Joshua Corey's Blog, page 10

We wander the ghostly streets of our emptied town, town not really empty or ghostly but full of hiding bodies, each with its possessing spirit, its pair of eyes, watching behind curtains but not watching us, watching the screens, the phones, the tablets, the TVs, the computers, waving to relatives, undressing for lovers, delivering whatever comfort or company the face and voice can provide without touch, without even the touch of the vocal cords resonating in shared air, colliding with the skin, the tympanum, reverberating maybe with skin, a hand touching an arm, a shoulder, a cheek, lips, the teeth.

One morning Gregor Samsa awoke from uneasy dreams to discover that time as he had understood it had disappeared. He hid in his bed as long as he could, hiding from the inevitable confrontation with his family, whose well-being and ontology derived entirely from the iron regularity of Gregor’s habits: the dailiness of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, the commute to and from the office, the cross of days upon which his body had been nailed. The sun was stuck in the branches of the tree outside his window; Gregor coughed and closed his eyes against its senseless taps and ticks.

The terror outside and the terror within like mirrors facing each other in a hallway, through which fragmentary bodies, all mouths and hair and eyes, pass one another with fearful glances. But the sky is pure as the bricks. I pick up books, put them down again, phone holstered in my pocket like I’m the new sheriff of a ghost town called Anxiety—a town in which all the world’s population has been contained, peeping from rooftops and windows and from behind swinging saloon doors. You feel their eyes but they stay out of sight, as robins hunt implacably for worms.

Lift my head to find a blue-sky afternoon and sunlight picking out the shriveled red leaves on trees just about ready to bud. April. Life in confinement has these momentary breaks, gusts of air and light in which to walk or run, with the brimming platter of Lake Michigan offering a sense of wholly convincing, wholly illusory freedom. All day from behind closed doors the muted treble of mediated voices. My daughter pounds out tunes from Hamilton; I steer in circles like water around a drain, every day. The city mantled in fog, mirage of who we used to be.

Fighting a losing battle against domestic entropy—we wash dishes and make beds, while clothes and shoes and papers and other detritus accumulate in every corner, studiously ignored. Zooming with students is a bit of a balm—seeing other faces, offering and receiving the simple comfort of contact, though we no longer breathe the same air. A long walk yesterday, riding the jagged peaks of Beethoven’s “Serioso,” String Quartet #11, working out a rage. Sky, lake, and skyline in leveling shades of gray-blue, like being trapped in a Rothko. Gray skies again today but also the cheerful filament of a robin’s song.

A variation on Hemingway: in the spring the world was still there, but we did not go to it any more. Sun plays peekaboo as I stand in the Trader Joe’s parking lot waiting my turn to go inside and do the week’s shopping. Strangely mellow and cheerful inside with so few shoppers, each steering their cart like boats in a harbor avoiding any chance of collision. Chatted with a friend six feet away, knee-deep in the new normal. The world is too little with us; neither getting nor spending we lay waste our powers. Everyone buys daffodils, everyone waits.

Lingering in pajamas. Rain overnight, then this morning the sun made a break for it but the clouds roped it in and we are sunk again in the universal gray. Frenetic Zoom meeting with the extended family; my 99-year-old grandfather just a pair of eyes bobbing at the bottom of the screen while assorted aunts and cousins shriek and wave. Faces, faces. On a card table in the living room a jigsaw puzzle of assorted cats slowly assumes its shape: the York chocolate, the calico, and Pixie Bob, a cat named after a haircut. Outside is a mirage we ignore.

Boxing in the basement keeps me as sane as I’m able to be: working the heavy bag with the bike racks and the asbestos. Rain overnight tapped its fingers on the windowpanes. Daffodils trumpet mutely from their vase. Cobbled together a strange shabbat yesterday evening with a livecast from a local progressive synagogue (guitars, mandolins, lesbians, babies) followed by pizza and Emma. (2020) on our TV, misplaced period and all. We handed out medals to each other for our weeks of endurance: my daughter was Best New Bedtime Negotiator, my wife was Beacon of Sanity, and I? Full of worms.

Chicago’s mayor shut down the lakefront and I wonder if Evanston will follow, intensifying the sense of confinement: walking there each day has been a solace, earbuds in, working my way through Beethoven’s string quartets one by one: today if given the chance I’ll listen to Quartet in E flat major, Opus 74, “Of the harps.” My wife works the harp of intimate ties on phone and Facetime; our daughter sings Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life,” encountered as danse macabre on her Nintendo Switch. Fog today. Life’s a laugh and death’s a joke, it’s true.

Impenetrable gray within and without, in spite of the orchid, daffodils, succulents crowding the windowsills. I am representative of what? Middle-aged white guys, deracinated Jews, the over-educated, dad jokes, dadbods, the noonday demon. Coronavirus brings acedia in its wake; acedia, the medieval Christian monk’s indifference to his own salvation. But I still care about rejection. A lost seagull wings its way over the building that neighbors us to the west, vanishing white on white. There’s quiet and then there’s calm. Yesterday in the sun my daughter rollerbladed to a little beach to frolic in the sand. Frolic is her word.