VIRUS ALERT--Studies of Sjon Larsson, Jon Rousseau, Augusto Todoele and Rubion del Sur

 Sjón Larsson, To Tell the Truth
 Jon Rousseau, How Do I Know I Am Alive
 Augusto Todoele, Space Malebolge
 Rubion del Sur, The Murder of the World
 

A kind of philosophy emerges at Neon Garden 7 in March, 2020, just when world civilization broke. Geneticists boasted for  decades how they could CRISPR up a mastodon. These techs predominated at the labs of Wuhan and London and elsewhere. Improving man they would make him live forever at all institutes and universities. Craig Venter said just join the animal to the man, make a new man and along the way goats make spider silk. The Whitney Museum exhibited it. The darker sides were motivated by the idea that if the Chinese don't get ya then the Russians will.  Name any nation. This was in the air 3, 4, 5, decades before 2012, but a little under wraps.

So when 2020 comes round and the perfect biotech bioweapon produced from these sources is loosed upon the world, here was the handy coronavirus bubble and inside, carrying more than three faces that were known, aerosol AIDS, SARS, Ebola, all hid out in the bacteria portotella. Loosed is the preferred description since it evokes whatever you shall loose on earth. The poetics of evil in all its forms not withstanding, whether McCarthy in fiction, Crane in poetry and film, some months ahead of the American Emergency declaration of March 13, not prone to belief in anything anybody said, least of all officials, and doing practical research in support of  medical practice, essential services personnel and providers, I began ordering 3M n95 masks, large amounts of C, Siberian Chaga, UV lights, gowns, shoe covers, hairnets, scrubs, cleaning alcohol and actually got some masks in the mail belated before the shut off and the influx of  Chinese K95 counterfeits.

Writing of that time and just before had proliferated with analogies and accounts of the invisible. Worlds that Wittgenstein said were all the best of life but could not be stated occurred just before that  contemplation of Emmanuel Levinas to the effect that the highest state of maturity is not knowledge of the interior state, but of the exterior, especially as it appears in the face of anyone we meet, to see them as ourselves. These notions background both the writings of  Sjón Larsson To Tell the Truth and Jon Rousseau in How Do I Know I Am Alive. Another narrative figure, Augusto Todoele, named for the Lindisfarne texts he examined after a word from Luke 11.22 todoele meaning possessions, took a severe view of the events before and after the plague. He had began with the Klee Angel and followed with Space Malebolge, a judgement of civilization like Conrad coming out of the Heart of Darkness as Mr. Kurtz, the horror. But the horror was all that was held good in that old world. Nobody got away. But nobody was going to get away from exposure to the Wuhan bioweapon either, which stuck like glue, flew like a locust plague, and never went away or disappeared. It gave new appreciation for the life of bats, who lived with the simpler strains. When these were tinkered, turned and mutated and added to, they took down the world. Chants of bioweapon did not occur, but wars, rumors of wars, earthquakes and plagues did. Augusto intended to deal in Space Malebolge with the root causes of all That.

These authors concern the the life of the spirit. To say the body I live in is a living organism subject to the million vicissitudes of biology is one thing, to say I am a a living organism is another if it is a full time occupation to meet and defeat the attacks of Wuhan on the body. Imagine if these were upon the mind! So after three such attacks in a succession of some weeks one after another after another and one turns up feeling OK, that means nothing, just a prelude for the next. So what if there is a psycho weapon against the mind, broadcast in an envelop of microwaves with signatures for different maladies on demand by a keystroke of an operator? Hands up on that, a bioweapon which only needs a key so it doesn't rebound on the maker?

A last outcry is Rubion del Sur looking in prehistoric jawbones in the Antarctic for nuclear radiation, but also on fire with the suffering to produce The Murder of the World on Fukushima which has several virus too.

These narrative pseudo-voices had other writings appear under names most germane to the exploration of quarantine and constant oscillation of public statements, do, don't, do,  worse predictions than imagined proved false, but then proved to be not nearly dire enough, and then complete invention which became government said we should just stay indoors, as uttered in haiku years before, Caesar said just stay in bed.

I undertake these reviews in the same sense I gave chaga to the mailman and masks to a neighbor or whatever emerges in action. What's the point of knowledge if not action, seen or unseen, especially since the unseen, as learned, is much different from its text?