This February day stretches in front of me like a vast tundra. Today, for example, my calendar is empty. Empty! Not that we don’t DO stuff. We get together with neighbors for dessert or drinks. Occasionally we have dinner with a few vaccinated people. I put on my fleece-lined pants and go for walks. But if you’re (kinda) old and immune compromised, the symphony, the movies, the eating out, are gone for now. Have been gone for so long. People, a lot of people—you know this—are depressed.
I’m not depressed. I check my mood ring. Nope, not exactly. Instead, I am totally wasting my time. After dinner, while Jerry does the dishes (I cook; he washes) I lie on the sofa and watch stuff on my phone. This is the depths I have sunk to. Queer Eye. Tiny House Nation. Me being me, I analyze the appeal.
Take Tiny House Nation. I love how Zach figures out how to fit stuff inside stuff. Fit drawers under stairs, tables that pull out from under benches, stow sewing tables under the bed. When I was young, I read and re-read The Boxcar Children. Same thing. How to make a home in a boxcar. Or, how to give up the piles of your life’s debris and strike out fresh, stripped to the bone.
And Queer Eye. Totally over-the-top queer guys who travel around transforming, for the most part. hapless people’s lives in a week. Sometimes I believe it. I think a week of quick psychotherapy, a new haircut and wardrobe, plus a transformed living space, could wake some people up. We’re all queer. Aren’t most people suffering from alienation, loneliness, lack of what they think they need to be happy? At the end of one episode, to see a glimmer of possibility in one person’s life, well, a few times I’ve had tears in my eyes.
Also, I have watched all available episodes of Chef’s Table. It’s not the food. It’s the personality of the chef. The obsession, the bending over a single scallop, placing a sprig of green on top with tweezers. Moving through markets, gardens, with the eye of an artist choosing tubes of paint. And the backstory, the early suffering until the obsession was able to be given full rein.
Although I’m burned out on it at the moment, I’ve watched many episodes of Great British Baking Show. The thing is, you know how silly it all is, all of these shows. Who puts large tents in the middle of a field in Essex, and marches a group of amateur chefs into it every day to give them timed baking assignments? Who opens the door to find five queer guys ready to transform your life? Who buys a tiny house, considering that they depreciate terribly and are so customized that re-selling them would be difficult?
I really don’t care. I want to see people aspire. I want to see them roll all their desires into one, for the nonce. I want to see people change. I want to see people helping people change. I don’t care that it’s all staged. I look for the glimmers of truth in it. And there are definitely those. The amateur cook who makes a perfectly gorgeous cake. The man whose changed life makes his ex-girlfriend willing to try again. The couple whose tiny house will get them living in Maine at last.
Don’t we create our art, whatever it is, constructed as it is, otherworldly as it might be, to elicit a moment of truth? Oh yes, THAT’S how it is. That’s the feeling I was having. That’s the truth. No matter that the vehicle—religious ritual, horror movie, poem, song—is a made thing. We know that. We watch a stage play knowing perfectly well it’s not “real,” but in its contrivance, it can give us a window into what’s raw and real.
The P.S . . . . .
As you might expect, the dead zone includes no exterior activities to report at the moment. I’m working on preparing interviews for two Michigan poets, Alison Swan and Teresa Scollon, to Zoom record for Interlochen Public Radio. Also, I’m reading Albert Goldbarth’s (wonderful, as usual) new book of poems, Other Worlds, which I’m hoping will model for me how I can write the poem about quantum scientists I‘ve barely started.