CRITICA

This short piece is excerpted from a moral fairytale titled On a cru. . .[We believed…]. Using the freedom of tone that any satire allows, the text proceeds both through a vivid, cynical interrogation and an immense tenderness towards the tragic destiny of our species: one condemned, with its indestructible good will, to be incapable of dealing with its contradictions without wanting once and for all to resolve them.

Poetry https://guerrierpoesie.blogspot.com/
Perplexity https://cheveupoesie.blogspot.com

It was already not always easy to live together before, when there was a multitude of deadly diseases that could decimate us, but the omnipresence of a single incomparable risk that called us to be vigilant everywhere — while shopping, on returning home, leaving our house, staying at home, carrying our children in our arms, keeping them away from us, going about our daily chores, encountering the hundreds of reminders to order and caution that flashed on giant panels, all this sudden deployment of asepsis and prophylactic passion had seriously diminished our reserves of compassion. We looked at each other fiercely. Our eyes darted onto the state of health of each passer-by with scrutinizing distrust, and we issued discrete evaluative hypotheses on his general state. Everything was there, his blood pressure, his temperature, his breathing, the physical clues of the level of aggression that could be expected if we made the slightest misstep by pointing out to him the inadequacy of his prophylaxis, to protect him against himself. We had acquired an unstoppable diagnostic capacity in the detection of potential dangers observable in the carriage of the head, the pallor of the cheeks, the arch of the back.

Slowly, the twists and turns in this purified climate of imminent death seemed to create two groups: those who immodestly indulged in the delights of fear made official as a new rule of manners, an ultimate form of heroism, and sacrificed all discernment to it; and the others, who were content to lower their heads a little, hidden from retaliation against their disbelief by the annihilation-preventing accessories which made it impossible to guess whether the glimmer in their eyes was associated with a smirk or not. There were a few, more or less serious skirmishes when the constabulary expressed itself with excessive zeal with regard to the minor offenses committed. The devotion with which some applied the new rules, trying to show the world how just and good they were, so respectful of their neighbor that they thought it fair to denounce him for his good, also had the result of weakening the social fabric.

One noticed with dismay that the generation which should have rejected en masse all notions of a panacea, was the most docile, managing to exhibit the index of its alienation as an indisputable testimony of its political conscience and transforming the most visible accessory of submission to injunctions, into a fashion accessory.

The innumerable versions of fatality, all its varied and unpredictable causes generating the precariousness of our various fortunes; all those could now be reduced to a single name, a unique noun to appropriate for our greatest good, for our complete health, for our interactive security — completely reassuring in the fear it generated because created somewhere far away by informed laboratory technicians, custodians of indisputable knowledge. We put it on like an overcoat they lent us against the storms, this word pandemic, both mysterious and terrifying. Those of us who supposed ourselves enlightened came to agreement very quickly, because life, a fortiori, everyday life and what we could hope to see there, was only a heap of prejudices; we no longer trusted anything but the uninterrupted messages which were hurled at us.

There was something very reassuring about this wave of panic, and we fairly quickly incorporated this new nomenclature of morbidity. Incorporated, yes, suddenly became free to unrestrainedly discover in ourselves a myriad of symptoms, each more alarming than its predecessors. We made it more corporeal than our body itself, which seemed to us to have become so unreliable and so obsolete that it appeared just as practical to submit it to the new nomenclature completely. We did not realize that it was only replacing the terminology that had preceded it which had evaporated in the face of the urgency of the major crisis, and we brandished this name in all circumstances by saying, this is what threatens me and what I am, this name is us, an obscure but magnetic formula that hypnotized with all the force of its classifying power.

So, once freed to no longer be accountable to anything except to the drugs prescribed to manage our so embarrassing feelings of gloom, we came to no longer know who we were talking about when we were talking about ourselves, and to be satisfied with this designation which delimited us, erasing by its weight of categorization and omniscient erudition all our anger and discontents, to replace them with a badge visible from afar by all.