Wake Forest Humanities Institute
How We Know What We Know: Humanities Responds to Pandemic
Alyssa Howards
Reforming Religious Leadership: COVID-19 and Formation for Ministry
CONTRIBUTORS Weiss
Amy Lather
Be There Now
Pg 11
Towards the City of “tomorrow”: for a new humanism. The Pandemic and the Model of Civilization of Giovanni Boccaccio
Table of Contents
Windows in Walls: Finding Hope in the Familiar Strangeness of Covid-19
Hope at a Crossroads
Pg 72
Bernadine Barnes
Acknowledgments from the Editor
Pg 26
Ivan Weiss
Health disparities and the impact of COVID-19 among Spanish-speakers in the US
Anthony Parent
Carmen Pérez-Muñoz
At War With Ourselves: Military Metaphors and the Covid19 Pandemic
FILM: Chronicle of a Distant Summer
“Contagion or Nastiness: Science and the Gaol Fever Epidemics in Colonial Chesapeake”
John Senior
Pg 46
Pg 20
Adam Kadlac
Pg 42
Critical Mass
Pg 59
Elizabeth Clendinning
Pg 86
Roberta .Morosini
Pg 31
T.H.M. Gellar-Goad
Pg 85
“How to Watch a Plague: Lessons from Ancient Philosophical Satire”
A Sudden Blow, and Pericles Dead: Reading Thucydides in the Age of Coronavirus
The Trouble with Wilderness . . . Again
Pg 63
Learning from Literature
Writing (About) Disaster
Omaar Hena
Masked Vibrations: Sound and Society in the Age of Coronavirus
Cold War Cottagecore: Self-Soothing and the Written Word
Pg 7
Brian Warren
Pg 50
Reading the Archive
Strange Hope
Expression and Representation
Pg 56
Pg 80
Introduction
Pg 35
Pg 76
Leann Pace
A Distant and Distorted Mirror: Art after the Black Death Seen from a New Pandemic
Pg 68
Pg 15
Ryan D. Shirey
This project has been sponsored by the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute with support made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Jill Y. Crainshaw
Erin Branch
“Igniting fires in the streets”: Frantz Fanon, D.S. Marriott, and Poetics of Riot
Eric Stottlemyer
On behalf of the Humanities Institute, I would like to thank all of the faculty who participated in this new project. This collection of essays is the first body of work commissioned by the HI, and it has been one of the most rewarding projects on which I have had the pleasure to work while with the institute. Thank you for sharing your scholarship, your critical acuity, your insight, and your strange hopes with this reader and others. I look forward to working on future projects that are similar in scope and significance. I would also like to thank Kimberly Scholl, Administrative Assistant for the Humanities Institute, for her inestimable support of the operations of the institute, her keen eye for detail, and her infectious enthusiasm. Many thanks, also, to Lauren DeMarco, Humanities Institute Student Worker, for the many ways that she helps further the efforts of the institute, including her proofreading work on this manuscript. I hope you will share these pieces widely with your colleagues, families, and friends as we all look for ways to process this moment, and to move forward with nerve and imagination.
Periodically, the Humanities Institute considers a topic of broad concern and asks what the various humanities disciplines have to say about it. “HOW WE KNOW/WHAT WE KNOW” is an ongoing project that foregrounds how various humanities disciplines create bodies of knowledge through their particular methods, including archival research, philosophical inquiry, translation, and hermeneutical interpretation. Along with the discipline-specific methods, we aim to gather an archive of knowledge on a specific topic, with the understanding that, while disciplinary methods produce knowledge, it is the collective assembly of what is known and knowable (and unknowable), that comprises the Humanities at large. The pandemic and resulting travel restrictions disrupted many of our colleagues’ research plans, while quarantine, outrage over racism, and the ever-changing contingencies of work and family life meant that many of us found our intellectual attention for scholarship overwhelmed. Still, our faculty have copious knowledge and a lot to say about the history, art, literature, and lived experience of quarantine, emergency, and diseases, as a result of our scholarly training in the humanities. Seeking to document and publish this base of knowledge, the Humanities Institute put out a grant for short essays which would direct disciplinary knowledge and scholarly training to some aspect of the current emergency. We are thrilled and grateful for what our colleagues produced, and this collection is the result. Though many of the essays address several aspects of the emergency, we organized them loosely around recurring themes. “Reading the Archive” includes essays which explore Classical, Early Modern, and Colonial American history for information and understanding about the implications of the pandemic. The section on “Expression and Representation” considers how prose, poetry, translation, and sound are impacted by or bear upon our understanding of the present emergency. “Learning from Literature” includes essays that draw insight from literature and relay it as wisdom for our moment. Finally, the essays under the heading “Strange Hope”—an evocative phrase lifted from Jill Crainshaw’s moving essay—help us consider what “hope” can be even in the midst of our crushing reality.
Introduction Leadership Message
Aimee Mepham Associate Director, Humanities Institute
Dean Franco Director, Humanities Institute Winifred W. Palmer Professor in Literature Professor, English
The Bubonic Plague that struck Europe between 1347 and 1352 was a horrific disease. In many towns, it killed over half the population, and people often died within days of showing symptoms. Vivid first-hand accounts survive, and epidemiologists, archeologists and historians continue to turn up new facts about that devastating pandemic.The Black Death affected art of the fourteenth century, so it was a regular topic of my course, “Art in the Age of Dante, Giotto and the Plague.” I was teaching that course in the spring of 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Suddenly the experiences of people in the fourteenth century really did seem like a “distant mirror” to use Barbara Tuchman’s memorable phrase.[1] Our study of the visual arts after the Black Death came just two weeks after the university had closed and we had begun remote teaching. Everyone was in strict lockdown, and confronting the events of the mid-fourteenth century could have added to the students’ anxiety. Instead, it focused our attention. Rereading Boccaccio’s introduction to the Decameron—the most detailed first-hand account of the effects of the Black Death in Florence—became acutely interesting. The Bubonic Plague is a very different disease than COVID-19. It is a bacterial disease, but in a time before antibiotics, there was little that could be done to treat it, just as there is no treatment for the virus now. The mortality rate was many times higher that of the current pandemic, yet some of the images were eerily familiar. In the 1350s doctors were overwhelmed and piles of bodies awaited burial. Most of us had encountered similar images in newspapers or online, but not in our own streets like Boccaccio had. Social distancing was not as precisely defined as it is now, but doctors did give advice to avoid crowds, open windows, and cover mouths and noses. Boccaccio sensed that getting away into the fresher air of the countryside would help, so he had his band of travelers journey to their villas outside of Florence, telling each other the tales that would make up the Decameron. The economic effects of the Black Death sounded familiar, too, but in many cases, the causes were different. Shops were shuttered, the tax base shriveled, and there was evidence of hoarding. However, in almost all cases the cause was the massive death toll. Shops were closed because the owners had fled the city or died. There was a very real labor shortage, not widespread unemployment. Perhaps the most immediate parallel for us was that people could not care for their own stricken family members, who were forcibly taken away for isolation. At its worst, as Boccaccio says: “fathers and mothers abandoned their own children to their fate, untended, unvisited as if they had been strangers.” Still, like some people today, there were those who ignored all warnings, drinking and partying, as if there were no threat—or as if there might be no tomorrow. The Black Death certainly changed the visual arts, but art historians still debate about the precise nature of its effects. Millard Meiss’sPainting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, first published in 1951, is still our main point of reference in this debate. This ground-breaking book brought together social history and the development of artistic style in a convincing way, and brought new interest to the art of the later fourteenth century.However, Meiss saw certain visual qualities in the art of the time—spatial ambiguities, severe expressions, and archaic gold backgrounds—as a step backward from the greater naturalism developed by Giotto in the early fourteenth century. This stylistic regression happened, he argued, because progressive artists and sophisticated patrons had died; they were replaced by less skilled artists and middle-class patrons. Meiss characterized the “Black Death style” as one that expressed fear and remorse in direct reaction to the catastrophe of the plague.[2] More recently, scholars have questioned Meiss’s evidence and his interpretations. We now know that many of his examples were made before 1348, major architectural projects were restarted quickly, and there was no significant drop off in the production of fresco cycles, panel paintings and liturgical objects.[3] It is true that some important artists died, but others survived and were eager to get back to work following the plague. Workshops adapted and sometimes merged, resulting in products that were less reflective of a single master’s style.[4] This debate might have seemed like a scholarly abstraction any other semester, but in 2020 we could use our perspective to reconsider some of the works of art at its center.Meiss’s primary example of the Black Death style was Andrea Orcagna’s altarpiece for the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence (figure 1). With the severe, frontal image of Christ before a flat gold background, it was seen as a fear-inducing image of warning. However, the altarpiece was never meant to be seen as an isolated painting. Rather it is part of a much larger, more complex space: a memorial chapel that Orcagna and his brother Nardo di Cione worked on from 1354-57.[5] Indeed a view of the altarpiece with just a slight indication of the work around it, shows that it is a still focal point within a much more complex and dramatic scene. A fuller view of the entire chapel (figure 2) gives and even better sense of how immersive the experience would have been. Set above another funerary chapel, worshippers climbed a flight of stairs to stand within a wrap-around vision of the Last Judgment. Christ the judge looks down from above a stained glass window depicting the Virgin and Child and St. Thomas Aquinas. By praying to them, Christians believed they or their deceased loved ones would spend less time in Purgatory.On the altarpiece, Christ, Mary and other saints hover above the altar in a celestial apparition, rather than something in our world. The physical world is seen behind the altarpiece, where people are being pulled up from their graves. Those to Christ’s right (our left) will join the Blessed in Paradise, while those on the opposite side will be damned. Images of heaven and hell are normal parts of Last Judgments, but here entire walls are given to these scenes. Christ and Mary are enthroned together in a Paradise that crowded with people of all sorts who stand as if on risers so we can see their individual faces.Those who focused on the Paradise scene might recognize lost loved ones and be comforted by the thought that they would be reunited with them when we would all rise again. On the opposite wall is a representation of Dante’s Inferno—it is the most complete visual rendition of the poet’s imagined hell that exists from the fourteenth century. The small figures must have fascinated viewers, and I suspect that the viewers who would be most engaged were those who knew Dante’s writings well. They might be puzzling out the references or looking for historic figures Dante mentioned, rather than reacting in fear. At the same time that the two brothers were at work on the Strozzi Chapel, Orcagna was also designing and supervising the construction of a monumental tabernacle at Orsanmichele that enshrined a miracle-working painting of the Virgin and Child (figure 3). The painting was completed by Bernardo Daddi in 1347, just before the outbreak of the plague (Daddi apparently died in the plague). However, it was meant to replicate another miracle-working painting from the late thirteenth century that had been destroyed in a fire.[6] Such substitute objects, which carried the miraculous power of the original, were common in late medieval Europe.The tabernacle Orcagna designed is itself a substitute for another tabernacle that surrounded the painting, which we know through paintings in manuscripts.[7] If there is a regressive style in these works, it was fully intentional, connecting the present works to powerful objects of the past.Moreover, planning for the tabernacle probably began around 1346 in part to protect the new painting, even if work did not begin until 1352 after the plague subsided.No imagery on the shrine has anything to do with the Black Death. Instead, some sculptural details have military references, possibly inspired by the victory of Florence over Milan in August 1351.[8] Other details point to the music performed regularly before the shrine by the confraternity that cared for it.The entire complex is a magnificent work of micro-architecture, embellished with lacy marble stonework and colorful mosaics behind the relief carvings.Using recent research, we can now see that the tabernacle is a monument that expresses triumph, joy and gratitude for the Virgin Mary’s intervention in preserving health or the independence of Florence. Revisiting this material now gives us a sense of empathy with these people who lived so long ago. Why should we see these extraordinary monuments they made as expressions of fear or as stylistic regressions? Orcagna and his brother were survivors of the plague, and they were undoubtedly eager to take up these challenging projects.If living through a pandemic has taught us anything, maybe it is that such crises do pass—they are pauses, rather than breaks, and that there will be change but not necessarily change that follows an imagined trajectory. [1]B. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, New York, 1978. Her chapter on the Black Death (92-115) is a vivid synthesis of contemporary accounts. The many publications of David Herlihy and Samuel K. Cohn, Jr. gather more recent scholarship; see, for example, Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, Cambridge, MA, and London, 1997, and Cohn, “The Black Death, Tragedy, and Transformation” in The Renaissance World, London and New York: 2007, 69-83. [2]M. Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, Princeton, 1951, 72-73. [3]L. Bourdua, “The Arts in Florence after the Black Death,” in Florence, edited by F. Ames-Lewis, Cambridge, 2012, 79-118. [4]J. Steinhoff, Sienese Painting after the Black Death: Artistic Pluralism, Politics, and the New Art Market, New York, 2006. H.Van Os, “The Black Death and Sienese Painting: A Problem of Interpretation.”Art History4, no. 3 (1981): 237–49. [5]B. Cole, “Some Thoughts on Orcagna and the Black Death Style, ”Antichità Viva 22 (1983): 27–37. [6]D. Norman, “Change and Continuity after the Black Death,” in Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion 1280-1400, New Haven and London, 1995, I: 146-7. [7]G. Kreytenberg, Orcagna’s Tabernacle in Orsanmichele, Florence. New York,1994, 25-27 [8]B. Cassidy, “The Assumption of the Virgin on the Tabernacle of Orsanmichele, ”Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 51 (1988): 177-179. On the musical performances and imagery, see B. Wilson, “If Monuments Could Sing: Image, Song, and Civic Devotion inside Orsanmichele, ”Studies in the History of Art 76 (2012): 139–68.
From the Editor
Aimee Mepham | Associate Director
Figure 3. Andrea Orcagna, Tabernacle in Orsanmichele, begun 1346. Painting of the Virgin and Child is by Nardo di Cione, completed in 1347.
Figure 1. Andrea Orcagna, Strozzi Altarpiece, 1345-7. Photo: Web Gallery of Art.
Figure 2. View of the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Paradise is on the wall at left, and the Inferno on the wall at right. Photo: Wikimedia.
Why end with a plague? This is a problem that has vexed scholars of ancient Roman poetry for generations. The poem in question is Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, “On the Nature of the Universe,” an epic in six books that purports to introduce the addressee to Epicurean philosophy and, from there, a better life. De Rerum Naturaends with a gripping, unsettling account of the famous plague of 5th century Athens — the same one described and survived by the Greek historian Thucydides, as my colleague Brian Warren examines in another essay in this series. The version presented by De Rerum Natura engages extensively with Thucydides’ account, but the emphasis and presentation are much different, reflecting the divergent genres, literary objectives, styles, and influences of the two works. In Lucretius (book 6, lines 1138–1286), the disease originates in Egypt, arrives in Athens, and “turns the fields into graveyards, devastates the roads, and drains the city of its inhabitants” (line 1139–1140). The disease began with fever; bloodshot eyes; blood and ulcers in the throat; and rough, painful tongue oozing with blood.In the second stage of the disease, the infected experienced chest congestion; emotional distress; bad breath “like how exposed rotting cadavers smell” (line 1155); weakness of mind and body; anxiety and depression; and constant vomiting and cramping, leading to exhaustion. These symptoms were accompanied by rash all over the body, yet only a mild heat to the touch, but an intense feeling of burning inside, and unquenchable thirst. Some of the sick would plunge themselves headfirst into streams or wells. The pain was unrelenting, sleep was difficult, and the medicines of the day (such as they were) proved ineffective, with something helpful to one patient being fatal for another. The final stage of the disease before death included ataxia; grievous complexion; wild eyes; tinnitus; breathing troubles; sweat; thin, yellow mucus, produced with difficult, hoarse cough; twitching and trembling, from hands to limbs; cold starting in the feet and pervading the body; narrowing of the nasal passages; sunken eyes; hollow temples; cold, hard skin; rictus; and tense forehead. Death came in the eighth or ninth day from the onset of the disease. Those who did not die from the disease at this point would then progress to ulcers and black anal discharge; or headache and discharge of tainted blood through the nostrils. This killed more victims. In survivors, the disease then caused amnesia, or progressed to the limbs and genitals — which led some of the diseased to amputate their hands or feet or eyes or external genitalia, “sharp fear of death assaulted them to such an extreme” (line 1212). In the face of this pandemic, the civic structure of Athens broke down, according to De Rerum Natura. Bodies piled up unburied. Birds and beasts generally avoided the corpses, while those who ate them would die, too. Fauna, in fact, were rare, and most contracted the disease and perished, dogs foremost among them. Funerals, when they happened, were rushed and unattended by mourners. The narrator of De Rerum Natura marks out as “the most pitiable thing” (line 1230) the fact that once someone caught the illness, they fell into the depths of despair. People who avoided their diseased loved ones ended up dying alone themselves; people who tended to their diseased loved ones caught the plague because of the close contact and died, as well. There was nobody who did not either die, get the disease, or lose a loved one to it. The pandemic spread from the countryside into the city. Bodies piled up in private buildings, in the streets, in public places, in the temples of the gods — and with the plague came a loss of faith. In the final image of the poem, bereaved families physically fight with each other, competing to place their dead on a funeral pyre, “often brawling with much bloodshed rather than abandon the corpses” (lines 1285–1286). This ending has long been seen as the poem’s greatest challenge: why does a poem that begins with a celebration of life and the generative powers of the love goddess Venus — a poem that claims to provide a path to a life free from anxiety, thanks to Epicurean moral and natural philosophy — end with a historical vignette of disease, distress, and death? It is a macabre counterbalance, to be sure, not only to the poem’s grand opening but also to the opening of the poem’s final book, in which the same city of Athens is cleansed and enlightened by the philosophy of Epicurus, some two centuries after the plague to be encountered at book’s end. In fact, the ending is so troubling that older schools of thought held that this couldn’t be the end of the poem, that more was lost to the sands of time, or that Lucretius died before composing the remainder. Most scholars these days have discarded that canard, preferring to treat the plague as a problem of interpretation rather than of textual transmission. I’d like to explore here two compelling but incomplete answers, with an eye to our current moment, and in pursuit of the poem’s two main literary modes: philosophical didactic and satire. Readers of De Rerum Natura coming at the plague from a philosophical perspective have considered the book’s close as a kind of “final exam” for the student of Epicureanism, the poem’s addressee. The idea behind this interpretation is that if you can observe the plague of Athens with equanimity, you can live a life of beatific tranquility. In reading a graphic textual account of a society in shambles and people in the throes of an inescapable, painful death — people just like us — we come face to face with one of the sharpest instantiations of the fear of death. If we can stave off that fear as we witness the plague, then we are perhaps truly free from it, or at least mentally prepared to diagnose and discard that fear in our own lives. But this offers nothing for the historical victims of the plague, and perhaps offers little for us who are experiencing pandemic not in history but firsthand. Indeed, one of the signal ethical lessons that the narrator implies in the tale of the Athenian plague is a kind of fatalism: people who abandoned their sick relatives, “being too desirous of life and too fearing of death, soon afterward endured the punishment of a base and bad death, deserted, without help, at the hands of slaughtering Neglect [Incuria mactans]” (lines 1239–1241). Whether you cared for the stricken or not, you yourself got infected, so providing care was at least a way to increase the chances you would not die alone. This lesson rings hollow our own time, when the vectors of disease transmission are much better understood, and when scientists are telling us that the best way to protect those we care for is to stay away from them. Still, the best practices informed by epidemiology have meant that many, particularly the elderly, have died alone. What would an adherent of Epicurean philosophy, like the narrator of De Rerum Natura, say about our current moment? One answer might be that the highest good (the summum bonum) is a life free from anxiety, therefore you should isolate yourself from public life, from all sources of anxiety, and so long as you are safe from coronavirus and police brutality, you are living the good life. But another, more generous take, equally (if not more) consistent with the evidence for Epicurus’ teachings on social life, would hold that you cannot live a life truly free from anxiety unless everyone in your society can live a life free from anxiety, and so it is incumbent upon you to protect others from contagion and to work for social justice and for Black lives.We can detect hints or echoes of this perspective in the Lucretian plague: the physical symptoms of the disease are accompanied by the psychological ones, and the spread of the disease through the population corresponds to a breakdown in the fabric of Athenian society. The very fatalism of the scene might be underscoring for us the importance of collective action and a collectivist value on social wellbeing. There’s another way to look at the plague scene, not as a bit of philosophical instruction but as a satiric one. From a certain perspective (as I argue in my recently published book, Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Satire), the poem’s end is dark comedy, a satire on civic life. It furnishes a particularly grotesque illustration of the breakdown of a society that isn’t based on what the poem calls uera ratio, “right thinking” or “true philosophy.” From this angle, the challenge isn’t to separate yourself from the fear of death as you bear witness to plague-ravaged Athens. Instead (or, perhaps, in addition), the woes of long-dead Greeks are an object lesson, a chance for you to stand on the moral high ground and look at the flawed and failed humans suffering not primarily from pestilence but rather from cowardice, antisocial tendencies, and inflated self-worth. The end of Lucretius’ sixth book, in this view, echoes the beginning of his second, where the reader is told that it is pleasurable to watch a shipwreck from high ground on shore — not because of schadenfreude, but because it gives you a sense of the ills you yourself are not suffering. The Lucretian plague, viewed as satire, pushes in the opposite direction from the ethical, philosophically derived caution against Neglect. Readers are encouraged to distance themselves from the Athenians, not so much from their contagion as from their disorderly and distressed responses to it, in an ethical choice against pathos in favor of dispassionate unperturbedness. Again, cold comfort for the plague’s historical victims. For readers in ancient Rome, meanwhile, the satiric vignette of the collapse of Athens can reflect on the ongoing civic crisis in Lucretius’ own time, what will turn out to be the death throes of the Roman republic. The disease functions as a metaphor for the infectious and deleterious spread of greed and political ambition among the Roman elite. For us, reading De Rerum Natura with 2020’s hindsight, it is tempting to read the United States as Athens and Rome combined: we face epidemiological and political crises simultaneously. (But note:we are not Rome, and our current moment cannot with any accuracy be linked closely either to the fall of the Roman Republic in the mid-1st century bce or to the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century ce.) Reading Lucretius during the coronavirus crisis both offers us ways of thinking through and coping with the realities of disease and at the same time demonstrates the limitations of both philosophy and society in the face of contagion. When we examine the plaguy denouement of De Rerum Natura from the perspectives of philosophy and of satire, we find a mirror to society, even if looking through a glass darkly. The breakdowns in our society and economy — both those structured by virologists’ best advice and those erupting from bad-faith political partisanship, mass anxiety, and the torments of quarantine — find parallel and precedent in Lucretius, and from his poem we can draw motivation to strengthen our social bonds in this time of crisis rather than allowing them to decay and collapse. Meanwhile, the breakdowns in our government, which also find parallel and precedent in Lucretius, end up seeming less like a depressing instantiation of American exceptionalism and more like a shared failure, not simply the fault of the man-child on top. The Lucretian plague can help us in our struggle to live with the crisis, too. One of the most important things we can do at this moment to slow the spread of coronavirus is to stay home, to distance ourselves from friends and loved ones and strangers. This is a hard row to hoe. But doing it may fend off the fate of the Athenians at the end of Lucretius’ poem. Paradoxically, shutting down our society voluntarily could prevent our society from shutting down entirely. And in its closing scene as throughout the poem, De Rerum Natura is a guide for how to cope with isolation: study of the natural world and the causes of things, self-quarantine from life’s various sources of anxiety such as ambition or greed, and a detached, but not cruel, observation of the faults and flaws around us, the testimony of the troubles from which we are ourselves free. Yet even for me, dearly acquainted with Lucretius’ text, the conclusion with the plague does not seem to meet the moment. The philosophy of Epicurus did the Athenians no good during the plague because the sage himself hadn’t yet been born, but in a broader sense, philosophy — there was plenty available in Athens by the 430s bce— does no good for the plague-stricken. Now, too, we cannot reason our way out of coronavirus. We must hunker down and wait it out. The same goes for our society, which, like ancient Athens, has proven almost powerless in the face of a virus that, in the big picture, is understood not so much better than the Athenian plague was in its day.
How to Watch a Plague: Lessons from Ancient Philosophical Satire
In March 2020, countries across the world began to issue lockdown orders to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, the deadliest plague humans had encountered globally in a century. Corresponding worldwide decreases in travel, industrial production, and general human movement not onlydecreased global levels of air pollution, but lowered seismic noise, the vibration of the Earth's crust,by up to 50%. Even as the pandemic raged, sparking noisy debates in healthcare, economics, and politics about how to reduce COVID-19’s global impact, the world itself had become a quieter place. The prevalence or absence of ambient sound, however, was much less noticeable to most people than the ways that music and the coronavirus response were integrally intertwined. An explosion of new cultural practices regarding sound has come to define the global struggle with the virus. Sounds of a 21stCentury Pandemic Globally, urban areas were the first to institute lockdowns and quarantines in the face of the pandemic. But physical proximity of dwellings, despite social distancing, meant that live sound became a key means of commemoration and community support. Rather than aiming to hide early death tolls (as some towns did throughsilencing town criers and church bells in the 14thcentury), public commemorations of the dead and exhortations of support for medical workers erupted in major cities. As hospitals became overwhelmed and death tolls climbed,Italians sang from their balconiesand New Yorkerscheered, clapped, and clattered pots and pansin solidarity with medical professionals. These humble household artifacts are already being sought by museums planning to document the global impact of the virus. The first wave of the virus also brought an initial global wave of musical public health messaging, reflecting a broader trend over the past several decades of public health or social welfare organizations using music to communicate preventative health measures. Such campaigns, which employ a blend of traditional-regional musical styles and are targeted to reach audiences with a wide array of experiences in formal literacy, have been shown to amplify local progress in fights against diseases likemalariaandHIV/AIDS. Musical responses to COVID-19 prevention, however, appeared spontaneously rather than as part of formal public health responses, and used internet meme culture to “go viral” not only in their region of origin, butaround the world, reflecting an unprecedented array of musical traditions and visual approaches. Feeling down after singing “Happy Birthday” twice to ensure that you’ve spent enough time washing your hands, as has been recommended in English-speaking countries? Thanks to the work of a British teenager, anyone with internet access could “wash your lyrics,” using the web-based program to pair song lyrics of their choice with images on correct hand-washing technique from the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). Finally, for those tired of focusing solely on prevention, songs making light of the strangeness of the “new normal” of life under the virus—includinga lack of toilet paperin the United States and thesocial pressure to make excessively productive use of time spent quarantining at home—provided some initial entertainment and sense of commiseration. (This author’s local favorite: “Quarantined With You” by Greensboro musician Andy Eversole.) As some amateur musicians and dancers suddenly reached global fame, the line between amateurism and professionalism in music continued to be blurred by pop and rock stars who, lacking access to their traditional crowds of thousands for safety reasons, evoked a new intimacy as theyperformed concerts from their bedrooms. TheOne World: Together at Homebenefit concert was the pinnacle of such events. Organized by Lady Gaga and produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and social action organization Global Citizen, the concert featured dozens of musical celebrities who united to raise funds (eventually over $128 million USD) for WHO’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund and local healthcare responders. The event added a new twist to thelong and controversial history of pop-rock benefit concerts: it embodied an expanded vision of “liveness” and inclusion. Though the concert streamed on major global television networks, it was also instantly accessible and archived for free on the internet. Local isolation became an opportunity for global connection. The role of mass media in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic provides a marked contrast from how our ancestors experienced music during the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. At that time, television and the internet had not yet been invented, radio was in its infancy, and films were still silent. Record players were an increasingly common household item, but there was no true alternative to live performance—one reason that many 1918-19concert seasons went ahead much as planned, despite public knowledge of the risks involved. Instead, in 2020, unified public health messaging has silenced most public live performances on every continent. Large crowds and the close proximity of musicians in ensembles provided initial and obvious dangers—but specific aspects of musical production were found to be particularly high-risk. Initial viral outbreaks were foundamong church choirs, which frequently include large groups of individuals continuously expelling virus-transmitting droplets within crowded and poorly ventilated spaces.Wind instrumentalistsare also potentially at risk for spreading the disease. Even as high-profile groups such as the US Army’s West Point Bandhave found ways to take preventative measuresand continue to perform, most musicians have spent months rehearsing only in small groups and playing only for themselves, only gradually adding more rehearsal time asevidence regarding potential preventative measureshas become clearer. Though 21stcentury listeners are perhaps more invested in recorded music than listeners at any other point in history, the lack of live performances caused substantial disruption to music both as entertainment and as a key part of the global social fabric. Musicians watched as major parts of their identities and ways of connecting to the community either went silent or went online. Community organizers and educators continued to innovate new ways for their constituents to keep making art together—yet, novirtual choirwith tracks edited together online can replicate the visceral, embodied experience of performing or listening live—the intangible feeling of presence or realness that Walter Benjamin called “aura.” Perhaps most importantly, as rites of passage such as marriages and funerals have globally been forced to change formats, the musical accompaniment that marks many of the most significant occasions of our lives has also been forced to cease. We have been forced into silence just at the time we need music the most. Renaissance or Retrograde? Writings from times of pandemic—whether the bubonic plague of 14thcentury Italy, the global influenza outbreak of the 1910s, or our current battle with the novel coronavirus—are unified in their insistence of music as a way to cope during unprecedented times of pestilence and social disruption. The indomitable spirit of amateur and professional performers and educators of our era means that society is unlikely to go silent, even as most Americans continue to perform to limited or virtual audiences. Yet, even as performers continue to burst defiantly into action from home, their very livelihoods are among the most threatened if the virus lingers. According tosurvey data released by US-based nonprofit Americans for the Arts(continuously updated; data from September 18) concerning workers in all arts sectors,77% of artists used their art to raise morale and create cohesion in their communities. At the same time, 94% reported income loss, 79% experienced a decrease in income-generating creative work, and 63% became fully unemployed. A full 96% of organizations cancelled events, and arts organizations experienced nearly 96.6 million fewer attendances than usual. Initially, in August 2020, fewer than 60% of respondents believed that their arts organization would survive the impact of COVID-19; that number has fortunately fallen dramatically as organizations and individuals find new ways to survive financially. It is unclear how long the global community and in particular, communities in the United States will continue to be plagued by the novel coronavirus. What is clear, however, is that the longer the virus disrupts past societal patterns, the more likely such patterns are to fundamentally change. Optimists point out that the mid-14th-century outbreaks of the bubonic plague that decimated the populations of important urban areasushered in the new social order that kindled the Renaissance. The coincidence of economic imperatives and scholarly and artistic initiatives sparked renewed inquiry into past civilizations and prompted the development of new innovations in almost every area of human endeavor, including the performing arts. Just as the pathology and trajectory of the current novel coronavirus differs substantially from its pandemic-causing predecessors, however, so too are social conditions vastly different than they were in the late European Middle Ages. It is possible instead that the broader social issues that plague the early 21stcentury will worsen. What of music in the post-COVID-19 world? The combination of looking to historic artistic practices such as live music-making among families or small groups of friends, coupled with an intensified embrace of new technologies, could lead to an era of exceptional innovation. Current disruptions to traditional platforms for musical performance, such as church services and concert seasons, may leave a vacuum in which new types of musical activity might grow. Even should some of these traditional platforms return in full force, simultaneous social changes (including, in the United States, responses to the Black Lives Matter movement) may mean that norms of programming and presentation change seemingly overnight. Yet, if concert halls and theaters remain closed; if no new patrons emerge to financially support the performing arts; if we grow out of the practice of making music together, in the same space—if we let our creative voices remain masked after the danger has passed—then what we may hear is a new form of silence. l
Roberta Morosini
‘“Consider how your souls were sown: you were not made to live like brutes or beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.” (Dante, Inf. XXVI 118-120) Florence 1348.[1] The plague kills more than 100,000 Florentines. In the fiction of the Decameron written by Giovanni Boccaccio around 1370 ca., the Author features ten people, seven women and three men leaving Florence on Pampinea’s initiative. While in the church of Santa Maria Novella, she proposes that they all leave for ten days in the countryside and spend their time taking turns narrating stories. They will then return to Florence. This study surveys the reasons behind their decision to leave, the way they chose to organize themselves while in the countryside, and their return to the plague-infested city. What is the purpose of storytelling to then return to the hell they have just left behind? [Fig. 1] The answer is found in Pampinea’s speech to the rest of the group, but for the purpose of this essay I will summarize it by means of two 14th century illustrations of the Decameron. The first [Fig. 2],features the plague with an allegory of fiery woman whose irrational fury kills all she finds on her way. In the second,the artist chose not to focus on apocalyptic images of the plague with a sickle, to show instead the lively presence of the community: the “merry brigade”of Pampinea. [Fig. 3] Let’s look at the image up-close [Fig. 3]: we see Santa Maria Novella as the space that divides the scene: on the left, contagion and death, on the right the flourishing Tuscan countryside. Two elements to notice here: the artist positions the church at the center of the scene while locating Pampinea in the in-between space of the inside-outside. What to make of these spatial considerations? The artist has interpreted Boccaccio’s Introduction to the Decameron quite well. First of all, the story begins with the horrendously devastated Florence as a consequence of the Black Death: a place without law and chaos reigning in the city. After a detailed and gruesome description of the plague, the Author then moves on to illustrate the different reactions that Florentines had to the spread of the contagion, identifying and condemning those who chose to isolate themselves at home, those who left the city, those who lived as if it were the last day of their life indulging in all types of pleasures. All exaggerated and irrational reactions. Then he shifts his attention to the inside of a church, not any church but Santa Maria Novella, the Dominican center where Dante had once listened to Remigio de’ Girolami, a celebrated and popular preacher and political writer. [Fig. 4] From here, a religious space [Fig. 4], emerges in contrast the premise for a secular and modern social revolution entrusted to a woman: Pampinea.In fact, she delivers a powerful speech that contains the basis of a humanistic vision for the city of the future. As Florentines are taken in different forms by fear and superstition, individualism and irrationality prevail, she elaborates a strategy for the city, a project that can only be executed together. This is why she does not leave alone. This is why the group needs to return to Florence, despite the plague still raging. [Fig.5] Thus, the brigade forms. Pampinea proactively suggests how they could “stay together on one of our various country estates, shunning at all costs the lewd practices of our fellow citizens…without in any way overstepping the bounds of what is reasonable”. Pampinea’s proposition has a purpose: their stay in the countryside will provide them with more knowledge about their world, government, and values. The manner in which they share this knowledge is through storytelling that, story after story, shows to have an impact on each member of the community, in particular on the women. At a time when women are confined to the interior (as stated in the prologue), Pampinea is beautifully represented in her dynamic being, breaking the boundaries and leading the group towards a garden that is defined as a true “paradise on earth”.In so doing, she illustrates how human creativity and initiative can move society forward. The place that they all chose for their storytelling is a garden that reflects human labor and industriousness and becomes the model of the city of tomorrow. Thus, I argue that Pampinea embodies the modern and industrious citizen who, instead of “staying” or waiting for miracles in idleness,sees in mobility a form of progress towards the “city of tomorrow”, that has all the features of that garden and reflects human creativity. The power of Literature: together for a new humanism Put in this perspective, as the world experiences the chaos brought about by the pandemic, the Decameron stands as an inspiring and resourceful text. The way Pampinea and the rest of the brigade react to the plague, offers itself as a model of industrious citizenship, namely, individuals are called upon to save their souls, but also to take precautions to avoid the contagion and save their bodies. Furthermore, each member of the brigade is reminded of their personal responsibility towards themselves and their community. Soon the reader sees in the brigade a microcosm of government, summoned to join Pampinea’s efforts to rethink the city “together”, to provide new models of behavior through storytelling. In fact, if she wanted to merely and selfishly save herself, she would have left on her own. Here in the Introduction, therefore, is the first hint of the ideological project of the Decameron that offers itself too as a manual for our times.We find in Pampinea’s words the ultimate message for a wounded community to heal, find remedies and pluck up courage to rebuild from within, together. To be sure, Panfilo, who is the most pragmatic of the group, wraps up Day 9 by saying that the time spent in listening and telling their hundred stories has a civic and political goal, hence celebrating the power of literature: “the telling and the hearing of such things will assuredly fill you witha burning desire, well disposed as you already are in spirit,to act valorously”(IX Concl.5).[2] This reminder to the rest of the brigade stresses Boccaccio’s ideological and political intentions, for it shows on the one hand the incongruences and failures of traditional models of behavior in a “liquid society” to use Z. Bauman’s terms,[3] and, on the other, proposes a new typology of citizenship: the ‘liquid’ citizen whose features are to be found in Pampinea. Through her, Boccaccio’s concern is expressed when the brigade sets laws for this new Paradise on earth that takes shape with their tales. Paradise is then possible on earth, and coincides with a productive and healthy City, where there is room for rules, as much as for entertainment and all is regulated by individual responsibility for the common good. How can Florence be rebuilt and return to new splendor? I recently asked the same question about Covid-19 and identified in Pampinea and her group, the inspiration to “move”, finding ways to restart and reinvent ourselves with courage, fantasy and compassion. How to use this time to rethink our city, our environment, launching the values of a community where everyone does his/ her part? Boccaccio is hopeful: with individual initiative, through labor and the banishment of immobility due to fear and despair. He is not alone since his vision for the city has its visual counterpart in the Good and Bad Government by Lorenzetti,[4] a fresco cycle in the room where major decisions of the Commune were taken in Siena in the late 1330s. Pupils are in class taking lessons, workers are fixing the roofs, every shop is open for the community to sustain itself, and women can dance freely and safely in the street. [Fig.6] At this time of global pandemic, I suggest looking at the brigade in the Decameron, and considering their decision to leave and return to the city still infested by the plague. Spending time away telling stories also suggests the power of literature. Storytelling is not simply presented as a remedy for thoughts of the plague (I.Intro.93), but carries a political message where political stands for “to the advantage of the polis”, the City. In this light,the role of literature is underscored by Boccaccio as a functional way to shift the focus on deeds of individuals who work in harmony with the rest of the community. Again, Lorenzetti seems to suggest the same. See Concord sitting beneath Justice, holding the ends of a cord that descends from the plates of the balance. She passes the cord to citizens, dressed to indicate their varying social status, who in their turn pass it on to the old king representing the government of Siena. Thus, all citizens contribute to harmony by holding and passing on the cord (a pun on the false etymology of ‘concord’ as deriving from cum chorda, with a cord) [Fig. 7]. The same message is in a painting on one of the book covers of Siena’s tax office, theBiccherna, shows the Virgin recommending to Christ her city, encircled by a cord she holds in both hands. The city is represented as though resting on three marble columns in the colors of the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope and Charity, the pillars of a healthy civic life [Fig. 8].[5] Finally through Pampinea and her group, Boccaccio sends a powerful message for our days during Covid-19 with thoughts for a new humanism, where movement is a communitarian effort to progress towards the city of tomorrow, a city to be built together. This is Wake Forest University’s Pro-Humanitate vision that Boccaccio entrusts to Pampinea: together we can make it, for the common good. In Pampinea’s brigade lies the model of a community that is engaged in the common good, while the verbs cercare and operare, to enquire/ be curious and to be industrious in Panfilo’s words, enhance the brigade’s brave attempt to engage in, and put into practice, the political project of founding anew our cities, through work, sustained by the liberal arts, because for Boccaccio, like Dante, operare is an art that “is God’s grandchild” ( Dante, Inf. XI 105). [1]I want to thank Professors Gale Sigal, Charmaine Lee and Albert R. Ascoli for accepting to read this short essay, and offering their precious feedback. [2]G. Boccaccio, The Decameron. G. H. McWilliam, Engl. trans. London: Penguin Classics, 1972; Decameron, ed. V. Branca, ed. Turin: Einaudi, 1972. [3]Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000 and The Individualized Society. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. [4]See more on Boccaccio’s Decameron and contemporary visual arts in R. Morosini, “From the Garden to the liquid city. Notes on 2.10, 3.4, 3.10 and 4.6/7, for a Decameron poetic of the erotico–political based on useful work (‘civanza’)”. In Umana Cosa. Giovanni Boccaccio tra letteratura, politica e storia, ed. M. Papio, in Heliotropia,http://www.heliotropia.org/,46-89. [5]Cf. R. Morosini, “E lavorando semini ciascuno”: An Interdisciplinary Reading of Decameron III, 4, in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors. 2 vols., eds. M. Israëls e L. Waldman, Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2013, 385–393.
The Epidemy in Florence. The brigade leaves to the countryside, Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Laurent de Premierfait, ms. Fr. 239, fol. 1, 2nd half of 15th century, France.
Fig. 1. Return of the brigade to Florence, in G. Boccaccio, Decameron, ms. It. 63, 304v, 1427, Florence.
Towards the City of “tomorrow”: for a new humanism The Pandemic and the Model of Civilization of Giovanni Boccaccio
Fig. 2. Allegory of the plague, in Boccaccio, Decameron, ms. It. 63, fol. 6, 1427, Florence.
Fig. 4.The brigade meets in the church of Santa Maria NovellaandPampinea’s speech, in G. Boccaccio, Decameron, ms. Holkham misc. 49, fol. 5r, Bodleian Library, London.
Fig. 5. Restoring the City through storytelling in the useful garden, Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Laurent de Premierfait, ms. Fr. 129, fol. 1, 15th Century, Rouen.
Fig. 3. The Epidemy in Florence. The brigade leaves to the countryside, Boccaccio, Decameron,trans. Laurent de Premierfait, ms. Fr. 239, fol. 1, 2nd half of 15th century, France.
Fig. 8.Neroccio di Bartolomeo de’ Landi,The Virgin Recommending the City of Siena to Christ, 1480, tempera and gold on panel. Archivio diStato di Siena, no. 40.
Fig. 7. Good Government:The Concord of a City as a collective effort(detail), fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1348-50.
Fig. 6. Lorenzetti, Effects of Good Government on the City Life(detail), fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, 1348-50.
In 431 BCE, the city of Athens entered into war against the formidable Spartans in a conflict which modern historians call the Peloponnesian War. Under the guidance of their leader Pericles, the Athenian democracy was fighting for its life. At the end of the war’s first year, Pericles delivered a funeral oration eulogizing the Athenians who had fallen in battle. His speech presents a dream vision of an idealized Athens. Pericles' funeral oration stands today as the most famous celebration of the virtues of democratic society in classical literature. Soon after Pericles delivered his famous speech, however, a deadly plague struck Athens, and Athenians began to behave in ways that contradicted many of the ideals expressed by Pericles in his funeral oration. To escape the invading Spartans, the Athenians who lived in the countryside abandoned their homes and sought refuge behind their city’s walls. There, the displaced Athenian families took up residence in whatever available space they could find, including in temples and shrines. When the city itself was full, the evacuees began to settle between the Long Walls, which protected a narrow corridor linking Athens to its port, the Piraeus. Soon refugees from the countryside were also settling in the Piraeus itself. In these miserably overcrowded conditions, Athenians began to die in large numbers from a virulent disease. The Greek historian Thucydides offers our only eyewitness account of this catastrophe in Book 2.47-54 of his history of the war. He is also our only source for Pericles’ funeral oration.[1] Thucydides tells us that not only did he see many of his fellow Athenian citizens suffer and die of the plague, he himself survived it (2.48.3). And although Thucydides reports that Pericles died in 429, the year after the plague’s initial outbreak, he does not mention the cause of death (2.65.6). We learn from another ancient source, however, that it was the plague that killed him (Plut. Per. 38).[2] As I was editing this essay for online publication by the Wake Forest University Humanities Institute, news broke that President Trump has contracted COVID-19. I have never seen President Trump as similar to Pericles--in classical Greek terms, I would characterize him as a perverse hybrid of Cleon, Nicias, and Alcibiades, which is a different essay--but I will at least say that now President Trump, like Pericles, has suffered from the disease that will define his historical moment. In writing his history, Thucydides’ ambition was to give an account of the war’s events that would be “a possession for all time” (1.22.4). More specifically, he hoped that his history would prove permanently useful to those who wanted to look clearly upon what happened in the past, because—given the human condition—similar events may be expected to happen in the future (1.22.4). And so, I think, a contemporary reader cannot help but wonder if Thucydides’ account offers insight as COVID-19 confronts Americans with a complicated tension between our own society’s values and ideals and the harsh realities of life during a pandemic. In the first place, we can consider the observations Thucydides makes about the plague’s social and psychological effects on the Athenians and the ways it disrupted the life of the city. We can also consider Thucydides' provocative juxtaposition of the funeral oration and his account of the plague. But before looking into these larger questions, let’s consider Thucydides’ description of the disease. Thucydides tells us that the plague was said to have originated in Africa, arriving in Egypt from the south before spreading into Libya and into the territories of the Persian Empire. Upon its arrival in mainland Greece, it first attacked residents in the Piraeus. Rumors spread that the Spartans had poisoned the water supply. Soon the disease afflicted the city of Athens itself, where the number of deaths rapidly increased (2.48). As Thucydides describes it, the illness in its fullest form ran its course through the whole body, beginning with a violent feverishness of the head. Eyes became red and inflamed. The tongue and throat bled, and the breath became foul. There followed sneezing and hoarseness, pain in the chest with severe coughing, vomiting of bile, and then dry heaves producing violent spasms (2.49.2-4). The body became reddish and livid, and broke out in pustules and ulcers. There was an intense sensation of burning heat inside the body, and the sick could not tolerate the touch of even light clothing but wanted only to be naked and to immerse themselves in cold water. Some of the unattended plunged into wells seeking to relieve their unquenchable thirst—another notable symptom. Throughout the ordeal, the sick could neither sleep nor even lay still (2.49.5-6). Death often came on the seventh or eighth day. Some lived longer, with the disease descending into the bowels, producing ulcerations and severe diarrhea, which was often fatal. Those who survived sometimes lost genitals, fingers, or toes—a form of permanent injury that Thucydides’ plague shares with COVID-19, at least in the case of fingers and toes—while other survivors lost their sight. And some of the recovered suffered amnesia and no longer recognized themselves or their friends (2.49.6-8). Thucydides says that he offers his detailed and graphic description of the plague’s symptoms in order to make it possible for his readers to recognize the disease should it ever appear again (2.48.3). Many modern scholars have made attempts to identify what has come to be called “Thucydides syndrome” as a known disease, but so far to no avail. Diagnoses they have considered include smallpox, bubonic plague, measles, typhus, typhoid fever, and, most recently, Ebola. In the 1990s, a mass burial pit containing at least 150 bodies was excavated in the ancient Athenian cemetery known as the Kerameikos, and the burials have been plausibly dated to the time of the plague. In a study published in 2006, DNA examination of dental pulp recovered from the skeletal remains implicated typhoid fever. The methods and findings of the study, however, are under dispute, and the identification of the pathogen, or pathogens, that caused Thucydides’ plague remains a matter of debate. Some have argued that it may be too much to expect to identify the disease on the basis of what evidence we have, especially considering that the microbe responsible has likely mutated, and the disease may now be extinct.We might also consider the possibility that “Thucydides syndrome” has transformed itself into a disease characterized by futile scholarly inquiry. Beyond the illness’s symptoms, Thucydides offers several additional observations about the plague. He says that the birds and dogs accustomed to feed upon human corpses either kept away from the many unburied bodies or died after tasting them (2.50.1-2). With respect to human behavior and psychology, Thucydides enumerates the impossible problems the plague posed and the vicious cycles from which there seemed no hope of escape. Doctors were helpless, and died fastest, as they themselves were most frequently in contact with the sick (2.47.4). Prayers at the temples and consultations of oracles did not help, and soon ceased (2.47.4)—a detail the Roman author Lucretius employed to draw attention to the futility of seeking favors from the gods. For more about Lucretius’s description of the plague, see the Humanities Institute essay written by my colleague in the Classics Department T.H.M. Gellar-Goad. Defeated by their misfortune, the Athenians passively surrendered their hopes of escaping from the disaster (2.47.4). Some of the sick died in neglect, while others died in spite of every care. No single treatment could be established, because what helped one patient harmed others. The disease carried off all alike, both the strong and weak in body, without regard to their manner of living (2.51.2-3). Those who realized they were becoming sick fell quickly into despair, which left them even more vulnerable to the disease (2.51.4). And in a passage that scholars credit as the earliest statement in our literary record of the awareness of both contagion and acquired specific immunity—concepts not found in any ancient Greek or Latin medical writings—Thucydides says that when people saw that those who nursed the sick became infected themselves, some began to hang back in fear. The miserable result was that many died forlorn in their social isolation (2.51.4-5). Others, who were ashamed to spare themselves, visited their friends and died as a consequence. Thucydides also says that survivors of the disease felt great pity for the sick and dying, because they knew the disease from experience and felt free from danger since no one contracted the disease twice, or at least not with a fatal result. In their exuberance, those who recovered cherished the frivolous expectation that they would never die from any other disease either (2.51.5-6). With observations such as these, Thucydides brings out the complicated range of human psychological responses to the plague, including emotional cycles of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair, the sad outcomes of fear-driven social isolation and neglect, the troubling self-destructive form noble impulses can take, and the false feeling of invincibility that surviving a great danger can bring. Many, if not all, of these seem highly relatable to life as we have come to know it during the coronavirus pandemic. I feel prompted to compare the feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and despair that friends and family members have expressed to me, and that I have often felt personally. I think, too, of the way the pandemic is driving us apart from each other, and about those who have died in hospitals and in nursing homes isolated from their friends and family. At a more general level, Thucydides says that the plague was destructive of human life on a scale unprecedented in Athenian experience or memory (2.47.3). The overcrowded conditions caused by the evacuation of the countryside exacerbated the disaster and produced horrifying spectacles. In the sweltering heat of summer, the bodies of the dead and dying lay where they fell all about the streets, one on top of another, especially around the city’s fountains, where the dying gathered because of their intense desire for water. The temples in which displaced citizens had settled were now ominously full of corpses. (2.52). Thucydides also says that the plague introduced an increase in lawless behavior, characterized by conduct unrestrained by respect for traditional ethical standards whether human or divine, and by the shameless pursuit of immediate pleasures, or whatever gained such pleasures (2.53). Thucydides points in particular to a breakdown in funeral customs—a feature of Thucydides’ description that calls to mind the discovery of the mass burial pit in the Kerameikos. Athenians buried bodies wherever they could, often in cursory fashion, sometimes making use of a funeral pyre that was not theirs (2.52.4). As readers of Thucydides, we might think about the story of the seventeen bodies packed into a morgue designed to hold four at a nursing home in New Jersey, about the burial trenches in Iran and on Hart Island in New York City, about the refrigerator trucks parked near hospitals to be used as makeshift morgues, about the way the requirements of social distancing have disrupted funeral customs in our own day, about the widespread fears—in some cases a tragic reality—of coronavirus overwhelming our medical and social capacities to manage disease, suffering, and death. In the larger context of Thucydides’ history, however, we can see Thucydides’ description of the social consequences of the plague as something more than a relatable episode about the tragic consequences of a widespread lethal disease. Many interpreters of the plague passage have seen it as a commentary on the fragility of civilized life. On such a view, the social outcomes of the plague illustrate how, under the pressure of disastrous circumstances, darker facets of human nature can override the customs and manners that make a morally healthy society possible. The plague, like some rough beast with a blank and pitiless gaze slouching towards Athens, vexes Thucydides, and us, to the grotesque moral nightmare of a human society reduced to the struggle of every man for himself and God against them all. While I think there is some validity in such an interpretation, I would propose a more specific reading, one more closely tied to the Athenian democratic context. The plague, Thucydides notes, seriously affected only the Athenians, never the Spartans (2.54.5). Because Thucydides' account of the plague immediately follows Pericles’ funeral oration, Thucydides invites us to consider how the plague's visitation dramatically and ironically overturns so many of the uniquely Athenian and democratic ideals expressed in his speech. On such a view, the plague of Athens becomes a corpse-strewn tide in which the ceremony of democracy is drowned, a disaster loosing anarchy upon the city, a sharp point of the real puncturing not so much the general illusions of civilization but the specific fantasies of Athenian democracy. In the funeral oration, Pericles praised the Athenians for the respect they freely give for their city’s laws and customs (2.37.3); the plague produces an epidemic of lawlessness (2.53.1). In the funeral oration, Pericles boasted about Athens being a great center of imported goods from abroad (2.38.2); the plague, too, comes from abroad (2.48.1). Pericles praised the Athenians for their regular and appropriate observance of religious ritual (2.38.1); the plague profanes with polluting corpses the temples and shrines where such rituals take place (2.52.3). Pericles praised the Athenians for their versatile self-sufficiency as individuals who are equal to every emergency (2.41.1); no individual was versatile and self-sufficient enough to be equal to the plague (2.51.3). Pericles praised the Athenians for their sensible use of wealth, for their liberal generosity, and their unselfish dedication to the city (2.40.1, 2.42.4); in the context of the plague, Athenians begin to use their wealth for immediate pleasure and self-indulgence (2.53.1-2). Pericles praised the Athenians for their sense of honor and self-sacrifice in their service of the common good (43.1) and for valuing honor above any personal advantage (2.44.4); with the arrival of the plague, they began to disregard honor in the pursuit of personal advantage (2.53.3). The gap between the values expressed by Pericles in the funeral oration and the way the Athenians behave during the plague raises a number of questions. One interpretation might be that the plague reveals the fundamental hollowness of the vision of Athens Pericles presents in his funeral oration. But is Thucydides really presenting Pericles as the purveyor of hollow rhetoric? Maybe. Such a reading, however, is complicated, I think, by the exalted view of Pericles we find later in Book 2, where Thucydides praises Pericles' integrity and judgment, and lays blame on the Athenians themselves and Pericles’ successors for the breakdown of social and political cohesion which led ultimately to Athens’ defeat by Sparta in the war (2.65). For a contemporary reader, such an interpretation of the plague's effect on the course of the war might serve as a warning about the deleterious effects the pandemic is likely to have on our own society’s commitment to its best ideals and values. Events like the plague, or the pandemic, are likely to tear a society apart as they drive a wedge between a polity and its best idea of itself. I think Thucydides’ own narrative of the war, however, can also give contemporary readers grounds for a more optimistic view, because in the aftermath of the plague and over the course of the war, the Athenians proved themselves to be far more resilient and far more inspired by the ideals of the Periclean funeral oration than the more pessimistic reading would allow. Although Thucydides draws a strong causal connection between Athens' defeat by Sparta and the lawlessness and selfishness that the plague produced among the Athenians, he himself acknowledges that the Athenians carried on the war with extraordinary energy for more than two decades after the plague, all the way to the bitter end, when they were forced to surrender to Sparta in 404 (2.65.12). And if we look beyond the scope of Thucydides' history at Athenian history in the years after the Peloponnesian War, we find that even after Sparta imposed an oligarchy on the defeated Athenians, the Athenians rose up against it, and that in less than a year they had reinstated the democracy. So while it seems appropriate to acknowledge the dangerous pressures that the pandemic, like the plague, can bring to bear on the civic health of our society, the Athenian democracy’s capacity to endure suffering, calamity, defeat in war, and foreign political intervention can offer us some hope even as the pandemic tests the limits of our own democracy’s capacity to face the challenges of our historical moment. [1]The translations, paraphrases, and discussions of Thucydides in this essay are my own but owe a great deal to the many translations and commentaries I have studied and consulted, including: Richard Crawley's translation as published inThe Landmark Thucydides, ed. by Robert Strassler (Free Press, 1996); Paul Woodruff's translation inThucydides: On Justice, Power, and Human Nature(Hackett, 1993); Walter Blanco's translation in Thucydides: The Peloponnesian War, ed. by Walter Blanco and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts (Norton, 1998); Martin Hammond's translation inThucydides: The Peloponnesian War(Oxford, 2009); J. S. Rusten's commentaryThucydides: The Peloponnesian War Book II(Cambridge, 1989); vol. 1 of Simon Hornblower'sA Commentary on Thucydides(Oxford, 1991); and vol. 2 of Gomme'sA Historical Commentary on Thucydides(Oxford, 1966). [2]In this passage, Plutarch attributes Pericles' death to the plague (Gk,loimos), but to a mild and lingering form rather than the acute form that Thucydides describes. This has led some scholars to doubt that Pericles did in fact die of the plague. But perhaps like COVID-19, the Thucydides' plague had both an acute and persistent form, and Pericles succumbed to the latter.
Contagion or Nastiness: Science and the Gaol Fever Epidemics in Colonial Chesapeake
Anthony S. Parent Jr.
The Maryland Gazette reported on 9 July 1767 that the Albion from Bristol under the command of Captain Spencer had landed last week in Annapolis, and cleared customs to continue to the Chester River, carrying about 100 indented servants, all “very healthy,” all because the ship had a ventilator on board.On the other hand, a “casual visit” to an Eastern Shore plantation by a convict from a recently arrived transport ship had “communicated” the gaol (jail) fever distemper (now known to be typhus fever)to a widow’s enslaved people, felling nearly thirty of her household, including the widow Mrs. Blake herself, all “Victims to the Fury of this malignant ravaging Pestilence.”In another case, Mr. Howard of Annapolis and “many of his family” had also succumbed to the contagion from contact with a convict.Moved to “heartfelt sympathy” by these examples, the Maryland General Assembly had enacted a quarantine act in 1767, printed in full on page one, which the reporter opined “will probably give some check to its [the gaol fever’s] introduction, and save the lives of thousands.”[1]This essay about the fatal consequences of a malignant epidemic spread by convicts revealed the key medical, economic, and social issues of a contentious debate on gaol fever in colonial Chesapeake. Sir John Pringle, and Reverend Dr. Stephen Hales D.D., both a Fellow of the Royal Society (F.R.S),located the provenance of gaol fever in inmates who had been infected in His Majesty’s gaols, ships, camps, hospitals, and neighborhoods, publishing their findings in the society’s journal Philosophical Transactions.[2]Collecting testimonials from ship captains on the use and benefits of ventilators, Hales was particularly interested in slave and convict transports, where he prescribed using windmill-like ventilators for expelling “noxious, putrid, close confined pestilential air” and pumping in instead “salutary air.”[3] In 1753 Pringle published “An Account of Several Persons Seized with the Goal Fever, Working in Newgate; And of the Manner, in Which the Infection Was Communicated to One Entire Family.”Pringle’s narrative begins in October 1750 when he and Hales inquired into the best way of purifying the air at Newgate Prison to prevent the escalation of the gaol fever epidemic. They offered their opinion that the congestion of the space was responsible for the infectious calamity and suggested the remedy of mounting a windmill-generated ventilator on the leads of Newgate with tubes winding into the chambers.[4] Benjamin Franklin reviewed John Pringle’s“Account of Gaol Fever”in the Pennsylvania Gazette on 4 September 1755.Franklin, also a Fellow of the Royal Society and a later friend and traveling companion of Pringle, endorsed his paper for showing how the highly contagious gaol fever surfaces in the close quarters of gaols or ships congested with convicts or other passengers, until they “have poisoned the Air they breathe, and one another.”Not only is this epidemic introduced from English gaols and ships, but more recently by the “practice of scumming” felons from the German gaols and carrying servants on “sickly” Dutch ships, transmitting the disease into households throughout the region.Once in the Chesapeake the climate appears to heighten its malignancy, where “some Families have been almost ruined by the Mortality among the Servants and Slaves, introduced by a single purchased Convict.”Franklin promoted Pringle’s paper as a caution urging the planters to be “more cautious how they buy the Plague and bring it home to their Families.”[5] Jonas Green, the publisher of the Maryland Gazette, who had apprenticed under his cousin Benjamin Franklin, was surely aware of both Franklin’s review of Pringle’s“Account of Gaol Fever”and the Philadelphia plague scare in 1754, when on 9 July 1767 he printed the article discussed at the beginning of this essay.The article brought on a maelstrom of anonymous responses in letters to the editor,debating the causes of the malignity: the “Nastiness of Negroes” or the contagion of convicts? Responding anonymously on 30 July, A. B. wrote the convict trade was beneficial. He denounced the writer’s “pathetic” style in attributing the unfortunate situation of the widow’s loss on the Eastern Shore to a casual visit of a convict, both questioning the veracity of the “alleged” story and calling it a “groundless” rumor.Rather, he ascribed the source to the “nastiness of the Negroes.”We have had “diverse examples of Negroes dying without any color of Suspicion that they could possibly take the Disorder from a Visit of a Convict Transport.”Rather the doctors had diagnosed it both “to great Numbers [of Negroes] living together, in a very small House, built without proper Windows, of Passages for a free Air; and the Negroes being very uncleanly and negligent of themselves, Bedding, etc., which has caused a foul Air, and brought on the Disorder.”The cautionary tale here counsels the planters who have “great numbers” of enslaved people to “build larger and more airy Houses for them and see that their Habitations are kept clean and sweet.”[6] Picking up the gauntlet on 20 August in a 4,400-word response, Philanthropos, perhaps a pseudonym for Green because he took personally “the keen Animadversions of Mr. A. B.,” called his letter to the editor a “clearly selfish” view of someone with a “sordid” self-interest in the convict trade”and “an Advocate for the Importation of Felons, the Scourings of Jails, and thus abandoned Outcasts of the British Nation, as a Mode . . .for the peopling a young Country.”Alluding to Franklin’s 1751 essay “Felons and Rattlesnakes,”Philanthropos called these transports “vermin” and questioned whether “the Mother-Country should disgorge the foulest Pollutions of her Jails upon Us?”[7] The planters were receptive to Philanthropos’s rhetorical flourish partly because of the Potomac region’s unhealthiness and partly because it was the venue of the greatest number of convict disembarkation.Concerned with cost and risk of contagion, planters began to figure the new mortality into the viability of their estates.Since the infected convicted and indented servants “frequently propagated . . . the gaol fever or small-pox” among the inhabitants of the colony with often “fatal” consequences, the Virginia assembly, first in 1766 and again in 1772, now including African captives,authorized acts compelling transport ships “to perform quarantine.”[8]Because of the “alarming report” in that year, when the gaol fever had carried off fifty enslaved Africans within two months, Governor Lord Dunmore urged the Secretary of State to persuade the Board of Trade to find the assembly’s quarantine act “agreeable.”[9] If Benjamin Franklin expressed his “satisfaction”in a letter to the American Philosophical Society in 1773 of Virginia’s efforts to suppress both the convict and slave trades, then he lamented the crown’s interference.The efforts by the General Assembly to place prohibitive duties on imported Africans had been thwarted by the crown, because “the Interest of a few Merchants here has more Weight with Government than that of Thousands at a Distance.” At the same time, the gaol fever “spread in Virginia, by the Ships transporting Convicts” had prompted the General Assembly to pass an act quarantining ships arriving with the disease, but the convict contractors, “alleging that this might increase the Expense of their Voyages, the Law was at their Instance repealed here.”[10] Gaol fever epidemics carried in by convicts devastated the Chesapeake region during the late colonial era, leading to efforts to quarantine transport ships.Between 1751 and 1755 collaborators Dr. John Pringle and Dr. Stephen Hales attributed gaol fever to the bad air of the confined spaces in gaols, military camps, and transport ships.The physicians, following Pringle’s lead, credited environmental conditions as the cause of gaol fever and promoted sanitation; the wardens, incorporating Hales’s invention, installed ventilators as a cure.Yet slave traders and convict contractors blamed the bodies of their bound laborers for the malignancy, debating in the press whether the culprit was the “nastiness” of the slave quarters or the contagion of convicts.Dreading the loss of their laborers, the assemblies of both Maryland (1767) and the Virginia (1766 and 1772) legislated quarantining infected ships, whether slave or convict, but these acts were overturned by crown veto after mercantile interests protested them as a restraint of trade, increasing the cost of their voyages. Also concerned with cost planters began to figure the malignancy into their economic risk.Despite his promotion of science in the colonies from 1756 to 1773, Franklin still laid the blame for this contagion squarely on the bodies of transported felons,whom he once analogized to a plague of rattlesnakes,even as convict traders cast aspersion on enslaved Africans. [1]Maryland Gazette, (Green), Annapolis, July 9, 1767, http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/xml_docs/slavery/documents/ mdss.xml&style=/xml_docs/slavery/documents/display_doc.xsl. [2]Pringles “Observations on the Diseases of the Army” was “one of the most remarkable notices of an outbreak of gaol fever.”Francis C. Webb, “An Historical Account of Gaol Fever, Read before the Epidemiological Society, on Monday, July 6th, 1857,” 11, 42-43.https://archive.org/stream/b22348955/b22348955_djvu.txt. [3]Stephen Hales, “An Account of the Great Benefit of Ventilators in Many Instances, in Preserving the Health and Lives of People, in Slave and Other Transport Ships. By Stephen Hales, D. D. F. R. S.,”Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775)49 (1755): 339.Henry Ellis and Stephen Hales, “A Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hales, F. R. S. from Captain Henry Ellis, F. R. S. Dated Jan. 7, 1750-51, at Cape Monte Africa, Ship Earl of Hallifax,”Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775)47 (1751): 216. [4]John Pringle, "An Account of Several Persons Seized with the Goal-Fever, Working in Newgate; And of the Manner, in Which the Infection Was Communicated to One Entire Family; by John Pringle, M. D. F. R. S." Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) 48 (1753): 42-55.http://www.jstor.org/stable/105120. [5]“Introduction to John Pringle’s Account of Gaol Fever, 4 September 1755,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01 06 02 0078, ver. 2014 01 05). Source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 6, April 1, 1755, through September 30, 1756, ed. Leonard W. Labaree. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963, pp. 178–179. [6]Maryland Gazette, (Green), Annapolis, July 30, 1767, http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/saxon/servlet/SaxonServlet?source=/xml_docs/slavery/documents/ mdss2.xml&style=/xml_docs/slavery/documents/display_doc.xsl. [7]Maryland Gazette, (Green), Annapolis, August 20, 1767, http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/xslt/servlet/XSLTServlet?xml=/xml_docs/slavery/documents/ mdss3.xml&xsl=/xml_docs/slavery/documents/display_doc.xsl.“Felons and Rattlesnakes,9 May 1751,” printed in The Pennsylvania Gazette May 9, 1751 and reprinted in (Hunter’s)Virginia Gazette, May 30, 1751, Founders Online, National Archives, last modified December 28, 2016,http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0040. [8]William Waller Hening, ed.,Statutes at Large, vol. 8, 260-61 (Nov 1766), 537-538 (Feb 1772 http://vagenweb.org/hening/vol08-28.htm. [9]Governor Dunmore to the Secretary of State 1773, CO5 1351, 10, To the Secretary of State from the Governor, Lord Dunmore, with enclosures and replies (1772-1773), Microfilm Reel No.2, Virginia Colonial Records Project, Library of Virginia. [10]“From Benjamin Franklin to Richard Woodward, 10 April 1773,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01 20 02 0094, ver. 2013 12 27). Source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 20, January 1 through December 31, 1773, ed. William B. Willcox. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976, pp. 155–156.
Coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic is rife with war metaphors. Hospitals are “war zones,” doctors are “soldiers.” Grocery store employees and other essential workers are on the “front lines.” Places with high infection rates are “red zones.” According to journalists, pundits, and politicians, the infected and healthy alike are “battling” an “enemy” that “invades,” “attacks,” and engages in “stealth transmission” (“Stealth Transmission”). Most of us are “hunkering down,” “sheltering in place.” We accept this rhetoric because the metaphor “medicine is war” is so commonplace that some might even call it a dead metaphor. It’s true that war metaphors have a long history in medical (and medical humanities) discourse. In the 19th century, Louis Pasteur labeled microbes “invaders” in his explication of germ theory; before him, poet John Donne (1572-1631) called illness a “siege” and physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689) wrote of “eradicating” and “annihilat[ing]” disease. The discovery of the immune system led to discussions of bodily “defenses,” of “fighting” against illness, and—inevitably—“winning” or “losing” that fight. Some patients “triumph” over disease while others “succumb.” In “Illness as Metaphor,” Susan Sontag unpacks the metaphors associated with tuberculosis in the 19th century and with cancer in the 20th. These diseases, she explains, were associated with contemporaneously salient personality traits and considered somatic expressions of repressed (in the case of tuberculosis) or thwarted (in the case of cancer) passions. The metaphors used to describe them, she argues, constitute a form of victim-blaming, whereby patients come to believe their illness resulted from bad or wrong feelings. She calls for an end to medical metaphors and hopes that improved knowledge will one day render them superfluous. Yet medical metaphors remain a versatile rhetorical tool. Patients report feeling heard and understood by their providers when conversations include metaphors (Casarett, et al). We borrow military jargon to lend weight to civilian medical operations: we call the nation’s chief medical officer a surgeon general who leads the public health service corps. We call groups undergoing similar treatment a “cohort,” a word derived from the Latin cohors, a Roman military unit comprised of interchangeable, ultimately expendable soldiers. Unsurprising, then, that during the Covid19 pandemic “war-time imagery is compelling. It identifies an enemy (the virus), a strategy (“flatten the curve” but also “save the economy”), the front-line warriors (health-care personnel), the home-front (people isolating at home), the traitors and deserters (people breaking the social distancing rules)” (Musu). Talk of war may motivate some to adhere to policies that would have been unthinkable a year ago; after all, wars demand tremendous resources and public support to be successful, and war rhetoric encourages a mentality of shared purpose and sacrifice. As one bioethicist asks, “How else to elevate a social problem and make it the object of our intense focus and attention, not to mention our financial support?” (Parsi). The war metaphor tightly encompasses many aspects of life under viral siege. However, military and war metaphors create serious problems, as scholars have noted (see Nie, et al; Lane, McLachlan & Philip; Wiggins). Rhetorics of fighting and battle encourage medical professionals and sick people to suppress emotional distress and to soldier on, despite setbacks. They produce an artificial win-lose dichotomy that suggests certain choices—such as foregoing experimental treatments—are acts of cowardice or defeat. Someone who “loses” their battle with illness risks being perceived as weak or worse, believing themselves to be. Such language presents death as a question of will or inner resources, rather than an irrefutable eventuality. As the physician Paul Hodgkin acknowledged, the “’medicine is war’ metaphor […] discriminates against feeling and reflection” (1820). A good soldier follows orders, without question or emotion. In this moment, imagining ourselves collectively as soldiers does not allow space to mourn what has been lost or to acknowledge anxieties about an uncertain future. Furthermore, the war metaphor provokes us to name and attack an enemy, even one we can’t see (a microscopic pathogen) and against which we currently have weak weaponry. War metaphors fit neatly into political discourse, with troubling consequences, given recent surges in nationalist and populist ideologies[i]. In March, President Trump described himself as a “wartime president” and called on Americans to make “sacrifices” to “beat” the “Chinese virus.” Orders to stay home, practice social distancing, and wear masks might be palatable if presented as moral or ethical duties, but presenting them as patriotic obligations invites resistance and complaints about overreaching governments bent on controlling citizens’ bodies.[ii] What could be commonsense discussions about safeguarding our own and our neighbors’ health become intractable debates about whether to listen to authorities, and if so, which ones.[iii] Given widespread adoption, these metaphors come to organize discourse and circumscribe the rhetorical tools we perceive as available in a given context.As Judy Segal writes in Rhetoric of Health and Medicine, “the terms of a discourse constrain not only the outcomes of debate but also what it is possible to argue at all” (117).[iv] When we deploy war metaphors to describe the pandemic, we transfer a set of meanings that we already attach to war to a public health emergency. Obviously, this is the function of all metaphors; indeed, “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff & Johnson 5). To explain how these “borrowed” meanings work, linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson analyzed the metaphor “war is argument” in Metaphors We Live By (1980). Thinking of argument as a war, they claim, predisposes us to employ other metaphors suggesting violence, aggression, conquest. For example, we say “he shot down my argument” or “she destroyed my claims.” Ultimately, “we talk about arguments that way because we conceive of them that way—and we act according to the way we conceive things” (5). But what is often a relatively benign process takes on malignant properties here (puns intended). Importantly, these metaphors both “produc[e] and perpetuat[e] values,” and what is valuable in battle may be less so in a public health crisis (Segal 117). As Ravi Chandra wrote in a recent Psychology Today article, “the antagonism of the war metaphor takes us away from deeper understanding of illness and the world.” Talking about something that is not a war as if it were is not simply substituting one set of words for another. Those words structure our thinking, actions, and reactions to a given circumstance or event. The war metaphor encourages extreme stances and undermines civil norms, like debate and deliberation.It positions us all as combatants and conditions us to accept violence as a solution to a problem.And while most of us would readily accept some violence done to some coronaviruses by pharmaceutical means, the metaphor does not necessarily guarantee such a targeted response. Instead, it creates a discursive culture where anything undesirable (the virus, masks, public health guidelines, shuttered schools and businesses) becomes a potential target. Witness, for instance, the assaults committed against Asian Americans and the physical and verbal abuse of those enforcing mask policies, such as retail workers who are disproportionately people of color.Death threats have been directed at public health officials, including Dr. Anthony Fauci and his family. Obviously, more is going on here than figures of speech, but might the effects have been different had we adopted a different metaphor? For example, the “journey” metaphor (popular now among cancer patients) doesn’t imply that death is a defeat or a failure; it’s one of several possible destinations. This metaphor also gives the patient more agency and ownership: being a traveler does not demand the same sacrifices or obedience as soldiering. The journey metaphor, with its emphasis on the individual, may not be useful in conceptualizing a global pandemic--the health, social, and economic impacts of which we are only beginning to understand. In some ways, we do seem to be fighting for our physical, emotional, and economic survival. Still, the war metaphor has done little to promote coordinated action. It has produced fear, anxiety, and panic, which in turn lead people to make irrational choices (like stockpiling toilet paper). As Paul Ricoeur noted, metaphors both create and describe reality. If public discourse constantly reminds us that we are at war, then we should expect the devastation that follows. Works Cited Casarett, David et al. “Can Metaphors and Analogies Improve Communication with Seriously Ill Patients?.”Journal of Palliative Medicinevol. 13, no. 3 (2010): pp. 255-60. doi:10.1089/jpm.2009.0221 Chandra, Ravi. “Covid19 As Metaphor: The Immuniversity, Not War.” Psychology Today. 6 May 2020.www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-pacific-heart/202005/covid-19-metaphor-the- immuniversity-not-war?amp Hodgkin, P. “Medicine Is War: And Other Medical Metaphors. ”British Medical Journal vol. 291, no. 6511 (Dec. 1985): pp. 1820–21, doi:10.1136/bmj.291.6511.1820. Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago UP, 1980. Lane, Heather Patricia, et al. “The War Against Dementia: Are We Battle Weary Yet?.” Age and Ageing vol. 42, no. 3 (2013): pp. 281-3. doi:10.1093/ageing/aft011 Martin, Emily. “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles.” Signs, vol. 16, no. 3, 1991, pp. 485–501. Musu, Costanza. “War Metaphors Used for Covid19 Are Compelling But Also Dangerous.” The Conversation. 8 April 2020.www.theconversation.com/war-metaphors-used-for-covid-19-are-compelling-but-also-dangerous- 135406 Nie, Jing-Bao et al. “Healing Without Waging War: Beyond Military Metaphors in Medicine and HIV Cure Research.” The American Journal of Bioethics, vol. 16, no. 10 (2016): 3-11. doi:10.1080/15265161.2016.1214305 Parsi, Kayhan. “War Metaphors in Health Care: What Are They Good For?” Bioethics.net. 16 September 2016.www.bioethics.net/2016/09/war-metaphors-in-health-care-what-are-they-good-for/ Ricoeur, Paul. “Creativity in Language.” Philosophy Today, vol. 17, no. 2 (1973): pp. 97–111. doi:10.5840/philtoday197317231. Segal, Judy. Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine. Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor; and, AIDS and Its Metaphor. Picador USA, 2002. “‘Stealth Transmission’ Fuels Fast Spread of Coronavirus Outbreak.” Medical Letter on the CDC & FDA, NewsRX LLC, 2020, p. 10. Wiggins, Natasha M. “Stop Using Military Metaphors for Disease.” British Medical Journal. Vol. 345, e4706. (12 Jul. 2012). doi:10.1136/bmj.e4706 [i]In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban used the pandemic a reason to grant himself the power to rule by decree. In the Philippines, President Roderigo Duterte asserted the right to punish those spreading “false information” about the pandemic, thus granting himself enormous latitude to quash dissent. Similarly, in Alberta, Canada and the UK, new legislation gave leaders broad powers to control public life in ways unthinkable during non-Covid-times. [ii]It goes without saying, I hope, that the federal government’s messaging about masks, social distancing, and other protecting measures have been inconsistent at best. [iii]Obviously, this particular challenge extends to the questioning of scientific data and medical expertise. One could write volumes about what this pandemic has revealed about scientific and statistical literacy, as well as conflicting views about the status and value of scientific authority and expertise. Such topics, though, are beyond the scope of this essay. [iv]See also Kenneth Burke’s discussion of “terministic screen” in Language as Symbolic Action (1966). Like a window screen, words can function as filters, “directing attention away from some interpretations and toward others” (45).
I. Present Absence Crash: Why are you shaking me off? Nuke: I want to bring the heater. Announce my presence with authority. Crash: [indignantly] To announce what? Nuke: My presence with authority. --Bull Durham I’d walked past the room countless times over the years without giving much thought to the peculiar descriptor that (once) graced the placard for Z. Smith Reynolds Library 204—“Telepresence Classroom.” I’d even used the room on multiple occasions, and while I knew that it was equipped with hardware allowing for videoconferencing, until recently I had never considered what was promised in the room’s designation as a place for “telepresence.”[i] I haven’t been in the library—where my office, the Writing Center, and the classroom I have most frequently taught in are located—for five months. This professional distancing from my work environment (on top of the requisite social distancing required of us all) has, strangely enough, given me the space and opportunity to consider that term—“telepresence”—in a way that I never did when it was a regular feature of my traversal of the workplace. When we made the urgent transition to online teaching in the spring, all of a sudden the implicit question within the very word “telepresence” became apparent. Can something far away be close at hand? Can we truly be present at (social) distance? A student emailed me recently and lamented that she would not be able to participate in a program this fall. She sounded sad and regretful. She has been, she says, “struggling deeply with the new virtual world we’re all working in.” I have been, too. In telling me she would not be here (there?) this semester, her email felt more present to me than most of the correspondence I’ve received lately. In writing to me, she made her absence present. In so much else we are seeing and hearing right now, the exact opposite is happening. II. Telepresence What is presence? Presence, short for telepresence, happens when people use technology and overlook at least part of i ts role in the experience: A telepresence conferencing system makes us feel as if we’re face-to-face; an online virtual world seems real; [ . . . ] students learn about the world and workers learn how to do their jobs using compelling simulations; we think of and interact with computers, agents, avatars, robots and androids as if they were living social entities even though we know they’re not[.] As we expand technology’s capabilities and applications, we’re having ever more, and ever more compelling, presence experiences. --“About Presence” International Society for Presence Research The word telepresence as coined by the cognitive scientist and pioneering figure in artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, first in a government funding proposal titled “Toward a Remotely Manned Energy and Production Economy” in 1979 and, more publicly, in an article adapted from that proposal for Omni magazine, simply titled “Telepresence,” in 1980. For Minsky, telepresence was a techno-utopian solution to a host of the challenges faced by the limitations of the human body within systems of production, exploration, and maintenance that would either exceed our physical capacities or pose grave or mortal physical danger to human operators. From the safe handling of nuclear materials to mining to space exploration, Minsky envisioned a technology of remote operation in which the robotic extension of human senses and physical abilities would not only make work safer, but also fundamentally transform our world for the better: If teleoperator technology promises wealth and freedom beyond dreams, is there a dark side? People who issue manifestos should think about such matters. The solution may be to grant those who want to live in the "old ways" their chance, while those who want new gifts should also have theirs. I think the gifts promise better, richer, and longer lives. Minsky saw the challenge of telepresence in explicitly technological terms—a challenge of funding the right research, investing in projects that would build more sensitive and precise controls, and moving all of production towards a combination of automation and technologically-mediated human action. He did, however, acknowledge the possibility that such a trend might have unpleasant consequences: Might telepresence, though, have a special tendency to make workers feel alienated? Perhaps, yes, even with superb technology. Many jobs will become intensely more interesting and more creative; many worlds will be expanded. If each step toward telepresence were also a step toward the economic pain and psychic grief of unemployment, one might consider working against it. Yet a generation of reforms is already eliminating many of the unsafe jobs that telepresence could preserve. Telepresence offers a freer market for human skills, rendering each worker less vulnerable to the moods and fortunes of one employer. In a remarkable rhetorical sleight of hand, Minsky poses telepresence as a solution to the very problem that automation helped to create. “Unsafe jobs” necessitate reforms that eliminate such work. If the same dangerous work, however, can be accomplished from a distance through machine extensions of the human body, then somehow workers could participate in a “freer market” for their skills (provided, of course, that they are skilled machine operators/telepresence technicians rather than the “unskilled” workers who might have previously been called upon to endanger their lives and health for the sake of production). Putting aside the dubious libertarian utopianism of a labor market made infinitely competitive through its decoupling from physical location, Minsky’s periodic, small gestures to the discomfort—psychic and material—of the telepresent future suggest an awareness of the fundamental problem underlying such a project. How can technological mediation create a sense of presence rather than a sense of alienation? As Minsky puts it earlier in the essay, “The biggest challenge to developing telepresence is achieving that sense of ‘being there.’ Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing? Will we be able to couple our artificial devices naturally and comfortably to work together with the sensory mechanisms of human organisms?” In the decades that have followed Minsky’s work, many scholars have taken up and expanded upon the questions that animated the origins of telepresence.For instance, there now exists an International Society for the Study of Presence (ISSP), whose members collectively authored a definition of presence in which the original term merely stands in for telepresence. This resonates with the presence-ologists’ focus upon the ways in which meaningful presence in a technologically mediated environment is definitionally the lack of awareness of that mediation by the human subject (see the quotation at the beginning of this section). In his article, “Presence, Explicated,” the communication scholar Kwan Min Lee defines presence as “a psychological state in which virtual (para-authentic or artificial) objects are experienced as actual objects in either sensory or nonsensory ways” (37). Researchers in this field have spent time defining and debating presence and virtuality and have worked to establish metrics for determining presence, from brain scans to narrative questionnaires and beyond; however, the assumption that the virtual and actual can be collapsed, as Lee suggests, or that the human subject’s lack of awareness of this collapse would be a desirable thing, should give us pause. Can the virtual (para-authentic) university feel like an actual, authentic one? I suppose that depends on what we believe the university is. We may be, as the ISSP argues, “having ever more, and ever more compelling, presence experiences,” but that seems a far cry yet from having more experiences of each other’s presence. We know, for instance, that even those with whom we are present can be absent. If physical proximity is no guarantor of our capacity to be present, then it stands to reason that virtual experiences might rest on even shakier ground. III. Dramatizing Presence “How can I explain, I need you here and not here, too” – of Montreal, “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” “THERE IS WRITING HAPPENING / MAYBE THATS [sic] HARD FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND/ I AM HERE BUT “I” AM NOT HERE. – Ram Dass,Be Here Now It is one question of Minsky’s that lingers in my mind as I prepare for another digitally-mediated semester: “Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing?” Can we feel like we’re together even though we may not be? Is the Ad Council on to something when they tell me, with a phrase that competes with “telepresence” for oxymoronic force, that we are “#AloneTogether”? Writing may have been the first attempt at telepresence, a technological mediation that attempts to place the writer in a virtual location, most often with a real or imagined reader. The drama of the “writer’s presence” has been a powerful story about how writing works in a variety of contexts, but I have been thinking of the ways that rhetoric and composition have taken up the idea in different ways. Does my field offer a way to wrestle with the contradictions I keep stumbling over? In her 1982 essay in College Composition and Communication, "Responding to Student Writing," Nancy Sommers argues that one of the important things instructors do when we comment on student writing is "to dramatize the presence of a reader" (148). The student’s writing, and our writing in response to it, thus functions as what Lee might call a kind of para-authentic object that stands in for a reader (whether that reader is an actual human being or an idealized abstraction is an open question). Don’t we suggest as much to students when we ask them to imagine audiences or to think of their writing as a proxy for themselves? Don’t we ask our students to be present in their writing—through their voices, their ideas, their projection of virtual selves? Now in its ninth edition, a commonly used reader in composition and creative nonfiction classes is Robert Atwan and Donald McQuade’s collection titled The Writer’s Presence. Their “Introduction for Students” states: Presence is far easier to identify than it is to define. We recognize it when we see it, but how do we capture it in words? How can we begin to understand this elusive characteristic known as presence? [ . . . ] How can someone be present in writing? How can you project yourself into an essay so that it seems that you’re personally there, even though all your reader sees are words on a piece of paper? I find the uncertainty that Atwan and McQuade’s allow in their phrasing here somehow comforting. Yet, like the ISSP and Lee, the authors of The Writer’s Presence deliver an affirmative answer to the questions they raise. Yes, writers can be present in writing; presence (short for telepresence?) can be achieved. Yes, we can have “ever more, and ever more compelling, presence experiences”—we need just turn to our experiences as readers for evidence of this phenomenon. Building upon Atwan and McQuade’s work, as well as that of Peter Elbow and Gordon Harvey, Nicole B. Wallack’s 2017 Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies argues explicitly for the value of the literary essay to writing curricula precisely because—however difficult it is to define “the essay” in purely generic terms—it is nevertheless the “genre of presence.” There is a strain of thought in writing studies that not only allows but enthusiastically champions the idea that the mediating technology of the written word can go unrecognized by the reader. Reading and writing overcome Minsky’s problem of presence, we like to believe, and through them we can “achiev[e] that sense of ‘being there.’” And just like Minsky’s teleoperators, when we are confronted with an environment that poses a danger to our health— say an in-person classroom during a global pandemic—we have the technology to be present; we can be there and not there, too. IV. Presence/Absence A written sign is proffered in the absence of the receiver. How to style this absence? One could say that at the moment when I am writing, the receiver may be absent from my field of present perception. But is not this absence merely a distant presence, one which is delayed or which, in one form or another, is idealized in its representation? This does not seem to be the case, or at least this distance, divergence, delay, this deferral [différance] must be capable of being carried to a certain absoluteness of absence if the structure of writing, assuming that writing exists, is to constitute itself. [ . . . ] To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general. And this absence is not a continuous modification of presence, it is a rupture in presence, the "death" or the possibility of the "death" of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark[.] (7-8) --Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” Limited Inc I re-read Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc during quarantine, revisiting some of the long-running and acrimonious disagreement between him and John Searle through the 1970s and 80s. I thought looking back at those questions around language, presence, absence, the trace, and différance might offer something to distract me. I remembered the book itself as cheekily mean-spirited (which it is) and hoped it could be worth thinking about again in a time when questions of communication have become more complicated by our deeply felt absence from one another. It was less fun than I thought it would be, and I was reminded quickly why I never much took to post-structuralism. But Derrida makes a point that leaves me troubled. In its appeal to the transcendence of temporality and distance, writing seems to offer a kind of presence. We can listen to the dead through writing. We can “talk” with those who are miles away. We feel like we can, as Atwan and McQuade suggest, “project ourselves” onto the page (or the screen), and our words can travel to places that we cannot. Not exactly so, says Derrida, who I will not pretend to understand fully on the matter. In fact, in order for writing to function as writing, it must be able to operate in a kind of radical absence of both the receiver and the composer—it is itself a “rupture in presence” (8) haunted by the mortality of both parties. While his project takes on “logocentrism” more broadly to challenge even the possibility of presence in oral communication, Derrida’s particular critique of presence in writing led me back to the thought of what it is that we are trying to capture in our mediated communication during this crisis. If our oldest form of telepresence carries with it the trace of both absence and, sadly, the death that awaits us all, then what do the new forms of “presence” possibly hope to offer beyond further reminders that we are not in the same place, that we might be in danger, that we might not always be here. Does writing, or Zooming, or texting, etc. inevitably reinforce our sense of radical absence more than it might collapse the distance between the virtual and the actual? Are the scholars of presence too optimistic? Were the post-structuralists too…? V. Play Ball One week into the St. Louis Cardinals’ COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent quarantine, second baseman Kolten Wong posted an image to his Instagram account. The image displayed cardboard cutouts of fans in the seats of Busch Stadium, and Wong captioned the picture, “My mom never got the chance to enjoy many games at Busch but now she will!” One of the cutouts was of Keala Wong, the ballplayer’s mother, who died of cancer in 2013. In a stadium where the living cannot watch games for fear of mortal illness, cardboard cutouts sat waiting to witness the return of a team that would miss over two weeks of play as they waited to see who else might test positive for the virus. I heard the story later from an announcer sitting in that empty stadium and calling the game “live” in St. Louis, even though the team was playing in Chicago. The announcing situation reminds me of Bull Durham, a film that questions the authenticity of presence in its own ways, where the Durham Bulls radio announcers reenact the plays by striking bats with mallets and purport to be calling a game live that they are simply relaying from another source. What can we know about presence right now, tele- or otherwise? If I plan to “announce my presence with authority” in my classroom this fall, I will surely seem as foolish as Nuke LaLoosh. And yet, like Atwan and McQuade, I feel like we might recognize presence when we see it—or feel it. Surely Kolten Wong feels his mother’s presence. I don’t question that. I sincerely doubt, though, that a “better” technology than a cardboard backed photograph would collapse the actual and virtual for him in the way that some technologists hope that virtual reality and telepresence might. I don’t see a way to be more present for my students on a screen than on the page, and neither seems an adequate substitute for physical co-presence, even when that has become unsafe work. The struggle to somehow be together when you can’t is so profound that we forget that it has always been with us. It’s a big part of alienation. It is at the heart of grief. Perhaps if we share the reality of that struggle we can enact a kind of presence with one another that does not rely on advertising platitudes or the limits of our technology. Or perhaps we will always be haunted by absence, but maybe that connects us, too. Works Cited “About Presence.” International Society for Presence Research, ispr.info/about-presence-2/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020. Alone Together. www.alonetogether.com/. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020. Atwan, Robert and Donald McQuade. The Writer’s Presence. 9th/Kindle ed., Bedford, 2018. Bull Durham. Directed by Ron Shelton, performances by Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins, The Mount Company, 1988. Dass, Ram. Be Here Now. Lama Foundation, 1971. Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Northwestern UP, 1988. Lee, Kwan Min. “Presence, Explicated.” Communication Theory, vol. 13 no. 1, Feb. 2004, pp. 27-50. Oxford Academic, doi:10.1111/j.1468-2885.2004.tb00302.x. Minsky, Marvin. “Telepresence.” Marvin Minsky/Papers, web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/ papers/Telepresence.html. Accessed 15 Aug. 2020. Originally published in OMNI Magazine, June 1980: 44-52. of Montreal. “The Past is a Grotesque Animal.” Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? Polyvinyl Record Co., 2007. CD. Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing. ”College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 2, May, 1982, pp. 148-56. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/357622. Wallack, Nicole B. Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies. UP of Colorado, 2017. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pq33v8. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020. Wong, Kolten [@thewongone808]. Photo of cardboard cutouts in stadium seats. Instagram, 11 Aug. 2020, www.instagram.com/p/CDwnqllg5wr/. [i]In researching this essay, I have discovered that the “TelePresence” of ZSR 204 referred specifically to the brand of the videoconferencing platform installed, “Cisco TelePresence.” Apparently, the concept was taken up commercially. The room, however, is now simply called a “Video Conference Classroom.” I am (partially) teaching a blended course in it this fall.
For decades, the health system in the United States has been a question of debate and a major point in the speeches and agendas of political candidates. In the past few years, it has become a determining factor in swinging votes left or right. For months now, the beliefs of both sides about how the system should work have been put to the test by the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact it is having in every aspect of American society. This pandemic is the most recent example of the particularly difficult position of disadvantage in which underprivileged populations find themselves when tragedy strikes. This relates to Julian Tudor Hart’s idea of the “inverse care law”, which states that“The availability of good medical care tends to vary inversely with the need of the assisted population. This is most [...] accomplished where medical care is most exposed to market forces […]”.[i] Despite the fact that more than forty million people in the US (over 13% of the population)[ii] speak Spanish as their native language, Spanish-speakers are still one of those underserved populations, facing multiple barriers that prevent them and their communities from receiving the quality of care that English-speakers enjoy. This essay will explore some of the ways in which health disparities in the US make Spanish-speakers more vulnerable to this pandemic. One of the most important differences that became particularly obvious at the beginning of the pandemic was the lack of information and resources regarding prevention in Spanish. By mid-March, the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) included numerous resources in English regarding basic information about the virus, general recommendations, specific guidelines for pregnant women, children, travelers, and more. There were also flyers about how to stop the spread of germs and what to do in case of getting sick. However, only the former was available in Spanish, which unfortunately could convey the message that Spanish-speakers were being only seen as potential carriers of the virus (i.e. a threat) but not as patients (i.e. victims). 55% of the US Hispanic population live in Texas, California, and Florida, three of the states with the highest counts of cases. Correlation is certainly not causation, but the incidence of cases in these states should have triggered a more immediate response to the need for materials in Spanish. The lack of resources from a trustworthy entity in Spanish could have also potentially led Spanish-speakers to search for other sources, increasing the danger of relying on inaccurate information. For that reason, members of the Medical Spanish Taskforce -a national organization of health care providers, educators, and other professionals- put together a list of reliable resources in Spanish to share among the population in hopes of spreading accurate information about COVID-19. The language barrier is not just relevant during the prevention phase, but also when patients seek potential treatment. Their frequent inability to find a Spanish-speaking provider is now increased by the switch to telehealth in many clinics during the past few months. “Telehealth is convenient for some people […] But it isn’t easily accessible to the 25 million people in the United States who speak little English, who are more likel yto live in poverty, often work service or construction jobs, andmay be more at riskof exposure to COVID-19. Even if they are able to get online, most of the systems that support telehealth […] are hard to access for people who primarily speak other languages.”[iii] Platforms may be hard to navigate for non-English speakers, are frequently not available in other languages, and make it hard for a third person (such as an interpreter) to join the call, presenting a challenge to Spanish-speakers who can’t communicate with their providers. Difficulty in the accessibility to care becomes an even bigger issue when we look at the demographic information of COVID-19 cases. “Epidemiologists around the country are examining as more and more evidence emerges that the coronavirus is impacting Latinos, and some other groups,including African-Americans, with particular force[…] In Iowa, Latinos account for more than 20 percent of coronavirus cases though they are only 6 percent of the population. Latinos in Washington State make up 13 percent of the population but 31 percent of cases. In Florida, they are just over a quarter of the population but account for two of every five virus cases where ethnicity is known.”[iv] One of the reasons why Spanish-speakers are more affected by COVID-19 is connected to the types of jobs many of them normally have access to: they work in the fields, in meat plants, the food industry, as janitors, in delivery services… which means that many of them have been deemed essential workers and are more exposed to the virus than those who have the ability to work from home. In San Francisco, California, for instance, 43% of COVID cases affect Latinos, despite being only 15% of the population in the city.[v] This data may not even present a completely accurate picture, as epidemiologists report that testing still remains scarce in minority and low-income neighborhoods and demographic information regarding race and ethnicity is missing from around half of the reported cases all over the country.[vi] The lack of testing sites in low-income neighborhoods is not just an issue in big cities, but also in smaller ones. Winston-Salem has a population of around a quarter of a million people and local activists have now been fighting for months to bring more testing to the eastern part of town, where minorities tend to live in higher proportion: “Many were outraged at how East Winston, and the 27105 zip code as a whole, were left out of the initial locations for testing sites.”[vii] This situation perfectly portrays Tudor Hart’s inverse care law, leaving those that need testing the most without access to said tests. Dr. Tiffany Shin, a pediatrician in Winston-Salem, works mostly with Spanish-speaking patients. She witnesses first-hand the challenges that this underserved population regularly has to go through and that the pandemic has exacerbated: “Life was hard enough already for many of these families, so this is an extremely difficult time that is worsening their situation.Health is beyond lack of disease and COVID-19 has brought out the many factors that impact people’s wellbeing. The current situation is worsening issues such as food insecurity, child abuse, isolation, mental health issues, and more.”[viii] Dr. Shin touches the topic of the collateral consequences of the pandemic, beyond being affected by the actual virus. The CDC recently reported how Latinos of every age are suffering higher levels of depression, anxiety and other mental and emotional issues due to the pandemic: “Hispanic respondents reported higher prevalences of symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder, COVID-19–related TSRD, increased substance use, and suicidal ideation than did non-Hispanic whites (whites) or non-Hispanic Asian (Asian) respondents.”[ix] This new set of issues also has the potential of prolonging and worsening the situation of disadvantage that this community endures, as it will likely cause emotional distress in the home, family abuse, substance abuse, loss of job and subsequent financial insecurity, and more. In other words, this is a crystal-clear example of the cycle of health disparities. Image credit: https://www.breakthecycleprogram.org Breaking this cycle is a public health need and should become a priority for lawmakers. Offering Spanish-speakers access to health care in their first language will not suddenly bring them equality, but it will drastically change the way in which they receive and perceive health care and will contribute to fighting the factors that keep them in an underprivileged situation. Although many institutions offer Medical Spanish courses both at undergraduate and medical school levels, these courses often focus on linguistic skills and maybe some basic cultural aspects. However, they often miss the relevance of presenting a more complete view of the types of challenges that Spanish-speaking patients face and the impact of health inequality in their lives, not just in their health. In addition, a higher number of bilingual providers is not the only necessary change to bring equality to health care; the whole system needs to be reviewed in order to be made inclusive and accessible to these communities. The facts and connections regarding the impact of COVID-19 in the Spanish-speaking population in the US presented in this essay are just an example of the complexities and multitude of factors and variables that determine the wellbeing of Spanish-speakers in the US and how being systematically left out from access (to information, testing sites, providers, and more) damages their chances of ever overcoming their position of disadvantage in society in which many of them are. [i]Hart, Julian Tudor. “The Inverse Care Law.” The Lancet, vol. 297, no. 7696, 1971, pp. 405–412., doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(71)92410-x. [ii]“Hispanics in the US Fast Facts.” CNN, Cable News Network, 6 Mar. 2020, www.cnn.com/2013/09/20/us/hispanics-in-the-u-s-/index.html. [iii]Wetsman, Nicole. “Telehealth Wasn't Designed for Non-English Speakers.” The Verge, 4 June 2020, www.theverge.com/21277936/telehealth-english-systems-disparities-interpreters-online-doctor-appointments. [iv]Jordan, Miriam, and Richard A. Oppel. “For Latinos and Covid-19, Doctors Are Seeing an 'Alarming' Disparity.” The New York Times, 7 May 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/05/07/us/coronavirus-latinos-disparity.html. [v]Branson-Potts, Hailey, et al. “The Price of Being 'Essential': Latino Service Workers Bear Brunt of Coronavirus.” Los Angeles Times, 17 May 2020, www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-05-17/latino-essential-workers-coronavirus. [vi]Servick, Kelly. “'Huge Hole' in COVID-19 Testing Data Makes It Harder to Study Racial Disparities.” Science, 10 July 2020, www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/huge-hole-covid-19-testing-data-makes-it-harder-study-racial-disparities. [vii]Sanderlin, Lee. “Activists, Leaders Bemoan Lack of COVID-19 Testing in East Winston.” Winston-Salem Journal, 11 June 2020, journalnow.com/news/local/activists-leaders-bemoan-lack-of-covid-19-testing-in-east-winston/ article_68212455-1911-53ac-b976-04061d4d3c52.html. [viii]Personal communication, August 15th 2020. [ix]“Mental Health, Substance Use, and Suicidal Ideation During the COVID-19 Pandemic - United States, June 24–30, 2020.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 13 Aug. 2020, www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6932a1.htm?s_cid=mm6932a1_w.
In March 2020, countries across the world began to issue lockdown orders to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, the deadliest plague humans had encountered globally in a century. Corresponding worldwide decreases in travel, industrial production, and general human movement not only decreased global levels of air pollution, but lowered seismic noise, the vibration of the Earth's crust, by up to 50%. Even as the pandemic raged, sparking noisy debates in healthcare, economics, and politics about how to reduce COVID-19’s global impact, the world itself had become a quieter place. The prevalence or absence of ambient sound, however, was much less noticeable to most people than the ways that music and the coronavirus response were integrally intertwined. An explosion of new cultural practices regarding sound has come to define the global struggle with the virus. Sounds of a 21st Century Pandemic Globally, urban areas were the first to institute lockdowns and quarantines in the face of the pandemic. But physical proximity of dwellings, despite social distancing, meant that live sound became a key means of commemoration and community support. Rather than aiming to hide early death tolls (as some towns did through silencing town criers and church bells in the 14th century), public commemorations of the dead and exhortations of support for medical workers erupted in major cities. As hospitals became overwhelmed and death tolls climbed, Italians sang from their balconies and New Yorkers cheered, clapped, and clattered pots and pans in solidarity with medical professionals. These humble household artifacts are already being sought by museums planning to document the global impact of the virus. The first wave of the virus also brought an initial global wave of musical public health messaging, reflecting a broader trend over the past several decades of public health or social welfare organizations using music to communicate preventative health measures. Such campaigns, which employ a blend of traditional-regional musical styles and are targeted to reach audiences with a wide array of experiences in formal literacy, have been shown to amplify local progress in fights against diseases like malaria and HIV/AIDS. Musical responses to COVID-19 prevention, however, appeared spontaneously rather than as part of formal public health responses, and used internet meme culture to “go viral” not only in their region of origin, but around the world, reflecting an unprecedented array of musical traditions and visual approaches. Feeling down after singing “Happy Birthday” twice to ensure that you’ve spent enough time washing your hands, as has been recommended in English-speaking countries? Thanks to the work of a British teenager, anyone with internet access could “wash your lyrics,” using the web-based program to pair song lyrics of their choice with images on correct hand-washing technique from the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS). Finally, for those tired of focusing solely on prevention, songs making light of the strangeness of the “new normal” of life under the virus—including a lack of toilet paper in the United States and the social pressure to make excessively productive use of time spent quarantining at home—provided some initial entertainment and sense of commiseration. (This author’s local favorite: “Quarantined With You” by Greensboro musician Andy Eversole.) As some amateur musicians and dancers suddenly reached global fame, the line between amateurism and professionalism in music continued to be blurred by pop and rock stars who, lacking access to their traditional crowds of thousands for safety reasons, evoked a new intimacy as they performed concerts from their bedrooms. The One World: Together at Home benefit concert was the pinnacle of such events. Organized by Lady Gaga and produced by the World Health Organization (WHO) and social action organization Global Citizen, the concert featured dozens of musical celebrities who united to raise funds (eventually over $128 million USD) for WHO’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund and local healthcare responders. The event added a new twist to the long and controversial history of pop-rock benefit concerts: it embodied an expanded vision of “liveness” and inclusion. Though the concert streamed on major global television networks, it was also instantly accessible and archived for free on the internet. Local isolation became an opportunity for global connection. The role of mass media in the 2020 coronavirus pandemic provides a marked contrast from how our ancestors experienced music during the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. At that time, television and the internet had not yet been invented, radio was in its infancy, and films were still silent. Record players were an increasingly common household item, but there was no true alternative to live performance—one reason that many 1918-19 concert seasons went ahead much as planned, despite public knowledge of the risks involved. Instead, in 2020, unified public health messaging has silenced most public live performances on every continent. Large crowds and the close proximity of musicians in ensembles provided initial and obvious dangers—but specific aspects of musical production were found to be particularly high-risk. Initial viral outbreaks were found among church choirs, which frequently include large groups of individuals continuously expelling virus-transmitting droplets within crowded and poorly ventilated spaces.Wind instrumentalists are also potentially at risk for spreading the disease. Even as high-profile groups such as the US Army’s West Point Band have found ways to take preventative measures and continue to perform, most musicians have spent months rehearsing only in small groups and playing only for themselves, only gradually adding more rehearsal time as evidence regarding potential preventative measures has become clearer. Though 21st century listeners are perhaps more invested in recorded music than listeners at any other point in history, the lack of live performances caused substantial disruption to music both as entertainment and as a key part of the global social fabric. Musicians watched as major parts of their identities and ways of connecting to the community either went silent or went online. Community organizers and educators continued to innovate new ways for their constituents to keep making art together—yet, no virtual choir with tracks edited together online can replicate the visceral, embodied experience of performing or listening live—the intangible feeling of presence or realness that Walter Benjamin called “aura.” Perhaps most importantly, as rites of passage such as marriages and funerals have globally been forced to change formats, the musical accompaniment that marks many of the most significant occasions of our lives has also been forced to cease. We have been forced into silence just at the time we need music the most. Renaissance or Retrograde? Writings from times of pandemic—whether the bubonic plague of 14th century Italy, the global influenza outbreak of the 1910s, or our current battle with the novel coronavirus—are unified in their insistence of music as a way to cope during unprecedented times of pestilence and social disruption. The indomitable spirit of amateur and professional performers and educators of our era means that society is unlikely to go silent, even as most Americans continue to perform to limited or virtual audiences. Yet, even as performers continue to burst defiantly into action from home, their very livelihoods are among the most threatened if the virus lingers. According to survey data released by US-based nonprofit Americans for the Arts (continuously updated; data from September 18) concerning workers in all arts sectors,77% of artists used their art to raise morale and create cohesion in their communities. At the same time, 94% reported income loss, 79% experienced a decrease in income-generating creative work, and 63% became fully unemployed. A full 96% of organizations cancelled events, and arts organizations experienced nearly 96.6 million fewer attendances than usual. Initially, in August 2020, fewer than 60% of respondents believed that their arts organization would survive the impact of COVID-19; that number has fortunately fallen dramatically as organizations and individuals find new ways to survive financially. It is unclear how long the global community and in particular, communities in the United States will continue to be plagued by the novel coronavirus. What is clear, however, is that the longer the virus disrupts past societal patterns, the more likely such patterns are to fundamentally change. Optimists point out that the mid-14th-century outbreaks of the bubonic plague that decimated the populations of important urban areas ushered in the new social order that kindled the Renaissance. The coincidence of economic imperatives and scholarly and artistic initiatives sparked renewed inquiry into past civilizations and prompted the development of new innovations in almost every area of human endeavor, including the performing arts. Just as the pathology and trajectory of the current novel coronavirus differs substantially from its pandemic-causing predecessors, however, so too are social conditions vastly different than they were in the late European Middle Ages. It is possible instead that the broader social issues that plague the early 21st century will worsen. What of music in the post-COVID-19 world? The combination of looking to historic artistic practices such as live music-making among families or small groups of friends, coupled with an intensified embrace of new technologies, could lead to an era of exceptional innovation. Current disruptions to traditional platforms for musical performance, such as church services and concert seasons, may leave a vacuum in which new types of musical activity might grow. Even should some of these traditional platforms return in full force, simultaneous social changes (including, in the United States, responses to the Black Lives Matter movement) may mean that norms of programming and presentation change seemingly overnight. Yet, if concert halls and theaters remain closed; if no new patrons emerge to financially support the performing arts; if we grow out of the practice of making music together, in the same space—if we let our creative voices remain masked after the danger has passed—then what we may hear is a new form of silence.
Over the past year, I’ve written a book chapter on social violence, race, and riot in the poetry of Bhanu Kapil and D.S. Marriott, two lesser known but highly accomplished US-based authors of British Asian and Black descent. In ways predictable and wholly unpredictable, my research has gone through fits and starts, stops and re-starts. In October 2019, my brother was admitted to the ICU at the UC San Francisco Hospital for a severe, life-threatening lung infection. His illness was not due to COVID-19 and, thank goodness, he has recovered. But seeing him on a vent was a harrowing experience for my entire family, most of all for him. In January, I began writing again and managed to draft a section on Bhanu Kapil. Then it was March. My wife is a nurse and soon began caring for COVID-positive patients. To attain some semblance of grounding, in April I turned to Marriott’s writing on blackness and riot. And then it was May. And as many took to the streets (including myself) to protest the extrajuridical murder of black people in the face of a global pandemic, here I was writing on a body of poetry whose content directly engages the ways in which blackness is relegated to death due to police detention and torture, murder by asphyxiation, and ensuing eruptions and uprisings as people take power into their own hands. The experience of reading, writing, and researching this body of work was, in a word, overwhelming. This brief essay showcases one of Marriott’s poems from his collection Duppies (2018). There are two things we need to know. First, his work adapts the London-based underground musical genre of grime. Grime is MC-led, placing emphasis on linguistic dexterity and rapid delivery, “spitting bars” and passing the mic from one MC to the next in under 20 seconds. Grime MC’s spit their 8, 16, 32, or 64 bars to aggressive beats set at a frenetic speed of 140 BPM, laid down by a DJ mixing and reloading tracks (Hancox 63-64). When Marriott turns to grime in Duppies, he recalls the genre’s undeniable basis in black pain, violence, and revolt. Likewise, his grime poems unapologetically pursue dirt, filth, and abjection as a refusal of social climbing, particularly when channels of upward mobility remain unavailable to black peoples living in the outskirts of London as elsewhere. The other thing we need to know is that Marriott’s writing has been heavily informed by his critical study of Frantz Fanon, particularly in Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being (2018). Following Fanon, Marriott pursues what a poetics of blackness might look like when it embraces collective death and dispossession, performs it deliberately but does so not to invent another form of the human, nor to “redeem” blackness through the fitness of representation, nor to speak from beyond the grave as a haunted life that would reanimate the already socially dead, but instead to perform blackness as an Orphic descent into the abyss, plunging us into forms of language and discourse which remain irreducibly opaque, illusory, and even unreadable but which compel us to take responsibility for what Fanon calls the “death-in-life” shaping our subjective and social world (Whither332-33)? This question inspires Marriott’s grime poems, especially so in “Murking (after Stormzy).” Murking in grime refers to a violent act of linguistic aggression against one’s enemies, popping them off with the bullets of one’s “bars.” The poem begins with a mordant atmosphere evocative of Stormzy’s tracks, such as his hit single “Cold” from Gang Signs & Prayer(2018). The poem begins with “a moment exploding,” suddenly frozen in “the unerring cold of a thousand cellular voices,” with “walls bathed in sweat / Bodies in a heap in a forgotten basement” (17). From out of the claustrophobic scene, Marriott writes an off-kilter lyric “I,” physically violated and detained by police: And here I am barefoot bleeding leaning against the po-po so viciously off-key from one imploding moment to the next (the human orphaned from its spirit), where each thing granted is farther off (fenced) (and each random zero is beside itself with boredom) still murking still mired in the nevernever. (18) Initially, the lyric “I” seems to assert itself as fully present (deictically “here”). The subsequent lines—through their abrupt indentation, heavy enjambment, and irregular rhythm—suspend and fracture the “I,” as if the metrical feet of the poem were reduced to bleeding flesh and the jagged lineation were violently contorted to stanzaic shape, much as the “I” is forced to lean against the po-po. The lyric subject is simultaneously held in perpetual detention without time (“from one imploding moment to the next”), divided from itself and forever abandoned (“the human orphaned / from its spirit”), and oscillating back and forth between a resignation of its complete confinement (“fenced”) and its ceaseless desire for imaginative release through the performance of slaying (“still murking”), however chimerical (“still mired in the nevernever”). In these ways, the lyric “I” achieves an illusory presence, at once disembodied and reduced to mere body: just one “zero” among others. In addition to its performative aggression, murking in grime tracks conventionally leads the speaker to forms of knowledge about oneself and one’s world. In the final stanza of the poem, we can see a similar movement but with a difference in that it proceeds towards non-knowledge and violent eruption, or what the poet has called “the abyssal” structure of blackness. The final stanza reads: Me, a man, singing in the circuits, hearing a voice bored by itself, a voice reserved for nothing, the smoked just too pure for what really matters when the fix remains too fixed for the expanses the distances and passion is the least delirious and what remains of the junk means that what could not be made good is the still point of heaven. (That’s how it is – the infinite always dissolving into leaven like ash in celestial fire, the remainder suddenly flooded with stars.) In me a petrol-soaked carnage, its art igniting fires on the streets. (18) In a cascading movement downwards, the solitary “Me,” held in suspension as if staring over an abyss, slides into simply “a man” (potentially anyone) “singing in the circuits.” This latter phrase gathers all at once the “Me” entrapped within the tightly enclosed circuits of public housing blocks, the “Me” performing on the itinerant circuits of the grime scene, the “Me” as mediated into electric current on a digitally recorded grime track, as well as “Me” singing the figurative circuits of revolution. In my reading, these lines carry the lyric subject towards two contrasting forms of black poetic knowledge, which in truth eclipse one another. And these two trajectories towards black poetic knowledge prove inseparable from the racialization of the universal/particular relationship. In Whither Fanon, Marriott describes the mutual eclipsing of universal-whiteness/universal-blackness as “the abyssal” structure of blackness. “To the extent that the black experience of the world is unknown to itself, lost in abstract self-delusion,” due to the imposition of whiteness and a white social world, “the abyssal is both the summit of what is known and a path into the unknown, and as such everything enters into its tumultuous movement” (315). Along one line, if “whiteness”— and all its attendant metonymies including “man,” “pure,” “good,” “heaven,” “the infinite” and so on—masquerades as a universal category abstracted from its historical, material basis in anti-black violence, in these broken, ungrammatical lines the “me” fully realizes how universal structures of whiteness (as enforced by the po-po) depend on blackness as the radical particular that must be detained, controlled, and negated: or not entirely negated, just enough to exist as “the junk” and “the remainder” upon which whiteness depends to attain the veneer of universality. Bleeding and alienated, “a voice bored by itself / reserved for nothing,” the “me” sings the delirious song of “what could not be made good.” He has reached “the summit of what is known”: that black life matters only in so far as it is made for death before white structures of power. At the same time, however, it is precisely through its descent into radical particularity that the “Me” also enters onto “a path into the unknown,” opening onto another, contrasting form of black poetic knowledge which, however hazy, comports its own universalism. As difficult and opaque as these lines certainly are, their unruly paratactic structure works to “unfix” the all “too fixed” racist discourses of whiteness and blackness. Through its alienation and disembodiment, the “me” speculates upon whether “what remains of the junk” and “what could not be made good” might metaphorically be “the still point of heaven.” In other words, it is as if the “Me” intuits an obscure form of blackness unto itself, now seen from below. In the parenthetical lines, the subject momentarily glimpses how the apparent “infinite” of whiteness is but an illusion, “always dissolving,” and “like ash / in celestial fire,” leaving “the remainder”—an inassimilable difference—which itself carries its own cosmic significance, “suddenly flooded with stars.” Or, as Fanon lyrically expresses, “black consciousness is immanent in itself. I am not a potentiality of something; I am fully what I am” (Black Skin 114). If we read these lines slowly, it is as if this “remainder / suddenly flooded with stars” becomes implanted “In me,” leading to the radical recognition that black life does in fact matter—but only for itself. In body, voice, and soul, the “Me” is caught in the impossible predicament of simultaneously recognizing the utter meaninglessness of black life before the law and the cosmic significance of an immanent blackness without any epistemological project. This condition of impossibility explains why the poem spontaneously combusts in the final lines. Indeed, it is this anarchic remainder of a blackness flooded with stars which ignites “In me / a petrol-soaked carnage.” In the final lines, the “me” is no longer the solitary agent but rather the wretched vessel through which forces beyond its control become mediated into art, spitting bars of fire to incite riots on the streets. In excoriating irony, “Murking” revels in the ways in which blackness has been and continues to be condemned to negation before the (very powerful) façade of white universality. By self-consciously embracing death, Marriott’s “Murking” humiliates processes perpetuating social violence and affirms what is (for him) truly “black” in life: an anarchic, albeit unknown form of blackness whose cosmic immanence and irrepressible difference propel his subjects towards the fulguration of non-sovereignty, at once entrapped within yet annihilating racial antinomies by “set[ting] the anti-black world on fire” (Whither 319). Nonprescriptive and open-ended, his poetics of riot labors towards “an affirmation of the life that is not” (345), exulting in a “life lived in absolute heterogeneity” (313). Or, as Fanon says regarding the wretched confronting the enemy during revolt, “as for us, we sing, we go on singing” (Wretched 135). I’d like to return where I began. When I flew out to San Francisco last year, I truly thought I was going to say goodbye to my brother. At the time, I was also reading Fanon, who himself succumbed to double pneumonia after the CIA detained him and refused him treatment for leukemia. In a letter to his friend, Roger Tayeb, Fanon writes from his hospital bed in Bethesda: Roger, what I wanted to tell you is that death is always with us and that what matters is not to know whether we can escape it but whether we have achieved the maximum for the ideas we have made our own. What shocked me here in my bed when I felt my strength ebbing away along with my blood was not the fact of dying as such, but to die of leukemia, in Washington, when three months ago I could have died facing the enemy since I was already aware that I had this disease. We are nothing on this earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty. I want you to know that even when the doctors have given me up, in the gathering dusk I was still thinking of the Algerian people, of the peoples of the third world, and when I have persevered, it was for their sake. (Qtd. in Marriott, Haunted Life 228) For Fanon as for Marriott, death is always here, always with us, and always to be held in a loving embrace. But for him, what matters is not death’s inevitability nor even the act of dying but whether what we have done has “persevered” the cause of true democracy, in the name of those most vulnerable to harm, violence, and death. From an ethical standpoint, Fanon’s writing and Marriott’s poetry carry a positive, even utopian lyrical expression for the desire of a world that affirms life through the sociality of persons, not things: it is the struggle for a politics of life before inescapable collective death. In the gathering dusk and coming of night, they also direct us to the very real lives whose very real deaths have happened, are happening, and continue to happen, inciting raucous shouts, broken glass, and fires on the streets. Works Cited. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Grove Press, 2008. ————.The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963. Hancox, Dan. Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. William Collins, 2018. Marriott, D.S.. Duppies. Commune Editions, 2018. ————.Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity. Rutgers UP, 2007. ————.Whither Fanon: Studies in the Blackness of Being. Stanford UP, 2018.
One cannot get very deep into an 80’s playlist without encountering what is arguably the biggest international hit of the neue deutsche Welle, (New German Wave) music genre: Nena’s 1983 nuclear protest anthem 99 Luftballoons. In this frantic cautionary song, a warmongering general with an overactive imagination misidentifies as sinister craft a flotilla of balloons drifting in the sky. What follows is an escalating military show of force as subsequent nations follow suit, culminating in a third World War. The song ends with dismal imagery of the world in ruins–and for German teachers like me, a handy lesson on gendered nouns. (A related linguistic gimmick: the German press recently has taken to using neue deutsche Welle as an irreverent term for the second wave of COVID-19 that appears to be imminent in that country). Borne of the collective unease due to Germany’s unenviable strategic Cold War geography—and intensified by its role as host to almost 300,000 U.S. troops as a condition of the post-WWII armistice—99 Luftballoons continues to enjoy regular radio playtime, and for my colleagues and me often serves as one of few common linguistic reference points for beginner students of German. Die-hard 80’s fans could argue for the song’s renewed relevance in the age of COVID: like Nena’s looming nuclear threat, the virus quickly metamorphosed from a distant possibility into a frightening reality. Twenty years earlier, as a kind of Cold War bookend to Nena’s smash hit, a quieter voice had already reminded the German reading public of their tenuous existence in the nuclear age. Marlen Haushofer's Austrian novel "The Wall" (1963) resonates in a COVID world, showing how quickly and thoroughly a catastrophe can dismantle our baseline normal. This dystopian pseudo-memoir chronicles the daily routines of a woman who, during a weekend vacation in the foothills of the Alps, suddenly finds herself alone and isolated from the rest of the world by a massive, invisible, and insurmountable wall. The author never reveals the specific cataclysmic event that precipitated the wall; given the tense geopolitical climate in which it was written, however, most readers have assumed some kind of nuclear disaster from which the narrator had been spared (but who built it? and when?). What follows is a Robinson Crusoe-esque chronicle describing how the protagonist fills her days, days that seem to blend together into cycles of food gathering and speculation about the uncertain future. The sensationalistic yet also very imaginable plot is haunting, and I used to assign it regularly in my German in Translation courses. Unfortunately, about ten years ago, I felt compelled to take The Wall off my reading list: students simply could not relate to the book's odd mixture of personal and social trauma combined with the quotidian tasks of harvesting, cooking, and other domestic chores. The book, they collectively lamented, was about housekeeping. Blissfully unaware of how mundane daily routines can help us imagine some illusion of order and control in the midst of catastrophe, students could not imagine themselves into anything resembling the narrator’s circumstance. COVID has made the novel relevant.Not only do the pandemic fads of bread-baking and mushroom foraging make the narrator’s frontier-style life now seem less foreign, the uncertainty and subdued terror that form the backdrop of her daily life is, perhaps for the first time, relatable to students.Certainly the fears of the nuclear age—and indeed of any geopolitical or viral cataclysm—pose the same threats to our most basic livelihoods, peeling away as unessential our layers of humanity and at worst, leaving us as mere organisms seeking our next meal. The novel’s fixation on mundane household tasks, steeped in unease, alienation, and accompanied by hints that the entire cataclysm might have been of our own doing, create an unsettling combination of banality and terror—a word pair that also describes life under a pandemic lockdown. Now, at the tail end of the summer of 2020, the Cottagecore movement is poised to enter the mainstream. This largely internet-based aesthetic ironically seeks to downplay technology in favor of frontier-style living: calico dresses, homemade candles, etc. Why, then, are the same young adults–particularly women–being drawn to precisely the day-to-day activities that their predecessors ten years ago dismissed as monotonous when performed by the novel’s protagonist? Even more striking are the parallels between this idealized lifestyle and The Wall: a summary of the Cottagecore ethos in a recent New York Times article is uncanny in its similarity to the basic content of Haushofer’s novel of isolation, animal husbandry, and female self-sufficiency: “Small animals, calico tea cozies and not a lot of men.”[i] Despite the similarities, the embellished homespun life of Cottagecore shares little with the bleak domestic everyday of The Wall. Rather, at first glance, the novel reads like a survival handbook, emotionally austere in light of the sudden and distressing nature of the narrator’s circumstance. One gets the sense that some kind of psychological defense mechanism is at play here, as if the numb chronicling of daily household tasks is the most self-expression that she can muster amid circumstances she cannot yet fully process. Yet she also reveals an urgency to tell her story, even if only to an imagined humanity. Indeed, as a fictional memoir, The Wall is structured as if intended for fellow survivors–provided there are others–to read. Perhaps this is a key to the novel, and indeed to other works borne of calamity: it is precisely when we are in survival mode that the written word delivers us. Haushofer may have intended this as her message in her choice of the novel’s memoir structure, which foregrounds the act of writing and self-expression. A colleague recently suggested that more than ever this coming semester, our teaching will be not primarily about the transmission of facts, but rather about human contact and connection. My fellow Germanists and I might argue that our students were already uniquely primed linguistically and intellectually to process the tragedy of COVID. Due to the devastating events of the twentieth century, we are accustomed to teaching about catastrophic disruptions to daily life. Already in our lower-level classes, we find ourselves regularly introducing vocabulary that reinforces German’s stereotype as the “downer” language: from entry-level cognates such as Trauma and Schock, to the upper-level mouthful Vergangenheitsbewältigung (overcoming the past). And in our advanced courses, students share a running joke that any text on a German literature syllabus is by definition “depressing.” In light of my future students’ unfortunate new repertoire of experiences, I will be putting the novel back into my teaching rotation. Perhaps the fault was mine in the first place for teaching it in hypotheticals (“what would you have done?”), a setup and verb that primes students to focus their discourse on action. Rather than leading my students to fixate on a certain reality—or its opposite—my own COVID experience suggests that perhaps I would do better to draw out in them the many and creative ways that they bear witness to this reality (“how will you speak/write of this to your children or grandchildren?”) Unlike Nena’s ninety-nine year war, The Wall ends the way that COVID likely will: with no distinct moment of resolution.The pandemic of 2020 and its memory will remain a part of students’ lives long after the virus is defeated. What this experience, this novel, and indeed the entirety of German Studies, can teach them about self-expression will be theirs to tell. [i]Isabel Slone. "Escape Into Cottagecore, Calming Ethos for Our Febrile Moment."The New York Times,10 March 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/style/cottagecore.html.
Homer’s Iliad is famous for offering a vivid and often gruesome spectacle of war. But it opens with a far more insidious deadly force: the plague that Apollo sends on the Greek troops. And the description of this plague and its devastation make clear that it is a threat more dangerous even than war: the sickness is a divine force that comes invisibly and swiftly, killing men as indiscriminately as it attacks dogs and livestock. The plague of this epic, together with the pestilences that haunt Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and Antigone, offer a grim view on how disease infiltrates and warps human minds as much as human bodies. Even in the absence of germ theory, these texts show that the ancient Greeks were well aware of the capacity for unseen, nonhuman substances to circulate and contaminate all aspects of human life. Filled with rage at the Greek king Agamemnon, Apollo’s plague-bringing arrows rain down first on animals, only then to infect the Greek troops (Il.1.50-52). For nine straight days, pyres packed with the dead burned constantly (αἰεὶ δὲ πυραὶ νεκύων καίοντο θαμειαί,Il.1.52). It is only at this point, and only at the urging of Hera, that Achilles calls the Greeks to assembly to seek a remedy for the ravaging disease. Their only recourse is the prophet Calchas, who is the sole person able to see that the source of Apollo’s wrath is Agamemnon’s enslavement of the Trojan priest Chryses’ daughter. Enraged at this news, Agamemnon lashes out at the prophet: he will only return the woman he has enslaved if he is given another. He demands Achilles’ own captive, and the hero’s rage at this offense becomes the central theme of the epic, beginning with its very first word: “wrath” (mēnis). Ultimately, with the return of Chryses’ daughter and animal sacrifices to Apollo, the plague disappears and the horrors of the Trojan war can continue apace. And while the narrative of the plague occupies a comparatively minuscule portion of the Iliad, it illuminates themes that are central not only to the poem writ large, but to human experience of infectious disease. First, that rage bookends the Iliad’s plague narrative (Apollo’s anger at Agamemnon’s disrespect and Agamemnon’s fury at having to return his captive) suggests that this is the real sickness, because for either Apollo or Agamemnon to cling to this emotion would make it impossible to eradicate the plague. Anger, then, is the real obstacle here. Second, the indiscriminate masses of corpses–of both animals and humans––that are the plague’s casualties visualize the nature of disease itself, as something that endlessly reproduces and circulates the same infectious material. The fact that members of the dead are never named underscores the fact that they have been rendered as nameless and faceless as the disease. At the same time, the fact that nine days pass before action is taken to quell the plague begs the question as to what constitutes a critical mass: how many have to die before meaningful action is taken? This gets to the heart of what it means for something to be a plague, or in today’s parlance, a “pandemic.” The latter literally means “all people,” but which people–and how many–have to die before action is taken? Notably, no named characters in the Iliad succumb to sickness, a stark anonymity that also pervades Sophocles’ portrayals of infection. While Apollo’s anger provides a logic for theIliad’s plague, the mysteriousness of the blight on Thebes is the central focus of Oedipus the King. The play opens with Oedipus addressing the suppliants who have gathered in front of the palace, seeking absolution from the illness that ravages them. Like the Iliad’s plague, the malady ravages humans as well as animals and the land: “a blight is on the buds that enclose the fruit, a blight is on the flocks of grazing cattle and on the women giving birth, killing their offspring” (25-7, trans. Lloyd-Jones); “countless are their deaths, and the city is perishing” (179, trans. Lloyd-Jones). Desperate for answers, the citizens turn to Oedipus, the man who had saved them from the terrors of the Sphinx. But the inscrutable nature of the pestilence makes the Sphinx seem tame by comparison. Faced with this mystery, Oedipus’ only recourse is to consult the oracle at Delphi. The divine directive is clear: remove from the land the pollution (miasma) that infected it after the murder of the former Theban king, Laius. It is at this point that the realities of the pestilence fade into the background as Oedipus begins his quest to discover the killer. Of course, as we all know, it turns out to be Oedipus himself who pollutes Thebes, having killed his father and married his mother. For if the mechanism of the pestilence is invisible, equally inscrutable is Oedipus’ DNA. Only the blind prophet Teiresias has access to this information, but when he begrudgingly shares his insight with Oedipus, he is met with rage and dismissal. While the Iliad offered a stark portrayal of the ravages of pandemic, several features of Oedipus the King seem uniquely apropos to the current COVID-19 crisis. First, Oedipus’ harsh reaction to Teiresias (and Agamemnon’s to Calchas) brings to mind the suppression of warnings about the severity of the virus and its potential to cause worldwide disaster. In the USA in particular, the virus was (largely) not seen as a threat until the case numbers spiraled. And the solution to Thebes’ plague envisions how grim the future may yet be: Oedipus, having blinded himself, must leave the city entirely, never to return. Second, that the blight on Thebes is specifically because of the pollution (miasma) embodied in the person of Oedipus evokes the current obsession with disinfecting and decontaminating. In the wake of COVID-19, it’s become easy to imagine viral particles lurking invisibly everywhere, making every surface seem a threat. But the case of Oedipus shows how such attempts may ultimately be futile. There is another important twist to Oedipus the King: this play most likely premiered in 426 or 425 BCE, which means that audience members would themselves have been survivors of the horrific epidemic that raged through Athens in 430 BCE. This disease (whose precise cause has still not been determined) claimed huge numbers of lives, including Athens’ premiere statesman, Pericles. The onset of this epidemic at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War played no small role in Athens’ ultimate defeat at the hands of the Spartans, but the audience of Oedipus the King would have had no idea of the years of war awaiting them. Nonetheless, they would have known all too well how disease can rend apart a city, even its most prominent citizens. The audience of Oedipus the King, then, offer an analogue for us modern readers of this text, encountering it as we are in the midst of a pandemic of our own: we share the same grim familiarity with disease as well as the same uncertainty about what the future holds. I want to conclude with Sophocles’ Antigone (performed in the 440’s-430’s BCE), because of all the ancient Greek plagues under discussion here, this one offers the most poignant reflection on the intersection between civil unrest and disease. While this was performed before Oedipus the King, it depicts the events after Oedipus’ exile and death. Oedipus’ sons, Eteocles and Polynices, fought each other to the death for the kingship of Thebes, leaving behind Oedipus’ daughters, Antigone and Ismene. Creon, the uncle of Oedipus’ children, is now king, and has forbidden the burial of Polynices since he was the one that attacked the city. His corpse lies unburied and decaying, and this pollution begets more. For while we have seen in the previous examples a single source of contamination, in Antigone there are several maladies in circulation. Antigone, determined to give Polynices burial rites, disobeys Creon’s edict and is caught. In the battle of wills that ensues, Antigone claims that she is obeying a higher law than Creon’s in not allowing her brother’s corpse to be desecrated. Enraged at her defiance, Creon sentences her to death, in spite of the pleas of his son, Haemon, who is betrothed to Antigone. Creon’s rationale is that insubordination is the worst evil: that this, not sickness, is what destroys homes and cities (672-4). Resolute, Creon sentences Antigone to be walled up alive, providing her with a measure of food “so that the whole city will escape pollution” (775-6), the pollution that haunts those who kill their own family members. As the blind seer Teiresias reminds Creon, though, he has already let the city of Thebes be polluted by the unburied corpse of Polynices: “it is your will that has put this plague upon the city” (1015, trans. Lloyd-Jones). In spite of this, Creon still refuses to allow Polynices his rites, prompting Teiresias to proclaim that Creon suffers from the “disease” of foolishness. Creon’s rigidity and mercilessness in punishing those he thinks are afflicting Thebes ultimately leads to the suicides of Antigone, his son, Haemon, as well as his wife. Only too late did Creon realize his mistake in prohibiting the burial and rescind the punishment of death on Antigone. We are seeing today how extraordinary circumstances have the polarizing effect embodied in Antigone and Creon, and the devastating effects that can result. But the striking fact of the Antigone is that, unlike in the previous two texts, the cause of the blight is obvious––at least, to everyone but Creon. And this play provides a grim reminder of how the actions of one can impact an entire community. But most importantly, the Antigone showcases the importance of fighting against injustice even in the most dire of circumstances. We are in an altogether better place than the ancient Greeks who experienced these texts: instead of prophets, we have doctors; we have robust public health systems instead of sacrificial offerings and oracles. But these works also offer a unique perspective on the current pandemic: to confront the reality of the virus in all its destructiveness, and to work logically and calmly under the guidance of experts to defeat it. Otherwise, I fear a horrific recognition like the one Oedipus experienced: we have reached a critical mass already.
March 16th was the day my COVID-19 retreat began, as it did for many of us, hastily and unexpectedly ushered in by the global pandemic. It was also my birthday, and from now on I will have a coincident benchmark by which to measure the passage of time and change. Over these long months at home, I have been adjudicating a dispute between the idealist in me who has hope for truly evolutionary change and the realist who grapples with the terrifying power of social, political, and economic momentum. So far, neither the idealist nor the realist has won, creating a deadlock between two enemy combatants. I try not to ruminate on circumstances that lie beyond my control and prefer instead to focus my energy on hope. Certainly, I am not always successful at doing so. During these dark times, I have been mining hope from the more-than-human universe, that vast, seemingly infinite realm that makes my human concerns seem trivial and small. I try to embrace the cosmos in all its grand mystery, to internalize the infinitesimal fraction of a microsecond that, compared to the universe, is the sum total of my brief life on earth. There are lessons about power, love, and meaning we discover (or recover) when we lose ourselves, our egos, and our anxieties in nature. As COVID-19 brought our massive global economy to a sputtering halt, many of us found hope in two ways: first, by returning to those humans whom we love (and with whom we were now forced to spend so much time), and second, by returning to nature, which I argue is also a kind of love. By “return” I mean fully embracing someone or something outside of ourselves with concern for neither the future nor the past and with little regard for our own small, ego-centered obsessions. Considering the ever-maddening intensity of our lives, the indomitable power of distraction fueled by social media, and the light speed with which we jump from one thought to the next, this kind of “return” can be life-changing, like David Foster Wallace’s fish suddenly realizing they are living in water. The number of popular blogs, articles, and vlogs about nature’s benefits reached a zenith sometime between mid-April and mid-May of 2020. The global shutdown brought clear blue skies to perennially smog-choked cities from Delhi to Seoul, Los Angeles, and Madrid. With noisy, terrifying humans sheltering at home, mountain goats sought new territory in the empty streets of Wales. Gangs of macaques, now starved and desperate as tourism evaporated overnight, rioted in the streets of Lopburi. Cougars descended the slopes of Cerro el Plomo to search for food in a now deserted Santiago. What to most of us had been invisible—our fraught relationships with the more-than-human world—became stunningly visible, like those jumbled, non-sensical, magic-eye stereograms once found at mall kiosks that suddenly reveal hidden, three-dimensional pictures. Animals everywhere seemed to be celebrating (or in some cases bemoaning) our absence. Yes, some of the images shotgunned across Facebook and Twitter were fake: photographs taken at different places and at different times, years ago and under different circumstances. But the general message was overwhelmingly clear. We were gone, and nature was eager to return. Simultaneously, tragedies unfolded around us. Bracing lost jobs, hospitalized loved ones, and funerals we could not attend, we stepped out of the frenetic pace of contemporary life to connect with the natural worlds that otherwise serve as the backdrop to our human dramas. To me, all these events point toward one maddening question: as an evolutionary product of the natural world, why are we humans so adamant about separating ourselves from nature? You can slice this ontological pie one-hundred different ways only to discover hidden pies with hundreds more slices lying underneath. For the purposes of this essay, though, I would like to choose one very small slice by turning to the writings of John Muir, the nineteenth-century Scottish-American preservationist and nature writer. Muir is most commonly associated with California’s Sierra Nevada and Yosemite National Park, but he was an advocate for “wilderness” everywhere, and in doing so rambled throughout the Pacific Northwest, the Yukon, and Alaska. Muir used his wanderings as a way to refract wilderness through a lens of self-discovery. A one thousand-mile jaunt from Kentucky to Florida left him nearly dead from malaria, and he subsequently decided to reinvent himself in California. In the Sierra Nevada and in Alaska, Muir found an expression of the divine that far exceeded the strictures of his father’s severe evangelism. It was here that Muir advocated a particular conception of wilderness that, thanks to his influence on American letters, haunts us still and that helps dictate our contemporary relationships to the more-than-human. Let me back up a little. In the twenty-first century, we are sometimes and in some ways accustomed to thinking of wilderness as pure, pristine, and unsullied by humans—humans with their speedy lives, morally suspect behavior, and greedy, self-serving agendas. Wilderness in the contemporary sense offers a reprieve from the madness we create around ourselves, which is a lunacy we reify in the social, economic, and political systems that provide for our lives. (Systems, too, I might add, that prevent us from having to fight bears.) In the pristine air and biological fecundity we find in our conceptions of wildernesses, we uncover something within that is sacred. We quiet the soul and find reflections of our best selves. But we feel this way about “wilderness” largely because of Muir’s legacy and the ways his thinking continues to influence our own. Muir found in the wilderness what was for him the most ardent and undeniable expressions of divine creation. And for someone who was raised within the confines of a strict religious orthodoxy, Muir as an adult turned to the wilderness as a way to literally remake the image of his God. This conception of wilderness did not begin with Muir, and we find analogs to it across the earth and throughout many cultures. The Mountains and Rivers poets of ancient China, for example, drew upon similar arguments made separately by Confuciusand Lao Tzu five-hundred years before the advent of Christianity. Arguably, though, Muir is largely responsible for popularizing this idea in the 19th and 20th centuries and thoroughly situating it in idealized notions of the American West. To unpack Muir’s influence on us, then, it is important to ask two questions: first, for whom are these wilderness experiences available? And second, what is the cost of defining what we deem to be the best of nature as something fundamentally devoid of human beings? I am certainly not the first person to wrestle with these ideas. In a landmark 1995 essay titled “The Trouble with Wilderness,” William Cronon argues: This, then, is the central paradox: wilderness embodies a dualistic vision in which the human is entirely outside the natural. If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not. [T]hen also by definition [wilderness] can offer no solution to the environmental and other problems that confront us. . . . we thereby leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable, human place in nature might actually look like. Worse: to the extent that we live in an urban-industrial civilization but at the same time pretend to ourselves that our real home is in the wilderness, to just that extent we give ourselves permission to evade responsibility for the lives we actually lead. (302)[1] It is important to note that, for Muir, a truly Divine wilderness is accessible only to educated whites who have arisen from the font of Western enlightenment. We are Fallen individuals in the classic Christian sense who know and respect the boundaries of our fallen state and whose divine grace rests upon our ability to recognize nature as a superior construct. If this sounds heavy handed, consider the circumstances on which such a premise must stand: in the simplest of terms, the powerless must acquiesce their lives and livelihoods to the powerful, and we see the consequences of this premise in how Muir treats the Native Alaskans he encounters in his book Travels in Alaska. Despite the fact that he relies on them for navigation, for food, and for brute paddling power (not to mention their ingenuity in designing and engineering some of the best made canoes and kayaks the world has ever seen), Muir perceives and describes the Native Alaskans he encounters as children groping in the dark and eager for the salvation of Western religion (96). They are savages who can make you feel at home (105), but who nonetheless are inclined to cannibalism (104). They have eager, child-like attention, but are poor, ignorant people desperate for a western education (117). They are curious, intelligent animals who under the authority of western governments and under the salvation of religion might claw their way into the lowest ranks of human beings (123). Long before they will be able to do so, he bemoans, they will be “whiskeyed out of existence” (123).[2] Muir’s alarming racism is darkly teleological. He must hold aloft these two opposing extremes. In one hand is a wilderness devoid of humans that is forever preserved and unchanged in a perfect state. In the other is a wilderness adulterated by supposedly depraved, “underdeveloped” cultures that have occupied for millennia the very same land upon which newcomer Muir wants to plant his ideological flag. If he can extricate the “native” from the wilderness, he can ensure that wilderness will remain the acme of divine creation. To be fair, Muir does form meaningful, and at times ardent, relationships with many of his native guides, and these relationships humanize his depictions of them. And in their childlike wonder for the world he finds in them levels of awareness and respect that elevate them above the inebriated, desperate goldminers descending like locusts upon the southern Alaskan landscape. Nevertheless, native Alaskan communities are an impediment to Muir’s project, which is to preserve natural areas by crafting a wilderness ideology that excludes them. Aside from the obvious consequences—the overt destruction of native cultures—why is this wilderness ideology problematic? In preserving wilderness areas as sacred spaces separate from human habitation, we concretize the dangerous notion that humans are born into a society that is impervious to the power of the natural world. That we are liberated from its evolutionary processes. That we operate independently from it. None of these notions are true. We also establish a false sense of security. As long as we preserve the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Wrangell St. Eliases of the world, as long as Denali has one single road to and from its massive edifice, we are lulled into believing that they will always be there, that they will be immune to the worst ravages of our contemporary lives: biodiversity loss, land-use change, and, of course, global climate change. This brings us back to the current pandemic. In the exigencies created by COVID-19, we have a remarkably fragile opportunity—but an opportunity nonetheless—to recuperate within our own minds the ideas we have about the natural world, to step forward into the future with a little more space in our hearts for all that is not human. [1]Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.”Environmental History1.1 (1996): 7-28. [2]Muir, John.Travels in Alaska. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998.
There was a moment early in the pandemic when I entertained a rather specific hope: In the face of a common threat—one that has no intentionality and thus cannot discriminate on the basis of race, gender, sexual identity, political party or any other demographic category under the sun—the American people would find a renewed sense of solidarity. In a country that has felt more polarized than at any point in my lifetime, perhaps the opportunity to unite around a public health mission would encourage us all to take a more active interest in the well-being of our fellow citizens and, as an outgrowth of that concern, engage in revitalized deliberation about how to tackle the myriad problems facing the country. Don’t get me wrong. I did not indulge the Pollyannaish fantasy that all divisions in society would disappear—that Republicans and Democrats would suddenly agree about everything of consequence, that racism and misogyny would vanish from the earth, and that children would never again go hungry. No one who knows me well would ever accuse me of having an optimistic disposition, and I’m on the academic record arguing in order to be virtuous, a hope must be realistic.[1] An excessively rosy outlook is not one I’m usually inclined to adopt. Nevertheless, I really did believe back in March that the challenge of confronting the coronavirus offered the opportunity for a broad societal reset. Most of the problems that existed before the pandemic would still be around once we had defeated the virus, but I thought it possible that we might return to those problems in good faith, with fresh eyes and with a commitment to the common good. Energized by this sense of possibility, I allowed myself to hope for that particular vision of the future. Writing now, seven months later, it’s fair to say this hope has taken a beating—a development that may initially seem counterintuitive. After all, we can hope for anything we want, can’t we? A cure for cancer; to win the lottery; a championship trophy for a favorite sports team; that a teenaged son will voluntarily clean his room. These hopes don’t really cost us anything, since we often entertain them while doing nothing more than lounging around the house.Indeed, when we are told, in the midst of whatever problem-solving dilemma confronts us, that "hope is not a strategy,” I think it is this apparent cheapness of hope that is in view. Hope is easy; too easy, in fact, to make much of a difference. Without denying that there is a difference between hoping for an outcome and actively working to make it a reality, I think it is a mistake to dismiss hope as trivial or easy to maintain in this way. Hope is a crucial animating force in human life, one that seems to be a rather fundamental prerequisite for action. Merely hoping to write a good book won’t produce a polished manuscript, but it is difficult to see how one can so much as begin to organize words into coherent sentences without hoping to write something that people might want to read. By the same token, the hope for a renewed sense of solidarity among Americans will not, by itself, bring about such a renewal. And yet without that hope, there is no impetus to overcome the many obstacles that undermine a more robust connection to our fellow citizens—the sorts of obstacles that make us view others as competitors in a zero-sum game rather than colleagues jointly facing an uncertain future. Without hope, we are left stagnant and aimless. Fair enough, one might say. But why think that hope can sometimes be difficult to maintain? What factors could possibility undermine the ability to hope for a given outcome, something that it seems we can do from the comfort of our living rooms? While philosophers offer differing accounts of the precise structure of hope, there is broad agreement that to hope for some future event requires a desire that the event in question take place and also a belief in that event’s possibility.[2] For example, to hope that people who are currently out of work will be able to survive financially is, at a minimum, to want the unemployed to survive financially and also to believe that it is possible for them to do so. Some theorists have, of course, objected to this account, but they have generally done so by suggesting that additions be made to its basic structure. Hope may involve more than this combination of desire and belief, but pretty much everyone agrees that it doesn’t involve less.[3] However, I think we can see the difficulty of maintaining certain hopes even if we focus solely on our desires and beliefs about what is possible in the future.A clear-eyed look at the world sometimes manipulates our sense of what is possible, and sometimes the circumstances in which we find ourselves erode our desires such that we no longer even want what we previously did.Hope, even in its most basic elements, can be hard, and protecting it sometimes requires a concerted effort that we do not feel equipped to invest. For me, the pandemic has proven to be a disheartening case study in the ways that our experiences might conspire to undermine both the desires and beliefs that constitute our hopes. Rather than see a country drawn together by the burdens of shared sacrifice, I have instead witnessed more deeply entrenched partisanship where political affiliation is a remarkably strong predictor of how seriously people regard the threat posed by COVID-19.[4] Rather than see a renewed concern for the most vulnerable members of our society—individuals whose lives have been disproportionately ravaged by both the disease and the economic consequences of attempting to fight it—I have witnessed a jarring elevation of the value of personal choice untethered from any concern about the well-being of others.[5] And fueling it all, I have seen a proliferation of conspiratorial thinking that calls into question basic facts about everything from the origins of the disease to the motivations of the public health officials charged with advising our political leaders.[6] Indeed, it is this last development that has taken the largest toll on the hope for renewed solidarity I indulged at the beginning of the pandemic.[7] I have had numerous discussions over the last few months that have felt like exchanges with people from an alternate reality—where up is down, left is right, and there is no agreement on the basic premises of the debate. When people cannot even agree on their points of disagreement, it is very difficult to nurture any sense of shared commitment, and the epistemic structure of conspiratorial thinking makes it almost impossible to know how to improve matters. Without agreement on a shared body of facts, genuine conversation is impossible, much less robust deliberation about how to navigate a complex world. Is it possible for these circumstances to change? Certainly. People experience conversions of various sorts all the time, and it is possible that those currently in the grip of conspiratorial thinking might have the scales fall from their eyes in large enough numbers to rehabilitate the quality of our public discourse. But given the conversations I’ve had over the past few months (and the ways in which conspiratorial thinking has worked its way into mainstream politics[8]), that possibility feels entirely theoretical—what philosophers might label a merely logical possibility.I have no concrete sense of what might bring about significant change or how to contribute to the effort. Rightly or wrongly, the conspiracists strike me as simply too far gone. As time has gone on, I have felt my desire for that sort of change erode as well. Perhaps this is the mind’s way of helping us deal with vanishing possibilities. By reducing our desire for the things we previously wanted, we can avoid the anguish of unfulfilled hopes. Or maybe the effort required to maintain our desires—mysterious though that effort may be—leads to exhaustion whereby we can no longer find the energy to care about certain things. Either way, the result seems to be a kind of feedback loop that has the potential to eliminate the hope in question: a diminished sense that real societal change is possible leads to a diminished desire for that possibility to obtain which can further erode a sense of what is possible. I fully admit that the appropriate response to this predicament is unclear to me. On the one hand, an accurate assessment of the damage to our social fabric presented by conspiracists might justify a re-evaluation of my hopes. Maybe genuine solidarity among people whose views of the world differ so radically is not a genuine possibility. If so, it might prove more realistic—and therefore more virtuous—simply to hope for the political defeat and social marginalization of conspiracists and leave aside any hope for a more substantive transformation in their worldview. On the other hand, my moral and democratic ideals make me reluctant to think of my fellow citizens as enemies, even if it is only their mode of thinking that needs to be eliminated. One might be able to hate the epistemic sin while still loving the epistemic sinner, but resigning myself to this approach not only means giving up on the hope of a certain kind of social transformation; it also means abandoning the possibility of genuine dialogue with a number of people I know. This might be a prudent course of action, even a virtuous one, given the circumstances. But it still feels lamentable, like cutting off ties with an addict because there is nothing else you can do to help. After seven months of the pandemic, and all its collateral damage, I’m just not sure I have the energy to do anything else. [1]"The Virtue of Hope," Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 18 (2015): 337-354. [2]This traditional account of hope is elaborated by J.P. Day in “Hope,” American Philosophical Quarterly 6 (1969): 89-120. [3]See, for example, Adrienne Martin, How we Hope (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). [4]“Republicans Remain Far Less Likely than Democrats to View COVID-19 as a Major Threat to Public Health.” Pew Research Center. Accessed August 14, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/22/republicans-remain-far-less-likely-than-democrats-to- view-covid-19-as-a-major-threat-to-public-health/. [5]William Cummings, “Ex-White House Physician Ronny Jackson Says Masks Are ‘personal Choice’ after Winning Texas Primary.” USA Today. Accessed August 14, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/15/coronavirus-masks-personal-choice-says-ex- wh-doc-ronny-jackson/5442909002/. [6]“A Look at the Americans Who Believe There Is Some Truth to the Conspiracy Theory That COVID-19 Was Planned.” Pew Research Center. Accessed August 14, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/24/a-look-at-the-americans-who-believe-there-is-some- truth-to-the-conspiracy-theory-that-covid-19-was-planned/. Oliver Darcy, “Sinclair Drops Segment Featuring Conspiracy Theory about Fauci.” CNN. Accessed August 14, 2020. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/media/sinclair-fauci-conspiracy/index.html. [7]Nancy Rosenblum and Russell Muirhead examine the rise of conspiratorial thinking in their recent book A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019). According to their analysis, which I find compelling, the distinctive feature of (what they call) the new conspiracism is that it invokes conspiracy without any theory and thereby sows doubt about even the most basic empirical claims. [8]The development is detailed in the recent PBS Frontline documentary “United States of Conspiracy.” Accessed August 14, 2020. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/united-states-of-conspiracy/. And as I write, a vocal advocate of the QAnon conspiracy (among others) won a Republican primary in Georgia for a spot in the US House of Representatives.Matthew Rosenberg, Astead W. Herndon, and Nick Corasaniti. “Marjorie Taylor Greene, a QAnon Supporter, Wins House Primary in Georgia.” The New York Times. Accessed August 14, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/us/politics/marjorie-taylor-greene-qanon-georgia-primary.html.
The learning curve for ministry leaders under the conditions of COVID-19 has been dramatic.[1] Congregational ministers are learning, on the fly, how to convene their communities remotely in online worship services, peer group gatherings, and other opportunities to share life together. They are navigating hard theological questions about what it means to celebrate communion and preside at baptisms and funerals in remote and online spaces. Hospital chaplains are learning how to support patients, their families, and hospital staff under the conditions of limited physical access and restricted movement. Pastoral caregivers working in counseling practices are learning how to provide therapy on electronic platforms. All of the above are feeling the fatigue of their professional and personal lives mediated through Zoom, Facebook, and other electronic platforms. And many ministry leaders are also processing the trauma associated with death caused by this virus, as well as the exhaustion that navigating relentless change brings. The COVID moment has required Christian communities to quickly imagine and create new forms of community in digital space. In the early weeks, many faith communities moved into online spaces with the intention of reproducing virtually what they ordinarily do face to face. As the months have passed, however, many faith communities have explored new ways of gathering virtually, ways of sharing life together that online spaces more readily accommodate than in-person gatherings. At the time of this writing, some ministry leaders are beginning to weigh the advantages, disadvantages, and best practices of returning to something resembling the “normal” in-person patterns of the life of faith. But a “return to normal” raises important questions, which one pastor I spoke with this summer articulated powerfully: “Our church leadership has long discussed the possibility of opening a second campus. And overnight, we got one - a new virtual campus. People from all over the world participate in our online gatherings who do not and could not ordinarily participate in person. Now the question is: what will we do with our virtual campus when we return to whatever ‘normal’ will be.” COVID-19 is certainly poses profound medical, social, economic, political, and public health challenges. But the pandemic comes as a sudden acceleration of rapid institutional change already underway in many North American Christian traditions. For more than two decades, scholars and analysts have been attentive to the “changes” in the “American religious landscape,” to use a now familiar shorthand. Christian traditions are wrestling with declining participation and interest in the received patterns and practices of church and religious life. Americans who claim to be “spiritual but not religious” do not look to traditional forms of faith community in which to express their religiosity.[2] The patterns and practices of ministry leadership are changing in response to these and other cultural and historical pressures. Ministry leaders are challenged not only to provide the various forms of leadership to which they are called – forms of leadership that make ministry as a vocation distinctive from other forms of professional formation - but to work with their communities to reconfigure the ways of being together in which those traditional patterns and practices of ministry are intelligible and meaningful. In a way, then, the COVID-19 pandemic is an exception that proves a rule. The COVID moment, and the broader context of institutional change in American Christianity, raises a challenge both to theological education and to Christian traditions more broadly: what does it look like to nurture religious leaders capable of imagining new forms of Christian community? This is a question about ministerial formation, by which I mean the process by which persons learn the practices, habits, virtues, dispositions, and ways of being in the world that make them skillful and wise ministry leaders. Practical theologians emphasize that ministry formation is not simply about mastering particular competencies. Instead, formation for ministry is more deeply about developing a certain kind of vocational identity and way of being in the world, whereby persons learn to see and respond to their experiences and the experiences of those communities they serve through theological lenses.[3] Ministerial formation happens in the constellation of formal theological education, professional practice, engagement in intentional forms of reflection on practice, and in peer and mentoring relationships with well-formed practitioners. Scholarly conversations in the last two decades have tended to value a traditional virtue model of ministerial formation. In these conversations, there is some telos, some metaphysical center of gravity, that gives shape to and sets the trajectory of ministerial formation. Practical theologian Christian Scharen, for example, identifies the telos of ministerial formation as “the abundant life for all creation provided by God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, which is already breaking in on the world though it is not yet fully realized.”[4] The pattern for ministerial formation rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ sets the terms of the development of character and virtue in the life and work of ministry. Scharen and his colleagues, for example, explore what they call “Christian practical wisdom,” that virtue of fitting pastoral judgment responsively to the particular conditions of particular communities in particular moments, what Aristotle called “phronesis.”[5] In these conversations, the teleological center of gravity that orients ministerial formation stands outside of history, thus anchoring pastoral virtue amidst challenges posed by dominant social and cultural dynamics.[6] What emerges in the teleological frame is a conception of ministerial formation that is individualized, practice-oriented, and largely a-contextual. It is individualized because it is largely focused on the ministry leader’s cultivation of virtue; practice-oriented because the practices of ministry leadership are the unit of analysis and assessment of ministerial formation; and a-contextual because the particular contexts of ministry in particular times and places may occasion, but do not fundamentally condition, ministerial formation. Certainly, it is important for Christian practical theologians to understand that ministerial formation is rooted in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This individualized, practice-oriented, and a-contextual frame, however, underestimates the ways in which ministerial formation is both intelligible in and also is always working to reshape the contexts of ministry leadership. Contexts condition and render practices intelligible. For example, ministers know what it means to preach a successful sermon to a particular audience in a particular context because they have analyzed that context and respond accordingly. Chaplains know how to provide pastoral care to persons in the context of specific communities because, with experience, they have come to know and understand the characteristic challenges facing those communities. If contexts condition and render the characteristic practices of ministry intelligible, then context also plays an important role in ministerial formation. To be formed in and through the practice of ministry is to be formed in context. A complex analysis of ministerial formation, therefore, is incomplete when it is only indexed to some metaphysical telos. This matters because the contexts and conditions of Christian community were changing rapidly before COVID-19, and those transformations have only accelerated rapidly since its advent. As the context of ministry changes, so too do the conditions of ministerial formation and ministry practice. It is not that ministry leaders are no longer engaging in the practices that make ministry vocationally distinctive. Ministers will still proclaim the Gospel, convene communities of faith around the communion table, offer pastoral care, speak prophetically into public spaces, create opportunities for religious education, and the like. But just what those practices look like is responsive to the contours of emerging contexts of Christian community, whether they happen in virtual spaces, or in other spaces that transcend the walls of the church, such as neighborhood bars and cafes, city streets, community gardens, mobile food pantries, etc. It makes sense to assess ministerial formation in terms of practical wisdom - judgments that “fit” context rightly - as long as contextual factors remain relatively stable, since the “rightness” of practical judgment depends significantly on contextual factors. But sudden transformations of context, like the COVID-19 pandemic, disrupt practical wisdom. The COVID moment shows that a fuller understanding of ministerial formation is needed, beyond the teleological accounts that have dominated recent discussions in Christian practical theology. Other forms of practical knowing need to be explored, especially those that theorize the creativity that religious leaders exercise in seasons or moments when the contexts of their leadership become unstable. For example, Hebrew Bible scholar William P. Brown argues that the Wisdom Literature explores the complex relationship between creation, which is “wisdom’s central theme and focus,” and character, “which captures much of the rhetorical aim of the wisdom corpus.”[7] Biblical understandings of wisdom might complement Aristotelian practical wisdom in a fuller account of ministerial formation. Such an account is needed if we are to fully understand the ways in which religious leaders are working to re-imagine and re-shape faith communities in the age of COVID-19 and beyond. [1]In this article, I am addressing ministerial formation in American Protestant Christianity, the tradition with which I am most familiar. I hope that the insights offered here promote reflection on leadership in other religious traditions. [2]Analyses of these trends abound. See for example Mark Chaves, American Religion: Contemporary Trends, 2nd Ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017); Robert P. Jones, The End of White Christian America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016); Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012); Robert Wuthnow: After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty- and Thirty-Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), among others. [3]For example, Craig Dykstra famously developed the idea of “pastoral imagination” as one way of exploring ministry formation. Pastoral imagination, Dykstra argues, is the disposition to “see what is going on through the eyes of faith.” “This way of seeing and interpreting,” he writes, “shapes what the pastor thinks and does and how he or she responds to people in gestures, words, and actions.” Craig Dykstra, “Pastoral and Ecclesial Imagination,” in For Life Abundant: Practical Theology, Theological Education, and Christian Ministry, eds. Dorothy C. Bass and Craig Dykstra (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008), 41. [4]Dorothy C. Bass, et al., eds.Christian Practical Wisdom: What It Is, Why It Matters (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2016), 11. [5]For Aristotle, phronesis is the quality of “deliberating well:” it is that capacity that operationalizes the moral virtues properly, or as he says, the “correctness regarding what is beneficial, about the right thing, in the right way, and at the right time.” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, rev. ed., ed. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1142b 29, 111. [6]L. Gregory Jones and Kevin Armstrong argue that ministry leaders have forgotten the teleological centering of their identity and vocation. Jones and Armstrong write: “... we are convinced that underlying the particular pathologies that beset contemporary pastoral leadership is a crisis of confidence that Christian life in general, and pastoral leadership in particular, has a telos, a direction and purpose. As a result, pastoral leaders are caught by larger cultural systems, outdated conceptions of maintaining and managing a disappearing religious establishment, or competing and often incompatible among diverse laypeople, judicatory leaders, peer clergy, and the pastors’ own interior sense of what they are called to be doing.” Jones and Armstrong, Resurrecting Excellence: Shaping Faithful Christian Ministry (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006), 26. [7]William P. Brown, Wisdom’s Wonder: Character, Creation, and Crisis in the Bible’s Wisdom Literature (Grand Rapids, William P. Eerdmans, 2014), 5.
Writing (about) Disaster
Holding a tool or a pot constructed and used by a person who lived thousands of years ago is always a humbling experience. I feel connected to these people. We all work, laugh, eat, and face our own mortality. I am now exploring a new point of connection. I am (and hope to remain) a survivor of a worldwide pandemic. Maybe I am living in a moment that will be defined as a societal collapse or a rebirth by future scholars. As an archaeologist, I work in the ruins of other people’s lives. Tragedies, whether of the everyday variety like a broken cooking pot, or the extraordinary, think Pompeii, are snippets of human experiences frozen in time. We speculate about the causes of depopulation, abandonments of urban areas, or mass casualties in a landscape; was it famine, economic turbulence, plague, warfare? Now I am one of their kindred, a person living through a tipping point. In April, I received a revised version of a chapter titled “Whose Past Counts? Collective Remembrances” to be published in The Oxford Handbook of Complex Disaster Risks and Resilience. I am one of three authors on the chapter. Our work considers the role played by collective memory in recovery from disasters in two urban case studies: the Lisbon earthquake of 1775 and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70. While separated by 1700 years, the modern cities continue to be shaped by these historical recovery efforts. My first introduction to geographic Jerusalem was in 1996. I was an undergraduate studying abroad, living on the line separating the West Bank from the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo. I arrived in Israel two months after the assassination of Rabin and a month before the first of two bus bombings in Jersualem. As a white American, I passed through West Bank checkpoints freely, sometimes walking into Bethlehem for shopping and to visit one of the sweet corn food carts. I remember sitting on the roof of our living accommodations listening to the Dave Matthews Band while watching Israeli helicopters patrol the area. I was witnessing the tensions of a society struggling to recover from multiple disasters: the Roman destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish exile, the European Christian occupation and bloodshed of the Crusades, the British Mandate period, the Shoah, the Nakba, the 1948 and 1967 wars, and the first Intifada. The Bible seems to jump off the page in Jerusalem. You can visit The City of David Archaeological Park which is purported to be the site of King David’s palace. You can stand in the Church of St. Peter, a relatively modern church built over a Byzantine church that may sit on the remains of the house of the biblical Caiphas, the high priest. You may visit the tomb of Jesus, the one identified by the Catholic and Orthodox churches, in a building whose keys are held by Muslim families because of strife between the various Christian sects that occupy the building together. Each religious, archaeological, and cultural site represents an engagement in the pitched battle for the narrative soul of Jerusalem. In words now famous from the hit musical Hamilton, “Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?” Who would and will continue to tell Jerusalem’s story? On the one hand is the Jewish community largely displaced from Jerusalem for nearly two millennia, seeking a homeland after centuries of persecution and genocide in Europe culminating in the unthinkable Shoah. On the other hand, an Arab community, Muslim and Christian, with incredibly deep historical roots in the region also victimized by European cruelty and imperialism. There are non-local stakeholders as well; American Evangelical Christians, deeply invested in the politics of Israel for religious reasons. There are the millions of tourists and religious pilgrims, many of whom feel some ownership of the city as children of Abrahamic faiths, walking its streets in hopes of catching a glimpse of its ancient past. Edward Said, in his essay, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” called Jerusalem a city “covered entirely with symbolic associations totally obscuring the existential reality of what as a city and real place Jerusalem is.” The possible addition of a cable car connecting the City of David to the Western Wall Plaza would allow visitors literally to sail over the houses and businesses of real citizens of Jerusalem, disembarking only in these symbolic places. I wrote much of the material focused on Jerusalem from the safety of my office in Wingate Hall and the comfort of my living room couch. From a comparison of the case studies, my fellow authors and I concluded the following: 1) Narratives of recovery and resilience are messy; one person’s recovery can feel like a continuation of the disaster to another person within the same city or region. 2) Disasters can elevate narratives of conflict between science and religion in both explanations for the disaster itself as well in strategies for recovery. 3) Public memorialization of a disaster reflects one understanding of the event and shapes collective memory of the event in future generations. 4) Community desire for a quicker recovery post-disaster can lead to authoritarian-leaning governments. This revised chapter arrived in my Inbox in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. As I re-read it, I felt as though its tone failed to convey the human sorrow, fear and hope endemic in communities embroiled in disaster and yearning for recovery.Who was I to write about the suffering of others, to critique how they chose to move beyond grief, displacement and death toward life again? When I proposed this essay in May, I assumed that by the beginning of the Fall semester, the United States would be on the road to recovery with regard to COVID-19; this was entirely too optimistic. We still stand squarely in the midst of this disaster. The pandemic has also aided in laying bare the reality of a host of injustices and inequalities with regard to race, housing equity, earning a living wage, access to healthcare, and support of public education. America will be forever changed by 2020 and how we choose to go about recovering from this year will be critical. We will have an opportunity to address specific issues like inequity and underfunding in public education but we will also have the opportunity to reconsider American identity. The narrative of rugged individualism and freedom has not served us well in a pandemic that requires collective action for the common good. When this is all over (whatever that means), how will we choose to tell our story of pandemic and disaster? How will we frame our own recovery and resilience? The answer to these questions will depend greatly on the outcome and aftermath of the November elections.Yet I only have control over myself, my vote, how I behave, what I convey to my children, and what I teach in the classroom. Reflecting on this book chapter and my experience of this pandemic, I have formulated the following guidelines for myself as a scholar and human in the times going forward: When writing about human disaster and recovery, whether it be in 2020, 70 CE, or 1177 BCE, I will validate and acknowledge, as part of the scholarly process, the trauma experienced by the humans living through upheaval. In my own lived experience or in my scholarly pursuits, when a seemingly uniform vision of recovery and resilience is presented, I will look for the stories of people whose interests and experiences don’t fit within the uniform narrative. I/we must press to make narratives of recovery and national identity complex and multi-faceted. Similarly, our formal memorialization process of this current tragedy must capture the deep inequities in how this pandemic has affected communities. Even better yet, perhaps we memorialize not in stone or garden landscapes but in actions to address inequality in healthcare, wages, education, and housing. We likely have many more months to go before we can begin to talk about recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. We hear most about the need for economic recovery but recovery will take many forms. Will we socialize and build community in the same ways? How will we reshape our lives in the wake of lost jobs, months of working at home (if we are lucky), and supporting our children in distance learning? Recovery doesn’t mean returning to the same life that we inhabited in early March. Some of our fellow citizens are no longer alive to participate in this recovery and the people who love them will never be the same. Memorialization and the collective narrativization can be important steps in moving forward after a disaster. Yet, we must remember that collective memory and acts of memorialization are flexible and culturally constructed. This fact has been reinforced as we have watched statues of Confederate generals being pulled down. If we proclaim a narrative of recovery, we must ask ourselves if all citizens are experiencing this recovery? Just as a phrase like “urban collapse” cannot hope to capture the experiences of thousands of individuals navigating a changing reality at the end of the Early Bronze Age in the eastern Mediterranean, so we cannot speak as if all people living within the United States have experienced the pandemic in an identical fashion. I have endured personal uncertainty and loss before but this is my first global disaster. Some readers will cite climate change, human trafficking, and systemic racism as global disasters in which I have been living all along. You are, of course, right and I acknowledge my privilege in not having suffered directly from these growing catastrophes. Acknowledging the work of feminist theorists, my pandemic experience is unique to me and my family but is also part of larger macro-narratives. I am again made keenly aware that this dynamic of micro and macro experiences existed in the ancient world. How do we capture the humanity of these micro experiences when we often do not have names of individuals and can’t pin down how many people lived in a particular household? This is my next scholarly endeavour---finding a writing style that honors the humanity and individualism of ancient peoples even when the particulars of their identities and experiences are unclear.
When we beautify our gaze, the grace of hidden beauty becomes our joy and our sanctuary. John O’Donohue[i] The advent of Covid-19 in March 2020 has made windows and the space they mark between us more conspicuous than ever in our lives. Many of us are hearing the painful stories. People yearn to visit loved ones in nursing homes, hospitals, and other abiding spaces, but their visits are mediated, often by windows. I have seen the poignant photos of nursing home visitors standing outside their loved ones’ windows, looking in through the glass to connect, if in only a limited way, with Grandma or Uncle George. The photos linger, those blurry selfies of a grandchild’s small hand pressed to Grandpa’s wrinkled one with a window between them. Covid-19’s invisible presence has occupied the spaces between us. We are all affected, and some stories being birthed in these times are stories of unfathomable grief. Too many people are dying alone because of quarantine precautions. Thousands are isolated in their homes. Many already on life’s margins are experiencing even greater distances between themselves and hope for the future. In these uncertain days, we are experiencing much of life from unexpected and unfamiliar distances. How are these distances changing us? What about COVID 19 is causing us to probe our identities and relationships as part of human communities? Life in Liminal Spaces Some are calling the distance between us in these days liminal space. The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limens and means threshold. To be in liminal space is to be betwixt and between. Consider high school graduations. When a high school student graduates, she enters into a liminal space as she journeys toward whatever is next in her life. She is betwixt and between her childhood and next steps toward adulthood. What makes high school graduations, job changes, and other life transitions liminal? Liminality is what emerges when we haven’t yet replaced what was with whatever is to come in our life journeys. To be in liminal space is to be in limbo, to be neither here nor there. Some communities embody rituals to mark life’s liminal spaces. Called rites of passage, these rituals provide a sense of rhythm amidst the chaos and instability generated by liminality. Baptism is an example in Christian communities. Baptism marks people’s identities as believers and initiates them into a community of faith. The rite is linked to a range of biblical water stories, such as the flood story in Genesis and the story in Exodus of the Israelites crossing the Sea of Reeds into a 40-year wilderness. Christian baptisms are also connected to Jesus’s baptism in the Jordan River as narrated by New Testament storytellers. Christian baptismal rites exemplify liminality. Baptizands journey away from their old identities, plunge into the betwixt and between of baptismal waters, and emerge, wet and splashing, to continue their life journeys. Their physical wetness announces their spiritual transformation. They have been immersed in mysteries that reach back to the beginning of time, travel across histories and geographies, and stretch into the future toward a river of life described in the New Testament book of Revelation. Baptism marks believers’ identities. Baptism also reminds communities of their ongoing journeys through wilderness places in search of geographies and graces of God’s presence in their lives. We are, baptism reminds us, always betwixt and between. Windows in Walls Liminality[ii] is one concept—a window—through which we can reflect on the instability Covid-19 has brought to our thresholds. We know Covid-19 is changing our lives. As much as many of us long to “get back to normal,” we suspect, most of us with reluctance, that yesterday’s normal is no more, and we find ourselves fearful of an uncertain future. These are liminal times. The concept of liminality also invites us to query the health of yesterday’s “normal” and consider hopeful possibilities for a transformed future. Franciscan spiritual teacher Richard Rohr speaks to these possibilities. Liminal space, says Rohr, is where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown. There alone is our old world left behind, while we are not yet sure of the new existence. That’s a good space where genuine newness can begin. This is the sacred space where the old world is able to fall apart, and a bigger world is revealed.[iii] Liminal spaces have the capacity to deconstruct the normal if we open ourselves to larger horizons and resist reaffirming old systems of power, possessions, and privilege. Covid-19 has propelled us into a vast liminal space. An array of uncertainties is seeping in through windows of societal edifices we once assumed were secure. We now have a view of human vulnerability—a reality long before Covid-19—that is revealing elements of community both to be celebrated and lamented, witnessed to and confessed, held onto and transformed. Familiar Strangers to Ourselves and Others Consider again images of people visiting loved ones through nursing home windows. On one hand, the windows stir a deep sense of physical and emotional loss. We are no longer safe to each other. Even family members and friends have, in a sense, become strangers. With our physical presence, we put each other at risk, even unto death. Even as the windows symbolize loss, grief, and even anger, they also hold an awe-full beauty. The distance is meant to protect us. The distance reveals something as well. It discloses something precious, precarious, and sacred about our humanity. Zoom gatherings, now ever-present in my personal and professional life, amplify the symbolic and actual power of windows in walls and the distance between us. Consider this ritual. I enter the Zoom room. I turn on my audio and camera. Windows appear on my screen. Through these windows, I can see my friends, family members, or co-workers. I also see myself. How often I have resisted the urge to tidy up a loose hair or adjust the tilt of my head as I watch myself in a meeting. Zoom meetings intensify the paradox for me. By watching myself interact with others on Zoom, I become a kind of stranger to myself. At the same time, my colleagues and friends also seem familiar strangers to me as I encounter them in places where I am unaccustomed to seeing them and peer through virtual windows into their lives and abiding spaces. Hope in Liminal Strangeness When will the pandemic end? How will it change us? Where lies hope for the future? Rana L.A. Awdish, a physician, describes the pandemic’s liminal strangeness as she experiences it in a Covid-19 patient’s hospital room: There is so much talk of “endings” and “after this” and even of “returning” to some way that we used to be. None of those imagined times and places feel real to me. Only this timeless space feels real. This is the pause before a new beginning. We are the breath suspended in our collective mask. And in this intermission, when we seem to exist outside our lives and outside time, we are changing.[iv] Awdish’s words spark both uncertainty and hope. What is the hope? Two thoughts emerge. The first is what anthropologist Victor Turner emphasized in his work. Liminality, said Turner, births “communitas”: Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at the edges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority. It is almost everywhere to held to sacred or “holy,” possibly because it transgresses or dissolves the norms that govern structured and institutionalized relationships. . .[v] A possibility of Covid-19 resides in this. Liminality births new structures, and we can be intentional about what “lasting effects” we embed in our responses to this “extra-ordinary moment.”[vi] Second, we have an opportunity to acknowledge that too many people have for too long been living in chronic liminality because of oppressive and limiting societal structures. If we want to behold this moment’s beauty, our beholding must include seeing people on the margins in more radically hospitable ways.[vii] A gift of Covid-19 appears as its presence reveals false assumptions and certitudes about human life and living. Changed by what we see through the unexpected windows in our metaphorical and literal walls, we can choose to build today and tomorrow on the foundations a genuine newness that honors all people. We can wear masks, shelter-at-home, and honor windows in walls as marks of social responsibility and mutual communal care. We can insist that romanticized and oppressive myths of normalcy give way a justice-rooted wisdom of possibility. Awdish concludes her essay by talking about physical distancing as “evidence of our profound connectedness and love.” Every choice we make in these days, she says, “reveals who we are becoming, so this pause seems filled with our love for one another. The feeling is palpable in a way I didn’t know emptiness could be.”[viii] We are learning our way through Covid-19’s liminal wilderness as we experience new dimensions of vulnerability and transparency and as we begin to gauge closeness and distance with recalibrated tape measures. As author John O’Donohue said, how we gaze shapes what we see.[ix] The hope in these days is that hearts, minds, souls, and bodies are being awakened to the radical beauty in our world and each other as we behold ourselves through windows in walls. [i]John O’Donohue (n.d.), “To Beautify the Gaze,” retrieved August 17, 2020, from https://greatmystery.org/perspectives-beautify-the-gaze/. [ii]Francisco Martínez (2015) Liminality and the Modern: Living Through the In-Between; Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 2:3-4, 371-375. The concept of liminality appears in a range of scholarly disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, and others. Perhaps best known from the 20th Century is the work of social anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. Both van Gennep and Turner explored and articulated how the fluidity and instability of liminal spaces make them spaces where creativity and unexpected new life can emerge. [iii]Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs: The Gift of the Contemplative Life (The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1999), 155-6. See also Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2011). [iv]Rana L.A. Awdish, “Perspective: The Liminal Space,” New England Journal of Medicine 383: e17, 2020, retrieved August 12, 2020 fromhttps://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2012147. [v]Victor Turner, "Liminality and Communitas," in The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1969), 125-30. [vi]B. Thomasson, “The Uses and Meaning of Liminality,” International Political Anthropology, 2 (1)2009, 5-28. See also, Thomasson, et. al, eds., Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017). [vii]Frances E. Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen B. Cohen, “Double Liminality and the Black Woman Writer,” American Behavioral Scientist, 1 September/October 1987, 101-14, emphasize the power of those who are outside of concretized structures to transform those structures: “Communitas is dangerous, holy and sacred precisely because it transgresses or dissolves the norms governing structure,” 111. [viii]Awdish. [ix]O’Donohue.
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Chronicle of a Distant Summer
Wake Forest University Faculty Contributors
Bernadine Barnes Bernadine Barnes is a professor of Renaissance art history at Wake Forest University. She is interested in how contemporary audiences of different genders or social groups gain access to works of art and how contemporary viewers respond to images. She has published four books, including her most recent book, Michelangelo and the Viewer in his Time (London: Reaktion, 2018). Erin Branch Erin Branch is an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of the Writing Program. She teaches first-year writing and courses in medical rhetorics, rhetorical history/theory, and personal essays. Her publications include essays on the history of American food culture and the legacy of women like Julia Child, MFK Fisher, and the journalist Clementine Paddleford. Elizabeth Clendinning Elizabeth Clendinning is Associate Professor of Music, Director of Gamelan Giri Murit, and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Arts Center at Wake Forest University (WFU) as well as an affiliate faculty member at the North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA). She holds a PhD and a master's degree from Florida State University and a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago. Her first book, American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination, was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2020. Jill Y. Crainshaw Jill Y. Crainshaw is Blackburn Professor of Worship and Liturgical Theology and Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Academic Initiatives at the School of Divinity. She is the author of several books, including When I in Awesome Wonder: Liturgy Distilled from Everyday Life (Liturgical Press, 2018). Crainshaw's most recent publication is a collection of poetry entitled Footnotes and Endnotes (Library Partners Press, 2020). T.H.M. Gellar-Goad T. H. M. Gellar-Goad is Associate Professor of Classics and Zachary T. Smith Fellow at Wake Forest University. He specializes in Latin poetry, especially the funny stuff: Roman comedy, Roman erotic elegy, Roman satire, and — if you believe him — the allegedly philosophical poet Lucretius. He is author of Laughing Atoms, Laughing Matter: Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and Satire (University of Michigan Press) and Plautus: Curculio (forthcoming, Bloomsbury). Omaar Hena Omaar Hena teaches and researches modern and contemporary world poetry in English. His book, Global Anglophone Poetry was published with Palgrave in 2015 and his essays and articles have appeared in Contemporary Literature, A Companion to Modernist Poetry, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, and Post-Ireland? Essays on Contemporary Irish Poetry. He is currently working on a book on race and publics in contemporary British Black and Asian poetry. Alyssa Howards Alyssa Howards is Associate Professor of German and chair of German and Russian. She also serves as the campus Fulbright advisor. Her research areas include 19th-century German literature and culture as well as language teaching methodology. Adam Kadlac Adam Kadlac is Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Wake Forest. He teaches classes in ethics and political philosophy and has published a series of papers that examine hope as a virtue. You can find more information about his research interests at adamkadlac.net. Amy Lather Amy Lather has been an assistant professor of classics at Wake Forest since 2016 and became a Dunn-Riley Faculty Fellow in 2020. She received her PhD in 2016 from the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on aesthetic and sensory experience in archaic and classical Greek poetry, and her forthcoming book is a study of the concept of poikilia, a word that encompasses all manner of material and aesthetic qualities. Roberta Morosini Roberta Morosini is Professor of Italian. Twice vice-president of the American Boccaccio Association, fellow of Villa I Tatti,the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, UCLA Speroni Chair in 2019, she is a scholar of the Medieval Mediterranean with a focus on Dante, Boccaccio Petrarch. Her most recent publications are Il mare salato. Il Mediterraneo di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio (2020) and Dante, il Profeta e il libro (2018, forthcoming in English). She is currently working on Boccaccio’s Decameron to enquire ways the civic community can respond to plagues and pandemics (L’amore e il lavoro al tempo della peste. Il modello di civiltà di G. Boccaccio), as a way to bring forward new models of civilization for a new humanism. Leann Pace Leann Pace is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department for the Study of Religions. She has worked on archaeological field projects in Turkey, Israel, and the United States. Her current teaching and research interests include religions and cultures of the ancient Levant, heritage studies in conflict regions, and online pedagogy. Anthony Parent Anthony Parent is Professor of History and American Ethnic Studies at Wake Forest University. He has a PhD and MA in History from UCLA and BA from Loyola University. Parent is author of Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740 (2003) and co-author (Heinemann, Kolp, and Shade) of Old Dominion New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007 (2007) and author and co-editor (Wiethaus) of Trauma and Resilience in American Indian and African American Southern History (2013). Carmen Pérez-Muñoz Carmen Pérez-Muñoz is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Spanish. She specializes in Medical Spanish and teaches courses in this area both for the Undergraduate College and the School of Medicine at Wake, where she’s the Associate Director of MAESTRO (Medical Spanish certificate program). She’s particularly interested in the role of Medical Spanish training as a tool to eliminate and prevent health inequalities. John Senior John Senior directs the School of Divinity’s Art of Ministry program, which includes its field education curriculum. His research and teaching focus on pastoral formation for ministry, field-based learning, ministry leadership in both ecclesial and public settings, and the role of theological education in preparing leaders for a wide variety of institutional contexts. Trained in Christian ethics and the sociology of religion, Senior is also interested in political theology and ethics and earth-centered approaches to ministry and the moral life. He is the author of A Theology of Political Vocation: Christian Life and Public Office (Baylor University Press, 2015) and is currently working on a book project on emerging patterns and practices of leadership in ministry. Senior is an ordained Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church (USA). Ryan Shirey Ryan D. Shirey is an Associate Teaching Professor of English in the Writing Program and Director of the Wake Forest University Writing Center. His teaching and research interests include writing center studies, composition pedagogy, community writing, and Scottish and Appalachian literatures. Eric Stottlemyer Eric Stottlemyer is the Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Programs and Experiential Learning and is an Associate Teaching Professor of English. His current research interests center on the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, epistemologies of nature, and experiential wilderness education. When not being chased by bears in the Alaskan wilderness, he teaches environmental studies, environmentally-themed writing courses, and summer Alaska field studies courses on writing and global sustainability. Brian Warren Brian Warren is Associate Teaching Professor in the Classics Department at Wake Forest University. He also teaches in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Program, and is the author of the article "Alcibiades" in Oxford Bibliographies Online: Classics. His main research specialty is Thucydides. Ivan Weiss Ivan Weiss is an assistant professor of practice and interim director of the Journalism Program at Wake Forest University. His films and multimedia projects have explored a variety of subjects, including segregation, gentrification, and the experience of musical performances and athletic events. Running through all his projects is an engagement with how we create, change, and make discoveries. As an educator, Weiss seeks to teach students to use the tools of filmmaking and journalism to strip away falsehoods, reveal truth, and see the world with new eyes.
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