Notebook

The heat is finally ending tonight. The rain came an hour ago, and C. says it feels like a fever’s breaking. News about the climate crisis tends to focus on high temperatures, not the lows. But since the 1990s, the average nightly temperature has been rising faster than the daytime highs. And these nights have felt so heavy, like the way an old man steps out of a bodega with a tallboy of beer in a damp paper bag and says, “Oh Lord.”

Sometimes C. and I debate whether we’d rather live in ferocious heat or subzero cold. She always chooses the cold. “You can put on a jacket,” she says, “but you can’t take off your skin.”

They buried John Lewis today. The New York Times published an essay he wrote just before he died. I can’t imagine the sensation of writing beyond my death, hoping its timing might capture the attention of a nation busily tearing itself apart. “While my time here has now come to an end,” he begins. And: “Ordinary people with extraordinary vision can redeem the soul of America by getting in what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.” His essay appeared alongside news about the collapsing American economy and how it might not bounce back. A former presidential candidate who dismissed the pandemic died of the virus this morning. A hurricane named Isaias formed in the Caribbean this afternoon, and it threatens to roll up the eastern seaboard. Meanwhile, our current president suggested delaying the election. Although this is unlikely, the table is set for chaos in November.

I flipped to where I’d left off in Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. The synchronicity knocked me sideways as the narrator prepared her friend to get ready for inevitable upheaval: “We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!”

When I consider the man I want to become someday, I often picture myself as someone who prays. I have no idea why this impulse is so persistent or where I would direct my prayers or why I haven’t yet become this man. But I enjoy imagining myself climbing out of bed and kneeling before a devotional image. Whenever I see someone unrolling a mat and kneeling towards the east, I envy the sense of orientation this must provide as their thoughts turn to otherworldly matters or the workings of the soul.

This morning I started reading Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, and I already know it will be an essential book for me. I’m only on page 40, but this feels like the most prescient American dystopia: a climate crisis that leads to desperate violence and reactionary politics. And Butler writes beautifully about god through the voice of a spiritualized fifteen-year-old:

A lot of people seem to believe in a big-daddy-God or a big-cop-God or a big-king-God. They believe in a kind of super-person. A few believe God is another word for nature. And nature turns out to mean just about anything they happen not to understand or feel in control of. Some say God is a spirit, a force, an ultimate reality. Ask seven people what all of that means and you’ll get seven different answers. So what is God? Just another name for whatever makes you feel special and protected?

But what is this urge to pray? My first thought speeds past the philosophical, evolutionary, and aesthetic reasons, and unexpectedly lands on a few lines from Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem:

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

It’s a challenging, even troubling thought, but it’s also humbling—which might be the point of prayer.

Today’s headlines featured terms like “demon sperm” and “the umbrella man” because we’ve slipped into a psychedelic hell this summer. There’s a doctor in Houston who supports our president’s bizarre fixation on hydroxychloroquine as a cure for everything. She also believes we get sick from having sex with witches in our dreams. The president thinks she’s terrific. He says she’s “spectacular in her statements” and I can’t disagree.

Meanwhile in Minneapolis, authorities have identified the man with an umbrella who smashed up the windows of an Auto Zone and kickstarted a night of arson and looting. He’s a white supremacist linked to the Hell’s Angels. The umbrella natters at the mind. Maybe it’s meant to hijack the symbolism of the protests in Hong Kong, where umbrellas shield protestors from security cameras and drones. Perhaps it’s a 21st-century echo of the Umbrella Man in the Zapruder film that captures the killing of JFK. He’s the mysterious man who opened an umbrella on a sunny day, the one who some believe gave the signal to kill the president.

I remember driving through the Mojave desert ten years ago. I was lonely and filled with grief, and I flipped on the radio for company. I heard a man say they found the lost city of Atlantis, that it was somewhere under Reno. Living in America these days feels like being trapped inside that moment forever.

Midwife – Demon

Prayer Hands | Antiquated Future, 2018 | Bandcamp

North Dakota snow. Aural destabilization. Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. William James and “the educational variety of religious experience.” Bohren and Der Club of Gore. Neoplatonism. Varvara Stepanova. Waffle House. The Salton Sea. Bombay Beach. Endless rain. Hubert Robert’s ruins. Static. The main character has my mom’s eyes. The lights of Do Lung Bridge in Apocalypse Now. The Electrifying Mojo. Chrome. No sunshine, only night. Ela Orleans. Rumble strips and tollbooths. Broken screens. Endless rain. Season two of The Leftovers. Plotinus. Origen. The rose in The Little Prince: “Let the tigers come with their claws.” Mahjong. The Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans. Robert Irwin. Stephen King’s The Stand. The Ronettes. The orange juice kid. Spinoza and the idea that god is in the trees. Freightliner trucks. Desert religion. The Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada. The nails and blades in a ritualistic power figure: Nkisi N’kondi. Dial tones. Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code. Twentynine Palms. The makeshift towns in the Imperial Dunes. Coast to Coast AM. Being afraid to pray. Reel to reel tapes. Ghosts. Hexagram 18 in the I Ching: Decay. Heat lightning. Footsteps on marble. Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0. Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. The profane old Buddha in New Orleans who told me that “opinions kill motherfuckers and experience saves lives.” Flickering lights. Mysterious wounds. Color breathing. Robocop and “I’ll buy that for a dollar.” Slab City. Motel vending machines. Interstate 10 is the dime and Interstate 55 is the double-nickel. Maersk Sealand. The Cold Crush Brothers. Sodium lights. Highway service plazas. Towns called Fairfield. Tristan Tzara’s Dada manifestos. Basic Channel. Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome in Meditation. Folding chairs. Church basements. Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower. Replicas, simulations, and artificial skies. Will Durant. The Scholastics. Bertrand Russell. Model 500’s “Night Drive through Babylon” on Woodward Avenue at three o’clock in the morning. Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Crucifixion. Don DeLillo’s Underworld and Mao II. Jeunet and Caro’s The City of Lost Children. William Basinski: “The world is in a bad feedback loop right now.” Tarot readers, soothsayers, and faith dealers. Late-night callers. Glitchy power grids. Doubt.

The heatwave continues. Going outside is like walking into a hairdryer. People teeter in the street, sweat staining their masks. The pandemic has stretched from a blip into a season and now it’s the way we live in America, checking the infection curves and color-coded maps each morning like the weather. The seven o’clock cheers faded long ago.

Five years ago, my father and I spent eleven months far from home, waiting for him to receive a lung from the VA hospital. Lately I’ve been thinking about something he said: “At first, the uncertainty was bearable because it was a new kind of uncertainty, but now it’s familiar and that makes it worse.”

What will be the long-term effect of this national humiliation? Each day feels dumber and more dangerous. A headline said bird attacks on Americans are on the rise. Fair enough.

Every day feels like the same day, an endless smear of Sunday and Wednesday. It’s two-thirty in the morning, and a caravan of motorcycles and dune buggies are growling up First Avenue, their engines rattling the windows. Another heatwave is settling over the city. The coronavirus continues to burn through America, breaking records in eighteen states. In Portland, federal troops are tear-gassing citizens and kickstarting a vicious loop. The White House wants to jam the airwaves with images of angry protestors, broken windows, and fire in the streets until the suburbs are too scared to think. One hundred days until the election.

I put on William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, hours of compassion that bleed through the grit and grain of decaying tape. “Our world is in a bad feedback loop right now,” Basinski said a few years ago in an interview. “We’re at a point right now where we need to get rid of some bad feedback loops and it’s happening. It’s not gonna be pretty, but eventually things will resolve.”

This might be the year the loop finally and truly breaks.

William Basinski – DLP 3

The Disintegration Loops II | 2062, 2012 | Bandcamp

Finished Stephen King’s The Stand today and, even at 1152 pages, I was sad when I read the last sentence, as if a friend had left town for good. King’s tale of a plague-stricken America is a sprawling, flashy meditation on whether modern civilization is worth the effort—and if we’re brave enough to choose a different path. Most of all, it’s a story about broken people trying to keep their sanity in the face of the unthinkable, and it certainly resonates in 2020. Every chapter offers a cliffhanger, and it brought me back to teenage nights of staying awake into the small hours with a flashlight, promising myself just one more chapter. I’d nearly forgotten that reading can be so much fun.

A line keeps turning in my mind, an epitaph scrawled by a character on the wall of a prison cell:

I am not the potter, not the potter’s wheel, but the potter’s clay; is not the value of the shape attained as dependent upon the intrinsic worth of the clay as upon the wheel and the master’s skill?

I admire the implication of personal responsibility twinned with otherworldly detachment. Seems like a good strategy in these days of factions and anxiety. My knowledge of religion is patchy, but I wonder if King pulled this idea from an ancient text, perhaps the karmic wheels of Hinduism or some Neoplatonic notion of becoming a channel. The closest reference point I could find comes from the Old Testament:

The word came to Jeremiah from the Lord, saying, “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will cause thee to hear my words.” Then I went down to the potter’s house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it. Then the word of the Lord came to me, saying, “O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? Behold, as the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are ye in mine hand.”

The Lord goes on to talk about punishing disobedient nations. But for a moment, the Bible seemed rather zen. And it’s depressing how many Christian websites want your credit card information.

Last night I flipped through the first few pages of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. People have been telling me to read this book for years. It’s helped them with procrastination, they said, and it might help me too. Of course I ignored them, preferring to ruminate in my muck. It’s that idiot glitch in my brain: This might help me, so I will avoid it.

Cameron’s use of the phrase “creative injury” struck me. It’s a heroic image, the artist suffering a crushing blow that leaves them limping off the field. It suggests they really tried to soar. Maybe this happens to some people. My injuries stem from the everyday fears that I’ve allowed to fester. The source is the same, even if the shadows they cast might vary depending on the day: paralyzing doubt versus brittle rigidity, fear of rejection versus perfectionism, etc.

I know how to fix this because it’s the same thing I tell my students. Give up on inspiration. Show up every day for an hour, or even ten minutes if that’s all you can spare, but write no matter what. Write as poorly as you can and see where that takes you. As long as the keyboard is clicking or the pen is moving, something is bound to happen.

Take my advice, I’m not using it. Instead, I stare out the window. I organize my music library. I make needlessly complicated systems with color-coded index cards. I doodle and wait for a moment that will never arrive. An old man in New Orleans once told me it doesn’t matter if the nail is in the exact right place, so long as it’s holding together two pieces of wood.

Fast clouds rolled across the overheated city this afternoon. Heat lightning and thunder. I love the free-falling sense of the atmosphere rearranging itself before a storm. On the corner of First Avenue, I watched a dozen pigeons gather on a traffic light, and I couldn’t remember if they always perched there or if this was weather-related.

Right now there are storms on Jupiter, unwitnessed and unseen.

America is back to losing over a thousand people each day to the virus. The owner of a company that’s eating the world made thirteen billion dollars in a single day. Now he has $189 billion. Meanwhile, our president brags about his mental fitness because he correctly identified an elephant in a test designed to detect dementia. He goes on TV and says, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.” He repeats these words like instructions. This is the man sending federal troops into American cities, hoping to transform peaceful protest into televised violence.

And for a lunatic moment I wonder if it will keep raining until everything is washed clean.

Cybotron – Cosmic Raindance

Enter | Fantasy Records, 1983 | More

While researching a few details for my novel this afternoon, I came across a declassified CIA document about detaching from time and space through experiments with “color breathing” and “energy balloons.” There’s also a discussion about weaponizing Tibetan metaphysics and techniques involving the frequencies of an air conditioner. It felt like a document that I shouldn’t look at for very long.

I’m already detached from time and space. Each day feels as if I’m waging the same staring contest with my screens. I’m getting restlessness and craving the road. America is eating itself alive these days, no doubt, but I want to fall in love with this country again, with the physicality and widescreen weirdness of it all. I remember speeding across a blank Oklahoma plain dotted with pump jacks and cattle pens. I thought I was hallucinating when replicas of Buckingham Palace, the Roman Coliseum, and the Arc de Triomphe appeared on the horizon, surrounded by dancing lights that advertised cheap steak and the loosest slot machines east of the Rockies. The disorienting effect wouldn’t have been out of place in a CIA report.

Plastikman – Detached

Closer/Arkives | Mute, 2003 | More

A pair of heat domes have straddled the nation, and I imagine them as two great translucent, shimmering beasts. One has settled over the Pacific Northwest; the other is anchored over the Eastern Seaboard. This afternoon C. and I drew down the shades and fired up our feeble air conditioner. We listened to it wheeze and sputter while we made the final tweaks and edits to our book about our Light the Barricades installation. We started this book six months ago in a ferry house on an island in the Baltic Sea, a few weeks before the world changed. Some of the responses we collected from visitors last year have a new resonance: Our national conscience is being stripped bare. Others haven’t aged well: I’m hopeful because it’s almost 2020.

Why does the last ten percent of a project feel so impossible? Is the fear of completion a logical condition or just a glitch in my brain? Finishing a project means closing doors, killing darlings, and foreclosing possibilities. This can be rough work, but it’s not nearly as exhausting as dragging unfinished work around day after day until it leaves you haunted. Why haven’t I learned this lesson yet? It might explain why I’ve been rewriting the same novel for five years.

But the moral is that we’ve decided to invest in a clothbound cover with a foil stamp, and that’s something to look forward to.

Björk – Cover Me (Plaid Mix)

Hyperballad EP | One Little Indian, 1996