A Digest of the Plague Years

I had been the author of unalterable evils, and I lived in daily fear lest the monster whom I had created should perpetrate some new wickedness. I had an obscure feeling that all was not over and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past. There was always scope for fear so long as anything I loved remained behind. My abhorrence of this fiend cannot be conceived. When I thought of him I gnashed my teeth, my eyes became inflamed, and I ardently wished to extinguish that life which I had so thoughtlessly bestowed. —Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. —H.P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness” In the new century, I think we will all be insane. —Angels in America: Millennium Approaches We shall begin with the gnashing of the teeth. From there, we will then proceed to discuss the abnormalities and the nightmares, and the question of madness as it relates to our collective experience of time. But for now, let us talk about Frankenstein, and maybe we will spend a moment with Hamlet. He was crazy too. Moreover, as we all know, the time is out of joint, and my clavicle is broken. Here is the ghost, here is the monster, here is the sad attempt to tell the story as if it was not always already going to be out of order. This is not the beginning but this is how we must begin. Since I started this week with thirty stitches in my face, feeling very much like a dull brocade, I find myself turning to Shelley because her monster seems a kindred soul, a kind of shallow reflection of the thing I have become, that I am in the process of becoming. My physical body has taken on many of the traits of my metaphorical being; that is, the creature that inhabits my mind, whether I am awake or I am asleep. This is the creature I become when I teach, the one that my students see when they see me at my most dynamic, those moments when I have triggered the mania and it is no longer I who am teaching but the mood. This is the creature my students love. They do not notice that it is a construct. That it is an act. That we are all together making a joke. They do not see that it is a costume. They do not see the stitching or the seams. But now, wandering the Paris airport, I have become this creature, this costume. I am the monster I dressed as when I let the mania become me. I am nothing more than a collation of pieces held together by nylon and gauze, chutzpah and hope. This monster, it should be made clear, is not the emblem of some grave modernist consequence. No echo of Promethean hubris, no emissary of Sisyphean indulgence, neither titan nor god, the monster I have become, that I am becoming, takes the form of a some kind of goofy filigree, a poorly executed, adolescent sewing project, the stitching of a which looks to yield a most inauspicious counterpane. I am the darning that composes a smallpox blanket; I am a rag doll fashioned by a near-sighted seamstress. I do not know if I bear responsibility for what I have become, for what I am becoming, but at this moment, none of this matters. For whatever reason, I know that this is where we must begin, even though I do not know the exact reason why. I do not ask too many questions. This is a game, and I fear I am on the verge of losing my turn. What I do know, however, is that it is important to begin with the gnashing of teeth because from the gnashing of teeth we get to the Paris airport and from the Paris airport we get to the seizures, and from the seizures we get to the police station and the emergency room, the lingering symptoms of anterograde amnesia, the hallucinations, and the generally unwelcome—though not terribly shocking—diagnosis of epilepsy. It is important to begin with the amnesia and the epilepsy so you can understand why this digest takes the form it takes. I have difficulty making new memories so everything occurs to me in fragments, and during a seizure I typically black out. Free association has my only reliable mode of address, the only way I can make myself understood. Sadly, as of yet, I have not been able to convince my analyst that “free association” means that our sessions are gratis. But there are few others who speak the language as well as she. The gnashing of the teeth. When did I start doing that? It only became obvious during quarantine, well into the third month of the virus, when I noticed that I had cracked a tooth, and that I cracked it while I was asleep. At the time, I was just one of many who shared this complaint. During the pandemic, dentists the world over reported a near epidemic of cracked teeth; and while they agreed this phenomenon was somehow cognate with the time of the pandemic, they differed as to how best to understand the correlation. While some portion of such a noteworthy statistical abnormality might have been occasioned by the overall lapse in personal hygiene that came with the lockdown, most professionals were inclined to believe this deluge of broken teeth was a consequence of the stress of the quarantine, and our slow yet unwilling submission to the syrupy joy of that thing we had only just started to think of as COVID time. You know what I am talking about. COVID time: that wax-like substance through which we came to move. That clock-like thing which could be either hard or soft, solid or liquid, sap or amber, with no clear sense of reason or cause or flow. The virus amplified the narcotic aspects of time, illustrating its properties as a drug, its more addictive qualities, and the pathetic fact of our dependency on it, whatever it was. Whether snorted or injected, we needed it, and we would strip the copper from out the walls just to pay for it. Inasmuch as a shared understanding of time provided one of the largely ineffable architectonics that supported and sustained our collective sense of mutuality, quarantine slowed some things down and sped some other things up; but as it dragged on, the crisis became banal, and panic somehow merged with our sense of the normal, making us all into junkies of both the everyday and the uttermost, addicted to the highs and the lows, the euphoria of the dope and the agony of its denial. That is to say, our cracked teeth were the most conspicuous sign of the slow violence of the pandemic, of the ways in which our bodies, all bodies, were burdened by the physicality of the virus, the ways in which the virus as metaphor began to manifest itself as a dimension of our physical being, even among those who were not physically ill. The gnashing of the teeth, the cracked molars, the bleeding gums; these were symptoms. Of what no one can be sure. But for now, of this we can be certain: We were cracking our teeth, whether awake or asleep, because our trauma had to go somewhere, and for some reason it decided to go into our mouths. Perhaps this is why I kept biting my tongue. Bite your tongue. Do not speak. Cover your mouth. Do not inhale. Respiration is communion, an inconspicuous commingling; to breathe is to be accomplice to murder. To speak is to confess. “Each man kills the thing he loves…with a flattering word…with a kiss…Some do the deed with many tears, and some without a sigh…” Oscar understood. He knew that peril resided in the mouth, in what went in, and what came out. Permeable membrane, transfer station: the mouth is the point at which we are revealed to the other, if not quite to ourselves; the place we admit the physicality of the other and some portion of those things that are other within ourselves. Inherently uncanny, we have invented all sorts of arcana—around consumption, and around speech—so we might pretend that we are still hidden, when we are only ever hidden from ourselves. If I stress the grinding of my teeth as a symptom of something that remains unspeakable, it is only because so much seems to begin with my mouth: my seizures, my depression, my mania, my anorexia, my bulimia. My mouth has become an orifice of the excremental, the membrane through which the poison escapes its fleshy prison and slips into the realm of linguistic exchange and social subjectivity. The seizures always begin with my mouth. This is why I do not eat. Or speak. This is why I throw up. Nobody says it to me, but I hear that I am fragile. I should have known. It takes a lot of work to hold these pieces together, and I am tired of being on display. I am tired of being made to make decisions. I will tell you what I need or what I want when I know that I need or want it. Until then, please stop with the interrogation. In Paris, the police pinned me to the ground, they handcuffed me to a chair and later to a gurney; later still, a bed. They asked me questions I had no answers to, and I did not believe any of it was real anyway. They insisted they were helping. Everyone is insisting they are helping. The cure for what ails you is to submit to the pain. Harm is the best help. Now, why won’t you tell us what we want to know? Where did you get those cuts on your forehead? What is the meaning of these stigmata? I do not know the answer. But these seizures are mine. They are a message that is meant only for me. I will let you know what they mean when I know what they mean, when I know that I am supposed to let you know what they mean. When the frame is complete and the image comes into focus and the tragedy of geometry is resolved, perhaps then it will all make some kind of sense. Maybe then you will listen without hunting for answers as it answers were abundant. I am tired of having to explain myself. No one gets my jokes. I may as well be back in Paris, speaking my broken French through the mist of the wakeful nightmare, trying to prove that I was real, that I could hold my parts together by force of will, and failing, because none of the rest of it was real so how could I be so what did it matter. I could say whatever I liked because my mouth did not belong to me anyway. The psalmist tried to tell us .“There is no speech or language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.” We belong to the language, and it resides in us; it is not a thing we are owed, or a thing we possess. I am tired of having to explain that I cannot explain myself because nobody wants to hear that and I cannot bring them to understand. But let me try again. This is a joke, and as Freud might have mentioned, jokes are like dreams because they always reveal more than one expects or intends. Of course, he had trouble explaining himself, as well. With that in mind, here we go. Being assaulted in Paris was really the ideal punchline to a joke that had gone on too long, the kicker to an interminable improv routine that I kept on playing out even as the doctors were injecting me with morphine. This was the punchline to the pandemic, to the death of my professional life, to my rebirth as what one might describe as an ensemble of misaligned parts. We start with the ending to probe for the latencies that have haunted us since the beginning, for some clue as to what might be coming, what new monstrosities have heard our anguished call and are coming to meet us, just over the knoll, at the unattainable horizon. This is the negative left by the flash. All that I know is what has been seared into my retina, the photogene of an impossible tableau, of something I saw but did not see and thus cannot remember. All that I know is printed from this negative, this cringingly obsolescent technique of image capture, the only materiality the image might still claim. To the extent I speak of myself all is derived from this negative. This is what happened, and were you here, if you could examine this scrap of film, this is what you might see. I am hollowed, a collection of shadows, obtuse angles, contusions and vacancies. I am equation that is unsolvable, irregular, unbalanced. The reaction is predictable, it is a chemical inevitability; it is ever about to happen. You might see my jaw line, my cheek bones. You might see the bags under my eyes, the only piece of luggage I did not lose in Paris, one of the few pieces of Beirut that has stayed with me. They are the coda to an unsung cantata. Dumb record of all that has happened, they do not give up their secrets as gladly as one might hope; they are there to remind you of what you do not know, a mnemonic that conveys only interminable dread. If you could examine this negative you might see a set of disconsolate limbs moving of their own accord, obliged to dance a tarantella that mimics the vibrato that lives in my teeth. Remember man that you are dust. Another word for what is written on the flesh is hysteria. A leaden memorial that blocks the light of the sun, what is written on the flesh insists upon its veracity. Here is one way to understand our predicament. “The story is a moral one.  I leave its development to my readers.  It would be little flattering to them to suspect they required my assistance, in order to discover the obvious lessons it conveys.” That is Sir John Bowring, English translator of Peter Schemeihl, a German novella by Adelbert de Chamisso de Boncourt, an exiled French aristocrat, that tells of a man who cuts off his shadow and sells it to the Devil, only to find that, without a shadow, he has forsaken his place within the social, made outcast among his fellow citizens and souls. He is abandoned. They cannot hear what he cannot say. This story is one of the threads that winds its way into Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie’s fantasia of childhood and polymorphous perversity. In Peter Pan, the shadows are willful. They come and they go; sometimes they fall off. Sometimes they run away and need to be sewn back on. Within the shadow resides the disloyalty of recollection, the paradox of mind. Looking for the shadows, we cannot see the light; to look to the light, we are blinded to the colors and the shades. There is no way to win under the terms of these rules. Pan, pandemic, pandemonium, Pandora. Dora, d’or, gold, mines, digging. Dora was the first hysteric. Pandora; all Dora, all the time. I wake up in Paris to find that my shadow has been stolen from me; I have to believe that this is some act of benevolence, but it frightens me nonetheless. The shadows on my face are the images of all that has been forgotten; or rather, why has been denied to me. I wish I could tell you what happened but I have been forbidden to speak of it. There are no answers on offer; the text is yours to decipher. I cannot see the text except in reflection and whatever I see can only be delivered in the form of a translation of a translation. It is inherently and perhaps necessarily unreliable. Moreover, I have no confidence in my facility with language; nor do I have much confidence in yours. You rely upon the intimation of structure, as if there were some sort of constant that might serve as. A point of orientation, a polestar by which you might navigate the whimsical menace of the swells. But this sea is old. It is ever more forbidding, twisted and irascible. You cannot see, you cannot understand, that its substance, the minim we call words, are but vibrations, sounds composed of toxins and radiation and applications of liquid smoke. You think the language speaks for you when it is you who speak for the language. When you cannot speak it is the language that will not let itself be spoken, and it is then the gendarme throw you to the ground and press their feet into your back, because they think you are high they think you are high and that you are an Arab and you are indelibly stained by the sand. You left Beirut two days ago and here you are in a police station somewhere in Paris with a boot on your back pressing your broken clavicle into the peeling linoleum because your inability to answer questions is taken as hostility, resistance. The radius of the pain is irregular and indefinite. It is everywhere. You scream the name George Floyd and even though you are certain this is a dream or a scene from a bad long-form improv, you know that is not appropriate; moreover, for the gendarme it is just confusing. What do cops in Paris know about police brutality in Minneapolis? And though you hurt, you can breathe. Still. The pain is a screaming. Circling an indefinite center, it traces the shape of the past as it imposes itself upon the present. The pitch of the now shifts as it moves toward the future. Bent, the sound of the words slip away and with them goes the meaning of the story. Everything becomes muted, dull, low. The tale does not find its realization in the telling but in the malleability of sound, the mobility of the frequencies moving between the treble and the bass. The sacred staff is our only point of reference, the only structure the language will admit, and it is always in danger of breaking, leaving otherwise conversant heptatonic phrasings to come undone, to float away with all sharps and the flats, sounding a new kind of symphony, a deaf-mute opera, a Missa negra that comes to a climax in a banquet of chestnuts. This is a digest of the plague year; of its derangements; of a person and a society deranged. It is a digest of their implications, their repetitions. I begin with this indulgence of autobiography because I am trying to understand the repetitions which I find myself indulging, far from willfully. I begin with Lebanon because that is where I am, the place I call home; the place I wrestle with calling home, the place to which I hold no claim but nonetheless somehow claims me, that lays claim to so many who do and do not belong here, but nonetheless find themselves here, heir to the histories of those many generations of exiles and refugees that, at one time or another, found themselves quarantined on the shores of this land, the banks of this sea. I begin with Lebanon because here there is some unspoken pain we are all trying to master, some loss that cannot be born.  This is a digest of the plague year. It is a digest of the plague years. It is a digest of illness, and of madness. A digest of a time out of joint. It is a digest out of joint, an attempt at telling a story about the plague year that is faithful to the texture of the madness of that year, that does not seek to obscure the madness of that year behind the repressive designs of narrative. Not history, but free association, inasmuch as such a thing is possible. History floating up and off the couch, addressed to someone, to no one, or maybe to someone you have not yet heard, someone just outside your frame of vision, someone who is not listening but, in not listening, is able to hear what we are whispering to each other, what we are writing with our words, the disinclination of our speech. My friend, welcome to the Carpathians. The monster haunts the edge of the water. The monster sees the girl. He thinks about the boy. He thinks about his song. The monster is a collection of disobedient tissues, a melancholy opus of scars. An echo of life, a counterpoint, he hides himself among the rushes. He wishes himself safe in his cave. The sound of his need envelopes all that is near him. He cannot speak but you can almost hear his lamentation. “‘Accursed creator! Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust? God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance. Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but I am solitary and abhorred.’” Taken from the novel, these words only begin to convey the depth of the creature’s suffering; which, for Shelley, is beyond even that of the most accursed foes of God and man. For the creature, it is an existential horror, and his appearance is merely the outward token of his social and spiritual degeneracy. “His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.” While human beings might believe themselves made in the image of God, their physical plenitude a sign of the justice of God and the promise of the redemption of their blighted souls, the creature has no soul to forsake. An artificial being, he has no soul to give, he has no soul to take. Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep. Upon reading Plutarch’s Lives and Paradise Lost, the creature consecrates himself through language, trying to make sense of his condition through what he is able to discern from classical works of literature. Measuring himself against the great men of antiquity, he finds himself without equivalent, with no likeness in terrestrial history, and none in the celestial peace of the heavenly Kingdom. For every Greek there was a Roman; even Lucifer had a company of sycophants. His loneliness is without precedent. The monster stands outside even the pretense of order, or the whisper of disorder. It is neither same nor opposite, one or the other. It can be neither nothing nor something. It is without reflection, the inescapable density of emptiness. At its core, Frankenstein is a text about authorship, about creativity and creation. How terribly sad. It is a cautionary tale about the unruliness of the things we create. Victor is tortured by the fact of his creation, his creature, the thing he mangled into being, by the fact that he has executed a power previously the province only of God. He has brought forth life and he is repulsed by that which he has made. He comes to see in the creature the image of his desire and the depths of his hubris. Who is he, and by what right does he bring this thing, this life, into the world? What has he unleashed upon the world? What responsibility does he bear to the creature? What responsibility does he bear to the world? A fable of utilitarianism run amok, Frankenstein asks us to consider the limits of our capacity to know what is good, as well as the extent to which we are able to perceive the ends of our actions; and to consider the consequences of living as if we are capable of knowing what is best, and to build our lives—individually and collectively—as if such knowledge is anything more than arrogant pretense. Which is to say that Frankenstein is about the illusion of control, and the impulse to create as expression of the desire to control; to not merely express oneself as a means of acting in the world, of shaping the world, but to indulge the imperious presumption that one has the ability and the right to seize hold of the world and, in so doing, that which does not comport with one’s idea of the world, to eliminate the contradictory, and the uncanny. This is why the novel is so often read as a parable of parenthood and the myriad fears—conscious and not—parents entertain in their relationship with their children. While parents may fear for their children as inherently fragile physical creatures, they fear also how the world will react to their children, how their children will react to the world, and what kind of emotional detritus that encounter will leave, what kind of scars they will bear. Less easily acknowledged are the fears that arise from what the child might be though to reveal about the parents, how the children reflect on their parents, how children shape the reaction of others to their parents, and what children reveal to their parents what is in themselves, but that they cannot confront. In Frankenstein, the creature turns to literature, to Paradise Lost, to Adam and Lucifer and their relationship to God to attempt to understand the stakes of his relationship to his creator and to the world from which he has been expelled. For those who come to the novel having first encountered the creature through popular culture, this aspect of Shelley’s characterization is immediately striking. While the cinematic figure of the creature is almost entirely mute, a dumb beast, in the novel, the creature is wildly erudite, able not only to read and to imagine himself in conversation with extraordinary figures from world literature, but to speak, and to speak in long, sometimes almost florid sentences. “‘When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone….’” Tumbling one over another, these sentences beget paragraphs that become a myriad of pages over which the creature tells his tale, the story of his brief atrocity of a life, the depth of his sorrows, and his utter surrender to abject misery. Unequal to either redemption or damnation, he seeks vengeance wherever he might find it, eventually visiting it upon Victor Frankenstein’s brother, the darling William, and Victor’s bride, the sainted, adopted sister, Elizabeth. “I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept and grasped to death his throat who never injured me or any other living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery; I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin. There he lies, white and cold in death.” The creature knows that these murders have assured the inescapable truth of his exile, that he cannot hope for redemption by either God or man. Having given himself over to vengeance and the enlargement of sorrow among those to whom he owed his life, he condemns himself to the perdition of interminable forgetting. Declaring that he will banish himself to the most remote climes of the North, the icy wastes of the pole, the monster tells his terrified interlocutor that “his work” will not be complete until he has done away with himself; and, with himself, all traces of his creator. “I shall collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame, that its remains may afford no light to any curious and unhallowed wretch who would create such another as I have been. I shall die. I shall no longer feel the agonies which now consume me or be the prey of feelings unsatisfied, yet unquenched. He is dead who called me into being; and when I shall be no more, the very remembrance of us both will speedily vanish…” In destroying the creation he is assured of the destruction of the creator: Noah must survive the flood so Divinity too might live. In the end, there can be no God without man. “I will be what I will be” cannot be without our prayers or the pyre. It is not worth denying: What drew me initially to the figure of the monster was my superficial resemblance to the image of the creature that was established in the 1931 film. When I first saw myself in the mirror upon leaving the airport infirmary, when I was finally able to take off the bandage the nurses had wrapped around my head, all I could see were the stitches, and my thoughts turned immediately to Karloff: hollow eyes, pale skin, bolts, lesions, the presentiment of scars. Like the creature, I turned to the symbolic in an attempt to understand what had happened, and what was happening to me, to cover over the fact of the irremediable absence. I knew I was marked, but what did the mark mean? I was marked, but how did it happen? When God marks Cain in the fourth chapter of Genesis, he explains his purpose: “And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand: When thou tiles the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and. Vagabond shalt thou be in the earth….Therefore, whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.” As punishment for the murder of his brother, Cain is cast out, condemned to a life of misery, fruitless toil, and wandering, an interminable exile from a place and a time to which he can never return. The mark is a reminder to all who meet him that Cain’s act is so heinous that the society of his fellows can issue no punishment equal to his crime. For society to pronounce judgment upon Cain would be to recognize him as a subject, to afford him some minimal existence as a member of their communion. The only meaningful punishment is to deny this entirely, to refuse Cain even the possibility of recognition; he can stake no claim, even if that claim is to the slight dignity afforded those who are murdered. This, of course, is just one version of the story. No singular text, one does not tell the tale of Frankenstein so much as enter into Frankenstein as one might a hall of mirrors. a labyrinthine phantasmagoria in which images pile upon images, distortions upon distortions of distortions, unfolding as an interminable improvisation on a monologue that may or may not express some kind of theme. Like the creature itself, the text of Frankenstein, as we have come to know it, is an ensemble, a composition that consists of innumerable variations, fabrications built upon fabrications, playing the role of both symptom and dream. What is diagnosed remains uncertain, but it speaks to something dormant, a latency within the political unconscious. It remains to be seen. In the film, the scene in question takes place between Boris Karloff, in his eternally iconic performance as the monster, and Marilyn Harris, the precocious six-year-old playing the part of a young girl the filmmakers named Maria. It establishes the pathos of the creature, which emerges as much from his naivety as from his appearance. Invented for the film, the encounter between Maria and the creature finds the two of them playing a game in which Maria tears petals from a flower and throws them into a nearby lake. Despite his grotesque appearance, Maria is not afraid of the creature, and declares guilelessly, “I can make a boat,” as she flings the petals she has gathered into the water. The creature looks on, delighted. Misunderstanding the rules of the game they are playing, and hoping to make Maria float like her broken petals, the creature picks up the girl and throws her into the water. A gesture of born of curiosity as much as ignorance, his intent is far from malevolent. Nonetheless, unable to swim or to pull herself out of the lake, Maria drowns. Her death becomes the catalyst by which the villagers’ fear of the creature comes into focus, the only proof they need to condemn him as a wretched fiend, an abomination that must be destroyed. This enmity, in turn, gives shape to the anger the creature feels toward the villagers, to all those whose very being only highlights his monstrosity. Deeply affecting, as it plays out in the film, the creature meets Maria near the cabin she shares with her fatherLargely invented for the 1931 film. In which the creature is wildly erudite. Unlike the mute horror of the 1931 film, as portrayed by Shelley, the creature is an intellectual. Adam's crime was to acquire knowledge. These are not the old ways, these are the new. “Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.” An accident, in the 1931 film, the creature kills the girl. You see the blood, the blood and the pool, cerulean blue with clouds of crimson. Two days, five seizures. A dream a delusion a fantasy of jackboots, of handcuffs and rubber bands and shreds of cotton, a choir of nurses a chorale of police. This is my aria, or is it a solo. How can I perform with my wrists tied to the bed when I wake on the floor of the airport, Leo’s rainbow beside me, six fireman bending over me, a leash and a dog and the gendarmerie, my audience. Do you know where you are? You don’t know what happened? You don’t need to know what happened? Stigmata present. A present of stigmata. Of the five, I remember only the first. This is the only one during which I did not pass out. There have been others, but I do not remember them either, except in retrospect, as reconstructions. With the first in Paris, I feel my jaw come unhinged, I feel it move through my neck and my head and remember knowing that I was never going to be okay again. I remember the contortions in my face, my visage taking the appearance of a terracotta satyr bellowing throughout some antique drama. This too is Hamlet: a play within a play within a play. No hay banda. Es una grabacion. It is a tape recording. Llorando. Llorando. The puzzle box and the key. Dora and the jewels. More things about which I am not permitted to speak. Speech is of course forbidden, but you have no idea how difficult it is to write these things down. Once written they are indelible. Speech might be recorded but somehow it remains porous and inexact. Recording sound is not quite the same thing as manipulating surfaces, tracing the shape assigned a vibration. Speech is alluring, writing is conspicuous. Both are beautiful, but one moves with purpose. Jealous of each other, speech is forgiving; the written is cruel and demanding. While the breath will disperse, ink is indelible. Whatever form it takes, the written always leaves a trace. Writing things down is a way of keeping the wound open. I do not know quite when, but at some point, in the summer of 2019, I took up residence in my body. What do I mean? Around July of that year, the mental illness with which I had struggled for some time—an illness my psychiatrist had diagnosed as bipolar disorder and my psychoanalyst had taught me to understand as something more subtle, more insidious and strange—that illness, whatever it was, whatever its specific etiology, became permanently lodged under my skin, weaving its way into my nerves, slowing seeping, insinuating itself into my bones. This had happened before. For maybe a day, two at most. After July 2019, I found myself prone to more punishing, more complete melancholic absences of sense, leaves taken of selves left behind. For a week, maybe two, I would stop eating. I would stop showering or dressing or leaving my house. I would forget how to take care of myself. I would drink, and sleep, and starve myself until I became nauseous and started vomiting—every hour, sometimes twice an hour, sometimes more—and I would keep this up until I was so physically weak I could barely get out of bed. Eventually, when the pain became overwhelming, I would make the effort to get to the kitchen, to grab some bread or some crackers, and re-train my stomach to accept food, to rebuild my strength, to come back from dehydration. After those days or weeks I would also have lost the thread of my life in a tangle of dirty clothes and sheets and bottles. I would have to find that again as well.  I became resident of my body in the sense that my body was now possessed by a creature that was diseased, disordered; that was confused about where it had left itself, and could only express control by imposing a conditional debility, by making the body ill.  Please forgive these solipsisms. They are not unimportant. I have lived with, or suffered with, some form of bipolar disorder, or manic depression, or melancholia, whatever you would like to call it, for years now. (My analyst prefers that I call it the demon, or the spirit, the thing that hides in the closet.) I knew its movements, and its manifestations, even in the absence of any kind of understanding. What was happening to me now was new, different. It began to happen regularly, often at least once a month. I was used to my mind going on its journeys. But suddenly my body was not my own. It belonged to me only intermittently. I began to dream routinely of vampires and ghouls, of zombies and ravenous, rabid dogs, of hideously efficient killing machines. In my waking life, depression became an increasingly physical companion, a hysterical pain that I played some role in actively fomenting, but that was drawing upon something plaguing the unconscious, something that my unconscious was trying to say. Repetition is never repetition; it is always change, the unconscious working its way toward language, toward voice and toward the ear, toward another person and their hearing.  Another way of saying repetition and this repetition was part of mine, an increasingly necessary component of life in Lebanon during the second half of 2019. In July of that year, a good friend had passed away, too young, after a barely more than a year spent battling leukemia. She died after having been in the hospital for weeks, tethered to an intravenous drip of poisonous chemicals, a schedule of chemotherapy that had become, bitterly, her life, her routine. Part of my routine during this time had become cooking vegan meals to pack up to bring to her, because the food in the hospital was dreadful, ironically unhealthy if characteristically unpalatable, and she was trying to eat as much of a plant-based diet as possible. My friend had long been the keeper of the routines of the community that she had summoned around her. She threw the holiday parties, she kept the schedule of celebrations that moved the year along. An American, more than a bit ironically, she died on the morning of July 4. Even before her death, her illness had made the rituals of conviviality, the unspectacular routines of celebration, increasingly difficult to sustain. After, the calendar fell apart, and we—I—were unmoored, uninclined to attend to the maintenance of the carnival.  None of this, of course, is particularly out of the ordinary. To live with the death of a loved one is to momentarily lose interest in the world, giving up the world in the hope of regaining what one had lost, only eventually giving up the lost to get back the world. In the limbo between loss and reparation, food loses its succor, holidays surrender their meaning, shadows are longer, everything grows cold. Having lost my friend, I was bound to be abnormally depressed, as were all who knew and loved her, and it was in this period that I started not eating but drinking, trying—unheroically—to express her suffering through my body, to take up the mantle of her pain. Not quite aware of what I was doing, I nonetheless understood that I was routinely making myself sick. Eventually it passed as, in retrospect, I should have assumed it would. I came back to the world, I came back to my work and my friends, the tempest of depression abated. I stopped drinking. Then came the revolution.  It is difficult to explain just what happened in Lebanon in the fall of that year. For decades, Lebanon has born the weight of myriad political generalizations through which both insiders and outsiders have tried to explain it, to discipline it, to control it. I have little desire to add my voice to this chorus, to compound my previous solipsisms by trying to make sense of Lebanon through the prism of my own limited experience.  But am I an outsider? I have lived here for more than a decade. And while I may never be of it, it is only through the prism of my experience that I can understand Lebanon; or, more to the point, to understand how—refracted and reflected—Lebanon has imprinted itself upon me. This narrative is less incomplete than it is, as Derrida might have said, disseminated, playing with the impossibility of meaning, of signification, while trying still to hold some basic truth. (It is worth remembering that Derrida was from Algiers.) The truth, nonetheless, branches off in many directions and takes many different shapes. In Lebanon some of those shapes are organized, aggressive, jealous, brutal. Still, like the unconscious, history has its own ways, especially in the course of a political upheaval. In these moments, there is interpretation and analysis but little explanation. It is worth parsing some of what we do know, the shapes that, like the Dragon of St. George, disturb the surface of the sea, occasionally reaching out to devour a passing ship; like the swells off the corniche, growing to sweep the fishermen off the shore. I tell you these things, in part, because it is necessary to understand that some portion of the way I write, the way I speak, my relationship to language as a means of expression, an always already failed means of bridging the unbearable distances between us. My language is about Lebanon, is from and of Lebanon. It is tiresome, filled with burdensome ellipses and repetitions, with strange, languid cadences, glissando, portamento. Its lassitude, a symptom of having to find ways of expressing oneself, of pretending to be understood; a figuration of the myriad ways that Lebanon talks about itself but never quite to itself, the ways that Lebanon is perhaps always in the process of coming undone, or undoing those of us who come to it.  To say that during the October uprisings, the routines that had long held Lebanon together, however uneasily, were upended would not be incorrect. Nor would such a statement capture just how important a gesture the abandonment of those routines was, for the country, for its citizens, we oddly placed residents, for any hope in the future. In the wake of the storied civil war, the sectarian power sharing arrangement that had long shaped Lebanese governance was rearticulated as a new kind of compromise between the most powerful combatants in the war. Men who had been warlords were made over as statesmen, and they proceeded--almost entirely and without exception--to use their newfound legitimacy in the new government to leverage control over the country’s not inconsiderable resources, rebuilding the nation around a version of gangster capitalism that saw the substance of public wealth quite brazenly directed into their pockets.  Or, perhaps more appropriately—given what would take place after October 17—their Swiss bank accounts.  For what now seems like years, international financial institutions had been hounding Lebanon over the extent of its public debt, which was somewhere near twice GDP. For just as long, the Lebanese parliament had been debating how to go about procuring the funds to manage the debt, which was more or less a euphemism for asking how best to manage the image of the country so that its gangster capitalist government could go on pocketing funds from international agencies that had been meant to support the development of Lebanon, its people, and their resources. This debate never made any headway; largely because none of the MPs felt any great desire to sacrifice their piece of the pie, no matter how small a slice, so they might serve it up to the equally craven overlords of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.  On October 17, this debate had devolved to such a point that the Minister of Telecommunications proposed that the Lebanese state might consider generating necessary revenue through the imposition of a tax on the use of WhatsApp, the internet-based phone and chat application that, being largely free, was—for most people—hugely preferable to the extortionary rates levied by the state-run telecommunications system, or the two “private” companies that split the Lebanese cellular market between them.  Appropriately for a foreigner with limited proficiency in Arabic, I first heard about this tax in a taxi, on my way home from my analyst, later that night. Fielding calls from his family, my driver started railing bitterly about the proposal, while simultaneously laughing at its absurdity. I agreed that the whole thing seemed not only hysterically funny, but almost impossible to implement. There is no way something like that could ever happen, I thought. The government cannot figure out how to keep the trash off the ground, I said. My driver dropped me off around nine o’clock. By 9:15, there was a dumpster on fire at the end of my block. By 9:30, crowds had amassed downtown. A mile away, I could hear them from my balcony. They were marching on Parliament. For whatever reason, the proposed tax galvanized popular opposition to the government in a way that no other issue had managed to do so since the end of the civil war. The generation of young Lebanese people born in the decades since the end of the war—a generation whose eldest members were beginning to slide into their thirties—were no longer content to watch their futures squandered, their patrimony hoarded, while being lectured about the dangers of engaging in mass civil disobedience against the government and political oligarchs who had robbed them of their nation. Long accustomed to being told that the country was perpetually on the brink of chaos, young people took to the streets in droves; they were joined by throngs of older citizens long frustrated by the post-war consensus that had allowed for the political and financial elite to bleed the country dry under the guise of offering stability in the face of disorder.  In the wake of the uprisings, the center did not hold, and this was a good thing: here, so near to Bethlehem yet so far away, something was being born that was hoping to tame the rough beast of gangster capitalism, of sectarian tension, of fear as a mechanism of statecraft, of the most egregious forms of extraction and primitive accumulation. Much of the country reveled in this moment, the ways in which the fear that had been foisted upon the population was now turned around, leveled at the anointed leadership class. Everyone enjoyed watching them cower. Stunned at this outpouring of public wrath, barely able to contemplate what was happening to their riotous decades-long misrule, the ruling class turned away from the game and turned on the people. They took their money and ran, scorching the earth behind them, salting the ground, making life as difficult for as many people as possible. This was before the tear gas and the rubber bullets and the shock troops showed up. This was before the virus. This was before the explosion.  The center did not hold and this was a good thing, but even as it was coming undone, the consequences of its dissolution were never entirely clear, and far from straightforward. Jubilation and frustration mingled from the first, later giving way to anger, to a new kind of fear, as the new world rubbed up against the intransigence of the old, of the old and its stubborn refusal to die, to accept the inevitability of its demise. At first there was a festival atmosphere to the affair, over which the military exercised what seemed, at the time, a relatively benevolent watch. Then sometime in December, as Christmas loomed heavily over the city, confrontations between the demonstrators and the army, the general security, became more and more common, more aggressive, more prone to fire.  I have no doubt that I am telling the story out of order, and that is maybe the point. I am not entirely sure, ever, what the point is, or was, except that, as we drifted into the new year, the country found itself in a state of narcoleptic inconclusiveness, somewhere between waking and sleeping but never really one or another, trapped between revolution and reaction and repetition, political uncertainty exemplified, amplified, by the temporality of the virus. Behind the many nested crises of the past year, behind the many setbacks and overcomings, the transformations, there was always the virus, merciless in its ridicule, refusing to let us forget for one second our vulnerabilities, exposing our desperate need for one another by denying the simplest expressions of human connection.  It was sometime during these events that I began to take up residence in my body, that my body became the chapter house of all I could not express or share, the echo chamber of all that was impossible to express to myself, much less to others: all of that which was lost, seemingly beyond recovery. All the things I am not saying, all the things that cannot be said. I cannot speak so I vomit, compulsively, routinely. I vomit so I do not have to speak. My body expresses something horrid and material, something that lives in liquid, not in breath. I worry after all the things that we are not saying, all that is grief. I worry for all the things that are not being said, all that needs to be said, but is held close; if not in private, then near the family, that nurturing and stultifying scaffold upon which so much of Lebanon depends, upon which—in some fashion, in some configuration—we all depend. I worry after the queer friends who find themselves trapped within that circle, quarantined with people with whom they find themselves at silent odds; I worry for the queer friends who do not have families to hold them close, who have disposed of them. I worry after the stateless, the refugees, the damned who were always going to be disposed of.  How does physical illness reach into and press on the unconscious? What of the unconscious does it dislodge? What does the unconscious dislodge in the body? What regime of knowledge and power and repression does quarantine enforce? What desires does it foreclose? What desires does it discharge? When I lived in America I was routinely visited by ghosts. In Lebanon they have not bothered me. Not until this year. Not until corona. Not until the explosion. They belong to me now. I belong to them.  I say lockdown; my analyst says confinement. In this word, I hear the echo of antiquarian sexualities, of pregnancies, upper-class ladies hidden away from the world. I hear a displacement: confined, hidden, suffocated, made to surrender to the shamefulness of the body and its sex by disappearing into ill-ventilated bedchambers, behind curtains, protected from the air and the light. I think of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, tortured by her wallpaper, forced into an ineffectual rest cure by an unforgivingly domineering husband, a doctor, with only slight interest in the etiology of her hysteria. I think of the woman behind her wallpaper, sickly yellowish green; I think of the ghosts I see in the window in front of my desk, the ones that sit at my side, on the sofa, waiting, pondering. The center did not hold; the rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem. It is coming on Christmas again. It is December 2020. I am confined to my bedroom; I suffer the pains of morning sickness well into the night.  Whatever has lodged itself inside my body is no longer in any simple sense my illness. Or, perhaps more precisely, and against so much of what contemporary psychopharmacology declares to be true, my illness is no mere chemical imbalance. The drugs I am prescribed have their effect, but my illness has always been ineluctably, resolutely bound up in the social: I cannot tell if it reaches out to meet the social, or if the social—the broken promises of some minimum of shared responsibility, of care—has reached inside of me, an inhabiting spirit, a rough beast.  My analyst says confinement; I say lockdown. What has been locked up inside my body? This is a digest of the plague year; of its derangements; of a person and a society deranged. It is a digest of their implications, their repetitions. I begin with this indulgence of autobiography because I am trying to understand the repetitions which I find myself indulging, far from willfully. I begin with Lebanon because that is where I am, the place I call home; the place I wrestle with calling home, the place to which I hold no claim but nonetheless somehow claims me, that lays claim to so many who do and do not belong here, but nonetheless find themselves here, heir to the histories of those many generations of exiles and refugees that, at one time or another, found themselves quarantined on the shores of the eastern Mediterranean. I begin with Lebanon because here there is some unspoken pain we are all trying to master, some loss that cannot be born.  I say digest. You say digestion. I say we should order more arak, more khubuz. You say bring me the kibbe nayyeh. Raw meat. Another word for Lebanon is death drive. My dreams for some time have been of things undead: vampires and werewolves and ghouls of all sorts, of wolves and dogs attacking me. I have dreams of invasion, of being housed in camps and trying to escape and being shot down. In sleep, I find myself running down barely remembered streets in Old Cairo, in the darker corners of Sultanhamet in Istanbul. I dream of something that calls itself the Demon Killer that, draped in a burka fashioned of burlap (burka, burlap, a displacement, a rhyme), wields a sword, and hunts children, demanding, “Do you practice religion?” before wielding steel against them. I am trying to protect the children. I fail. I dream of planes exploding in the sky, of planes crashing, of bombers bombing. I find myself bobbing in the waters of the New York harbor, looking back at the city, unable to reach the shore. I am looking for the World Trade Center, trying to find the towers, seeing an unfamiliar neon monolith, ugly, oblong, topped with an inelegant spire. I find myself staring into the waters of the Mediterranean from the deck at the Sporting Club, wanting to dive, afraid to get into the water. It does not escape me that my name is Waterman, a name that I was oddly uncomfortable with as a child, for reasons that are no longer entirely clear. A name that I only recently noticed belongs properly to a superhero. It does not escape me, nor does it offer any comfort, knowing that the candomblé priestess I met with in Brooklyn ten years ago, without knowing my family name, announced that, of my three orixas, two were of the water; Oxum and Yemanja, the sweet and the salty; mothers both. They would be fighting over me, the priestess told me. The mothers. Each claiming me as their son. It does not escape me that I was born on the Mississippi and that I live on the Mediterranean. It does not escape me that this is madness. It does not escape me that we call this madness the unconscious.  Egypt The language of plague is almost always biblical, Old Testament, the rhetorical stridency of the wrathful God. The language of plague is almost always about the rise and fall of nations, about terrestrial questions of the Lord and his judgments, his righteous prophets, the just and the unjust, a story about punishment and reward. They begin with blood. They end with blood. “This is what the LORD says: By this you will know that I am the LORD: With the staff that is in my hands I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood. The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink and the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water.” I have sat on the banks of the Nile. And I have witnessed the wrath of the Lord. Among all the plagues visited upon the people of Egypt, thirst would come to seem like an act of divine generosity, a moment of clemency before the coming of the deluge. In Exodus, the bleeding Nile spills out everywhere, overflowing in all directions, along all tributaries, drowning everything in its path. “This is what the Lord says: ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt—worse than there has ever been or ever will be again.’” Unable to bind himself to a given schedule—the oddly equivocal “around midnight”—God nonetheless pledges himself to the children of Israel, and to the people of Egypt, that his vengeance will be swift, and terrible, his justice cruel, his judgements merciless. The lamentations of Egypt, he promises, will be the praise song of the Hebrews, an air of exultation to be sung in their hearts, and in the hearts of their children, and their children’s children, a song that sings of a timeless bond with the Lord. It is the story of the tenth plague that binds the tribes of Israel to one another, that founds the Jewish people. Between the first plague and the last, the river running red with blood and the streets of Egypt running red with the blood of its children, God sends a blight of frogs and lice, pestilence, boils, locusts, a hailstorm of ice and fire, and a darkness that covers the land; a darkness so dark that “it [could] be felt.” But of the ten plagues visited upon Egypt in the Book of Exodus, the first and the last are perhaps the most momentous in their banal implication of the human body, and of blood as a sign of that body and the fictions it bears concerning lineality and descent, and of lineality as securing the truth of the nation. The story of the Exodus is the story of the people of Israel, their liberation from bondage, and the unimpeachable justice of the one true God. It is a story about freedom, and the fidelity of God to his people, their lamentations and his goodness. What goes missing in the Passover narrative, however, in the story of the doorposts and the lintels and the blood, is that the jubilation of one people comes with the decimation of the other, with no regard to class or station or role. As a literary contrivance, the Passover narrative prefigures the Christian liturgy of the eucharist, of bread into body, of wine into blood. Among Christians, this is a narrative that sings of virality, about what lives in the blood, what dies in the blood and kills in the blood; the blood of the lamb that washes you clean and the blood libel that marks you and your people as beyond redemption. Blood is where your punishment lives, as well as the place from which salvation comes. As I write this in February 2021, not yet a month after the attempted insurrection at the Capitol, I am reminded that the conspiracy theorists who have consumed the Republican Party seem to believe, against all reason or logic, that there is a shady Left-wing cabal that kills children to steal their blood, to drink their blood so to have eternal youth. A strange cross fertilization of the vampire and the blood libel, of the gothic Catholic undead and the fantasy of the Jewish Satanists, united in a majestic plot to overthrow the kingdom of God. “Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway?” This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. “I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it.” Another way of saying the tenth plague founded the Jewish people is that the tenth plague founded monotheism; or, that the tenth plague is an allegory for the foundations of monotheism in much the way the story of the Black Plague is an allegory of capitalism emerging for itself by strangling the slumbering figure of medieval feudalism in its bedclothes. After violently suppressing the baroque polytheism of traditional Egyptian religion, Aton monotheism was itself violently suppressed. Is the suppression of the Sun God and his preservation among the Hebrew tribes that fled Egypt the truth of the allegory? “The eagle that has his young look into the sun and requires that they should not be dazzled by its light is behaving, then, like a descendent of the sun, submitting his children to the ancestral trial. And when Schreber lays claim to being able to being able to look into the sun unpunished and without being dazzled he has retrieved the mythological expression for his filial relationship to the sun as a symbol of the father.” God the father, God the son, God the holy spirit: three and one and one and three. People once killed each other over this trinity. London, 1665 I am teaching Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. It is February 2021 and we have been in some sort of lockdown for the better part of a year. I seek solace in stories about plagues past, in the stories that people tell about their plagues; or the stories they tell to avoid telling in the stories of their plagues, to avoid the fact of their immense vulnerability in the face of disease. In the midst of the COVID pandemic, we have made being ill into something heroic, something tragic; in the way that, as Susan Sontag argued, we have made cancer into something noble. Once unspeakable, as if naming it invited a contagion, at some point in the latter half of the twentieth century, people with cancer were beatified, enhaloed, particularly in those instances when cancer could not be linked to any possible organic cause, to cigarettes or booze or red meat. Those struck by COVID, who suffer its “visitation,” as Defoe might have written, have been endowed with a similar aura, afforded a similar holiness. That said, for the most part, people do not like to talk about being sick, and most people do not like to hear about sickness. No stranger to illness, Virginia Woolf once noted that, despite being the most common, perhaps the only wholly common attribute of humanity, there is precious little written about being sick; our literary traditions preserve almost nothing of the banality of illness. Defoe’s readers would most likely have been more comfortable reading about the Great Fire of the following year, of 1666. The heroic sacrifices of those who sought to preserve London from ruin made for better drama; and, in the right hands, the iteration of the sixes could have endowed the burning with the mark of the beast and the unquenchable fires of hell, never far from the minds of the good Protestant dissenters of the city. We will come back around to Woolf and her thoughts on illness. For now, it is worth adding a corrective. Perhaps at the dawn of her century, illness was more democratic; but while God may be no respecter of persons, physical illness is far from equitably distributed, and very often a symptom of underlying social inequalities, of poverty of race, of the malignancies of difference. Even for Defoe, looking back on 1665 from the vantage point of 1722, much of how the bubonic plague spread, of who became sick and who would die, had to do with questions of class and station. “[T]he richer sort of people, especially the nobility and the gentry from the west part of the city, thronged out of town with their families and their servants in an unusual manner; and this was more particularly seen in Whitechappel; that is to say, the Broad Street where I lived; indeed, nothing was to be seen but wagons and carts, with goods, women, servants, and children…coaches filled with people of the better sort and horsemen attending them, and all hurrying away.” Able to evacuate the city in relative comfort and to find refuge from the plague in their country estates, the better sort of 1665 shuttered their townhouses and fled overcrowded, infested, bubonic London for the better climes, far removed from dead-carts piled with poorly shrouded corpses, from mass graves, from the site of necrotic tissues and disease-ridden churchyards, funerals and burials, the almost certain promise that proximity to necrosis would expose one to a common lot, the lot of the common. Defoe was likely no more than five years old when the bubonic plagues overtook London in 1665. It is generally believed that his account, if not wholly fictional, is based upon journals kept by his uncle, embellished by Defoe through his own research, and his impending sense of poetic urgency. Whoever it is that is speaking through the text—and it is no doubt Legion, for we are many—the narrator wrestles with the decision to leave London or to stay, or whether it is feasible to give up the city. Should I stay or should I go: for Defoe’s narrator, the question is one of piety, of piety and the plague as a manifestation of God and his Divine wrath. Is the visitation of the plague a judgment upon London and its people? Or was it—as the narrator’s brother insists—merely a failure of the physician’s art, some unaccountably terrifying historical accident, hiding neither meaning nor malice? The narrator is inclined to believe his brother, to accede to his reasoning; yet he cannot wholly surrender his belief in a divine purpose, in the plague as the hand of the wrathful God. This belief is only exacerbated by his anxiety over sectarian divisions among the Protestant faithful. “The Church of England was restored, indeed, with the restoration of the monarchy, about four years before; but the ministers and preachers of the Presbyterians and Independents, and of all the other sorts of professions, had begun to gather separate societies and erect altar against altar, and all those had their meetings for worship apart…” Confronted by the inevitable flowering of Protestant antinomianism, Defoe’s narrator cannot help but see the plague of 1665 as a manifestation of Divine law, an intimation of God’s fidelity to terrestrial powers, and the need to maintain established centers of religious authority as a hedge against moral degeneracy and social dissipation. We will see this again. Eventually coming to the conclusion that the plague was the instrument of some divine purpose, Defoe’s narrator remains almost bitterly dismissive of those for whom government mandated days of fasting and prayer, of public confession and personal humiliation, by which the authorities sought to assuage the anxieties of their subjects, comparing them to quack doctors and peddlers of charms and amulets promised to defend the wearer against disease. Defoe’s critique is directly less specifically to the local magistrates than to the hypocrisy of those who, faced with their own mortality, discover religion, their faith suddenly provoked by fear of death. While he is generally sympathetic to the common and the ignorant, to those for whom religion and magic were virtually indistinguishable—those for whom an “abracadabra” was as good as a Pater Noster—he is far more critical of the swells, those who believed themselves insulated from illness by virtue of their wealth, those who might continue in their decadence by shutting themselves up in their palaces, behind high walls, abandoning the city to preserve the panto. “[The] Court, which was then gay and luxurious, put on a face of just concern for the public danger,” he writes, caustic, shutting up those institutions of diversion that had accompanied the Restoration of Charles and his throne, a new world of mirth after a generation of Puritan deprivation, reserving to themselves the pleasures of drink and games, of “plays, bear-baitings, games, singing of ballads, buckler-play, or such like causes of assemblies of people…” Deprived of their amusements, no recourse to proper medical care, and daily confronted with the grim bill of the recently deceased in the shape of the itinerant death-cart, the common people could be chasing after “conjurers and witches, and all sorts of deceivers,” magicians and entertainers who promised protection from disease as well as a good show. Quack remedies. All sorts of deceivers. We will see this again. Bleach. Hydroxychloroqiune. Fasting and prayer. The Devil and the mask. Ammonium nitrate. 1920-2020 Freud often asked much of his readers, but never so much as he did in the years immediately following the Great War.“The manifestations of a compulsion to repeat,” the father writes (Father, Vater, Vader) “exhibit to a high degree and instinctual character and, when they act in opposition to the pleasure principle, give the appearance of some ‘daemonic’ force at work. In the case of children’s play we seemed to see that children repeat unpleasurable experiences for the additional reason they can master a powerful impression far more thoroughly by being active than they could by merely experiencing it passively. Each fresh repetition seems to strengthen the mastery that they are in search of.” One of Freud’s most beguiling works, Beyond the Pleasure Principle is much misused. Around psychoanalysis there are, of course, considerable differences between academics and clinicians, to say nothing of the numerous schools and claimants to interpretive priority that have followed after Freud, struggling to stay afloat in his not inconsiderable wake. The death drive that the father begins to elaborate in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is something that remains a subject of rancorous debate; its most enduring misinterpretation perhaps being the characterization of the death drive as a death wish, the psychic instinct toward the dissolution of sensation, of bodily imprisonment, mistaken as a form of suicidal ideation. On the contrary, much of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is devoted to understanding how the death instincts could coexist with an instinct toward life, toward sex and self-preservation; how the existence of a death drive could be accommodated to a psychoanalysis of the neuroses that understood neurosis as stemming from the primary repressions of sexuality and desire which constituted the basis of what Freud called, with some small measure of irony, civilization. Confronted by the first World War, and the influenza pandemic that followed immediately after, as entwined crises of civilization, the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle sought to understand the previously unexamined psychic forces that militated against those primary repressions and the forms of creativity, the forms of sociality, to the forms of neurosis and the everyday unhappiness, to which they gave rise. The result of these investigations remain utterly baffling. Much of Freud’s effort at tracing an etiology of the death instinct turns upon an extensive discussion of death as a biological fact, the end of respiration and cessation of metabolism as the seemingly common fate of all living things. While Freud concluded that the death instinct could not be explained through reference to biology in the ways in which the sexual instincts, the drive to sustain and preserve life, could be, he was nonetheless compelled by August Weismann’s theories of heredity and the germ-plasm, the component of cellular life that preserved the substance of earlier generations as the inheritance of biological reproduction. Citing Weismann’s contention that the individual body might die but its component germ-plasma would live and continue to reproduce, Freud perceived in Weismann’s theory a means of conceiving something approaching eternal life, albeit of a wholly cellular, secular nature. If, for Weismann, the theory of the germ-plasm was a supplement and a corrective to Darwin’s theories of mutation and natural selection, Freud’s application of the concept seems less bound to heredity and lineal descent through biological reproduction, than to the persistence of life-in-death, of life after death. The theory of the germ-plasm, in this sense, provided a model for resolving the contradiction between life and death instincts, inasmuch as the death of the body—the soma—did not compromise or extinguish the life of its cellular components. “It is generally considered that the union of a number of cells into a vital association—the multicellular character of organisms—has become a means of prolonging their life. One cell helps to preserve the life of another, and the community of cells can survive even if individual cells have to die.” Like many of Freud’s attempts at thinking the organic dimensions of psychic life, his attention to Weismann and his theory of the germ-plasm is less compelling for what it tells us about the nature of the psyche than for what it tells us about the ways in which the psyche is shaped by our limited efforts to understand it; by the operations of metaphor and metonymy, by image and by example, by language and its fragility. Finding solace in language, our attempts at mastering the psyche, of coming to master loss by coming to know it, are ultimately doomed to consign us to the purgatory of repetition, to the dungeons of the death instinct. In so doing, we preserve ourselves from the horror of eros, of desire and need, of life as the movement toward ever greater connection, and—accordingly—the inevitability of pain, of grief. Freud’s description of the body as a multicellular organism, an association among cells for mutual benefit, may be a reasonably accurate characterization of the body and its biology; it is also, obviously, an image resonant with a host of discourses surrounding and summoning the idea of the social body, of associations among people as components of larger wholes, bound by mutual feeling if not by organic dependencies. By the time Freud finished editing these reflections, his daughter was dead. Of the Spanish flu. And neither he nor his wife could get to Hamburg on the train. Pandemic steals us from death, even. We cannot be there to watch our loved ones die. And within a few years, he and his fellows would have new associations about trains. Sophie Halberstadt-Freud was twenty-seven when she died. She had one child, Ernst Wolfgang, who was the inspiration for some of Sigmund Freud’s most penetrating insights on loss, condensed in the figure of fort, da. Fort, da: Here, gone. Whether we see it or not, fort, da is a game indulged by almost all children of a certain age, and almost always at mealtime, when they are often restrained in some kind of high chair, and they throw a toy, or their food, to the floor. Being restrained, they cannot retrieve the object they discarded, so they are dependent upon an older person to retrieve it for them, to return it to them. Dependency, here, of course, is another name for mastery, for control; not of oneself, but of those around them. It is a way of taking control of some aspect of an otherwise terrifying environment, a room, a house, a landscape in which one finds oneself largely out of control; or without control, which might be the same thing. Am I still playing this game? If so, what are the pieces, and have the rules changed? I withhold food. I vomit until I am severely ill. I fall, I hurt myself, I am helped up, I get helped. Doyle is worried. Beyond the Pleasure Principle, of course, was—in no small part—the summation of Freud’s attempts at understanding the myriad violences of the First World War; not just the violence of the battlefield and the trench, but the violence of displacement, of populations forced to flee, of empires crumbled and new nations thrown up; of revolution and its specter, of Bolshevism and its siren melodies. It is an attempt at mastering the experience of war, the horror of war and then pandemic, which might account for its weirdly elliptical structure, a structure less labyrinthine than rhizomorphic in the Deleuzian sense. It is a text born of loss on an unimaginable scale, a loss that quite simply cannot be wholly admitted or borne. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud addresses the war directly on only one occasion, in chapter two, when he introduces the question of what he calls traumatic neurosis, a condition that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, has most likely come to be known as post-traumatic stress disorder. “The terrible war which has just ended gave rise to a great number of illnesses of this kind, but it at least put an end to the temptation to attribute the cause of the disorder to organic lesions of the nervous system brought about by mechanical force.” In this opening salvo, one hears some slight rebuke to the Freud and Breuer of the Studies in Hysteria (1895) that marked the dawn of psychoanalysis: not in terms of organic lesions of the nervous system, but of the relatively uncomplicated version of trauma that Freud and Breuer held, their sense that the childhood traumas that prompted hysterical neuroses were relatively straightforward and somehow always related to the physical reality of sexuality, rather than—as Freud would later postulate—fantasies of sex. Freud would seem to admit as much when, in a subsequent passage, he writes, “No complete explanation has yet been reached either of war neuroses or of the traumatic neuroses of peace.” The text goes on to discuss the relationship between fear, fright, and anxiety, their differences, their interactions, and their relationship to the formation of traumatic neuroses. Chapter two is, not inconsequentially, where Freud introduces fort, da. “I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities—I mean in children’s play.” That Freud would move so immediately, if obliquely, between the experience of traumatic neurosis as the underlying structure of war neurosis and the operations of children’s play—particularly inasmuch as his observations concerning children’s play came directly from his grandson and his consultations with his daughter—is both illuminating and perverse, drawing attention to the relationship between infantile attempts at mastering loss and the fact of war as a perpetually repeating means of attaining mastery. Describing the mechanics of the game at some length, Freud goes on: “The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement—the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach.” Repetition as cultural achievement: a way of mastering the self and the life instincts, mastering desire by holding onto loss. Freud’s grandson invented fort, da as a way of staging and compensating for his mother’s absence. It cannot have been lost on Freud that by the time he wrote these lines, Sophie’s absence was irrevocable. It now seems baffling that it took a world war for Freud to notice that his patients were often quite desperately and willfully attached to their pain; or rather, to draw out the theoretical consequences of those attachments.  In evoking the war, Freud represses the history of the pandemic. This is not all that surprising. War is spectacular and horrifying, given to associations with heroism and romance, of beginnings and endings and great deeds and vainglorious death. Disease is slow and worrying but uncertain, a form of the slow violence that is insidious, tedious; painful to watch, harder to narrate. The emotional toll of the slow violence of pandemic emerges in his notorious essay on mourning. The shock of war is manifest as the moment of existential, bodily horror—of fright—that is thematized in the essay on the uncanny War did not steal his daughter. War he could face. The inventor of psychoanalysis, a means of healing by way of the quiet, patient, slow movements of the talking cure, could not face the tedium, the banality, of the illness that consumed his daughter. Europe is haunted by its dead. It clings to them and cannot give them up. It is a way of holding to them, of making sure they stay put. Every once in a while, however, they jump out of the dark just to remind you that they are there. A reflection of all that you are, but have forgotten about yourself. This enemy has not ceased to be victorious. This enemy is relentlessly, gleefully victorious. My purpose, of course, is not to coordinate an explication of psychoanalytic theory, but to consider some portion of how Freud’s writing is bound up with the history of the war, but also the history of pandemic, of the Spanish flu, of the death and loss that binds the war to the flu, the war that, in many respects, caused the flu; or, at the very least, caused the flu to become something more horrible than a mere viral outbreak, the war that gave it an impetus toward the global. It is about explicating my own attachment to Freud as a figure, and a writer, through whom I have tried to understand my pandemic, the pandemic that arrived, ironically, exactly a hundred years after his, one hundred years after Beyond the Pleasure Principle. One hundred years after the death of Sophie Halberstadt-Freud. Sophie Halberstadt-Freud died on January 25, 1920. One hundred years later, around this day, COVID-19 would begin its vicious global killing spree, would begin its stealth campaign, deploying itself from mainland China toward other climes, other places with far less fanatical, far less effective, procedures for containment. There was nothing Spanish about the Spanish flu. The Spanish flu began in Kansas. It had followed Dorothy from the land of Oz. It would have stayed in Kansas and perhaps perished there, had Woodrow Wilson not dragged the United States into the European war, the war to end all wars, the war to make the world safe for democracy, forcing poor young men from the hinterlands into a conflict in a place they knew nothing about, a conflict they knew nothing about. The war did not make the world safe for democracy so much as it made the world in Wilson’s image of nations and national self-determination, however circumscribed by US ambitions for empire. It made the world momentarily safe for capital, for American investors. But it did not make the world safe. Mustering a force large enough to prosecute the war against Germany and its allies was no small task. Conscription brought together young men from throughout the country into close quarters in military barracks with poor sanitary conditions: nearly five million in one year. The virus was hiding among them. Stalking them. Biding its time, an insidiously brilliant serial killer. As American troops began landing in Europe in June 1917, the killer was among them. The New World come to wreck strange vengeance on the Old. The image that comes to mind is of Murnau’s Nosferatu, Count Orlock, stowed away aboard ship, bound for points west; eastern Europe, superstition, backwardness, an oriental darkness come to consume the vitality of all that is modern, urban, urbane, to take advantage of a world that believes it has shaken off superstition and its shackles. A world that cannot conceive the reality of monsters. The old world is dying. The new struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. It begins with blood. It ends with blood. Do this is remembrance of me. My friend—welcome to the Carpathians. 1832 Epidemic disease, of course, has killed countless millions throughout history. The first meaningfully global pandemic, however, is generally thought to have occurred in 1832, when bacterial cholera spread across the planet, giving rise to a sense of common vulnerabilities, a world made worldly through the implacable hunger of contagion and blight. Driven by new infrastructures of capitalist extraction and resource transfer, fed by the inexorable appetite of steam for coal, cholera made its way around the world as Britain built its empire, weaving those networks of accumulation and dispossession Laleh Khalili has called “the sinews of war and trade.” Trade networks anchored by colonial ports and fueling stations, suturing Europe to Africa and Asia, to the Caribbean and the greater Americas, the circulatory structure of British imperialism and capitalist ambition, of speculation and desire, carried with it the stuff of the plague, the bacterial seed in the blood that would take root as ships moved from port to port, trading in death. When it reached the United States, the spread of cholera would be abetted by similarly novel infrastructures by which the coastal cities of the Atlantic had begun to stretch themselves out over the continent, competing over the resources of the interior. In 1825, the opening of the Erie Canal had linked New York to the Great Lakes, while the Cumberland Road had provided similar access to the cities of the Chesapeake, most importantly Baltimore. By 1832, similar canalization projects had been mapped out on other, more remote, water courses, just as designs for rail networks—driven also by steam engine—threatened to render riparian transport and shipping to a second-class status, if not obsolete. Like Fulton’s design for fleets of seaborne vessels propelled by steam, as a component of the infrastructure of US capitalism, these networks were significant for what they entailed with respect to speed, the lightning-quick pace of transit between points of extraction and points of sale allowing for an overall reduction in shipping costs made up for by the staggering volume of trade. Invaluable for the accumulation of capital, speed was also a great friend to otherwise fragile bacterial agents whose empires had been long constrained by the relatively leisurely course of mercantile exchange, as well as elder networks that had long fitted together diverse peoples from different, far distant places. In 1832, however, common sense understanding respecting the transmission of disease were multiple and largely incongruous. Miasmatic theories about illness continued to hold sway, as did theories about the divine origin of plague as punishment. Observing the empire of cholera taking shape in real time, in 1832, contemporary medical professionals would begin to put together their experience of the pandemic with older histories of epidemic disease, giving shape to something like a statistical epidemiology. These, however, were curtailed by a lingering Puritanism, a theological golem drawing life from ongoing debates over the politics of disestablishment. “The disease, whose late inroad upon our country is the occasion of the people of this Commonwealth being invited by their government to unite to-day in a religious service, is of not precisely ascertained origin, but its history for the last fifteen years has been carefully observed and recorded.” Drawn from a pamphlet distributed under the title Professor Palfrey’s Fast Sermon, John Gorham Palfrey’s description of the etiology of the cholera pandemic traced the distribution of the illness, over a fifteen year period beginning in 1817. Treating cholera as a moral rebuke to the infidel nations of the East, to “Hindustan” and “Arabia,” implicit in Palfrey’s discourse were all the ways in which the perceived erosion of moral character, and steadfast confidence in the truth of Christianity, had invited God’s judgement upon the Occidental nations of the West, whose crisis of faith had caused them to be numbered among the heathen peoples of the earth. “[A] continent is no moral being, that it should be the subject of punishment….A continent is not so much as a body politic. It had no common cause, nor duty, nor character, nor responsibleness, nor mind to be affected by punishment so as to grieve or amend…[Yet] a nation, acting as such through its government, has unity, and it has morals and interests of its own; and it is true that God’s retribution for national sins is by means of temporal evils, because nations, not being like their component parts, immortal existences, having no being except in this world…to be rewarded or punished at all, must be rewarded or punished with temporal prosperity or loss. In the age of COVID, Palfrey’s admonition that disease is not sent to rend the social bond, “not to suspend all offices of good-will, not to crush all impulses of love,” is deeply resonant. Like we subjects of this much-too-late capitalism, denizens of a world consumed by intemperate greed, and punished by a deliberate maldistribution of resources that contributes to what Mark Fisher described as “the slow cancellation of the future,” Palfrey and his contemporaries were subject also to a sense of despair born from the ways in which the spread of disease—the mysteries of its distribution, of its differential impacts upon different bodies—burned through the sinews of the body politic. In hiding from one another for fear of the disease, cholera dissolved, and disintegrated, while demanding heroic acts of charity, of care, for those who suffered from it. Ringing with the pretense of Christian mission, however, Palfrey’s statement is not a disinterested call to an ethics of care as part of a political morality, of solidarity in light of common vulnerability, but an affirmation of the social bond as evidence of a Providential scheme in which pain and suffering and difference are absolute and unyielding; in which pain and suffering and difference are given to the world as evidence of a Divine plan for redemption through expressions of mutuality. In this, Palfrey’s statement echoes with the sentiments of the early Puritan divines, for whom the body politic, the social body, was nothing more or less than the body of Christ and his church, an expression of theological principle, not political morality, not solidarity. In the face of God and God’s will, the science of the Enlightenment, of epidemiology and seemingly common sense precautions regarding unnecessary contact between people who may or may not be ill, are—in Palfrey’s discourse—as fragile as the bodies which have been visited by the judgement of cholera. It is the year 2020 and I am writing this just a few days after the Supreme Court of the United States, fortified by the deeply conservative religious sentiments of its most recent installations, and regardless of all we know about how infections are spread, ruled that political officials have no authority to close houses of worship, of religious assembly, even in the face of our own relentless, viral agent. This, after months of libertarian recklessness to the most basic procedures necessary to protect life, of Christian surety in Jesus as inoculation; or, an untutored confidence in disease and death as opening unto the afterlife, to reward and redemption. Fort, da; gone, there. Like manipulative little children, striving to master the unbearable fact of loss, we repeat what we have done before, slipping into hopeless patterns in the face of our discomfort, our dis-ease. What role might the cholera pandemic have played in consolidating a strangely American individualism, a rush to the west that was a rush away from society? “The Red Death had long been feeding on the country. No sickness had ever been so deadly—so great a killer—or so fearful to see. Blood was its mark — the redness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and a sudden feeling that the mind was rushing in circles inside the head. Then there was bleeding through the skin, though it was not cut or broken — and then, death! The bright red spots upon the body and especially upon the face of the sick man made other men turn away from him, afraid to try to help.” Poe wrote those words at some point near the end of his life. By most accounts, they first appeared in 1850, sometime more than a year after his death. The circumstances of his death remain shrouded in mystery, though many speculate it might have been caused by cholera or flu. Although “The Masque of Red Death,” like most of Poe’s short fiction, occupies a distinctively gothic world, a world that could bear only passing resemblance to the United States of his life, Poe would have well remembered the cholera epidemic of 1832, of what it wrecked upon the haunts of his youth. He was twenty-three at the time, maybe four years after having abandoned his education at the University of Virginia, and just one after having succeeded in getting himself kicked out of West Point, dealing a killing blow to whatever remained of his relationship to his adoptive father. The Red Death may well have been an allegory for the demise of the remaining dregs of early American aristocratic pretense that were spelled out by the cascading financial crises of those years, those crises as often as not very much tied to the ascendance of Andrew Jackson and his raggedy frontier populism, so far removed from the ritual gentility of the post-Revolutionary generation. There is no immediately sensible connection between the demise of the early American gentry and the pandemic of those years, unless one wants to consider the relationship between the pandemic and the infrastructures of ascendant industrial capitalism—of economies of scale in industry and agriculture—but the Red Death does seem a very plausible figure for the conditions of their demise: Sealed up in their mouldering estates, convinced of the talismanic power of foresaid rituals of gentility, of privileges born of colonial legacies or Revolutionary perquisites, the old families were dying out. Bereft of money, their names might linger as traces upon the urban landscape, of the old east coast port cities, and their descendants might later be recorded in the Social Register; but the old world was breaking up, and they could no longer hide behind the privileges of rank. Illness as metaphor, an allegory of social death. There is no sensible connection between the pandemic years of cholera and the social demise of the old colonial aristocracy, but who can know what cholera might have meant for the old families of New York, of Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond? What are the physical consequences of social death, what psychic consequences follow the social death of a class, no matter how odious or ancient, and what is their physical impact? The recursions of hysteria are endless. Herman Melville’s father died just months before the first cases of cholera reached Boston and New York, late in January 1832. Forced to travel seventy miles overland, in subzero temperatures, after two days, Allan Melvill reached his home in Albany only to fall into a delirium. Already unstable because of his failing finances, the inexorable decline of the Melvill and Gansvoort families, he died having lost his mind, bodily exposure leaving him emotionally undone and physically wrecked. How did Herman absorb this loss? How did he carry it with him? What bearing did it have on his fiction, on his family? When Herman Melville’s eldest son Malcolm shot himself in 1867, what story was he telling about his family, his father and grandfather? Why the ‘e’ in Melvill? Why the ‘w’ in Hathorne? Which father were they disobeying? Who did they hope to kill? Would Herman Melville have felt better about himself watching us waiting on line at the club on Little West 12th Street and Gansvoot, hoping to be pretty enough to be let in? Would he be happy knowing the cobblestones are still there? And the view to the Hudson? Call me, Ishmael. But I never gave you my number. I’m sick of this club. Let’s go to Xcel and look at the hunky bartenders. We approach a series of questions perhaps most thoroughly explored by Faulkner, but which nineteenth century fiction would find its own ways of answering, even if they were answers no one could bear to hear. The psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips has described the ways in which the stories we tell about ourselves are almost entirely lies, prevarications meant to hide from ourselves the truth of our perversions, of the horror of desire and drive, of how we are constantly undone by aspects of our personalities, our histories, those things in our past, in our family, that we cannot see and do not understand, that we do not perceive or know, or care to know. The desire for knowledge, Phillips argues, is always a desire for mastery that is a flight from the real. The ministers and the medical doctors who wrote about the cholera pandemic offered two different paths to knowledge, one supersensible, one scientific and rational. Both sought to fit the epidemic into an order of things, into things as they were, as they ought to be. In so doing, both sought to restore order, even as cholera was tearing it apart; even as nascent industrial capitalism, of populism and frontier resentment of urban elites was breaking the old world into pieces, putting it together in new and unfamiliar shapes, a mosaic of what was describing the shape of what was to come. The fiction that follows the decade and change following the 1832 pandemic is perhaps more honest, or perhaps more faithful, in tracing these new shapes. The Red Death, costumed for a masquerade, masquerading as one attending a masquerade, shatters the illusion of the revelers that they have survived by hiding themselves away behind high walls, with infinite provisions. A conspicuous reference to Shakespeare, Poe names the tyrant prince who throws his masquerade ball Prospero: Prospero the storyteller, Prospero the wronged prince, the magician whose pursuit of knowledge will be his undoing. As if Shakespeare’s magician prince has been restored to his rightful place, in Poe, his long-sought dukedom, Prospero the tyrant pursues the figure of the Red Death through the opulent halls of his palace. Composed of multiple multicolored rooms, accented by more opulent multicolored windows, Prospero’s palace is lighted from the outside to create a riotous, delirious phantasmagoria, the edifice declaring Prospero’s command over every aspect of the appearance of his world. Nonetheless, when he finally apprehends the figure of Death, he falls to the ground, dead, as do his guests, leaving Death to rule over the ashes of the smoldering world, invincible and alone. The platitudinous rituals, the procedures—occult or otherwise—by which we seek to cling to order, to restore order, to organize our pains and our pleasures, are no match for the empire of death. Neither our hatred or our disdain will preserve us. They are, more likely, presentiments of a different form of disorder, one that insinuates itself from within order, from within what is, giving life to what is to come. The chaotic monstrosity of illness in Poe becomes infirmity, derangement, and depersonalization in Melville, where Ahab’s hatred of the white whale gives him a singularly of purpose that is less the embodiment of knowledge than of certainty; and it is his certainty that leads both himself and his crew to their deaths. It is his certainty that tears into the forms of discipline that organize the possibility of sustaining life aboard ship; including—perhaps most saliently—the lay system that compelled the crew and tethered the success of the voyage to their pecuniary self-interest. Where the lay system guaranteed each man a percentage of the profits from a given voyage, Ahab offers the crew a single gold doubloon as reward for sighting the white whale, bending one of the most hallowed techniques of labor discipline under capitalism—the self-interested necessity of the wage relation—toward avarice and disorder in the service of Ahab’s desire. Ahab’s madness becomes the madness of the crew, the quasi-socialist camaraderie of the proto-capitalist whaling vessel made a cultish surrender to the master, and the consequent loss of personality. Moreover, Ahab’s madness, his disordered hatred of the white whale, is the emotional manifestation of his infirmity, his have being “unmanned” in his last encounter with the white whale. Melville’s choice of words, here, is seductive, if not cunning, playing upon the phallic pun of the white whale’s name to suggest castration and the transformation of Ahab into a kind of monster, while simultaneously evoking Ahab as a captain without a crew, a vessel of one, unmanned and adrift. Infirmity and illness. Illness and madness. Illness as a metaphor in service of an allegory, the image of the ship substitute for society, and diagnostic premonitions of the necrotic social body. The ship of state, of society, undone through cruel fidelity to its malign purpose: the single-minded pursuit of profit leading to injury, infirmity, derangement. “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old world is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” Monsters in the deep of the unbreakable sea. Just as Ahab’s appearance marks the emergence of something new and terrible, some hideous excrescence plaguging both the old and the new, in Moby-Dick, Ishmael’s slow dissolution into the body of the increasingly deranged crew suggests the dissolution of the post-Revolutionary order of aristocratic pretense, Ishmael’s character being as marked by the trappings of privilege as Ahab’s body is marked by his encounter with Moby-Dick. Formally, this is marked by the absence of clear focalization in the second half of the novel, as well as the complete abandonment of story or plot, characterization or conflict. Like Ahab, “unmanned,” a vessel adrift, both Ishmael and Moby-Dick lose their bearings, their narrative voice, becoming delirious if not deranged, abandoned—like the Quranic Ishmael—upon the desert of the sea. Illness and madness and debility, the self yet more fragile than the body, traces of a history of sickness that bring us back around to Freud; of psychoanalysis as a way, not to a cure, but to more effective ways of being well, of respecting illness while moving toward health. A way of speaking about debility and the illnesses of the body as ways the mind speaks for itself. ENGELS The Red Death had long been feeding on the country. No sickness had ever been so deadly—so great a killer—or so fearful to see. Blood was its mark— Like epidemic cholera, among the present generation, physical debility and mental illness touch upon one another as a function of the reorganization of labor under capitalism, the organization of labor in accordance with the unrelenting demands of the profit motive. Asiatic cholera became a global pandemic because of the “sinews of war and trade,” stalking those who habituated the networks that constituted the emerging capital world economy, of nations and empires, of production, shipping, and resource extraction. Ahab lost his leg to the white whale because he had been following such networks on a previous voyage; the networks followed by sperm whales circumnavigating the oceans. The business of whaling was unrelenting, employing crews for perhaps years at a time, compelled to hunt for the sake of their own percentage of interest in the sale of their harvest of oil. In the interval between disembarking and return, any number of accidents could befall a person any number of illness might strike him; and certainly the punishing regime of labor aboard ship, the discipline necessary to the maintenance of a crew, the lack of proper food or water and abundance of poor liquors, had many consequences for mental health. Ahab may have been the catalyst for the mass hysteria among the crew of the Pequod, but he played upon features of ocean-going life that were all too common—if not inevitable. Employed in war though not resource extraction or trade, Septimus Smith in Mrs Dalloway was subject to similar forces; just as the war itself had as much to do with preserving a particular set of social and economic relations as it did the balance of forces between nations and empires, national sovereignties, inter- and intra- imperial contestants. As Freud would indicate, the trauma of combat—particularly the industrialized, distanced, disembodied combat of the Great War—was bound up in myriad, untold ways with the etiology of the war neuroses. Had his patients been drawn from among the working-classes of Britain and not the Austro-Hungarian middle- and- upper-classes, he might have noticed this earlier. He might have noticed all the ways that capitalism and its labor regime, its disciplines, seep into the mind as well as the body. Black plague; black lung; black heart. One drop. Eeny meeny miney moe. Eggs butter cheese bread. Stick stock stone dead. “In the Cornish mines about 19,000 men, and 11,000 women and children are employed, in part above and in part below ground. Within the mines below ground, men and boys above twelve years old are employed almost exclusively. The condition of these workers seems, according to the Children’s Employment Commission’s Report, to be comparatively endurable, materially, and the English often enough boast of their strong bold miners….[I]n the matter of the health of these workers, the same Children’s Employment Commission’s Report judges differently. It shows…how the inhalation of an atmosphere containing little oxygen, and mixed with dust among the smoke of blasting powder, seriously affects the lungs and disturbs the action of the heart, and diminishes the activity of the digestive organs….[M]any due young of galloping consumption…[having become] unfit for work between the thirty-fifth and forty-fifth year….” First published in 1845, Friedrich Engels’ Condition of the Working-Class in England was, like Defoe’s Journal, a furious digest of the calamities that had befallen working people in Britain under a regime of profit-driven mass production; the forms of physical infirmity occasioned by the transformation of men and women and children who would once have been reasonably independent farmers into brutally-conditioned proletarians, workers assigned to a task, and dedicated to a task, that could easily cause them to become ill, or leave them physically broken. Just as Benjamin’s conscripts had—once upon a time—gone to school in horse-drawn carriages, only to find themselves in the trenches, behind barbed wire, listening for the roar of aeroplanes that came raining death, Engels’ investigations into the condition of the Manchester proletariat—factory workers and miners—exposed all of the ways in which these new employments lent themselves to a new host of sufferings. Capital may have needed its laborers, it may have had a vested interest in trying to keep people alive, in trying to encourage the flourishing of life—Foucault’s celebrated biopolitics—but what matter if a few were maimed, or if chemicals used in production turned out to be toxic, or if the inhalation of coal dust underground in unventilated mines wrecked the lungs? As the report cited by Engels suggests, the conditions of such labor might be endurable, perhaps even beneficial; but eventually the work makes one unfit for such work, dying young of “galloping consumption,” that form of tuberculosis whereby an otherwise and apparently healthy body becomes suddenly ill and expires within days. As opposed to the more glamorous—“chronic”—form of the disease, the one suffered by courtesans who haunted the demimonde, as well as the proper young ladies of the better classes, coughing into lace handkerchiefs, swooning before their beaus, and melting into the counterpane. Engels makes no particular distinction between black lung and tuberculosis, and—for his purposes—he need not. For the nineteenth century, there would have been little observable difference between pneumoconiosis and tuberculosis, and miners of all stripes were prone to both. Etiologically, the first condition damages the lungs so irreparably that it leaves those who suffer it unusually susceptible to a host of bacterial infection of the lungs, including TB. He might have done well, however, to at least note that, unlike black lung, tuberculosis was easily transmittable, highly infective, well into the mid-twentieth century, and quite certainly deadly. It would be left to Marx to suggest the transmissibility of the myriad violences of capitalism, of its labor regime, of the ways in which the work of one not only exhausted his or her body, but was all too easily forwarded to the body of another. “Englishmen, always well up in the Bible, knew well enough that man, unless by elective grace a capitalist, or landlord, or sinecurist, is commanded to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow, but they did not know that he had to eat daily in his bread a certain quantity of human perspiration mixed with the discharge of abscesses, cobwebs, dead black-beetles, and putrid German yeast, without counting alum, sand, and other agreeable mineral ingredients…” Drawn from his analysis of the working day, the chapter of Capital most relevant to the labor movement of his day, Marx’s description of the various unsavory and indigestible pollutants that corrupted those commercial bakeries that had pledged themselves to the sovereignty of capital offers a wholly apt image through which to consider the ways in which the circulation of labor, of goods, of producers and consumers, constitutes a circuitry of infection, serving to organize the uneven distribution of illness and health, misery and joy. Organized around the imperatives of surplus, of speed and volume and the maximization of value, as a function of their necessary imbrication with the physicality of labor, the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities knitted a reticular webbing of toxicities, a parasitic skin, growing upon, and gnawing at, the sinews of trade, of the circulatory structure of capital as a world-making project. Whatever else it may be, labor is respirant, and respirant in common, its respiration bent to the rhythms of management, held within the time signature of capital. Labor is respirant. Capital is particulate. Their fusion is frission, is fission. It is destruction, dust and detritus; all that is wanted and all that is not; the pain in the spine, the spasm, the tremor. It is surplus-value and surplus ruin and the bodies wasted in the creation of both. It is overabundance and the falling rate of profit, the failing limbs. It is gas in the pump and fire on the oil well. It is the refinery and the ash. It is the ammonium nitrate abandoned in the port. The fireworks and the welder. The explosion and the plume, an effervescence of glass. Fiveaugusttwentytwenty I don’t want to write this. I don’t have the words. How does one do things with words? It is 5 March 2021, seven months after the explosion, one year and one day after Lebanon went into lockdown. Can one still do things with words? What right do I have to words? By what right do I write? Do I speak? Is there a greater sin than indulging in words, becoming drunk on words? Is there anyone left to hear, to read? I vomit rather than speak. It is a noise I am permitted, a noise I am forgiven. Speech is pedestrian, everyday, repetitive; it makes the world, it is the light in the dark, the tip of the spear, the promise of order; it is the activation of meaning within the order of the absolute, the extraction of purpose and the vanishing of its detritus, of all that is in the word but not of the word but of the relationships among words. All that is said that we do not mean to say even when we are certain we know just what we have said. I vomit rather than speak. And this is another word for writing. A sound that is substance, a mark, a sight, a smell. I was at the store. The AM/PM on Makdisi Street. I needed something for supper. I don’t remember what. I was hoping I might run into someone sitting outside at Ferdinand, but no one was there. The bartenders wore face shields. The tables were full. I was at the store, waiting to pay. There was a slight tremor, and the shelves shook. My immediate thought was that the wall had been hit by a car. The dimly recalled memory of a largely forgotten moment when the store in which I worked when I was seventeen was hit, from the outside, by a drunk driver. There was a slight tremor, and the shelves shook; I looked at the woman standing next to me and she looked at me. Maybe thirty seconds later, maybe more, maybe less, the world broke open. A roar, a scream; all the air was sucked out of the room, and we crouched low to the ground, waiting for the glass panes directly in front of us to burst. The glass did not burst. The air comes back into the room. Dazed, stupidly, we go through the motions of paying for our stupid items, waiting to figure out what happened. There is no context for this text. I vaguely stumble outside expecting that I would find that a building had collapsed on Makdisi Street. I find a field of shattered glass, the safety glass that is not supposed to shatter, the plate glass that tells a story about the faith Beirutis once had in their post-war future: the faith that there would be no more bombs, no more shells. I spin around trying to see, hoping, pleading, that this is just a building that collapsed, that one of the ridiculous high rises with their promises of well-appointed designer interiors and manicured terraces and rooftop swimming pools that are being built in Hamra came down and sucked the air out of the world. And then I see it. To the north and the east. The plume. It is purple and orange and red and oddly, remarkably beautiful as it begins to waft out over the sea. Of all the things the Mediterranean has seen, has it seen anything like this? Sea, seen, scene. Makdisi, incidentally, names someone who had made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, when such things were still possible. The Islamic equivalent is better known: Hajj. Al-Quds takes prefixes and suffixes and attached to people and a place. To the Christians who, against all odds, helped to build west Beirut. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it    Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.    The darkness drops again; but now I know    That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? That’s Yeats. Gone are my people, but I exist yet, Lamenting them in my solitude... Dead are my friends, and in their Death my life is naught but great Disaster. The knolls of my country are submerged By tears and blood, for my people and My beloved are gone, and I am here Living as I did when my people and my Beloved were enjoying life and the Bounty of life, and when the hills of My country were blessed and engulfed By the light of the sun. This is Gibran. It is 17 March 2021 The lira reached an all-time low yesterday, trading for fifteen thousand against the dollar on the black market. Subsidies are being ended for food and for fuel. By the end of the month we are to be plunged into perpetual dark. Meanwhile, streets and roads are being blocked all over the country. Hamra Street was blocked for maybe the first time yesterday, as were Corniche al-Mazzra, parts of Verdun, the al-Amin Mosque—that Hariri-sponsored architectural monstrosity—parts of Khalde and parts of the road to Dora. Some of the main thoroughfares of a country hardly able to bear the weight of its traffic under the best of conditions, a city where traffic can be brought to a halt under a winter rain. Rotouba: congestion: an early acquisition of the foreigner’s vocabulary: an apology from a disgruntled servees driver: a guarantee that you will be late to your destination. The country is congested. Nothing moves, nothing works, bank accounts are frozen, the robber barons refuse to agree to the compromises necessary to form a government. The air is deadly with diesel fumes. Perhaps Allah or maybe Shaytan might be able to tell us what we were breathing after the explosion. And still, the corona, the hideous demon crown that, being multiple, Legion, threatens to descent upon every head. Threatens to crush every skull. The road to Dora is blocked. Dora is a hysteric whose story has been blocked, who cannot recognize herself in her story. Lebanon is a hysteric who has no story, for whom memory has become disconnected from experience or history, for whom memory is a haunted house crawling with the ghosts of someone else’s past. The airport road and the old airport road have been blocked. The road to Tyre has been blocked. I really hope it has been blocked with burning tyres. Solecism and puns: this is how the mind talks to itself. The barriers that once protected Tyre from invaders did not preserve it from the armies of Alexander the Great, whose assault on the city walls and fabrication of a makeshift bridge gave that portion of the coast its peculiar geography. We have seen this before. It is hardly an original thought, but it struck me with some peculiar force today that we are being punished by the ruling class for having the audacity of conviction, of belief, the audacity to style ourselves revolutionaries, to make war on the robber barons who are the ruling class of this country. Punishment, or counter-revolution by different means. Punishment: a child is being beaten, we are being beaten. Is a child being beaten? In what order of the fantastic do we now move, and what kinds of movements are we making, what kinds of movements have we already made? The Black Horse My people died from hunger, and he who 
Did not perish from starvation was 
Butchered with the sword; and I am 
Here in this distant land, roaming 
Amongst a joyful people who sleep 
Upon soft beds, and smile at the days 
While the days smile upon them.  “Dead are my People” The history of modern Lebanon, as with much of the so-called Middle East, can be traced to the events of the first World War; to the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, the end of the Caliphate, and the disposition of formerly Ottoman territories among their imperial competitors. My students, if they can claim to know anything about the history of Lebanon, know an extraordinarily unlikely amount about the League of Nations and the parceling of the world into nations—discrete and separate—based upon strange calculations of race and ethnicity, language, culture, or pure mercenary interest. Once an integrated administrative unit, the boundaries between Lebanon and Syria were drawn, in part, to create a Christian majority state on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean; a state that would, presumably, share faith with the French colonial mandate, and with Europe more broadly, thereby severing older allegiances with the Ottoman territories and with Constantinople, while also providing a reliably friendly sea port. In practice, of course, this was almost impossible to accomplish. The coastal cities, with perhaps the exception of Tyre, had significant Muslim majorities, while the Christian population was largely rural, confined to the villages of Mount Lebanon. Although there were always exceptions to these arrangements, the creation of a polity with a Christian demographic majority did not necessarily entail a rearrangement in socioeconomic and political relations. Moreover, nearly 150,000 people—mostly men, mostly from Mount Lebanon—had migrated to the Americas in the decades leading up to the war, from 1870 to 1914. Although the Christian and the Druze communities of the mountain had already begun to acquire an economic power and thus a political authority previously denied to them under Ottoman rule, they were a shrinking element of Lebanese demography, and the Christian demography of greater Syria. By the end of 1917, nearing the last desperate months of the war, another 150,000 had died of starvation, of disease, of typhus. While this mass death might be accounted for statistically, one can only speculate on what it meant for those who were left behind, those in Lebanon and Syria, and those abroad, in America, Canada, Brazil, in El Salvador, or in Mexico. Gibran’s poem is a testament to their grief. The knolls of my country are submerged By tears and blood, for my people and My beloved are gone, and I am here… Here in this distant land, roaming Amongst a joyful people who sleep Upon soft beds, and smile at the days While the days smile upon them. The lament of the Lebanese expatriate, resident of a new and expanding diaspora, “Dead are my People” speaks of guilt in the face of overwhelming pain, and distance; shame at not having to confront the fate that befell one of three Lebanese before the end of the war. My people died a painful and shameful 
Death, and here am I living in plenty 
And in peace...This is deep tragedy 
Ever-enacted upon the stage of my 
Heart; few would care to witness this 
Drama, for my people are as birds with 
Broken wings, left behind the flock.  Throughout the poem, Gibran’s agony at having abandoned the beauty of Lebanon, as well as his share of its miseries, is palpable, and he translates that agony into a story about shame, which serves also as a critique of American comforts, the comforts of a society far removed from the realities of warfare—that had never truly borne the horrors of warfare—and whose ignorance was a soft bed. Granted the bliss of easy slumber, Gibran’s American consorts could not see the tragedy that was being played out upon his heart and, offered the chance to attend the show, they could decline with no stain upon their conscience. “[B]irds with broken wings, left behind the flock,” the people of Lebanon and greater Syria were easily disremembered; not so much forgotten, as willfully erased from memory as from standards of moral propriety. As incisive as his critique may have been, as deeply felt as his grief no doubt was, in truth, Gibran was only partially representative of a diasporic population whose presence in the Americas was facilitated by the rising economic power of Mount Lebanon; and, in many cases, forced upon people because of the social factors that contributed to that newfound economic leverage. It was these same socioeconomic rearrangements that helped to precipitate the famine of which he wrote. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, and with the rise of steam powered shipping, the centuries old Lebanese silk economy was increasingly woven into the increasingly globalized, transnational trade in manufactured textiles and manufactured clothing. Confronted by expanding demand, land owners throughout Mount Lebanon transferred much of their total acreage to the mulberry plantations, devoting fields previously given over to cereal production and making them primary nodes in the silk economy. The primary diet of the silk worm, land that had once fed Lebanese people was dedicated to trees that would provide sustenance for insects, parasitic creatures who produce the raw material for luxury items that might be sold in the boutiques of the better European capitals. Meanwhile, older growth forest was felled to make room for mulberry trees. This elder timber would be used to build silk processing factories, and to ignite the furnaces necessary to the extraction process. The trees that were not felled by the combine of the silk industry were claimed by the Ottoman authority, fashioned as telegraph poles, or as ties for the storied railway through the Hijaz. As Graham Pitts has demonstrated, while it meant greater wealth pouring into Mount Lebanon, the commercialization of the Lebanese silk industry and its integration within global networks of trade came with a host of far more deleterious social and ecological consequences. Widespread deforestation contributed to erosion, undermining what little agricultural capacity Lebanon might otherwise have sustained. Moreover, the denuding of mountain slopes meant that local aquifers could not absorb the winter rains swiftly enough to be replenished for the spring and summer growing season. Already compromised by water intensive mulberry growth, traditional springs and wells began to run slower and slower and eventually dry up. Pitts cites at least one instance in which a local grower poisoned a well so that its water could not be drunk, allowing him to claim its output for his own, for purposes of irrigation. Water intensive, commercial silk production had far less need for labor than had earlier forms of agriculture. The penetration of capital into the region under the auspices of European colonialism had undermined quasi-feudal ties of obligation around work, making all work labor, and all labor disposable. Beginning in the 1870s, Lebanon’s second largest export after silk—one that would eventually eclipse all other commodities, and one that continues today—was labor, men (and now women) going to seek employment in the expanding economies of the Americas. Confronted by a lack of land and labor, Lebanon was not able to sustain itself through subsistence agriculture. As she began exporting people, the country began importing the majority of its food, a situation that persists to this day. By the end of the nineteenth century, the basic structure of the Lebanese economy was well in place; and like most colonially circumscribed commercial monocultures, that economy, and the social arrangements it sustained, were—are—exceedingly fragile. Staking their integration within the circuitry of the global capitalist economy upon non-consumable or non-nourishing agricultural commodities, while rendering the country dependent upon agricultural imports as a source of food and remittances as a source of supplementary income, some within the nation purchased wealth and power at the expense of the great majority, now reliant upon monies from relations abroad, the conditional beneficence of local barons or that of the colonial powers, seeking always after their own interests. When the war broke out and the Ottoman navies blockaded the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, both sources of imported sustenance were choked in the cold waters of the forbidden, forbidding sea. The export of silk to the west was just as assuredly stifled, as were any revenues it might have accrued; while the commercial prospects of the traditional, easterly markets of Damascus and Istanbul were circumscribed by the fiscal imperatives of a failing empire embroiled in a losing war. Unable to plant, unable to sell, unable to buy, unable to eat, people begun to die at an extravagant rate: up to 500 a day in certain instances. By the end of 1917, Pitts calculates, more than 150,000 were dead; more than 1 in 3 Lebanese had died—of hunger, disease, or as a consequence of corvee labor—by the end of the war. With the casual acidity of the well-disciplined historian, Pitts notes that the death toll might not have been quite so punishing if the United States had not entered the war as a partner of the Allied nations in 1917, thus ensuring the conflict—and the blockade—would continue for another year, until the armistice of 11 November 1918. And, lest we forget, with the Americans came the Spanish—the Kansas—flu. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Famine was just one of the factors contributing to the death toll in Mount Lebanon. Outbreaks of malaria and typhus further weakened and decimated the population. Brought on by the deteriorating sanitary conditions occasioned by the war, and exacerbated by the desperate search for some form of nourishment given wartime food shortages, a population of already enervated peasants were hardly able to ward off what might have been otherwise non-fatal infections. Weakened by hunger, desperate for any form of sustenance, the women left behind by those men who had emigrated could be found “clawing over garbage piles,” searching for something to eat, exposing themselves to the insects—lice, mosquitoes, and flies—that carried strains of typhus and malaria, while unleashing swarms of flies that the lice clung to, thus rendering them uncommonly mobile. Then there were the bodies. According to some accounts, in some districts, corpses littered the streets, providing gruesome hosts for those insects, and presenting new vectors of infection among those who might have hoped to remove the remains of neighbors or loved ones, to provide them the dignity of some kind of burial, or—at the very least—to spare them the indignity of having their decomposition appear as a public spectacle. After tragedy, farce. I tell my students: There are some things that should never be forgot. And still some lies are better than others. Patmos And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the beast say, Come and see. And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and wine. Traditionally associated with the dispensation of Famine upon the peoples of the world, those lost in ecstatic misery, awaiting the battle of Christ and Antichrist and the coming of the Kingdom of God, the “balances” held by the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse evoke the implements that would have been used by a first century grain merchant who plied his wares on the edges of the Mediterranean. Or, the sort of scales that continue to be used among produce and grain merchants in the twenty-first century Mediterranean world. This association is supported by the verse that follows upon the opening of the third seal—Revelation 6:6—as the beasts are instructed to distribute grain according to portions measured against penny and pound, while commanded to leave the oil and wine to themselves. “And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.” Grain can only be acquired by purchase, no matter how small the cost; oil and wine are free, for those who would partake. A densely allegorical work, any interpretation is inexact, subject to reinterpretation and contention. But here, at least, the point seems to be the exact opposite of the one that Calvin reached. Grace is not enough. Salvation must be won, the Revelation tells us, while Perdition comes free. In Lebanon, in 2021, the agricultural sector is primarily dedicated to the production of tobacco and hashish, olive oil and wine. The grain is imported. And it was the grain silos at the port that absorbed the better part of the blast on August 4, practically melting in the heat. According to some analysts, because the hanger that exploded was to the east of the silos, they acted as conductors, amplifying the shock of the explosion and directing it to the east of the city, while providing a limited amount of shielding for districts in the west. The city finds itself divided yet again. I sincerely hope no one reads any of this as evidence of design or intent. The image of the scales, of course, also evokes associations with Justice, with Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice introduced during the reign of Augustus, and claimed in equal portion, by subsequent emperors eager to declare themselves and their rule as marked by an inclination toward magnanimity. Eid El-Fitr It is May 12, 2021. The Eid begins at sundown. People are starving. Wives and mothers struggle to scrape together another iftar. Garbage pickers have multiplied, in search of salvageable food. The joyousness of Ramadan has been muted, and the point of the season all but lost. What is the point of deliberately fasting when one does have any choice in the matter? What spiritual benefit can be derived from having deprivation and hunger thrust upon you? I have spent the last five months teaching a small group of students in a class called Illness and Madness. A deliberately provocative title. We have spent those five months reading works of high literature, low literature, cultural theory, history, sociology, trying to piece together a transnational language of what it means to be unwell, the different ways people have understood being unwell. It was in this context that I first had to piece together the ways in which the political economy of silk production, and the ways in which it cannibalized subsistence agriculture, had contributed to the eventuality of the great famine, an event that looms large in the history of modern Lebanon, but which most of my students are largely unaware. The line between capitalism and empire, the political economy of silk, the great famine, and the present epidemic of chronic hunger is indirect, circuitous, but these eventualities do arrange themselves in a historical constellation of no passing significance. They align themselves with the history of successive waves of displacement, of displaced peoples finding refuge on this coast; and for the robber barons that have long ruled this benighted nation, this has long provided a perfect device by which to disguise their own perfidy, the rhetorical figure of the “parasitic refugee,” locusts to the fields. Except it is 2021, almost two years into a global pandemic, and we do not talk about parasites, but viruses; as if the internet was preparing us for this moment, for COVID-19; as if the whole history of the literary transpositions of illness, its shrouding in metaphor; as if the whole history of illnesses being taken up as metaphors by which to describe the social, has become hopelessly entangled. Another word for this is condensation. Reading my students’ essays has made me excruciatingly aware of how they live this entanglement through their bodies, their minds, a panoply of illnesses built upon layers upon layers of anxiety. The exquisite violences of capitalism—the precarity that it seeds and the harvest that it reaps, itself generates a sense of unbearable tension, a feeling of being always near the threshold of chaos, about to stumble—have only been amplified by the class war of the neoliberals; and this is the trunk around which wrap the tendrils of other histories of tragedy and farce. The history of all the violences done to Lebanon, done in Lebanon, by which Lebanon was wrought, grow thick: the mundane inconveniences of a social order perpetually on the cusp of breakdown, of wondering if the electricity is going to go out and when, of wondering if the reckless servees driver will crash or if he will try to rape you, of wondering how one gets from point A to point B when there is no map for this territory, of wondering how safe you are at point B when one gets there or if they will hate you for your name, your religion; of wondering when the shooting starts and the bombs fall; wondering who’s watching and who they know and what they might tell. And then all the demands, all the obligations and expectations: family, education, fortune, marriage, children, keeping up appearances, never letting oneself be exposed. Reproducing for the sake of the sect, for the demographics of religion are the framework in which politics are made to play out. My students live all of this. It weighs upon them. They are beginning to buckle. I talk to my analyst. I realize I live with all this. I remember the dream I had about Charlie Manson. We tell ourselves stories in order to live....But writing has not yet helped me to see what it means. My analyst tells me I will laugh at all of them. We cannot speak to each other in lies any longer. We cannot speak except in lies. “I remember that no one was surprised” It is July 15 and I have not written here for some time. Nor have I written much elsewhere. Since I was denied tenure—and since my bipolar medications dried up thanks to the economic situation of the country—I have had almost no hope of maintaining my sanity long enough to work. The concentration is barely there. Sometimes I can muster it. Sometimes, in the euphoria of mania, I can summon the interest in the various notes on my desk that reveal themselves as the thread of new research, new writing. But mostly I am just depressed, and hurt, and angry. Incapacitated by the sharp edges of these feelings, I stay in my bedroom, unhappy citizen of a necrotic world. Meanwhile, I confront something that seems shockingly unfamiliar: sadness. Long accustomed to depression and all it portends, I have forgotten what it means to be merely sad, to be preoccupied by an everyday melancholy that is not brutal or unforgiving, but simply there, a shadow, lingering. Depression consumes the world without cause. Sadness is born of the world and its many disappointments. Freud once said that psychoanalysis offered no such thing as a cure. It could only ever offer the hope that neurotic depression might be converted into everyday unhappiness. How fortunate for me that I would get to experience both at the same time. It is July 15 and I cannot stop weeping. It is slow, and undramatic. I do not sob so much as leak raw emotion. All of the hurt of the last however many years—is it five?—have congealed. The pure depression of the manic depressive has itself been overtaken by the frightened, angry child, the child who has done nothing wrong but is going to be punished anyway just for thinking something, asking for something, for writing something private in a secret language so that he might express some private anguish. Only he does not want his anguish to be private; he wants someone to listen, to understand. Only there is no understanding; there is only an unreasonable anger, spite, and a series of accusations. I am already a criminal, always. So I will be a criminal. I will become criminal. Since I am already suspected of being disobedient and treated accordingly, I will commit all crimes of which I have already been accused. The anger which I hold close to myself somehow hurts another, so I am told to ask for the forgiveness of the other, because the diary of my private anguish somehow hurts them more than they have hurt me. My private anguish may be petty and stupid, but somehow, viewed through the eyes of the other, it becomes amplified. If I am hurt, I must not show it; I must leave no record of it. Bury it. Bury yourself. It is July 15 and the pandemic rages on, new variants here to harm us. Somehow, we are expected not to talk about what the pandemic has done to us, and most of us have forgotten how to talk. The repression was there from the beginning. I feel all the pain. I feel it burn.