Stress Test

From some angles, it seems as though we’re only the medium of transmission for things far lighter than bodies, lighter even than air, entities moving through us as sound moves as a wave through air. As every new wave of frontline infantry dies off in the ensuing battles, the lines remain stationary on their planned trajectory as another steps in to fill their place. Even when lives try to center themselves, that centering decenters life in the end, creating some spiritual object representing life. Souls and their eternal relations come to replace the lives they were created to represent and soon “The People” writes itself over persons. Some have theorized that the only way to truly represent human life is to give the voice of humanity the center stage, a state of all against all giving each life its own chance to voice its actions before anything alien can.

As is often reminded by Radio War Nerd’s commentary on biological warfare, the Black Death and the lesser plagues like it, have always had the distinction of how little they ultimately affected the situations of their victims. With the largest loss of life in human history, the Black Death accounted for almost nothing, in terms of systemic impacts. Even the Hundred Years War was only put on pause, with the underlying feudal structures carrying on perfectly capable of adapting to the loss of human capital. It’s always the dream of collapse fetishists that a pandemic striking the great liquid mass of flesh would somehow turn around and do the opposite, cause systemic shocks and leave human life free to flourish.

We’ve been asked under quarantine to return home. In all this, “essential businesses” have remained opening and well functioning. More importantly than that, their supply chains perfectly capable of functioning as long as expendable flesh can be cycled freely, its systems of pure systemic matter that have flourished. Systems of art are being fed more than ever, every proper noun online doubling, tripling their content production, as the internet faces, more usage than ever before, with online streaming platforms buckling under the intensive load of the newly-made NEETs desperate to hold them on through their isolation.

Every disease seems to take the people, infected before the organism ever came to be by the linguistic parasitism of their cultural moment, into a direction that was already contained within themselves. Yersinia pestis took the medieval body, so commonly made grotesque in the imagination of the time, exploded as it was often imagined to, the skin bulging out with septic fluid. Malaria came from the darkest tropics to infest the victim as if a product of a magic spell outside science and time, the first manifesting symptom being the overwhelming fear and anxiety as fever sets in. Smallpox, as it ravaged within the American continent centuries ahead of European colonization, turned flesh fo the formerly stable into scabbed, sickly parodies of what they once were, their societies seeming to be hollowed from within. Spanish influenza, just as the season of modernism and the Century of Language took off, struck down the most virile and young. And now, SARS-CoV-2, in “The Age of Loneliness” as Felix Biederman calls it, a disease comes along where the given protocol, perhaps more felt than the disease itself, is the enforced quarantine and distancing imposed in fear of its spectre.