"Too many red lines have been crossed...we convince ourselves that sudden change is something that happens outside the normal order of things, like a car crash, or that it is beyond our control, like a fatal illness. We don't conceive of sudden, radical, irrational change as woven into the very fabric of existence.
We have entered a new era.
Change is like death. You do't know what it looks like until you're standing at the gates.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, (2018)
At the end of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, we see a dystopic future, a radically altered paradigm of human existence, where Man is forced to share his space with dinosaurs who have escaped a high-security bio-research facility and are roaming free as an unceasing reminder of technology's ultimate impotence to save mankind from catastrophe.
The novel corona virus( SARS nCov2) has similarly created this 'new normal' for twenty-first century mankind, whereby we are forced to accept this new contagion as part of life, as wired into the human condition for the foreseeable future, until either a vaccine or a drug is discovered to contain the lethal epidemic, that has infected a sizable proportion of the global population already.
Even shaking hands with a friend could get you killed; how apocalyptic is that? How much more phantasmagoric than even the most grimly futuristic Hollywood dystopia could have ever imagined?
As the world has been suckerpunched by alien viral epidemics every few decades or so, the parameters of mankind's traditional reality have also been radically revised, transformed and renewed to make way for new and emerging paradigms that have redefined human survival, culture and environment in ways no man-made technology or revolution ever could. How else could we have imagined a world order where Russia, China/ North Korea and The U.S are united against a common adversary?
How not to be surprised by the fact that according to media reports, some terrorist organizations have recalled their overseas recruits to avoid covid-casualty, putting a brake on their subversive agenda temporarily?
Fear did what love couldn't do.
The first of these most massive and impactful European pandemics was The Black Death --the bubonic plague --that raged through the continent during the latter half of the 1340s. It was responsible not only for the depletion of more than half of Europe's population but also for revolutionary transformations in its economy (since it phenomenally reduced available work-force), demographic distribution, allocation of labour and socio-hierarchic status quo as a whole, which ultimately led to the gradual demise of the dogmatic, feudal and fundamentally oppressive social order of the Middle Ages, to make way for the more enlightened, egalitarian and democratic transition to the Renaissance.
The next major public health crisis that would occupy the cultural imagination of the Western World for the ensuing four centuries would undoubtedly be syphilis. It is surprising how so many of these aggressive infections affect and regulate human intimacy and love, to introduce new prohibitions and taboos around sexuality, that are necessary for species-survival.
Caused by Treponema Pallidum, a kinky, curly, noodle-like bacteria, Syphilis was such a scourge to ravage through Europe at the peak of its expansionist phase, that even the New World fell victim to its massive spread through sexual contact with the colonising race. Vernacular literature from the colonial period is especially sensitive to the outrage, scandal and morbidity of the disease, mostly in the form of the cautionary tale. Since it could be transferred, in utero, from mother to the unborn infant, it acquired its macabre symbolism of blighted innocence and paternal sin visiting the blameless progeny.
Much of European literature from that era suffers from a cultural neurosis that is organised around the stigma and terror of syphilis' disfigurement and disability. Henrik Ibsen's play Ghosts is a very good example of that literary trend. Since it spread through promiscuity and prostitution, the social elite, the ruling class, showed an above average vulnerability to the infection due to their dissolute and libertine lifestyle. Syphilis, thus became a trope of Victorian England's moral critique as well.
Government data on the subject is insufficient due to this embarrassment and stigma. It is rather the writers and artists-- the Rembrandts, Baudelaires and Bram Stokers--whose aesthetic depiction of the contagion is particularly eloquent.
Baudelaire, who chronically suffered from the infection, writes poems that are are an excursion through the dark and infernal interiors of the afflicted mind. The Parisian subculture of addiction and prostitution is revealed as the sinful seat of the disease, that is the physical and metaphorical trophy of the poet who creates beauty--flowers--out of evil.
Bram Stoker's mythology of Vamprism (that, pretty much like viral reproduction, spreads through the increased availability of the host body) is said to be a sublimated response to the anxiety and shame of syphilitic blood poisoning through intimate erotic contact that Stoker himself might have been exposed to.
In the absence of treatment or prophylaxis, isolation was the only recourse to stop the contagion--sounds familiar?
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| Picture Courtesy: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/it-director-andy-muschietti-eyed-for-dracula-prequel-dracul/ |
The extensive prevalence and mortality of syphilis in the pre-penicillin era, especially in the upper echelons of society, is certainly responsible for the anti-elite sentiments of 18th-19th century's political philosophy which might have precipitated the French and English revolutions strengthening the balance against upper-class excesses and decadence towards a more democratic, and people-oriented polity.
During the 1940s, the world could enjoy a brief respite, with the commercial availability of penicillin that is the most definitive antidote to the infection, and the first commercial production of latex condoms in 1932, which could effectively resist transmission. The encouraging turn of events virtually gave license to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Life was a dream indeed, for a little while, with free sex and consciousness-altering drugs, until AIDS struck a blindsided population with its lethal force.
The HIV was to change the norms governing sex, promiscuity, monogamy and abstinence in ways that are so permanent and irreversible, that it still defines the behaviour, attitude and philosophy concerning sexuality in many traditional societies where safe sex is not yet the default option.
Public health advertisements in India, during the early stages of the epidemic,( late1980s-mid 90s) emphasised the importance of, Restraint( 'Sanyam'), Monogamy( 'Wafadari') and Protected Sex ('Condom'). It was amusing to watch a relatively new nation, still hungover from Victorian inhibitions, awkwardly and begrudgingly confronting the reality of prostitution, homosexuality, and unprotected sex and beginning to accommodate sexuality as a topic of public discourse in schools, red-light areas and in the mainstream media---both in print and on television.
It became the voice in the head for many of us who absorbed the message as kids, without understanding the context. It is still a matter of deep-conditioning that Indian men and women in their 30s and 40s, are generally averse to sex outside a committed relationship, even though times are changing pretty fast.
Later on, when the first two areas of exhortation largely failed to cut an impression on the public, the anti-HIV campaign focused exclusively on encouraging safe sex, which finally changed the game. Indian parents and teachers could no longer ignore the rampaging elephant in the room and had to apologetically initiate a discussion on the merits of the condom, with boys and girls attaining premature puberty under the influence of the globalised mass media and capitalistic consumption.
As teenagers coming of age on the cusp of the new millennium, whose childhood and puberty have been spent in the deadly shadows of a virus which had no vaccine, no treatment, and once contracted, progressed along an unstoppable trajectory of aggressive morbidity and death, we, as a generation, have got our sexual morality shaped by hypercaution and excessive premeditation, which stems from a fatal fear of sexuality itself. 'Better safe than sorry', our mothers used to say, and so did our governments: what if there were a rip in the rubber?
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| Picture Courtesy: https://www.glamour.com/story/the-perfect-french-kiss-how-mu |
Intravenous substance-abuse, one of the most common routes of transmission in developed countries, also came under severe criticism and censure. The drug-fuelled rock ballads of Lennon and McCartney weren't cool anymore. Mick Jagger was the role model to avoid. No parent wanted their kid to be the next Freddie Mercury. Narcotics as aesthetic inspiration lost currency. The former hippies, who were now parents to teenagers, started to volunteer for anti-drug vigilance groups in schools and neighbourhoods.
As a matter of mordant irony, Michel Foucault, the post-modern icon whose historic theory of sexuality is largely responsible for the contemporary perception and understanding of sex as a powerful cultural and philosophical force shaping the exercise of power, died in 1984, being one of the first celebrity casualties of this novel, sexually-communicated virus.
As a matter of mordant irony, Michel Foucault, the post-modern icon whose historic theory of sexuality is largely responsible for the contemporary perception and understanding of sex as a powerful cultural and philosophical force shaping the exercise of power, died in 1984, being one of the first celebrity casualties of this novel, sexually-communicated virus.
Sex with a stranger was not 'romantic' or 'adventurous' ( as it is for the Tinder-generation, breathing in the safety of anti-retroviral therapy and a downward surge of the epidemic, in an environment where condoms are as normal as oxygen), it was irresponsible, stupid and seriously 'uncool'. Low sexual exposure--better still, virginity, both in men and women--signalled the fact that you were restrained, responsible and reliable; that you wouldn't endanger your partner through risky behaviour.
This fetishisation of virginity persisted up until very recently, long after cultural modernity and capitalistic permissiveness had securely established themselves even in smaller towns of the Indian heartland. It is only after the advent of technologically enabled one-night stands that the paradigm is changing again. Casual sex is shining again, albeit with protection.
The Corona virus, thankfully, does not bring in the stigma of sexual transmission.
And therein, lies the bad news. HIV was like the dreaded, but fundamentally reasonable, headmaster who left you alone if you stayed away from penetrative sex.
nCovid 19, pretty much like its predecessors, ie SARS and H1N1, is a deranged shooter let loose in a rock concert ; no one knows whom it will attack and when. Nothing, not even kisses, hugs or holding hands is safe anymore. Only an anti-social self-distancing works; the isolation of the paranoid, the compulsive obsession of the neurotic, these are the new standards of sanity and health.
How do you experience and pass on the ecstasy of a warm and delicious embrace if a 3-foot distance were to mediate your romantic communication?
How many love-stories have been nipped in the bud due to the unforeseen and interminable lockdowns, isolation and a mass displacement of the global population?
In how many cases has the disappointment of job-loss been compounded by the heartbreak of physical separation with a loved one?
These are answers only Time will yield. The Corona epidemic will recede in a few months, as did others before it; what will remain afloat are these individual narratives of tragedy and triumph, of heroism and cynicism, of fear and courage. The government records of infection and mortality will never reveal this enormous and invisible human cost: these stories will remain lodged in the white space between the lines of Covid19's official dossier.
For now, we shall wait with bated breath for the first ray of hope at the end of a seemingly endless tunnel that is dark and airless.
We shall watch out for the dove with an olive leaf, as the boat on which the whole of humanity stays afloat sinks fast; as the civilization that boasts of technology to make the moon our next home grinds to a complete halt, compromised and abject before an enemy that is smaller than a speck of dust.
A vaccine. A drug.
We shall forget about talking furniture and a holiday in outer space for a while.
Then, we could walk out of the darkness of our loveless exile, walk freely into the light and warmth of contact--where holding the shopping bags for an aged neighbour, or catching a child as it falls down, would no longer be criminally condemned; where acts of human kindness, and love, could once again be expressed through the warmth of skin and flesh, where it would be finally possible to hug a long-lost friend or a lover without having to secretly obsess about his contact-history.
All this...such ordinary incentives restored! That is our biggest collective fantasy now, a return to what we already had. To go back to the flawed and frustrating world as we knew, hated, and loved it!
The freedom to be whole again, to be enfolded in the physical warmth of another, out of this fragmentation and loneliness; The right to enjoy the beautiful mess of a lover's sweat and saliva, until, of course, a new virus strikes again.
