Seventh Day: Robinson? C’est Moi!

December 29, 2020

This will be my final entry since I have set my eyes on the horizon most of these past days and toward a possible world to come. Still, as of this date in late December, exactly six months since I began these reflections, the pandemic is still not over, and not even the ending is in sight. Help may be on the way, according to the message in the bottle, but it has not yet arrived, and not another soul has stepped foot on the beach of my desert island and raised their arms with the promise of a lasting and tearful embrace. Nevertheless, I will not waste any time left on the island by dipping my feet into the shallow waters of platitude concerning “lessons learned.” My only purpose was to record some of the more deleterious effects of my own solitude and to give some words of hope (and caution) for the benefit of fellow castaways who have been locked down on their own desert islands. Even though I stated at the beginning of this fictional monologue of a castaway on a desert island that I was pretending to speak for everybody (tout le monde), I am also very well aware that I have not speaking for “everyone.” There are still “others” who have either chosen to remain or have been stranded on the mainland—so-called first responders, including doctors, nurses, bus drivers, and grocery clerks. Of course, as in the case of every plague in history, the poorest classes have been left behind by those who have the means of escaping to their own islands. However, I have never held any pretense of “speaking for them” like so many liberal journalists and intellectuals have done over the past six months from the relative safety of their own desert islands. (The very act of speaking to all the others for the others is the kind of hypocritical doublespeak that intellectuals are historically guilty for engaging in, even when we were not in a pandemic or plague.) Besides, during the periods of the lockdowns, even bus drivers and grocery clerks were forced to return each night to their own islands, even though this resulted in the spread of the contagion to members of their families and loved ones, and so I hope that some part of my monologue can still speak to them, if not for them, as well. So instead of standing on the beach searching the horizon for the first signs of Celan’s airplane, this morning I went back into the part of my retreat where I have stored my library on a stone shelf where the dampness didn’t get to it, and I found my sun-bleached copy of Camus’s La Peste. I thought it might be a better use of my time reading the ending to discover any “lessons learned” from the last plague, especially since the difference between the plague recounted by Camus’s narrator and our own is only a change of one consonant—that is, bats instead of rats.

As the reader may recall, the novel recounts the events of a fictional plague that occurs in the town of Oran on the northern Algerian coast in the year “194X.” The narrator is later revealed to be Dr. Bernard Rieux, a physician and “first responder,” who chronicles the events of the plague that begins on April 16 and lasts for almost a full year, officially ending on January 25. Before the lockdown began, I was still teaching an undergraduate course at the university on “existentialism,” and Camus’s later novels L’Etranger and La Chute were on the syllabus for the spring semester, but I decided not to teach La Peste because of its length and also because I didn’t believe that the novel would speak as resonantly to a group of twenty-year-old undergraduates. Therefore, it was a bit of an irony when reports of the Covid-19 virus that supposedly was spreading from Wuhan, China, began circulating in the media beginning around the end of January 2020, and then gained in volume and proximity to the campus until the shutdown of the university occurred on March 16—one month before the fictional date of the beginning of the plague in the novel—and I was forced to teach online from my new desert island post in Fayetteville, a small village on the Finger Lakes outside Syracuse, New York.

It was then that I threw the rest of the course syllabus out and assigned the novel to the students—most of whom were now secluded at home with their families, or locked down in small apartments around Syracuse, especially the international students who couldn’t travel home by mid-March—asking them to read one part each week and keep a personal diary of their own experiences of the time of plague that they were now also living through. We immediately discovered an “uncanny” verisimilitude between Dr. Rieux’s account of the pattern of events that took place in the city of Oran that fateful spring and the events that were unfolding daily through media reports and through our own experiences of the reactions on the part of our own “townspeople.” This included the initial state of denial concerning the reality of the plague, which was most prominently vocalized by politicians, but also realized through the reactions of reckless and wanton behavior on the part of the people themselves. However, this was soon followed by expressions of panic and fear as the reality of the pandemic finally sunk in among most, which occurred about a month later (mid-May in the novel and around mid-April in real life) when the tangible evidence of the plague could be quantified in the number of corpses it produced each day, or in the media footage of corpses piled on top of one another in the makeshift morgues in hospital gift shops, in long rows of refrigerated trucks that lined the streets around the hospitals in New York city, and, finally, in pictures of soccer stadiums converted into either ICU wards or morgues in European cities like Madrid, Barcelona, Venice, and Milan.

This synchronicity continued throughout each chapter of the novel, corresponding to each week of the pandemic between the months of March and early May, and I can only recommend that readers put this novel on their own desert island reading list or, if they didn’t think to pack it before the shipwreck, that they take some time if and when they return home to read it. I could go on recounting the details of Camus’s somewhat prophetic description of our own time of plague, but instead will simply quote an observation made by Rieux that appears as a long internal monologue in the first chapter, since I believe its relevance will be more than apparent to the contemporary reader and fellow castaway:

A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions. Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

It is from this passage we might understand the significance of the epilogue from Defoe’s own plague diaries, which Camus chose for the novel, and that states as a rule of genre that one kind of imprisonment can be represented by another, just as it is allowable to represent anything that really exists by something that does not. In other words, a plague or a pandemic is also a kind of imprisonment, or existential loss of freedom, just as the kind of imprisonment that a pandemic necessarily entails can also be represented by the fiction of living on a desert island. (At least, this is how I have understood the law of genre that governs Camus’s own fictional account of the plague in “194X” and have simply applied it to govern my own fictional account of living on a desert island during the time of the pandemic in 2020).

At this point, however, I will now skip to the conclusion of the novel in part five, which takes place in the month of January. Given the uncanny accuracy of Camus’s description of the train of events that took place during the first eight months since the pandemic began, especially when the gates to the city were shut and the townspeople were forced to “shelter in place,” one would naturally guess that his account of the last month of the plague, before it suddenly dissipated on or around January 25, will be equally clairvoyant. So I retrieved my copy again and began to mark up passages from a past that seemed like accurate predictions of my future. Soon, however, I realized that I had highlighted so many parts with a piece of charcoal I had drawn from the fire that the pages were now black and almost illegible. Consequently, I have decided to quote two passages from the end of the account that take place the moment when the plague began to retreat from the city and the people began to come out of their isolation, since this is the day that most of us have been dreaming of for the better part of 2020.

Over a relatively brief period the disease lost practically all the gains piled up over many months. Its setbacks with seemingly predestined victims, like Grand and Rieux’s girl patient, its bursts of activity for two or three days in some districts synchronizing with its total disappearance from others, its new practice of multiplying its victims on, say, a Monday, and on Wednesday letting almost all escape, in short, its accesses of violence followed by spells of complete inactivity, all these gave an impression that its energy was flagging, out of exhaustion and exasperation, and it was losing, with its self-command, the ruthless, almost mathematical efficiency that had been its trump card hitherto. Of a sudden Castel’s anti-plague injections scored frequent successes, denied it until now. Indeed, all the treatments the doctors had tentatively employed, without definite results, now seemed almost uniformly efficacious. It was as if the plague had been hounded down and cornered, and its sudden weakness lent new strength to the blunted weapons so far used against it. Only at rare moments did the disease brace itself and make as it were a blind and fatal leap at three or four patients whose recovery had been expected, a truly ill-starred few, killed off when hope ran highest.

[ . . . ]

It must, however, be admitted that our fellow citizens’ reactions during that month were diverse to the point of incoherence. More precisely, they fluctuated between high optimism and extreme depression. Hence the odd circumstance that several more attempts to escape took place at the very moment when the statistics were most encouraging. This took the authorities by surprise, and, apparently, the sentries too, since most of the “escapists” brought it off. But, looking into it, one saw that people who tried to escape at this time were prompted by quite understandable motives. Some of them the plague had imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature; they had become allergic to hope in any form. Thus, even when the plague had run its course, they went on living by its standards. They were, in short, behind the times. In the case of others, chiefly those who had been living until now in forced separation from those they loved, the rising wind of hope, after all these months of durance and depression, had fanned impatience to a blaze and swept away their self-control. They were seized with a sort of panic at the thought that they might die so near the goal and never see again the ones they loved, and their long privation have no recompense. Thus, though for weary months and months they had endured their long ordeal with dogged perseverance, the first thrill of hope had been enough to shatter what fear and hopelessness had failed to impair. And in the frenzy of their haste, they tried to outstrip the plague, incapable of keeping pace with it up to the end.

Both passages, it seems to me, speak of an exhaustion of sorts. The first passage describes the exhaustion of the virus itself as if it was a marathon runner who finally runs out of the last ounce of energy and collapses on the pavement only a hundred yards from the finish line, or perhaps the exhaustion that occurs when a wildfire that has raged through the countryside and burned over a million acres, including houses and livestock, finally smolders and dies because of the lack of any more fuel. The second sense of exhaustion concerns the hope and perseverance of the townspeople themselves, many of whom exhibit completely opposite reactions ranging from skepticism and denial (“Thus, even when the plague had run its course, they went on living by its standards”), to panic and complete loss of self-control (“And in the frenzy of their haste they tried to outstrip the plague, incapable of keeping pace with it up to the end”). In both senses, Camus seems to record a strange symmetry between the plague and the people, as if they were parts of the same organism and thus expressed the same pattern of behavior because they were one living thing.

The most visible signs of this parallelism can be seen in the sudden outburst of frenetic and desperate activity that occurs in both parts of the organism simultaneously, which can be explained physiologically as a common symptom that happens when an animal is about to die and it suddenly exhibits an increase in expenditure of its last ounce of energy, or its last gasp of breath. For example, I have heard stories from hunters of an elk that had been shot in the heart, which manages to run several more miles even though it was already physiologically dead, or of a plane accident victim who walks away from the crash and gets several miles before finally collapsing, even though the victim was missing half of his head and was already brain-dead. Consequently, in the passages above we seem to witness a similar phenomenon on the part of the plague, which in the end seemed to “brace itself and make as it were a blind and fatal leap at three or four patients whose recovery had been expected,” and the townspeople, for whom “the rising wind of hope, after all these months of durance and depression, had fanned impatience to a blaze and swept away their self-control.”

At this point, I will longer maintain the fiction of my desert island genre, and so I will refer to contemporary events to further illustrate this strange parallelism, or rather, this underlying symmetry between the behavior of the virus and human behavior that seems to imply that they are both parts of the same giant organism. For example, in the last weeks of December 2020, it seemed that the virus was finally defeated, with the approval of the vaccines for Covid-19, and the politicians and the media were uniformly declaring we were now close to the end of the pandemic. However, almost on exactly the same day that vaccines were beginning to be administered in the UK, there was the sudden discovery of a new variant that appeared exactly as if the virus was indeed bracing itself and making a desperate leap at the human populations again, immediately prompting a new and more severe round of lock-down orders across the European continent and the banning of passengers on flights from the UK to almost every airport around the world. In other words, just at the moment when the gates to the city of Oran were opened, they were quickly slammed shut again and the townspeople were again prisoners of the same pestilence. If this synchronicity of events is not already compelling enough, one only has to consider the fact that the date of the appearance of the new variant of Covid-19, which is now raging around the globe, occurs almost exactly one year from the first visible appearance of the virus in Wuhan, Verona, and Seattle toward the end of December 2019.

Concerning similar signs of “impatience” that have occurred almost simultaneously in the human part of the organism, I will quote from an email (i.e., “message in a bottle”) I received this morning from a former student in Seoul, Korea. After wishing me a “Happy 2021,” the student reports: “Although I can’t compare it to the U.K., South Korea is also really serious. The number of confirmed covid-19 cases has exceeded 1,000 per day. Many people are still going out for their own enjoyment. It’s tragic.” At the same time, there has been a rise in the number of what Camus calls “escapists” in the United States, where there has been a remarked increase in signs of impatience and loss of self-control on the part of populations, often culminating in “blind and deadly leaps,” including large gatherings where people refuse to wear masks, and well over one million travelers in airports across the country, even while the number of cases and confirmed deaths continue to blaze and rise higher each day with no ending in sight.

What do we make of this uncanny parallelism, or this strange symmetry of the same pattern of behavior expressed by the virus and the townspeople? At the risk of anthropomorphizing the virus—that is, by applying the motives that are offered to explain the behavior of the human side of the organism to deduce the possible motives for the behavior of the virus—can we impute this “blind and fatal leap” of the virus to something like “exacerbation,” “panic,” “the first thrill of hope,” “frenzy,” “rage,” or “desperate bid for freedom”? As I was meditating on this question, I recalled a passage from the last chapter of Whitehead’s Process and Reality—a book I didn’t think to bring with me, and so I don’t even need to maintain the fiction of my desert island library in this case—where he defines the essential characteristic of life as a kind of desperate “bid for more freedom.” If I recall the passage correctly, Whitehead ascribes to nature something like a motive that appears behind every act of theft or robbery, in which life steals through the environment comprising both organic and inorganic societies in order to find “an empty space in a desperate bid for freedom,” which he further defines as an intense “craving for satisfaction.” For example, is this comparable to the empty space that the virus initially found in the living cells of bats, which then, in pursuing its own satisfaction, led the virus on a chain of robberies through the empty spaces it then discovered in the respiratory system of the human populations? To recall Deleuze’s question from the previous meditation concerning whether or not sexuality can offer us the fantastic principle that replaces an “origin” with a “goal” (i.e., becoming), in his definition of nature I believe that Whitehead already offers us an even more fantastic principle, which is the principle of life itself, since life has no “origin” and knows only becomings. In fact, the principle also recalls Heidegger’s earlier definition of life is “a domain of openness which possesses as wealth [i.e., becoming] with which the human world [and human sexuality in particular] may have nothing to compare.”

To this image of viral life we must now pose another image that appears in Camus’s description of the completely opposite reaction on the part of the townspeople: “Some of them the plague had imbued with a skepticism so thorough that it was now a second nature; they had become allergic to hope in any form. Thus, even when the plague had run its course, they went on living by its standards.” What would it mean to continue to live by the standards established by the pandemic? To maintain social distancing, to continue to wear masks even after the last signs of the virus have dissipated in memory? Or, according to the thesis I have been pursuing throughout the course of these meditations, to continue to live in a world without others? In my view, this is the prophetic vision that Camus already offers us at the conclusion of the last plague, and which I will adapt to describe our own post-Covid world: a world in which roughly half the human population continues to live on a desert island (although, certainly, only the half that has the means to afford it), while the other half is forced to live with the deleterious effects of the pandemic and who must risk their life daily in their desperate bid for freedom (i.e., satisfaction, justice, the right to inhabit, etc.).

To conclude today’s last reflection, I have often been astonished during the past six months by the admiration extolled to those societies for their “resilience” in defending themselves against the virus—by virtue of the fact that they are also the most closed, ethnocentric, politically totalitarian, and immunologically controlled! If I were now to speculate concerning this new immunological order that will emerge as a principle of sovereignty to govern the global system in the post-Covid environment, I might define this principle according to the following maxim: the most beautiful world is also that which is perfectly closed. Thus it would be a world that has managed to seal off every empty space, and every orifice among its human population, precisely to prevent life from breaking in in its own bid for freedom. (It would be like the moon, or a planet, like Uranus.) First, however, to create the most perfect society, it will be necessary first to change the species. In other words, if the Greeks had established the concept of the previous world, since the time of Aristotle, by defining its primary inhabitants as “political animals” (that is, animals who live in a city and thus whose primary trait is defined as “sociability”), then the concept of the world that is being fashioned by the new immunological order is certainly no longer Greek. In fact, the primary problem with the Greek concept of the world according to an immunological point of view is that it left open too many empty spaces for life to break in. As far as the new world and its inhabitants, therefore, we are no longer even “late-born Greeks,” like Heidegger, but rather “posthuman.” And perhaps the posthuman will one day be defined by ethnologists as “the most solitary animal” (animal solitarium), the animal that will have been discovered to have lived alone on a desert island, who was reported to be heard on some nights calling out to himself from deep inside his cave—“Robinson?” Followed by the reply—“C’est moi!”