Our world is no longer ours, but it has a soundtrack and illustrations most folks don't know about. So play the soundtrack as you read this piece, and I'll share some truly extraordinary art. The arts are where I find my self-expression, and so I'll use them as I try to make sense of the last ten days.
The soundtrack (hit play then read):
And back to our world as we all try to reclaim it as our own.
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| Danse des morts--1493 painting by Michael Wolegemut |
But now? Now we're dancing to a horrible new tune and we don't know the steps.
We all had ample time to prepare for this, frankly. Years. All the bug-out people we laughed at a few months ago aren't worried about finding toilet paper somewhere tomorrow. Most of the rest of us are. I'm not because I'm married to the kind of man who's just built for crisis management. Sent him out for milk and he came back with twenty rolls of toilet paper, sixteen rolls of paper towels, and six boxes of tissues. Sent him out the next day for bread and he shows up with ten pounds of ground beef, five pounds of chicken, and a huge pork roast. My husband is a handy guy to have around. I'm lucky in that respect.
But there's no guarantee matters will remain this way. Now that the quarantine--yes, I'm calling "social distancing" what it really is at its core--has been extended for a full month I find myself wondering how things will transpire after Pandemic Day Twenty...or Thirty...or Seventy-five.
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| Koper Regional Museum 16th Century fresco |
Then I have to force myself to realize that no, things aren't getting better at all.
Three days ago, America had 1000+ deaths from COVID-19. Yesterday, that total had doubled. Tragically, that exponential growth is only too easy to calculate, and if I told you "you do the math", you'd be able to do that math easily and in your head. Math, never my favorite subject of learning, is even more loathsome now than it's ever been.
Facts and figures combine, dancing in front of my eyes like a mural on a medieval ossuaries like a violently spinning danse macabre and no one gets to sit this dance out. We're all dancing to a tune hummed by a virus and composed by microorganisms so tiny but oh so easily capable of felling the strongest humans it pirouettes around...then into...then through until finally the melody fades and man meets his mortality.
During the Middle Ages in Europe, the Danse Macabre was an allegorical reference to the inevitability of Death in times of plague or epidemic. In some of Europe's oldest extant cemeteries, the Danse Macabre was portrayed by artists as a bacchanalia shared by mortals and the Grim Reaper, where they danced wildly, drank freely, and had orgies--a last hurrah before everyone's dance ended.
Math, music, melody, macabre, mortality.
A pandemic with a soundtrack.
A way to tell Death to go fuck himself or to bring you a new bottle of wine.
Facts and figures combine, dancing in front of my eyes like a mural on a medieval ossuaries like a violently spinning danse macabre and no one gets to sit this dance out. We're all dancing to a tune hummed by a virus and composed by microorganisms so tiny but oh so easily capable of felling the strongest humans it pirouettes around...then into...then through until finally the melody fades and man meets his mortality.
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| St. Nicholas Cathedral-Tallinn, Estonia fragment 16th century painting |
During the Middle Ages in Europe, the Danse Macabre was an allegorical reference to the inevitability of Death in times of plague or epidemic. In some of Europe's oldest extant cemeteries, the Danse Macabre was portrayed by artists as a bacchanalia shared by mortals and the Grim Reaper, where they danced wildly, drank freely, and had orgies--a last hurrah before everyone's dance ended.
Math, music, melody, macabre, mortality.
A pandemic with a soundtrack.
A way to tell Death to go fuck himself or to bring you a new bottle of wine.
You probably recognized the music, but not many people would recognize this as the Danse Macabre, composed by Camille Saint-Saens in 1874. The images are all depictions of the Danse Macabre from medieval Europe. In a harsh day to day life and faced with the horrors of smallpox or the bubonic plague, people looked to what they assumed would be their last few days as a time to sample all of life's pleasures if they could. That's what the Danse Macabre is all about really. I mean--if you're going to have black boils rise on your body with a high fever and terrible pain and you know those boils are going to literally explode, spraying contagious black pus all over everything then who cares if the old guy next door sees your boobs? In a world where "medicine" consisted of drinking nasty potions that were usually poisonous or getting your veins laid open with a rusty knife to allow the "evil humors" to leave your body, your survival rate wasn't all that great. So they celebrated the fun stuff in anticipation of the fatal stuff.
But for us, things are different. Instead of partying like it's 1999 with all our friends while we wait to die, the world of medicine is totally different. Clean. Sterile, Fighting off the contagion while relieving the symptoms. We don't have a kegger and invite Death to come on in and do body shots of tequila. No, our Danse Macabre is much different.
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| The Dance of Death, Polish painting circa 1670 |
Look--the plague isn't partisan. Coronavirus will kill liberals, conservatives, communists, socialists, monarchists, moderates, and dictators without bias or prejudice. This isn't a Red State/Blue State issue or problem. Look around you right now--is there any political base untouched by this pandemic? No. So if you're too evolved, too educated to get a blindfolded group sex party together to combat "social distancing" with an allegorical medieval character toting a scythe, then you don't need to get your information about the pandemic from a politician/elected official/minister/waste management/Geek Squad/Reddit/old dude down the street/Twitter/Facebook/partridge in a pear tree/Grim Reaper/blogger.
You need to listen to the DOCTORS. Because right now? Medical researchers and physicians are the only ones who are providing information regarding the virus dispassionately and accurately. If you don't, you might as well invite the Devil to pick you up at five because what the politicians are feeding us as "facts" is actually all spin-doctored propaganda, devised with an eye toward the upcoming election. The doctors don't give a damn about their TV ratings or how much interaction their Tweets are getting. What they care about is advising the public on how best to avoid infection and that's primarily the information we all need.
See, the end result of the Danse Macabre has always been the same. Once the music ends, the dance is over for all the dancers. They leave their mortal shells behind for the death details to pick up and they follow the Grim Reaper into Death. And if you get your "facts" from a politician, that's the outcome you're risking.
So yes, our world doesn't seem to have changed much on the surface of things. But we all know--whether we admit it or not--that everything is totally different now than it was a month ago. We're facing a legitimate crisis that supersedes any global threat of my lifetime. It doesn't matter when this pandemic is finally brought to a close because COVID-19 is going to leave behind a world that's lost its innocent belief that our society is too advanced and tech-savvy to fall prey to a microbe.
Hopefully, we'll all end up wiser when this is over. One of the best ways to ensure that happens is to decline the temptation to twirl in the arms of Death during our ultra-modern Danse Macabre. Politicians aren't going to solve this pandemic. They're as qualified to cure you as those medieval "physicians" with their rusty, bloodstained knives and their possets made of stones from a goat's stomach crushed with ivory and mixed with donkey bile.
Whatever you do, sit out the Danse Macabre. For all our sakes.
