Talking to the virus
Talking to the virus (i), watercolor 8x8 in. March 2020 © Rami Schandall.
Lee Maracle is a celebrated writer from the Stö:lo Nation on the west coast of North America. She posted a story on Facebook in the early days of pandemic-panic in Canada. It told of a meeting among the forces of nature, to consider a home for virus and bacteria. Cedar volunteered its roots, where these beings could live without harming “the fragile ones” who were dying. We should talk to this virus, in a spiritual sense. The story reminds us that we live and have lived with beings like Covid-19 for eternity, but when our relations with the natural world are disrupted, opportunistic organisms find new hosts. Medical anthropologists and others observe that, through human history, as well as contemporary times, when there are grave changes in the balance of ecosystems, new diseases appear.*
Maracle’s story resonated strongly. I had begun a series of paintings of the corona virus itself. “Corona” is a crown, and these organisms look like they have a little halo or crown in photographs. I saw beauty in that form, and did many paintings over several intense days when writing and clear-thinking seemed impossible.
Talking to the virus (ii), watercolor 8x8 in. March 2020 © Rami Schandall.
As I played with wet paper and watercolour, the relationships between the organisms and their context would blur, their boundaries would blur into each other, and then coming to a drier part, they were contained again. This is simply the nature of water, and of watercolour, and the metaphors of these boundaries and relationships — their edges, containment, contamination, separation — were powerful to meditate on in these anxious times. And in the study, the sketching, the painting, I felt aversion, facination, irritation with limitation and loss of control, gradually moving into acceptance, into the pleasure of the play between accident and deliberation. Settling, eventually, into calm, talking to the virus.
There are many ways to frame this unprecedented event. It is a crisis, and it is frightening, and we don’t know how it will turn out, except that many are suffering, myriad ways. Yet, all of the beings at play in this dynamic are of the earth. Viruses and bacteria and things that are pathogens to us, have their own beauty, their own logic, their own evolutionary arc, sometimes coincident with ours. Solutions, rebalancing, will come from and be of the whole.
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May all beings be happy
May all beings be healthy
May all beings be safe from danger
May all beings be free from suffering
and the causes of suffering.
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* Andrew Nikiforuk writes Ten Thoughts on the Power of Pandemics drawing on his books written on the same subject. Laura Spinney in The Guardian looks at the impact of factory farming in China and a possible link to the novel corona virus. John Vidal in Scientific American looks at how habitat destruction sets up the ideal circumstances for pandemics to occur.
Talking to the virus (iii), watercolor 8x8 in. March 2020 © Rami Schandall.
