Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal

Photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images

I began to lose it this week.

I know, I have it very easy. I’m not required to put myself at risk every day as a hospital or essential worker. I’m still employed. I’ve got some savings, and don’t have to worry about basic survival. I get food delivered. I haven’t lost any family members or friends from COVID-19 (though I did lose my dad in a horrible accident, and couldn’t get to the burial). My apartment gets plenty of sun and I have two dogs who love me. I get a couple of good walks in a day, and have plenty to read. I don’t have kids. I have direct, personal experience of living through a plague once before in my life.

All of that should make me a prime candidate to hang in, take this period as a disciplinary exercise, and generally be a good citizen. And I have been — I haven’t had any physical human contact for two months now, I wear a mask everywhere, I use rubber disposable gloves for groceries, I keep my six-feet distance so far as I can, even though it’s impossible in my neighborhood to walk on a sidewalk or in a park and not be accosted by joggers, who routinely come within inches of my face. I have no intention of breaking any of these rules, although I am tempted by homicide if any of these fit, entitled motherfuckers actually spit on the ground near me.

But I can recognize signs of psychological and physical stress, and I’m beginning to lose it. This week, for some reason, Wednesday was a bad day. Or at least I think it was Wednesday. What day is it again?

My sleep patterns are totally screwed up, and I find myself waking up tense several times a night, or crashing out for 10 or 12 hours at a time. I wake up and want to go back to sleep. My appetite is waning, and my body longs for some weights to push and pull. My teeth grind all night long and my jaw is tense. I have all the time in the world to read and write, and yet I find myself anesthetized with ennui, procrastinating and distracting myself. Yes, I scan the news every day, often hourly, to discern any seeds of progress.

And here’s the thing: I can’t see much on the horizon. Get unlimited access to Intelligencer and everything else New YorkLEARN MORE »

Yes, it’s a big relief that our hospitals are no longer overwhelmed and daily deaths have plateaued or even declined a little. Yes, the epidemiological worst has not happened — largely because of the new behavioral rules — even though we could well be headed past the White House’s estimate of 60,000 casualties in the medium term, and countless more whose bodies will be permanently wracked by the damage this virus does to the lungs and heart and kidneys.

But I’m also aware that even this modest arrest of a previously exponential disease has only delayed the inevitable. “Flattening the curve” has actually been a remarkable success — but its very success will likely draw this epidemic out for months and years. Yes, if you’re being super-realistic: years. Vaccines do not happen overnight — and even an 18-month deadline for vaccine salvation is being optimistic. We still don’t have a vaccine for HIV, and probably never will. HIV is a retrovirus, which is far harder to vaccinate against than a coronavirus, but COVID-19 is exponentially more contagious than HIV, if not as fatal. Remove constraints and it will spread like ink on a napkin.

A study yet to be peer reviewed from China suggests that the virus has so far about 30 mutations, some far more severe than others. It is also unclear that antibodies can even succeed in preventing the disease, and for how long: “Preliminary studies on monkeys suggest COVID-19 antibodies provide partial, short-term protective immunity to reinfection, but, as Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch recently wrote for the New York Times, these early results are just ‘educated guesses.’” Notice the word: “short-term.” We are going to be dealing with some form of this virus for the indefinite future, and it has a good chance of becoming endemic: “Other coronaviruses, which cause common cold symptoms, lead to a very weak immune response and people can catch the same bug multiple times in their lifetime.” A preliminary study of convalescent patients in China was not encouraging: It found that 30 percent of those who had been infected by COVID-19 had so few antibodies to the disease it was unlikely they’d have any immunity. If this finding turns out to be true, we’re truly, royally fucked.

Treatments? That’s at least worth some limited optimism. It was treatments — not a vaccine — that allowed us to turn the corner on HIV. And that’s why I still do get up in the morning. The trouble is that it took years to develop effective treatments for the vast array of opportunistic infections, and more than a decade for scientists to come up with an effective treatment for the virus itself.  When a virus is brand new, and we don’t know much about it, it simply takes time to figure out its weak spots, and develop treatments to exploit them. We’re talking several months at best, and — as with HIV treatments — we will be disappointed most of the time. Hydroxycholoroquine turns out, in some patients, to make things worse, not better. Gilead’s remdesivir is one reason I have some hope. Seven clinical trials are underway, and anecdotal studies in Chicago have raised hopes. Yesterday, leaked data from one trial suggests it might be a flop, but that particular trial may also be misleading. We don’t know.

This pattern of hopeful rumors that were later dashed is a familiar one for HIV survivors. There were countless possible treatments for various aspects of AIDS opportunistic infections in the late 1980s and ’90s, and trials were constant. Many succeeded in arresting some aspects of the disease — but many very promising trials turned out to be duds. What looked like breakthroughs in phase three trials often became crushed hopes in phase four. Remdesivir is an already existing drug, designed for Ebola (and eventually rejected in favor of better treatments). AZT was also a preexisting medicine that seemed promising at first, and then we discovered, through rigorous trials, that mono AZT therapy was basically useless, and usually toxic. It took years for researchers to come up with drugs that could, sometimes in combination with AZT, bring viral loads to zero. It may take just as long to develop brand-new treatments that could make a decisive difference with COVID-19.

The obvious massive difference between the race to find treatments for HIV and those for COVID-19 is also that HIV in America was relatively contained within the world of anal sex and intravenous drug use (and still is). The broader society could go on as normal, even though the gay world was experiencing medieval levels of death. With COVID-19, in stark contrast, we have shut down almost our entire economy and restricted all human interaction in unprecedented ways. Even in 1918, there was no national shutdown similar to the one we’ve imposed more than a century later. Yes, there were masks and social distancing and business restrictions, but the most draconian measure, in Saint Louis, shut down all economic activity in only one city for just 48 hours.

So we have created a scenario which has mercifully slowed the virus’s spread, but, as we are now discovering, at the cost of a potentially greater depression than in the 1930s, with no assurance of any progress yet visible. If we keep this up for six months, we could well keep the deaths relatively low and stable, but the economy would all but disintegrate. Just because Trump has argued that the cure could be worse than the disease doesn’t mean it isn’t potentially true. The previously unimaginable levels of unemployment and the massive debt-fueled outlays to lessen the blow simply cannot continue indefinitely. We have already, in just two months, wiped out all the job gains since the Great Recession. In six months? The wreckage boggles the mind.

All of this is why, one some days, I can barely get out of bed. It is why protests against our total shutdown, while puny now, will doubtless grow. The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify. We remain human beings, a quintessentially social mammal, and we orient ourselves in time, looking forward to the future. When that future has been suspended, humans come undone. Damon Linker put it beautifully this week: “A life without forward momentum is to a considerable extent a life without purpose — or at least the kind of purpose that lifts our spirits and enlivens our steps as we traverse time. Without the momentum and purpose, we flounder. A present without a future is a life that feels less worth living, because it’s a life haunted by a shadow of futility.” Or, in the words of the brilliant Freddie deBoer: “The human cost of the disease and those it will kill is enormous. The cost of our prevention efforts are high as well. You’re losing something. You’re losing so much. So you should mourn. We’ve lost the world. Mourn for it.”

We have done what we had to do, and I am not criticizing the shutdown strategy so far. I’m simply saying that it cannot last. We keep postponing herd immunity, if such a thing is even possible with this virus. A massive testing, tracing, and quarantining regime seems beyond the capacity of our federal government in the foreseeable future. And we are a country without a functioning president — ours thinks we should inject bleach to kill COVID-19, and is also doing what he can to divide the nation to keep his fast-diminishing candidacy from imploding. And we know this much after three and a half years: The worse this gets, the worse he will get. Already he is lambasting shutdown orders as well as Georgia’s attempt to end the shutdown. He is an incoherent, malevolent mess of a human being. I used to be disgusted by him. I am now incandescent with rage at him and the cult that enables his abuse of all of us.

And so we wait. Absent a pharmaceutical miracle, we are headed, if we keep this up, toward both a collapse in the economy and an inevitable second wave that will further cull the population. Yes, I’m a catastrophist by nature. I hope and pray something intervenes to save us from this uniquely grim future. But I learned something from the AIDS years: Sometimes it is a catastrophe. And sometimes the only way past something is through it.

Nice to have two dogs that love you though.

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The gem in this video from the New York Times is nine-year-old Sienna Jayde from Staten Island at 2:55. “I dunno what a dag is, I know what a dowg is. I dunno what caffee is, I know what cawffee is.”

She actually won the prize for best accent in the NYT competition. But the most New Yorky thing about her is not her accent itself; it’s that at nine years old she already understands the social and cultural difference that surrounds her, and is conscious of where she fits into the scheme of things. A grand and rare gift of the city.

And the Nyuyorican or Dominican woman (it’s starting to get hard to tell as both groups’ speech is starting to approach that of Black New Yorkers) @princessnokia (and I think — from her dress and color choices — an Ọṣun devotee/santera) that comes right after Sienna is great too, though hardly comprehensible to even me in parts, except for one of her these-are-a-few-of-my-favorite-things: “Me, I like a good time; I like long walks in the pawk, hangin’ out with my cousins, and blowjobs on the FDR… “

“…and not for nothing, let’s be real: you flew here and I grew here.”

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Jonathan Safran Foer and Aaron S Gross: “Covid-19’s history is not yet fully known, but the links between animal and human health could not be clearer.”

Then work on clearing people’s minds of the heresies of vegetarianism and veganism, since they divert energy from a real goal: confronting and fighting back at the manufactured agriculture industry, and instead deflect it onto a narcissistic struggle for one’s own moral purity and sanctity.

Money quote:

“We are preoccupied with the production of face masks, but we appear unconcerned with the farms that are producing pandemics. The world is burning and we are reaching for more fire extinguishers while gasoline soaks through the tinder at our feet.”

And one more detail of my own: those that aren’t entirely vegetarian but will order and eat chicken on an almost daily basis (as long as it’s the breast with no skin), though, as per the article, chicken is the filthiest of domesticated meat-animals and the greatest conductor of dangerous animal to human viruses — but won’t eat veal because it’s cruel, or fatty cuts of pork or lamb or beef because they’re “grooooss“, or if the option is available, will go for the mercury-laced sushi and think they’re protecting their health that way are…..ererrrrrrrrrrrrr…delusional.

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“Otvorite sve kafane” — “Open all the taverns!”

Thanks to Dimitar Bechev.

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Sorry for the overused, cliché mural of the Resurrection in the Monastery of the Savior in Chora in Constantinople. I’ve been fasting from social media, except for important emails and Noruz wishes, for all of Lent, and now I feel really sluggish about coming up with something more interesting than the mural.

Also feeling like I can’t find any new text or original comment to make. So I’m posting Russian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s story which I posted a few years ago: “The Man Who Flew Like a Bird”. I think the story, especially its powerful punch allegory at the end in the cemetery that reveals the whole story as an allegory, deserves rereading.

Thanks. Happy Easter. And will be back with more.

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The Story of the Man Who Flew Like a Bird:
Ivan Mashovets—Graduate Student of the Philosophy Department

From the account of his friend, Vladimir Staniukevich, graduate student in the Philosophy Department:

…He wanted to leave unnoticed, of course. It was evening. Twilight. But several students in the nearby dormitory saw him jump. He opened his window wide, stood up on the sill, and looked down for a long time. Then he turned around, pushed hard, and flew… He flew from the twelfth floor…

A woman was passing by with a little boy. The youngster looked up:

“Mama, look, that man is flying like a bird…”

He flew for five seconds…

The district police officer told me all this when I returned to the dormitory; I was the only person who could be called his friend in any sense. The next day I saw a photo in the evening paper: he lay on the pavement face down…in the pose of a flying man…

I can try to put some of it into words… Although everything is slipping away… You and I won’t make it out of this labyrinth… It will be a partial explanation, a physical explanation, not a spiritual one. For instance, there’s something called the trust hotline. A person calls and says: “I want to commit suicide.” In fifteen minutes they dissuade him. They find out the reason. But it isn’t really the reason, it’s the trigger…

The day before he saw me in the hall:

“Be sure to come by. We have to talk.”

That evening I knocked on his door several times, but he didn’t open it. Through the wall I could hear he was there (our rooms are adjacent). He was pacing. Back and forth. Back and forth. “Well,” I thought, “I’ll drop by tomorrow.” Tomorrow I talked to the policeman.

“What’s this?” The policeman showed me a vaguely familiar folder.

I leaned over the table:

“It’s his dissertation. There’s the title page: Marxism and Religion.”

All the pages were crossed out. Diagonally, in red pencil, he’d written furiously: “Nonsense!! Gibberish!! Lies!!” It was his handwriting… I recognized it…

He was always afraid of water… I remember that from our college days. But he’d never said that he was afraid of heights…

His dissertation didn’t pan out. Well, to hell with it! You have to admit you’re a prisoner of utopia… Why jump from the twelfth floor on account of that? These days how many people are rewriting their master’s essay, their doctoral dissertation, and how many are afraid to admit what the title was? It’s embarrassing, uncomfortable… Maybe he decided: I’ll throw off these clothes and this physical shell…

Behavioral logic didn’t lead to this, but the act was committed nonetheless… There’s the concept of fate. You’ve been given a path to follow… You rise to it… You either rise, or fall… I think he believed that there is another life… In a thin layer… Was he religious? This is where speculation begins… If he believed, it was without intermediaries, without cultish organizations, without any ritual. But suicide is impossible for a religious person, he wouldn’t dare violate God’s plan… Break the thread… The trigger mechanism works more easily for atheists. They don’t believe in another life, aren’t afraid of what might be. What’s the difference between seventy years or a hundred? It’s just a moment, a grain of sand. A molecule of time…

He and I once talked about socialism not resolving the problem of death, or at least of old age. It just skirts it…

I saw him make the acquaintance of a crazy guy in a used bookstore. This guy, too, was rummaging around in old books on Marxism, like we were. Then he told me:

“You know what he said? ‘I’m the one who’s normal—but you’re suffering.’ And you know, he was right.”

***

I think that he was a sincere Marxist and saw Marxism as a humanitarian idea, where “we” means much more than “I.” Like some kind of unified planetary civilization in the future… When you’d drop by his room he’d be lying there, surrounded by books: Plekhanov, Marx, biographies of Hitler, Stalin, Hans Christian Andersen stories, Bunin, the Bible, the Koran. He was reading it all at once. I remember some fragments of his thoughts, but only fragments. I reconstructed them afterward… I’m trying to find meaning in his death… Not an excuse, not a reason… Meaning! In his words…

“What is the difference between a scholar and a priest? The priest comes to know the unknown through faith. But the scholar tries to comprehend it through facts, through knowledge. Knowledge is rational. But let’s take death, for instance. Just death. Death goes beyond thought.

“We Marxists have taken on the role of church ministers. We say we know the answer to the question: How do you make everyone happy? How?! My favorite childhood book was The Human-Amphibian by A. Belyaev. I reread it again recently. It’s a response to all the utopians of the world… The father turns his son into a human-amphibian. He wants to give him the oceans of the world, to make him happy by changing his human nature. He’s a brilliant engineer… The father believes that he’s uncovered the secret… That he’s God! He made his son into the most miserable of people… Nature doesn’t reveal itself to human reason… It only entices it.”

Here are a few more of his monologues. As I remember them, at least.

“The phenomenon of Hitler will trouble many minds for a long time to come. Excite them. How, after all, is the mechanism of mass psychosis launched? Mothers held their children up crying: ‘Here, Führer, take them!’

“We are consumers of Marxism. Who can say he knows Marxism? Knows Lenin, knows Marx? There’s early Marx… And Marx at the end of his life… The halftones, shades, the whole blossoming complexity of it all, is unknowable to us. No one can increase our knowledge. We are all interpreters…

“At the moment we’re stuck in the past like we used to be stuck in the future. I also thought I hated this my whole life, but it turns out that I loved it. Loved?… How can anyone possibly love this pool of blood? This cemetery? What filth, what nightmares…what blood is mixed into it all… But I do love it!

“I proposed a new dissertation topic to our professor: ‘Socialism as an Intellectual Mistake.’ His response was: ‘Nonsense.’ As if I could decipher the Bible or the Apocalypse with equal success. Well, nonsense is a form of creativity, too… The old man was bewildered. You know him yourself—he’s not one of those old farts, but everything that happened was a personal tragedy for him. I have to rewrite my dissertation, but how can he rewrite his life? Right now each of us has to rehabilitate himself. There’s a mental illness—multiple, or dissociated, personality disorder. People who have it forget their names, social positions, their friends and even their children, their lives. It’s a dissolution of personality…when a person can’t combine the official take or government belief, his own point of view, and his doubts…how true is what he thinks, and how true is what he says. The personality splits into two or three parts… There are plenty of history teachers and professors in psychiatric hospitals… The better they were at instilling something, the more they were corrupted… At the very least three generations…and a few others are infected… How mysteriously everything eludes definition… The temptation of utopia…

“Take Jack London… Remember his story about how you can live life even if you’re in a straitjacket? You just have to shrivel up, sink down, and get used to it… You’ll even be able to dream…”

Now that I analyze what he said…follow his train of thought… I can see that he was preparing for departure…

We were drinking tea one time, and out of the blue he said:

“I know how long I have…”

“Vanya, what on earth are you saying!” my wife exclaimed. “We were just getting ready to marry you off.”

“I was joking. You know, animals never commit suicide. They don’t violate the course…”

The day after that conversation the dormitory housekeeper found a suit, practically brand new, in the rubbish bin; his passport was in the pocket. She ran to his room. He was embarrassed and muttered something about having been drunk. But he never ever touched a drop! He kept the passport, but gave her the suit: “I don’t need it anymore.”

He’d decided to get rid of these clothes, this physical membrane. He had a more subtle, detailed understanding than we did of what awaited him. And he liked Christ’s age.

One might think he’d gone mad. But a few weeks earlier I’d heard his research presentation… Water-tight logic. A superb defense!

Does a person really need to know when his time will come? I once knew a guy who knew it. A friend of my father’s. When he left for the war, a gypsy woman prophesied: he needn’t be afraid of bullets because he wouldn’t die in the war, but at age fifty-eight at home, sitting in an armchair. He went through the whole war, came under fire, was known as a foolhardy fellow, and was sent on the most difficult missions. He returned without a scratch. Until age fifty-seven he drank and smoked since he knew he’d die at fifty-eight, so until then he could do anything. His last year was terrible… He was constantly afraid of death… He was waiting for it… And he died at age fifty-eight, at home…in an armchair in front of the television…

Is it better for a person when the line has been drawn? The border between here and there? This is where the questions begin…

Once I suggested he dig into his childhood memories and desires, what he’d dreamed of and then forgotten. He could fulfill them now… He never talked to me about his childhood. Then suddenly he opened up. From the age of three months he had lived in the country with his grandmother. When he got a bit older he would stand on a tree stump and wait for his mama. Mama returned after he’d finished school, with three brothers and sisters—each child from a different man. He studied at the university, kept ten rubles for himself, and sent the rest of his stipend home. To Mama…

“I don’t remember her ever washing anything for me, not even a handkerchief. But in the summer I’ll go back to the country: I’ll repaper the walls. And if she says a kind word to me, I’ll be so happy…”

He never had a girlfriend…

His brother came for him from the countryside. He was in the morgue… We began looking for a woman to help, to wash him, dress him. There are women who do that sort of thing. When she came she was drunk. I dressed him myself…

In the village I sat alone with him all night. Amid the old men and women. His brother didn’t hide the truth, although I’d asked him not to say anything, at least to their mother. But he got drunk and blabbed everything. It poured for two days. At the cemetery a tractor had to pull the car with the casket. The old ladies crossed themselves fearfully and zealously:

“Went against God’s will, he did.”

The priest wouldn’t let him be buried in the cemetery: he’d committed an unforgivable sin… But the director of the village council arrived in a van and gave his permission…

We returned at twilight. Wet. Destroyed. Drunk. It occurred to me that for some reason righteous men and dreamers always choose these kinds of places. This is the only kind of place they are born. Our conversations about Marxism as a unified planetary civilization floated up in my memory. About Christ being the first socialist. And about how the mystery of Marxist religion wasn’t fully comprehensible to us, even though we were up to our knees in blood.

Everyone sat down at the table. They poured me a glass of homemade vodka right away. I drank it…

A year later my wife and I went to the cemetery again…

“He’s not here,” my wife said. “When we came the other times we were visiting him, this time it’s just a tombstone. Remember how he used to smile in photographs?”

So he had moved on. Women are more delicate instruments than men, and she felt it.

The landscape was the same. Wet. Dilapidated. Drunk. His mother showered us with apples for the trip. The tipsy tractor driver drove us to the bus stop…

English translation © 2011 by Jamey Gambrell

1. 1

To be published in 2016 under the tentative title Time Second Hand by Fitzcarraldo Editions, London.  

2. 2

“Svetlana Alexievich: The Truth in Many Voices,” October 12, 2015.  

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Happy Norooz, نوروزتان مبارک pic.twitter.com/sndBUYI5yM

— Azar Nafisi (@azarnafisi) March 19, 2020

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Just chill…

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…is from Pasolini‘s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo — it’s in the link in its entirety and with English subtitles (Took a break from my Paradzhanov images.) Watch it at some point this Lent/Holy Week. It’s as powerful — more — as Orthodox matins for Good Friday (the “Twelve Gospels”) or Bach.

The photo is of Enrique Irázoqui. I guess Pasolini needed a Spaniard’s ferocity to convey Matthew’s Jesus, the angriest of the four Christs. (As such he’s probably the most problematic for Jews). For me Irázoqui is the most beautiful Christ that has ever been portrayed.

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