Notebook

I used to be so shy. There was a time when I would count how many words I said each day. At night I logged the number into a notebook. Sixteen. Twenty-three. Anything in the thirties was a good day.

This new season of self-isolation brings those quiet adolescent days to mind. The ambient chitchat among strangers has fallen silent because we’re told to stay home. No more talk about the weather at the café or mumbled apologies as we jostle through a crowded train. No more meetings, events, or dinners with unfamiliar faces where I would try to say clever things. All of that feels distant and silly now. Nobody needs my advice and I hold no fascinating opinions. Still, I don’t hope these quiet days don’t last too long.

We gather in the park because there’s no place else to go. Because we need to see the sky. We keep our distance and nod at one another, more aware of each other’s presence than before. Looking up, I see the first signs of spring and I remember reading something from Spinoza that said god lives in the trees.

These are long days of suspension. Brittle energy fills the city as we retreat inside for safety. Yet there are no storm clouds in the sky, no soldiers in the streets. Standing at the window, I watch the skyscrapers glint in the late afternoon light. For a moment I’m convinced everything is just fine. That I must have imagined the whole thing.

They’re talking about life disrupted through May and maybe August. They’re talking about mailing Americans thousand-dollar checks. They’re talking about sheltering in place. Sheltering from each other.

It’s the texture of a dream, this sensation that something has gone deeply wrong even though the cause cannot be seen. There’s an echo of those first days and weeks after losing my mother and then my father. I’d wake each morning thinking I’d dreamt such a strange and terrible dream and should tell them about it. It took several seconds, sometimes minutes before I remembered.

Hypnagogic. Hypnopompic. These words describe the terrain between consciousness and dreams, the rich land I’ve ceded to a tiny screen that I keep pumping for new pandemic information on either side of sleep. They describe those slippery moments when our thoughts remain tinted by the suspension of disbelief that allows us to dream.

Coming back from a run, I stopped dead when I saw the vacant steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. No clumps of tourists or people posing by the fountains. No hot dog or halal vendors, no old men selling watercolors in the shade. I yanked my headphones out of my ears, sensing this was a moment to be honored, the sight of a city so quickly emptied of its heat and noise. Fifth Avenue felt like a soundstage. A woman’s voice drifted across the street. “Surreal,” she said. And it was. But maybe the days before this pandemic will soon seem even more surreal.

Leyland Kirby – Tonight Is the Last Night of the World

From Sadly the Future Is No Longer What It Was | 2009 | Bandcamp

A haunting score for moments hypnagogic and hypnopompic.

I woke late and began my day by scanning an article that said gun shops are seeing a surge in first-time buyers. Head still on my pillow, I continued clicking and scrolling through the latest coronavirus news. Over four thousand confirmed cases across the nation, four hundred of them in New York City. The stock market crashed again and my feeds were filled with chatter about curfews and sheltering in place. I watched drone videos of empty Italian highways. I need to rethink my morning routine.

Hypervigilence and weltschmerz are not sustainable. Presence and compassion demand sanity, which requires some degree of information hygiene. Or at least waiting until I’ve had some coffee, a shower, and a few minutes to remember my name before tuning into the latest pandemic news.

Determined not to spend the day scared in front of a screen, I begin to clean. I clean because I have a book to finish, papers to grade, taxes to file, and my finances are cratering. I clean because it provides a brief illusion of control. I sand some wood and paint some shelves. I fix the leaky shower. I dig into cluttered closets and rethink where to put my record collection.

Riffling through an old box of keepsakes, I come across a note that I wrote to her five years ago: Let’s become dedicated night owls and haunt all-night diners. It’s only been twenty-four hours since the restaurants closed, but sitting in front of a plate of French toast at midnight while talking about anything besides this virus feels like a scene from some lost golden age.

Autechre – VLetrmx21

From Garbage | Warp, 1995 | Boomkat

But if you’re looking for some weltschmerz, this song is the perfect score.

Starbucks has removed the chairs from its tables. News anchors wear gloves to model good behavior. We saw the coronavirus coming for months yet our leaders did nothing, clinging to national mythologies and hubris. Now New York City has closed its schools, restaurants, bars, and theaters. No more gatherings of fifty people or more. I run through Central Park, passing joggers with balaclavas and kerchiefs wrapped around their faces like they’ve been throwing Molotov cocktails. Neighbors sit on separate benches, loudly describing their days. On First Avenue I saw a man wearing a World War I mustard gas mask and I could not tell if this was paranoia or parody.

Tonight two elderly men stood at opposite ends of the television screen, bickering and campaigning from a hygienic distance. This feels like the last presidential debate. Society might look very different on the other side of this pandemic. Maybe we’ll put on a better show.

Flying Saucer Attack – Distance

From Distance | Domino, 1994 | Spotify

These days I feel better with the television news playing in the background, even though it’s nothing but nonstop dread and pharmaceutical advertisements. I want mainstream information, the sense of something shared. I find comfort in the illusion of bodies across the nation gathered before the same broadcast rather than privately scrolling through the algorithmically tailored hysteria and moralizing of the internet.

Today I bought a few pieces of lumber from the hardware store, dredged my toolbox from the closet, and spent the afternoon sawing, sanding, and varnishing. I needed to work with my hands. To be reminded that I can make something that takes up space and serves a need. I built a small table to collect the overflow from my desk.

Perhaps I’m turning into my father and grandfather, men who retreated into their garages to build wooden vases and boxes in times of distress. So many half-finished widgets littered their workbenches after they died, their function and intentions unknown. I thought about them both as I worked, wondering what they would make of these pandemic days.

After I finished building my table, I found the pawn my father carved five years ago to replace the one we’d lost from our set. We fell into the habit of playing chess each night at the hospital while we waited for his new lung. He whittled it quickly and I can still see the blade coming dangerously close to his oxygen tubes. This pawn is one of my most cherished possessions, and I set it on my new table tonight, a small gesture of the communion I crave.

Flying Saucer Attack – Instrumental Wish

From Distance | Domino, 1994 | Spotify

One of the songs I’ve played the most over the past two decades. And more than ever these days.

Friday the 13th and the city feels like it’s emptying out. I feel a twitchy need to assign significance to the date nowadays. I’m beginning to understand the street preachers and late night radio voices who root through arcane numerology and biblical verses that implicate Wall Street, Hollywood, and the United Nations. Anything for a semblance of control.

This morning I walked into an empty barbershop. “Is it strange to get a haircut today?” I asked, waving my hands at the general atmosphere of pandemic anxiety. “No, no,” they said. “Please come in. We need the business.”

The president declared a national emergency this afternoon. He also insisted this epidemic wasn’t his problem. Gatherings of more than five hundred people are forbidden in New York City. Some supermarkets have no more rice, water, and toilet paper. Rumors circulate about closed schools and suspended subway service. Copies of Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year from 1665 are back-ordered through April. Nearly everyone I know has rewatched Contagion.

Crushing lines at the supermarket and the shelves are empty. The streets hum with a hunter-gather energy like the days before a hurricane. Except there is no storm, only the prospect of staying indoors.

The stock market crashed again, its worst day since 1987. Sports leagues have canceled their seasons, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is closed indefinitely. Canada’s prime minister is in self-isolation. News anchors deliver frightening pandemic updates against a swirly purple background with tumbling microbes. This is not helping my feverish state of mind. I carry four gallons of water to an elderly woman’s apartment down the street, just in case. Then I watch footage of monkeys rioting in a park somewhere in Thailand because there are no tourists to feed them.

Abul Mogard – Slate-Coloured Storm

From Circular Forms | Ecstatic Recordings, 2014 | Bandcamp

A beautiful song of suspension. And maybe the story is true, that Mogard is a Serbian metal worker who began building synthesizers during his retirement, hoping to recreate the acoustics of the factory floor. Either way, this is the soundtrack of myth.

Infections continue to spike, throwing daily life into a state of suspension. There’s no other story in the news, there’s nothing else to think about these days. I wanted to write about Robert Ryman, who taught himself to paint while working as a guard at Moma in the 1950s. This is a dream of mine, to construct a simple life that teaches me to deal with silence and presence while learning how to paint. I thought I’d steer this journal towards art and trying to find some kind of god, but that feels silly now.

Tonight the president announced America was closing its borders against Europe for reasons unknown. Meanwhile in New York City, we’re told the subway is safe although we should avoid taking it. International borders are being closed and China has cranked its surveillance state to full volume, geofencing its citizens and corralling them with drones. Like removing our shoes at the airport, I don’t see how any of this gets unwound.

Going for a late-night run, I pass a screen that says a beloved all-American actor just announced he has the coronavirus too.

Aphex Twin – Tassels

From Selected Ambient Works II | Warp, 1994 | More

Soundtracking these days with this song of unease.

The zips and color fields of abstract painting have never moved me beyond a chilly appreciation for their role in pushing art to its vanishing point. Walking into Newman’s The Stations of the Cross, however, felt spiritual. The title does the lifting here, juxtaposing the weight of violence and supernatural suffering against fifteen monochrome canvases. My eyes tried to map their brittle lines against the bloodshed and trembling on that day at Golgotha, but I could find no correlation, and I was left alone with those dispassionate shapes and a woman on a bench with her pencil paused in the air, hovering between contemplation and frustration.

A security guard rocked on his heels, occasionally emitting a rubber squeak that emphasized the hush of the gallery, a place with the secret air of an empty gymnasium after hours.

When the series was first displayed in 1966, Newman said these images were based not on Jesus’s cry of lama sabachthani: Why hast thou forsaken me? “This is the passion,” he said. “Not the terrible walk up the Via Dolorosa, but the question that has no answer.”

For a moment, I understood this sensation, the sense of utter vacancy, a hollowing of thought that left space for something greater. In my notebook, I scribbled this sentence: The denial of beauty leaves one greedy for any thread of hope, no matter how thin. This felt like a profound insight at the time, one of those camera-flash thoughts that comes bright and quick before fading forever. Artists like Newman and Mark Rothko insisted their blank fields of color were not academic exercises but spiritual statements. Although I feel lucky to have caught the briefest sense of this, I also left the room wondering if you can nail any damned thing to the wall as long as you attach it to the drama of myth.

How to concentrate when the economy is crashing and our government does not care about the spiking number of infections? Walking past the television to get a banana, I hear an expert say, “The worst is yet to come.” So many years of institutional rot are catching up to us. People make comparisons to Rome.

Italy went into lockdown tonight. A national quarantine has closed all shops, schools, restaurants, and events for two weeks. My mind flicks through memories of my trip to Rome three years ago. I remember gazing up at the oculus while families and lovers whipped me around as they snapped self-portraits. Soon I was dizzy and stupid because I could not comprehend how such a thing was constructed two thousand years ago. I mourned because such a sublime place will never be built again. We no longer build to humble our pride.

Spiritualized – Effervescent (Chimes)

From The Complete Works | Arista, 2003 | Spotify

A moment of calm before the storm.

Went to an exhibition about the countryside that felt like walking into a Wikipedia entry written under the influence of heavy-duty stimulants. A robotic Josef Stalin meandered through the gallery, a reminder that nothing matters anymore. The paranoia of arch-conservatives mingled with snapshots of Slab City, Arcosanti, the Shakers, Buckminster Fuller’s utopian dreams, Black Bear Ranch, and the Garden of 1000 Buddhas. The walls said things meant to be taken seriously: Expensive minimalism cannot save authenticity. And: Rigidity enables frivolity. My favorite, written on the floor: Things? Space? Things in space?

Although it’s easy to dismiss this exhibit as the self-aggrandizing mood board of an architect in his twilight, this garbled portrait of rural life does capture the current mood: “The village is becoming the voice of reason.” Because what’s the alternative? Our cities have become homogenous, humiliating, and financially untenable—unless you can land a job that consists of writing emails, rearranging pixels, or trolling for clicks. Meanwhile, the New York Times is running articles about something called “cottagecore.” My fantasies about retiring in a double-wide somewhere in the Mojave are burning brighter than ever.