bisongrass

[bisongrass]

Wait, I wanted to add one thing

I started re-reading this book about a guy who disappeared into the Maine woods when he was 20 and stayed there, living as a hermit, until he was accidentally caught 27 years later. He did not sleep inside for one night. He said one word the whole time, which was “hi,” to a hiker who he passed in 1990. He stole everything he had or ate, and never felt any less guilty about the stealing. He built the floor of his shelter out of bundled National Geographic magazines, which he covered with a carpet. In winters, he would wake himself up at 2:30 a.m. so he wouldn’t freeze to death in his sleep during the coldest part of the night. Instead, he would pace around to keep warm. He kept the same pair of glasses for 27 years and was terrified of breaking them. He craved no human contact. 

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Sept. 13, 2020

It has been a very long time since my last entry. The newness of the pandemic fell away, so that the details were no longer interesting to me or anybody; my sense is that we collectively wearied. No one wanted to think about it or read about it. Instead, we tried to make a life in between these new adjustments. I was left with the ache of an absence, which is much harder to describe. Plus the monotony of things, I suppose, which is not interesting to describe. 

I stopped writing as well due to a feeling of wanting to get away from my own thoughts as much as possible, since my apartment became, at a certain point, a horrible hall of mirrors -- or maybe that was my brain more than my apartment, although in some senses the two share a certain quality -- are analogous in some regard. My apartment is another sort of fevered skull in which these thoughts multiply, or something. In any case, in the acrid, melting heat of full summer, there was a predictable disintegration of my mental processes, where I was driven back to my worst and most basic warped beliefs, sent into self-tormenting thought spirals from which no escape seemed possible -- I do have a mind that fixates easily on things, which is great when the fixation is making a news story better, but not very good when my mind is held as the object of its own attention. 

I was also, finally, driven into the throes of deep grief that seemed to be an accounting of every sad thing that had happened in my life up to that point. It felt like a kind of possession. I developed an ache in my back that couldn’t be explained, and it would get worse in tandem with the stress. I thought of some distant cousin who I spoke to decades ago at a wedding. She developed at a point in her life a chronic pain condition that would not go away. She started using painkillers and became addicted, which profoundly disturbed her since she had two children whose lives she felt she was missing out on. What cured her finally was going to a past-life regression therapist -- this from a woman who was your basic staunch North Toronto WASP. The therapist told her she had been a French peasant girl who was flogged to death or something, and this explanation gave my cousin great relief. The pain eventually subsided. Of course, what allowed this to happen was that she chose to believe it. I am glad that the experience helped her unburden herself of a sense of responsibility for her own pain, but I could never believe such a thing, although now I have a new understanding of how tempting such beliefs are. In my own case, I suppose, there is a similar sort of faith required, since some of my own pain, or my own shortfalls, are not easily explained. So, using psychoanalytic theories of child development, I’ve sort of cobbled together an idea of what went wrong during my childhood, but in truth there is no way to verify this. There’s no one who could or would corroborate it, even if they witnessed it. But I feel certain things must be true. And so that’s my necessary article of faith. 

Anyway, when you’re in this kind of grief, you feel a bit like a ghost of yourself. Certain days, I forced myself to socialize, though I felt alternately hollow, withdrawn, anxious, sad. I couldn’t speak what was on my mind, because it was impossibly arcane and relied on an enormous private matrix of associations, and also because of the threat of bursting out sobbing during the normal course of socializing. (Do people “burst out sobbing”?)

On top of this was the inescapable neverending hum of anxiety about whether I was carrying and spreading COVID. At one point I did get tested because I had a scratchy throat and I needed to visit the chiropractor, and lying on her table requires me to stuff my snoot in a little valley between two padded cushions. Getting the negative test results back translated into about 48 hours of (metaphorically) high-fiving peace, at the cost of feeling like I had had barbed wire threaded through my sinuses for five seconds. I mean, they basically touch the bottom of your eyeball and then they sort of twizzle the swab around, collecting whatever they collect in that nerve-ridden northwest passage. It was hideous, and my one eye cried for about two minutes, but it was also worth it to dampen down the hum. Which is, of course, back now. 

There is a quality to the worst days that is like a nightmare in that there’s an almost acausal feeling of dread and fear that permeates all the action -- but it’s not that it is actually acausal, it’s that the causes are so omnipresent and atomized and background. And I’m not just talking about COVID, but every global problem that churns and grinds and looms and destroys while we sit trapped in the firehose of information, more passively witnessing, it feels, than ever before. Or maybe that’s just me -- I’m becoming increasingly aware of my tendency to passivity.

To deal with anxiety, I started doing longer and longer bike rides. Most times, there is some alleviation of stress, I think because I drain the adrenaline out, or burn it off, or evaporate it, or whatever happens to it with exercise. But there is no goal in sight beyond the day’s goal, nothing to work towards, and I feel this extends to my... whole... life. I am so tired of having no plans. The feeling of having no purpose is my most recent difficulty. I need projects, but I have insufficient energy or motivation to initiate them. But I guess I can’t just let that be how it goes -- I can’t allow myself to succumb to this passivity. I see people doing their art or perfecting their cooking or whatever and I’m just hornswoggled, or boondoggled, or something. Maybe I mean gobsmacked. They have a sense that there is an audience, it seems. I feel it less and less. 

[bisongrass]

May 27, 2020

It just becomes a record of life at a point. That’s the thing about this event: I think I am so used to the idea of a trauma being a swift short blow, but this one is a slow creeper. The economy will collapse slowly, over time, and the fallout from that will cast forward even further into the future. So, after a while, it just becomes life I’m reporting on, the sudden pivot is behind us, and now it’s just accretion. I am reminded of the beginning of the Auden poem Musée des Beaux-Arts:

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along

Eating from a sanitized takeout container, or opening a window using their sleeve to protect their hand, or just walking dully along, but masked.

It’s especially surreal I find now that we have been walloped with a heat wave. There is something so benign about the summer, and socializing with friends outside has a feeling of normalcy about it; it is easy for me to forget that this stupid disease rages on in the background. Today I had to pee, once again, while visiting a friend, and this time I used her bathroom, but I turned the doorknob and flushed the toilet with my foot. Later I understood this to be absurd, as there were Lysol wipes I could employ to clean the things I had touched. The surreality comes thumping in at times like these -- I pulled my mask up over my face to cross the threshold of her house, feeling simply being in her house was illicit and possibly dangerous, and then my thoughts went to winter and what will happen to me when I can’t see people like this? I worked in J’s backyard for most of the day and when I came home, I felt in good spirits; there is something so nourishing about low-key companionship. “To be alone in the presence of another,” as Winnicott says. I  love few things better than being buoyed along in a companionable group too familiar for much performativity -- sitting on the beach in a peaceable cluster, some reading, some dozing, some spacing out, occasional conversations coming into bloom and then fading, the nearby water providing the constant promise of a sharply thrilling bodily experience. 

On weekends I do excursions to the houses of farther-flung friends. At the end of the day I am left with the sensation of a pleasant social residue. Sunday (was it Sunday? I’m not entirely sure) I went to the LCBO to pick up a bottle of Very Expensive Scotch and dropped by B’s place on the way home. We sat in his yard chatting at opposite ends of a picnic table, but the long way, like we were rich people or minor royalty in the 1700s. Petals from a nearby tree blew into my glass, which B delivered to me pincered in a Lysol wipe. As we were talking, his next-door neighbour came home, and it was, unbelievably, J (different J), who I thought was living in Guelph, but who moved back here, apparently, with S and their baby. 

Another wild coincidence: I walked to Type one day to pick up my books and ran into J (still yet another different J), who was sitting in front of Bitondo’s Pizzeria with a slice. It was an unexpected and happy meeting -- he doesn’t live nearby. Weeks later, I decided to get another order of books from Type, and as I was on my way there, I ran into J sitting in front of Bitondo’s Pizzeria with a slice. “This is the first time I’ve been here since we last ran into each other,” he said. It was my first time back at Type since I last saw him, too. Sorcery!

It’s lilac season. They’re best smelled at night. My friend D touts the benefits of the “lilac walk” -- one meanders from one bush to the next, that’s the entire governing principle of the walk. I have yet to partake.

I’d like to write more but I’m too tired. 

[bisongrass]

Elba

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May 6, 2020

I feel sadly like my own record is beginning to bore me. It’s not quite duty-blogging but it’s passionless blogging. And yet I don’t want to end up with no record. I don’t know. It’s a dilemma. Albeit an incredibly low-stakes one.

What I did want to write about at this moment, though, is how memories stand out from the Before Time of when I chose to do things not knowing they would later constitute memories for which I would be so grateful. 

In the first week of March, I went to the AGO on my way home from work and stopped in on a new show called “The Art of Magic,” which was a bunch of cool old posters for magic shows from the turn of the 20th century. 

I remember specifically really enjoying the colour that they had chosen for the walls: a very deep peacock blue. I was there after dark and the whole show seemed intimate and slightly spooky, just the way you would want it to. After touring that exhibit, I went and sat down in front of New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana’s video piece, and I stayed there until they dimmed the lights and an announcement came over the loudspeakers saying the gallery was closing. I stayed until it closed! I could have left before that and now I’m so, so glad I didn’t. 

Another thing I did was, very uncharacteristically, I played hooky from work -- the only time I have done such a thing -- to see a movie, Portrait of a Lady of Fire, with B. It was raining and I rode to the theatre in a rain coat but with no rain pants, so from hip to knee, my jeans were soaked and cold, and the first scene shows our protagonist, Marianne, diving into the ocean to rescue her canvases, and then being shown to a cavernous room in some old Brittany manse devoid of furniture, but with a fireplace, and here, she takes off all her clothes and dries herself and her canvases by the fire. It was a profound tantalization to watch it while I sat still cold and shivering in the dark. Afterward, B. and I sat in the lobby of TIFF and discussed the movie, which now seems like such a luxury. It was March 3. I kept the ticket and it’s on my fridge now like some weird talisman. The last time.

B. would point out later that it was a movie that featured masks, along with a rather quarantine-like isolation, and I remember feeling, at the time, a deep yearning to have access to this life. I wanted to find my own deserted Breton island, and to experience time as more limitlessness for once. 

Another night, I decided to stop by my friend E.’s book launch at the Walton -- she had edited the Best Canadian Essays 2019 -- and while I was there, I ran into someone who I used to work with decades ago -- whose boss I used to be, in fact, when he was maybe still a teenager -- who has since become a minor Twitter celebrity, as well as author of one of the essays. (It did not occur to me, as it does sharply now, to wonder why I had not published an essay that might be considered for inclusion in this anthology.) He and I and someone else I only sort of knew had a conversation that turned out to be warm and convivial and also about the remake of the movie Cats. I left feeling good; I had come to an event where I didn’t know anyone except E., who was busy being the de facto host, and I had made of it a socially successful evening. I had a little bit of the warmed-by-the-Breton-fireplace feeling as I made my way home.

What suddenly occurs to me now is that I could have said no to any of these things, and I didn’t, and I am brimming with thanks for my past self. As well, there was a time when H. and I were considering postponing our trip to Italy until the spring, and we decided to go in October instead. I remember specifically one day where we had a lot of train travel. The weather was hot, the car was not air conditioned, and the train moved very slowly through corridors of very tall grasses. I remember entering a state of strange passivity, neither asleep nor awake, unable to concentrate on any activity, really, waiting without the sensation of anticipation, allowing time to pass almost as if it were a limitless resource. 

[bisongrass]

May 4, 2020

It’s normal now -- almost all of it. Just went to the laundromat wearing a mask and disinfected all the surfaces I touched and washed my hands when I got home and so it goes. I’m getting charwoman’s hands.

Saturday, the weather was grey and cold but I decided to go visit a bunch of people. This meant bringing my own food with me and sitting outside on various people’s porches for about four hours and peeing in the backyard of someone who used to be my supervisor. I kind of couldn’t believe what I was doing.

Usually I wouldn’t visit her, but I knew she lived alone, without a pet, even, and I like talking to other single people. It was also interesting to hear her perspective as someone who now “Zooms” with clients all day -- how weirdly tiring it is. She said that she was hoping to get her sister’s dog, an Irish wolfhound named Nico, to come live with her for a few days. She said “I call him my boyfriend. It drives my niece crazy.” Based on what I know of Irish wolfhounds, I think they would make a good couple. 

For the most part, conversations are no longer about the virus and the fallout from the virus much any more. I mean, some of that is inescapable, but now we just talk about life and the pandemic is incidental to it, mostly. 

Someone I work with met a man on Tinder during this and now they’re pretty much living together. She posts photos of the loaves of bread he bakes for her. She’s stupidly happy. Two other co-workers wondered if the guy she met was a freeloader and were generally suspicious. “It happened so fast,” they commented. But another co-worker said, “It’s like wartime,” and yes, I agree. There was an intensity, an urgency. Only now for me all that is subsiding, which is, bizarrely, a little disappointing. As I told my therapist, I’m great at the thinking, less at the doing. it was good for me to pushed more into the doing. It helped me hone an appreciation for what was important. Now I feel myself drifting into acting like I have all the time in the world, again.

Sunday was beautiful, sunny and 22 degrees, and I went for a two-hour walk in the morning all the way over to Yonge Street on the train tracks. There’s a section between Poplar Plains and Yonge where it suddenly feels rural more than industrial. There are pine trees. I heard a woodpecker, saw a bunch of rabbits.

After zooming with clients (ughhhh), I gardened a bit. The church across from my house has these perfect elevated flat spaces -- PATIOS -- and I fantasized about holding distanced picnics there. Everyone could bring their own food but I wanted there to be something sumptuous about it -- pillows? Candlelight? Fancy glasses to drink out of? I wonder how much this would provoke judgment. Or would people enjoy seeing it? A bit of both, probably. Yesterday two kids and their dad took over part of the street with a goal net to play ball hockey and then the mom showed up with the dog -- is that so different? I JUST WANT AN EXOTIC CANDLELIT FEAST ON THE STEPS OF MY LOCAL CHURCH, IS THAT TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?

I keep thinking about this clip from Ric Burns’s doc on New York where he’s talking about how the car changed the way the city was used -- like, up into the 30s, residential streets were overrun with kids playing and cars were an anomaly. I had a sense of violation when I saw clips of the cars nosing in on this rough playground. It feels nice to think that streets are once again largely empty, although I’m already mad in advance at the way they will go back to being overrun with traffic. 

I feel there should be special dispensations made for pleasure right now, because it’s hard to come by. Police would come by and say “Wait, are you enjoying yourselves? Is everyone two metres apart? Carry on, with our blessings.” 

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Apr 30, 2020

I keep thinking of that Emily Dickinson line, Hope is the thing with feathers. It bothers me, this quote -- comparing hope to a bird seems... unoriginal? Inaccurate? Sloppy? And yet at the same time, it’s lodged in my head, so clearly it has some sort of personal significance to me, possibly as yet undiscovered.

[bisongrass]

[bisongrass]

Upper: Pillow for Women and a Bowl, Totoya Hokkei (1780–1850)

Lower: In A Temple Yard, Hiroshi Yoshida (c. 1935)

[bisongrass]

Apr 29, 2020

The month passed quickly and undifferentiated -- picture the calendar grid wiped clean of all dividing lines, just a solid cube marked “April.” 

I wonder what I’ll remember of this month, other than a composite picture of myself sitting at my desk looking out the window, or doing yoga in the living room, or lying in bed zooming. I’m watching the flowers a lot now, because their progress helps marks time. The forsythia are out, ratty yellow fireworks. The magnolias are still mostly tight buds. One quarter of a cherry tree at Robarts Library is in bloom. 

Two days ago, I met a friend at Leslie Street Spit for a bike ride. The sun was hot and the air was brisk and the sky was blue, blue, blue. We stopped to sit on the beach, and he told me that the Spit had only been there since the 1950s, and it was not intended as a wilderness at all -- that had been incidental. But now here we were, surrounded by trees and long grasses and shrubs. The bricks that made up the surface of the beach, once landfill, were now smoothed-down nubs, deeply pleasing to look at and to handle. Their pillowy shapes, their nice, complementary hues, the way they are visibly yielding to nature in a way that makes them look almost organic -- it makes them very compelling objects to admire and arrange. We took in the artistic efforts of visitors who preceded us, and then added our own. 

As I told B., in the absence of my usual activities -- indeed, in the absence of almost any activities -- I feel as though the usual things on which I stake my identity are gone, and I am increasingly distilled down to an essence. I don’t mind being an essence, but it doesn’t make for great entertainment. Socially, I no longer imagine myself to be scintillating or novel. I simply am.

While we talked, a woman in my sightline further down the beach was picking up pieces of brick and taking swings at them with an improvised baseball bat -- a stick of some kind. She did this for maybe half an hour. 

Something about the story of the naturalization of the Spit felt tangentially relevant to our present condition -- this strange time, this global pause -- but I couldn’t quite piece it together. 

I left him there to do a phone session with his therapist and I continued home to do a session with mine. A strange thing about this time is how the hierarchy that somewhat defines the relationship between therapist and client has been flattened a bit. I see my therapist in her home, although I can tell she has been careful to make the space as neutral as possible, and I think about her anxiety, because it is impossible she isn’t feeling it. I wonder who buys her groceries. I wonder if she wears a mask. She is trapped in her home too -- more so than I am, even, because she’s older and therefore more vulnerable -- and this seems strange, given that I always imagine her as being one step ahead of me in virtually every way, more competent, more of an adult. 

As a therapist to others, too, I feel it: I have never lived through a pandemic; I don’t know what’s going to happen; I have no particular wisdom to impart. Here, I can only be an essence too -- to offer a sense of “being with,” and hope that that is good enough. I simply am.

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[bisongrass]

I want to describe more: I want to describe the peculiar feeling of seeing so few people, and of staying far away from the ones I see. But I don’t know if I can describe this. It feels like a sensation in a dream, maybe, something that  cannot be translated to someone who has not felt it. The world seems to exist on the other side of a pane of glass, or a lens. The way things on TV or in movies are tantalizingly real and tangible seeming, intimate, even, sometimes, but are literally untouchable. Projections. There’s a kind of ache to it, but again, how can you describe the loss of something to someone who doesn’t know what it is to lose it? 

Of course, I am not alone in feeling this. I’m not currently describing it to anyone who hasn’t felt some variation of it. So I don’t need to reach for analogies. But I want to record the feeling for future people -- for future me, even -- but also for future us, because I think we will want to forget what this feels like.

I keep thinking of the last time I had any human contact, which was when M. and I bumped elbows to say goodbye on Thursday, March 12. It’s wild that I remember this, and that I remember it wistfully -- remember when you could bump your co-worker’s elbow? I remember looking down onto Berkeley Street from the 16th floor -- remember when you could watch the city doing its thing, watch people walking clumsily with umbrellas, or quickly without them in a downpour? Remember when you could watch the ebb and flow of traffic, watch the streetcars like subaquatic creatures snaking along their tracks, watch snow squalls moving in over the lake and the Porter planes coming in low before landing at Billy Bishop? Strange, acute stabs of missing the office now: extremely unexpected. I can close my eyes and see every detail so clearly, I almost feel as if I am there. 

I keep thinking with guilt about my office plant, which had just begun to sprout new growth when I left. 

I remember in the second week of quarantine, my co-worker’s sister died. I asked A. how she was doing, and she said that one weird wrinkle to the whole thing, besides the obvious, was that her brother had worded a tweet about their sister’s death in such a way that it seemed to be referring to A., rather than her sister, and so A. watched as people began to mourn her on Twitter, writing wistful remembrances and so on. I said, How strange, it must be like being a ghost! She said, “We are all ghosts now.” 

[bisongrass]

Apr 26, 2020

The idea of destinations is becoming looser & looser. You have to pick one, for sanity’s sake, but there is no there there, or anywhere.

I mean, of course there are still places, but so few in the old sense of the word.  And sometimes, even when you get to a destination, your experience of the place has shifted so you no longer want to be there -- like the grocery store, for instance. You barely arrive before all your thoughts are on leaving. 

Yesterday I thought I would go to the Leslie Street Spit, but it was a weekend and one of the first beautiful spring days, and I didn’t even get as far as Cherry Street before I started noticing impossibly crowded bike lanes that made distancing impossible. I don’t know what stories people tell themselves that allow them to crowd like that, but all I see is a mental animation where all the DROPLETS are visible, dispersing into other people’s faces. And while I can handle a couple of close calls, there’s no way I could just ride into a thick mist of exhalations like that. So I took a circuitous route -- and why not, I had time -- through the Distillery District, which was, puzzlingly, still crowded with people who have a hard time letting go of the idea of destinations, I guess. I dropped down Cherry Street and poked around some industrial zones before finding my way (accidentally) onto the “Frolicking Trails,” cruising grounds for gay men. Veering off the Martin Goodman Trail, you can find dozens of small foot paths that go into the bush, and some meet the water’s edge, which was where I wanted to be. I found a downed tree that presented a nice perch from which to watch the lake in the sun. The spot also looked out on the part of the Leslie Street Spit that is a marina, so there were a lot of ass-ends of sailboats, which really would not be my first choice of views, but I couldn’t be too picky. 

The water lapped at my feet. The shoreline was unattractive, glazed with green algae and scattered not only with the usual debris of fallen twigs and leaves, but also reminders of human idiocy, the plastic ring from the neck of a bottle, a sheet of thin plastic half in and half out of the water and tearing in many places, a submerged tampon applicator (apparently known, in Halifax, as “beach whistles”). For some inexpliable reason, the harbour was also studded with tires, maybe three or four. I watched a mallard swim into view, then clamber up onto one.

But nature did its work -- the water noises were so soothing, and the smell was even nice. The breeze was brisk but the sun was hot and twinkled on the surface of the lake. The surrounding birds made a subdued racket -- calls you don’t hear in the city, the “booger-dee” of red-winged blackbirds. I rested there maybe 45 minutes before I got too cold and had to start moving again. 

Seeing so many people out on bikes and walking the trail gave me a sense of normalcy. Even though I wish people were more careful, I was still glad to see that human sociability and their wish to be connected with nature could not be quashed. (I still judged hard the people I saw with their bikes strapped onto a carrier on their car. Like, okay, ride your bike to the Spit, but don’t drive there, you bozos. People should not be allowed to drive their bikes anywhere right now.)

I rode past my office on my way home, which was a little hard -- memories of going for coffee runs with M., which was just starting to be a weekly ritual, a time for gossip, to air our worries, to vent, to have a laugh. We would often to go to Tandem and M. would catch up with the owners, talk about the latest Raptors game. 

Riding through the deserted city core was a trip -- I’m so used to getting all re-stressed on my way home, trying to navigate merciless traffic along Richmond. Not this time! So nice, if you ignore the rest of the situation. 

Also yesterday I had a visit with J. and S. We sat in the “conversation pit” at Harbord Collegiate. S. was resplendent in a white fake-fur coat and huge turquoise sunglasses that matched her scarf. We talked about the mass shooting in Nova Scotia, which took place about an hour from where she grew up. She said she wants to provide pro bono short-term grief therapy for people directly affected by the tragedy.

It’s insane that a mass shooting has had such a muted reception. Just another sign of how impossibly altered our lives have become. People can barely handle their own trauma right now. The scale of the trauma we are collectively living is different than a mass shooting of course, but something even of this magnitude demands people’s energy and attention in a new way, leaving them so little to feel for other people. Or so it seems to me. In any case, the mass shooting, the worst in Canada’s history, would normally have caused an enormous reckoning -- the country would have slowed down to talk and think about it, to wonder how it got to this, to discuss gun control and how violence against women is a too-often-ignored phenomenon. Now, it feels like it’s happening somewhere else. There is no there there. There is barely even a here here.

[bisongrass]

Frankenthaler/Rothko/Martin/af Klint

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Some part of my neighbour’s house is groaning and creaking in the wind like an old ship and I’m up here in the crow’s nest sailing through a sea of time with no land in sight

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