Cold today, wind chill in the twenties. I’m getting crotchety. I increasingly find myself squinting at the world and wondering if maybe dignity disappeared around the time we began advertising our politics, gods, and the intelligence of our children on the bumpers of our cars. Thoughts like this must be resisted; I don’t want to become a prematurely old man, pining for a romanticized past. A chiding quote from Tristan Tzara comes to mind. Back in 1922, he said, “You’ll never know why you exist, but you’ll always allow yourself to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”
Tonight I meditate to the sound of helicopters, sirens, and someone hollering on the street, repeatedly shouting, “You just don’t understand.”
The president still refuses to concede the election; he’s firing his critics as well as the few remaining officials who tell the truth. An 87-year-old senator tested positive for the virus. Ten o’clock curfews in Ohio and New Mexico. Mask mandates in Iowa, North Dakota, and Mississippi. They’re closing the schools in New York City.
Meanwhile, I keep forgetting the screen is a tool, not an environment. Sometimes it feels like a sense of obligation, the way I keep clicking and scrolling—as if I’m abandoning my post if I press the off button. The decent urge to bear witness has been hijacked and thoroughly mangled. I think of Jung working and writing in a tower without electricity: “Simple acts make man simple; and how difficult it is to be simple!”
The Pope is praying for our relationship with technology. “Let us pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind,” he said. In Washington DC, the self-styled militias that once haunted the dirty fringes of the American mind commingled with Republican leaders, groups with names like the Three Percenters and the Oath Keepers. They hollered “stop the steal” outside the Supreme Court because they believed the president should have been reelected.
We’re slipping into a new medieval age of faith and feeling. Our screens encourage us to curate the realities we’d like to believe, revealing a deep-boned craving for affirmation and grievance, as well as dot-connecting that festers into conspiracies. How does any of this get unwound? When I got sober seven years ago in New Orleans, a profane old man would often tell me, “Fuck your feelings.” Then he’d remind me of the facts. That advice probably saved my life.
Despite my best efforts, I don’t trust most of my clicking and scrolling, knowing it’s guided by the invisible hand of an algorithm. Meanwhile, I’m having long telephone calls with people about the facts of this winter. We discuss our plans for hunkering down and sheltering in place. All of us staying home, spending more time navigating the world through screens.
We knew it was coming. They’ve been telling us for months, and now it’s here: a dark winter as infections explode across the country at a staggering rate. Despite the warnings of experts, it still feels like a shock to enter another grim season when public life fades and the suffering becomes uncountable. Like grief, there’s no preparing for such a thing.
C. and I spent the afternoon alone in a chapel at the cemetery, its silence broken only by distant sirens and the occasional drone of an airplane descending toward JFK International. We tested some lighting ideas and measured the apse and alcoves for a project about loss that we’re planning for next spring. And what will the world look like then? How will this winter be remembered? More and more, the future feels impossible to comprehend until it arrives.
I sympathize with the sleeping figure in Valentin de Boulogne’s Dream of Saint Joseph, a portrait of a weary man unaware of the angel tugging at his sleeve. The description that accompanies this painting often comes to mind these days: “Incapable of rising to the truths of the spirit, exhausted by the effort, mankind falls back into his torpor.” How many times have I glimpsed a better, more spiritualized way to live—and retreated? Sometimes I fantasize about chucking my gadgets into the river, retreating into the pages of the classics, and living a solitary life in the gloom like Magdalene or Francis with their skulls and candles that remind them time is short. Yet even as I write this, I find myself still scrolling, refreshing, and clicking yes, I am still watching.
But it’s reassuring to know that saints wrestled with distraction, too.
In the year 375, Saint Jerome was determined to escape the world’s clamor and find salvation in the desert. In a letter to a student, he described the difficulty of removing himself from the ones he loved and “harder still, from the dainty food to which I had been accustomed.” Although he managed to leave these comforts behind, he could not bear to abandon his books. So he carried his copies of Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid through the Syrian wilderness, books that were considered profane by his religion. “And so, miserable man that I was,” he wrote, “I would fast only that I might afterward read Cicero.” It lingers in the mind, the image of a man dragging his library through the desert, only to punish himself for reading.
A peculiar stretch of November summer has faded into grey skies and rain. My mind is fragmented tonight, flicking around the room and batting at threads but unable to grasp any one thing. Story of my life, perhaps. But how can anyone concentrate when the news is filled with our president’s infantile attempt at a coup d’etat while the predictions of a scary winter are coming fast and true? Hospitals are reaching capacity in several states. Restrictions are returning to New York.
So I’m retreating into my old notebooks for a few hours, hunting for distraction. Maybe I need a reminder of what it felt like to write when politics and infections didn’t constantly tint my thoughts. I riffle through stray factoids that never found a home: Evolution is fastest in body parts used to attract mates or frighten rivals. Words that haunt the unconscious: Trilobites, moonfish, and gorgons. I scan the liturgical names of geological epochs like the Time of the Great Dying, or jotted phrases that I can no longer place: Light echoes from red supergiants. Eyes on stalks. How the word static implies fixture as well as chaotic noise.
The philosopher Herbert Spencer believed the first gods appeared in our dreams. These visions gradually became ghosts that haunted our stories. After all, the word spirit applies to ghosts as well as gods. And in the beginning, God was only “a permanently existing ghost.”
Last night I dreamt about a regal bald woman, impossibly tall, who glided above the floor with her back arched like a vacuum. I nodded hello, and she said, “You’re welcome.” No matter what I said, she replied, “You’re welcome.” Then she turned and zoomed away, leaving me alone in a long empty room.
Got my first coronavirus test today. Figured it would be a good idea after spending seventeen hours in a middle school gym on Election Day, which feels like a lifetime ago. I waited in line for nearly three hours, slowly inching past a shuttered diner, a construction site, and a mattress store until I reached the clinic. Some people came prepared with folding chairs and picnic lunches. Others paced and had tantrums. Inside the clinic, a nurse shoved a Q-tip up my nose for four seconds. Then I left. I walked down First Avenue feeling as if I’d participated in an obscure religious ritual, or perhaps an unsatisfying art installation.
There’s news about a possible vaccine for the coronavirus. In the meantime, infections are breaking records each day, and this winter might teach us a hard lesson in exponential math.
In New York, the weather is still impossibly warm and sunny. Shops are removing the plywood boards from their windows after barricading for riots that never came, despite the hysteria that spread across the networks and newspapers. The election was peaceful, and America’s institutions appear to have survived an unprecedented stress test. But a shadow lingers. The president fired the secretary of defense this afternoon, the one who refused to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy America’s military against its citizens. This bare minimum qualifies as moral fiber these days. Is the president planning something? Will he ever concede?
After the election results were announced yesterday, a burst of spontaneous cheers gathered steam until people were dancing in the streets, celebrating in a way that felt like the end of wartime. New York. Atlanta. Detroit. After so much time spent fixating on the psychological needs of rural and suburban voters, the cities finally got to have their say, and they said it loud: Donald Trump is just a bad memory. Philadelphia. Washington DC. Los Angeles. The heat of the crowd wrote history last night, rendering Trump’s tantrums into background noise, barely audible through the music and cheers.
Yes, I wept as Kamala Harris and Joe Biden delivered their acceptance speeches from a parking lot in Delaware. Politics aside, I wept with the relief of seeing people who were recognizably human, with faces capable of joy, humility, and concern. Only then did I fully recognize just how much mental armor I’d required to deal with the White House’s alien garble of orange make-up, baffling slurs, Christian viciousness, and crazy-making reminders to “be best.”
Misty-eyed for Joe Biden. 2020 has been filled with disorienting moments. The president-elect spoke to us from a parking lot with a Planet Fitness in the background. Instead of applause, cars honked. “It sounds like he’s talking to the world’s worst traffic jam,” said C. And the optics did look apocalyptic, a reminder that America is not okay as the pandemic claims more citizens each day. If I’d tuned into this scene a year ago, I would have thought we were building a provisional government after a terrible explosion or zombie invasion.
And there’s a heatwave in November. Record-breaking temperatures here in New York City, and the summertime weather is heightening the sensation of suddenly stepping into a new and unfamiliar season.
The networks called the race for president at 11:26 this morning, and the city erupted in cheers. Horns honked, voices hollered, and pots banged. We went to our windows and screamed with sweet relief. It was a beautiful inversion of the evening cheer in the early days of the pandemic—spontaneous and joyful because there’s some sense left in this nation after all. A collective exhale. I stood at my window, wiping away some tears.
Like a gift, it was seventy-five degrees and storybook weather in New York City today, so we filled the streets, strangers needing to look at one another to confirm that yes, this was real, as if waking from a terrible dream.
An unusually warm and sunny day in November, seventy degrees with a light wind. And we will have a new president after the counting is done. But it’s a confusing sensation, standing on the verge of catharsis while also bracing for the president’s hellacious meltdown. How far will the radius of the blast site reach?
Meanwhile, we wait for a signal, a 72-point headline or a glossy cable news graphic that cements and formalizes. Televisions chatter through the walls and fill the hallways, the sound of news anchors endlessly reporting that there’s no new news to report. I need to remember to look at the sky.
Patchy sleep and fever dreams about narrow margins and outstanding ballots. But the line between sleep and waking life feels awfully thin this week. Reporters stand in from of the White House, saying things like, “Reality has not set in for Trump that he could lose.”
It looks like Biden will take Pennsylvania and probably Georgia. This election is a nail-biter, but only because it’s unfolding in slow motion. Like everything else it has touched, the pandemic has warped the election timeline into gooey dream logic. If these results had come through by midnight on Election Day, we’d cheer a resounding victory. (The blue wall! Georgia, and maybe even Arizona!)
Last night the president stood at a podium in the White House and whined about how it’s so unfair. He babbled about cardboard and binoculars. He said the votes for his opponent were illegitimate. My skin crawled as I watched. Never in my lifetime, etc. But I’m reassured that most of the nation ignored him and went back to counting votes and waiting.
During the seventeen hours I spent in a middle school gym on Election Day, I was often overwhelmed by the chaos of the voting process. Ninety-two strangers from across the human spectrum had gathered to work the polls. Some of us had challenging personalities. Some of us had tantrums. Some of us made mistakes that needed to be corrected. We bumped into one another and got in each other’s way. We had a lot of questions, but we did our best. It was ugly and unruly, but at the end of the night, thousands of people had voted, the numbers tallied up correctly, and there was something beautiful about the whole thing.
