cardboard ghosts of future past

Back in the old days, before cardboard cutouts depicted demographically apportioned faces, before stone-still, silent, opaque audience members dressed for the occasion (sports, symphonies, operas, bullfights), actual people were in the seats, stands, arenas, galleries. Can you believe it? In those days, people gathered en masse, in the flesh, prey to each other's coughs and sneezes, victims of unwittingly and unwillingly shared particulate matter. Vulnerable to any stranger's invisible or visible imprint. In the olfactory wake of a curnucopia of scents: body odor, body scent, soap, sweat, perfume, eau de toilette, cologne, and a gazillion unnamed human animal exhalations and excretions. Are you taking all this down? Believe it or not, in those days people thronged and congregated: in bars, churches, pubs, classrooms, assemblies, rallies, union halls, corridors of government, conclaves of commerce. Now, as you know, in every instance, such breathing, pulsing crowds (and individuals) have now been displaced by cardboard simulacra, two-dimensional facsimiles of mute stillness. You don't remember this? Of course not. It was before your time. It was before grim and horrid circumstances forced a consensus of care and protection: social distancing, masks, sanitary measures, disinfection. When these efforts failed, people endured lockdowns, shutdowns, closeouts, wall-offs, barrier-bastions, sealant seizing, communal-closeting, superquarantining. New words were invented to describe new fortifications. But it was too late. The damage had been done. The viral wildfires had, well, gone viral. Those who had mocked the seriousness of it all, those who attributed it to a political hoax or a foreign scheme were in the front lines of failure. They were among the legions to succumb first. But not all of them, not all the disbelievers fell to cruel fate and cold reality. Some escaped. Some went into exile, their whereabouts still unknown. However, the masses had no such escape hatch. Instead, they made the best of a novel way of living, three-dimensional forms floating in and around their cardboard fellow citizens. They learned to befriend the cutouts. They even importuned upon the cutouts to imitate them, to serve as substitutes, ersatz personalities, avatars. In this way, large numbers of the Three Dimensionals found gainful employment -- such as it was -- as designers, painters, artists, portraitists, fabricators, shippers. And so the old days became the new days, and everyone forgot about the old days. That is why I wrote this letter to you, my grandchildren.

failure to thrive

When infants or children show signs of not growing according to standard projections, "failure to thrive" might be the diagnosis. The cause or causes might be a host of medical, nutritional, biological, genetic, psychosocial, or environmental factors. Sometimes the cause is undetermined. 

In some cases, failure to thrive, or FTT, is attributed to abuse or neglect. 

Some researchers have focused on maternal touch as a contributing factor to FTT. These studies examine mother-infant tactile interactions: their frequency and type (unintentional, intentional, during play, during feeding). In some cases, the mother or child may exhibit an aversion to physical contact.

Failure to thrive.

The term has poetic gravitas, a resonant summons for us to reflect.

In the Age of Coronavirus, will infants, children, adults, including the ill and the elderly, experience failure to thrive? Will our necessary, imposed self-isolations, self-quarantines, add the unintended affliction of FTT? At a minimum, will our severely restricted social interactions, our social distancing, cause human thriving deficit, or HTD?

We are social animals.

I know I am.

I already have a burgeoning case of HTD.

How about you?

And in the bigger picture, from a global standpoint, from a species perspective, how much FTT or HTD can the human race sustain? And for how long?

Oh, the longing for touch, our ardor for human texture, pining for skin and pulse, hungering for hugs and human scent, blood, sweat, and tears, tactile tension and tangible tenderness.

Acute Abysmal Chronic Human Wasting Disease (AACHWD)

Acute Abysmal Chronic Human Wasting Disease (AACHWD) is a progressive yet rarely fatal condition classified as a transmissible modern malady (TMM). Symptoms include obsessive-compulsive repetitive behaviors, such as rapid thumb movements, frequent finger-tapping and swiping, bursts of excitement, aphasia, and neuropathy of fingertips. Other observable phenomena linked to AACHWD include voluble cursing at video or digital-device screens, memory loss, insomnia, and rapid heartbeat. Withdrawal attributes include adrenalin letdown, irritability, sullenness, anxiety, moroseness, lethargy, poor appetite, restlessness, and social withdrawal.

Geographic Distribution and Origins

The geographic extent of AACHWD has changed dramatically since June 29, 2007, the date of the inception of the iPhone. Since 2007, the disease has been found globally in free-ranging humans in loci with either concentrated or sparse concentrations of adult homo sapiens. The disease has been increasingly identified outside of the original endemic areas of the United States and industrialized nations. Earlier manifestations of the disease were seen in 1980, first in Japan, coinciding with introduction and popular use of the video game Pac-Man. Designated “eradication zones” around the areas where it was detected have proved ineffective and fruitless. Scientists doubt whether such aggressive management will succeed in eliminating free-ranging foci of AACHWD.

Transmission to Other Animals 

Concerns have been raised about the possible transmission of the AACHWD agent to domestic animals, such as dogs, cats, parakeets, canaries, fish, salamanders, cattle, and sheep, which may come in contact with infected humans. To date, no such transmissions have been observed or reported.

Diagnosis and Treatment
 

To date, no histopathologic, immunohistochemical, and Western blot testing of brain biopsy and autopsy samples have confirmed a AACHWD diagnosis. Clinicians have relied on anecdotal observations of the aforementioned symptoms, but no accurate measurement protocol, regime, or scale exists, leading some scientists to doubt the existence of a verifiable disease.

 

Recent studies have shown limited treatment success correlated to separation from environmental sources of infection, including exposure to smartphones, tablets, laptops, and gaming devices. Even in clinical trials of treatment, however, some patients continued to exhibit progressive aphasia, memory loss, social withdrawal, vision disturbances, and seizure activity leading to status epilepticus or induced coma.

human touch

Not just any touch. Human. After today's healing service, at St. Paul's Cathedral, downtown Syracuse, I wondered, "Why does this move me so?" When the priest puts the oil of chrism on my forehead, and even more when her hands press upon the top of my head, I am moved. I am touched, literally and figuratively. Why is that? Is it out of a deep hunger? A longing for human warmth and connection? To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, in "Prufrock," it is that and so much more. But if I am honest, it is not touch alone. It is smell as well, though I can't seem to name any. (There was no incense, yet in some deep recess the burning wax of candles resonates, I'm sure. And bread, morsels of sacred bread. Isn't all bread sacred? In our family, as kids, back in Stamford, Connecticut, if we dropped bread from the kitchen table, where we dined, our custom was to pick the bread up and kiss it. Was the practice imported from Poland or Slovakia? I should ask my mom, 98.) So today, snowflakes touched my skin, or could have, this late in cruellest April, but they ain't human. My head will touch my pillow and find comfort there, but it ain't human. Which begs the rank and obvious question, "Am I human?" That is not as morose or as depressing as you might first think. Back in high school, Father Giuliani often said we had to be human before anything else, certainly before we could claim to be Christian (or atheist, for that matter). What is it to be human? You could make an argument, couldn't you, that the absence of touch, inhabiting the arid, monastic cells of the Desert Fathers, vacant of human touch beyond my own skin, my own fragrance, would pin me with the solipsistic label inhuman.

If I were a sociologist . . .

. . . I would tell my students to think big, and originally, even if they started small, and unoriginally. I'd challenge them to come up with a grand research project, something like: why do groups of humans flock to do certain things and why? Oh, I know, studies have already explored that. But dig deeper. Watch people at a store or at a mall. What are the influences of smell or building design or age or race or clothing or crowdedness or gender? There's lots to explore. And lots to learn about humans as individuals and in groups.

counting crows

As I walked along the Creekwalk, I disturbed the countless crows. They hawed and screeched; they flustered and fluttered. One man, a rude intruder of the tree-limbed confab. What harm posed I? What threat? I kept walking, toying with the crowy sentinels, sneaking a smile but wondering who'd get the last laugh.