I’m so obsessed with The Hunger (1983) right now, streaming on the Criterion Channel, which is the best $10 monthly investment you can make in your cinematic education. Directed by Tony Scott (Top Gun!), this blue-blue valentine stars Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve as a lady doctor and lady vampire respectively who embark upon lady carnal love. Oh, and you know who’s the spurned lover in this scenario? Mr David Bowie, that’s who. Really it’s so futile to resist this movie that I don’t see why you’d try. The plot may be as flimsy as GOP logic but its cerulean desire—not to mention fear and horror of physical intimacy—is just so of the moment. Dig if you will this picture.
Yesterday I called Apple with a few questions about my new Macbook Pro. The rep offered some helpful solutions, and then we began comparing notes about our new O-Corona lives, hers in Kentucky, mine in one of the US hubs of the virus.
At first it was light and breezy but as is almost always true in Life in the Time of COVID-19, the dynamic quickly deepened. She was shocked by how how completely the City That Never Sleeps had shut down and by my casual assumption that I had contracted the virus. Her greatest fear, she confided, was that she’d also contract it. Then she began to sob.
Actually, she said. My greatest fear is that I’ll have to give birth while we’re all still quarantined. She went on to say she had just discovered she was pregnant, which she’d been trying to do for the last five years. There was a pause, in which we both realized just how far we’d conversationally traveled outside the parameters of a standard Applecare call. Then I took a breath.
Ok, I said. We’re going to pray together. So we did–for our health and the health of everyone we loved, which in my case was and always will be everyone. For the spirit in her body who had the temerity to incarnate into the world now. And for all the corporations and institutions to recognize and honor our humanity. After we hung up, I received the standard Applecare survey. Was I satisfied with the quality of the call? Yes, yes, I was.
This weekend I’m unwinding with loads of Mary Tyler Moore and no other screens after days of testing a new tarot spread I’ve devised to support us in these out-of-time times.
My corporal self is worn out. I’m on the first day of my periodic table without the now-forbidden ibuprofen and am fighting what I am fairly sure is the Covid-19 virus, though of course there’s no test or healthcare unless I’m at death’s door.
I’m not being alarmist: I’ve been exposed to at least two people who were exposed to people who tested positive; I’ve had a low fever and a sore threat for days; and I’m fairly certain many New Yorkers are already positive, though this doesn’t mean we should abandon social distancing. Nor am I being casual about my self-diagnosis: I’ve taken zinc, vitamins, hot salt baths; gargled hot salt water; inhaled broth and tons of hot liquids. Prayed and meditated. Isolated. Honestly this is not a plea for help. More an acknowledgment that this is life now.
I sense I’m already turning a corner, partly because I’m lucky enough to have a strong immune system, and partly because JOJ-she who fixed my back last fall–gave me a remote healing session.
The concept of weekend seems odd, doesn’t it? With the flow of life on hold, the human race is suspended in a collective tesseract, one in which the constructs of linear time do not apply. Right now we don’t belong to the physical world at large. We are not bodies in place and time. Alone together, we are only energy particles to each other, faces on screens, voices in the ether, memes. Why not identify as Nefertiti on her Egyptian throne in 1370 BC? Or Mary Tyler Moore in 1977, blithely breaking through glass ceilings with a tam o’shanter?
On one level we are more exposed than we’ve ever been. Have you ever talked to this many people while in your PJS? Have your coworkers ever before seen your home? But we are also malleable, fluid, changelings. Stripped to essences.
Spirits.
To navigate this universal stop-time and stop-motion, we need new and forgotten tools–economically, medically, spiritually, emotionally, politically. We artists, healers, witches—seeers and soothers and sooth-sayers–are well-acquainted with ethereal realms. We know about kairos–the land of soul time that always lives beyond, below and around linear time.
So let us help. We are going to make it after all, but only if we make something new.
Yesterday I called Apple with a few questions about my new Macbook Pro. The rep offered some helpful solutions, and then we began comparing notes about our new O-Corona lives, hers in Kentucky, mine in one of the US hubs of the virus.
of a standard Applecare call. Then I took a breath.
