The Face of Pandemic

What's behind the face of the pandemic? What's going on behind all those masks? Our face masks prevent an infection of too much meaning, they keep things decently hidden, things like frank facial expression.

What do all those mouths get up to, behind their curtain of privacy? We're told that some couples have only just discovered the intimate uses of masks, now that they have so many lying around the house ... but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the delicious public freedom of keeping your face half-hidden behind a strip of cloth, and the exhilaration of knowing when you're secretly mouthing f-- you to your boss, landlord, hostile neighbour, tight-lipped criticizing parent ... or whoever else is harassing you.

Oh, the freedom of it. What will we do without masks if the pandemic ever ends? We think we hate them, but when we take them off we'll miss them. The mask has become an old friend, a familiar, rather like an old cardigan you grab on the way out in case it's chilly outside. Why have people always relished the masked ball? The theatre of masque? Because masks symbolize this and disguise that at the same time, provocatively. ("Pro-vocative": "before speaking").

Will we celebrate the end of the masked ball by making a huge ball of shared masks, and burning them on a bonfire? Some people won't, they'll store them away in drawers as keep-sakes from this era. They'll pass them on to grandchildren. Museums will collect them for future exhibits, galleries present Mask Art, publishers produce Mask Lit -- a new genre.

Masks have been around since the days of ancient drama and religious procession, and won't be going away now. Many people won't give them up just because the pandemic's over. Give up the delicious ambiguity of what goes on behind them? No way. Some will decide the pandemic's not that much over. 

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The Mask and the Crown of Life: a Brief Amusement

A funny thing happened on the way to the grave, and I couldn't keep a straight face, despite my destination. Of course no one really believes in the destination, and maybe that's the funniest thing of all.

Life is all play and we're all tricksters. We put on masks, try roles, tricking ourselves as well as each other -- Prosperos all, but not wanting to abjure our rough magic. We put on a mask, for instance, as magical protection against the "corona" (crown) of the pandemic virus that stalks us today. It's an act of faith, but certainly not faith in the government bodies and experts who told us to wear the mask, after telling us for months it would do no good. Oh well -- it can't hurt, we decide.

Funny things keep happening, in life, over the lifespan:
You spend the first half building your brain and the second half de-menting it (with substances, grief, wear-and-tear). But often old-age de-mentation is but a time of deeper wisdom (of "the best of brains, the worst of bodies").

When young we used to say we wanted to find ourselves, but today's young seem obsessed with finding shared identity, not self -- a programmed thing, not an individual thing. Bullying is often part of sports, and "anti-bullying" was briefly a movement. Now bullying's part of the rules of the game of censoring and de-platforming the wrong rights-movements. (Never trust a movement.)

Agatha Christie played a disappearing game at one point. Hide and seek. She left home and everyone ran around looking for her and coming up with theories about her fate -- and then she was back. Many people want to do an Agatha-disappearance, or at least to play-act one through dis-guise. Some people seem to have quite taken to hiding behind COVID masks, making a flag for the face covered with playful symbols. Shapes, colours, diagrams all mean something. At first we all felt awkward wearing a pandemic mask, but now we're beginning to feel naked without it.

That's one of the funny things: you disappear behind a mask, or you disappear into thin air like Agatha did, but then you resurrect. You are re-born. If you were born in the first place, that is. Some apparently weren't. If you were born in a place where earlier tribes lived before you, they say you weren't born in your natal place, but "settled" there. Where you came from is not explained, but you can only be native to the place where you were born. Maybe some of us are laughing on our way to grave because we won't be dying there, never having been born. We laugh at this thought, funny-humorous and also funny-strange.

We wear the crown of immortality then, and the double laughing/ weeping masks of theatre as we follow the muses through our comedy-drama -- never born, yet having the time of our life.

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