This Day, Every Day
In those first confounding days, before we knew the difference between the ridiculous but necessary (keeping our distance) and the merely ridiculous (Cloroxing our groceries), we cast about, separately and collectively, for something to read.
They’d been through this a century ago, the height of modernism, yet there was barely a word about it in Woolf or Stein or Joyce or Dos Passos. People kept mentioning the same Katherine Anne Porter novella, but everything beyond that was allegorical (Camus) or associative (King Lear). Where was the pandemic art that reflected the full unexalted mess of it, the claustrophobic gray sprawl of it, in stark and honest detail? The job is to wring the general from the specific, but each endless, beginningless day was somehow too much of both. Everyone sleepwalking through a specific version of the same general nightmare. The stakes both existential and immediately flattened into cliché. Everything is copy, but even as we lived it we understood the bad news: the most momentous thing that was happening to any of us, and it wasn’t even usable material. We kept trying to only connect, to pretend that the circuits could stay unbroken through Zoom squares, but we understood the absurdity of the assignment. We made the requisite bad puns about going viral and self-deprecating jokes about inessential labor. We never got around to reading the novella.
The problem — well, there were many problems, but one was a problem of interiority, which is to say a problem of the internet. We couldn’t go to exterior spaces, but we didn’t have full access to interiority, either, not really, because in everyone’s pocket was a wormhole that led to everyone else’s pocket. Lonely but never truly alone. Gabriel Kahane had jammed the wormhole, though, so he could be alone. Or bored. Or quiet. He could notice the color of the sky: weird blue and smokeless one morning, Crayola violet another. These details made their way into Magnificent Bird, the exceptionally self-assured show that emerged from Kahane’s noticing. At night, he saw a strange glow of oxblood in the sky — forest fires in the distance — and this, too, made it into one of his songs. There was fire, too, somewhere through the wormhole, or so he was told, but this was figurative fire — “friendly fire”: one line in a sketch that renders the chintzy psychomechanics of the smartphone as economically as Pound’s image of a metro station. As Gabriel sings in the play’s eponymous song:
A PICC line drip of glowing hearts
Righteousness and shopping carts
Fire is a motif throughout Magnificent Bird. So are frailty, ominous dreams, mortality, and civil war. It’s also funny! Some of the details are in extreme close-up, the one tangible sliver in front of your nose; others are panoramic, a continent-sized country cross-sectioned in a stanza:
Foreclosing a grand old dream
Black motorcade running on empty
Big box and a Ponzi scheme
Drain everything, land of the plenty
We were all there, some version of there, but we couldn’t make it mean much, couldn’t find a way to notice, and now we can hardly remember it without succumbing to its distance, without feeling like we’re paraphrasing someone else’s cliché. Now I don’t have to wonder why it didn’t show up in Woolf or Joyce.
Magnificent Bird is one of the few pieces of art that has made meaning of it, has made it specific and thus eternal, and the magic is done the old-fashioned way: the world in a grain of sand, a cup of coffee, a cherry-red plastic chair. In “The Sabbath,” Heschel writes, “That day is this day, every day.” The only way to see out is to have some access to the interior, to wipe both sides of the window clean.
