eight things i like right now
I like how people are doing these little creative projects, not to get a fucking tv show or something, but to just entertain themselves and have fun. I like my friend Brooks’s short songs project.
I like this little journal of these past weeks of quarantine. I’ve been keeping a journal too, inconsistently, so i don’t forget how this all felt.
It’s springtime and there are house sparrows everywhere. They sing outside my window every morning and afternoon, a soft rolling warbling on the fire escapes. You don’t hear much now except the birds, and sometimes the howl of sirens; and when I think back on this moment in time, I’ll forever associate these days with the sparrows.
When I lean out of my window it’s warm and it’s sunny. New York feels somewhere between heaven and hell. The morgues are almost full so they’re going to start burying the dead in the parks. Japan is in emergency mode so we can’t get Grandma on the phone. The nurse thinks she’ll be okay. I don’t think this crisis is going to relent on Easter Sunday, as was once hoped, however I’m planning on treating myself to a slice of pie then, and I think it will be a good time to reflect on thoughts of resurrection and what we’ll do with our lives if we make it through.
I like my friend Brady’s mixtape for this month, inspired both by yé-yé music and Miyazaki films. In his newsletter, Brady mentions finding the Spiked Candy blog in college and discovering wonderful French 60s pop through that — I also read that blog! Has anyone written about the golden age of music blogs, when you could download .MP3s (illegally? unclear) from sites like Said the Gramophone and Fluxblog and Largehearted Boy… or search for a specific song on The Hype Machine… or get roasted by Carles… has anyone? Anyway I remember that on one of these blogs I first heard “La Petite Fille De La Mer” by Vangelis and it is still one of the most beautiful songs I know.
It’s a nice time to look at art. I like this from my friend Claire (yes, all my friends are talented), about museum curators accidentally hanging famous paintings upside-down. It features a very gorgeous Georgia O’Keeffe (below is the correct orientation).
This Chinese woman Li Ziqi has a YouTube channel where she makes things very very slowly and traditionally. Sometimes people wonder if her well-produced channel is propaganda by the Chinese government; to me, this seems like a silly question. It could very well be propaganda, but it’s completely harmless and soothing and beautiful and it doesn’t actually lead me to endorse Socialism With Chinese Characteristics.
I was raised Catholic and am still temperamentally and morally a Christian, by which I mean I do not believe in God but my psyche is still primarily motivated by concepts like sacrifice, universal love, the equality of all people, and the universality of sin. Predictably, this makes me a guilty anxious self-hating wreck in times of crisis, and that’s when I turn to Buddhism instead. Where Christianity is devoted to love and charity, Buddhism is devoted to non-attachment — its equivalent concept of all-giving Christlike love is Mettā, or loving-kindness, which is rooted not in sacrifice or self-mortification, but in recognizing the interconnectedness of all things.
(Sorry, look, you don’t need a white person explaining Buddhism to you!! But if not in religion where else am I supposed to look for guidance? Don’t you dare say literature, when nearly all of Western literature is similarly guided by predictable Abrahamic values!!! Anyway!!!!)
In the past, during one anxious time in the winter after the 2016 election, I went on a donation-based Buddhist retreat in a small house on Rockaway Beach. In between long stretches of meditating and cleaning, we listened to the monk give something called a Dharma talk, which at the time I likened to the homily a priest gives in a Catholic mass. This year, when the shit hit the fan (epidemiologically speaking), I searched through Apple Podcasts for another Dharma talk, and stumbled on this short one about the nascent pandemic. It was striking to me, the way she used this virus to point out how we are all connected “in ways both terrifying and beautiful.” You should listen to it.
(I also recommend being a dilettante toward religion in general. It makes sense to me to be a Christian in feast times, to remind you of obligation, and a Buddhist in famine times, to remind you of solidarity. No need to believe in the resurrection or reincarnation or anything supernatural, I’m talking about developing a moral system. And don’t ask me how the other world religions fit into this I’m not Life of Pi over here!!!)
There’s a Fiona Apple album coming out THIS UPCOMING THURSDAY. Her first in a DECADE. The title is “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,”and what a wonderful title for us while we are all bolted indoors. Have you read this profile of her yet? Or this look back at my favorite album of hers, Extraordinary Machine?
Here is a poem by Jack Gilbert, a master of solitude and grieving and joy, called “A Brief For The Defense.”
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.