Dream Log: Art and Ohio State

I can remember a lot of my dreams since the coronavirus crisis started. Last night's dream was the first one where there was a pandemic in the dream.

I was in Columbus, Ohio, on the campus of the Ohio State University,

in order to attend a meeting intended to aid low-income people. However, the other people at the meeting would not respect social distancing from me, so I left before the meeting started, and wandered around the campus. On the way out of the meeting I found a key on the floor, but I didn't know what to do with it.

Social distancing was not being respected very much at all: for example, an Ohio State football game was about to get underway. I steered clear of the football crowd. On my way past them, I noticed a group of about twenty people in wheelchairs. A member of the Ohio State football team got behind each wheelchair, and together they ran, pushing the wheelchairs ahead of them, into the stadium. The crowd roared as soon as they got a sight of the speeding wheelchairs.

I walked through some campus buildings, looking at some library books which were not shelved in the main library. One book was a literary-and-visual-arts journal for Chilean expatriates. It was written in English, but everything was full of Chilean references which I did not get. I liked the illustrations, though, many of which were in a colorful sort of post-Matisse style.

Then an idiot neighbor of mine, several houses away, woke me up with a hammer and an electrical saw, making some stupid home-improvement stuff, just as he has been waking me up -- and quite a few others in the neighborhood, I'm sure -- very early most Sunday mornings for a long, long time. However, I fell asleep again very quickly, and in my dream, now I was both in Columbus, Ohio, at Ohio State, and simultaneously at home in Ann Arbor. And my neighbor was no longer a home-improvement boob oblivious to his neighbors and their sleep patterns, and was now instead an artist who used the hammer and saw to make works consisting of vertical rows of wooden panels about 15 inches square. An interesting thing about the panels was that they were decorated -- with paint, mostly -- in a very wide array of colors and styles. I made two fabric panels the same size as his wooden panels, one with a silkscreened image of an early-20th-century American politician, and the other very colorful,and hard-edged, very post-Ellsworth Kelly:

I offered these pieces of fabric to my neighbor, for him to add to the wooden artworks. He bought the one with the silkscreen image of the politician for $10, and passed on the colorful hard-edged piece.

Then I was back in Columbus. I met someone I knew decades ago when I lived in Columbus, and we sat in a huge deserted student union building outside of a shuttered cafe, talking. Suddenly the cafe's manager appeared, tossed me a bunch of keys on a ring and walked away. Just like with the key I'd found outside the meeting earlier, I had no idea what I should do with these keys. Then I woke up.

Coronavirus and the Flu Pandemic of 1918-1919

About 100 years ago, there was a worldwide flu pandemic which killed between 17 and 100 million people. The latest statistics I've seen for the coronavirus say that deaths are still under 1/4 of a million. After killing millions of people, influenza a century ago quickly mutated into a much less deadly strain. It wasn't until decades later that a flu vaccine was developed. And maybe someday, we'll be able to convince people to actually take the flue vaccine.

I've been thinking about the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, because it seems to me that the flu back then was about as contagious and deadly as coronavirus, and that the difference in casualties between the pandemic back then and the current one has a lot to do with the helpful, simple advice which science has given us to deal with coronavirus: stay away from other people. Don't touch your face. Wash your hands regularly.

By contrast, governments around the world censored information about the flu pandemic. They tried to keep people from finding out that there was an epidemic at all. And they did such a thorough job of that, that to to this day, many people have still never heard of the flu pandemic of 1918-1919, and we still don't know whether it killed 17 million or 100 million people.

It may seem very cruel, in the midst of all the current suffering, for me to say that things have been much worst in the past. But they have, and humanity survived, and what I'm trying to do here is not to be cruel but to give people hope. For all of the sheer stupidity leading to illness and death at the current time, a century ago, a comparable outbreak of illness was handled much worse still, and we survived, and we learned, and we developed vaccines and worldwide institutions to anticipate and react intelligently to epidemics. Yes, clearly, many people are reacting stupidly to coronavirus, and it's getting people killed. Still, it's not as bad as the flu pandemic a century ago, and the main reason why is because, overall, we're reacting and behaving much better, much more intelligently and effectively. We're putting into effect what we've learned from earlier epidemics.

And as horrible as the news is now, day after day, I firmly believe that we will survive this, and that we will come out of this smarter and wiser than we were. That's how I see things, looking through the perspective of centuries.

Now, back to the daily horror: how do we get through to the people, from governors in some states to protesters in other states -- and for once the news from the US is so horrible that, frankly, I don't even know much about how things are being handled in other countries. I'm overwhelmed by the domestic news -- how do we get through to these people, and get them to follow the very simple procedures, distance, masks, washing hands, which work so well?

I don't know.

All I can think of to do is to urge everyone who reads this to think about what we can do to get through to those people, before it's a matter of horrible, obvious statistics showing in hindsight that they were wrong. We need persuasiveness so urgently right now. I feel my lack of persuasiveness so intensely.

But I can't give up. I have to urge all of you not to give up. Try to change people's minds, to save lives.