Coronavirus Year
In the spring of 2020, when the whole world went into quarantine, I was holed up in the French countryside.
I had just got home from a year’s teaching in the US and wanted nothing better than to be told I wasn’t allowed to leave my house for a very long time.
There were seven of us--me and Alastair and our two twenty-something-year-old children and three of their friends--plus an untamed dog from the pound, and ours was a pretty bucolic lockdown.
While the others sat on the steps in the sun, worked in the vegetable garden, swam in the river with the dog, and played poker at night, when we weren’t preparing increasingly ingenious meals from what we’d picked in the garden or foraged in the fields or excavated from dusty mason jars in the larder, or regaling each other with internet tattle or with news of friends and friends-of-friends who’d come down with the virus, I shut myself in my workroom and binged on Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Reading Pasolini, watching Pasolini, breathing, sweating, dreaming Pasolini.
Pasolini is someone whose work I love and live by, and it seemed as if Pier Paolo was the right guide to this plague time.
I was craving his poetry from the early 60s, a poetry imbued in a classical humanist tradition that was simultaneously raw confessional and civic-minded.
I was craving his newspaper journalism of the 1970s, polemical pieces delineating how consumer capitalism was destroying nature, language, culture, the human body, even.
I was craving his “The Gospel According to Matthew” or “Medea,” films which reworked Bible and Greek myth into modern-day allegories of individuals’ relation to society or their own fate.
I felt I needed to re-immerse myself in Pasolini’s life—a branded, scandalous martyr-pervert’s life, lit up by what he described as “avid Dionysian joys,” but also by his harsh dedication to “the courage of truth.”
This is a rough-draft extract from I Bite My Friends (to Cure Them) the book I’ve been working on the last couple of years. Originally conceived as the story of how early Christian saints, political prophets, and contemporary artists have used their bodies to protest power, the book’s now morphed into a memoir-via-history-of-my-heroes.
You may have read some sections of it. The story of my friendship, as a lonely 14-year-old, with transvestite artist Stephen Varble was published in “Granta” and “lithub” https://lithub.com/a-14-year-old-girl-a-genderqueer-performance-artist-and-one-of-new-yorks-most-unlikely-friendships/;
my profile of Russian political artist, Piotr Pavlensky—a man who nailed his scrotum to the paving stones of Red Square as a symbol of resistance to Putin’s regime--appeared in “The New York Times Magazine.” https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/11/magazine/pyotr-pavlensky-art.html?searchResultPosition=1
Other heroes of this book include the Cynic philosopher Diogenes of Sinop, my mother, Michel Foucault, a third-century Carthaginian woman-martyr, Russian feminist punk group Pussy Riot, a 19th century French hermaphrodite, and of course, Pier Paolo Pasolini. All interspersed with chunks of autobiography.
It’s a mad project, more ambitious, more inchoate, more thrilling than anything I’ve ever undertaken. Most mornings I feel as if I’ve stepped off the edge of a cliff. But readers—and the hope that some of my inadmissible obsessions will resonate with them—give me courage.
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It’s now Fall 2020, we’re down to four inmates of our house in France, including my ninety-four-year-old father, plus the dog. We’ve been harvesting the last tomatoes and eggplants from the garden, boiling them down into chutney, and when I’m not wrestling with my duende in I Bite My Friends, I’m working at a Maison de Quartier in our nearby town of Romans-sur-Isère, teaching classes on American politics and culture (in French!) to kids who can’t afford college.
I ask how many of them would like to visit the U.S., if they had a chance.
Not a single hand is raised.
Where do they dream of going?
Canada, maybe.
Why aren’t they curious to see the US?
Too violent. Too many guns. Too unequal. Not a good place to be poor, or a person of color, to have an accident, or get sick.
Fifteen years ago I asked this question in a similar setting-- to North African and Gypsy kids in Perpignan--and they were all, Pack me in your suitcase, I want to see Miami, I want to go to LA!
Now America’s like this geriatric bogeyman.
Perversely, it makes me miss my scary not-so-loved home-country.