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Title: Out Of The Iron Lung Author: Anonymous Date: April 2, 2020 Language: en Topics: COVID-19, health Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-06 from https://itsgoingdown.org/out-of-the-iron-lung-a-miasma-theory-of-coronavirus/
I have often suspected, that there may be in the Air some yet more
latent Qualities or Powers differing enough from all these, and
principally due to the Substantial Parts or Ingredients, whereof it
consist
For this is not as many imagine a simple and elementary body, but a
confused aggregate of ‘effluviums’ from such differing bodies, that,
though they all agree in constituting by their minuteness and various
motions one great mass of fluid matter, yet perhaps there is scarce a
more heterogeneous body in the world.”
– Robert Boyle, Suspicions About The Hidden Realities of the Air
They say: ‘we will return to the new normal.’ This is a blank cheque, a
license to impose whatever conditions they choose.
The first wind’s approach is imperceptible, as is the way of winds. None
of the townsfolk can recall when it started blowing and its arrival is
heralded only by the merest alteration in the dances of dust-motes and
the faintest susurrus in the smoke of the cooking fires. In time it
grows to a tempest of infernal velocity, propelling dust-motes at such
speed they scour flesh to the bone and spreading sparks from the cooking
fires to scorch the four green corners of the earth. Nonetheless, the
townsfolk scarcely notice its presence, so steadily did it begin to
blow. Asked why their limbs are bleeding and their crops burned, they
shrug and say: it must have always been this way.
How quickly this pandemic has caused so many things to go out of the
window. Left shibboleths are abandoned, some deploying irony to ease the
guilt they feel at defenestrating hope from the Overton window. Stalwart
anarchists joke about calling the cops on community members incapable of
following the woolly yet cast-iron strictures of the new normal. For the
liberals, eternal return and World Cup repeats on the telly: for
radicals, the melancholy blanket of humor, which distances as it
comforts.
Woolly for the elite who spread this disease, jet-setting and
handshaking and conveying freight across oceans: cast-iron for
streetwalkers, day-laborers and the coming wave of looters. Expect to be
shot dead, to be dragged wailing from the graveside, to be handed the
cardboard box of ashes.
All laws semi-permeable membranes, to be transgressed in one direction
only.
The second wind, good and golden, is summoned by stately country dances
to keep the bad and bitter away. These quadrilles, the voodoo steps of
which were imputed to the townsfolk by a charlatan jongleur for no
greater price than a slop of stewed tubers and a sack on which to lay
his head, are sworn to conjure vitalising jetstreams from the verdant
south to impregnate the land with green life. And indeed they do, the
fields are emerald and glisten wetly, the pumpkins groan at the seams, a
pungent stench of loam pervades the town. It is too much: an undernote
of dung crescendos in the nose: countless caterpillars wriggle over
unattended infants: the pumpkins burst and rot below an unrelenting
hot-house sky. Gagging in the swampy heat, the townsfolk beg the
balladeer to teach them the counter-clockwise choreography which will
undo all these things and restore the sharp familiar breezes which cut
over the pastures before. But he will not relent, not for gold nor high
office nor the promised caresses of milkmaids, not until every last
grain of the harvest has been handed over in tribute will he finally
undo his mischief and depart in a harlequin swirl, leaving the townsfolk
destitute and eating one another among the fly-blown fields.
To say ‘the new normal’ implies that where we before was something other
than a gross abnormality. It stakes out a semi-permeable membrane, which
we have crossed and may not return.
When the forces of reaction are infinitely and inevitably stronger than
any action we the people may take, can they still be thus named? Had we
not better humble ourselves by exchanging the terms, and admit it is we
who react?
The third wind sets the church bells pealing on All Hallow’s Eve, and
freezes the clappers to the crowns on Easter Day. It is the evil shadow
of the blue sky and the corn-coloured sun, without brightness, without
form, a violent action without source or mass. What the sun raises, it
withers: what the sky smiles upon, it scrapes bare. The townsfolk
recognize this perversity as the true nature of all winds, and have the
priest expel every last one from the town. The atmosphere is dead and
motionless and at last the townsfolk can breathe in peace. Patting one
another’s backs they gratefully exhale, and find they cannot draw in
clean air. Jackdaws and swallows plunge to earth and break their necks,
and the clouds start to come down on the high meadows in titanic,
petrified clots, spatchcocking cattle, raising mushroom-clouds of
spoiled grain. Gagging, tearing at their constricted throats, hating
themselves for what they do, the townsfolk seize the frail and the
sickly and those not of good home and trample the breath from their
lungs. A meagre vintage of consumptive air is bruised out and they fall
to their knees and lap at it gratefully, fanning the feeble breezes over
brows stinking with sweat.
They call it a pandemic, and it is. But better to define pan- by metrics
other than mere geography. There is more that unites Bolsanaro and
Johnson than there is uniting, say, Mohammad Mirmohammadi with the
unnamed Kurds body-bagged in western Iran, which is eastern Kurdistan in
all but reality.
The World Health Organization has sagely observed that corona does not
recognize lines of conflict, and that is true, but it surely recognizes
trade routes between tax havens. In its blindness the virus ignores the
lines we draw on the earth, is funneled precisely through the spaces we
create in the air for the flow of capital. Corona has spread unevenly,
globally, and were the viral bodies to glow bright they would expose the
logic and pattern of ceaseless expansion.
Already, the pandemic has begun to metastasize and find frailer subjects
to consume in Cox’s Bazaar, al-Hawl and Moria, and it will continue to
do so long after the world system has righted itself with force. In its
end as its beginning, it is the people who will die.
But corona is definable as pandemic because of the capitalist class, not
only in the sense that it has found epicentres among that class as well
as among the wretched of the earth, but also because without that class
and what it is doing to the world the virus could not have so spread.
To say this, of course, is to commit the crime of ‘politicizing a
tragedy’. Which is to say, the crime of saying: ‘this is not normal.’
The fourth wind overtakes itself, lifting leaves and litter long before
its chill is felt on the face. Though the surface of the millpond is not
wrinkled by the breeze, a wicked old woman with a pustular growth down
her neck is tumbled into it and drowned. Though the heads of corn do not
waver in the fields, the hayrick is tumbled onto swains as they copulate
in its shadow and breaks their sinful bones. Unable to make out the
origin of these mischiefs, the townsfolk ascribe them to wizardry or the
malice of ghosts. When the gentle kiss of the wind is finally felt by
the burghers and goodwives leaving chapel on a Sunday afternoon, those
few who correlate it to the shepherd-boys now buried in unmarked graves
among the furloughs or the grandmother left to decompose among the roots
of the bulrushes are themselves called mad and frogmarched to the pond
for trial by ducking in its blameless clear waters and interment
thereafter somewhere deep in the fields.
We must take this virus seriously. We must also continue to take
seriously all those things we took seriously before.
At the extreme limit we should properly be seeking to contain this
disease among the Bolsonaros and the Johnsons of this world, to turn it
against them. We the working people of the world have every right to
turn our backs and close our doors (on them and them alone!) and let it
rage out in the private air-lounges and fascist meet-and-greets.
But what we say of our own struggles – that capital will always seek to
consume and co-opt them – is no less true of the response to this
disease. Even now, capitalist states use the virus to impose new
excesses and justify the old, imposing the ‘new normal’ for the people
even as they insist that the old normal must hold for the system.
And so the left are once again left behind, on the back foot, providing
palliatives for terminal ills.
We must return from sentimentality to humanity. To do so, we must take
paths through ancient thickets long thought impermeable.
We must go back, and arrive further ahead than when we started.
The fifth wind brings relief from the steady damp heat of the tropics.
Known to the townsfolk as ‘the doctor’ for its restorative properties,
it is venerated just as any medicine-man is venerated, with profound
suspicion and fear. That which seeds the crops may strip their budding
fruits away; that which sweeps away pallor and disease may keep blowing
until all else is lost. Accordingly the townsfolk curse it, stamping
their feet and shaking their fists and spitting into the air. In this
way they are restored and made grateful for the damp stillness that was
before, and the doctor continues on its lonely way around the earth,
re+juvenating each town it comes to and so finding a home in none.
The liberal ‘resistance’ mocks at the snake-oil salesmen though of
course they have been snake-oiled all along, suckered into believing
that the system which bred this sickness can heal it. Their call is that
the states should be doing more and more competently, as though it is
not the endless, wretched drive for competency which brought us to this
end. As though it were not these margins which necessitate the
immiseration of human capital.
It is globalized capital which is the sticking-plaster and the so-called
sticking-plasters – mutual aid whatsapp groups, degrowth, global
democratic confederalism – which must replace it. See how quickly the
just-in-time deliveries of medicine and groceries fail, how rapidly the
airlines that have been fattening this past half-century need bailouts
to stay afloat. This was never a serious or permanent solution.
The sixth wind catches its own tail, coming upon itself at the point of
its inception over the waters, and so impelling itself onward at greater
velocities to more distant climes. Its strength seems infinite, drawing
power from its own power as it catches itself over and over, swallows
itself, is blown apart in each and every direction, until the original
velocity and vector of its passage is no more chartable than the dance
of the stars. Blowing everywhere at once, it might as well not blow at
all. Its name slips into disuse and even the mariners forget its power.
They would have you believe that the margin between closing all the
borders and imposing martial law on the one hand and surrendering all
control to the diktats of ailing UN technocrats on the other is
impossibly thin. In fact, green gardens and mutual aid abound in it.
“Science, science, science,” the guardians of the old order cry. So let
them have it. There are more sciences in heaven and earth than are
dreamt of in their philosophy.
The seventh wind comes down suddenly from the mountains, unlooked for
and not spoken of by the wise-women or the bards. It strips the fruit
from the vine, scorches the earth and freezes the cattle. The townsfolk
quiver, for they know they will starve, and crucify their bards on the
highest stripped boughs and drive their wise-women into the blasted
meadows to await their fate. But wait: the wise-women are returning with
rare truffles previously obscured by the gross green marrows, with
rich-bodied invertebrates plucked from the overturned earth, with sweet
wine distilled from the spoiled crop of grapes. Such a feast is prepared
as was never before tasted, and the townsfolk rejoice. The crucified
bards wink at the wind as it passes from the land, recognizing it as one
of their own.
When we say that science is as real and unreal as myth, what we mean is
that for all practical purposes we all still live as though the universe
were 6000 years old and created for us to dwell in. We cannot bear it
otherwise, and the denotation of corona as pandemic is testament to
that. And so it becomes a question of which snake-oil is best to live
one’s life by. The liberal fantasy is that the laws of reason and
science will stabilize the system, install technocrats where necessary,
get the job done. This is snake-oil but it appeals greatly, and it can
be tasted on the lips of Labour Party apparatchniks calling on the
British government to do more, mocking Boris Johnson for not washing his
hands. When did we become the nannies of the nanny state? Not far from
here, surely, to calling the cops on joggers.
Rather, the snake-oil most fitting to our times is that old quackery
which holds foul effluvia rise from the foul places of the earth –
swamps, ghettos, wet markets – and are wafted around by the motion of
air, with any close at hand at risk of contagion.
By all means wash your hands. But it is not the physical contact between
loved ones which has caused the spread of this virus any more than the
unthinking genetic twitch of the virus is itself to blame. It is the
disturbance of the very substance of the earth and sky and ocean, the
containment of labour and labourers into certain stinking places which
birthed this disease and the concomitant whirl of shipping-containers
and trade winds which funneled it precisely back into the heart of
empire. Bad winds, night air, raised by the black magic of just-in-time
delivery.
Thus we are freed from the sterile pettiness of social distancing and
personal hygiene, from individual culpability for systemic failure. Thus
we are burdened with the challenge of building a hygienic, spacious,
caring society, in and around the old.
The eighth wind seems to emanate from every point of the compass rose,
chilling the skin, raising the hairs on one’s head. The townsfolk go to
the north to seek for its source and do not find it, and the south
thereafter, the west, the east. In time they realize it must come from
within, and that the thorn stockade they raised around the town and the
furs they wrapped themselves in have only trapped the icy wind inside.
Now they know this it no longer seems fearful, and they strip naked and
burn their fences and are dead of hypochondria before the last ember
grows cold.
Of course, we cannot take miasma theory just as it was, bound up with
the fear of the mob, the unwashed, the filthy. We must go back, and
arrive further forward than where we started.
The sick have sometimes spoken of how necessary it is to be sick, how it
constitutes a refusal of the unasked-for burden of labour. We should not
cast aside our defiant wretchedness in the face of the pandemic. Rather,
we should see this as the greatest test and opportunity of such a
stance.
If 80% of the world is to fall ill, had we not better exchange the
terms, and admit that it is the world which is sick?
“Once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of
therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each
other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick,
pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left
to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its
much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt,” writes
Johanna Hedva. She notes that chronic disease encompasses lifetimes and
so all of time – chronos – defying the capitalist demand that sickness
be a temporary abrogation in the toil of homo economicus. So what of the
acute condition, only a needlepoint – acus – in space and time?
How Can We Stitch Together Our Acute Little Needle Points Of Pain Into A
Permanent Testament?
For a certain few this may mean coughing on the great and the good, each
of us now become the vector of bio-terrorism, should we wish it. But let
us not drift into fantasy, tantamount to irony.
For most of us, this will mean not going back to work. It means staying
home sick and the concomitant rent strike. It means remaining –
politically, actually – sick.
It will mean exchanging the individual benefit, such as it is, of
artificial care to the last gasp of breath for the social benefit of a
healthier world. It will mean stepping out of the iron lung.
The ninth wind is too caustic to be directly borne. Cowled, the priest
steps into it, but scurries back inside the vicarage before he has gone
half a yard. The doctor gets a little further, turning his head away
from the gale and scuttling crabwise across the street before breaking
out in a riot of chilblains and beating on the door of the vicarage,
seeking sanctuary and finding a rejuvenating nip of consecrated wine.
The doughty squire turns his back to the wind entirely and trudges for a
league across his fields. Afterward, whiskers stained claret, he brags
about this to the priest and the doctor, omitting to mention that he not
only sheltered the whole way behind the carthorse now left on a halter
in the graveyard to freeze but left the fields entirely unploughed. Only
the farmer’s sick old aunt, waiting in an outhouse for doctor and priest
that she may be granted permission to die, understands what must be
done. She steps into the perishing wind, nightie whipping round her
skinny ankles.
Liberals mock Trump cronies who assert they will happily die to keep the
Dow Jones afloat. Where is our equivalent offer? What will we die for,
if not one another? Are we willing to contract deadly disease, in this
pandemic or the next, delivering sustenance to elderly neighbours? To
black-market ventilators out of windscreen-wiper motors and sheets of
plywood? To be arrested breaking quarantine in the act of doing what is
right and thrown into the plague-pits operated by the new normal, which
look rather like the plague-pits of centuries past? To be the
edelweißpiraten of the new normal? To step out of the iron lung?
What if the grand sacrifice you are called to make looks like cooking
dahl for pensioners far away from any front line, and embracing them
recklessly in their final agony? What if it looks like accepting a life
ten years shorter and harder on the hands? What if it looks like a
cytokine storm shredding the organs? What if it looks like the final
wind, which cannot and must not be resisted, for if you do it will break
your bones, turn you inside out, tear you limb from limb and leave you
gutless and floating on the breeze? What if the only thing to be done is
to be borne with it, to allow it to enter into you, to be aloft? In this
way you may survive for a year or two; perhaps more. We must hope that
it will be more. Sooner or later we will realize no wind now blows, save
that constituted of our own drifting flesh. Perhaps there never was. In
any case, we have chosen our path, and must be borne with it wherever it
will go.
Are you prepared for the conscientious objection from health?