Joshua Corey's Blog, page 11

100 Words: “It’s Quiet Uptown”

“It’s Quiet Uptown”—my daughter sings the Hamilton song again and again, accompanying herself on our little electric piano. “You hold your child as tight as you can / And push away the unimaginable”—drawing out that last word, riding it up and down the scale. Sunny this morning—let the weather be the first and only indicator of my mood for the day. We say unimaginable but we don’t mean it—the word itself is the kernel of our magical thinking, as if gaming out the worst-case scenario somehow forestalls it. Say it, don’t spray it: “I never liked the quiet before.”

100 Words: Blank wall of the week

Blank wall of the week, to be climbed with the assistance of coffee and not much else. We gave up on the meritocracy a while ago and now we’re giving up on competence, too. The sky at present offers social distancing from sunshine. I’m at the nerve center of nothing. I’m nobody—who are you? To my left orchids bloom at an angle, pinkly oblivious. We envy the plants and animals as medieval Christians did, for not knowing sin. There’s an afterlife to look forward to, as ambiguous and ominous as the present. Buckle up, folks. Belly up to the bar.

100 Words: Sleep has become a thing of ooze and fragments

Sleep has become a thing of ooze and fragments, tentacles I elude like a character in a story by H.P. Lovecraft. Long walk by the lakeshore in stinging spring snow; ice clung in little limbs to a fence where Lake Michigan churned. At home moods rise and fall like the waves, like voices. My arms burn from push-ups; by the time this is all over I’m gonna be buff or dead. “Over” is a concept it’s hard to understand. Time dilates and expands, filling every crevice: empty space is in short supply, or maybe it’s become everywhere. No birds sing.

100 Words: Sunday squared

Sunday squared by stillness, hesitation, weather pitched uneasily between winter and spring. There are snowdrops in yards, a few crocuses coming, no buds on the trees. Weak sunlight wakes the brick on buildings. My wife and I take a long walk through town, criticizing houses: “Would you live here?” Our daughter sews huge-eyed dolls out of felt, one after the other, and we play with them: their names are Dally, Wyra, Robin Kessler, and Brenda. Wray’s a mermaid. It’s my sister’s birthday today. I look to the hills from whence comes my help, but Illinois hills are in short supply.

100 Words: Insane in the membrane

Insane in the membrane: what is a membrane? A thin boundary of cells. A membrane separates me from the others in my household or holds us together in a spasm of anger or laughter. A membrane surrounds my building, my town, my state. From every window I see a wall. Go for walks as long as you like, you still have to come home again. Last night we sang in the stairwell for a neighbor’s birthday and I collected takeout from a man wearing plastic gloves.Watched a Miles Davis documentary with the door closed and woke up here, alone.

100 Words: Birdsong again

Birdsong again, like a fine-tipped pen tracing arabesques on crisp gray paper. Is fear a form of intelligence? One morning walker walking who knows where. The gray bowl piled high with glistening mandarin oranges is a sign of our prosperity and foolish hope. Coffee sings into the pot. Canada geese laminate the sky with their Star Trek whistling honk. M-class planet. How many cases today in Washington State, in Italy, in New York? The plan to make us hate government forever is near its fruition, just when we need it the most. Mandarin slice bright as pain on my tongue.

100 Words: Morning, fog

Morning, fog. Two pink metallic balloons from a birthday two months ago stand at attention in the dining room, perfectly still, side by side like the ventricles of a heart. The news says we’re going to Italy in the worst possible way: no Spanish Steps, only frozen pizza and triage. The mist wraps the building like a cat turning before it settles, like the Heavyside Layer, like Eliot said. Remote teaching is for the birds, the same cheerful songbird I heard singing yesterday that lives, I think, in a backyard tree. My daughter reads in bed: the balloons are hers.

100 Words: Shelter in place

Gray skies, birdsong, white drone of the sound machine. Uncanny Evanston, still morning, still in the morning. We track each other’s movements from room to room, each with our screen. We debate our good neighbor policy. The air, invisible as usual, twists around our building, our town. I leaf through my journal for the past several weeks, finding only the usual complaints. No future reader will find any note there of what was about to happen. And nothing has happened, keeps happening. Walk to the post office, one worker wears gloves, one doesn’t. The randomness of the affections determines everything.

Three by Reverdy

Amedeo Modigliani, Pierre Reverdy (1915)

Fetish

Little puppet, little lucky charm, the marionette affrays herself at my window at the discretion of the wind. The rain has wet her face and dress, rubs itself off of her hands. She’s lost a leg. But her ring remains, and with it, her power. In winter she knocks at the glass with her little blue shoe, an ecstatic dance in the cold that warms up her heart, the heart of a wooden charm. At night she raises her arms in supplication to the stars.

Further Than That

At the little window, under the roof tiles, watch. And the lines of my eyes and the lines of hers intersect. She said to herself, I will have the advantage of height. But the shutters opposite are pushed shut and the irritating examination is fixed. I have the advantage of the shops to look at. But finally we must climb up—or else it’s better to come down, and go somewhere else, arm in arm, where no one can see us. 

Always Alone

Does the smoke come from their chimneys or from your pipes? I preferred the acutest angle of this room in which to be alone. The opposite window is open. Will she come?

In the street bridged by our arms no one lifted their eyes, and the houses bowed down.

Once the roofs touch, we no longer dare to speak. We’re afraid of all the screams—the chimneys are extinguished. It’s so dark.

100 Words: OLD IN ART SCHOOL (2018), by Nell Painter

Painter, an eminent 64-year-old historian turned painter, heads back to school in pursuit of a new career as a serious artist, in flight from her twentieth-century eyes toward a postmodern reckoning with the market and the comparative invisibility of a black woman past middle age. An ode at times to her hometown of Newark, New Jersey; a screed at times against the callousness of The Art World and the callowness of art students; a lament for the brilliant mother and bitter father she loses on the way; a song for life indefatigable and for an imagination more powerful than youth.