The Poetry of COVID-19

    We’ve all heard of  the ‘butterfly effect’ and we’ve all known intuitively that it was true. Things have effects, that can’t be denied — but unknown ones, unimagined ones, effects beyond our imagination and our control. In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is defined as “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state."  In other words, if a butterfly flaps its wings in Arizona; a tornado occurs in Oklahoma. The wing flapping does not necessarily cause the tornado, but it has effects. The idea that these seemingly innocent butterfly wings have catastrophic results is irresistible; it flies in the face of hedonism and thoughtlessness; it is a stern rebuke to all who imagine that there are no consequences. There is something uniquely human about hoping beyond hope that our actions do not take place in a vacuum, that this is not an irrational world. Take death, for instance. Again, there simply must be a reason. We have long known that grandmothers die, alone sometimes, in nursing homes, perhaps abused, certainly neglected, unwanted, in inconceivable agony often precipitated by their undeserved abandonment. We do not want to think about them; but nevertheless we do. It also occurs to us that some grandmother, somewhere - if not our own — may just happen to die when we are feeling -- shall we say -- particularly carefree and uninhibited? When we are at a party perhaps? Peeling off our shirts? Lowering our panties? Proudly displaying that tramp stamp or sexy thong?  And is that not, somehow, wrong? Not the thong of course — everyone has the inalienable right to wear one — but the fact that we do so enjoy showing it off at a party, dipping a finger into our pants with a gentle tug at the strap — while at the same time some grandmother somewhere is most certainly dying? Is this not unjust? Is it not, in truth, selfish of us to enjoy ourselves excessively at the exactly moment that someone else is enduring inextinguishable suffering? Can nothing be done about this stupifying contradiction? The more one thinks about it the more one might be inclined to turn down the next party invitation. Or perhaps the old woman's suffering provides more of a reason to go —in order to block out such ugliness and our own guilt? For certainly we are in some way duplicitous? This brings us to COVID-19. Whatever else the disease is — and we might argue the night away about that (and why not? Is there really anything else to do?) —  COVID-19 is certainly, if nothing else, poetic. No—more than that — it embodies — in the inevitable juxtaposition of its images, nothing less than the virtual essence of a poetic injustice so terrifying that it might just (some hope) facilitate an ethical sea-change, a moral tidal wave, and halt the endless appalling cycle of man’s inhumanity to man. For COVID-19 not only sets the image of a party against a grim death — one in which we are choking on our own sighs, coughing up blood, lungs welling with congested fluids and unrealised dreams — but, at last -- we understand! It is the urge to party itself that causes death — it is that wild desire to release, let it ‘all hang out,’ throw caution to the winds;  this is  the origin of all worldly pain and suffering! For with such urges comes a toxic, infectious, unexpurgated narcissism. Think of an orgasm; sublime pleasure is ineluctably connected to forgetting that anyone else dies. And COVID-19 announces, in no uncertain terms, that when we are at that strip club gazing at a plump white  — or black, have it as you will — ass, we are killing someone. Today they closed strip bars in Toronto to save grandmothers from COVID-19. I see a young man’s back arched, the swell of his buttocks, his plying eyes yearning for —what is it? Perhaps the twenty dollars I will stuff into his shorts, but alas, the shorts are gone and ‘it’ bounces out and ‘it’ is pulsating growing. It wants me, or I prefer to think so, just as he does, and his mouth goes down to my nipple but still he manages to look me in the eye, and I am straining — not even so much with desire — as with the recognition that yes, I too have a body, even at 67 years, going on 68. But this momentary pleasure, this fleeting egoistical need (I imagine it is an need; in fact it is even less than a  momentary impulse — it is a preference — as easily satisfied as it is forgotten) is the primal cause for the aching, trembling expiration of a 99 year old grandmother, wizened and frail, yet still clinging  on to dear life, gasping through a respirator. And that grandmother’s life — though she is 99 years old — is that not worth something? Something more than my superficial joy, more than the wild look in that stripper’s eyes — which I imagine is pleasure, but is probably just greed? It is I who have killed this kind old woman (because surely she must have been kind, there is not much else for her to be, at 99 years old, abandoned by her family). No, she is kind, although somewhat of a curmudgeon — understandably so, at 99 years— but replete with a wealth of worldly wisdom, and ergo, she cannot help but be kind. And when her gentle eyes come to rest on anyone -- particularly the self-sacrificing nurse who is attempting so desperately to keep her alive; they speak — ‘Don’t I matter?’ 'Do old people not matter anymore?'  'Do I deserve to die, because Sky Gilbert must satisfy a neurotic penchant for some sad, vain, absurd sexual recognition in a gay strip club—fragrant with the aroma of man-sweat, cum and poppers?' Does this admirable old woman deserve to die quite literally at Sky Gilbert's own hand? I think not — says COVID-19. And we must listen. We must hear the poetry of COVID-19. There has never been a truth that was so beautiful, so painful, so very apt, so inevitable — one that frankly and simply makes such intuitive common sense that it erases all science. If we could eat it, we would. But instead, we just must understand: COVID is right, and I am wrong. And I am so terribly, terribly sorry.