For weeks, I’ve been thinking about that “Relay” from November and the Tibetan horoscope that, it turns out, had lulled me to complacency. The foretold “sudden change or obstacle” took about a year to materialize, though it comes well within the predicted time frame. The point is that the present planetary alignment is said to “force a more spiritual outlook by causing material loss.”
I am subject to the rule of planet Ketu, one of two “shadow planets” of Vedic astrology that according to cyberastro.com “highlight the unresolved issues, unanswered karmas, hidden sides and problems from previous deeds or lives!” Ketu is “considered to toss life completely and dip you into miseries and destruction in the normal course of life.”
Tsering Choezom’s reading of my planetary influences during this period is blunt. “Wishes [will] hardly be fulfilled especially if you don’t concentrate well enough. . . . Don’t create any problems and just be focused and positive about the matter you [are] dealing with.”
I’m trying to buy a modest condominium apartment (“avoid making huge expenses” during Ketu’s rule, the horoscope also said), but the transaction is delayed and for who knows how long. I wonder if I can still get a mortgage, given present conditions. I wonder if I should even try. Would it not be wiser to give everything away and move to Thailand, renounce the material world, and rev up that spiritual outlook in preparation for the next life? It may come sooner than I’d hoped.
Sometimes I feel like the loneliest monk, an appellation allegedly born from a mis-hearing of the name Thelonious Monk. Living alone, social isolation is less edict than lifestyle.
This pandemic, which might quickly spell my doom, has paradoxically delivered the gift of time. I haven’t been to the office in weeks but to pick up the new issue from the crate outside on Thursdays, waving to anyone inside before retreating to my car. Working from home is a strange experience, one I did not enjoy as a freelancer in Brooklyn and do not care for now: Zoom and conference calls and CNN, the day zooms by and little is accomplished.
But music is always at hand, and if I have yet to absorb Ketu’s stern lesson, I have at least learned that Mozart makes me happy. “Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551, ‘Jupiter’: I. Allegro vivace” soars and swoops and ambles and swells. It is ecstasy set to music. When melancholy comes, jazz piano complements nicely, like the heavy blues of “Lonely Woman” from the Horace Silver Quintet’s “Song for My Father,” and “Blue in Green” from Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue,” possibly the pianist Bill Evans’s very finest hour among a catalog bursting with colossal, colorfully altered chords and brooding, bluesy solos.
There is evening piano “study,” which might include run-throughs of Monk’s “Well You Needn’t,” “Blue Monk,” and “Straight, No Chaser,” the latter one of the most maddening, rhythmically challenging melodies to emerge from his brilliantly unbalanced soul, to this novice at least. My renditions might impress Richard Nixon, an offensively soulless pianist, but, were Monk somehow revived, would likely kill him a second time.
Now and then I pick up the guitar. I strum as aimlessly as I walk, room to room, observing the acoustic reflections in each. Here, it is warm and resonant, here bright and reverberant, there dampened and dull. Inevitably I return to the window and stare, at nothing.
As work and weather allow, I cycle to Wiborg’s Beach and walk, picking up plastic. Soon, I’m told, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans. Will anyone be here to measure these things? I sing verses from Van Morrison into the gale: “Love of the simple is all that I need / I’ve no time for schism or lovers of greed / Go up to the mountain, go up to the glen / When silence will touch you, and heartbreak will mend.”
And there is Bob Dylan’s surprise, the elegiac, 17-minute “Murder Most Foul.” Initially a lament for President Kennedy, Mr. Dylan seems to weave all of postwar pop and jazz history amid song requests to the legendary disc jockey Wolfman Jack, returning again and again to the assassination. Our greatest living poet sounds like “the sardonic ghost,” said Rolling Stone magazine, “sifting through the wreckage of the 20th century on ‘Desolation Row.’ “
“What’s new, pussycat? What’d I say? / I said the soul of a nation been torn away / And it’s beginning to go into a slow decay.” It sounds like a eulogy, for all of us.
I think of Hunter S. Thompson, who wrote, in 1972, of “what a fantastic monument to all the best instincts of the human race this country might have been, if we could have kept it out of the hands of greedy little hustlers like Richard Nixon.” Tricky Dick wasn’t just a lousy pianist.
As I write this, late on Sunday afternoon, my brother sends word, from 3 a.m. in Dharamsala, India. One of his classmates, two years ahead of me at Milton Academy, has died of Covid-19.
A dozen or so years ago I hurried from my Midtown office to the Old Town Bar on East 18th Street, after Jonathan, then staying at my Brooklyn apartment, urgently informed me that he had fallen asleep and would be very late for their appointment, where his classmate waited, alone. Tom, whose brother was in my class, had become a journalist, and a teacher, and a housing policy analyst, living in New York City and working for affordable and better quality housing for his neighbors of lesser means.
It was good to catch up over a beer. I wish I had known it would be our last meeting.
On March 8, the president re-tweeted a picture of himself playing a violin with the caption, “My next piece is called ‘Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming’ “ and the comment “Who knows what this means, but it sounds good to me!” (Readers likely know that the picture was equating him to the nefarious Roman Emperor Nero, said to have fiddled while his capital burned.)
On April 1, as the Covid-19 death toll in the United States hit 5,000, he interrupted his press briefing to declare that he had become “number one” on Facebook. Perhaps he should be number one on our Public Enemy list, as well.
On Saturday, long after bald-faced lies that the number of cases would soon be zero and the virus would miraculously disappear, he uttered what an honest 2016 campaign slogan would have been: “There will be a lot of death.”
I call it murder, most foul.
Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.