“For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”: Plague Journal

Gertrude and me.

uncertain roads ahead

My getting  lost BF Jorge.

Signs of the times.  

 Borges and Batts Hall - The Texas Observer

This is where you'll find me - on  the stoop.

Or exploring the cemetery. 

Thanks for the pic Savitri D. 

In periods of plague, time blurs.  We live in the present, guessing about the future, looking at current numbers and past outbreaks, trying to figure out where we are and  what’s coming.

During the Cholera outbreak of 1947 in Egypt,

Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007), sketched an image of losses:

“It is dawn.
Listen to the footsteps of the passerby,
in the silence of the dawn.
Listen, look at the mourning processions,
ten, twenty, no… countless.
…
Everywhere lies a corpse, mourned
without a eulogy or a moment of silence.
…
Humanity protests against the crimes of death.
…
Cholera is the vengeance of death.
…
Even the gravedigger has succumbed,
the muezzin is dead,
and who will eulogize the dead?
…
O Egypt, my heart is torn by the ravages of death.”

As I write this, an avalanche of death is hitting my city,

Some six hundred on Friday,

“1,497 virus deaths in 24 hours - the highest single-day toll of any country so far - with almost half in NYC...”

Everywhere, friends are sick.

Back and forth to the emergency room, trying to breathe.

A doctor I know weeps every night after his shift.

One made it through it on her own.

Others are not so lucky.

Drop dead, says the pres.

The hospitals are jammed with bodies.

Not enough ventilators.

Everywhere, we hear the sirens.

Ken Schles is in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

April 2 at 8:57 PM · Fort Greene, New York:

“The sound of ambulance sirens punctuate the air. This afternoon we watched our local hospital take in patients. My wife and daughter and I took our dog for a walk in the park and a hospital abuts the western edge. Five ambulances pulled up in a matter of minutes. There’s a tent set up to receive walk-ins. I lingered long enough to watch two ambulances disgorge patients. They wore breathing masks. The EMTs dutifully went about their tasks, methodically and routinely. One put on a new pair of blue rubber gloves before opening the back of their vehicle, quietly rolling their patient to the care of others. Around the corner is a huge refrigerator trailer, to store the dead….Falling into an abyss, I imagine, is akin to something like soaring. Until you realize a bottom is fast approaching. The Federal government had three months to prepare. Instead it swerved from denial to excuse, xenophobia to magical cure, or made believe #covid-19 would just go away. Trump had projections for months and yet still there’s no coordinated response in place. Today he blames the states for being unprepared. Suddenly they recommend we all wear masks. In two weeks 10 million jobs vanished. In less than a week NYC will run out of ventilators. My son asks, “What will happen to the people who need them?” “They will die,” I reply. Governor Cuomo said earlier, “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them. …Jut assume you are on your own in life. I think about the other crises I’ve experienced in NY. Today was a beautiful, breathtaking day, not unlike 9/11. Only the situation we’re experiencing will go on for weeks. Or months. They say, ‘history never repeats itself, it only rhymes.’ Sounds true enough. “If a person comes in and needs a ventilator and you don’t have a ventilator, the person dies,” said the governor. I’m reminded of that cover of the NY Daily News, “Ford to NY: Drop Dead.” For now my family and I are healthy. But I get word from people close that others are not. Some—their husband, fiancé, friend, father or mother just died. I read in the news about the more famous among the deceased. @ Fort Greene, Brooklyn”

In his press conference, the governor tells us about his brother who is sick.  He says playgrounds are to be closed.  I saw a ton of kids playing ball in Carroll Park the day before. The governor is asking the police to crack down.

Civil  liberties  are eroding.

Anyone have a sneaking feeling this is going to remain?

I think about Colin Powell going to the UN with his stories about Weapons of Mass Destruction.

They all fell in line, locking up the heretics.

No one in charge apologized after the panic.

Louis Colombo

21 hrs ·

“In a properly civilized world, we would view this pandemic as nothing but a reminder of our interconnectedness to nature, a reminder that we are part of, but not above nature. We would treat this time as a time to pause, retreat, reflect, be with those we love, tend to those we care about. But our world is not civilized, so instead, we are thrown into panic, anxiety, and despair, worried about making it through the month in the blind hope that next month things will return to “normal,” all the while forgetting that our date with finitude is the normal we forever try to suppress.”

We are all born dying.

We all cycle through our moods, trying to limit panic inducing media overexposure.

I can only skim the headlines, says mom.

Me to.

Its better to read novels and stories, watch old movies.

We’re not supposed to join the struggle, 

Not sure how but to separate and scream.

Memo to those feeling stuck, try to walk through Borges’ labyrinth. Jorge is my boyfriend when I'm lost. He always teaches me it's ok to dream of other long lost spaces, where we become cockroaches, we read Whitman in German, and our libraries become surrealist cathedrals.

All week, I’ve been reading and rereading Whitman and his metaphysical poetry of Brooklyn, reminding us we are all a part of this. 

Seeing us as interconnected.

Song of Myself (1892 version)

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

My students and I unpack it,

Looking at  the city,

And our lives,

We can’t touch.

But we are connected, separated, together, apart.

Apart  connected,

Sitting  on our stoops, meeting six feet apart,

Looking at  people walking with their masks on.

Bike riding to Sunset Park,

Past empty restaurants,

Along the waterfront.

Walking through the cemetery,  we  look at the Pierponts and the Steins,

An old civil war soldier, lives  gone by.

Wondering about where we will go.

“Lets not make it another ten years before we walk through the cemetery again,” I say.

“I hope I have ten years,” says Billy. 

We walk  up to look  at the statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, and the statue of Lady Liberty in the distance.

“Minera is waving to lady liberty,” says Billy.

They wanted to put a building impeding the view, but the neighborhood organized against it.

“We need holy moments in our struggle.”

The last stone we visit is for Leonard Bernstein.

There's a place for us, somewhere a place for us.

How many sermons Billy?

Are they all in one place?

He writes five, ten, twenty a day, says Lena.

How about a little kindness, he  wonders.

It has to be more than mutual aid, says Savitri.

We have to think a little more about this.

We read Mary Oliver on the roof.

I was steadfast about two things, loving foxes and poems.

Thanks Mary. Me too. Hello sunshine.

Its eerie how beautiful it is out there, even with all the uncertainty.

Enjoy the sunshine.

The Sunset of Romanticism
Charles Baudelaire
Tr. William Aggeler

“How beautiful the Sun is when newly risen
He hurls his morning greetings like an explosion!
— Fortunate the one who can lovingly salute
His setting, more glorious than a dream!

I remember!... I have seen all, flower, stream, furrow,
Swoon under his gaze like a palpitating heart...
— Let us run to the horizon, it's late,
Let us run fast, to catch at least a slanting ray!

But I pursue in vain the sinking god;
Irresistible Night, black, damp, deadly.”

Still we stay?

Shall we run to that horizon?

I move. Walk there. And come back.

Bike, hike,  talk, walk.

And return home, where I am grateful to live.

To read poems on the roof.

To watch late night movies.

Every night, dreams get odder and odder.

I’m lost but unlike usual I don’t ‘seem to mind.

Here in New York.

“I am not leaving New York,” writes MOLLY JONG-FAST.  “Not that a smart person would stay. My apartment building is almost empty. And I can’t blame them. New York City isn’t normal. New York isn’t even post-9/11 New York. No, pandemic New York is completely different than any New York I’ve ever experienced in my 41 years of New York.”

 

I’d rather die in New York than live in New Jersey, said Vito Russo years ago, before he did eventually die.  I feel the same way.

Although I hope I don’t die.

I hope no one else does.

But I know we all  eventually will.

That’s  just the tempo of things.

Dad died six years ago.

His best friend Fred nearly thirty years ago.

He loved Borges and showed me those stories when I visited him in Lubbock before he left.

When Borges visited Lubbock, two decades prior to that, a young girl asked him about his poetry, reminding him of lines between  his stories he had not imagined.

“…a girl asked me weather in writing another poem, “the Golem,” I had been consciously rewriting the circular ruins,” says Borges, recalling that trip to Lubbock.

“The answer was no but I thanked her for revealing this unsuspected affinity to me. In fact it amazed me to have traveled hundreds of miles to come upon this piece of news about myself out on the edge of the desert.”

I guess its always that way.   

The circular ruins are many here:

“the obscure man kissed the mud, came up the bank without pushing aside (probably without feeling) the brambles which dilacerated his flesh, and dragged himself, nauseous and bloodstained, to the circular enclosure crowned by a stone tiger or horse, which once was the color of fire and now was that of ashes. The circle was a temple, long ago devoured by fire…

Fred and I talked about that space, lost in the ruins, in our minds.    

Trying to teach me to see the mysteries in the lost cowboys, wandering, looking for a piece of land long gone.

In 1986, Fred told me about Isherwood, who shuffled off earlier that January.

“We  must remember that nothing in this world belongs to us,” says Isherwood.

“At best we are merely borrowers.”  

I think about Chris and  Don, Sally Bowles and Fred and the records he gave me.

An old Jerry Jeff Walker album, I’ve played all week about that feeling of being  free,  driving through the lonesome lost highways from Dallas to Austin, East to New  Orleans, South to Mexico, riding  with friends, feeling free, time that seems irretrievable.

Leavin’ Texas

Jerry Jeff Walker

Texas this morning the sounds they just sing to me
I feel alive again and with every footstep that's settin me free
Hey old friends,
Keep alive the good times we've had in those rollin',
Rollin' hills
They will always be a part of me
Whenever I think of Texas memories

Oh Texas I'm just a little lost but I'm keepin' on,
Just like that morning star, that's ahead of me,
I keep shinin' on
'Til I make it to the borders of the Rio Grande
There I'll catch me one last sunset 'cross the prairie…”

Sunday, we read the headlines about the dead.

And catchup.

Drink coffee.

Yoga and virtual church.

A message from  Judson Memorial.

“I'm sending you good energy and love.

Micah

**********

A PRAYER OF RELUCTANT CELEBRATION

(For This Bird Who Just Pooped Into My Palm)

Rejoice! Rejoice!
It would have been a maddeningly poetic image
(And really, poetry is all that’s getting me through these days),
The perfect picture:
A deserted New York street, not a soul in sight, in my newly-creepy world,
And me taking my afternoon constitutional,
Just to keep the blood flowing,”
Just to keep my brain from failing,
Just to keep my butt from flattening further,

…

Let’s drop the old stories in our wake,
And become the poetry we wish to see in a just-born world.

Each day, the plague timeline gets more  and more odd.

Memories and moments in time.

Louis Colombo offers a little recent history:

Dec 18th - House Impeaches Trump
Jan 8th - First CDC warning
Jan 9th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 14th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 16h - House sends impeachment articles to Senate
Jan 18th - Trump golfs
Jan 19th - Trump golfs
Jan- 20th first case in South Korea
Jan 20th - first case of corona virus in the US, Washington State.
Jan 22nd - “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. It’s going to be just fine.”
Jan 28th - Trump campaign rally
Jan 30th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 1st - Trump golfs
Feb 2nd - “We pretty much shut it down coming in from China."
Feb 5th - Senate votes to acquit. Then takes a five-day weekend.
Feb 10th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 12th - Dow Jones closes at an all time high of 29,551.42
Feb 15h - Trump golfs
Feb 19th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 20th - Trump campaign rally
Feb 21st - Trump campaign rally
Feb 24th - “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA… Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”
Feb 25h - “CDC and my Administration are doing a GREAT job of handling Coronavirus.”
Feb 25h - “I think that's a problem that’s going to go away… They have studied it. They know very much. In fact, we’re very close to a vaccine.”
Feb 26th - “The 15 (cases in the US) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”
Feb 26th - “We're going very substantially down, not up.” Also "This is a flu. This is like a flu"; "Now, you treat this like a flu"; "It's a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we'll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner."
February 27: “One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”
Feb 28th - “We're ordering a lot of supplies. We're ordering a lot of, uh, elements that frankly we wouldn't be ordering unless it was something like this. But we're ordering a lot of different elements of medical.”
Feb 28th - Trump campaign rally
March 2nd - “You take a solid flu vaccine, you don't think that could have an impact, or much of an impact, on corona?”
March 2nd - “A lot of things are happening, a lot of very exciting things are happening and they’re happening very rapidly.”
March 4: “If we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better.”
March 5th - “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work.”
March 5th - “The United States… has, as of now, only 129 cases… and 11 deaths. We are working very hard to keep these numbers as low as possible!”
March 6th - “I think we’re doing a really good job in this country at keeping it down… a tremendous job at keeping it down.”
March 6th - “Anybody right now, and yesterday, anybody that needs a test gets a test. They’re there. And the tests are beautiful…. the tests are all perfect like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. Right? This was not as perfect as that but pretty good.”
March 6th - “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it… Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”
March 6th - “I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault.”
March 7th - Trump golfs
March 8th - Trump golfs
March 8th - “We have a perfectly coordinated and fine tuned plan at the White House for our attack on CoronaVirus.”
March 9th - “This blindsided the world.”
March 13th - [Declared state of emergency]
March 17th - “This is a pandemic,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”
March 18th - "It’s not racist at all. No. Not at all. It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want to be accurate."
March 23th- Dow Jones closes at 18,591.93
March 25th - 3.3 million Americans file for unemployment.
March 30th - Dow Jones closes at 21,917.16
April 2nd - 6.6 million Americans file for unemployment.

Magali Regis

10 hrs ·

The things that COVID 19 made clear

1. United States is not the world's leading country.
2. China won the 3rd world war without firing a missile and no one could handle it.
3. This situation is a wake up call to identify everything that is important to us.
4. Prevention is stronger than cure. Prevention saves more lives than acting at the last moment.
5. Health professionals are worth more than a footballer
6. European nations are not as educated as they appear .
7. We are not mistaken when we ask for more hospitals "and less war".
8. Children occupy a privilege in life.
9. Oil is worthless in a society without consumption.
10. Death does not distinguish race, color, or social state
12. Social networks bring us closer, but it is also the means to create panic
13. Now we know how animals feel in zoos.
14. There are those who earn millions and do not serve humanity.
15. Children are now educated as free thinkers by their parents
16. We started to get it that shaking hands and kissing are not necessary
17. Humans are the real vírus on the planet.
18. The planet regenerates quickly without humans.
19. More should be invested in health rather than festivals and parties.
20. Social media influencers have no real influence.
21. Older generations can be wiped out sooner than we know it. Connect with your elders.
22. Working from home is very possible, unnecessary meetings are now obsolete
23. Luxury items are not a necessity to live.
24. Love the neighbors always
25. Teachers have a higher value than people think.
26. Everything is temporary.

In the end .. We are not prepared for a pandemic.

A little BIG reflection