Friday, September 16, 2022

Journal of the Plague Years

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (Albrecht Durer, 1498)

Imagine a time when you can sit in a restaurant or attend a gathering without feeling that you're testing your mettle or in fact taking your life in your hands with a bravado display of  courage in the face of something which is impervious to human will. There was indeed a time when strapping thirty-year old athletes defied the demographics (which mostly showed the majority of Covid fatalities occurring in an older demographic). To be insouciant was like jumping out a window to see if you could fly. If you remember back in the early stages of the pandemic, refrigerated trucks with bodies lined the streets near hospitals and funeral homes couldn’t handle the traffic. When the Delta variant first appeared, before there were any Covid vaccines, in January of 2020, it was the Dark Ages. A crazed rogue president was issuing increasingly wild pronunciamentos amongst them quack cures which included at one point bleach and  hydroxychloroquine. Low paid cashiers in supermarkets and workers in meat processing plants (where there were massive outbreaks) risked their lives, like front line soldiers, to keep the population fed. The symptoms of the bubonic plague which sent Boccaccio’s nobility fleeing Florence and entertaining themselves with the Decameron were far more severe. Creuzfeldt-Jakob, the human form of mad cow (bovine spongiform encephalopathy), something from which wide swathes of the population have been spared, may give some idea of the severity of the Black Plague. Still, the whole earth has been traumatized. With each end of each new outbreak of a variant, one wonders is this finally it? Is this the day the scrim of fear will be lifted? Is the moment when life itself can return to being the greatest threat to life.

read "The Final Solution: Consciousness and Beyond" by Francis Levy, The Screaming Pope

and watch the trailer for Erotomania


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