How many times do I need to remind myself not to look at my telephone in the morning? Woke up to a message about freezes, pay cuts, and furloughs at the school where I teach. Then I read that our president suggested injecting household disinfectants to kill the virus and clean our lungs. It’s become a hallmark of the times: thinking something is a joke until enough headlines and articles convince you it is true.
Spent the rest of the day scrolling past local, regional, and national alerts instructing Americans not to drink bleach. Our president, this man with a name like a slur, he also said something surreal about injecting light into our veins, but there’s no poetry in stupidity. Sometimes there’s poetry in anger, and I saw it scrawled across the street this afternoon.
As of today, 50,000 people have died from this virus in America. There’s the very real and woozy sensation of living in a country that’s circling the drain. Waiting in line to enter the supermarket, a woman dressed in blue scrubs stood six feet behind me and hollered into her phone. “You want to tell me this is sensationalized? Come talk a walk with me through the fucking ICU.”
Flipping through an old notebook last night, I came across a page dedicated to the first time I saw a painting by Hubert Robert. Such beautiful cadence in that name: Hubert Robert. Say it out loud and you can’t help but smile.
I remember walking through a gallery at the Art Institute in Chicago, hurrying past portraits of the royal dead. Then I saw three massive paintings of ancient columns and arches stained with moss and time. The green-pink skies felt like the uneasy atmosphere just before a tornado. I nearly overlooked the tiny figures among the broken stones, their bodies dwarfed by architecture that had been designed for gods. A kerchiefed woman crouched over a puddle, scooping water into a pail. An elderly man groped among the rubble with a cane. A young man leaned against the shattered torso of a statue, flirting with two girls in bonnets. A mother cradled a bawling child. A floppy-eared dog gnawed a bone.
I studied these faces living among the ruins of a civilization that once belonged to giants. The label next to these paintings offered no information beyond the titles: The Old Temple, The Fountains, and The Obelisk—dispassionate names that gave them the force of fact or documentary. They were painted in 1788 by Robert, who was known for his capricci, a genre of architectural fantasy where scale and time are disregarded. He is now one of my favorite painters.
Standing before Robert’s ruins, I tried to understand the hum in my belly, the sense of longing. But it wasn’t that mysterious: everyone pines for a fictional past sometimes. Whether it is childhood or the romanticized splendor of Rome, nostalgia for a better time is hardwired. Preparing to tell the tale of Odysseus, Homer had said, “Come now, let me tell you stories of better men,” and the poet Ovid mourned the loss of the noble ages of gold and silver in the year 8.
The woman with her pail of water, the blind man, the flushed lovers: they were dwarfed by history, eking out an existence in its shadows. I wonder if Robert was mocking our desire to retreat into the past. Although his paintings are devoted to the relics of a grander age, they also feel like prophecy, a vision of future generations fetching water among the shattered cinderblocks of discount department stores. Such dystopian scenes once sparked a dark little thrill. But these days, the idea is no longer a remote entertainment or a weather report from a distant land.
Heat-mapping cameras are being designed to scan our distance from one another in workspaces and on the streets. Our infection status will be logged and tracked by our telephones. Overwhelmed by living in the future, I hunt for a chaser, eventually finding something human in a story about two elderly lovers whose budding romance was cut short when the border between their towns was closed. Each day they meet at three o’clock in the afternoon for a picnic on a rural road where plastic fencing separates Germany from Denmark. I wonder how they’re making sense of this world.
There should be a clinical term for the sensation of wanting to look at my phone while looking at my phone. I turn it off and go outside to look at the flowers. I’ve never stopped to enjoy the flowers before.
First proper thunderstorm of the season in New York City. A crack of thunder rattled the windows and its violence reminded me of a cruise with the in-laws a few years ago, back when cruises were foolish but not suicidal. We were on a ship heading towards Alaska with extended family from Taiwan, Florida, California, and all points between, a rare reunion to celebrate an uncle’s golden wedding anniversary.
Hunks of ice drifted past the ship. Green cliffs rose into the mist. A woman yawned and said she was going back to the casino. That’s when I understood why people jump from cruise ships. When there’s nowhere to go except spaces for pleasure-seeking, spiritual decay begins to take root.
C. and I wandered the ship until we found a vacant lounge that played haunted ballroom music between bingo sessions. We made a list of the things we wanted to do in the future, grand plans for public art projects that now seem ludicrous in these days of social distancing.
I often dream about the North. The sea and bright wind, the promise of some final reckoning with white lights, and everything swept clean.
I remember the sound of white thunder, that bone-shuddering crack as another piece of a glacier fell into the sea. Most of all, I remember the sound of so many voices cheering and our cameras clicking, as if we were applauding the result of our terrible way of life.
Today the price of oil went negative for the first time since we’ve started keeping track of these things. There’s too much oil now. So much that we have no place to put it. I’m not bright enough to understand the implications beyond the fact that we’re living in an age of graphs and charts doing unthinkable things. Meanwhile, our president does everything he can to make things worse: tonight he announced that he was suspending immigration to America “to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens.” It seems appropriate that a rejection of the American experiment would be announced with idiotic capitalization.
I’m pressing on with Camus’s The Plague after pulling it from my bookshelf in some sort of fugue state two nights ago. I thought I’d only dreamt about picking up the book in the grey light before dawn; I’m not even sure how it ended up on the shelf. I don’t remember buying it. But I’ll keep reading it because I want to believe in limbic wisdom and subconscious patterns.
My eyes stutter and loop through the words before me because my attention span has been chewed up by the news. I read the same sentence on page five again and again, struck by how it harmonizes with today’s headlines about oil, stocks, and employment numbers: “Think what it must be for a dying man, trapped behind hundreds of walls all sizzling with heat, while the whole population, sitting in cafés or hanging on the telephone, is discussing shipments, bills of lading, discounts!”
A world so quickly and thoroughly changed. I find myself frequently returning to a century-old line from The Surrealist Manifesto: “Let yourself be carried along. Events will not tolerate your interference.”
In the wake of the world’s first mechanized war, the Dada movement ferociously rejected institutional logic before fading into the dreamlife of Surrealism. Some of us turn outwards, others inwards. Which direction will dominate after this crisis?
Dreamlife and reality feel as if they’re blending a little more each day. Last night I woke before dawn for a sleepy pee and thought I’d dreamt about standing before my bookcase and picking up a copy of The Plague by Camus. When I woke a few hours later with the book on my chest, I began to read about the town of Oran’s reckoning with an illness that begins with a dead rat on the stairs: “It was about this time that our townsfolk began to show signs of uneasiness.”
I can’t stop staring at this photograph. I zoom deeper into these faces bunched against the glass, as if I might find a reason for their anger. I study the woman’s mouth, teeth bared and jaw dropped, probably wrapped around a word like tyranny or freedom.
The aesthetics are the usual garbled protest logic: American flags, bullhorns, ballcaps with the name of our president, and a Guy Fawkes mask—a man who tried to blow up the King. The caption in The New York Times is deadly bland: “Protesters at the Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio,” by Joshua A. Bickel for The Columbus Dispatch. But it’s so much more than a local protest and you should spend time with the whole image. This is a portrait of the future, one that will be studied by historians in the year 3000 who want to understand the end of America.
These are people who don’t like being asked to stay home to protect the vulnerable.
Disinformation and agitprop are spreading like the coronavirus, infecting their hosts with rage. Imitation becomes a form of infection. Those mouths frozen in mid-holler have the same gestalt as our president’s face, all petulant lip and snarled teeth. It’s a mouth as familiar and All-American as Coca-Cola and McDonald’s. It’s a mouth that appears in my dreams.
Look at those people massed together, spit flying and breathing heavy in the midst of a pandemic. I hate to admit it, but a dark part of me is rooting for Darwinism. And that’s the problem. Because what kind of damage and pain has led these people to the doors of this building? Can it ever be unwound?
Meanwhile in New York City, a man shouts from a rooftop on First Avenue. “I’m gonna give you a treat tonight!” A bit of Vegas patter ricochets across the buildings and Sinatra begins to croon. “Come Fly with Me” reverberates through the shuttered streets, otherworldly and haunted. I stand in the rain wearing my bandana and I listen to the whole thing. After the song ends, I cheer along with strangers who whistle and shout unseen from their windows above me.
Difficult mood today. I watched footage of thousands of protestors swarm Michigan’s capital to chant “Lock her up” because they don’t like the governor telling them to stay home during a pandemic. They called it “Operation Gridlock” and hollered into cameras about tyranny. They carried guns.
Maybe it’s because I heard a chipper news anchor announce that only six hundred people died from this virus yesterday in New York City. Only. This is the bar for good news. On my desk, there’s my bandana, my notebook, and a photograph of my parents. I wonder what they would make of this situation if they were still here, if they could see how much the world has changed. Would they have any familial wisdom or generational memory? What would they say? I have absolutely no idea. There is no frame of reference.
This season is marked by the utter impossibility of considering the future. Maybe I could become a Zen lesson in the art of presence, but it feels more like I have the attention span of a goldfish: understanding the world only nine seconds at a time.
Brittle atmosphere at the supermarket. Our bemused collectivism has shifted towards something more twitchy. A man snipes at a girl for not standing six feet away. Others blithely plow through the aisles and shoulder past me like beings from another planet, unmasked and uncaring.
I leave the usual bag of groceries by my elderly neighbor’s door, a woman I admire because she lives only on cheese, dark chocolate, and papaya. I knock lightly and head down the stairwell like a backwards thief, and I hear her voice calling behind me: “Slow down, there’s no need to hurry through this world.”
Time blurs. Every day feels like it’s either Monday or Saturday. Why is there something so heartbreaking about the sound of someone you love diligently brushing their teeth?
I joined the line outside the supermarket, all of us spaced six feet apart and wearing our mandated masks while we waited for someone to exit to somebody else could go inside. This gave me plenty of time to contemplate the message on the back of the woman’s windbreaker in front of me: “You can’t control the wind but you can adjust your sails.”
The Western States Pact. The Midwestern Coalition. The Northeast Pact. America’s states are forming regional coalitions as they chart a return to life after a pandemic. These names have the cadence of the future; they acknowledge the reality of cities and sprawl rather than fictional borders. This could be the first step towards breaking America into something much more functional and interesting. From the personal to the local, boundaries at all scales are being redrawn.
This sense of history falling apart sent my thoughts to a neon graveyard in Las Vegas. You can study the history of Vegas through its neon lights, an American art form peppered with terms like “daytime neon” and “shed job.” Las Vegas’s neon museum is a labyrinth of candy-colored signs that spell out beautiful slang: Stardust and the Sands, the Tropicana and the Silver Slipper. I remember walking through corridors of jumbled neon and thinking this was the poetry of the nation: the grammar of dead casinos.
Heavy rain and wind today. I stood at the window and watched raindrops slide down the glass like I was six years old again. My thoughts echoed the weather, petulant and gloomy. What am I doing with this life? This season of crisis could be a time to rethink everything. Make some big decisions. Go back to school. Become a nurse, a scientist, or a mystic. Leave America behind and walk the earth.
“Make something for lunch,” she told me. “Start there.”
