What is amiss, plague and infection mend.

While the jester gambols, more and more seems to be for sale. The title line comes from Timon of Athens, where it appears in Timon’s last speech in the play:*

TIMON 
Come not to me again, but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood,
Who once a day with his embossèd froth
The turbulent surge shall cover. Thither come
And let my gravestone be your oracle.
Lips, let four words go by and language end.
What is amiss, plague and infection mend.
Graves only be men’s works, and death their gain.
Sun, hide thy beams. Timon hath done his reign.
(Timon exits.)

Timon of Athens 5.2.246-55

Of course, the “salt flood” of climate change aside, Timon’s words have increased gravity when there is an actual plague. This past week, not only have world markets plummeted due to the rising threat of a pandemic from Covid 19 or Coronavirus, but travel has become increasingly restricted while people in China and elsewhere have been almost completely confined to their homes or flats. Is this new plague some cosmic way of mending what is amiss? Is it, as Herodotus might have claimed, a kind of judgment visited upon us by the gods? Is it like the recent Pandolph and Bardo New Yorker cartoon?

“And, for being careless with the environment, put tiny, hard-to-remove stickers on all their fruit.”**

Of course, a rapidly spreading, sometimes fatal disease is not a joking matter. The deaths are terribly sobering, and the rapid spread remains alarming, in spite of the assurances given by politicians thundering that it’s “all under control” while that seems to be contradicted by a lack of concrete details about any real virus plans being in place, a lack of organisation on the ground, and a lack of any details about what really happens as the Covid 19 infection spreads.

Some wonder if it is the result of Nature thrown out of balance by our poor stewardship–not a direct judgment as much as a kind of consequence. Still, at this point, perhaps we should look at the spread of disease as Thucydides did–carefully recording the behaviour of the virus as it moves through the population–the kind of observation that might aid us in the future more than any evaluation of what the sudden appearance of the virus might mean in some larger hypothetical moral construct.

Still, it may be difficult not to see it that way too–or at least as some kind of force of nature. The plague that Timon casually invokes as a mender is, of course, usually more of a disruptor, which is part of Timon’s point. Death ultimately renders all humanity the same.

In Albert Camus’ novel La Peste (the Plague), the doctor initially finds dead rats in the hallway of his building, and believes that they have been discarded after being caught in strong steel traps. The rats have actually died of the plague, and are directly reminiscent of the historic plagues that swept through Europe at various times (including several times during Shakespeare’s life). The rats also reflect the citizens of the Algerian city of Oran in which the novel takes place, who are variously trapped by the plague that exercises an increasing hold over the lives of both sick and well alike.

In Shakespeare’s play, the disillusioned Timon has reached an end, having seen the rise and fall of human fortune and the vanity of earthly things. He largely dismisses human life, seeing it as ending only in a grave. In contrast, Camus’ Dr. Rieux fights for life, but without having a definite subscription to any given religious or moral perspective. Fighting for his patients and his community’s health against great odds seems more like something he simply does as part and parcel of his human condition. His conviction seems to be to human life itself. As he says, “I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.”***

Marina Warner notes:

Far from being a study in existential disaffection, as I had so badly misremembered, The Plague is about courage, about engagement, about paltriness and generosity, about small heroism and large cowardice, and about all kinds of profoundly humanist problems, such as love and goodness, happiness and mutual connection. Camus published the novel in 1947 and his town’s sealed city gates embody the borders imposed by the Nazi occupation, while the ethical choices of its inhabitants build a dramatic representation of the different positions taken by the French. He etches with his sharp, implacable burin questions that need to be faced now more than ever in the resistance to terrorism. Perhaps even more than when La Peste was published, the novel works with the stuff of fear and shame, with bonds that tie and antagonisms that sever.****

In the end, perhaps Shakespeare and Middleton***** in 1605, and Camus in 1947, are looking at their subject through only slightly different lenses, offering perspective slices of human experience. Humanity has always faced scary times, some of which arrive with contagious and potentially fatal diseases. Human history, and our literature, is replete with stories of disease, with tales of plague, along with the other stories of misfortune that we tell. That such stories are so common offers little consolation to those who lose their lives or to their families. But the stories do remind us that public pronouncements about epidemics being “all being under control” or “being a very small problem” are seldom based in any truth, and it remains ulikely that such reassurances may prove accurate for Covid 19 either. Plagues are like the lightning of the earth, striking where and whom they will and having no real regard for honour or degree.

In this case, there may be some comfort that Covid 19 seems to be much less likely to be fatal to the young.

Could it be worse? Of course it could. Jack London’s 1912 novel, The Scarlet Plague portrays a post apocalyptic world where a plague has killed off the bulk of humankind, obliterating most of human knowledge and understanding along with it. The only people left are largely ignorant and remain divided into rough tribes of hunter gatherers. The main character, an English professor before the plague decimated the world’s population, finds that as the only person who remembers what the world was like before it was swept by disease, his knowledge has become immaterial in a world that has regressed into a much more primitive state.

Seems like there might be something distinctly resonant in London’s largely forgotten work with our world today as well. Do universities students clamour to read Marston or Fletcher these days? How many George Herbert poems can you recall off the top of your head? Or any noted poet? Even Shakespeare? Or is the trend nowadays much more towards money than towards knowledge? More towards profit than understanding? Do we scrabble for a retirement of blissing out before a ‘boob tube’ that these days shows more boobs than ever?

Our nations seem to be increasingly specialised. The United States designs technology that then is built and/or implemented overseas. The current administration may pay lip service to the idea of bringing back a manufacturing base, but that seems likely only to the degree that we might be able/willing to subsidise both the return move and the ongoing maintenance of that manufacturing on local shores. Whatever the mechanism, we seem to have no real need for literature and the arts these days, or at least many people seem to feel that way. Even if there were desire for such diversions, who could really afford them?

Books? Well, yes. If you’ve a taste for that. They seem comparatively slow, however, and old fashioned. There are so few chases in them. And who has the patience after long days in the corporate trenches? Like “reading” a foreign film, who wants to make the effort?

Of course, the ghost strongly believes that such thinking, aside from being ridiculous is also dangerous. Dismissing literature and the arts brushes aside the historical and cultural basis of our ability to think critically, to reason our way through challenges, to address moral conundrums. Only by immersing ourselves in literature and the arts do we learn how to navigate our human experience, because these are the repository of human wisdom in that regard. Without the basis, the map, the compass they provide, we all too often end up lost, or with the leaders we seem to have currently–those blowing storms through the empty vessels of their thunder brows. Sound and fury grasp pathetically at profit alone, and ultimately signify nothing. Such clouds of steam tend to be good at the posturing part of politics (which hides the morally bankrupt rot that forms their core) until real action is needed. When true crises arrive, citizens are most frequently left wading through the flood alone. Don’t believe me? Wait and see. Anyone remember Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans? Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico? Anyone remember the administrative response? Christian lip service hang thy head in deepest shame.

In the end, perhaps what we need most is humour. Laughter will see us through almost anything. It even tends to make an inevitable end more graceful.

CUT TO: Two men having a silly discussion in the middle of the night, when the topic turns to Hamlet.

Suddenly one man notes that, in a world as wealthy as this one, no household should be without ham. “Hamless! That would be the real tragedy,” he quips. He notes that someone should write that, and perhaps someone will do so.

Well said. But we must also consider the vegetarians, for the heavenly father feedeth them in their better considerations for the earth. Vegetarian ham? Eggs? Haggis?

All good until the plant kingdom rises up to take us down. “I really got hot when I saw Janette Scott fight a Triffid that spits poison and kills.”*******

Day of the Triffids? Day of the lipids? Day of the lipstick? If the viruses don’t get us, and we don’t get us, something else will. Something will for certain.

Let’s just hope to hell it isn’t chocolate. If that goes bad, the ghost might not make it to the next post, regardless of how loathe I am to leave all of you out there on your own. Have a good week in any case and we’ll see you next time.

*The word plague appears at least ten times in Timon of Athens, and the word is only used more (13 times) in 1 Henry IV, where Falstaff uses the word repeatedly as an oath.

**Cartoon by Corey Pandolph and Craig Baldo. More may be seen on the New Yorker website: https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a21426

***Camus, Albert. The Plague ; Translated by Stuart Gilbert. London: Hutchinson, 1967, p. 127.

****“Marina Warner on The Plague by Albert Camus.” The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, April 26, 2003. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/apr/26/classics.albertcamus.

*****Timon of Athens is thought to have been a collaboration between Shakespeare and Middleton, which John Jowett stresses makes the play “all the more interesting because the text articulates a dialogue between two dramatists of a very different temper.” Shakespeare, William. The Life of Timon of Athens. Edited by John Jowett. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 2.

******More about this and other interesting images at the Science photo library website: https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/300629/view

*******Lyrics from Science Fiction Double Feature. O’Brien, Tim. The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Rhino records, 1987.