The odd survivor – for there were some – had not cheated death: For him, a wasting away and slow demise still lay in wait.
Either, running sores and black flux from the bowels, or spate
Of corrupted blood poured through the nose, along with a throbbing head – The patient’s might and main ebbing away with what he bled.
And if the haemorrhaging of foul blood did not leave him dead,
The plague proceeded to the limbs and muscles, and progressed
Even to the genitals. Some people were possessed
With such grave terror at the door of Death that with a knife
They managed to castrate themselves, and so hang on to life.
Many lingered in this world sans hands or feet. Some lost
The light of their eyes. This was the price such dread of dying cost. Some fell into a deep forgetfulness, and lost all store
Of memories, and did not know their own selves any more.
Though corpses piled on corpses lay in heaps upon the earth Unburied, yet the tribes of birds and beasts gave them wide berth And sprang away in order to escape the noisome stink.
Or else they, having tasted of the flesh, at once would sink
Down dead – though there were hardly any birds to speak of, nor
Did the dismal tribes of wild beasts venture from the forest, for The animals fell sick in droves and perished. But the clan
Of dogs was hardest hit, the true and steadfast friend of Man: Strewn on every corner, life wrenched from them by the might Of the plague, they still did not give up the ghost without a fight!
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things 6.1199-1224 (Translation Stallings)
Published sometime between 80-60 BCE Lucretius’ de rerum natura, or On the Nature of Things, ends on a rather downer note: the total and complete destruction of civilization through plague. Everyone and everything dies.
He (roughly) translates Thucydides’ “Plague of Athens” as described in the History of the Peloponnesian War and in grotesquely profound detail illuminates the impact of plague on human bodies along with the concomitant, cascading institutional failure of society. Frankly, it is one the great endings of any work in literature. The Latin is as beautiful as the imagery is noisome and noxious.
It is a true literary revelation.
The remarkable achievement of the plague, though, must be set in the proper context of the whole poem. Lucretius was an Epicurean, meaning that he took it as axiomatic that the core building blocks of all reality were atoms and void.
Infinite atoms fall through the infinite and unbounded void—with no beginning and no end—and through voluntas—that is Latin for “Free Will—atoms “swerve” and knock into one another, creating an infinite swirl of an atomic stew out which is born the cosmos. Lucretius begins the didactic poem with the basic building blocks of reality (atoms and void), and book by book, builds the entire cosmos out of atoms. No element of reality is left unexplored from the atomic theory behind love and emotions, or lightning, volcanoes and magnets, to the development of human society. Everything can be understood through the unseen atoms.
Even the plague of book 6 is framed according to atomic theory.
In addition to the physical and biological implications of atoms Lucretius posits a proper and moral engagement with reality based in atomic theory. At the most basic level of universal analysis, everything is simply the flux and movement of atoms in the void, as they join and combine into aggregate structures, until they disintegrate back into their primary atoms according to the foedera naturae (alliances of nature). Everything in the universe undergoes this process of union and fissure forever.
To this end, what is the proper life to be lived?
The answer: to be free of all care and anxiety.
One ought to reject every aspect of human society and culture that might cause a state of anxiety or suffering, broadly conceived, since at the core of all human activity is simply the movement of unseen atoms. There is no real meaning to life besides understanding this basic reality of existence. The fear of death must be jettisoned—and along with it—the fear of religious narratives of the afterlife, which are simply fictitious stories that show a lack of true understanding of the nature of the universe.
As Lucretius states: “death is nothing to us and it pertains to us not in the least” (nil igitur mors est ad nos neque pertinet hilum; 3.830).
Death is nothing to us because it literally is nothing. Your death is simply the disintegration of atoms, and even the atoms of your anima (soul/spirit) fissure and disjoin along with the atoms of your muscles and sinews and organs, as they spill back out into the cosmic mix of the atomic swirl, only to join with other atoms to create something new.
What happens to you?
There is no you. You became atomized, and were reintegrated into infinite void and infinite atoms.
So is the nature of things.
To fear death is to fear nothing. There is no after death. There is no before life. There is no soul or spirit to remain intact for infinite time, resulting in the need of a cosmological narrative that can account for an immortal soul.
You simply end and disintegrate and become nothing. I know, hopeful isn’t it?
And there is a joy to see others caught up in the drama and soap opera of life, as their inability to gaze upon the true reality of atomic nature results in their living a life of fear, anxiety, and hysteria.
These people are like sailors shipwrecked by a storm mid-sea. The Epicurean is on terra firma, watching the buffeting and sinking of the ship, as the sailors are tossed in the surge and swirl of an Ocean of false reality.
At its core Lucretius’ plague is the manifestation of his philosophical, didactic mission. As we witness the total and complete collapse of human bodies and every element of civilized society, you have a choice and it is binary: do you become swept up into the madness of it all or do you step out of the swirl and recognize that all you are witnessing is the movement of atoms through void?
It is a choice.
The end of one thing is the requisite enactment of rebirth, and this rebirth is simply the movement and union of atoms until they disintegrate again, only to be reborn into something new, over and over and over forever according to the foedera naturae.
Do you realize how lucky you are? You came into being out of the swirl of the atomic voluntas and were able to witness the profound manifestation of the universe…
Or were you caught up in the swirl of the soap opera and drama, unaware of what you had the opportunity to witness?
That singular, finite, opportunity.
Such is the nature of things.
Send in the Vaxx-Karens.
What is it like to live in a state of fear? To fear the air, to fear your friend, to fear the doorknob or the closed space of the elevator, to fear the world around you at every turn?
What is it like to feel the pin prick of a needle, and the serum enter your flesh, as the nano-lipid particles deliver mRNA packages to your cells, thereby encoding viral spike proteins that enter antigen presentation pathways? Did the serum stop the fear? Are you still afraid of the air or your friend or your world at every turn? What was that fear? Was it the fear of COVID? What are you more afraid of, COVID or Cancer, or Heart Disease, or a Car Accident, or Drowning?
Or are you afraid of the unvaccinated? How many masks can abate your fear? How many nights of shut down and lock down and curfews? How many days at home alone on zoom as you wait for your next shot?
Did the vaccine passport end your fear? Did the overt acts of discrimination and medical apartheid cease your fear, as you showed your papers to enter a bar and sat beside your vaccinated congregation, breathing the same air and touching the same table? Was your fear reignited when you became sick after your second, third or fourth shot? Were you afraid as your walked through the bar, masked? What was the nature of that fear? Who made you afraid? Were you always this afraid or did it begin with COVID? Why did your fear require others to share in your fear?
You are afraid of death. We both know it. Your fear is simply a sign of your ignorance. I know, that is harsh. But Plato told us as much ages ago.
Does your fear require my participation in your fear? Does it? No, I don’t think so.
Your fear is your problem, not mine. Harsh I know.
I do not own your fear nor am I obligated to acknowledge your fear.
Your fear is nothing to me.
It was one of the great failures of the Humanities that it did not step in and offer society a broader range of understanding the COVID moment and properly situate it in a broader context.
There are many reasons why this is the case.
On the one hand, the Humanities is all but dead, having been replaced by the Identities, as a humanistic discourse has given way to identity concerns (but this is a topic for another day).
On the other hand, most professors in the Humanities did not learn the lessons of the Humanities and instead became the mimetic reflection of fear and hysteria itself.
All the grand pontification on matters of philosophy, literature, history and art—the immensity of human understandings and conceptualizations on life and death, that grand thesaurus of knowledge and insight—was simply swept away in a frenzy of fear and myopia.
Like almost everyone else, those scholars of the Humanities could hardly see through the cloud of their own contaminated air as it fogged up their glasses, which lingered haphazardly above their mask. The mask gave them a sense of security in the face of fear, though the fogging of their glasses suggested a different paradigm of understanding that escaped their omniscient gaze.
What could have the Humanities offered, had professors in the Humanities encoded their knowledge in their interpretation of the COVID moment?
It will be one of the great lessons of COVID: there was a moment when human consciousness could have been elevated. That moment was quickly passed by, when it was decided to “nudge” people into fear and hysteria.
Fear and hysteria are the enemies of enlightenment, elevated consciousness, and understanding.
The Humanities were an utter and complete failure in the face of COVID.
Let me be generous for a moment.
I understand your fear. I truly do. I understand your fear of COVID and Death.
You will Die. Trust me. It can happen in a million ways at any time. You probably are not going to die of COVID. For the vast majority of people on Earth over the last two years—as you scurried from your house to a store and back to your house, masked and covered in sanitizer—you were in far more danger of a million other things than you were of COVID.
Take for example the chart below, your odds of dying. According to the Covid Risk Calculator out of Oxford University I have a 1/100,000 chance of catching and dying of COVID, which puts be somewhere in between being mauled to death by dogs and being electrocuted to death by lightning.
Is it proper for me to be afraid of COVID?
No.
For others, certainly.
But for me, not really.
And even if I were 85 with 6 comorbidities should I be afraid of COVID?
The answer to this is No.
Death is nothing to us.
Situating risk of COVID in its proper valence is not really part and parcel of the Humanities.
But the lessons of the Humanities are deeper and more profound, and truly they provide the cure to COVID.
I do implore you, everyone reading this, whether or not you have chosen the medical interventions of the Pfizer inoculations (we ought to stop calling them vaccines at this point, ok?) or you have chosen some other intervention which may or may not work, I do implore each of you to read Moby-Dick. Of course, you could read the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Iliad or the Confessions or the Decameron…each will cure you of COVID in a different way, but Moby-Dick will cure you entirely.
I am not giving you medical advice.
Please don’t mistake me.
I am giving you something more efficacious, something that can cure your fear and hysteria. Something that might mend your broken spirit, that thing inside split in two by the day to day onslaught on your soul by the foul-mouth of Fauci or the rasping spittle of Trudeau.
Chapter 93: The Castaway
But we are all in the hands of the Gods; and Pip jumped again. It was under very similar circumstances to the first performance; but this time he did not breast out the line; and hence, when the whale started to run, Pip was left behind on the sea, like a hurried traveller’s trunk. Alas! Stubb was but too true to his word. It was a beautiful, bounteous, blue day; the spangled sea calm and cool, and flatly stretching away, all round, to the horizon, like gold-beater’s skin hammered out to the extremest. Bobbing up and down in that sea, Pip’s ebon head showed like a head of cloves. No boat-knife was lifted when he fell so rapidly astern. Stubb’s inexorable back was turned upon him; and the whale was winged. In three minutes, a whole mile of shoreless ocean was between Pip and Stubb. Out from the centre of the sea, poor Pip turned his crisp, curling, black head to the sun, another lonely castaway, though the loftiest and the brightest.
Now, in calm weather, to swim in the open ocean is as easy to the practised swimmer as to ride in a spring-carriage ashore. But the awful lonesomeness is intolerable. The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it? Mark, how when sailors in a dead calm bathe in the open sea—mark how closely they hug their ship and only coast along her sides…
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
But I must let you know, you cannot drag me down into your dystopia or fear.
I am sorry. It is not possible.
There has not been a single day when I have feared COVID, not at the beginning or now or in the future. I have not feared the air, or the door knob, or the closed space of the elevator, or my friends or my family.
I didn’t fear COVID when my children contracted it (according to the COVID Risk Calculator they stand at about a 1/1,000,000 chance of contracting it and dying) and I didn't fear it when I contracted it from them.
And in forty years as the COVID-Flu season returns, like it will have year after year after year, when my frail, broken body slowly creeps through the mortal darkness of my mind, I will not fear COVID. I will not fear death.
Death is nothing to us.