Extreme stress, such as that encountered in a life-and-death fight, is a teacher. In such moments, mechanisms unfold that remain hidden in everyday life. Attention becomes maximally focused. The dual separations between thinking and acting, intention and force, self and environment begin to blur. The trained body responds as an interconnected system. The state corresponds to transient hypofrontality. Illumination is not spiritual romanticism but the experience that, under maximum pressure, one's inner order becomes visible. 

*

"Yes, you have these magical word qualities and let one travel in a wonderfully sensual way. It depends on the type of woman where each chooses to go with such a spell; the field is vast in the world of imagination, whether erotic or entirely concrete. Everything moves in its orbits—some paths lie closer together than others." M.

*

"This entire chapter is like dialing into a magical data highway, the full force of the signals, all the pride, mine again. Only for my master would I lick his hand like a kitten and purr ... completely tame ... A very arousing part. I think I need to take a short reading break here." C.

Pledge of Success

For those who arrived too late and for those who neglected to take notes, I will once again explain the point of departure of the main story told in The Language Castle. The heroine is called Nana von Eisenreich. She is a lecturer at Landgrave Philipp University in the small North Hessian town of Ederthal. At any given time, she manages half a dozen erotic projects. The focal points of her academic work are the writings of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, and Samuel Beckett. Nana aspires to the legendary, if not mythical, position of Language Master. At present, this position is occupied by Count Goya, a virile, charismatic semi-genius with a gargantuan sexual appetite. The Language Master is Nana's Faustian pledge of success. Then there is the lecturer Chet.

Chet comes from Galveston. Galveston is a Texan city on an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Spanish conquerors were shipwrecked on its coast during the time of the Conquista; France claimed it as a colonial possession. Galveston later became (again?) Spanish, but it was the French pirate Louis Michel Aury who founded a European settlement on the island in the 19th century. Aury served as a mercenary in the service of Simón Bolívar; they fell out in New Orleans. Acting on his own account, Aury challenged the Spanish navy in the Gulf of Mexico.

No Hope of Mercy

Nana is devastated every time a man who might qualify stops at the door of her information office—opened only for him—as if he had the right not to concern himself with the details. Or worse still, as if Nana had no right to the fine gradations. Sometimes she lets a man have his way. Then she bathes in his incomprehension. She takes over his tasks until she can no longer endure the disruption. The incomprehension culminates in the platitude: "But we got along so well." We did not. We did not get along at all. We understood nothing whatsoever. Nana never says this. In the floodplain of an interest as sudden as it is absolute, there is not a centimeter of space for retrospective clarifications. It took Nana a few years to grasp that the combination of physical presence and ignorance may offer her a few niche propositions, but does not even brush against what is essential.

The men with milk-mix drinks on Ederthal's main thoroughfare appear to her like laughing horses. They converse in a snobbish language. What are they doing here? They demonstratively wear their masks at half-mast. The Habsburg Empire successfully defended itself against the plague by fortifying its external borders: a cordon sanitaire stretching from Croatia to Moldavia. The Ottoman Empire placed it under quarantine by military means.

"On the Turkish side of the Balkans, the plague raged until 1840; on the Austrian side it was never seen again."

This is recounted by the archaeologist Ian Morris under the heading COVID-19 – Answers from the Past. Karl Heinz Götze notes in his essay The Absolute Spirit, Cholera, and the Ascension of the Philosopher: Hegel's Death and Burial:

"Prussia did (after the cholera outbreak in the year in question) what it knew best. It waged war on the disease ... Cholera laughed at it and on August 23, 1831 ... claimed Gneisenau, the commander-in-chief of the Prussian army, and in November of the same year Clausewitz, the famous strategist."

Until the age of vaccination, quarantine was the primary protection against epidemics. Morris observes that COVID-19 throws us back to the level of the Habsburgs until we as hosts are no longer defenseless. At present we have "the choice between distance and death." Premature as this conclusion may seem, Morris simultaneously sees a new era approaching in which Western democracies may no longer be culturally dominant. The scholar anchors his outlook to two historical markers. Presumably, we were more equal for much longer than we like to imagine—namely during the hunter-gatherer era, which ended twelve thousand years ago in a competition of hierarchies as a consequence of sedentarization. We have been approaching that original regime again through the use of fossil fuels for the past fifty-two years. As is well known, the impulses toward egalitarianism from this quarter lose their legitimacy. If one takes this into account, Morris's perspective gains solidity.

Paul B. Preciado approaches the horizon of negative expectations with the conjecture that the virus could freeze the current state of the world.

"Everything would remain frozen for all eternity in the condition the world assumed with the outbreak ..."

Quotes from Corona and Us – Food for Thought for a Changed World / Paul B. Preciado, An Apartment on Uranus – Chronicles of a Transition.