Introduction: Toni Simon Art — Chant de la Sirène The Journal

Chant de la Sirène

ISSUE 1, Summer 2020

The Covid Duration

**Toni Simon, Pandemic Diary #8, Isolation (Gouache on paper)**

Editor’s Note

Duration & Endurance

They say that by the end of June, 45 percent of Covid19-related U.S. deaths will have occurred in nursing homes. That’s nearly half the American coronavirus deaths, or half of the more than 130,000 as of this writing. With a certain prescience at 87, my mother had rejected institutional care upon my father-caretaker’s death last year. She still lives at home, in spite of injury and illness. For that decision I am grateful.

But under Covid19 lockdown, she is lonely and isolated, although she has a couple of drop-by caretakers. When I speak to her from my own home 3,000 miles away, I remind my mother that she must wear a mask if she goes out. She lives in a hot climate. She hates the mask. She will moan and say, Oh, honey, I’m ready to die anyway….

No talk about the pandemic will perk her up. Like millions of elderly persons across the country and world, who can no longer see adult children and extended family for fear of the virus, my mother lives in a state of futility and despair. I’m ready to die, she will say repeatedly. Henri Bergson might have described this version of my mother’s “time” as a certain determinism, by which the spool he imagined unrolling its thread flows until it is empty, and “time,” per se, is over.

My mother’s “spool” may appear nearly empty. Reminding her of Covid19’s destructiveness to the human body is to remind her that she lives by a certain construct of successive time. Why live?

Then I stop the mask lecture. I happen to bring up a story from the past. My mother’s voice becomes bossy and crisp. She’ll start to laugh when I recall that time she was driving my brothers and me down the coast of California, and we camped on a “no-camping” beach near San Simeon. When the California Highway Patrol saw our car parked alongside Highway 1, they targeted big flashlights out upon the huge expanse of coastal sand. My mother instructed her children to lie snuggly behind a log. We did, blending into beach-log backsides. The CHP finally left. We drifted off giggling in our sleeping bags, waking up in a dense but beautiful fog.

Or I recall for her the “time” my dad climbed inside a huge plastic McMuffin playground toy at a McDonald’s in Globe, Arizona. While playing with his tiny grandson, my dad coyly dangled an unlit Camel cigarette from his mouth—provoking my mother, who hated his smoking while he pretended to inhale from the inside of the McMuffin cage next to a toddler.

My mother stops talking about dying and starts to tell her own anecdotes from life stories. She regains inner power in the listening and telling. For Bergson, that flow of the spool towards the end—towards inevitable chronological emptiness—is contradicted by an alternative spinning spool, one gaining threads. This second spool is what my mother collects of herself through the mental expanse we call “the past.” This is the spool composed of an ever-building, experiential consciousness, a creative mind that cannot be contained or explained by philosophical notions of time or identity (what Bergson calls “ego”).

The ever-growing second spool is what Bergson calls duration—la durée. Duration grows—not as a successive chain of events, not as a line—but as a gathering of ever-increasing threads. This spool is one of living contradictions, “composed” of distinctiveness, internal movement—or, as Bergson remarks, “when our ego lets itself live.” When “ego” refrains from separating “its present state from its former state,” it creates a “simultaneity” that puts “both the past and present [mental] states into an organic whole”—as in the “melting” of “notes in a tune…. With one another” (as Bergson writes in Time and Free Will).

Bergson’s writings on this un-timely sense of duration are full of metaphors. The spool, the musical tune—how else can one describe an aspect of human consciousness that may be consciousness itself, a consciousness finding “itself” through multiplicity and contradiction—or “paradox,” as Gilles Deleuze would later describe? Western modernity’s metaphysics generate what Bergson calls “an artificial bond,” which “imagines … a formless ego, indifferent and unchangeable, on which it threads the psychic states … set up as independent entities.” He then goes for a new metaphor, this one of a colored beaded necklace: “Instead of a flux of fleeting shades merging into each other, it [the “unchanging” “ego”] perceives distinct and, so to speak, solid colors … it must perforce then suppose a thread, also itself solid, to hold the beads together. But if this colorless substratum is perpetually colored by that which covers it, it is for us, in its indeterminateness, as if it did not exist, since we only perceive what is colored.”

Bergson adds: “…this substratum [in psychic states] has no reality…[it is] merely a symbol intended to recall unceasingly to our consciousness the artificial character of the process by which the attention places clean-cut states side by side… where actually there is a continuity which unfolds” (quote from Bergson’s Creative Evolution, translator Arthur Mitchell—emphasis added).

Continuity, unfolding, simultaneity—“our duration is not merely one instant replacing another,” like theoretical beads on a thread, notes in a tune, the alternative spool. Duration “gnaws into the future… well as it advances.” This durational effect is related to memory—not as nostalgia, for “[m]emory … is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register. There is no register, no drawer…the past is preserved by itself…it follows us at every instant….”

Every instant. La durée.

Conventionally, of course we think of a “duration” as “the length of time anything continues” (check the Cambridge Dictionary on this). A usage example reads: “We all had to stay indoors for the storm’s duration.”

The Covid19 duration has been a storm, a raging unpredictable tornado to put up with and endure while “staying indoors,” in our Midwest cellars, or isolating in our shelters. La durée, indeed, has been dure, “hard.” C’est dur, say the French, when something must be gotten through in spite of difficulty.

And yet enduring la durée, which is dure, has also generated for many the “durational” figuration of consciousness expanding, the creative mind happening, as Bergson describes. What brings my mother back to herself are the details of storytelling, of verbalized memory, acting as distinctive flowing pieces of her living present mind. For those artists and multi-media poets featured here in this first issue of Chant de la Sirène the Journal, the Covid Duration has offered challenges of hardness and endurance—yet also the durational interior of contemplative creative-mental space.

Of course, no one escapes history. And this has been a painful historical moment in human time: of physical and psychical loss, of social reconsideration and new scrutinies, of loneliness and isolation, of phobias—both real and imagined—of real illness and death for too many families. It has devastated human infrastructures, institutions and businesses. Too many have lost jobs and their incomes. Too many have lost their lives.

It has also been a time of exceptional creativity for some of us plunging our own depths moving through the expanse of duration.

Toni Simon, the visual artist (and poet) featured on this page, began her own durational activity last winter, creating a series of Covid19 paintings exemplied here by “Pandemic Diary #8, Isolation.” She lives in a community particularly hardhit last winter-early spring by Covid19, New York City. Her gouache-on-paper series has been her response, began as she was forced to “shelter in place,” in the Brooklyn apartment she shares with her husband, unable to see friends and physically engage with her community for months, afraid to leave a building worried that proper PPE was not unavailable. Like others around her in New York City and everywhere, she lived with the fear of becoming sick—and she, and all of us, watched our local hospitals fill with the severely ill and dying. For a few weeks, in fact, the coronavirus literally killed close to 1,000 New Yorkers a day. Working within this duration and enduring as an artist, Simon has produced gorgeous paintings that spoke not only of her own fears and experiences during lockdown, her isolation over the need to protect herself from a microscopic virus. She has spoken of mine, too.

Others featured in this journal share some version of this particular positioning as artists and poets have contemplated and responded to the Covid19 experience, which we all are having together and yet alone on the planet. There’s the worry we have developed as infection numbers grow countlessly higher in the United States—the confirmed cases of illness, the continuing massive deaths, particularly in an America under the Trump Administration’s lackluster efforts to control the virus. This information is filtered to us through the “dure” mechanism of clocks counting our days and months—time as gauged by CNN and 24-hour media programs. In chronological time, the virus continues its rampage.

There’s also been a transformative side effect occurring throughout the Covid Duration, a manifestion of our collective fear, yes, but also our collective longings for peace, social justice, human harmony. Like the spool winding up, not down, we are seeing a social transformation happening through our group suffering before our eyes. Many of us who felt separate are experiencing the fact that we live amidst a world of fellow humans. Out of self-isolation a growing, larger chunk of humanity seems to feel part of a group in the United States. The viral spread, perhaps, especially for Americans, may have brought to the surface our common vulnerabilities, and our common wishes for care—of self and others.

U.S. society, indeed, has been most challenged by the transformational shift. The Covid Duration has forced its citizens in greater numbers to look again, to see our history, to size up the destructiveness of our persistent institutionalized racism. The George Floyd murder by Minneapolis police officers a few weeks ago is not the only recent killing of a Black American by cops trained to exert lethal force and to target African Americans. But the video of Floyd being suffocated by an officer’s knee pounding into Floyd’s neck on the Minneapolis pavement seems to have struck the right nerve. It seems to have energized the American public, leading to marches against police brutality and American racism that still continue in nearly every town and city. More white Americans seem to be waking up to the fact that Black Americans endure unfathomable institutionalized violence and discrimination. And, amazingly, citizens are taking to the streets in enormous numbers sharing the collective belief that this violence and discrimination against Black Americans can now change. Informed discussions are regularly critiquing community police forces everywhere; police funding just last week in New York City alone was partially revoked by the City Council. The movement to defund and disarm U.S. police departments across the country is no longer just a radical Leftist dream. In several cities, including Minneapolis itself, this dream is becoming a reality. So, too, are monuments to racist historical figures, broken “heroes,” crashing to the ground.

It is this aspect of the Covid Duration, its mentally-socially transformational possibilities, that many in this collection engage with, observe, and/or critique. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Janelle Poe, Uche Nduka and Dudgrick Bevins speak frankly through their poetry and multi-media work about American racism, social dystopia, human bias. Bevins is particular poignant on making connections between Coronavirus and the AIDS virus, HIV—the latter similarly ignored for so long by Republican administrations, just like Trump’s today debunks the reality of Covid19 to his supporters. These poems and multi-media works critique our collective ignorance in arriving at this form of government at this point in history. Likewise, the poetry of Susan M. Schultz, Hank Lazer, Norman Fischer, and Lennox Raphael (of the New York Umbra-poetry group and now living in Denmark) takes on the recognition of America’s failed power structures under the current U.S. Administration as well as neoliberal agendas. These poets create through a political activism rooted not in “blaming” the other, as Fischer’s poetry declares, but through forms of spiritual nourishment, guidance, and human care, as in Schultz’s daily “Meditations” series or in Lazer’s “Sutras.” Duration for these poet-artists, indeed, is about transformation—but inside the mind as well as out, as we begin to reframe the inside nature of our social structuring.

Lockdown becomes its own kind of demon in the duration—literally creating a confining, durational “space” for several multi-media artists and poets in this issue. Sheila Maldonado, Doris Bloom, Laynie Brown, and Larkin Higgins express their particular durational lockdown observations and find a language to express the cramped aloneness of an apartment in the Bronx with crawling bugs, or a newspaper wrapping up the human body to near suffocation. But lockdown duration also gives these multi-media artists their inner creative engagement, a “freedom” to access inner emotional images, and to find the aloneness of writing and art a sustaining force. The details of spatial environments and self-perception become special, observational, are noted in detail. Video-maker Jesper Dalmose and artist-performer Nicole Peyrafitte also offer contemplative—and positive—moments of reflection found without their own Covid-Duration spaces under lockdown, whether they are within one of Copenhagen’s empty subway stations (Dalmose’s video is filmed in Denmark’s capital) or the birds Peyrafitte sees in daily walks and are then recorded in notebook sketches with words (born and raised in the Pyrenees region of France, Peyrafitte draws, sings, and makes films at her home on the Brooklyn shore of the Verrazano Bridge).

Barrett Watten also considers the emotions of what he calls the “Great Isolation” retroactively, filtered through the historical experience of German artist Hanna Höch when she was forced to sequester in Berlin during the second World War and as transposed to Watten’s own modern experience. Brenda Coultas studies her own perception of the flow of time, seemingly so mechanistic—but, in fact, as durational and potentially ecstatic: time within poetry writing (and reading). Carla Harryman adroitly observes the time-scape of daily life under the Covid19 pandemic through her own language of lockdown—“To get out of its way / To know what is normal.” Meanwhile, another multi-media poet, Laura Mullen, writes of the “erasure of words,” the “tightness / in your chest” that self-isolation under lockdown places upon the writer-perceiver (while simultaneously taking us on a wild sci-fi wonder-journey, into the futuristic carnival of durational space in her fabulous poetry video).

Multi-media Canadian / New Yorker artist Adeena Karasick, as well as poets Maria Damon and Alan Sondheim, captivate us in this issue with their own flights of verbal futurism and fantasy. They offer us linguistically sophisticated, sometimes absurdist and funny, durational performance poetries, demonstrating the core power of words through sound and sometimes in experiments with chant. Damon also—along with the poet Nada Gordon—shares her photo images widely in this issue. These photos were taken during extensive Covid-Durational “photo-walks”—to the local Brooklyn graveyard. Gyms were forced to shut down; people needed exercise. These two women friends—separately, respecting the intense social distance protocols in place in New York City last spring—avoided mass transit and hiked regularly from their Brooklyn apartments to the historic Green-Wood Cemetery. We are calling their photo work in this issue “A Parallel Project,” because the work was similarly begun and yet offers strikingly different approaches to the same “Green-wood” themes. At this historic Brooklyn cemetery, Damon and Gordon both found a park-like haven not full of New Yorkers (unlike neighboring Prospect Park): a safe and tranquil, blooming-garden-like world offering spring foliage, sculpted beech trees, and often humorous as well as moving gravestone etchings. The silent souls buried amongst Green-Wood’s garden-like beauty contain shocking figures like “Swords Mother,” a gravestone photo taken by Damon that I’ve featured on my own page shared with Ronni Thomas’s sculpture “Covid Mask.” Also, Thomas and I offer there our collaborative video-poem, a birthday tribute to my lost son and one of Thomas’s best friends. Thomas is an award-winning filmmaker; our short video collaboration offers previously unseen photo images of New York City’s vacant avenues in Manhattan under lockdown, and plays with the “artifice” Bergson says is “time”—against the subliminal “duration” that left America’s greatest urban center for many weeks and even months its own kind of ghostly vacancy under lockdown. Thomas’s photography in the film captures the New York, New York, of the Covid Duration stunningly.

We all run out of time, become ghosts of ourselves. Our “time” spools measured and weighed through numerical years do run empty. Many people have passed during Covid19, their “time” spool gone. Because of the American lack of cohesive national policy to diminish the spread of Covid19, many more Americans likely will have their numerical years shortened, their life journeys over too soon—a disturbing, tragic fact.

The writer-artists whose multi-media work is collected here in the inaugural issue of Chant de la Sirène the Journal offer us a different site for—and a different glimpse upon —the simultaneously filling spool. Instead of running low and dissipating, this durational spool gains fullness and strength. In the adversary of mechanical time, we live until our inevitable endings—and we do exist in time as well as in our time-bound social-historical contexts. But the durational spool is the fount, the source, of artistic endurance. It counters “time’s” endings. It continues to yield the love we have of not just recording experience, but of creating and transforming it.

I write in profound gratitude to all the multi-media poets and artists who were willing to submit to these pages, to share that dure, that work.

—Laura Hinton

ISSUE 1