COVID STORY:
AN ARTIST SHELTERED IN PLACE
ON THE 31ST FLOOR
For months now, looking out from the
elevation of my 31st floor balcony,
I eye-gulp the panorama before me,
embracing, with cell phone photos,
its architectural details and vastness,
its sea-sky moving tableau.
Internalizing the eerie emptiness in the streets,
I shift back and forth
from comfort to contagion,
now awed by the magnificence before me,
then in dread, as I think of the
Covid caretakers bravely carrying on,
despite fear and adversity.
This architecture, my architecture,
jutting high in the sky,
wrangles with my forlornness,
insisting that I focus, not on the heart-rending,
but on the handsomeness of the
edifices before me,
extraordinary in their extreme
verticality and variety.
It is as if I were tracing and stroking
each building with my fingertips,
now low with flat roof,
now bursting into the sky,
impossibly slender,
impossibly high.
With the memory of
running for safety during 9/11,
figures arrive from my previous art,
symbolizing the superhuman,
transformed into monumental edifices
intermixing with buildings around them.
Almost two decades after my full day
running from the falling Trade Towers in 2001,
I still feel viscerally that some scoundrel
can take a gun and shoot down a
skyscraper before me.
I engage the figurative symbol
to confront this villain,
erecting this form again and again
until it becomes part of, and
mirrors, its architectural environment.
It is exactly 7pm.
Balconies become platforms for
ebullient cheers, whooped yays, whistled thank-yous.
Honoring the bravest amongst us,
we come together in the evening
with a cacophony of raucous, roaring sounds
to broadcast our gratitude.
The Covid heroes don’t come forward.
They don’t appear on our balconies and rooftops
to acknowledge our applause,
to accept medals and citations,
to be financially rewarded
as they deserve.
My own deeds pale in comparison.
I’m not brave like that.
My giving/helping/donating
cannot hold a candle to their offerings.
They are the protectors
that I create in my art,
the defenders I want to be.
Surreal thoughts of illness
morph into more sanguine surrealism.
I feel empowered
to make anything happen now
in a landscape of my creation
(so long as my defenders are
here to stand guard).
This new setting becomes
a stage for performers,
a framework in which to romp and rollick.
It allows for movement with an
expansive outreach in space,
the antithesis of confinement and constraint.
How my spirit leaps as I
create this world of conviviality,
without the virulence of virus
to interfere with my whimsy.
Here, people can angst-lessly
go about their business, as they
saunter, exercise and frolic with free rein.
They know they are protected.
An evening’s radiogram-like regalia of dots and dashes,
tap out a Morse code of stillness,
camouflaging messages of
desolation and despondency.
Is someone talking, seated, moving
within each white cube that I see?
Will I ring the doorbell (when Covid allows)
and enter into one of the dot-dash cubicles
and say hello?
Will we shake hands?
I seesaw between feeling
circumscribed and confined by Covid, and then
overwhelmed with a desire to
run my fastest, hugging everyone in my path.
If I can get past being this horizontal yo-yo,
and allow myself to focus on,
and feel privileged by,
the mesmerizing view before me,
my disquietude diminishes.
Ultimately, it is this hypnotic and riveting
vision and version of reality
that feeds me at this time,
a time when solace and safety are
so very precious.
©Linda Stein
May 2020