Too much self-isolating can lead to self-alienation and you have to wonder if we're all up to nunnery-getting any more, now that God's Dead. Corona has me thinking about childhood. With Corona, I just want to know what makes her tick. But like Nietzsche said, 'Hey stupid, if you f*ck with an abyss, the abyss will f*ck with you.' But I went ahead anyway, and re-watched a movie I never would have re-watched, if not for you, Corona: The Blob. 1958. It was the first horror movie I can recall watching on TV and I have to admit the corny blob from outer space had my nerves on the rack for a while in childhood. I would have nightmares -- imagining swallowing myself, or maybe I was imagining being swallowed by the blob and was still conscious inside.
The blob is a life force that absorbs other life forces it comes into contact with. There have been many interpretations of the blob over the years. The self-evident Freudian theory. (Right?) And the Red Menace theory: At the beginning of the movie, as Steve McQueen is getting nowhere in Lover's Lane, his girl loves him but she fears he's a wolf, a whistling meteor comes to his rescue and hurls to earth (bomb whistles were terror tactics, making the meteor a terrorist). The blob was red, and liked to spread -- call it a commie comet and kill it dead.
But then, more germane to our Corona problem, there was the We-Are-Not-Alone theory. The blob as an amoeba, an alien form of life that came out of nowhere and confronted civilisation and our biology. Suddenly you're staring at cytoplasm, cell walls, osmosis in the face. It absorbed a doctor and mechanic, maybe giving it, symbolically, a kind of auto-immune system. Nuk-nyuk. Subliminally, if you looked real quick, the found meteor even looks like Corona. It gimme a chill. The kind of movie that makes you think. Think: there but before the grace of God go I: why, I coulda been that. And if it's up to the Blob, I will be blob. What if I were Corona, I thought?
It got worse. Stupid me, I went ahead last night and watched the old classic The Andromeda Strain. Not the musical (in case there was one), but the Crichton flick. When I think about it, what an evil f*cker Mikey could be: Velociraptors that come at you like riveting gangsters and flank you: you look and see them balooppidiloop before you're taken by the extra-species sadists; terminal people being harvested for body parts; Coma; West World, and Yul Brenner with no face. But Andromeda was a strain from outer space. A "hideously plausible" depiction of how an alien could make its way to earth and, again, the human species-level danger it represents. It's a crystal life-and-not-life form that mutates and replicates at the same time, and the scientists see it as intelligent, so naturally they want to blow it up.
But what got under my skin about the movie was the little scientist-to-scientist crack about the human species that didn't go over well in my self-isolation ill-humor (albeit, mellowed by red wine). One doctor says to the other that "the human body is one of the dirtiest things in the known universe." What else aren't they telling us? In the end I was reminded of something Stephen Hawking warned about humans being too eager to contact aliens, given we don't know what we'd be confronting. Blobs, Strains, Cook Books.
And speaking of evil cracks, who can look the other way at Agent Smith's snide little commentary in The Matrix. You'd go to cold co*k him, but you know you'd miss and miss. He said essentially humans are viruses and he's the solution. (See the disturbing video evidence for yourself.)
But recently, all those fantasies about alien life forms f*cking with us in the cinemas took a sinister turn when I began reading about some seriously inconvenient possibilities. We've known for a long time that terrestrial life most likely had its beginnings in outer space. But a few days ago I read an article that began a train of thought that has me worried, and if you're the worrying type, too, you may want to go do something else now. The headline asks: Could Giant Viruses Be the Origin of Life on Earth? Sweet Jesus.
The National Geographic (multiply-sourced) article goes on to ask: What if viruses predate bacteria, rather than the other way around? Here's a thought-provoker for your isolation:
[S]ome scientists say the discovery of giant viruses could turn that view of life on its head. They propose that the ancestors of modern viruses, far from being evolutionary laggards, might have provided the raw material for the development of cellular life and helped drive its diversification into the varied organisms that fill every corner of the planet.
The two married virologists from Aix-Marseille University say that their "discovery" of the Giant Virus and its existential priority means it was the essence that human being was waiting for along the evolutionary path.
If you're at all a Three Abe-oriented person you'd better look the other way now, because the news for modern man get worse. Now, we're also being told that "An Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness". Isn't that a kick in the head. That's right, the crazy quilt of thoughts you're having right now might be Old Man Virus just f*ckin' with his host. As the scientists tell us in this piece, "You've got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you've got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought." And here's more on it. Deal with it, they seem to be telling us.
Well, I was just starting to deal with the organic paradigm shift in my pants, when -- what rock through yon window breaks? -- could we moderns and Corona be distant relatives? Now, that's a mind-f*ck, achieved without acid or shrooms. Could viruses be behind civilization; civilization a kind of concentration camp of milling ideas? Could art be viral? That would certainly explain some of the abstract expressionism I've seen, if a virus were calling the shots. I pictured a cluster of humans for a giffy moment seeming like a virus and cringed at its hypnotic effect. Are we dealing with a Sam Huntington Clash of Civilizations thing? Who's to say Corona is not a better class of virus than the one science is saying currently controls our brains? Maybe Corona is the "Ubermensch" we've been waiting for and we should kow-tow. That crown must be there for a reason.
I don't know any more. How come I always felt chuffed when Carl Sagan was explaining things, how we were all "star stuff", literally, same material, but I felt good afterwards, teleologically-speaking? Maybe it was the Vangelis soundtrack. But also, I liked the Moody Blues back then and that may have added stained glass windows to what might otherwise have a horror show. All I know is, I've never felt more like a water bag with legs, some carbon, and a jelly fish for a brain than now. How do I measure up? Corona did this to me. Hell, maybe all this self-isolating everywhere is the real virus. We'll be more dedicated to the central internet brain 'they' say is coming than ever now. What if Corona slips a mickey in the works and upgrades our collective consciousness while we're sleeping (and we always are)?
My friend turned to me and said after watching The Matrix years ago, "Who knows, we may already be in the Matrix." I replied, "Yeah, and maybe we really are viruses." And he said, "Shut up, Donnie," because we liked to quote movie lines at each other.
Two Neo liberals talking. At the end of time.
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