Joshua Corey's Blog, page 6

Awakened by thunder, loud and variable in angle: heavy horizontals that strike flat the thick rotundity of the world, interspersed with incisive verticals that split the moment between the flash of light and the gray rain after. By afternoon the sun arrives and warms the wet earth—my daughter and I ride bikes in empty streets, in gentle airs. Pluck sweetness wherever you can find it, lend wings to the present moment, words to follow me through the pandemic to assemble something resembling a past. Flowers burst from a branch, budding directly, like dull stones made brilliant by wetness and sun. 

Overlapping flowers strike a sense of spring into my eyes walking around Evanston, by now more than half-used to my town’s half-abandoned feel. Storefronts stand empty—we lost a lot of retail before the shutdown in a kind of prolepsis—and restaurants limp along selling takeout; cars are few, bicyclists increasingly common, birdsong is audible most hours of the day. Squint and everything resembles a kind of paradise—the future is lapsed and the past unreachable, so the present stretches into its bad infinity. Trees, birds, and flowers mark space with their colors, their sounds, their pollen. The season is our only time.

People come out to the lakefill to watch the Blue Angels fly over our city—a nauseating extension of the military metaphors by which we are grievously captured: a salute to the “warriors” on the “front lines” by fighter jets reproducing the terror of aerial bombardment as thrill in a population that has never known such terror. Or perhaps we are merely resignedly curious, out to see the spectacle of powerless power for ourselves, as we’d gather to watch a piñata of the president beaten to pieces. The fuckers fly by in formation, their roar a beat behind their idiot beaks.

The workout doesn’t change much. At midday I swap pajama bottoms for shorts and go downstairs to the communal basement to meet my regular sparring partner. He doesn’t say much but he’s reliable. Jump rope, shadow boxing, burpees, stretches. I’ve got the Creed soundtrack going tinny on my phone, or maybe Led Zeppelin II. Put on the gloves and go to work: double jab and straight right, left hook and straight right, left uppercut and right hook. Get sweaty, do some pushups, hit some more. I don’t imagine anyone’s face; my opponent is abstract, inertial, myself. Down for the count. 

Mother’s Day madhouse trying to get some kind of takeout dinner together, but the Afghan place is slammed and outright cancels our order, while the pita place resembles nothing so much as the Citadel from Mad Max Fury Road before Max and Furiosa took down Immortan Joe. More and more of us look like Joe these days, pained human eyes hovering over the blank ferocity of black fabric or medical blue or the Cubs logo reproducing the planes of the cheekbones, hugging the chin, pinching the nose. Everyone seizes his plastic bag and rushes home to mother. Don’t be late.

It had to happen sooner or later—a day like any other that carried me into its eddies and set me spinning, unfolding hour by hour into a dream of panic or a sleepless reverie. And so here are words for yesterday. What I’ll remember: sketching a bad postcard Yosemite; my daughter’s new bangs; the curtains of quarantine drawn closer and tighter. It was sunny, I recall, and cool. We rode our bicycles past an outdoor concert setting up, the crowd or anti-crowd in little clusters ranging up and down the street, on stoops and lawns. Music, going to be played. 

Solitude like surface tension bears me up lightly walking past quiet houses in the sunlit chill. The difficulty of concentrating follows me like a beaten dog, insinuating itself in any room I enter, crawling under my chair and whining softly, perpetually. When I can read and write life is almost normal; when I draw something I am that thing; when cooking and listening to music I am the joyous center of all forgetfulness. Then there are moments like now, very nearly silent. The clock ticks. My wife turns a page. A magazine slides to the floor from my dreaming lap.

When do you know it’s midnight—when does the climax come? We live in Olson’s pejoracracy magnified—not merely governance by the worst but government for the worst, worsening as strategy, cynicism pursued for its own sake, a power no less demonic for its hollowness. Meanwhile the day lurches onward and inward, hour by hour. Grading, attempted writing, a walk in freshening airs past mute mansions by the water. Cui bono? I stare into the pantry willing the image of my desire to appear. What do I desire? What is desire’s nature? The supermoon tonight has its eye fixed on an elsewhere. 

Full moon tangled in branches over our street, like the arms of gravity that keep our satellite moving in time with us, marking that time, perpetuating a perfect and perfectly unequal relationship; yet both bodies, in the end, are primarily reflectors of light. There is no foreseeable end to any of this. Labor, in Arendt’s sense, swallows work: making the bed, doing the dishes, folding laundry take the place of anything enduring, singular, nonrenewable. As for politics—as for the agora—as for the public sphere in which one might exhibit one’s excellence, one’s valor…. The world and his wife sleep on.

Shades of gray, blue, white on this Tuesday evening rounding my lakeshore loop, the daily walk in pursuit of solitude, in flight from loneliness, soothed somewhat by the ripples on water, the echo of the lakefill pond with a few yards’ margin between it and the vasty lake that seems to go on forever but stops, I know, in Michigan. Boulders piled to no apparent purpose, like a clumsy metaphor for the haste to come out of shutdown with no actual cure in sight. I match my stride to Bach’s third Brandenburg Concerto, its ritornello climbing through registers resembling redemption.