the house by the sea pt. 8: too many questions

And what questions, all left tantalizingly unanswered by the films and by the literature. What is the virus and how does it work and where does it come from? The terror of ignorance is the constant in these stories, the pervading fear that underpins the rest, and the void of the dead, the immense emptiness left by the absence of life, allows for the imposition of a profusion of highly politicized meanings upon the dead themselves, making them the vessels for agenda that the decade demands. How they came to be becomes an insignificance; what matters is what they come to represent. The world falls apart and no one has an answer, and the nameless enemy is all the more dreadful for that reason, and for the familiarity of their bodies, their instincts, their humanity. Stripped back to some fundamental primal point they are us, a broken people with nothing but hunger and survival to take us forwards, all artifice and sanitization and reason long dissolved in hopeless nihilism. These are stories not of the dead but the living, of a desperate human failure to cohere and to respond, of the most ultimate collapse of the frail monoliths of civilization and progress that had blinded us all to our own injustices. Engulfed by the problem the social commentary of interpretive metaphor was hard to theorise and seemed barely to matter if at all, save for the committed anthropomorphizing of the broadsheets to try to lessen the sting of our failing narratives. They were the problem and it them, the horror of everyday life. There was no safe analytic distance and even concrete paradigms failed. It’s expected, invited, but not like this. Some things are and have to be or nothing is and can be. Death is death was the one thing they knew they knew and they knew now nothing. No one dared call a zombie a zombie because there are no zombies, as though to even utter the word would instantly invalidate the realism of their narrative case, as though to allude so blatantly to a mythos so widely acknowledged as fictional and to references so markedly low-end cinematic and to perceptions so culturally transcendent (i.e. fears so incredibly deep-rooted within the “human condition” and therefore universally [humanwide] potent: of cannibalism, terminal alienation, overarching lack of agency, contorted and frankly flawed notions of the very essence of mortality/what it means to live or to be alive/the revised place of a spiritual afterlife, &c.) would render the urgency and very tangible horror of the problem somehow false. The word itself signified fiction and that was how it was understood, as a device, a metaphor, a fictive layer; it undermined the severity of the problem, made light of such terrible darkness. To consider even the word was inappropriate to reality. The fact of the zombie’s non-existence is what made those films such fun to watch, bolstered as we were by the knowledge that such things could never happen. Now it had happened how wrong it would be of us to negate even a minor past pleasure by attributing its terminologies to this. The problem taunted language, defied it, it dared us to attempt meaningful reference and signification of happenings so very alien to our understanding of the world. There were no words for it; these were the limits of language, the incommunicability of horrors both unknown and inconceivable. How inadequate it becomes in times of trauma. Please tell me what turns the world upside down? There was word of language as ‘the cause’. Burgess said “it gestates in the deep structures prior to language. Or, at least, simultaneous with language. In the very primal structure that organises us as differentiated, discontinuous copies of each other. The virus probably enters, in fact, among paradigmatic arrangements. And then, almost instantly, the virus appears in a concept of itself”, and that “some specialists are suggesting that we use as little connotative language as possible, and to definitely avoid metalanguage”, but the problem swelled from the silent voiceless emptiness of the technological age, endless bytes of unvocalized information transmitting between servers that render the crudeness of oral interaction as outdated and dead as the cultures that relied on it, from the inorganic symbology reconstructed by binary coding that is immune to the dormant mutations that Burgess posits. Speculative causes multiplied like the problem in unverified mutters, evidence then a luxury or a pointless formality with no place in national accusation. It was the product of unnaturally high radiation levels resultant of an exploratory space programme that reanimated the dead with brains pared back to their most streamlined as necessary for – a nominal, purely physical – survival. This radiation had irrevocably altered the atmospheric makeup of the planet and our organic response to it and there was no going back. Or it was the planned impact of an incomplete biochemical weapons programme funded by government and military agencies that had leaked into the populace through accident or design, an ill-conceived conceptual weapon that like its forebears exponentially created more of a threat than it destroyed. Or it was the by-product of a genetically modified maize crop, or the inevitable endpoint of an accumulative ecological disaster. For others still it was a long-dormant trait of humankind buried beyond neuroscientific analysis within the earliest parts of the unused brain that had been reanimated as a side-effect of a widespread vaccination programme, perhaps the result of a corruption within the medicine itself. Or there was allusion to the Solanum virus replicating in the cells of the frontal lobe in hastily penned research papers thrown together with evidence negligible at best in desperate support of hypotheses pertaining to it, as though frequent and impassioned reference could somehow verify its fictive existence into hard science, as though the implausible efficiency of its viral properties and symptoms could be conversed into being, anything for an explanation at least vaguely suggestive of peer review and rigorous consideration and ugly biological fact and our own intellectual control of – and thus our measured response to – the situation, and not absurd speculation cloaked behind the temporary ignorance, the ‘un-blown paradigm’ of scientific method. Its very lexicon, of viruses and lobes and mutation and fluidic transmission, gave it an authority, a veracity conspicuously absent from other hypotheses all themselves equally untested. Convinced by vocabulary alone, social faith might be instilled in science in times of crisis, and edged toward religion only in times of out-and-out ruin. The most complex, incomprehensible explanation must be the truest precisely because we don’t understand it; we the masses shouldn’t understand these things, life and death and the pain between – they are for only the few to truly know. Or it was folkloric voodoo pharmacology at work, tetrodotoxin compounds sanctioned by government and issued to drinking water reserves at key locations around the country, a short-sighted attempt to pacify the violently discontented plenty. No one hypothesis seemed sufficient to explain the problem. It was as though the desolation and injustice of the of the 21st century had built to such heights that something had to give, and that the fundamental biological workings of the human organism were the only thing left to modify, and that from riots and poverty were borne the most dehumanizing infection, a complete annulment of our most essential and recognisably human traits, and all individualism and personality were crushed beneath the basest of instincts for which corporations had primed us for decades. Something changed. Regardless of its cause, as a blood-borne virus its rapid spread through the violent and cannibal relations it instigated in its sufferers was guaranteed. There could be no end. Does it help to know why?