I am at home

I am at home, in the sunniest room. I am slightly hungover. I am in a bad mood. My aunt sent me a homemade zen garden in the mail, with sand and rocks from Lake Superior. I haven’t unpacked it yet.

Quarantine! The perfect habitat for the age of autofiction. Quarantine marries the concerns about domestic life with the drama of the self. Global pandemic — squares of tissue paper. Suddenly, the masses will be grasping for dispatches from small apartments, which we wrote before the pandemic but which COULD have been written during. The crowds will finally identify with us. Oh wait, there are no crowds. I guess I’m also feeling cynical this morning.

I am in a bad mood because my life hasn’t slowed. I am envious of those who can’t do their work as well remotely. Even as my physical universe grinds to a halt (I’m thinking of a solar system, at which I am the center, and the planets circling around me begin to slow and fade from view), my brain is a hive of writers and pieces and schedules and follow ups. I’m happy to do it. But the news never stops.

Recently, I was inspired by this interview with performer Alex Tatarsky. As I read the passage below, I thought to myself, oh yes!

What [Jacques Lecoq, a French mime pedagogue] would always say is, “Tout bouge,” which means, in French, “everything moves.” That to me is this unending wellspring of inspiration. Everything moves, so you don’t have to always search inside yourself for some inner genius, which I think can lead to a lot of grief, but you can look around you and notice that everything is already moving, and everything is already there for you to respond to as information and material and to be in conversation with.

Oh yes! I thought when I read this a week ago. Oh yes — I don’t have to agonize as a writer when I can’t find the inner genius, because all I have to do is observe everything moving outside of myself. I have always loved the idea of an artist as a filter. You think you are just writing down what is happening, but you always end up leaving the reader with an impression of yourself. It’s all about what you notice, not how you say it.

Too bad, quarantine seems to say. You thought you were you going to head out into the world, a new person, to filter and be impressed . No, now you have to limit your exposure to other people, and to daily life. All you are allowed to write about is yourself, your little prison of an apartment, and how you feel. Maybe it’s good I have so much work. BLAH

Update, 12:05 pm: I assembled the zen garden:

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