ISOLATED THOUGHTS, ENTRY Nº6
15th of April 2020. Leeds, UK, the Earth
In these viral times one can’t avoid playing some loud jazz, staying in pijamas till noon and feeling like a real artist; not getting paid to be creative all day long. Acting on this, my new and old occupation, I’ve checked up the word virus. And how many things we have in common; us and a virus. Almost sisters, like looking at two drops of water. I think that you and me and all of us were viruses far earlier than the Covid-19 was even a prototype. Maybe it has been in the shadows, peeping at us, learning from the masters of viral behaviour.
Let’s start easy; a virus has the ability to self-replicate, reproduce, multiply itself. Fun fact, just over the last two centuries, humans, also known as ‘we’, have increased from 1 to 7.7 billion. Quite a spread, don’t you think?
A virus intends to damage and/or shutdown the system which it inhabits. Can you guess where this is leading us to? - To make this less painful, let’s imagine that we are living in a musical and what’s coming next is the chorus, come on, sing along! - ‘We’ have annihilated 60% of the animal species since the seventies; ‘we’ have been unscrupulously exploiting the planet’s resources and treating it as our rubbish tip; ‘we’ have taken off the handbrake on global warming, climate change and come on! Sing with me everybody!
‘We’ are a complex virus, one that attacks the system whilst being its own cruel saboteur; race, religion, sex, nationality, gender, culture, identity, history, preferences of any sort, politics, customs, class, resources, manners, bread, breed, education, money…everything and anything is a good enough reason to asphyxiate one another.
Next to this human pandemic, the Covid-19 seems a simple A versus B problem; a cure, a breather, a rehab process for the earth, the animal world and even ourselves. A break from the real threat; a break from us.
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