THANKS to that crazy scene in “X-Men: Days of Future Past” that slo-mos Quicksilver in a frenzied nanosecond rush to flick bullets mid-flight and slug a roomful of cops with the track “Time in a Bottle.” I felt a generation was roused to a fit of nostalgia, of the Jim Croce kind.
There is time for play, indeed, while we kill time under quarantine. So Quicksilver it was who sent me digging for Croce songs, music while I lazed away and mull about the future of the universe, which I’d certainly get a glimpse of in my next meal.
“If I could save time in a bottle/The first thing that I’d like to do/Is to save every day/Till eternity passes away...”
If you’re one in the legion stuck in holes in this pandemic, you’re likely feeling it—eternity in a bottle. It’s a dizzying shift in motion and emotion, dealing with what makes sense in the little space we’re confined in.
And then I thought of the Nobel literature laureate J.M. Coetzee, one name not too far from Jim Croce as sound goes. I remember that part in his novel “A Diary of a Bad Year” in which he talks about the 1918 flu pandemic, examining the social implications of the virus.
The virus, Coetzee said, only has the instinct to replicate, to take over host organisms and not necessarily kill them. Deaths, he said, are mere collateral damage, although viruses ultimately have world domination in mind.
The way the viruses cross from one species to another is by random mutation, something yet alien to human reasoning. In this game of chess, humanity relies on “human reason,” while the virus plays in the viral way.
It’s a game of strategy, yes, but in the logic of chess, it’s the virus that’s playing the white pieces and humans the black ones—meaning, the virus makes a move; humans react.
But that only assumes it is fair game with the virus. Doesn’t work that way. Says Coetzee: “It is not inconceivable that one day a virus will make the equivalent of a conceptual leap and, instead of playing the game, will begin to play the game of game-playing, that is to say, will begin to reform the rules to suit its own desire.”
So will human reason, the only form of reason there is, eventually find a way to triumph against the virus? Yes, but Coetzee said, this should not delude us with a sense of perpetual victory because humanity’s feats against the virus were mere “instant in evolutionary time.” He asks: “What if the tide turns; and what if the lesson contained in that turn of the tide is that human reason has met its match?”
True, a hundred years since the influenza pandemic and here we are, puzzled, gasping from yet another of Death’s invisible dust. But could Coetzee be right in reducing humanity’s fight via human reason alone? What about other human skills—the ones that know art, music, poetry, dance, our deep instincts to understand patterns in nature?
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tried to turn the coronavirus structure into music as a way to help them understand it, converting spikes and amino acids into AI-generated flute, strings and bell chimes. It’s now a 110-minute track you can get in Soundcloud in case you’re interested. So we get a musical representation of the virus in action as it latches on host tissues.
I can now imagine humanity like Quicksilver in slo-mo, flicking these crowned mutants to their deaths, and Jim Croce singing at the background. We’re X-Men, you see.