded with faux pinecones and prewired lights. We even bought some Christmas tree perfume, a remarkably specific product that makes it smell like a real tree.
I admire the artifice of our Christmas tree, from its polyvinyl chloride leaves to its pine-scented cologne. It makes me feel very modern, simulating an ancient ritual with murky origins that can be traced to the Roman mid-winter festival of Saturnalia or perhaps the Viking worship of trees. Bring outdoor scenery indoors and push it to the brink of flames.
Domestic rituals of all kinds will be critical during this long winter.
Tonight an old friend in New Orleans reminded me that even if I’m wrestling with the idea of faith, I’m in conversation with something bigger than myself. Perhaps doubt can become a form of faith; certainty cannot.
Sometimes I blame modern-day aesthetics for my difficulties. The optics seem wrong for devotion. The blue glow, the squinched face. The restless clicking and scrolling rather than staring and contemplating. But to argue against technology is not only boring, it lands on the wrong side of history—as if claiming that less access to information or reinstalling hurdles of time and space might be a better thing.
Thanksgiving. Tonight I am grateful because I have a safe place to sleep, food to eat, and the freedom to make my own decisions. Sometimes I overlook how rare these things can be and how lucky I am. I’m thankful for those I love and those who are patient with me. I am grateful for the memories of the people I’ve lost and that I’m slowly learning to hold them close, although they are no longer here. I am thankful I can walk and run without complaint, and I must remember to savor this, for this will not always be the case. I’m damned grateful for seven years and nine months without a drink. This year I’ve finally learned to fall asleep in silence, and I’m thankful for that too. I’m also thankful for the first sentence of Neuromancer: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Hunkered down somewhere in Ohio, and there’s not much to do except finish my book. I’ve made a commitment to wrap it up by the end of this terrible year, and I managed to write 1300 words today, which is logorrheic for me. Then the gears ground to a halt as I began to doubt this enterprise. Maybe I should shift the point of view to the first person. Perhaps I should rewrite the entire thing in the present tense. And so on. I often think about this observation from Annie Dillard: “I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend.”
Writing for longer than an hour leaves me craving a cigarette, even though I quit three years ago. I miss the dopamine loop, the carrot and the stick, and the rhythm of stepping outside for five minutes after each page or paragraph. I would probably start again if it didn’t leave me feeling like a pariah. My memories of smoking will have to do.
Four years ago, C. and I worked on a project in Greece, where they still believe in smoking. Someone invited us to dinner, and we spent five hours in a dim café with a fireplace, shouting with strangers over endless cigarettes. Metal cups of wine covered the table, and people jostled their chairs to accommodate new arrivals. I don’t remember any food. A few Greeks sang dirty songs while an earnest French backpacker chattered in my ear about his support for Trump. A German flutist described her meditation practice, and I nursed a coffee and smoked until my lungs felt burnt. An elderly woman in a red cloak settled herself next to me, drained her glass of ouzo, and began to roll a cigarette. She had the judging look of the elderly, the deep-staring eyes. She asked if I had any brothers or sisters, and I shook my head no. “I thought so,” she said. “Being an only child is like living in the desert beneath a mountain of feelings.” And later, her parting comment as she toddled toward the door: “I am still naive, and I will always choose to be that way.” The party ended when a dog was dropped on the table, knocking everyone’s glasses and ashtrays to the floor.
That night feels like another life. I miss the cigarettes, of course, and also the ability to travel. Most of all, I miss the heat and noise of strangers who are chattering, singing, and saying whatever comes to mind.
This morning my meditation tape asked me if there’s an observer or just the act of observing. I have no idea what to do with questions like this. I’m trying to focus on concrete things these days. Like iceberg lettuce. Whether I’m in Ohio or New York, a bodega or a supermarket, the iceberg lettuce looks increasingly ratty. The other vegetables are growing larger, genetically engineered into Platonic ideals of carrots or tomatoes, but iceberg lettuce seems to be getting smaller, wilted with brown bruises. Perhaps this is an ambient sign of an emergency, like the dwindling bees.
C. and I scrolled up and down the aisles of the megamarket in full hunter-gatherer mode, aiming to collect enough supplies for a few weeks. While contemplating the fish tank, I tuned into the woman’s voice looping over the P.A. system, struck by how it sounded simultaneously rational and insane: “We’ve widened our aisles to help with social distancing, we’ve enhanced our sanitizing practices, and we’ve increased our options for contactless payment…”
A new culture of shame is emerging, and not just in the trenches of social media. Reporters at the airport harass travelers on television, asking them if they even care about humanity. The New York Times is publishing heat maps of where people plan to spend their Thanksgiving—and with how many people. I’m not sure what I’m expected to do with this information.
It’s been a long year of predictions: infection rates, election outcomes, the future of cities, and the nature of work. This year has also been a hard lesson in the inability to predict anything. Nonetheless, I’m constantly pattern-seeking, hoping to glean new information from the rhythms of my life: morning routines and habit fields, the glitches and loops of ambient thought. But my conclusions are arbitrary, tinted by how I squint at my compulsions or occasional moments of coincidence. Maybe I’ll find better information by examining the pattern of the tiles in the bathroom.
There was a time when people believed the stomach’s gurgles and rumbles belonged to the voices of the dead. Ventriloquism began as a religious practice; the term is Latin for “speaking from the stomach”: venter (belly) and loqui (speak). The ventriloquist would decipher the belly’s sounds and predict the future.
Today we packed up a rental car and drove to Ohio to hide from the world this winter. We’re going to hunker down and shelter-in-place through this terrible season that has adopted the grammar of a hurricane. After navigating the manic tangle of New York’s bridges and New Jersey’s turnpikes, it was a straight shot across Pennsylvania on Interstate 80, my least favorite stretch of American highway. Nothing but Amazon delivery trucks and cops in my headlights. We drove through McDonald’s for lunch. We stopped at a rest area where a man stood on the grass, grinning at the moon. Six hundred miles later, we arrived in the Middle West. I love the full-bodied thrum in my nerves after a long drive, as if the mechanical has merged with the neurochemical.
Last night I dreamt about a world where we were required to wear plastic bags over our heads. A dead man sat in the backseat of a car, and an unseen voice told me to pretend he was alive. And somewhere on the rooftop of a parking structure, there was an image or memory that would make sense of my life, but I woke just as I was about to reach it.
Maybe it’s hardwired, this idea of an image that might provide revelation. The cross, the host, and the idol. I read about a temple where an image is treated as the living incarnation of an infant god. Over the years, this belief gradually became ritualized into elaborate festivals. Worshippers prepare food for the image, including fifty-seven delicacies and 125,000 fresh mangoes. They bathe and dress it several times each day. There’s something beautiful in the idea that an image might shape collective behavior, and perhaps it speaks to our relationship with the image world today. This phenomenon also points to the very human trait to take a simple idea and complicate it until it must be torn down and made simple again.
These have been days of long walks through the city with friends before the weather forces us indoors. Our conversations loop and wander, fueled by the jittery energy produced by information overload. This line from Don DeLillo captures the gestalt: “Too much of everything from too narrow a source code.” From Battery Park to Herald Square. From Red Hook to the Brooklyn Bridge. These rare hours of in-person chatter are a sanity check. Are things going to be okay? Were they ever?
Some people say they feel as if reality is slipping away. But perhaps reality is becoming more evident. Disease and indifference. Institutional decay and mortality. This might explain the increasing appetite for conspiracy, the nonsense that bleeds through our screens. More of us are inventing our own narratives, hunting for clear-cut villains and overarching themes. Meanwhile, there’s a very real morgue crisis in El Paso and new curfews in California, Colorado, and Massachusetts.
Tonight I watched a man on a crowded train, unmasked and defiantly eating a slice of pizza. He chewed at us like a dare. In the park, a woman harassed anyone within earshot if they weren’t wearing a mask, even if they were alone and far away, quietly looking at the city lights over the river.
My mom would have turned 68 today. I never know how to mark this day. Growing older means that more and more days on the calendar become attached to the memories of those no longer here. But a negative suggests a positive, an absence reminds us of a presence, and contemplating our short time here requires remembering why we want to stay, why we would be sad to leave. To consider the work and conversations left unfinished; the things left unsaid, the ideas that were not shared. We are but fitful flashes of an eternal light, said Spinoza, and we can describe this light in any number of ways.
I found a rare picture of my mom young and smiling, caught beneath the overheated gloss of a 1970s photo and sporting an incredible yellow collar. I wonder what she would have made of this world.
A defeated president fumbles toward a coup d’etat, generating insanities that have somehow exhausted their power to shock. Another recording-breaking day of infections and the outbreak maps require new colors. Orange and red no longer suffice; there are now deep burgundies and purples. Went to the doctor for my annual exam. Blood pressure taken, blood drawn, and heart monitored. I learned that it’s far more challenging to balance on one leg if you close your eyes. This seems like crucial information that I should have known by now.
