On The Edge With Dimitri Ehrlich

For this week’s “Report from the Edge,” our brilliant writer, creative director, brander, and award-winning music composer and producer, Dimitri Ehrlich, shares his unique experience during these fun-filled Corona quarantine times. (Illustrations by Mia Marie Overgaard and Rikki Jørgensen)

THE MORNING RITUAL

“We wake up and think, I’m glad I’m still alive, let me not waste this day. May I be as helpful as possible to as many people as possible today.” —Dimitri Ehrlich

Life During War Time — Penthouse Apple is not a bad place to ride out the apocalypse. We have a roof deck, where Michelle grows mint and scallions and basil, and perhaps optimistically, watermelon. One must be an optimist to plant watermelon. It takes a while.

We’re on the top floor of a 114-year-old building, with a nice clear view of the Dakota and Central Park. From my living room, I can see the spot where John Lennon was shot. We have enough food, a roof over our heads, and each other. So I guess we have everything we need.

OK, it’s not exactly wartime. New York City, of course, has been the epicenter of the outbreak and it has wrecked many lives right downstairs. The homeless guys who had set up near Gray’s Papaya on a mattress are gone. Where, one wonders?

When I had not left my apartment for the first 27 days in a row, I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. As it was raining heavily, I assumed (wrongly) it might be a good time to go food shopping. It was strange to walk down the block and gaze into the weary eyes of neighbors. Everyone is terrified. It’s hard to smile when you have a face mask on.

The tension is exhausting. Like all forms of paranoia, it feels like a wet heavy blanket, bristling with an embarrassing discomfort, but we can’t throw it off. And we’re scared to take Advil, in case the rumors are true (they’re not), competing with, for example, the notion that the Corona Virus was planned by the government as a distraction so they could install 5G networks. Rumors spread during calamities, conspiracy theories nearly as contagious as the virus itself.

Perspective. With large sacks of rice and many cans of beans and a precious, precocious five-year-old named Lev, who seems not to miss kinder-garten at all, preferring instead to turn our living room couch into a makeshift bouncy house, we can’t complain. We have it not bad here, though tens of thousands of our neighbors have been felled by this mysterious intruder, a pathogen that stalks us like dust particles, invading our dreams, hunting us in grocery stores, and with the un-cautious touch of a doorknob.

I think of the people living in Syrian refugee camps, or the millions languishing in prisons, for whom social distancing is not an option. Or the millions of people who have the disease, and whose family’s are wracked with grief, people dying alone, even the normalcy of a funeral swept away. For the rest of us, who have food and shelter, there is an opportunity. The shattering of so many norms at once reminds us that the “world out there,” the macro-systems that comprise reality, are not nearly as solid or permanent as they seem.

In these times when institutions like the economy and the basic foundations of our social structure, are crumbling before our eyes—we need to rely on our own daily rituals to maintain inner order as we come to terms with the basic fragility of our world.

Rituals. Having been raised with Buddhist meditation and martial arts since childhood, my life has always been guided by an inner wonderland of daily rituals. I have trained myself to wake up with the same thought every morning (“I’m glad I am alive, let me not waste this day, may I be as helpful as possible to as many people possible.”)

We are advised to create a sacred environment before sitting down to meditate, so I always vacuum, make my bed and put out a small water offering, and then begin each day with an hour of meditation. I’ve been doing that 7 days a week for the last 30 years. It’s a lifelong commitment I took.

it’s been said the water the wise person swims in is the same water the psychotic drowns in. And in my case, there’s probably a thin line between being a devoted spiritual practitioner and having full-blown Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.  Regardless of where I fall on that spectrum being slightly obsessive (“disciplined” is the euphemism I prefer) is coming in handy during the pandemic. Every day, I work out for at least an hour or two—yoga, boxing, martial arts, calisthenics. 

By repeating the same movements and meditations every day, there is a kind of railing to life. No matter how much of a mirage the external world reveals itself to be, the daily practices give me something both evanescent and reliable to hold onto, a glimpse of the interdependence that defines reality. Grounded in groundlessness, repetition of these ritual behaviors underscores the fact that everything changes.

And so the days turn to weeks. We jump rope on the rooftop. Monday, I installed a heavy bag. Tuesday? Dumbbells and tai chi. We stand upside down on our hands in a world turned upside down that no one understands. 

We play music at all hours. I find myself taking refuge in my old vinyl albums, maybe because the ritual of taking the record out of its sleeve and placing the needle provides solace, taking me back to my childhood. Or maybe it's like a homeless person who carefully wraps up his belongings with excessive care, there is a natural instinct to react to trauma with small decompensations, like the compulsive cleaning of the dust of an LP before each playing. 

Tom Petty’s "Damn The Torpedoes" has been getting a lot of play, and Lev loves "Refugee." Ironic, since we have all become refugees in our own homes.

We live in a historic moment of crushing despair, but this is its own peculiar gift. We are all tightrope walkers now: a momentary lapse of mindfulness can be fatal. Touched a shopping cart and then your face? Dead.  

There is an upside: living with renewed proximity to and awareness of death gives our lives new ballast, fresh momentum, a much-needed shove.

That ballast requires a release valve. Every night at 7 PM we go up on the roof and engage in a collective gesture of primal scream therapy. Along with tens of thousands—or maybe millions—of other New Yorkers, we clap and hoot and holler. Lev brings a mallet and bangs on pots and pans. Michelle, normally quiet, has discovered she likes making loud noises. 

There is an older couple across the street on the top floor of a building on the north side of 72nd Street, and while my eyesight isn't really good enough to be certain, I imagine we make eye contact each night with them at 7 PM when the shouting and clapping begins. It's a small ritual that lends some order to our suddenly shapeless lives. They come to their window and bang on their frying pans. We acknowledge one another by whooping and clapping. 

On the rooftops a few blocks away, we notice new people joining in each night. There is a doorman down below who steps out and blasts a trumpet. Cars honk their horns. We all feel a little like crying but we instead just shout "Thank you, New York! a little louder." This is a strange way to make friends with your neighbors, but it's all we have right now.

There is a catharsis in this kind of group applause—nominally we are cheering for the doctors, nurses, cops, firemen, delivery people and grocery store workers who are out there exposing themselves to death on a daily basis to save our lives. But we are also howling out our fear and bottled up anxiety, the tension of being indoors for weeks on end. 

I decided to bring my electric guitar and amp up on the roof and wear one of Michelle's old fur coats, a faded furry thing the color of burgundy of the sort Lenny Kravitz would snatch if he saw in a second-hand shop. 

I played a loud distorted sloppy version of Jimmy Hendrix's "Star-Spangled Banner," and a memory flashed back. I remembered being a small boy, and my parents were telling me that the teenaged boy across the street, Tommy Cicchino, was a drummer, and explaining that Tommy was planning to become a professional musician. I was about Lev's age at the time and didn't know the word musician. I thought it meant "magician."

But last night, as I mangled the last few notes of our national anthem, and the rockets' red glare faded slowly into the crepuscular lights over the Hudson, I saw the couple across the street smiling, and realized that maybe in my confusion at age five, I had gotten something right: maybe musicians—even untalented ones like me--can sometimes be magicians, and maybe doctors, too.

Illustration by Mia Marie Overgaard

For more information on Dimitri and his work, visit artist’s website at dimitriehrlich.com.