Joshua Corey's Blog, page 9

Drawing is a new form of meditation, something the three of us can do together, a way of changing the scale of our apartment as I lavish attention on household objects, the flora and fauna of our diminished world. I never believed I could draw but every decade or so I give it a try: this morning’s orchid isn’t art but a memory, a watercolor monument to a moment snatched away from the timelessness of quarantine. Sun today after a spasm of snow finds me drowsing by the fire like a Parisian decadent: a journey around my room, au rebours

I’d forgotten the hammock in our living room—put it up and float with windows on three sides and the gentle insistent march of the Große Fuge from the fourth, very nearly at peace, or rather with the anxiety guided along the splintering lines of melody, the procession from a young man’s vigor to an old man’s noble wrath in the face of deafness, indifference, and betrayal. I am lifted, succored, removed, and for once alone while wife and daughter go to Target. Yesterday we sketched each other, reducing ourselves: I’m a beard, a T-shirt, a pair of glasses without eyes. 

Short of words, ninety-seven to go. Up from the well of our building’s back yard a yet-bare tree spines to the sky; out on the street the masked citizens parade in disquieting numbers of ones and twos, delayed carnival. I’ve gotten too used to the emptiness. Find my way to the beach to sit in the lifeguard’s empty chair watching gulls squabble, earbuds in, working through Beethoven’s changes to his Große Fuge, that unaccountable music. Following string quartets with a piano played four-handed, twenty fingers finding form for outlines of the void. How late things become: farewell to the flesh.

A preponderance of little enigmas, masked faces on the street, couples arm in arm, joggers, a bicyclist trailed by children, teddy bears in the windows peeking out, ready to be seen. Each step back I take into a room of my apartment brings you the viewer further, casts me farther out. Loneliness without solitude predominates. Robins puff their chests and hop from lawn to lawn: E.D.: I dreaded that first Robin, so, / But He is mastered, now, / I’m some accustomed to Him grown, / He hurts a little, though - The spring is too big to be held back. Go forth.

A cat’s understanding of social distancing is entirely innate: our cat approaches and disposes of the people with whom he shares a space in lordly fashion, keeping his distance until he intuits by whisker’s touch that it’s time to wrap his tail around your leg or sprawl on the dining room table in reach of the arms of the sun. We are all indoor cats now. Like our cat I can sit by a window for hours watching the world go by, except it has nowhere to go; I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as I would anyone else.

Empty streets streak toward the horizon where the sun hovers like any ordinary star, patiently waiting us out. I tilted at windmills all day long: the giants were named Getting Up, Fixing Meals, Yelling and Staring, Sitting and Fidgeting. Work is a memory, a stopgap, an unsuccessful sneeze. Came home with Chipotle and my kid threw a fit because I wouldn’t let her handle the container the food comes in like usual because there is no more usual. “It is a good thing war is so terrible,” a general supposedly said, “or else we should grow too fond of it.” 

First night of Passover preceded by a day of mist climbing out of the lake, zombie leftovers from yesterday’s unseasonable heat. Why is this night unlike all other nights? Chicken soup and matzoh balls and our friends toasting l’chaim on Zoom, computer parked at one end of the table keeping the spot warm for Elijah, who didn’t show. I push the words and they push me. There’s a space between the days that cracks wider and wider, a space in the weather, Plato’s chora, space invader, creeping up on us as in Beethoven’s late quartets, as passion takes form, away.

Uncanny day of summer-like sunshine—if the uncanny, the unhomelike, which Freud taught us to be inseparable from its opposite, can be said to still exist on a planet being systematically stripped of its hospitality. Followed, as the night follows the day, by an evening of severe storms, “golf-ball-sized hailstones” as the meteorologists like to say, a-babbling like all of us of green fields. Cops chased my daughter and me from our old picnic ground by the lake today, so we sat on our building’s front lawn instead and watched the hours drift gently by. Life goes on past all expecting.

By night the lights inside shine brighter than those without: every room blazes with a mirror whose inhabitants pace like Rilke’s panther, the more solitary for the other people trapped with them. Dann geht ein Bild hinein, an image penetrates the muscles and nerves, takes flight like a tunnel through the body, hollowed out by time, und hört im Herzen auf zu sein, and halts being in the heart. False mirror of my own eyes confronts me at every turn until my fingers find the lightswitch and the opposite buildings glow again, ranging yellow windows over the street like bars. 

Night again, a few scotches under my belt, ranging from one end of the apartment to the other: at the north end something close to privacy, the small comforts of the den and TV; the south end gives out to windows on three sides, the familiar view of street and corner and the facing buildings made only slightly strange by the hovering dark and the traffic light’s traffickless wink from red to green and back again. Books stand mutely on their shelves and various devices charge against the day to come. We live in expectation: one more day, no more.