a post pandemic world
You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending
Matins, Louise Glück
Author's Note: Above is Mehoffer's gleeful exposition of liberation; below a representation of the fear that lingers when we will walk through the city knowing the virus is out there - holding onto people, perhaps even the last button I pressed, the door handle, my cell phone...
A latent paranoia abounds in Tooker's painting. I hear workplaces will function at 30% capacity, meaning I'll put a mask on and sit further away than usual from all my colleagues. If we were alienated by the modernity of an urban jungle before, then the virus has now extended that alienation to forced segregation in collectives. I don't know what a post-pandemic world, if one exists, will look like. But I do know that it won't look the same for all of us.
Maybe we'll make room for the intransience of human life, game-plans, and achievements. Will humanity be rendered fragile, or will we build stronger defences? Will we remain a broadband network of fear?
What I am certain of is that we’ve been carrying different lonelinesses inside us, long before the virus came along.
And physicists rocketed
copies of the decree to paradise
in case God had anything to say,
the silence that followed being taken
for consent, and so citizens
readied for celestial ascent.
Those who hated the idea stayed indoors
till the appointed day.
Disappointments of the Apocalypse, Mary Karr
a story of passing .
quilting a parable , piecing
together our dislocated parts
our quills rewrite the subtext
making a parabola of
our tender abdomens & sacral
bruises . engraving new ways
of contextualizing the fibres ,
the matrix of our body’s
telling . a failure of inner
tubing . how will we have
told the story ?
Herbal Balming, Razielle Aigen
"I spent far too many days trying to outrun this thing called mine, so if I set myself into your arms would you hold me like the earth, quietly? I am yours. Give me a field, give me a big sky. A mountain. Give me your mouth. I'm just looking for a quiet place that I could die inside of."
— An excerpt from "Cradle" by Anis Mojgani, found in his new collection, Songs From Under The River
Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Hunnybee
Sagar: I feel like this song resonates really well with the post lockdown theme. It's about how 'eras rot like nature'; and how this age paranoia and darkness that we live in is no permanent fate. But it’s also about how as inhabitants of such a world, we shouldn't be blind to its shortcomings. I feel like the world has been through an Epic Saga of sorts, which exhibited the best and worst of us. The ending of this Epic Saga won't fix the world, but that shouldn't deter those of us who seek to change it for the better. Also, the video is super trippy, and it induces an urge in me to travel - which I will hopefully follow through once all this passes.