A song for 2022: A 1000 miles away (Hoodoo Gurus)

 

     The world's current situation imposes us conditions since the end of 2019. Most of the time, we were more or less confined, depending on the job and the belief in vaccination and other measures for this pandemic still grassing.

     Apparently contrasting with all these, around twenty years ago, Hoodoo Gurus launched the song "A 1000 miles away" in 1991. Then, it was a time of some "optimism," near two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and some illusion that Science would solve any problem. That song fitted to those prosperous days, on the shallow, but in truth showed a person in a kind of dystopic condition living in nowhere at the same time that is working a lot flying from place to place.

     At the beginning of the song, it is possible to see that the meaning of "flying" is metaphorical, when the main character is not yet traveling and the back-in-vocal sing "now you are flying" as he is in a daydreaming or so. In the end, there is another signal that the singer is disconnected from the conversation, metaphorically singing that he is 1000 miles away while someone is trying to say something.

     There is also a game with space and time. In the beginning, there is a mix of work and space ahead to travel: "I got so much work in front of me, it stretches out far as the eye can see."

     About time, in the end, he says that "yesterday is a thousand miles away." So there is a double sense: yesterday, he was in a distance of 1000 miles away in space and time.

     The dream of the personage is to stop and not travel, in contrary of the most part of people. He dreams of someday sitting on the fence. This scenario remembers the song of Eagles, "Desperado," in an opposite way. In that song, the singer is counseling Desperado to step down the fence in a symbolic way too.

    For 2022, going to the third year of pandemic, being 1000 miles away is not a nightmare but a dream for many, in literal or metaphoric meaning. Nowadays, we could say that the symbolic meaning happens many times by the internet.

     Now, airports are restricted, and the dimensions of the lyrics changed. But we are still in an actual dystopic situation. All dystopic conditions shown by Arts can symbolize what we are living with this pandemic.        

 

Even full of the pandemic, let’s talk about pathocenosis

Mirko Grmek, a physician, and historian elaborated the concept of pathocenosis as a category to include in disease not just the biological factors but also social, economic, ecological, political, cultural factors. We can include historical and epidemiological factors because several epidemics are probably linked in a timing sequence through decades or even centuries. The virus changes or becomes indetectable depending on the conditions, but it can resurge in new ways. Or even can be competition among viruses, and under environmental and other states, it can reappear. Or even under "new old conditions," a new virus can gain the human environment.

In any of these situations, the pathocenosis concept can be applied. Grmek initiated this concept in 1969. It developed those years after. Now, in after-postmodern times, maybe it is the time to accept and assume those ideas. In other words, the diseases are not caused only by microbial agents but also by the action of humanity.

 

 

Wall of Silence, a song for pandemic times

 

The song Wall of Silence of October Project can push 

someone deeper into the strange meanings of these pandemic times.

The pandemic came from nowhere 

to make life "touches us with pain."

and people needed to detach from one another,

and we became strangers to others and to ourselves.

Even with the internet and mobiles,

it became “hard to talk these days” as before

And we ask, "what happens along the way."

and "what caused us to turn away…."

Maybe the pandemic is "a wall of silence,"

“a wall between us holding back our loss."

And how many people lost their lives and we lost those people,

and so one as another could say, "How did I lose you," 

so many people that are gone

and we don’t know how many more.

Wall of Silence of October Project is a song for pandemic times

to think about life.

 

Pandemic and epidemics

     Many people thought that the pandemic could make arise the better inside and among the human beings. Now after one year and a half of the Covid pandemic it seems that maybe the better and the worst of human beings appeared. In truth as always. The human being has lightness and darkness inside altogether. You can look to any Era, to any place. 

     The human being has an archetype of shadow where he put the failures, defects, fragilities and does not like to throw light on that dark place of mind. One of the reasons it is because it can be painful. Before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and after that, there were several epidemics, not just infectious epidemics but also epidemics of greed, bad feelings, bad thoughts, and other bad things that can affect people. 

     In the succession of times, one thing that can be refreshing is that more and more society becomes more critical to things like disrespect or menaces to life. Maybe the human being is learning step by step how to deal with the archetype of shadow. The after-postmodern period can be a time for the improvement of that critic, even with the interrogations that we have about the future. 

Is this an “infectious” Era?

  

Around the middle of the 20^th century, the discovery of antibiotics caused an enthusiastic mood about the resolution of infectious diseases. But, in the last decades of the same century, the agents of this kind of disease spread with new strength. Antibiotics became more and more powerful against these agents, even losing their capacity to exterminate those bacteria. At the same time, opportunistic infectious agents gained focus together with the spreading of the HIV virus.

During the first two decades of the 21st century those same diseases kept their presence, and other viruses infiltrated into the human communities: SARS, MERS, H1N1 and other variations of this kind. Finally, Covid-19. But this one specifically could be the last straw of this New Era that we could call “after-postmodern”. While Science is advancing in many directions, Covid-19 caused a dangerous surprise, and maybe not the last one…Under the circumstances of aggression to the environment, new epidemics, and pandemics can start suddenly…

So, there are several types of “infectious agents” beyond the microbes, located in the human heart and its greed for natural resources and human disrespect…

There is a hope that the solution appears in this same Era.    

Environmental and viral issues for the years to come

 

     The current pandemic is one of several epidemic viruses that occurred during the 21^st Century linked to balance rupture between mankind and Nature. 

It seems that we live at the risk of a continuing menace of new diseases from this kind of rupture if no one does something to change it. 

For now, we have the Paris Agreement. It is necessary, but maybe not enough. To get a better result, the nations must do a longer step, and the small communities must compromise to make changes. Consumerism must change. 

The mankind and contemporary living must change to a new vision of life and needs. But everything concerning to Art must improve, not only Science. We are not talking only about a biologic surviving, but of a true life and living as humanity with all its characteristics. Then, maybe, a new time of post-post-modern era comes.  

 

    

                                                                                                                 

The pandemic and the end of postmodern paradigms

     The postmodern times, between 1950 and 2001, had its paradigms: pragmatism, efficiency, bilateralism (and in the nineties, ‘unilateralism’), results. What was out of those, was less important, maybe secondary, or tertiary. Even ethics was submitted to all these things.

     After two decades of several problems we culminate with this “pandemic”. The pandemic was and is a kind of terrifying surprise for the supposed “power of science”. Everything must be reorganized in some way that we do not know yet. For while, it seems better than the Spanish Flue, but someone warns us that this is only the “tip of the iceberg”. It means that the real problem is the global warming and the invasion of the wild environment.

     Anyway, after these two decades of transition, it seems that the really “after-postmodern” times are coming. There are other names for this time: “post-postmodern”, “hypermodern”, etc. As we can see in history, the edge between the eras is not a dot, or a line. It is a blurry region where we can see factors of a period that is ending, and factors of another period that is coming.