Rand Paul Tests Positive for Coronavirus Days After His Father Dismissed Panic Over the Disease as a Hoax

Rand Paul Loses Part of Lung After Attack by Neighbor

Rand Paul Stops Unanimous Passage of 9/11 First Responders Funding Bill

Rand Paul, Angry Over Plagiarism Charges, Wants to Sword Fight

Mrs Dalloway’s a shaky old dear, burdened by her creator’s sense of the dithery redundant language a brain like hers might kick up (perpetual, always; out, out, out; very, very); but after all she comes by her sense of debility and peril honestly, living as she does in still-traumatized and death-haunted post-war London. Aunt Rosa, in Nabokov’s short story “Signs and Symbols,” shares the same dangerous world, though she doesn’t yet know the half of it:

Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

Philip Larkin, in “The Old Fools,” describes the elderly

crouching below
Extinction’s alp, the old fools, never perceiving
How near it is …

Yet both of these women register, in one way or another, precisely that perception; they simply differ in the ways they cope. Dalloway buys flowers and throws a party, not as death-evasion but as death-defiance; Rosa, like so many people, responds to the unassimilable, appalling fact of the avalanche (see also this recent post about Julian Barnes) with paralyzing anxiety and despair. So does Moses Herzog’s stepmother, in Herzog:

[Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness.

As in, maybe if you don’t live, you won’t die.

********************

With death very much in the spring air, UD returns to the essay “Aes Triplex” (1878), by Robert Louis Stevenson. (It’s short – read the whole thing.) Stevenson begins by noting, drily, that death is the bummer di tutti bummers: The thing stands alone in man’s experience. We propitiate it and the dead by dressing it up in all manner of funerary custom:

The poorest persons have a bit of pageant going towards the
tomb; memorial stones are set up over the least memorable; and, in
order to preserve some show of respect for what remains of our old
loves and friendships, we must accompany it with much grimly ludicrous ceremonial, and the hired undertaker parades before the door.

Lovely writing, no? Playfully alliterative (poorest persons pageant preserve parades) in a tonal – and maybe philosophical – counterpoint to the deadly serious subject… And there are other hints here that the author himself takes a lighter (counsels taking a lighter?) approach to this ultimate heaviness: a bit is gently slangy; memorials for the least memorable is funny; the oxymoron grimly ludicrous captures beautifully the tragicomic nature of many final rituals.

His next paragraph expresses his amazement, given this terror of death, that so many human settlements happily locate themselves right next to volcanoes and earthquake zones, with the people living there having no care in the world:

There are serenades and suppers and much gallantry among the myrtles overhead; and meanwhile the foundation shudders underfoot, the bowels of the mountain growl, and at any moment living ruin may leap sky-high into the moonlight, and tumble man and his merry-making in the dust.

The same playful alliteration (here mainly about the letter M); some wonderful rhyme (bowels/growl); some assonance (sky-high into the moonlight) – this writer is enjoying himself, bringing detached wit and amusement to the strange denialist ways of human beings. Inviting us to laugh at ourselves for our contradictions.

He then deepens the denialist point, noting that catastrophe-adjacent living is only the most dramatic instance of what we all in any case experience – the awareness of/repression of how dangerous it is to live even one day.

And what, pathologically looked at, is the human body with all its organs, but a mere bagful of petards?

Strange indeed how we, with “unconcern and gaiety… prick on along the Valley of the Shadow of Death.” This is not because we have some developed philosophy or theology on the subject of Life; on the contrary, we just enjoy the business of living, of sensate existence, and we enjoy keeping it going.

[W]e are so fond of life that we have no leisure to entertain the terror of death… [We give our whole hearts to] the appetites, to honour, to the hungry curiosity of the mind, to the pleasure of the eyes in nature, and the pride of our own nimble bodies.

Stevenson concludes that this is for the best; we should “stop [our] ears against paralyzing terror, and run the race that is set before [us] with a single mind.” Here his essay’s title comes into play – we need enormous mental strength – triple brass strength – to ignore our fear of death and live a full life. “Intelligence… recognize[s] our precarious estate in life, and the first part of courage [is] to be not at all abashed before the fact.” Don’t reach for philosophies, clarifications, consolations – just live. Dig in. Be engrossed. And then:

In the hot-fit of life, a-tiptoe on the highest point of being, [one] passes at a bound on to the other side. The noise of the mallet and chisel is scarcely quenched, the trumpets are hardly done blowing, when, trailing … clouds of glory, this happy-starred, full-blooded spirit shoots into the spiritual land.

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room, safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me
I am a rock
I am an island

Yes, a subsection of Israel’s cultists really is that stupid. And serious numbers of them continue to ignore government containment directives.

This was UD‘s.

Act!!

UD‘s advice for Arizona’s Rep. Biggs.

Israel has been encouraging illicit cultists since its founding. How can anyone be surprised that these secretive sects have under current conditions simply morphed into virus vectors? “[M]any of us [have] watched in absolute horror as our ultra-Orthodox brothers and sisters [have] attended weddings by the hundreds,” writes an Israeli observer.

Anyone could have predicted that they would ignore health guidelines and put the entire country at risk. Short of locking up thousands of people, there’s nothing to be done. God will infect them and their neighbors and it is God’s will.

It is the leaders who must be aware of threats to the community and to know when to order a shift in practice, and it is them I blame for what is about to occur. When we see hundreds if not thousands of ultra-Orthodox become ill with this virus, it is they who must answer for their deeds.

And don’t worry about our missing out in the United States!

Jewish leaders have voiced concern in recent days about an outbreak within the city’s Hasidic neighborhoods, amid growing evidence that many in the community are not taking the coronavirus health crisis seriously. Despite a state restriction on gatherings of 50 or more people, many synagogues across the city continued to hold large weddings on Tuesday. A handful of yeshivas remained open to children as well, local leaders said.

Every political leader, every city, every state, and every country that subsidized for decades – continues to subsidize – large numbers of people who teach their children contempt for secular authority and ignorance of an empirical realm that features viral infection, can take a bow.

Dedalus in the diaphane; Dalloway downtown:

This is the currency pols call walking around —

Consciousness afoot in freak-time,

The modern viral mariner’s rime.

So, thinking, along the extra sand

Piped in to make the beach expand,

How brilliantly we domesticate

Beaches and dogs… Impatiently we await

Our next trick: The all-clear! probe

Of the fatal microbe.

Bright mild sun and cloudless slate

And just enough wind to exhilarate

Make it a world well worth coming back to

After the coronal tide that terrifies you

Dissolves like the faintest reed

And our wildest fears recede.

On today’s up-and-back boardwalk march, whenever greetings were exchanged with fellow walkers:

“Mourning!”

“Mourning!”

“Mourning!”

It’s Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened of.

The grammarian Pere Bouhours [on his deathbed] said: Je vas, ou je vais mourir: l’un ou l’autre se dit. (Loosely, ‘Soon I shall, or soon I will die: both are correct.’)

***************

[L]ife is a matter of cosmic hazard, its fundamental purpose mere self-perpetuation… it unfolds in emptiness… our planet will one day drift in frozen silence… the human species, as it has developed in all its frenzied and over-engineered complexity, will completely disappear and not be missed, because there is nobody and nothing out there to miss us.

**************

[A friend] consolingly quotes a study showing that fear of death drops off after the age of sixty. Well, I have got there before him, and can report that I am still waiting for the benefit. Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’ in an endless wail, the horror of the moment – the minutes – overwhelming what might, to an objective witness, appear a shocking display of exhibitionist self-pity. An inarticulate one, too: for what sometimes shames me is the extraordinary lack of descriptive, or responsive, words that come out of my mouth. For God’s sake, you’re a writer, I say to myself…

… cuz these guys never cooperate with the forces of reason under any circumstances cuz they are the unacknowledged rulers of the universe. So the Israeli police can visit and plead all they like, but crowding people into rooms to sway over religious texts obviously takes precedence over the godless demands of some so-called state.

*************

And Korea can plead and plead with the messiah of all messiahs but he will instruct his pathetic followers to lie and lie until coronavirus spreads through that country.

They meet often in small halls, where they are huddled close together. Members aren’t allowed to wear any accessories on their faces – like glasses or protective masks – because they are considered insults to God, several former members of the movement told South Korean media.

Moreover, participating in weekly meetings is mandatory – rain or shine, and even in case of illness. Members of the movement must clock in when they arrive and when they leave a “working session”, which allows executives of the group to monitor devotees’ diligence. A cold or early signs of flu would not be considered sufficient to exonerate a member from doing his or her duty to preach the Good Word.

Here’s why it’s crucial for all non-suicidal states to take seriously the difference between sociopathic cults and legitimate religions:

A petition signed by more than a million people has been presented to the South Korean government requesting the dissolution of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, which counts more than 200,000 members.

Why should we need to petition our governments to outlaw homicidally debauched sects? Shouldn’t our governments already be using our laws to identify, surveil, and if need be dissolve the criminally insane operating in secret in the name of religion? Religion is not (quoting once again Katha Pollit) “what people make of it.” Not when they make of it twisted killing machines.

You have every right to nominate yourself one of the Three Christs of Ypsilanti. And if you can find enough faithful to populate a sanctuary, go for it. You get shut down when you start killing people.

… Maryland to Delaware, for another stay at the beach.

Blogging continues unimpeded.

In front of a graphic reading, “Coronavirus Impeachment Hoax,” [Fox host Trish Regan] accused Democrats of creating “mass hysteria to encourage a market sell-off” and sowing fear about the virus “to demonize and destroy the president.”