Notebook

There are so many things I wish I’d asked my mother. Tonight I’d like to know about her favorite saints. I want to know what shook her faith for so many decades, and the energies that brought her back to the church before she unexpectedly died.

Today we crossed two million cases of coronavirus in the United States, yet the number hardly makes a dent. There’s a sense it’s all behind us now. Perhaps it’s the summer weather or the government’s negligence. Maybe we can only be vigilant for so long. If there’s a second wave of disease in the fall, I don’t think we’ll lockdown again unless people are exploding in the streets. This thing’s gone from novel to normal in less than three months.

Sometimes I wish I believed in something otherworldly, that I had an icon or figurine to kneel before. A lady who smoked extra-long menthols once told me that prayer is simply a form of directed thought. “That’s all it is,” she said. “So why not give it a shot?”

My feeds are broken and everything’s glitching. Each time I look at the internet, it reads like one long scream, even though I agree with most of it. So I’m keeping my head offline and buried in software, working on some design for an organization engaged in ambitious justice work. And I’m trying like hell to conjure the faith of those fiery manifestos circa 1920 when they believed a particular font, grid system, or color scheme might solve everything. A new art for the future! Only straight lines! Only primary colors! These hopeful declarations are heartbreaking from today’s vantage point, knowing World War II and other unthinkable forms of devastation were waiting in the wings. Still, it’s nice to contemplate the Constructivists’ belief in art and technology as a “gigantic trampoline for the leap into universal human culture.”

This morning I was pacing our flat, searching for something I could not find. She told me it was probably “otherwhere.” Such a fantastic word.

The idea of “otherwhere” reminded me of a story I started seven years ago that I will probably never finish. It’s about an elderly woman who walks to the museum each afternoon to contemplate a painting of the Matterhorn disaster. Returning home one day, she sees a flyer taped to a lamppost with a photocopied image of her face. It says she’s gone missing, and there’s a $36,900 reward. The bottom of the page is cut into strips with the telephone number, just like any homemade flyer for guitar lessons or pet grooming. Three strips have been torn off.

If anyone wants to finish that story, please do. Otherwise it will remain otherwhere.

Sometimes you come across a phrase that haunts you all day. A few words scraped from last night’s dream, maybe an odd line in the news. This morning I flipped open a half-empty notebook that I found under the bed and landed on a page that said “horseshoe crab death march” next to a doodle of an alien-looking creature’s tracks in the sand. The handwriting belongs to me, and I half-remember writing this on the steps of a museum in Texas five or six years ago. Houston, maybe Dallas. But I cannot recall why I felt compelled to write this down, let alone illustrate it. Who was that man?

So I’ve been chanting “horseshoe crab death march” in my head all day like a terrible mantra, and I’ve learned there’s a precise word for the footprints of a dying creature: a mortichnia, or “death march”.

One hundred days after the first case of coronavirus in New York City, the shops and streets are beginning to reopen. Protests continue across the nation. They shut down the interstate in Oregon.

Still so many helicopters over the city. Some orbit around Midtown, others hover above a single point in an eerie state of suspension. Monitoring. Recording. I thought I had another few decades before becoming one of those grizzled men who suspiciously scans the sky for choppers.

Despite the racket, I’m more hopeful tonight than I’ve been in months, probably years. The mayor ended the idiotic curfew. Stores are removing their plywood and preparing to reopen. The daily protests have cohered into something peaceful and compassionate that has eclipsed any initial chaos (although torching a police station may have been a necessary jolt). Dismantling our militarized police departments is now a mainstream idea. Although our president’s tantrums finally seem to be running out of gas. No coronavirus deaths were reported in New York City yesterday. The weather is perfect.

Maybe I’ll look back on this entry in a few months or weeks—hell, even a few hours—and shake my head at my naiveté, but this hopeful feeling should be included among my nightly inventory of 2020’s calamities. We’re still living through a season that requires the suspension of disbelief, but perhaps it’s possible to believe we’re heading somewhere better.

The Caretaker – Glimpses of Hope in Trying Times

Everywhere at the End of Time | History Always Favours the Winners, 2016 | Bandcamp

A note from the margins of today’s rally in Washington Square. As thousands gathered to reckon with racism and brutality, the usual fringe groups dotted the edges of the park: garbled Christian faith-dealers, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, and a man wearing a tall wizard’s cap who cast spells upon the hedges.

And there was a new style of paranoia. Old men with amplifiers delivered gnostic interpretations of the facial expressions of various health officials. They said coronavirus tests were mechanisms for microchipping our blood. They talked about eating particles of silver for protection.

One of them shoved a glossy flyer into my hands. The language starts like a low-rent legal advertisement before veering into magnificent science fiction. Are you suffering from insomnia? Headaches? Brain fog? Irritability? According to the flyer, we’re actually suffering radiation poisoning from wifi and cellphone towers—but “they” will blame these symptoms on the “virus.” The pandemic is a ruse to keep us indoors while the government installs new infrastructure with frequencies that control us. Our telecommunications companies are carrying out the orders of Moloch, the “ancient Ammonite god who demanded child sacrifice by parents.” The flyer ends with an all-caps warning: Do not trust your government. Do not trust the police.

For the briefest moment, it seemed significant that the last sentence of a batshit conspiracy—an invention for feeling aggrieved—would reach the same conclusion as the very rational and real voices in the center of the park.

Vatican Shadow – Encryption Nets

Ghosts of Chechnya | Hospital Productions, 2012/2020 | Bandcamp

Tonight I came across Tolstoy’s three questions, and they feel especially pressing in these overloaded and disorienting days:

1. What is the best time to do each thing?
2. Who should receive my attention?
3. What is the most important thing to do at all times?

Tolstoy examines these questions through a parable about a curious emperor who believes finding the answers will solve all his problems. His advisors develop elaborate schedules and routines. They debate the merits of science, art, and faith. After a bit of deception, gardening, and bloodshed, the emperor eventually discovers the answer is whatever is happening at the moment.

I’m thinking a lot about presence lately—whether maintaining some degree of control over my attention will ever arrive naturally, or if it must always be hunted, tended, and guarded.

Basic Channel – Presence

Inversion | Basic Channel, 1994 | More

Twenty minutes of grainy low-light concentration. A durable writing soundtrack for twenty-odd years.

This morning I thumbed through a six-year-old notebook and came across a bit of nostalgia for the golden age of blogging: I felt so much more connected to my sense of the world back in the days when I would jot down whatever came to mind on my little station in the ether, oblivious to the lunatic currency of social media. I did not think about writing as any kind of career or persona; it was simply a way of figuring out the world.

I’d like to find my way back to that sense of writing, and I’m glad I’ve committed to posting something each night for one year. But Christ, I picked a hell of a year for this exercise. My interest in triangulating art, faith, and the day’s events feels increasingly toothless, maybe even oblivious. There’s so much to figure out in 2020.

We gathered around the mayor’s mansion and sat in the street for thirty minutes of quiet. The silence was stunning. It had presence and weight that nearly muted the birds and the steady beat of three choppers in the sky. A different world felt very possible with hundreds of strangers sitting on the asphalt in silence, all of these bodies driven by a shared impulse, both disciplined and limbic.

I closed my eyes and contemplated the convulsions and pain of the past week. For a moment, I thought I understood the compassionate silence described by spiritualized leaders.

Then a small thing occurred, a minor incursion in the scheme of bloodshed and berserk police, but I think it’s worth noting as a sign of our times. The silent vigil was interrupted by the dial-tone drone of an emergency alert that radiated from our telephones. We opened our eyes and riffled through our pockets, fumbling for the mute button and shaking our heads at the message on our screens: Emergency Alert. Citywide curfew in effect at 8pm. No traffic allowed in Manhattan south of 96th Street.

The timing felt like a taunt: freedom colliding with authority, the spiritual scraping against the technological.

Drexciya – Take Your Mind

The Unknown Aquazone | Submerge, 1994 | Bandcamp

Revisiting Drexciya this week, and I’ve come across some academic papers about their elaborate mythology—there’s one about Drexciya’s “sonic third space”, and another called Inside ‘Neptune’s Lair’: Drexciya, Dystopia and Afrofuturism.

The curfew has been moved to eight o’clock because some people looted Macy’s last night. Today I learned that curfew comes from an old French term to “cover fire.” Medieval towns would ring a bell each night as an order for citizens to extinguish their hearths and prepare for sleep.

Helicopters hover in the sky all day, waiting for something to happen. The streets smell like fresh plywood. Shops on the corner are boarding up their windows. I say hello to an old man with a power drill and a bucket of screws. Everything’s coming fast and ugly this year.

But these anxieties feel so disconnected from the thrum of walking with a peaceful crowd down Lexington Avenue, citizens of all kinds demanding justice and dignity for those who’ve been denied for too long. For a moment, anything seems possible. A line from Don DeLillo’s Mao II comes to mind: “To become a crowd is to keep out death.”

There’s an eleven o’clock curfew in New York City after last night’s violence by the police and the looting of some luxury stores by cretins. I flipped on the news and joined the nation in watching a moment of political theater so demented it boggles the soul. The President of the United States stood in the Rose Garden and declared himself the “president of law and order” while the police tear-gassed and flash-bombed a crowd of peaceful protestors to clear a path to a church across the street. Then our president stood before the damaged doors of St. John’s for ten seconds, waving a Bible in the air, possibly upside down.

A chorus of bishops, priests, and pastors condemned the president for using violence to get to church. Some of these religious leaders were among the tear-gassed. For too long Christendom has given spiritual cover to America’s ugliest impulses, and I pray this is the beginning of a Reformation.

A few hours later, UH-72 Lakota and UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters descended on American citizens in a “show of force,” a military term-of-art for kicking up enough debris, noise, and dirt to frighten people away. To scare away the people asking the police to stop murdering black citizens. Cameras followed tense crowds while reporters discussed possible clashes and looting, as if willing violence into existence. A news anchor said, “We are descending into something that is not the United States of America tonight.” I’m not sure if this is true.