Camus, Coronavirus, and Concerts About Matthew Shepard

So already, we had to do it today--post the adjacent on the Broad Cove Chorale-Unicorn Singers web site home page. We (the BCC-US board) haven't given up all hope of good news. Maybe, just maybe, we will get to perform Considering Matthew Shepard (CMS) the last weekend of March. Never say never, right?

An on the other hand, we're not blind to the handwriting on the wall; hence the front-and-center writing on our web site home page.

But it's about more than being practical and responsible. After all, it's Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard that we're singing. While acknowledging the reality of the human experiences of tragedy and confusion and death and hopelessness, CMS affirms life and ultimately enlists "All of Us" in becoming an authentic "we" for the sake all of us. It's about being authentically in the same boat--hopefully, a ferry and not cruise ship at this moment--and taking good and loving care of one another. When we posted our coronavirus-related update and pledged to keep our potential audience aware of further decisions and developments, all we did was walk the CMS talk we've been singing about for the last three months.

"Life Study" by Scott Ketcham*

Not that we'd never heard this talk or hadn't walked it before. But as the sixteenth section of CMS reminds us, "Some things we love get lost along the way." Or at least shoved aside for too long.

That estrangement from what we love and know to define our best selves, combined with the relatively unchecked march of coronovirus, have me thinking so much of Camus's The Plague (La Peste en français). 

I've mentioned this book in the past, usually in connection with some failure of human attention and human compassion; I'm hard-pressed to think of any book that gets it more right about the human proclivity to cultivate a sense of numbness, or at least detachment, through the mindless embrace of habits that eventually conceal us from ourselves. The Plague also gets it right about the consequences of that human inattention and detachment.

This time around, though, I'm thinking about The Plague because it's so much about how a bureaucratic entity deals with a health crisis that threatens the lives of its citizenry. As the book's title suggests, it's a recurrence of plague that constitutes that health crisis, and its locus is a single city--Oran, in Algeria. Camus tells us early on that Oran is home to a population that is remarkably devoid of "intimations" (5).** Oran, Camus explains, is a "modern" (5) city in which virtually all is done "with the same feverish yet casual air" (4). To have an intimation means to have "now and then an inkling of something different" (4).

One of my favorite moments in the book is when, in Part I, Dr. Rieux, one of the town physicians consulting about how best to fight the plague, refuses to spend the group's limited time debating whether or not to call the outbreak "plague": " . . . it has small importance whether you call it plague or some rare kind of fever. The important thing is to prevent it from killing off half the population of this town" (49).** 

I'm not sure why at moments like these people generally prefer to talk about semantics rather than "taking precautions" (49). Because they'd rather not feel fear? Because they're campaigning for re-election?

Of course, taking precautions isn't pleasurable--it requires so much attention. But then again, since when did semantics, half-truths, or non-truths stop the spread of disease? My belief is that disease thrives on mixed messages and deceptions generally. So do any number of ills, not all of them related to our physical health.

The first sentence of Part Two of the book is "From now on, it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us." There's that phrase again, "all of us." In times of pandemic, we all have to do what we have to do; pieces of music like Considering Matthew Shepard get us thinking beyond "me" and "my friends and family" to "all of us." My choral groups may not get to sing CMS two weekends from now, but it's already given us so much. I hope we'll pass it on, even if that can't happen at the end of March. It's a good thing when great art spreads!

There I go again, with my customary enthusiasm at such moments of disappointment combined with faith in those things that, as Considering Matthew Shepard says, are "the things that sway and pass/dance in circles." So I end with the cautionary words with which Camus ends The Plague, when plague is gone and the city is returning to its normal:

And indeed, as he listened to the cries of joy rising from the town, Rieux remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good: that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come again when, for the bane and enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in happy city.

We live in a global world in which more than people travel. Let's hear it for books and music that help us make sense of, respond to, and somehow rise above those moments like our present one! 

* from Scott Ketcham's web site: https://www.scottketcham.com/image/185236694032

** Camus, A. (1991). The plague. Vintage Books. [Note: Thankfully, coronavirus won't kill half of the population, but it will still kill many people, especially if we don't do what we can to limit it.]

*** Barria, C. (2020, February 28). Trump claimed coronavirus could 'disappear' in the United States, adding to the administration's mixed messages. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-trump-claims-covid-19-could-disappear-2020-2