“when the sky brightened” January Lights, Running from the Storm, Greeting New Arrivals
Walking to school, the sky still dark, we chatted about the day ahead, nothing that exciting, a lot of teachers would be calling in, said the teenager, now a senior. In class, they are reading The Stranger. Everyone pronounces Camus with an S. This is New York, after all. I recall reading it on our terrace in Florence in the summer of 1991. The teenagers been reading The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger all year long. We gossip about how kind he was to Simone in Cafe De Flore in the 1940’s. “The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth,” says Camus. The teenager lives it. Many have been this last few years, watching what comes of a cohort of students who locked down, spent their first year of high school in quarantine, watching as everyone coped with ups and downs, departing too early, friends tumbling off buildings, parents locked away. Some survived, others checked out. And tried to come to grips with it all.
“Mother used to say that however miserable one is,” wrote Camus. “there’s always something to be thankful for. And each morning, when the sky brightened and light began to flood my cell, I agreed with her.”
You wanna turn around and get out of here.
Yea.
So, the teenager and I ran out of town, channeling our inner Thelma and Louises, making out way upstate, listening to Strawberry Switchblade songs about trees, running away from the raindrops, snow flurries and absurdity of it all. "Dawn cracks the dark,” they sang, over ethereal synth sounds, “And it breaks the silence. Of my waking hours."
A Dykes lumber truck passes us on the highway. That's a good sign, says the teenager.
Lou sings "I'm set free to find my own illusions...I’m set free.”
Snow flurries surround us, as the conversation turns to Ian and Shane, Joy Division and the Pogues, the doomed poets serenading us through the years of road tripes. Robert would have changed the name for their song about The Stranger, says the teenager, “If there’s one thing i would change, its the title,” the teenager told me, paraphrasing, before recalling Leslie Feinberg fighting the cops in Stone Butch Blues and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, or Carol:
"January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: [...]Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define."
It had been that kind of a month.
A few more snow flurries, snow on the The Helderberg Escarpment in the distance.
Its so beautiful, says the teenager, looking at mountains on our way to Frenchs Hallow Halls and Prospect Hill Cemetary, just outside Albany.
Snow everywhere, we walk from grave to grave, looking at the names, one for Schermerhorn, our subway stop, some Dutch, arrived a long time ago, strange and familiar, grave after grave, into the forest, across a bridge, up to a waterfall, upstate, downstate, music and snow flurries, running from the storm.
Friday night, we found ourselves looking for the heart of Saturday night on a cold soulful night from barbes with friends to public records for dancing, the streets of Brooklyn popping, listening to old Tom Waits songs with Virginia and VICKIKRISTINABARCELONA, chatting about Annie_Ernaux and The Years.
Saturday, I dropped by Mom’s. We talked about it all, her loves, husbands, the premature departures, her parents who left too soon. We talked about mom's mom who lived 43 years, that she doubled in living, and what she would say if she could meet her now. I'd embrace her, said mom. We chatted about her favorite trips... countless journeys to England, our adventures in London in the spring of 1989, seeing the unbearable lightness of being, off to France over and over, leaving my brothers, dad, and I for weeks to journey in the fall of 1980 to see the Great Wall of China, eating caviar with champagne in Tehran with dad and Fred, and walking the streets of Kabul, exploring the art and history of Afghanistan. By the time we were done with an afternoon of oysters and cava, the snow was everywhere. I thanked her for our great afternoon. And she ducked in for an afternoon nap. Love you Mom.
My neighbor @john’s a bit of a poet. Performing at Freddy’s on 5th Ave, John improvised, asking for tips from the crowd... hate pleasure raindrops...we screamed.... Water falling fast ...calling to its past...songs of love and pleasure.... saints marrching...floods coming.
Shannon misses @mothtreee out West.
I think about defending democracy. We can't open the door those who oppose it. Biden’s beyond his prime. He didn't run after his kid died. Beau Biden was 46 when he died of brain cancer in 2015. His father was vice president. He watched Trump take over and beat him back in 2020. We beat him back. Now a war raging, expanding, terrying, horrifying, his progressive base dwindling as stands, with both sides sending military aid and humanitarian relief. Its like we are supporting the French in Algeria again. Viet Nam all over again. 1968 opening the door to Nixon again and again and again.
Berlinners are in the streets fighting fascists. Its feels like we are sleepwalking toward dictatorship, says Jennifer.
I make my way to Barbes with the gang on Tuesday, off to the Magician on Wednesday, and up to Village Works, piles of books and bands to there and back.
We talk about the new arrivals, new neigbors.
More and more are coming.
NYC can find its soul if it's open to everyone.
Such a strange week. We heard about Bowie eight years prior, on the way to Aunt Judy’s funeral, the whole world seemed to be howling.
Mom and I look at her lillies, spending the afternoon recalling the camellias from her grandads garden.
"I've had an amazing life," said mom over a pint, telling me about the snowfall friday. We looked at slides from her trip to China in 1980 and recalled her summers walking through Venice, teaching art history. The weekly conversation continues.
I'd spend the morning reading 2666, feeling the violence, recalling Ciudad Juarez, walking amid the towers rising, obscuring our skies and the quirky spaces remaining along the Gowanus in the name of developer dreams, finging common cause with Shannon and Nico on a strange Saturday.
At Brennan’s we read poems about borders and tree trunks in the snow, nothing personal by Baldwin, love poems by Kafka, old stories by Allan G and Jaberwacky and Chaucer, teenage stories, hope and longings into the night.
"madness really is contagious” wrote bolaño in 2666. We tried to make sense of the first couple of chapters, “the part about amalfitano” in.
I think about looking at the US, standing in Cuidad Juarez. What a strange site.
I rode from Brooklyn to Washington Square Park, for Judson, to the east side and back to Williamsberg for book group. Nora joined us from parks unknown, for the discussion.And I made it back through the howling winds back home.
We spent MLK day visiting the mutual aid center to drop off clothes for new neighbors and off to see Aunt Gladys, catching up on the fairytale of New York. The mutual aid corner at ave b and 7 is open every day.
Rev Billy described the theme:
“One of our glorious singers Jess Beck started saying out loud what we were all thinking, which is that the newest Americans in New York are forced to stand outside in the wind and the snow by the arcane ticketing system for migrants. As I write, our Earthchxrch is crowded with people from everywhere, 8am to 4pm each day. We are a “respite center. We are accepting donations and going to the line with coats and scarves and hats and mittens.. It was 17 degrees last night. Yesterday was the wet day. Our resource committee wants all the items of living, soaps and hygiene items, stamped envelopes. Mostly though: coats. We always shouted at the Black Friday consumers, “You don’t have to buy a gift to give a gift.” Feeling that deeply today as I listen to the many languages in the Earthchxrch, all the Sudanese and Venezuelan and Honduran and Haitian and Chinese folks. Our radicalism was always about love, loving action in public. The visceral power of offering coffee and central heating to someone who walked thousands of miles, sailed in sketchy ships, only to face down border guards and barbed wire… There is love and gratitude streaming from our guests. Some of them are stretched out sleeping on our carpet in the middle of the day.”
Many are strangers. But can we be friends?
“I would like to be your friend. But friendship isn't possible,” said Dennis hopper, as Tom Ripley, to Bruno Ganz - in The American Friend, (Highsmith and Wenders,1977).
Thinking about King and Ron’s old MLK parties. My mind rushes back to an old Jefferson’s episode, waking up a dumb kid in the mid-1970s. George and Louise had been looking at old photos, recalling opening their first store in 1968, the same day they heard about MLK’s death, as chaos and flame engulfed their neighborhood. The camera closes in on the radio in the living room. MLK’s words “I have Gone to the Mountaintop” ….:
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will…. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”
Finishing his speech, King walked off the stage. George and Louise sat rubbing their eyes looking out into the distance.
I was blown away, my spirit awakened. I wasn’t sure it was a spiritual awakenning, as much as a connection, a feeling of being part of something much much larger than myself, a panorama of bodies struggling against tides, waves of racism, violence, even histroy itself.
All week, more arrive.
The food drop offs take place every day. Bring food or survival supplies to ave b and 7th.
“I felt like I was going to die here,” said one of the migrants congregating in the park.
The day after our road trip, the teenager and I rode back to the park. Food and clothing share for new arrivals to the city, migrants from near and far sleeping in the streets, and applying from benefits. A global issue, migration is only increasing as people are pushed out, forced out, elluding repression and conflict, compelled to leave, arriving here with nothing, waiting for services and benefits... compassion. You know where to find a job some guys asked us dropping off bagels. Earthchurch has become a drop-in center. The world seems to be converging at ave b and 7th as people arrive from everywhere, in need, looking for shelter from the storm, sleeping on the sidewalks and subways.
Football playoffs with Max, thinking about Dallas and the myth of sisyphus, their owner Jerry Jones suffering into truth; firing Jimmy Johnson was like Boston trading Babe Ruth. The team is cursed to endure its own Curse of the Bambino style championship drought, just as the Boston Red Sox did between 1918 and 2004.
The teenager rode to meet friends for music, arriving at the Sutan Room early, stopping for a slice and some quality Anna Karenina time, convening with Thomas and Theresa, unpacking some of the strangeness of it all.
"She felt that her eyes were opening wider and wider, her fingers and toes twitching nervously , and that something inside was pressing in on her breathing..." wrote Tolstoy, of Anna with herself, with god, standing with a stranger, wondering about the train, moving forward. backward or sitting still, as agency or free will or fate, standing with a stranger, transgressing, trying to come to grips with it all. "All the forms and sounds in the waverring semidarkness struck her with extraordinary vividness"...
The flurries drifted through the sky.
And my friend Carson recalled the Dead, Joyce’s words about the snow:
“It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”
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