Wayne Scott at Poets & Writers:

In the dark days of quarantine, I have a habit, born of a fretful insomnia, of rising before dawn. Descending the stairs from my attic room, passing second-floor bedrooms, I imagine I am an all-knowing god of some small universe, like Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace, and can peer into the dreams of my loved ones.

My wife, who works for a health insurance plan that takes care of low-income people, argues in her sleep (even in her dreams she is in meetings, grappling with the tattered safety net, so many sick and soon-to-be-sick people). My twenty-two-year-old daughter, who will be next to wake up to work on her senior thesis, consoles herself that she wasn’t enthusiastic about the graduation ceremony anyway. My seventeen-year-old son, who fell asleep a few hours ago, will sleep until afternoon. He misses his friends, even as he chides them on social media for their lax compliance with social distancing. He worries about having a lonely eighteenth birthday in two weeks.

One bedroom is empty. My twenty-year-old son, still at an English-speaking college in Berlin, convinced us he was safer to wait out the pandemic there, rather than undertake a risky journey home. On a Facetime call we agreed his plan was best. My wife cried; Berlin is five thousand miles away from us.

More here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

Twenty years ago, the US Department of Defense set out a clear warning: “Historians in the next millennium may find that the 20th century’s greatest fallacy was the belief that infectious diseases were nearing elimination. The resultant complacency has actually increased the threat.” Along with other western nations, federal and state governments in America had spent the previous decade or so dismantling public health programmes dealing with communicable diseases in order to concentrate funds on degenerative illnesses: diabetes, heart disease, cancer, stroke. Corporate investment in the development of new vaccines and antibiotics almost dried up, as if the battle that humans had waged over millennia against plague and pestilence had now been won – at least in the developed world. Michael Osterholm, the Minnesota state epidemiologist, informed US Congress in 1996: “I am here to bring you the sobering and unfortunate news that our ability to detect and monitor infectious disease threats to health in this country is in serious jeopardy. . . . For 12 of the states or territories, there is no one who is responsible for food or water-borne disease surveillance. You could sink the Titanic in their back yard and they would not know they had water.”

In the years since, as Frank Snowden’s illuminating history shows, that indifference became endemic. The World Health Organization has argued for years that the mechanics of our globalised economy, the dramatic increase in urbanisation and mass intercontinental travel has exponentially increased the chances for infectious disease to mutate and spread. It identified a record 1,100 “worldwide epidemic events” between 2002 and 2007. A year later, researchers identified 335 new human diseases that had emerged since the development of the polio vaccine in the late 1950s, most of them originating in animals (many in bats). “Their names now run the gamut from A to Z – from avian flu to Zika,” Snowden notes, “and scientists caution that far more potentially dangerous pathogens exist than have so far been discovered.” Yet still, when he finally acknowledged the destructive presence of Covid-19 in his nation’s population, the primary response of the president of the US was one of genuine surprise: “Who would have thought?”

More here.

Humera Afridi in Lit Hub:

In this half-life of quarantine, danger lurks in the unlikeliest of places: the touch of an elevator button, a store-bought carton of milk, my son’s sneeze. Insidious and cunning, death is everywhere around us.

I pattern sedulous days at home with occasional walks around the neighborhood, along silent streets trailing westward to the Hudson River. Solitary walks, for the most part, because the locked playgrounds and confiscated basketball hoops stir a sense of horror in my 12-year-old. My lung hurts, he says, panicked and teary, feeling the city’s pain as his own one afternoon days before his 13th birthday, when I drag him out to get some air. This is too depressing, he mopes. I just want to stay inside. All but two of his friends have left the city to shelter upstate, with room to roam in isolation and scamper unfettered amid the changing foliage. In times of disaster, fissures are stark, the lines of difference indubitable. He sulks, alternating between The Office and All American for relief. Grateful he’s engrossed in narrative and not a video game, I bite my tongue and indulge the screen time.

Waiting for New York City to reach the “apex” of the health crisis, we are held in a kind of limbo or “barzakh”—an interval between spheres of existence, as Ibn Arabi, the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet, described. Barzakh is how I think of our suspension, the stasis between our lives before quarantine and the as yet unknown life to come after it’s lifted.

More here.

Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden wearing animal skins to hide the shame of their human flesh. “The Lord God made clothing” from the skins “for Adam and his wife”, Genesis 3:21 tells us. In a few Biblical pages, Creator had metamorphosed into Original Skinner. The Italian intellectual Roberto Calasso takes a dim view of this in his latest meditation on the roots of modernity in ancient myth. “Christian revelation is responsible not only for the declining reverence towards the cosmos … but also for a certain new, summary and almost brutal way of dealing with animals.”

Calasso doesn’t have only Christianity in his crosshairs. What unites Judaism, Christianity and Islam, he thinks, is not just an “obsession about divine oneness” but “the silent sacrificial war against the animal”. He finds that war prosecuted on the Rue Saint-Jacques in 18th-century Paris. An abbé recorded what happened when a pregnant dog rolled over at the feet of Cartesian theologian Nicolas Malebranche. “The Philosopher gave it a great kick, for which the dog let out a cry of pain and M Fontenelle a cry of compassion. ‘O, really,’ said Father Malebranche coldly, don’t you know that it feels nothing?’”

That war continues today, Calasso argues.

More here.

Tyler Cowen interviews Adam Tooze over at Medium:

COWEN: Let’s go back to the Spanish Flu of 1918–1919. Do you think that Western economies were better equipped to deal with the pandemic, in percentage terms, at that time than they are today?

TOOZE: Well, it’s an interesting question, and it’s an interesting way of putting the question. What’s been striking about the 2020 pandemic is that we have chosen an extraordinarily high-cost route. We have chosen a comprehensive lockdown as the default strategy for dealing with this. As far as I’m aware, no one attempted anything remotely like that in response to Spanish Flu.

At the local level, there were efforts, city by city, but there were no comprehensive national lockdowns. In fact, if you study the economic history record, the archive of that period, the policy decision-making in, say, the Weimar Republic, which I’ve spent some time on — all the minutes of the Versailles Peace Conference — the flu barely figures. It figures in a sense that occasionally a prominent person will get sick, famously President Wilson.

The idea of a kind of comprehensive lockdown as part of a public health response, as far as I’m aware — and of course, this has taken us all aback and has caused us to reflect on what we might have missed in the historical record — I don’t remember it arising anywhere as an option. And we know that the consequences were, of course, dramatic in terms of the loss of life, particularly in what was then the imperial world; the colonies, so-called, in Africa and India.

We’re much more affluent than we were then by an extraordinary . . . It’s very difficult to exaggerate in order of magnitude, broadly speaking, in terms of per capita income. And we’ve chosen a very high-cost route for dealing with the epidemic this time.

More here.

Erin Bromage at his own website:

It seems many people are breathing some relief, and I’m not sure why. An epidemic curve has a relatively predictable upslope and once the peak is reached, the back slope is also predictable. Assuming we have just crested in deaths at 70k, that would mean that if we stay locked down, we lose another 70,000 people over the next 6 weeks as we come off that peak. That’s what’s going to happen with a lockdown.

As states reopen, and we give the virus more fuel, all bets are off. I understand the reasons for reopening the economy, but I’ve said before, if you don’t solve the biology, the economy won’t recover.

There are very few states that have demonstrated a sustained decline in numbers of new infections. Indeed, the majority are still increasing and reopening. As a simple example of the USA trend, when you take out the data from New York and just look at the rest of the USA, daily case numbers are increasing. Bottom line: the only reason the total USA new case numbers look flat right now is because the New York City epidemic was so large and now it is being contained.

So throughout most of the country we are going to add fuel to the viral fire by reopening. It’s going to happen if I like it or not, so my goal here is to try to guide you away from situations of high risk.

More here.

Jonathan Fuller in Boston Review:

The lasting icon of the COVID-19 pandemic will likely be the graphic associated with “flattening the curve.” The image is now familiar: a skewed bell curve measuring coronavirus cases that towers above a horizontal line—the health system’s capacity—only to be flattened by an invisible force representing “non-pharmaceutical interventions” such as school closures, social distancing, and full-on lockdowns.

How do the coronavirus models generating these hypothetical curves square with the evidence? What roles do models and evidence play in a pandemic? Answering these questions requires reconciling two competing philosophies in the science of COVID-19.

In one camp are infectious disease epidemiologists, who work very closely with institutions of public health. They have used a multitude of models to create virtual worlds in which sim viruses wash over sim populations—sometimes unabated, sometimes held back by a virtual dam of social interventions. This deluge of simulated outcomes played a significant role in leading government actors to shut borders as well as doors to schools and businesses. But the hypothetical curves are smooth, while real-world data are rough. Some detractors have questioned whether we have good evidence for the assumptions the models rely on, and even the necessity of the dramatic steps taken to curb the pandemic. Among this camp are several clinical epidemiologists, who typically provide guidance for clinical practice—regarding, for example, the effectiveness of medical interventions—rather than public health.

More here.

George Scialabba reviews Martha Nussbaum’s The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal in Inference:

MARTHA NUSSBAUM, an accomplished classicist and prolific philosopher, begins The Cosmopolitan Tradition with a well-known anecdote about Diogenes the Cynic (taken, like most details about his life, from Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers). Scorning convention, Diogenes slept in a tub, wore rags, ate scraps, copulated and masturbated in public, and spoke his mind pungently and uninhibitedly. This behavior did not lack for admirers, even in high places. One day as he lounged in his tub, sunning himself, he was visited by Alexander of Macedon, then in the process of conquering the world. Looming over the philosopher, he said, “I am the great Alexander. Ask anything of me.” Without looking up, Diogenes replied, “Would you please get out of the light?”

Alexander was reportedly amused, and many subsequent generations have been mightily impressed. But it was not merely a clever retort. There was, Nussbaum contends, a core of principle to Diogenes’s answer. He thought (that is, Nussbaum thinks he thought: like Jesus and Buddha, Diogenes left no writings; all we know of his opinions comes from the writings of his Cynic and Stoic successors, Zeno, Chrysippus, and others) all that mattered, or should matter, to human beings are our most important capacities: moral reasoning and free choice. These are what make us human, what confer on us that inner dignity that is the human essence.

More here.

Peter Sjöstedt-H in iai:

“[W]hat we experience in our dreams … is as much a part of the overall economy of our soul as anything we ‘really’ experience.”

 – Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Such is it with dreams; even more so with psychedelics. But psychedelic experience not only enriches the self, it can contribute to our understanding of what the self is or can be. Psychedelic intake can violently alter aspects of the prosaic, or ordinary self; moreover it can add multiple further facets. In fact, it can in extremis destroy or multiply the “self” – with a range from individuality through unity to infinity, as we shall see.

First let us look at what can be meant by this ambiguous term, “the self”, in its ordinary sense. The self can be understood in its relation to matter, and in its relation to mind. In relation to matter, the self can be understood as, i. reducible to part of the body (materialism), ii. a soul distinct from the material body (dualism), iii. a mind that creates what appears as matter (idealism), and iv. the self can be understood as being at one with an extended body (processism). The common view is undoubtedly i. and ii., the biological and the predominantly religious – though both are fundamentally faith positions. As anthropologist, cyberneticist Gregory Bateson lamented:

“These two species of superstition … the supernatural and the mechanical, feed each other. In our day, the premise of external mind seems to invite charlatanism, promoting in turn a retreat back into a materialism which then becomes intolerably narrow.”

Whatever the mind-matter view, all will still understand by “self” its phenomenal aspects as well – the self in relation to mind. Certain thinkers, following Hume’s suggestion, consider the “self” to be an illusion of the mind in the sense that the word does not refer to any particular thing underlying the bundle of types of experience listed below. Such a belief claims that we cannot directly perceive the “self” as such, but only phenomena such as colour, sound, emotion, etc. Kant in response argues that though we cannot directly perceive the pure, underlying self, we must nonetheless assume it to exist (as “pure apperception”) as that which holds all such experiences together as one – a bundle is a unity that, as such, must be tied.

More here.

Timothy Egan in The New York Times:

Worthy of a Ghazal

…—for Tammara Claire

Had the heart been a bird it would have flown
to your courtyard carefully wrapping a ghazal
in a paper drenched in some Arabian aromas
landing on the bricked cope of a rural home
dropping words on your head making you
look for me but my absence is meager in this
world where love is not a panegyric rather
a dirge of nations, of mobs, of oligarchies
latching to thrones but you need not worry
feeding white ducks removing that curl from
your sweating forehead squeezing clothes on
a creaky bucket, let me give you a hand making
another ghazal on your hennaed feet, last night
you smiled through patterns embroiling your
wheatish skin on which I sit like a long memory
but earth-bound I review my majestic plans of
wooing you out of a structure surrounded by
marsh and yelping night-dogs but in my maqta
you appear free and shying, deserving conclusion.

by Rizwan Akhtar
from blognostics.net

*Maqta is the last couplet in ghazal in which the poet uses his name

Zia Ahmed in P.S. I Love You:

“I spoke for you,” the qawwal said.

“Pardon me?” I thought I’d misheard. The glass window between us dulled his voice, a rich baritone honed over a lifetime of devotional singing. Qawwali — Sufi music once performed at shrines, now a popular form — was his inheritance, a spiritual tradition that goes back more than seven centuries.

“To Nizamuddin. I spoke for you.” He smiled. “You’ll be okay.”

I felt reasonably well. The divorce had done real damage but there were a few positive outcomes, including a job as a junior diplomat at the State Department. My new employers had sent me to Pakistan, my childhood home, where I was now issuing a visa to the Sufi singer for his American tour.

More here.

Lynn Casteel Harper at the Paris Review:

The skull in Vanitas Still Life, while undoubtedly grim, bears a wry, gapped grin—a grin missing four front teeth. Stripped of its flesh, our bone structure apparently discloses a faint, effortless smile. The skull’s stark, denuded presence signals gravity, but its blithe affect signals buoyancy. Perhaps this face of death reflects both the weeping Heraclitus and the laughing Democritus, pointing viewers back to Ecclesiastes: there is “a time to weep and a time to laugh.” Wisdom here comes lodged in apposition—pairs of apparent opposites, united by the word and: “a time to be born, and a time to die … a time to break down, and a time to build up … a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.” These lines in Ecclesiastes encourage readers to imagine a world in which the poles of existence create vibrant tension, in which life and death, gathering and releasing, embracing and refraining, weeping and laughing, do not negate each other but instead balance and enrich. There is aggregation and integration—even with loss, even in death.

more here.

Catherine Nixey in More Intelligent Life:

In the spring of 1822 an employee in one of the world’s first offices – that of the East India Company in London – sat down to write a letter to a friend. If the man was excited to be working in a building that was revolutionary, or thrilled to be part of a novel institution which would transform the world in the centuries that followed, he showed little sign of it. “You don’t know how wearisome it is”, wrote Charles Lamb, “to breathe the air of four pent walls, without relief, day after day, all the golden hours of the day between ten and four.” His letter grew ever-less enthusiastic, as he wished for “a few years between the grave and the desk”. No matter, he concluded, “they are the same.” The world that Lamb wrote from is now long gone. The infamous East India Company collapsed in ignominy in the 1850s. Its most famous legacy, British colonial rule in India, disintegrated a century later. But his letter resonates today, because, while other empires have fallen, the empire of the office has triumphed over modern professional life. The dimensions of this empire are awesome. Its population runs into hundreds of millions, drawn from every nation on Earth. It dominates the skylines of our cities – their tallest buildings are no longer cathedrals or temples but multi-storey vats filled with workers. It delineates much of our lives. If you are a hardworking citizen of this empire you will spend more waking hours with the irritating colleague to your left whose spare shoes invade your footwell than with your husband or wife, lover or children.

Or rather you used to. This spring, almost overnight, the world’s offices emptied. In New York and Paris, in Madrid and Milan, they ready themselves for commuters who never come. Empty lifts slide up and down announcing floor numbers to empty vestibules; water coolers hum and gurgle, cooling water that no one will drink. For the moment, office life is over. Even before coronavirus struck, the reign of the office had started to look a little shaky. A combination of rising rents, the digital revolution and increased demands for flexible working meant its population was slowly emigrating to different milieux. More than half of the Ameri­can workforce already worked remotely, at least some of the time. Across the world, home working had been rising steadily for a decade. Pundits predicted that it would increase further. No one imagined that a dramatic spike would come so soon.

It’s too early to say whether the office is done for.

More here.

Anthony King in The Scientist:

One of the oldest vaccines could protect us against our newest infectious disease, COVID-19. The vaccine has been given to babies to protect them against tuberculosis for almost a century, but has been shown to shield them from other infections too, prompting scientists to investigate whether it can protect against the coronavirus. This Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, named after two French microbiologists, consists of a live weakened strain of Mycobacterium bovis, a cousin of M. tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. BCG has been given to more than 4 billion individuals, making it the most widely administered vaccine globally. Because BCG protects babies against some viral infections in addition to TB, researchers decided to compare data from countries with and without mandatory BCG vaccination to see if immunization policies are linked to the number or severity of COVID-19 infections. A handful of preprint publications in the last two months noted that countries with an ongoing BCG vaccination program are experiencing lower death rates from COVID-19 than those without.

One study, for instance, found that mandatory BCG was associated with a significantly slower climb in both confirmed cases and deaths during the first 30-day period of an outbreak. Another modeled mortality in two dozen countries and reported that those without universal BCG vaccination, such as Italy, the US, and the Netherlands, were more severely affected by the pandemic than those with universal vaccination.

More here.

Si Se Puede

When I take my morning walk now,
I am Pancho Villa. I am Che Guevara.

I am an outlaw in a mask and dark glasses.
I am starting a revolution.

Power to the peonies!
¡Vivas to the violets!

We would rather die on our knees,
sniffing at a flower,

than live, standing in line,
waiting for toilet paper to arrive.

Quivering, I throw my heart out,
six feet in every direction.

All that creeps, crawls, slithers,
or flies, I love.

I lower my mask.
I fling wide my arms.

I kiss death full on the mouth.

by Jose A, Alcantara
from Rattle Magazine
5/2/2020

______

Se se puede: If you can.

Samuel Rutter in The Paris Review:

I’m not ashamed to say that I bought Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature because of the cover: Frantisek Kupka’s The Yellow Scale (Self-Portrait) from 1907 is an exhilarating study of the color yellow. Its human subject, slouched in a wicker armchair, a cigarette dangling from one hand while a single, louche finger marks the page of a book, could be the perfect image of Des Esseintes, the dissolute antihero of Huysmans’s novel. Strictly speaking, the painting is a self-portrait of the habitually mustached Kupka, but it bears more than a passing resemblance to Charles Baudelaire, who haunts almost every page of Against Nature. This novel, about a dyspeptic aesthete who “took pleasure in a life of studious decrepitude,” spends some two hundred pages luxuriating in excess and opulence while the hero cuts himself off from the rest of society.

An old idea that persists about the novel is that it ought to be morally instructive in some way, that it should teach us the correct way to live. Certainly, when Against Nature was published in French in 1884, much of the resultant hand-wringing was because Huysmans’s hero learns nothing new from his misadventures in self-isolation. The problem, according to Émile Zola, was “that Des Esseintes is as mad at the start as he is at the end, that there is no form of progression.”

More here.