Sunset on Mars?

Reading and writing are dead. The Fifth Republic just took a dump. I like fish. Typhus is terrifying.

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover photograph of the setting sun was taken from Gale Crater on the mission's 956th Martian day (15 April, 2015).

1.

The Hinternet today tells us that literacy “has had a good run for the past 5,000 years, but it’s over.” So, too, as of a few hours, is the “révolution macroniste”, which was first announced in a 2016 book, about which Aditya Chauhan of India wrote, on 5 February of last year, on the Amazon site:

Takes Readers on a Journey of Enlightenment and Intellectual Rejuvenation

Emmanuel Macron's Revolution is an epic ode to the possibility of transformative change, a literary marvel that truly takes the reader on a journey of enlightenment and intellectual rejuvenation. From the first page to the last, the book is a masterclass in eloquence, overflowing with poetically complex language that elevates the reader to a state of sublime contemplation.
The writing style is nothing short of a work of art, each word woven together with such precision and care that it is impossible not to be drawn into the intricacies of Macron's vision for the future. The narrative is thought-provoking and deeply insightful, capturing the essence of the revolutionary spirit and its capacity to ignite change.
The author's passion for his subject is palpable, his love for France and its people evident in every word he writes. His vision for the future is nothing short of a revolution, an outpouring of creativity and positivity that has the potential to transform the world.
In conclusion, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. It is a literary gem that deserves to be treasured and shared, a testament to the power of the written word and the transformative impact it can have on our lives. If you are looking for a book that will inspire and challenge you, look no further than Emmanuel Macron's Revolution. It is a five-star masterpiece that deserves to be celebrated and admired for generations to come.

Moving on, then.

2.

We’re all children, my mother liked to say, with a tsk of the tongue and a shake of the head. By this, she meant that we were all, figuratively speaking, alone with an experimenter in a small room in front of a table on which stood a cake tin containing a small marshmallow and a pretzel stick. “Which would you prefer?” the experimenter would ask.

Then, we would be told to wait.

3.

“The 50-59 age group voted 40% for the Rassemblement National [extreme right], while the 18-24 age group voted 48% for the Nouveau Front Populaire [left-wing]. Ensemble, the presidential camp [centrist], led the 70+ age group, with 32% of the vote.” — France Info, Sunday, 30 June 2024

2.

My mother was 83 when she left this plane and jumped this ship, and passed away, and died. Fortunately, that was a little over two decades ago, so she was spared this latest phoenixing of the extreme right, the death mentioned above of reading and writing, and our regression from children to babies to zygotes to AI-generated primordial germ cells.

4.

Perhaps I’ll have something cogent to say about the second round of the legislative elections when they fall with a loud and hideous shriek next Sunday. Not bloody likely, however, as I’ll be travelling to Bamfield, British Columbia, in search of instant gratification. No pretzel sticks or marshmallows for this brat — fresh seafood, cold beers, beach swims and walks in the woods.

5.

To gain some perspective, let’s go back to Goya. But first, a word from our sponsor:

As I see her, it is all the same to me whether it be through walls or windows, or gaps in the wall or garden gates, that whatever ray of the sun of her beauty may reach my eyes will enlighten my understanding and strengthen my heart, so that I may be unique and without equal in discretion and courage. — Cervantes

To make the dress her own, Leocadia removed the bows, lowered the bustline and wore it with a lace shawl and bonnet. In the study, as in the painting, she is standing with her back to us; we can’t see her face or her bosom, which we know from La Leocadia (1819), the mural at La Quinta del Sordo, in which she wears the same dress and mantilla, and from Goya’s correspondence with Younger Moratín, to have been “impresionantemente amplio.”

Behind her, in the top left corner of the frame, is Mariquita, her daughter. Their daughter. Leocadia is holding her by the shoulders and telling her to be brave and strong while Goya’s doctor, Eugenio Arrieta, sits facing them in a heavy wooden chair next to a table covered in medical equipment — leech jar, stem pessary, packet of herbs (probably pennyroyal), bleeding bowl, bloodletting glass cup — and, clutching poor trembling Mariquita by the wrist, uses a long, pen-like lancet to inoculate her arm with milkmaid pus.

The lancet reminds Goya of the pens Munárriz gave him a quarter-century ago.

Leocadia was 32 years old when this sketch was made. Mariquita was five. Arrieta was 50 and would be dead within a year. Goya was 73 and almost dead: he started the painting three months after Dr Arrieta cured him of fiebre manchada — spotted or relapsing fever, which in this century is more typically referred to as typhus. In Goya’s Spain, it had several names: “lenticular” (because of the lentil-sized spots on the skin), “punticular” (spots), “pulicularis” (derived from fleas) or “tabardillo”. This last term either derives from the rash that covers the victim’s body like a tabard, a sleeveless jerkin or a short coat worn with or without a belt and consisting of front and back pieces only, with a hole for the head, or from the Latin tabes, which means rot, because the victim’s blood was thought to rot or corrupt. The term first appeared in 1489 and again in 1492, during the Christian sieges of Muslim Granada — the final war of the Reconquista — which was won not by spear, pike, long-bow, or harquebus flintlock, nor by the new strategies for killing developed by Queen Isabella and her engineers from France and Italy, nor cross-bows armed with arrows dipped in a solution of aconite, nor 12-foot-long Lombard cannons firing 14-inch balls of stone, but by body lice, which brought “El Tabardillo” to the fortress, which killed 18,000 thousand people, thus ending two centuries of Islamic rule in Spain, and breaking, perhaps forever, the Moorish hold on Europe.

(It also resulted in the total expulsion of the last remaining unconverted Jews from the Kingdoms of Castile Leon and Aragon.)

In Goya’s day, epidemic typhus, which wiped out Napoleon’s “Grande Armée” and ended his ambitions for a French-ruled world, was thought by most medical experts of the day to be the same as typhoid fever, as the symptoms and conditions are similar, if not identical. In fact, typhoid means typhus-like. The terms were coined by the French physician François Boissier de Sauvages de Lacroix, a friend of the Swedish botanist and taxonomist Carl von Linné, in Nosologia Methodica, a 1763 treatise that classified diseases into ten major classes of disease, several dozen orders, almost 300 genera, and 2,400 species. Before Sauvages, as he is known in medical literature, typhus and typhoid were called "camp fever," "ship-fever", or "flea-bite fever," as the bacteria that causes them flourishes best in crowded and unsanitary conditions — in gutters alive with rats and cobblestones littered with waste, or in communal latrines only emptied, if ever, long after they overflowed. Both diseases vector quickly: in the case of typhus, through rodents to humans by way of body lice, fleas or mites, and in the case of typhoid fever, through what epidemiologists call the faecal-oral circuit, the consumption of food and water contaminated with bacteria-laced faeces. The English poet Abraham Holland called typhus "the ague with a hundred names" and succumbed to it in 1626, two years after John Donne wrote his Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions and severall steps in my Sicknes, twenty-three meditations on his bout with typhus, which he called “purple fever,” one for each day. Thirty years earlier, when Donne was still writing pornographic and erotic verse—is there a difference?—his brother Henry, then 19 (a year younger than John), was put in Clink Prison in London for harbouring a Catholic priest, and therein succumbed to typhus, at the time called "gaol fever" or “the shits.”

Though it takes up to two weeks for typhus to incubate, the onset of the disease is very sudden. The first sign is the eruption of spots, coupled with high fever. The rash begins at the centre of the corporeal sphere and then emanates outward with growing intensity across the abdomen to the furthest tip of every extremity. This phase is so painful that victims often have to be tied down to stop them from killing themselves — this was the case for John Donne and Francisco de Goya — especially when the rash hits the genitals, which can become gangrenous. Lucretius and Thucydides before him, in their accounts of the Plague of Athens (429-426 BCE), now believed by most medical historians to have been typhus (a word derived from the Greek tulphos meaning smoke, mist, fog, senselessness or stupefaction caused by fever), describe how victims were known to “save their lives by castrating themselves." 

(Some medical historians believe that the Athenian plague was caused by smallpox. Some war historians believe typhus killed more Christians than Moors.)

The rash is followed by crushing headache, dizziness, chills, enfeeblement, loss of appetite, tears of blood, inextinguishable thirst, anxiety, nausea, vomiting, roughness and blackness of the tongue, myalgia, more vomiting, melancholy, fear, horrifying delusions, sadness and fainting accompanied by a burning fever inside so intense that the victims cannot bear to wear even the lightest clothing, but must go naked, and horrible apprehensiveness and agony; then hematuria (when the urine turns red and cloudy. In the Devotions, Donne describes the "sudden red waters, rivers of blood", which probably alludes not just to the reddish tinge of his urine but also to the first of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, which caused the Nile to turn blood red, probably because of an algal bloom, and the Phlegethon in Dante's Inferno, the river of blood in the Seventh Circle of Hell that boils the souls of murderers like Padre Biva), sensitivity to light and tinnitus, followed by re-eruptions of rash, sleeplessness and noisy dementia, which soon transforms from being a symptom into a state of continuous muttering and delirious rambling, with the victim talking loudly and incessantly, singing and roaring and making animal noises night and day, but more especially during the night. This is usually attended with a tremendous morbid watchfulness and an insatiable desire to communicate, to describe and recollect each symptom as it arises, a cerebral over-activity that is all-encompassing and exhausting. The victim cannot sleep, cannot rest, cannot empty mind of fret and think of nothing but must remain utterly focussed on every moment of consciousness, and wishes nothing more acutely than to describe every phase in word spoken or written. Yet Goya, like Donne and most typhus victims, could not speak as he endured unspeakable pain from the typhus pustules in his mouth, on his tongue and in his throat, which made this phase of the sickness especially intolerable. Unlike Donne, however, and unlike most victims of this deadly disease, one of the most deadly enemies ever known to man, which has killed more men, women and children than the bubonic plague ever will, Goya, being deaf, was spared the discomfort of hyperacusis — noise sensitivity, where everyday sounds seem agonizingly loud, though he did suffer from tinnitus — this was his constant torment from the first day of his first illness in 1793 till the day of his death in two weeks—but he never had to endure the constant ringing of bells, as Donne did, which continually tolled (“ask not for whom”) throughout London for the dead and dying (“they toll for thee”). Goya, too, was spared the treatments Donne and other victims endured. Pigeon carcasses, for example, were never strapped to the soles of his feet. Arietta’s techniques were more conventional: cold water baths, tinctures of this and that, bloodletting, purgatives, and a special, secret oil from Florence or from Sienna, which he used to lubricate the palms and soles of Goya’s feet, and his wrists and the area near his heart; and as payment for these and other medical services, he accepted another painting, Goya a su médico (1820), which is now in the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Based, like the painting of Mariquita being inoculated against smallpox, on an actual event — Arietta’s treatment of his friend Goya for typhus—but, again, entirely invented, recollected from memory, it shows the doctor and his pale, grimacing patient surrounded by what looks like doomed souls, ashen-faced ghouls from the afterworld. Or perhaps priests. Written across the bottom, in Goya’s wavering hand, is the following inscription: “Goya gives thanks to his friend Arrieta for the expert care with which he saved his life from an acute and dangerous illness which he suffered at the close of the year 1819 when he was seventy-three years old. He painted it in 1820.”

In 1822, the painting was returned to Goya, or rather, to Javier, who had taken over Goya’s inventory and apartments in Madrid, as just a few days after Arrieta inoculated Mariquita with cowpox, the Veinteañista government—this was during the brief moment of power of Riego’s radically liberalizing exaltados — sent Arrieta on an expedition to study the Eastern sickness in Africa, where, six months later, he contracted the disease — today we call it the bubonic plague — and died.

Javier sold the painting in 1840.

The words in the inscriptions startle and embarrass Francisco José de Goya. Their clunkiness. He does not remember writing them. He does not remember making the sketch. He remembers the climax of his sickness—typhus victims remain conscious but physically helpless—and his own feeling of moral spottedness, the cough that preceded it, and the rash that followed the cough, that inclined him to consumption, and the many evacuations and exits that ended it. And he remembers the first, still dangerous days of his recovery, and the first sketched lines of the inoculation, and the lancet, and walking with the doctor, drinking hot chocolate with the doctor, and meeting the milkmaid, and the pustules on the milkmaid’s hands, and her smile.

On the sketchbook’s facing page are four quick sketches in iron gall ink and pencil of a pretty young woman on a swing. In each, the girl’s forward swing is at its maximum amplitude. In two, she is wearing nothing under her flimsy cotton dress. In the other two, she is completely naked.