The Final Solution: Narcissistic Grandiosity

Superman (DC Comics)

Superman is not just a legend or a philosophical concept out of Nietzsche. The Uberbensch is an ideal that many people hone to with tenacity. The tightrope walking of the Wallendas and the free soloing of El Capitan are examples of abilities that create awe in spectators. Houdini could be chained within a submerged box and free himself. And there are Gary Kasparov and Steven Hawking who possess superhuman mental and mnemonic skills. A Mersenne prime has been tallied with almost 13 million digits. Who has the largest photographic memory? Superheroes in movies reflect the Walter Mitty-like romance with power. Those who don’t possess great skills may also possess a narcissistic grandiosity or megalomania that make them feel impervious to the vulnerabilities that their more vulnerable confreres suffer. However there's literally no amount of mental fortitude, physical strength or non-quitting spirit that will defeat COVID-19. Remission within a population may be achieved by recusal on a mass scale, but that involves confinement and it brings to mind the old boxing expression, “you can run but you can’t hide.” Neither physical, nor psychological fortitude are potent enough to subdue a virus like COVID-19. It would be nice to think that admitting defeat, such as alcoholics do when they admit powerlessness, would make some sort of difference. Yet failing to fight back in some way is also likely to hasten its spread.

The Final Solution: Pattern Recognition

Is there always silver lining? Murderous genocides like those perpetrated by Buddhist monks against the Muslim Rohingya minority in Myanmar have uprooted and devastated whole populations. Ice caps melt, sea levels rise and yet the Amazon rainforest continues to be despoiled. No pandemic has probably ever affected the world as greatly as the coronavirus, but it appears doubtful that lessons are being learned--particularly in the United States where the president refuses to wear a mask. Still, it’s always easier to prepare against the knowable than the unknowable. All the ventilators, face masks and hand lotion aren’t going to be a bulwark against as yet unthinkable diseases that are the product of a world that is literally beginning to tilt on its axis. There's an economic domino effect that occurs when supply chains begin to break. At the worst, businesses can’t pay taxes to governments who can no longer pay their bondholders. Mitch McConnell’s comments about letting states go into bankruptcy notwithstanding, it would be a catastrophe of the tax free municipals and even US Treasuries stopped being both a safe investment and reliable way for governments to meet their obligations. The problem is mirrored on a more global scale when dying infrastructures can no longer provide a bulwark against the incursion of maladies that may themselves be generated by a worn out planet. Oedipus famously brought about the prophecy he feared (and another plague--the one suffered by the people of Thebes) by trying to avoid it. And what if there were a way to see the future? Often the omens comes as riddles that need to be decrypted. How will anyone be able to act, when there's no agreement about the nature of the signs?

The Final Solution: Man Plans. God Laughs

Now Connecticut, New York and New Jersey are talking about quarantining people from states like Texas and Arizona where the coronavirus is peaking ("N.Y. Will Impose Quarantine on States With Big Outbreaks," NYT, 6/24/20) At one point several months ago the governor of Rhode Island briefly tried to stop cars with New York license plates (until Andrew Cuomo intervened) and there was a period when people driving even from New York to Long Island were supposed to quarantine themselves for 2 weeks once they’d arrive at some bucolic Hampton’s spot. Even though the EU has opened up its borders, it has decided to bar American tourists, at least for the present. The tables could easily be turned since quiescence is totally illusory as we have seen in the case of both Korea and China, two countries whose early declarations of victory turned out to be hollow when cases suddenly spiked (in the case of Korea when a single infected person infected nightclub patrons in Seoul). The coronavirus is peculiar, since it won’t be wrestled with, nor does it respond to displays of bravado. If there's an underlying powerlessness which characterizes the human condition, then the current pandemic may be one of the most lucid manifestations of how little control one has over anything. Man plans. God laughs.

The Final Solution: Never on Sunday

Remember Never on Sunday (1960), the Jules Dassin film about the Greek prostitute (Melina Mercouri. "Greece says it'll reopen to tourists July as it claims success over Covid-19," (CNN) "Brothels to Reopen But Hookers And Clients Required to Wear Masks and Gloves?" ran the headline in Nation and State (5/4/20). One announcement came on the heels of the other. While New Yorkers were taking baby steps in terms of allowing outdoor dining with social distancing, their Greek counterparts were obviously dealing with the resumption of more carnal satisfactions. Of course, the blow to prostitution has been one of the least hotly debated issues that’s arisen from the pandemic—though the pictures of the Amsterdam’s shuttered Red Light district have been a source of consternation to sex workers and customers alike. In a way it’s nice that one of the world’s oldest civilizations is paying attention to the needs of the world’s oldest profession. Plato you may remember argued against poets and poetry in The Republic (too bad he didn’t live to read C.P. Cavafy), but he didn’t opine about Dionysius. Let’s say you get on an Olympic Air flight to Greece and you find yourself wandering around The Acropolis or some other ancient ruin on a hot summer afternoon, will you be adjourn to the Temple of Aphrodite? Obviously, social distancing has a different meaning in Athens than it does in New York.

The Final Solution: Headstands

It is not hard to stand on your head. There are several methods. One way that’s popular with practitioners of Yoga is to wedge your forehead between your palms. A certain a amount of practice is necessary and eventually the balancing becomes effortless and you can remain upside down for indefinite periods of time. The process is a metaphor for something but it’s unclear what. Any activity that defies gravity always exudes a certain air of impossibility. If you can stand on your head, why can’t you fly? Myths have been created out of such death-defying impulses. For instance, Icarus  ignores his father Daedalus’ warning that his wax wings will melt, but it’s the wings that also free them from the labyrinth where the minotaur resides. Once standing on your head in the early morning becomes part of your routine (and you may still ask why) then you'll find that thoughts rush into your brain along with all the blood. By the time you’re ready to come down into a cat stance or downward dog you will return to normal, even if the world is still in chaos and you've had to jump through hoops to get to where you want to be.

The Final Solution: The Ouroboros

drawing of alchemical tract by Synesius  (Theodoros Pelecanos, 1478)

Serpents are creatures of temptation. The serpent lures Eve with  the forbidden fruit. In one sense a serpent is a snake, but it often seems capable of ambulating in a vertical way like a prehensile creature. Look at the upright serpents bobbing through festivities on the Chinese New Year’s. Serpents are beguiling since they're venomous and joyous at the same time. What goes around comes around.  Serpents are frequently anthropomorphized and often personify human flaws. Fire may emanate from their mouths as a sign of volcanic anger. The Ouroboros is an ancient symbol of the serpent eating its own tail. It’s a little like the cyclical view of history Vico advocated in the Scienza Nuova and also strangely prescient if you look at the arc of recent events. Hegel proposed a dialectics in which opposing historical forces (thesis, antithesis) produced the result (synthesis), but now such an evolutionary prospect seems delusory in this the Year of the Rat.

The Final Solution: The Divided Self

“Shadow Play,” a Twilight Zone that aired on May 5, 1961 presents Dead Man Walking with a Beckett/Bishop Berkeley, esse est percipi (“to be is be perceived”) twist. Dennis Weaver, the convicted criminal, who's about to be executed pleads for a stay,  insisting that the world is dependent on his perception of it.  If he’s executed, it will cease to exist. It’s also a little like Ground Hog Day since the scenario with some themes and variations continues to repeat itself each time the sentence is about to be carried out. Haven’t you woken up in the current pandemic with its attendant noxious cocktail of racism and economic inequality and wished it was all a dream that simply evaporated? What a relief to find that the current nightmare was merely a form of suicidal ideation and that there was no need to be afraid to be in the company of other human beings? Perhaps you might even unthink it by no longer existing.There have been numerous treatments of mental illness.  In The Snake Pit (1948), Olivia de Havilland suffers from schizophrenia. In Hitchcock’s Spellbound an otherwise “sane” person is made to feel they have lost their mind. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the Milos Forman film made from the Ken Kesey novel, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden and David and Lisa all present various states of what Rimbaud referred to as “les derangements des sens.” R.D. Laing’s 60s tome, The Divided Self argued that schizophrenia was not really an aberration, but merely another way of thinking. Considering the current state of isolation in which many people now find themselves, hearing voices may turn out to be a relief or even blessing.