Epicenter

"Epicenter" is a word they've said, we've said, I've said, you've said. Before I didn't care but this time I wish we meant it was the fashion epicenter, the entertainment epicenter, the business epicenter.

 And people who aren't here ask from my computer monitor, "How is it? How's New York?" 

Our New York is scraped raw and almost eerily still, especially on sullen gray days. On sunny days it's a little better, and I spend more time outside, but it's hard to enjoy myself, to feel much. Occasionally, I cry. I try to smile at everyone I see, but am letting that go, little by little. When I go out for groceries, I go into expedition mode, stopping here to examine a flower or talk to a neighbor, but always cutting the moment short, always moving on. 

Bike rides are the best; you're going to fast to think too much. All you can do is deal with the fact you are moving, feel the air on your arms, feel like you are gliding through the city you love.At home it's oh so quiet, and I turn on the radio while in the kitchen, even though there's an 90% chance for coronavirus content. I browse my phone to make the water boil faster and there I can find stories, images, of the hospitals in this city, where staff are working inhuman hours, where ER lines stretch down the block, where nurses are on the floor, cutting up Glad bags to use as scrubs, and lung failure is the number one cause of death. They are together with the dying, the sick, doing the ultimate work, serving with fear and dignity. It's too much to believe. 

Sirens wail outside--are there more because there are more? Or is it only now we can hear them as we've just only now turned off the news again? Because it's only two weeks in and we're going to need stamina to survive this, to find some way to thrive in this. Out my window a couple times now I've heard recorded messages blasting from police cars, about staying six feet away from other people. Other times, instead of machines and humans I hear birds. And when I stand in the backyard, I look at the windows of the neat row of houses with their neat fences all down the block and I think contentedly how there's a person behind each one (well maybe not each one but most because, you know, the ones in the hospital). I think about all those homebound people I can't see, can't touch, wondering like me, and I get a little overwhelmed for all of us.

Going Home

A week ago, Lee and I were deciding to go ahead with our Spring Break. We'd planned a slow road trip around Virginia and North Carolina, to a number of cities he had yet to see. Although NYU had already announced a temporary closure due to the coronavirus threat, and there was a small outbreak in New Rochelle, we figured we were going south, away from the virus and the panic, and we were picking up my Element in Northern Virginia, so we could always high-tail it home--which we did, on Tuesday, from Richmond, after spending some of our last intimate moments with friends and loved ones for a while. The feeling of dread we were navigating through was just getting too thick, and even though New York is densely populated and had started getting a number of reported cases, it is home.

3 episodes with unsettling masculine energies we came across on our travels and 3 books by/about badass femmes I have been reading...

M:

1) On our only night in Charlottesville, A came up to a table of four of us sitting at a dive bar (The Livery--in an old stable) in Charlottesville. He insisted on buying us a round of drinks and though we looked around the table at each other quizzically, we agreed. A said he was lonely, that he just wanted folks to talk to. He had some very bold tattoos, including "eternity" in cursive script across his neck and DaVinci's Vetruvian Man on his hand. He had just moved to town and worked a lot--as a short-haul truck driver for Walmart. He will be working more now, as he said limits on drivers' shifts had just been lifted b/c of "the virus." He said he had hopes for being a stand-up comedian. We weren't too into his jokes, but we did like his company for the length of that drink. 

2) On our first night in Richmond, as we drove home from a big brewery that had been very sparsely full of people getting drunker and drunker, we past what looked like a corpse on the side of a hill and thought better of it, going back to see. I got out of the car and walked up to the man--an older African American fellow--who seriously looked flattened, done but did see him slightly breathing. I wanted to wake him but calling into his ear didn't help, nor did poking him a few times. Two other women stopped and got out of their cars. It was a chilly night, cars kept going past us, fast. We stood there, vacillating between concerned and, when he finally began to let out some loud snores, amused. Still he wouldn't wake and finally my friend S called 911 and the paramedics came. They were gruffer with the man, waking him immediately with their pokes, but also kind, talking to him about where he was going, where he had come from. The women left, we watched for a while, the paramedics thanked us, and then we left... 

3) On our second night in Richmond, we decided we needed to get out of the house and so we ordered take-out and on our walk to pick it up saw a group of five young men (white, college-age?, high school?) wearing bandanas and each riding a different form of transport--a hoverboard, a moped, a skateboard, a regular old bike, etc--and hollering as they tore down the street. I know this description might sound silly but it felt markedly ominous. Our friend D said he wanted to mark that moment as the one he'll look back on when he realized the world had truly changed. On our way home from picking up that take-out, S noted a man covered in a sheet and sitting on a stoop talking to himself. None of the rest of us noticed, but we totally believed her and didn't see the need to turn back and check.

F:

1) Mermaid Moon by Susann Cokal. Susann, who was my mentor in grad school, is a ridiculously smart person and a talented and skillful writer with a truly unique voice. I'm so enjoying getting sucked into this world and story she has so beautifully crafted about a mermaid who leaves the sea...Seriously this prose and story is a gift!

2) Adriane Hanson's unpublished manuscript. All I'm going to say is sex, horror, nature, feminine power, death and murder burst forth in this story of a family of three sisters (and one brother) and those connected to them. So amazing to have been following my dear friend's progress on this manuscript over the past year and a half and even better now that I have the complete pdf uploaded on my kindle.

3) End of Days by Sylvia Browne. So I picked this one up last week when I saw a post from a page of it where this celebrity psychic predicts a viral epidemic like this one, as well as it's sudden disappearance. Browne is controversial, an outright criminal and a psychic whose had many study the inaccuracy of her predictions BUT so far the book is all about various world religions and their visions for the end of days and I have to say the cumulation of it all is quite fascinating. Favorite parts so far have been the retellings of indigenous American and Australian myths. From the latter: "The Dreamtime, woven through their lives in the most sacred and mundane ways, is at its core that time of creation when the Aborigines' spirit ancestors moved through bare, unsanctified land and gave it its physical form and its sacred laws. There was the Rainbow Serpent, who slithered across the earth forming rivers and valleys with its massive body. There was Bila, the Su8n Woman, whose fire lit the world. There were Kudna and Muda, two lizardlike creatures who destroyed Bila. They were then so frightened by the darkness they'd created that they began hurling boomerangs into the sky in all directions, trying to bring back the light..."

Between Worlds

I write to you from the world between worlds. Where thought meets dream, and day meets endlessness. It is the mildest winter I remember--ever, ever, ever... Sunny afternoons where I notice some people hanging out in sweaters, in flip-flops, in beanies, in short skirts, shift into temperate evenings, where the rain begins and it's warm, gross rain, the kind that sticks to your skin. One afternoon I remember recently explains it perfectly--I had rushed somewhere to get to a subway platform that was silent, still, only to find out from the digital display that the next train would be coming in ten minutes. As I caught my breath I began to sweat and I noticed all the people standing silently around me were sweating too, standing in their heavy coats in the mild air, like children not getting the season we expected. Occasionally, a cold wind picks up and we are reminded that it is February. February 2020 to be exact. At the yoga studio the other day, I heard two women talking about how it makes no sense that it's only February, that it feels like it's already been a year, already 2021. Hold up, hold up, I say. I didn't do much that I can report as a far-away adventure. Slowly, we are bringing a new semester to life at NYU. Mostly I have been staying in, at my new-home-finally-feeling-real-and-so-good home, at the edge of two neighborhoods. We are in New York but there is the coronavirus growing, growing in China, and so many of my students' think of their families back home, staying indoors with cards, with the internet, with whiskey, and we wonder about masks how and if and why the virus is way here now too. I am writing a story about Lebanon. (Always Lebanon.) A big election for us Americans is happened last week in Iowa, and nothing real came from it. And where am I? I am here, in my apartment, here at my computer, here, at the coffee table, playing with watercolors. And I have been reading and watching stories, and suddenly so many of these stories are about fantasies and ghosts and superpowers and other lands and language as material. I am here and everywhere. Far away. We are miracles and magic, we are memory and history brought to life, we are...

Clam Monster Thanksgiving

One of the first meanings attached to the Chinese character shen (蜃) might be translated to “clam monster,” a giant bivalve at the bottom of the sea, whose monumental belches rise to the surface as mirage. I learn this because my student has written about it in the opening of her essay, as she gives historical and global context to notions of illusion and translation. The clam monster is a shapeshifter that turns into a sea dragon and flies away…

This Thanksgiving I did not stay home in New York, or go home to Virginia, but (because fate and generosity and planning and consent) flew here to this nine-square-mile dove-shaped volcanic-rock island named by Columbus for his brother—Bart. Before then it is surmised that Taino and Orowak people frequented the island though did not settle there. For a long time only a few European settlers were able to make a go of it here, though they were ravaged by Caribs, by pirates. Eventually they brought slaves, raised flags. First France held dominion, then ceded to Norway in exchange for trade privileges elsewhere, then, France got it back. Slavery was outlawed in the 1850’s—freed slaves struggled due to poverty and a lack of fresh water, and their former masters struggled to build lives, but they did, between the white sand and the rocky cliffs, overlooking the emerald sea. From the mid-1900’s a tourism industry was slowly built around super-stardom and luxury. Now, 9,000 people live here year round and some 200,000 visit each year. New Year’s Eve is the peak of high season. Thanksgiving is the beginning of it, just at the end of hurricane season.

At night it rains, and during the day, we lounge, we swim, we eat, we wander, my companions read news from home and novels, and I read the pile of essays written by my students. Everyone in this "International" group recently came to New York from mainland China. We have been working together 12 weeks now and as I read what they wrote in their dorm here in paradise, the things they are trying come slowly alive, stretch across pages crinkled with humidity—the close-reading, the stating of significance, the possibility of a new idea appearing after you work for it. These writers have told me these are their first attempts using English to differentiate between and connect ideas across contexts, across forms, and I am amazed by the ways they have found to relate what is home to what is here, all of it so far away from where I am.

Grading is easier in a bathing suit and under a neon sky looking out at a sea shimmering with the reflections of impossible-looking clouds, I think, as I read the hard work of making sense of and using key terms full of abstract shades and shadows: Artificiality and Nature, Reproduction and Art and Politics, the Existent and the Apparent, Innovation and Technology, Uniqueness, Authenticity. They profess despair over where our Progress has taken us, but also an alternative sense of hope in a new conception of history’s cacophony, the collective responsibility for protecting creativity, the unexpected powers of alternate realities. 

This land is made of grey rocks that look soft, wise, ancient. Vegetation is bright, succulent, and punted with bursts of blossoms an island berries, an occasional heady rush of thyme. Small buildings rise up out of it, cluster here and there, roads follow the shapes of the land. Everyone talks about what was rebuilt when, and it’s hard to imagine the violence of the storms that sweep across the sea, like a monster.

The day after our Thanksgiving feast, we peel of just the two of us, find a parking lot, a hidden sandy path that takes us across cacti, larger blossoms, delicate white and yellow butterflies batting around like dust motes. We meet two fine turtles, so many striped lizards. We walk down and down a wooden stairway that some hidden hand has tended faithfully. Dripping with sweat, we look up again, and see the new beach we have come to: turquoise, steal, silver, mirror. The water are too much and everything. 

Over and over we have said, it looks beautiful. So gorgeous. Tastes delicious, smells so clean. And again: It is so beautiful, gorgeous, stunning, this paradise. We have smiled, sighed, not known what else to say, or do. And now I say, I just don’t know if it’s real. You nod. We shrug. I’m real, you say. You too. And we swim in a sea that will disappear into imagination, into memory. I write this there but post it now, where faraway at home it's cold and dark--and yet there sand in the corners of our suitcases, and sunburn clings to our faces.