Notebook

Last night someone vandalized the enormous CNN logo that stands in front of their Atlanta headquarters. It was a strangely encouraging sight.

This afternoon on Fifth Avenue, the police stood in clumps with face masks and shields while people peacefully marched with their hands in the air. Some of the cops had their batons unsheathed for no reason, idly beating them against their palms like something they’ve seen in the movies. The presence of the militarized police introduces the prospect of violence like a promise, and that promise came true by nightfall.

Minneapolis. New York. Los Angeles. Chicago. Seattle. Miami. Philadelphia. Nashville. Detroit. Atlanta. Louisville. Washington DC. Nothing gets America’s attention like the destruction of private property.

Rubber bullets and curfews. Clips of reporters hit with pepper balls. Footage of cops busting up the aid stations set up by protestors. Crowds massed in front of Trump’s gilded towers. Burning cars smoldered next to images of people hugging, pleading, and sweeping up broken glass. So much raw pain and anger trapped beneath the performative gloss of social media with its demented scoreboard of hearts. Stripped of context, these scenes from a crisis begin to loop, reinforce, deform, and take on a life of their own. And our president stokes the fire, promising “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons.”

Meanwhile, a privately financed rocket launched into outer space, leaving behind this nation of uprisings, fires, and tear gas.

More uprisings across the nation. More clashes with the police whose very presence introduces the prospect of mad violence.

Flipping on the news, I watched a man stand before a crowd of reporters, his eyes filled with pain and conviction. His name is Pastor Brian Herron from Zion Baptist Church in Minneapolis, and he wore a mask that said Dignity. Shaking his head at the applause as he began to speak, he quickly short-circuited the press conference optics:

“I don’t know what you’re clapping for. This is serious. A man’s life has been lost at the hands of someone who has sworn to protect and serve. I don’t condone the violence, but I understand it. You want to focus on that, rather than the violence that kicked this all off. We’re not going to be distracted. We’re not going to allow you to change the narrative. That man pleaded for his life. And the camera is a witness, so I don’t know how many more witnesses you need. It’s time for justice to be served. We’re tired. This ain’t no photo op. This ain’t no game. We live this every day. You’re upset when Kaepernick takes a knee but you’re not upset when a knee is on a man’s neck? But we’re also here with hope. We’re going to keep fighting. We’re not going to quit. God said he’d give us beauty for ashes. And out of the ashes we’re going to walk together and live together—the way we were meant to.”

Video

An uneasy grey day like a hangover from yesterday’s sunshine. I went for an ugly run, stopping every few miles to ring the sweat from my shirt. Running is one of the few concrete things I can do to prepare for apocalyptic times. Lately I’ve been running to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shade of Winter” for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Maybe it’s the retro-tragic drumbeat. I thought about my writing and the courses I’m teaching this summer while I ground out my clumsy miles. I puzzled out the best way to approach an upcoming project that needs to offer hope while acknowledging grief.

When I flipped on the news around midnight, my concerns about running, writing, teaching, and everything else felt stupidly indulgent. The police murdered a man in Minneapolis the other day. They knelt on his neck while he cried that he could not breathe. One cop knelt while three officers watched, ignoring the bystanders pleading to let the man breathe. The cop knelt for eight minutes and 46 seconds, all of it captured on shaky cellphone video.

Uprisings are spreading across the country tonight. Louisville. Phoenix. Memphis. Protestors seized a police station in Minneapolis and launched fireworks. Reporters stood in front of burning buildings, a gleam in their eyes. Meanwhile, our president dashed off messages quoting racists from yesteryear: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” This will be an ugly summer.

Simon & Garfunkel – A Hazy Shade of Winter

Bookends | Columbia, 1966 | More

The amount of incense smoke that darkens a temple’s ceiling indicates the popularity of that particular god. I learned this last year in Taiwan, and it’s such a beautiful image: the accretion of so many wishes, prayers, and confessions painted in ash across the centuries.

Lately I’ve been wondering what the accretion of faith looks like in my own life, the mounting evidence of my little rituals and routines. Perhaps this journal is something like that, the nightly act of fumbling through the muck of the day’s thoughts, trying to articulate something sensible while the world grows ever more unsteady. But I’d like to find something more poetic and tangible, something closer to ash.

Haze across the city this morning, giving the skyline the effect of a painted backdrop. Warm weather is coming at last. I’m fantasizing about an open-air city this summer: a sprawling network of night markets and bazaars that reclaim the streets and devour the cars. Maybe something good can come from this pandemic.

I dream about the sweaty Saturday night energy of the markets in Taiwan, where the ancient ritual of the bazaar meets the neon and loudspeakers of a cyberpunk Trading Zone. Beef noodle soup, cosmetics, and cellphones. Diced melons, jewelry, and flatscreens. Everything a person could need, all ad hoc and on the fly. She bought a wooden comb, I bought a smoked plum juice, and together we watched an old man with a cigarette on his lip auction off a Bluetooth headset, lawn furniture, and an enormous stuffed panda in ten seconds flat.

Vangelis – Blade Runner Blues

Blade Runner Soundtrack, 1982 | More

Today is Memorial Day, and my screen is more schizophrenic than usual. Remembrances of lost soldiers and advertisements for summer sales collide with visual shrapnel from America’s pandemic-themed culture war. I scroll through images of unmasked men with defiant grins, semiautomatic weapons, and don’t tread on me t-shirts. I read messages shaming the crowds flocking to beaches and boardwalks. I watch shaky video footage of masked shoppers hissing and cursing at an unmasked interloper in the frozen food section. Leave it to America to transform a virus into political theater.

Three years ago, I attended a Memorial Day service in a small-town cemetery where the sheriff bemoaned the “unpatriotic media that criticizes our president.” What should have been a compassionate speech honoring the sacrifice of our soldiers was instead laced with the venom of talk radio. I stood among the tombstones with my hand over my heart while he described a hallucinatory war against American values, “a war which may never be won.” I glanced at the nearby graves of my father and grandfather, both veterans, and wondered what they would think of this sheriff. “America must always come first in our hearts,” he said. We quietly dispersed for hot dogs.

“There are only volunteers in hell,” said the radio as I pointed the car south after the ceremony. Speeding from Michigan to New Orleans, I scrolled through the ecclesiastics and berserkers of talk radio, an opera of fear masquerading as fury. “This is a war for our souls, ladies and gentlemen, so join the conservative army—” static “—fight to remain a Christian nation—” static “—where the second amendment comes first.”

Conservative radio hums with cult logic, nudging its members toward real-life violence in the name of George Washington and Jesus Christ. There is something very rotten in Christendom if it can be used to sanctify greed, bigotry, pollution, and belt-fed weapons. And what begins at the margins of the radio dial eventually circulates through our screens until it finds its way into the mouths of small-town sheriffs.

After sixteen hours of talk radio, interstate winds, and screaming into metal boxes for food, my grip on the world grew slippery, an effect heightened by the voices that flickered through the static after midnight. Why can’t we escape the earth? they asked. Why is the universe so hostile to human life? And how can we be sure the earth is round?

One caller was convinced we were living beneath a dome on a different planet. A man in Knoxville worried that humans might be a dark army for an alien force. Maybe the universe doesn’t exist, said a caller from Baton Rouge. Perhaps the sun is hanging from a tree somewhere. Compared to the talking points circulating through our screens nowadays, these people sounded positively open-minded.

Bohren & Der Club of Gore – Midnight Radio 7

Midnight Radio | Epistrophy, 1995 | More

Riffling through my small box of family memories, I came across a folded clipping that said my grandfather’s grandfather was appointed the postmaster of a small town in Michigan in 1905. A crinkled scrap of paper accompanied the newspaper with a note written in an unfamiliar hand: His was a secular duty but he found the pealing of the bell a very real link with God.

I know so little about this man aside from one piece of family lore: his daily four-mile walk began to tire him out as he grew older, so he asked the mayor to install a bench at the halfway point between his fishery and the bar. There he would stop each evening to rest and read the day’s paper.

My grandfather’s grandfather lived through the 1918 pandemic, and I wish I could talk with him about it. Did he meet it with acceptance or anxiety in his corner of the world? Did the virus breed conspiracy and delusion like it’s doing today? Picking up the crinkled note again, I began to wonder about his soul. What did he believe? And who was the author of this oddly formal message written on graph paper? What compelled this person to describe my great-great-grandfather’s spiritual relationship with the “pealing of the bell”? I wonder if there will be a pealing of the bell for me.

Arvo Pärt – Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten for Strings and One Bell

Rudolf Werthen & I Fiamminghi | More

I’m slowly forging through High Weirdness, Erik Davis’s inventory of 1970s mysticism. He writes wonderfully about the feedback loops between our image world and the sense of spiritual possibility: “The object of weird fascination is folded back into the subject, constructing a strange loop of cultural play, recursive enigma, and extraordinary encounter that makes a raid on the real.”

Each time I come across the word “ontological,” I need to look it up, and the definition always inspires a low-grade panic attack because I know I’m reading the same sentence about “being, becoming, and existence” for the thousandth time.

The fuzzy line between media consumption and my soul reminds me of a moment in Don DeLillo’s Underworld when one of his characters zips along the Jersey Turnpike:

…and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays—all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality…

And I’m generating terrible realities for myself when I vacantly scroll through the day’s headlines, clickbait, two-minute hates, and social media psychodramas.

The Field – Looping State of Mind

Looping State of Mind | Kompakt, 2011 | Bandcamp

Time is a concept. Time is a flat circle. Clocks only measure other clocks. These ideas feel more valid than ever during these days of shuttered cities and social isolation. This morning I looked at my watch and wondered how it was already the 22nd. And the 22nd of what? For a moment, I genuinely did not know whether it was April or May, and I had to double-check my watch against the calendar on my telephone. It was the sensation of freefall.

The world is speeding up, yet daily life feels as if it’s slowed to crawl. Science says it’s because new memories require the landmarks of new faces, sights, and experiences.

DVA Damas – Time Dilation

Nightshade | Downwards, 2013 | Boomkat

Last night I dreamt that I was on a massive ship with skyscrapers. We could not leave and we would never reach our destination. Every so often, new people would arrive and they were terrified when I approached, for I was a ghost, haunting them.

Where does the vocabulary of dreams come from? Each morning I wake to the imaginary babble of fully-formed news reports and television clips while skating across sleep—where is the line between a dream and a hallucination, voices in the head?

My writing is too tight, balled up in repressed emotion and god-knows-what. Perhaps I should jack into the subconscious life, have more confidence, and let reason fly. Learn to keep the pen moving without pause. Describe the umpteenth day of statistics and doubt in this endless spring, the brutal sound of someone eating an apple in the other room.

Life has locked into a tight loop. I wake up and perform my morning ablutions. I tune into the governor’s morning briefing that veers from the data-driven to the deeply weird. I write and work. I step outside and look at the sky. Sometimes I go for an ugly run. I make phone calls. I tend this journal. Repeat.

The only variance is the impossible imagery that fills my screen. This morning I scrolled through images of floods in Michigan. Last night the Sears tower went dark, haunting the Chicago skyline with a dark silhouette that bordered on the sublime. A flurry of headlines mistakenly announced that NASA has discovered a parallel universe where time runs backward. They didn’t, but it’s a clear symptom of how much we’ve come to believe this is not the best of all possible worlds. Meanwhile the television says, “Things work out all the time for monkeys that turn out to be useless for human beings.” I think they’re talking about vaccines, but who knows anymore.