from Covid Conversations by Johnny Rodger

I

Ventilating the Problem

‘It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear’

The windbag often blows about the ventilator. This kind of air don’t do no good though. Not in the sense that it cures anybody. Not that it looks after anybody. Nor even that it identifies any particular problem. Unlike the ventilator, the windbag appears to have no mechanical workings. There are theories which seek to explain why the non-material phenomenon of the windbag –which should thus not be confused with the windsock or windtunnel – should have flourished in the early twenty-first century. That’s not to say however, that this apparatus (if one can even call it an ‘apparatus’) doesn’t have a much longer history. –Indeed , an endless one it might be said. The seventeenth century Hameln alchemist, Luftenharsch, for example, denied that there was a lack of mechanical working in the windbag, while stressing that ‘mechanical’ doesn’t necessarily mean a repetitive reworking of always the same material. It was all to do with scale, claimed Luftenharsch. This sort of pump should not be figured only in the form of a purpose built minimalist and utilitarian device. Despite their common facility in hoovering up from one source and offloading swiftly to another destination, they are often not only useless, but literally a waste of time, and, somewhat disappointingly, the harm they distribute is proportional to the efficiency of their operation as such. So much for the enduring faith in the ‘technological solution’!

Luftenharsch deploys the case study of his native city during the plague of 1347 to clarify those spatial and temporal effects. According to documents Luftenharsch was able to retrieve from the archives at the Deutsche Bucherei national library in Leipzig, the very streets and public spaces between the half timbered buildings of the old city of Hameln were mobilized to act as a void chamber in pumping plague death far and wide around Europe. Operating via a tonal directionality rendered essentially, that is to say, as an urban windbag, the load of the offending coccus is drawn in from an infected aggregation of city vermin (subsequently, and dangerously, dumped in the river), then it is voided into the young folk of the city –they naturally congregate in those public spaces –  The young people are subsequently expelled –disappeared – to the four corners of the continent by this tonal component which, sounding through the streets, is evidently unbearable to their still tender young ears.

Media play as pivotal a role for the windbag as they do for any transmission. Amongst the collection in the basement of the Bucherei, is to be found the rudimentary media employed in the fourteenth century. The thin timber tube, no more than a hollow stick, fashioned with a pattern of regular circular voids down one side, can still be seen there on display. There is of course, some doubt as to whether it is the authentic original stick, but nonetheless, the whole case sets an extremely worrying historical precedent. With the digital capability of current day media, one can only imagine the scale of disasters that could be wreaked on the population were the windbag to be transmitted via modern technology to the public in the cities of any major country today.

II

A Tyre and a Kerb in Lock-Down

Tyre:    Ooft!

Kerbstone:        ‘sup?

Tyre:     Cannae get a breath.

Kerbstone:        It’s the times –all this running about you guys do…

Tyre:     I’m not going anywhere…

K:         I mean normally. You’ve gassed yourselves, made yourselves sick –and everybody else.  … Normally I wouldn’t be getting a word in for your tales of adventures and derring-do. –One day it would be: oh I taste that saltiness from the wee puddle that’s dripped off you, have you been out to the coast today? The next evening it’s  –ooh that’s some strong manure I smell in your tracks, were you driving in the countryside this afternoon? Another day: wow, you’re absolutely roasting tonight –I can feel the heat off you –have you been parked up in the…

T:         Parked … that’s all I …

K:         Punctured is it then? Is it a puncture you mean? Is that why it’s like .. there’s no air in you?

T:         phew! Flat! … but it’s no just me …

K:         I’ve spent a life of flat. Of solid, airless, waiting. Don’t tell me what it’s like to sit in the one place all day everyday without a breath. I’m expected to have infinite patience. That probably entails being completely flat to be fair … totally dense, solid layer upon layer, with no room for air –so that ye cannae miss it… Just sit here endlessly performing yourself, marking out where the motors go and where the folks can step safely; separating the floods and the filth from the dry pathway of safety. Oh aye, I’m ey demarcating. A demarcator. It’s like the different types of being that they taught you at school. –Live-Never Alive –Dead. In that schema they say a stone is Never Alive. Hah, they’ve just not waited long enough for me to catch my breath. I’m talking aeons here.

T:         So what’s your hurry then (cough, cough)

K:         Hurry?

T:         To get me moving… if you’ve got yonks til your own next breath?

K:         well there’s certainly fresher air since you and your like have stopped rolling around the roads. But I’ve been missing my daily warming in the sun in the time you’ve turned yourself into a permanent shade. So what’s happened, have they abandoned you? Are you a write-off? An old wreck too far? You know what they’re saying about the vulnerability of the older generation. They’re preparing the great geriatric sacrifice…

T:         very funny …but haven’t you heard ?

K:         heard what? I haven’t heard much from your side since you blocked me out the daylight 24/7, and there’s hardly a footfall on this side either …

T:         they’re all dead

K:         who?

T:         phew! The humans.

K:         Eh? How’s that? Well, I think I’d have read about that in some old newspaper fallen in the gutter here, if it was…

T:         Oh yeah, who’d have printed that then?

K:         Alright … So how can we know that it’s actually definitively happened? And when it happened? Who’s going to tell us when the ‘when’ is? And if there’s no ‘when’ anymore, did it actually happen? I mean, if there’s just sun and dark now, and every day is the same, no marking time, there’s no weeks, no months, and no knowing the when or the if of anything.. is there? Just continuous sameness .. just the aeons… breathlessly on…

T:         (wheezing), yeah…

K:         Just lots of stuff heaping up down here, flattening out on earth, a load of things…

T:         …rolling endlessly through space. Alive to the air, dead to the calendar (wheezes its last, slumps completely flat on the tarmac.)

III

Dialogue Between a Cough and a Sniff

(Translated from Morse-Covid)

Cough:  Keep on  … keep on repeating myself …

Sniff:    hmmmf – you’re trying to hog the headlines again

Cough:  ha .. that’s actually what they call barking … reputed in some quarters as obnoxious, repetitive, invasive … I suppose by ‘headline grabbing’ you’re implying it’s some type of insistent, assertive territoriality … Yet all I’m really doing …

S:         we’ve been through it ‘all’ before …

C:         Ok, your motto is ‘keep things to yourself’ right? … right? I’ll just have to take the role of the beacon, the lighthouse, the fire on the mountain. I’ll let everybody know how the host feels …

S:         hmmmf

C:         Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!

S:         My motto, if I had one, would be ‘why are we still here?’

C:         Yet …yet, you do nothing to effect the change needed. Virus’s are born and virus’s die, and yes, we’re still here, we’re inseparable, maybe that’s why I seem to irritate you more than the virus itself. You’re long-suffering, passive acceptance of it doesn’t even let the thing roll on through. It’s hardly even an attempt at damage limitation. Just keeps it there welling up, going on and on… It’s difficult to reconcile, right enough, your quietist acceptance of the attack with your peevish resentment of sociable company in the thick of it.

S:         Hmmmf. You should hear yourself. Expectorating all over everyone and everything around. You’re like a dog pissing on each lamppost along the street.

C:         Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!

S:         Are you quite finished with your complaint?

C:         You’re the one that’s complaining!

S:         hmmmf

C:         … and as usual it all comes down to class with you…

S:         This is not a classy complex of yours…

C:         … as soon as you hear any earnest unselfconscious attempt to take action you turn your nose up. It’s sooo vulgar! You couldn’t bear for there to be anything good or true in a voice that speaks out in public, that tries to get the whole story out and make things better…

S:         …tries to drag everyone else into your story…

C:         People are in this story whether they like it or not. That doesn’t mean it’s the only story … Like the St Kildan islanders – the entire population would catch cold every time a visitor landed on their shore. The boat cough, they called it. It’s said you could hear the whole island coughing in their beds at night for weeks on end.

S:         That would certainly drown out the sound of their miserable sniffs.

C:         What a symphony though… it’s not like the solitary sneeze or the solo splutter. Who knows what vital pathological discoveries could be unearthed in a study of the history of the cough. It might bring appreciation of its role and its repertoire almost as a type of music. The relationship between single coughs, the timing, the duration and the phrasing in series: the tone and cadence of each cougher in the depth of night. The contrasting and harmonising of the tones and rhythms of each cougher in the community of coughs as they sound off together and apart. What is ther relationship, if any, between the individual cough and the sounding off of a whole population. Maybe it could tell us something about the virus, about the spread and the strength, about its movements, its attacks.

S:         … the sick staccato beauty of it …

C:         Which just keeps going on and on and on until it works itself out in a… a ..

S:         … Meaningless suffering…

C:         Bark! Bark! … Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!