The only way I can understand these uneasy days is to write about them. But finding my own thoughts has felt difficult lately. It seems to require more effort to keep my brains out of the muck of today’s opinion-mongers and two-minute hates, these digital screamers and bad-faith dealers. No matter what I do, their poison bleeds through the walls.

Maybe there’s no coming to terms with these days of lurching from calamity to calamity while being told it’s time to get back to normal. As I write this, a hurricane is approaching the eastern seaboard, which captures the spirit of the past eighteen months: the waiting-and-seeing, wondering how bad the damage might be.

New York City’s big reopening concert was canceled midway through Barry Manilow’s set due to lightning strikes. Last week it rained at the top of Greenland for the first time in recorded history. We’re back to wearing masks indoors.

What is the best strategy for surviving the 21st century? Does it require some sort of cool detachment? Bertrand Russell notes that Stoicism naturally took root during “a tired age” when Rome began to decay, a time when “the future, they felt, would be at best a weariness, at worst a horror. In a hopeful age, great present evils can be endured, because it is thought they will pass; but in a tired age even real goods lose their savour.”

Philosophies such as Stoicism suit a tired age because “its gospel is one of endurance rather than hope.” Maybe we’ve entered an absolutely exhausted age. But here’s why I often turn to Russell for comfort: “There is, in fact, an element of sour grapes in Stoicism. We can’t be happy, but we can be good; let us therefore pretend that, so long as we are good, it doesn’t matter being unhappy. This doctrine is heroic, and, in a bad world, useful; but it is neither quite true nor, in a fundamental sense, quite sincere.”

So I’ve been thinking about what it means to be sincere on and off the screen in 2021. This feels more productive than contemplating how to endure.

Today I learned that in 1983, Visage covered one of the most frightening songs I know: Zager & Evans’s improbable 1969 hit “In the Year 2525“, which races through ten thousand years of technological horror fueled by numbed-out consumerism. For example: “In the year 5555, your arms are hanging limp at your sides and your legs got nothing to do because some machine is doing that for you.” Both versions are catchy as hell.

The fall of Rome. 1969. Wherever we stand today. The year 2525. Real goods keep their savor.

Visage – In The Year 2525

Fade to Grey: The Singles Collection | Polydor, 1983 | More

A ninety-degree day in New York, bright and trashy. Is there a word for the tendency (or desire) to leave one dish unwashed, one bag unpacked, or one message unanswered? There’s an interesting line between procrastination and fear of completion. Both conditions apply to the book I’m forever writing and rewriting.

More than fifty-thousand new cases of coronavirus today as America prepares to celebrate the Fourth of July. Tonight I sat in front of a fan while premature firecrackers echoed through the streets. I wondered how to live in a nation that’s circling the drain. Thinking I might find comfort in philosophy, I thumbed through some old books. Here’s William James writing in The Varieties of Religious Experience: “The lunatic’s visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony.”

Bertrand Russell kicks it up a notch in The Future of Man: “Although the last survivor may proclaim himself universal Emperor, his reign will be brief and his subjects will all be corpses. With his death the uneasy episode of life will end, and the peaceful rocks will revolve unchanged until the sun explodes.”

That’s enough philosophy for tonight.

Union Jack – There Will Be No Armageddon

There Will Be No Armageddon | Platipus, 1995 | More

It’s hard to remember there was a moment when the novel coronavirus was finite, when patient zero’s immune system might have wiped it from the earth completely. Or the virus could have died with its prey before infecting a second person. How many other vicious little organisms have come and gone this way? The mysterious illnesses, the unknown causes. From a blind Darwinian perspective, a virus can be neither too weak nor too lethal: it must keep its host semi-functional so it can spread. This thought leads to a thrum in my belly, a swirl of panic.

This season of suspension will tint the thoughts of all who survive it. Bright-line moments from recent memory cannot compare, those shocks we’ve reduced to shorthand for before and after: 2016, Katrina, 9/11. Perhaps this pandemic—not just the virus, but our garbled reaction—belongs to the category of hyperobjects that operate at scales beyond human comprehension, such as the climate crisis or the internet.

The mind craves rhythm and needs the dots connected. Scatter a few coins on a table and the eye hunts for a pattern. But despite the monotony of these pandemic days, there is no pattern here: everything’s still rolling across the table, ready to land in ways we cannot predict: jobs, surveillance, shaking hands, and—midway through this sentence, I’m interrupted by a memory of an old man standing outside the Helsinki train station in the rain: “The situation is that we’re born, then we die, and what the fuck.” Good enough for now.

Björk – Hyperballad

From Post | Elektra, 1995 | More

The name for Timothy Morton‘s hyperobject concept was inspired by this song. The image of throwing one’s belongings off a cliff feels resonant with the current mood.

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.