Seven Samurai and Lost Friends, Harm Reduction and Cracked Mirrors: a Plague Journal

Message from Mellow Yellow

Nashawn RIP

lost friends. rip dad

A new friend on the Gowanus.

book club on zoom.

a walk with a friend.

Seth David Tobocman

March 24 at 5:49 PM. 
"My first cartoon of the COVID 19 era

National Grid pushes through the non-essential North Brooklyn Pipeline, endangering workers, our community, and undermining their commitment to NYS to stop abusing their power. #nonbkpipe #publicpower saneenergyproject.org/nonbkpipeline

#RevokeGridsLicense #NoFrackedGasFuture #WorkerAbuse

www.saneenergyproject.org/nonbkpipeline"

"Brooklyn, NY -- Thursday afternoon, National Grid finally answered the demand of Brooklyn elected officials and residents to halt construction on their North Brooklyn fracked gas pipeline. Residents who have opposed the pipeline stated that since this infrastructure is non-essential infrastructure, they are endangering workers and the community during this global pandemic."

“Once people envisioned the possibility of change in fixed  order,  the end of an  age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that  extent the Black  Death may have been  the  unrecognized beginning  of  modern man,”

Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century

The influence of disease on human history cannot be under- estimated.

Renaissances have been born out of plagues. 

Old orders die.

New ideas take shape when old ones fade.

Mirrors shatter.

Early in 1995, Frank Rich wrote of the influence AIDS has had on our culture: "History may show that the epidemic has changed our culture in much the way that the cataclysmic carnage of World War I transformed English literature.  However it turns out, this is the story of our time."

How will Corona change us?

None of us are sure.  

Certainly the climate is changing, as are our communities, habits, and relations to each other.

Some of us long for public space.

Others hope to take risks and see friends. 

I sneak out of the house for  bike rides and secret hikes with friends.

Certainly, nothing will be the same.

We meet on zoom to talk. 

And lines form around the grocery store. 

This is nothing new. 

It certainly felt that way watching Akira Kurosawa’s the Seven Samurai, his 1954 film about

about war-torn 16th-century Japan and the modern anxieties of old ways feeling under attack.

“ Danger always strikes when everything seems fine,” says one of the samurai sent to save the town from bandits.  In between the old habits and panic, the town plans to save itself.

“This is the nature of war: By protecting others, you save yourself. If you only think of yourself, you’ll only destroy yourself.”

Someone tell that to the president.

Yet, protecting others is never simple.

It is not easy to change course.

Old roles change.

Women disguise themselves as men.

People arm  themselves.

They learn to act together. 

Today, our foe is invisible.

People are grasping at  how to manage.

The governor, who took away our hospitals when they seemed expendable, negotiating cuts to Medicaid, is now making them in the parks and convention centers.

Still he asks us to look our for each other. 

Others just want to touch someone,

Besides themselves.

Nothing new.

Tuchman writes:

“That conflict between the reach for the divine and  the lure of earthly things was to be the central  conflict of the Middle  Ages…”

It would also be the conflict for the age of Corona. 

How long would we stay socially isolated, unable to touch or connect?   

A week ago during our human sexuality class my students joked  about feeling cooped  up in their homes and glad to actually be talking  with  each other.

And then the City University instated a recalibration period, beginning immediately, creating more isolation.

Trying to just connect with people becomes complicated.

We have technology, but the digital divide separates us.

We are also human.

Some of my students have computers.

Others have to borrow the family computer while their kids are running about. 

Inter generational families, with grandparents, parents, kids, and grandkids are not uncommon.


First they were concerned about leaving for fear of Immigration Customs and Enforcement.

One of  my students lives with a dozen in a one room apartment.

Now they fear the virus.

Another student collects cans to pay the bills.

He was attacked while collecting cans last week.

He just ordered a computer for himself.

Raids  on grocery stories and bodega’s are becoming common.

Everyone seems to have lost  their  jobs. 

At CUNY, administrators are trying to figure out how to save the semester, while cutting classes and putting off meeting times. 

In class,  we talked about ways to look out for each other and learn from these moments.

It’s a conversation many of us have been having.

My friend Sarah Schulman, who teaches at  College of Staten Island, writes:

“Some apparent consequences of the switch to on-line teaching for the public universities:

--Not enough students have computers. The Chancellor of CUNY has instituted a "recalibration" policy to try to get more students computers.

--A number of CUNY students are in the National Guard and are being called up for service.

--State Universities that have dorms are finding that once the students went home, they were not only in different time zones, but became subject to the chaos of their families, with younger siblings home from school, parents unemployed and lots of competition for computer time, interrupting their ability to be on-line for class.

A thought for the future: Schools that are tuition dependent, whether small elite liberal arts schools, or bottom-of-the-barrel public schools, may be in big trouble….

As Matt Brim predicted: Amazon University may be the future.”

How do  we practice harm reduction in  the age of the Corona virus, we wonder. 

Its not sustainable not to touch each other after a while.

This is what we do as humans. 

The layers of fear and anxiety are only compounded by the strange nature of our harm reducting social distancing practices, that are trigging  their own odd aftershocks.

“Trauma is inevitable” says Mattilda B Sycamore, who tweets:

“For those of us growing up knowing that touch meant violence, that it could never be safe, that we would never be safe, I wonder about the long term ramifications of this time when all of us are avoiding touch.   How long will it take for touch to feel save again?”

Old wounds never  quite go  away.

They sit there.

And then  we remind them.

How do we look out  for those on their own, for people  socially isolated by social distancing?

Finishing class, my friend Emily called, asking if I was up for a socially distant stroll through the neighborhood.

She’ s been in her apartment for 14 days.

“We're all in the Titanic here.

Caroline lost a friend from high school, a principal went, the poor are turned from the hospitals, and we lose the creative ones. Its gonna be a bumpy ride. Starfish and coffee. Look out for your friends peops,” I write on  facebook.

Walking through the neighborhood, we see development projects that have  stopped.

Animals trying to find a home on the polluted Gowanus. 

We don’t see the animals complaining about this.

A duck looks lonely.

But my new friend looks hungry.

It's all going to change. Building up and down...ever shifting.

A week ago, Caroline learned a friend she knew from grade school had succumbed to this:

“I can't quite believe this for so many reasons. Nashom, you were a beautiful person and sunlight followed you everywhere. Thank you for sharing your time with me. RIP Linder Wadez Kristina Pfadt Burns Amber Sexton.”

Krista Houghton is with David Dalrymple 

March 23 at 4:01 PM

“Today my NYC friends have lost a dearly loved friend and Sister to COVID-19...Nashom Wooden a.k.a. Mona Foot. To those that knew him he was a dearly beloved friend that was also a very talented singer, entertainer, and one beautiful and fierce drag queen.
I never had the pleasure of knowing Nash (as his friends called him), but of the posts I've seen of him over the last couple of years it is clear that he was loved and adored by many.
The heartbreak and sadness reverberating in our country's crossroads to The Universe is being felt deeply, and SO MANY have so far to go in a time of uncertainty and fear.
To you all that are feeling a gut punch to your Soul today, I am so very sorry for your pain.
PLEASE stay safe to ALL of those near and far. We are all in this together, my friend's.
Check on your loved ones...especially those that live alone. ❤💔❤”

One of my mentors asked how I was handling things.

“I'm not complaining,” I replied, noting we’ve enjoyed movies and drinks, lots of books and time to be together.  But the horror of watching friends and friends of friends die is a little unnerving. The specter of the ever-returning, ever evolving myth of the eternal return is a bit jarring. I'm writing a weekly plague journal. each week more obits, you know.”

The losses come in countless  forms. 

My friend Emily Gallagher is running for office.

Now she has to run from home. 

On March 28^th, she wrote at

 10:29 PM ·

“This COVID thing is hurting me tonight. I keep myself mostly distracted by focusing on the present. But I sometimes remember what I have lost, though I still have my life, and what I may soon lose. As a passionate person and a dreamer, I pour myself into things that I want. In 2016 I proposed to Zach Hetrick that we build a pollinator garden at the hostel. I lobbied for it. I consulted with audobon and others. I reached out to countless environmental orgs and tried to establish us as a hub. The night we were planting the plants, after 2 years of advocacy, I cancelled my date with the man I was seeing and rescheduled for the next day. I slept in my office, dirty and exhilarated and exhausted. The next day, I discovered my person had died that night, and my heart broke. The garden came to mean so much more to me. As it grew it became my special sacred place. It symbolized the fruits of labor. It symbolized love and cooperation and healing and renewal. And now, i don’t get to see it anymore. It’s gone and it’s fate is out of my hands. My whole department that I helped to dream up and build, that I had so much planning and patience for, unplugged in an instant. Oh the beauty we take long care to put in this world, how quickly it is extinguished. I’m sitting in my apartment I’ve lived in for 10 years very aware it could be taken from me just as quickly. I know the beauty is in the building of it, but there is loveliness in holding on to things too.”

Friend after friend posted stories about people they knew who had died.

My friend Mery. 

And  Gia Lisa Krahne 

March 28 at 11:14 AM

“I'm sorry to be the constant harbinger of bad news lately. But Michael Hughes, one of my oldest and dearest friends has passed away. The patient I mentioned yesterday, on the floor of nurse Kious Kelly who succumbed to Covid. Michael is a secondary casualty from this pandemic....

He was forcibly moved from Mount Sinai West on Saturday, presumably because, in his compromised state, he was no longer safe in the zone of the virus. He'd been on a ventilator for months recovering from a pneumonia he caught at rehab in November. But was quite lucid and we were aiming to recuperate him. He adamantly refused the nursing home move after the negligence of a previous facility; and we were fighting for him to stay safe in the hospital. But that battle was lost due to Covid. And now we have lost him.

Michael was the first person I met in NYC, within three days of moving here when I was 18. We became the best of friends and dance partners. Exceptionally generous, a free-spirited, passionate man who loved the arts & took care of his friends like royalty. When I found out he was ill in December, it was second nature to run to the hospital and return every day since to massage him, laugh together, enjoy precious friendship & reunite with old friends at his bedside. The greatest gift in the world was witnessing him heal.”

The last time I saw him on Wednesday, was alienating due to having to wear a mask and gloves. No more healing touches or kisses goodbye. He understood what his fate was going to be for the next months if they moved him. At least in the hospital, he felt safe and everyone knew him. But at the nursing home, no friends would be allowed to visit- alone with strangers, in fear of the malpractice so common in rehabs, and without the ability to talk aloud (due to tracheostomy). An echo of the fate of Covid sufferers.

I am sure it is by his own will that he left us. His current condition didn't warrant his body giving up on its own. But his sudden isolated circumstances were too much for his heart.

I am sharing this story not only to honor Michael's life, but to highlight all the secondary tragedies which must inevitably be occurring due to this scourge. I am sorry everyone, that we are going through this. Love must prevail on both sides of the veil. Let the emotions ebb & flow, and stay strong.”

AlanTimothy Lunceford-Stevens posted on

March 28 at 12:42 AM

“My Friend Roger died of COVID-19 Wednesday night.

Remembering my friend, who I had not seen in 2 years. February 16, Like an angel, he showed up at a medical doctors meeting I was at. We kissed, we hugged, and we sat together, listening to doctors talk about our illness. Then as we parted, we said we would talk again and plan to meet at lunch, near my home, at a restaurant he knew from a previous visit.

Three days later, he collapsed, on his way to work. Taken to a Brooklyn Hospital. I got a call from him the day he woke up telling what happened. He got sicker and sicker. He was put in a ventilator. We could not talk. I told my doctor what happened that night in a Manhattan meeting and what happened three days later, and his call. She ordered a test for COVID-19. 28 hours later, she called to say my COVID-19 test was NEGATIVE. I got reports from his wife regularly that he was still in the ventilator. She did not get COVID-19 either.

Well, Roger died on Wednesday at 49. I am sad for his wife. I hope she knows a lot of friends and family care about her. I was sad for myself.

I was heartbroken for Roger and all loss to COVID-19, because of Trump’s dragging his ASS on COVID-19 back in December, January, and a February. 3 fucking months - nothing. RIP Roger! You are an angel tonight.

This week Trump said we don’t need ventilators in New York. Bollycock Trump is asking Americans to go to Church on Easter. Trump does not go to Church. People don’t listen to Trump.

America has the most cases of COVID-19 now. Higher than China. We will have a crest in infections in two to three weeks in NYC. I hope Trump gets this from one of his supporters.

I hope all you, my friends and family stay home now. I hope you all wash your hands. Don’t touch your face. Stand 3 to 6 feet away from friends and strangers. And if you can’t get your breath, go to the hospital ER, not an urgent care center!

We are in this together. And #WeCareAboutEssentialWorkers.

Please Please Pease Wash your hands. Don’t touch your face.

Timothy”

My old friend Massimo used to run a restaurant in Dallas.

I worked  there in 1986.

The adventures we had were  many, before he moved back to Milano.

We always stayed in touch.  

His parents were always around, running  the family business.

On March 25, 2020, he wrote:

“It's 17:30 pm a grey and cold afternoon that doesn't invite out. Two days I'm locked in the house and have the need or excuse to buy something at one of the very few stores open. It's also the opportunity to dispose of the wet from the kitchen which is scented by an unexpected candle. My mom tells me she felt the urge to turn it on. The color factory in Paolo Sarpi finally doesn't have what I was looking for. On my bike I go home because those who know me know that rather than walking I'm riding. I feel like though I need to ride, to unload the tensions of forced immobility. Just a few meters from my house there is the square of the Monumental Cemetery. I decide to walk it in a continuous circle with the look lost in the air to remove the monotony of the path. A phone call interrupts me: a number that's not on my contact list. He's a thoracic surgery doctor at the Pederzoli Hospital in Peschiera del Garda where my father had been transferred for three weeks for health emergency reasons from the intensive care of the Sacco Hospital and then from San Carlo of Milan where in total he had been hospitalized for almost three months Good morning. In their ICU he managed to weaning and breathing independently was then transferred to the ward. In all these months I've always seen him tied wrists and ankles because if the sedation doses were dropping he would shake and ripped the tubes that had a little everywhere. For three weeks we couldn't see him because the risk of being or infecting is lurking. This morning I had called a nurse on the phone who reassured me that dad was quiet. The day before he underwent surgery to clean out of a superficial sternal infection the wound of the open heart surgery he had inevitably undergoing. Fever was initially diagnosed for second pneumonia with an annexed negative buffer to COVID-19. Instead it is an infection in the wound that is detected by purulence. The doctor on the phone tells me about the afternoon worsening of my father's health conditions... he talks about pressure, fatigue, talks about antichambers you walk without mind until you hit a wall that leaves you a deep hematoma. His father - he tells me-has ceased to live. But how? This morning was quiet, surgery went well, so what do we die of? Of what? The doctor tells me that maybe you can shut down and there are multiple reasons. I need help and need to talk to my brother. I have to deal with my pain, share it with my brother but most importantly communicate it to my mom. It's only been half an hour since I've been out and now I'm also afraid to go home because I'm holding the bleeding knife of truth that will be stuck in a proven and hopeful soul. Mom is laying on the couch with headphones to silence the television and she doesn't realize I'm crossing the threshold. I get down on my knees in front of her and with my hands I'll unplug her headphones. His lost gaze sees between the reverb of cathodic light my red and shiny eyes. I tell her first that I love her immensely then her heartbreaking cry hugs me and shoves in my back like death itself hitting you in the back. It's the same cold and the same grey as the afternoon I decided to face. Heart doesn't beat, tremble. Voice doesn't speak, screams. Everything is disconnected like a minefield. My dad left us and slipped away like the fish of his zodiac sign among the stars. Now I have to take care of the pain of a woman and a mother, my pain for him and for her and my brother's. Now it's dark night and I crouched in bed next to mom who wanted to abandon a powerful sleeping pill. Tomorrow will never be the same. I love my family. My dad is the yeast that made this precious asset fluffy and golden. Thank you with lots of love.”

““The only way to fight the plague is with decency,” Camus writes in the Plague. “Because decency in the face of pestilence redeems not just the individual acting in this way, but all of humanity.”

We see it everywhere.

Sunday, we meet online for our final talk about  Don Quixote.

Page after  page  of poetry, the book  is door between lost worlds and shapes of time, connecting myself sitting  here in Brooklyn, with Borges who read it in his library in Argentina, and Foucault who read  it in France, and Kundera who read it in the Czechoslovakia, and Nabakov who lectured about it at Cornell and taught my professor,  Mr Greg, who taught me about Russian novels at Vassar.

Reading it, I wonder about the other worlds it reveals, the mirrors that reflect on all of us.

Cervante writes:

“to believe that the things of this life will endure forever, unchanged, is to believe the impossible;  it seems instead that everything  goes around, I mean around in a circle; spring pursues summer, summer pursues estio, estio  pursues autumn, autumn pursues winter, and winter pursues spring, and in this say time turns around a continuous wheel; only human life and in this way time turns around a continuous wheel, only human life races to its and more quickly than time, with no hope for renewal except  in the next life, which has no boundaries or limit to it.” (804).

Our relatives survived many plagues notes Caroline reading a distant mirror.

I wonder,

Is Altisadora, the prankster, Lolita?

Finishing feels like the most  prolongued release  I’ve had in ages.

Everyone meets with  metaphoric cigarettes in our mouths,  satisfied with the climax.

It felt like ages reading this almost daily. From December  to  March,

A book  about harm and love, discipline and punishment:

“You should know,  Sancho,” said Don  Quixote,  “that love show no restraint, and does not keep within the bounds of reason  it proceeds and has the same character as death, it attacks the noble palaces of  kings as well as the poor huts of shepard.  And when it takes full possession of a health, the things it does is take away fear and shame…” (836)

Some think he’s nuts, others are seduced or in awe of the “mixture of intelligence and madness” they see in Quixote, whose enchanted world view seems contagious. 

Merlin visits from King Arthur’s tales.

And friendship inevitably involves a degree of domination, play and punishment. 

Says Quixote to Sancho:

“I have come  to make up for your failings and to put an end to my travails: I have come to whip you, and to discharge , in part,  the debt you have assumed.  Dulcinea perishes; you live in negligence; I die of desire;  and so, expose yourself of your own free will, for mine is to give you at least two thousand lashes in this solitary place.” (950).

Sancho declines, on no. 

Love is an ever present cracking mirror of distant reflections.

“And is the Altisidora story also a parallel to Marcela’s position in book one?” Catherine follows.

DQ “This maiden speaks as one who is lovelorn, as she herself admits, but, since I am not to blame for that, there is no occasion for me to beg her pardon.”

Is one obliged to return the love of an admirer?

And Chay wonders if we could talk about a few themes

 “ . . . we cannot get out of it , in order to achieve perspectivism. We are inside the vast book.” Harold Bloom writes in xxiii of the Introduction

“Don Quixote is a mirror held up not to nature, but to the reader.” HB xxvi

Or is it a story of  Double (Multiple?) Vision?

“Battered by realities that are even more violent than he is, Don Quixote resists yielding to the authority of the church and state. When he ceases to assert his autonomy, there is nothing left except to be Alonso Quixano the Good again, and no action remaining except to die.” Harold Bloom xxiii of the Introduction.

“He (Quixote) is at war with Freud’s reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying. But he is neither a fool nor a madman, and his vision at least is at least double: he sees what he sees, yet he sees something else also.” Harold Bloom xxiii of the Introduction

“Don Quixote cannot be said to have a double consciousness; his is rather the multiple consciousness of Cervantes himself, a writer who knows the cost of confirmation.” HB xxxii

The Contagious Nature of Madness.

“Don Quixote’s madness is deliberate, self-inflicted” HBxxvii

"Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived." p. 914

A Reality Crisis?

“A fiction, believed in even though you know it is a fiction, can be validated only by sheer will.” HB xxvii

In Part II the fact that “fiction has disrupted the order of reality” (HBxxiv) lives alongside the narration.

“Don Quixote was the first important work of prose fiction to view reality as a kind of fiction, and fiction as a kind of reality: Don Quixote converts the world to his own point of view through the sheer force of his madness, and with such success that a majority of the other supposedly "sane" characters in the novel end up acting as "crazy" as the Knight of La Mancha, as if they were characters in a script written by the deluded Knight,” writes Kenneth Krabbenhoft.

This critique of power structures opens spaces for new worlds.

Perhaps these are days of Quixote?

a socially distant  conversation 

Grocery  lines  and face masks.