Notebook

My thoughts return to the stars again because there’s nowhere to go on a Saturday night during a pandemic. Consider the word ecstasy in its strict sense, a Greek word that describes standing outside of one’s body. To be elsewhere. To escape the self. And once freed, where else would you go but toward the stars? Thus the painter and poet’s desire to capture a sensation that can only be described in terms of trees reaching for the sky and rivers pouring into oceans before joining the clouds.

Tonight I’m scrolling through the blurry photographs I took while trying to capture the moonlight over the Baltic Sea, where C. and I spent the first weeks of the year on a small Finnish island, practicing a very different kind of isolation. There’s a world of difference between solitude by choice versus loneliness by situation.

I’ve gotten in the habit of walking to the river each night to look at the sky. Lately I’ve been overwhelmed with the desire to know the language of constellations, the location of celestial bodies. It seems like a tragedy to go through life not knowing the names of the lights overhead.

There’s a touch of sadness whenever I watch the stars. I can’t help but search for my mom and dad up there. Although I do not believe in heaven, I remember the people I lost each time I stare into the night, obeying a nerve-wired impulse rooted in the magical thinking of the ancients. Two thousand years ago, the philosopher Posidonius introduced the most sublime image of the afterlife: “The virtuous rise to the stellar sphere and spend their time watching the stars go round.”

I’ve also found consolation in the words of Plotinus, who believed the stars have souls because “the heavenly bodies naturally inspire and make mankind less lonely in this physical universe.” Living in the final days of the Roman Empire, Plotinus turned away from “the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty.”

Difficult times can lead to otherworldly philosophy.

Tonight the few stars I saw in New York City looked cold, almost digital. Then I realized I was looking at an airplane.

Leyland Kirby – My Dream Contained a Star

from Eager to Tear Apart the Stars | 2011 | More

Last night I dreamt about a god who was angry because the noise of humanity prevented him from sleeping. This dream followed me into the vacant streets today, a city shuttered and hushed with only the occasional masked figure. I stood in the middle of First Avenue for a moment, losing the line between reality and dream.

A damp April day, the sky paper blank. Sixteen million people have filed for unemployment, yet the stock market is rising. We’ve built such a senseless hall of mirrors. If this pandemic doesn’t restore our senses, what will it take?

These days I walk to the market like I’m about to commit a poorly-planned crime. Even if our bandanas and scarves do fuck-all in terms of protection, they are symbols of taking this thing seriously. A reminder to keep our distance and keep others safe.

The curve might be flattening in New York City, leaving us with numbers that are difficult for the soul to square: fewer people are going to the hospital yet the death rate climbs higher each day. Many of those who entered the hospital two weeks ago aren’t walking out.

Fifteen thousand dead in America since March. And we still have politicians saying it’s not that bad.

Today the last sensible candidate dropped out of the Democratic primary, leaving the nation mired in incoherence from all sides. Strange to think there was a time when being politically informed sounded dignified, even noble. Now it’s like flushing your soul down the toilet.

They named the virus corona because it looks like a crown. Each night I join the rest of the city in dreaming garbled dreams about apexes and plateaus. Like so many others who are non-essential, my radius has been reduced to agoraphobic dimensions: living room to bedroom and back again, sometimes the corner bodega. Before sleep comes tonight, I want to remember space and motion. My thoughts immediately turn to the desert.

In the desert I drive fast and long because it’s a place of land-speed records and shattered sound barriers. Its utter stillness is a counterpoint for human motion. The Great Basin and the Mojave, the Sonoran and Chihuahuan. Desert logic deforms time and space. Soon it’s a quick hundred-mile drive to see a decayed military base or a wild sculpture made by conspiracy theorists and faith-dealers.

I never stopped in the desert, not even while crashed out in budget motels. Nerves still humming from the day’s driving, I’d stay hopped up on sound. The fritzing neon and grumbling ice machines, laugh tracks bleeding through the walls while long-haul trucks sped through the dark.

Tonight I want to find my way back to this sensation.

Spiritualized – Lay Back in the Sun

From Electric Mainline | Dedicated, 1995 | More

A desert-driving classic.

Sitting by the river on god-only-knows which day of this pandemic season, I watch a little boy say hello to a bird before it flies away. Then I dig the old lady who cut a tiny hole into her surgical mask so she can keep smoking her Benson & Hedges. After minimizing the threat of the coronavirus before becoming infected, Britain’s prime minister has been moved into the intensive care unit. In America, we’ve crossed the threshold of ten thousand dead. But there are signs the infection rate is plateauing in New York. The light is fragile, but it is there.

Dusting off some old notebooks last night, I found a diary about respiration, intubation, and oxygenation from the year I spent with my father, waiting for a lung. There’s an entry about a recurring dream from those long weeks in the hospital: I am on a small boat on a dark river, scooping lungs out of the river like fish and handing them to everyone I see along the shore.

Seefeel – Air-Eyes

From Starethrough | Warp, 1994 | More

The park is crowded today and it’s an awkward but kind dance among strangers, six feet apart. A woman bickers with somebody’s face on her telephone screen, the two of them arguing about the best way to dye your hair at home. “And I’ll have red dye everywhere like a murder scene,” she says. A few middle-aged men stand in a loose circle, loudly reading emails to one another. I hear someone say that a tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the coronavirus.

We wear bandanas and scarves across our mouths like a haphazard gang or makeshift religion. The effect is midway between a spur-of-the-moment heist and a gesture of atonement.

Another day of sirens punctuated by the daily seven o’clock cheer. For a moment each evening, the sound of emergency is overlaid with determined joy. Our faces holler out of windows, some of us banging on pots and pans. A voice above me is remarkably talented at ululating, and I try to imagine the face it belongs to. Sirens and cheers, these are the sounds that shape our days. And silence. The hush on the streets has the airless texture that briefly follows a storm, the muted acoustics of a vacant shopping mall. When this city finally revs back to life, it will be wonderful but also overstimulating after so much sense deprivation.

Fluxion – Subliminal Tone

From Vibrant Forms II | Chain Reaction, 2000 | More

A smudged rendition of that classic Chain Reaction sound that echoes and spins.

It’s a disorienting sensation, knowing we are living through a season that will be written into history books, a before and an after. The effect is compounded because there are no soldiers or floodwaters, nothing visible to fight or flee. Sometimes it feels like a mass hallucination, all of us wearing masks and lined up six feet apart to buy bananas and bread.

I thought I’d devote my energies to becoming spartan and pure, brand new and all-seeing. Instead I scroll and refresh.

Even though I should know better, I read pandemic think-pieces and predictions. So many predictions. That we will be better people on the other side of this. That we will be worse. That it will bring us together, that it will tear us apart. That we will become a new kind of species, forever skittish of one another. Shaking hands will become a relic from a foolish age. Others say the pent-up desire for human contact will find us crowding restaurants and savoring public life like never before. There will be a new labor movement, some say, and predatory capitalism will finally be knocked on its heels. Others envision a frightening new style of authoritarianism.

My only prediction is that our president, recognizing his popularity is plummeting, will use the pandemic as a pretext for suspending the election.

But I can’t stop thinking about those monkeys in Thailand. I watch shaky footage of monkeys rioting through the streets because no tourists were there to feed them. When today’s pundits and soothsayers start offering post-pandemic predictions—let alone whenever I think I have any bright notions—I must remind myself that nobody saw this virus leading to monkeys punching trashcans.

Now they’re saying the virus spreads by talking and breathing. We can kill each other just by being a person. One million infections worldwide, six thousand dead in America, and fifteen hundred dead in New York City.

And yes, I’m beginning to pray even though I don’t believe in much and I don’t know what to say. For now, I bow my head and hang on to a line from Voltaire: “Doubt is not an entirely agreeable state, but certainty is a ridiculous one.” An old man in New Orleans once told me that doubt is a conversation.

Some shops have signs taped to their doors: mask required to enter. We’re finally becoming a culture of masks in America. But the more critical shift is understanding that we wear them to protect others, not ourselves. And it’s a tragic twist, this spirit of collectivism borne from social distancing. Each day the American government reveals its staggering contempt for its citizens. We might finally take to the streets. But we can’t. Not yet.

Nights are getting weirder. So many sirens. Lone drunks vomiting in doorways. A man leans against a mailbox, eyes covered by a hood and hands pressed together like a prayer, mumble-chanting and grinning. Another ambulance speeds down First Avenue.

Clams Casino – Say Your Prayers

From Instrumentals 4 Mixtape, 2017 | Download

Passing each other on the sidewalk, we hold our breaths like children in a graveyard. The numbers have shifted from coherent to numbing. Over 200,000 infections in America tonight, and nearly five thousand dead. People close to me are falling ill.

The playgrounds have closed. More and more, it’s hitting home: I grew up during a uniquely lucky and stable time. Waiting in line at the supermarket checkout, I watch a woman spin around and shriek at the man standing four or five feet behind her. “Six feet apart. What don’t you understand about that? Six. Feet. Apart.” Her voice is like a wild creature behind her surgical mask, a boxed-in hysteria more unsettling than any exponential curve.

Our president gave a press conference with a man who runs a pillow company. He encouraged us to use these solitary days to read our Bibles. Our president was chosen by God, the pillow man said. And there’s an Old Testament logic to this idea: a plague visited upon a nation that chose a cruel game show host as its leader.

Meanwhile, spring continues to bloom like a taunt, conjuring visions of crowded cafés, street corners, and parks. This pandemic season reminds me of the logic of grief: the constant loop of forgetting followed by painfully remembering that everything has changed.

Daniel Avery & Alessandro Cortini – Illusion of Time

From Illusion of Time | Phantasy, 2020 | Bandcamp

My favorite record of the year so far, a grainy blend of the haunted and hopeful that captures the current mood.