Joshua Corey's Blog, page 8

Forms of life: these fungi live off the slow decay of a tree trunk chopped in sections to divide one neighbor’s lawn from another. Do we know what we are or where we are? Gnosticism, I wrote this morning, is nothing more than a revolt against the wrong sort of love, and the wrong sort of love is nothing more than Alfred North Whitehead’s Blakean definition of evil: creativity at the wrong time. Is that Joan Armatrading thrown up at the deep end of the playlist? It sure is: I am not in love / But I’m open to persuasion. Sing.

A lapsed day, an abstract. Somewhere a homicidal clown is telling people to let light into the body to kill the virus: Gnostic Trump, Demiurge Trump. Can’t seem to move, if movement means changing places, locales, perspectives. The bed’s weather is steady like the climate in a cavern. Shades of gray, cotton, and cream. Our hallways are lined with unhung pictures like patient pets. The toilet runs late into the night; I get up and lift the lid, stare at the mechanism, the mechanism stares back. Flush. People are dying. The heavy hemlocks, are they crying? That isn’t the line. 

Somewhere near serenity or arrest, today’s template for all the days behind and for many in front: inchoate dreams, coffee, a bit of reading (Joe Donahue’s splendid new book The Disappearance of Fate), desultory work, Zoom with students, boxing in the basement, leftovers for lunch, more work, rain, a walk along the shore listening to Emmanuel Ax and Yo-Yo Ma playing Rachmaninoff’s Cello Sonata, watching the lake pitch up oceanic waves, home to cook lentil sausage stew, watching Some Like It Hot with my daughter for the second time this week. The world goes away; you were never really here.

Busy griefs take a break in the wake of good news long expected yet somehow shocking: I’ve been promoted to full professor, and the ceiling feels like the sky. Evening walk by the lakeshore with whitecaps thrashing the rocks in respectable imitation of the limitlessness symbolized by the sea. Home to flourless chocolate cake, a glass of Prosecco, and a family celebration in all its small joys and awkwardnesses. I am touched to have arrived at last at a destination I had never before clearly visualized: a learner licensed to be fearless in the face of ignorance, especially his own.

Monday and a black dog comes and sits on my chest. The apartment is too small and I feel like I’m always at work. Gentle mild morning everywhere, blossoms on the tree in front of our building—is it an oak? Why don’t I know what kind of tree it is? The streets of the town are like the apartment, clean and empty except for a few idlers with no place to go. I follow my daughter to the lake, wondering if she’ll remember my presence or feel my absence more. This thing will drive you crazy if you let it.

This morning pedaled my undersized bike up Sheridan Road past the Baha’i Temple to the Wilmette beach, where families paced and frolicked anxiously in the sand—some masked, some not, some distanced, some not. Fresh breeze and sunshine just warm enough to sit in watching two little boys in facemasks dumping sand by their dump masked parents, cello and piano trading gentle complaints in my ears: Rachmaninoff’s cello sonata in G minor. An old woman smoking a cigarette strides up the beach in blocky high heels. Normalcy is on its way without ever quite arriving. Drawing is an aid to memory. 

Sketching teaches the elements of art, art as elemental, art as exclusion: I draw the absolute minimum needed to suggest something larger, more complex, more dependent upon the world. How many budding branches are in that vase? How many bricks in the neighbor building are visible from my kitchen window? Quantity becomes quality when what’s omitted guarantees what’s absent; the void on the page, the presence or absence of color, of fine detail, presents as evidence of things not seen. Feebly I suggest, with lines more or less crooked, some minimal fraction of the deserted world that meets my eyes.

Fridays you find you’ve been running a marathon and are almost completely out of gas. Nothing is easy, neither breakfast nor love. Snow again in the morning turned to irresolute rain by afternoon. Look at yourself. Look at yourself looking. One must have a mind of winter, Stevens said, though here it is April on a rapidly warming planet. The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is—between these nothings swim the almost empty streets, the shut-up stores, the masked faces. Always somewhere sirens, and we listen, tied to the mast, with nothing to stop our naked ears.

Is it what Conrad meant by the shadow line—the greasy smudge separating the waters of Lake Michigan from the mood indigo sky? The Große Fuge’s thirty-six chambers divide in my ears and partition my skull. A good day, a bright day, almost a vacation—then the curtain comes down and I have to get away from myself. Here I am again in the freshwater night. Cradling my rectangular glow, my 21st-century candlestick, closer to my chest, reaching for the way things used to be. “Remember lingerie?” Bruce Sence sighs in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985). See you around, Max. Raggedy man. 

Masked and anonymous in the Trader Joe’s parking lot, moved nearly to tears by the speech of the worker who advises us on how to behave once admitted: “All of us have someone we love at home, someone we want to protect.” It’s a ritual akin to baptism to wait, to be handed to a freshly sanitized cart, to be admitted into the confines of the deliberately underpopulated store in which sweet-and-sour 80s pop tunes reverberate as we maneuver our carts up and down the aisles, picking up our frozen pizzas and coffee and pasta. Don’t you forget about me.