Report from the Eye of the Storm (NYC)
Back in the old days, which was only six weeks ago, I was deeply engrossed in making a feature documentary, developing a public art project and seeking funders. Now I’m just grateful for a morning without a headache, fever, sneezing, or chest pain.
It is that cough, vibrating with multiple tonalities, that still erupts, unexpected, and keeps me on guard. As a dominatrix of the coughing frenzy, I whip each outburst with something to change its nature… hot tea, lozenges, Bryonia 200ck, Chestal, Elderberry. Prepared long ago to battle the invisible, I pray not to succumb to that most feared — shortness of breath. If that happens, I will have to leave this fortress and venture into the scary outside. I am told I have to start by calling my primary care doctor. But she closed her office with no way to reach her. What do I do? Where do I walk? Call an ambulance? Where might I land? In a tent, a convention center, a hospital without enough ventilators? And then what? A morgue in a gym or church basement? Writing this quickens my breath.
How present this keeps me: There is no future but this breath. If it remains unguarded, the unseeable may conquer. To be destroyed by something so tiny, so microscopic, so mysterious, taking us with a vengeance. What could make us more humble?
I don’t have honest hair. I am at an age where I wonder if I can make it through another week of Zoom calls. What will happen when those of us who do our best to look younger than we are, start to look our age? My body is the same shape as it was in my twenties, though my breasts face the floor rather than stand plump, voluptuous, saluting the sky. I am just as thin, strong, firm, my skin soft, though not luminescent like it once was. I am ready for what probably will never be again, to be made love to the age my body feels.
We are really all alone. Alone to face death, rewrite our wills, empty our closets of what we don’t need, think about worst case scenarios, and reluctantly prepare for them.
Weeks ago, I had midday outbursts of sweat followed by chills, five days in a row. It made no sense. I am way past the season of hot flashes. The next day when I came down with a fever, I got scared. For the next week the fever went up and down.
In the heat of that fever, I thought about my mother. How frightful it must have been for my grandparents, living in Cologne, Germany during the rise of Nazism. How hard the decisions they had to make must have been. My grandfather, for whom I am named, said Hitler is just a “passing fancy” — the Germans are too smart for him to stay in power. By the time the government came to the house to register their jewelry, my grandmother knew their lives were at stake and undeniably after the synagogues were burnt. After all, they were getting coded messages from the concentration camps. “Every day is a holiday, like Yom Kippur.” So they knew people were starving, as Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the year, is one of fasting. It is the Day of Judgment, when you are written into the book of life or death for the coming year. The woman who sent the message had worked in a morgue in Cologne. When she wrote, “There is plenty of work for me here,” they knew people were dying. It took my grandparents until 1941 to leave and they were, or so I was told, on the last boat out of Lisbon. On the way there, they threw out their last jewels and coins from the train window, afraid to be killed at the border. My grandmother kept cyanide pills just in case they wanted to take matters into their own hands. How easy I have it, just having to isolate myself, watch Netflix, read books and learn how to be healthy.
On my first day without a fever, I sat on my fire escape and marveled at the quiet. No cars on my street or on the big cross streets I can see on either end of my horizon line. Before all this, my fear was what the unbearably noisy construction on the block was pouring into the air: the worst of heavy metals, flaky fake chemical board dust and god knows what else that goes into building new buildings and dismantling the old. Now, no cranes, no asbestos removal. Compared to this time last year, the pollution levels in New York are reduced by 50%.
When I was last on the streets I found a small tent city on the lower west side. At first I thought it was a movie set (that’s how shocking it was to see that in this rich city). Downtown LA’s tent city is a kind of tragic, poverty porn drive-through: you can’t look and you can’t look away. How do we prevent that from happening here in New York City? How did we allow this to happen in the first place? Here or anywhere?
It was 1972 when I first moved to Soho and first stayed with a friend. My tolerance for being in an old rag warehouse with a commune called the Hog Farm, with no door on the bathroom, did not last long. Now that building is across the street from where I have lived since the mid-1970s and it is owned by a Swiss industrialist.
In the mid-1970s I could put my foot through my loft’s hundred year old floor, a loft which was not legal for living. The streets were noisy with big trucks hauling fabric. Their exodus began at 3pm, leaving the streets deserted, except for a person here and there you would pass that was your age, your demographic: an artist, dancer, sculptor who also had illegally taken a commercial floor to live and work in because they were inexpensive and spacious. There was only one restaurant, Fanelli’s on Mercer and Prince, and nowhere to get milk or a newspaper. When Lucky Strike opened I could stop by for a steak at 2am and find friends. Somehow the independent filmmakers and video artists were all living within blocks of each other. Collaboration was fertile, particularly in video, as there were no precedents. Unlike film, where men were excluding women, there was no hierarchy with video, and no history. This was the beginning of a new technology (that would have significant influence in documentary film and television news gathering.) Women, men, we were all equal, making guerrilla television. We didn’t think about how to be part of a capitalist system, but rather how to change it. The Lower East Side flourished with tiny shops of independent designers making clothes. Individuality reigned.
The creativity of those days seemed to erupt from a clean canvas. This pause we are in with COVID-19 is a radical wipe out of so much, from life to the jobs that sustain life. We are taking a quantum leap into the unknown, igniting human creativity (from home made to high tech innovation) out of desperation in some cases, freedom in others. A renaissance is seeding and I pray my canvas will not be blank.
In the 1980s, crime was high and I was mugged on the street in my neighborhood, around the corner from where I now live. These last number of years I have often proudly remarked on how safe New York is. Walking home alone, sometimes 30 blocks at 2 or 3 in the morning, I am never afraid. Now, I am afraid of our city and afraid for it. Today (end of March) crime was reported 20% down from the same time last year. What will it be like when our front doors all swing open at the same time, in the heat of summer, with no money for the next month’s rent, babies to feed, doctors appointments, anguish, rage, depression, drugs… Will people turn ugly? How do we save the city? How do we innovate and invent now, to not be hell?
We are at that moment that correlates with the AIDS epidemic, when it was slowly emerging from mystery. Because COVID-19 affects everyone, drug companies, doctors, institutions have jumped into action, unlike during the AIDS era, when patients and doctors and advocates had to beg for attention, as it was primarily only killing gay men and drug addicts. But like then, we are not sure what we are battling or which weapons are best. We felt powerless then, and we feel powerless now. We don’t know who may have the virus and how we might catch it, or how long one can be contagious, even if we (or they) don’t know we (or they) have it. What prejudice might this lead to? How afraid might we be of each other?
The first night of normal temperature in a week after my being a watchful guardian over every body change, I am thrilled, relieved that I have made it. The next day, on a Zoom call, someone says their doctor gave them a test because of some vulnerability they have. They tested positive for COVID-19. While having no other symptoms, they lost the ability to smell and taste. After the call, I start to sniffle. That night I cannot smell peppermint or lavender or rosemary. Now I have convinced myself that I must have COVID-19. I am scared for a second and know that I will beat this. I am not going to the hospital and I am not getting sicker. Vigilance over the mind is as important as over the body.
The news of a disproportionate number of African American and Latino people dying of the virus transports me back to LA, where I lived in the 1990s. I made a film after the LA Riots, and while I was not afraid to hang out at midnight with self-proclaimed gangsters, robbers, and kidnappers in South Central, I was terrified of the smog that made its presence seen and felt by day. I heard a story on the radio of a woman with several children at the age of 36, who had severe physical problems including diabetes and early signs of brain decline. (According to Dr. David Perlmutter, 50 % of Alzheimers could be prevented by lowering the intake of sugar and carbohydrates.) Her diet consisted of McDonalds and the cheapest fast food joints that kept her family alive. She had never cooked broccoli. She did not know what it was.
The indigenous people in the south of Colombia say that there is no difference between the health of the individual, the health of the community, and the health of the land. Never before has this resonated so deeply with me. We have been so disconnected from nature and tried for centuries to have dominion over her, even as native peoples all over the globe pay reverence to “Mother Earth,” revering her, treating her like they do their own mother, giver of life, sustainer of life, protector. I remember what an Ecuadorian elder once said, ”What you call progress, we call disease.”
When I first watched the virus news on television, I got a sore throat. Now, I realize, I lost my smell after I was told it is a symptom of COVID-19. My coughing escalated after learning about residual pulmonary disease. What does that say about me? Is there any virtue in my feeling everything? It seems being so porous is a great detriment. Is psycho-immunology a field of study?
I do not know how I will resurrect myself, be relevant, find funding for ambitious projects, or if what made sense a month ago will ever make sense again. How in the silence of our homes do we dive into our souls so that we each find the authentic way to re-invent ourselves in ways that will allow us to flourish? What will be revealed to the depths of our being if we are all conscious and brave enough to dive deep, to see our bad habits, individually and communally, take inventory of our natures, discover what we are here for? We have no idea of what humanity is capable of at its best. Our collective intelligence, our ability to innovate and create, rather than swirl in reactivity, depends on our individual creativity. I cannot see the future. I do not want to repeat the past or go back to what does not work. I pray the answers will come.
Wanting to gather in churches for Holy Week was understandable. It brings to mind the words of a yogi, Guruji Sri Vast, who said that God is not to be worshipped but practiced — and that of a rabbi, David Cooper, who said God is a verb. May the God in all of us prevail.
Maxi Cohen