Day Four; Day Three Hundred and Sixty-Five
By Jared Stanley
Creating a TV show is hard. I’m not a professional, but now I understand. We tried it on March 18, 2020. The conditions weren’t ideal, it’s true. It was a single camera show with one set, a living room in a cardboard box painted with blue fingerpaint. How hard could it be to make a TV show? I was the cameraman. The stars of the show were a couple Barbies that we had turned into marionettes by stringing some fishing line under their armpits. The screenwriter, who was six at the time, had only the sketchiest idea of a plot. I tried to explain that a sitcom is pretty different from improv, but, since she was also the director, the six-year old in question had zero interest in my input. She just told me to roll camera. Oh, also, she was the puppeteer. We filmed in the basement studio. Upstairs, I could hear the urgent beeping of my email inbox. Did I mention that this was Wednesday morning, and I have a full-time job that does not usually involve television, and, though it was technically the six-year old’s spring break, we weren’t leaving the house. The TV show didn’t really work out. I did, however, manage to post a couple seconds of the pilot to Instagram. The caption reads: “Day four: a new show called Ginormous Difference. We turned Barbies into marionettes.” Day four: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Sometime in April, before bed, my partner and I were talking about a news article detailing the skyrocketing divorce rate in Wuhan, where the first lockdown occurred. We aren’t married, but we’ve been together for 20 years. There’s the kid, a house, all that. Well, at least we can’t get divorced, we said, laughing, patting each other one the back slightly harder than we otherwise might. That’s how we talked about the strains in those first days. By averring, talking around, smiling at one another, a bit of sighing. There was, all of a sudden, so much time surrounding the activities of a day. At the center of our lives was the kid, and we were trying to keep it together enough so that she didn’t get too stir-crazy. When Zoom class time came, she would run off into her room and bury herself in pillows.
And on went the year. Family members got sick. That graph on The New York Times would go down a bit, and then it would spike. Friends of friends died. In one case, we conspired to avoid telling one of our elders that he had COVID-19. We told him he was in the hospital for a bad cough—he caught it from another relative who wouldn’t wear a mask. He survived, thank god. Others lost jobs, others lived with the accumulated fears of losing a job and getting sick. And for all that, we’re still lucky. I remember some Zooms with a dear friend in New York back then; ambulance sirens in a steady stream of sound in the background, as we chatted about, who knows what, whatever. Just so we didn’t have to sit around while the time passed, listening to the sirens. The laying bare, once again, of structural racism at the heart of our country, the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbury, and so many others. The protest. The imprisonment and separation of migrants at the border. The institutionalized hatreds and neglects of our system were on full display.
But you already know all of this.
I did a lot of reading at night, as always. There was both solace and challenge to be found there. I read Sappho, the ancient Greek poet, who reminded me that we would all delight in one another’s presences again: “Her shoes were leather and from Asia / rich Lydian patterns across the toes.” If you love shoes as much as I do, you’ll know why this image provides such deep comfort. I read Suhrawardi, the 12th century Persian mystic, who encourages us to acknowledge the forces outside of us, good as well as evil, while at the same time trusting in that which appears right in front of our eyes and between our ears. For him, the imagination is everything: it provides us with the means to see beyond the present moment towards other worlds, barely hinted at by this one. And that was one of the greatest difficulties this year—so much remained invisible, unseeable. Since we were stuck in the house, imagination had to lead the way. Reading these old writers helped me understand how to move with attention and intention (sometimes) through a time that people liked to call “unprecedented,” but is really one of the more precedented and inevitable things to happen to us over the last decade.
Beyond the attempted TV shows, news talk, poetry, and mysticism, the rooms of our house were filled with music. Lizzo, the Go-Go’s, Diana Ross, and a lot of 70’s jazz. In our house, there was so much Alice Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, the one a profound mystic, in love with the universal, a music of mental journeys and aching loss, the other a profound, wisecracking democrat of sound, in whose music there are no “hatred or enemies.” My daughter is uninterested in high flown stuff like that. She just likes the burping tubas on Arthur Blythe’s records and Lizzo’s spirited flute.
I’m making it sound like we were just kind of floating around. Sometimes that’s true, but just as often, the house was full of screaming. Everybody’s done a lot of it. A lot of meltdowns. A lot of feeling trapped. Stuck in the house, each of us moved through our fear and frustration and helplessness in successive waves of acting out. It accumulates. January 2021. That was probably the lowest time. One night in that lost month, I found myself in the driveway, late at night, leaning on my car and sobbing. About nothing and everything.
We tried to keep faith, which is hard when what’s right in front of your face is in constant conflict with the language being thrown around on the radio and the TV. All the bluster and lying. And for what, to fill a void? So we read, listened, made TV shows, we found kinetic sand in the most unlikely of places. And screamed at each other. But the unmistakable silences continued to surround us in the house, despite the noise. One night, probably in April 2020, I walked a quarter mile down the middle of Plumas Avenue. Not a single car drove past to disturb this strange, early evening game. So empty and quiet. It was hard to square this feeling with the roiling anger, death, injustice, and dissatisfaction that coursed through the country and the world. It was an ancient feeling.
It’s impossible to talk about the experience of the last year. If I could write single words, or even parts of a word, “loss”, or “gr[ ]”, maybe “[ ea ]” or “[ me d ]”, some small mark like that, that might get closer to the unsayable. Fragments, parts of days, parts of words. Maybe that kind of writing could say more about how all of it has felt. But then, you know how it feels: just when you think, ‘oh, maybe all of this makes sense,’ that fleeting moment of coherence dissolves.
I hope you’re doing alright. See you around soon.
Photo/Ann Ploeger.
Jared Stanley is the author of three collections of poetry: EARS (Nightboat, 2017), The Weeds (Salt, 2012), and Book Made of Forest (Salt, 2009), as well as numerous artists books, chapbooks, and ephemera, including Ignore the Cries of Empty Stones and Your Flesh Will Break Out in Scavengers (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2018), and Shall (Black Rock Press, 2019). In 2018 he was awarded the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers’ Hall of Fame. Jared's poems and prose have been published in The New York Times, Poem-a-Day, Triple Canopy, Harvard Review, and Make Magazine among many others. Stanley lives in Reno and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Nevada, Reno.
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