Thomas Breen Photo
Coronavirus emergency prep session Wednesday in the basement of the city government office building.
(Opinion) — For all the worth of Yale’s programs open to the public over the years, few have had the advantage of in-your-face timeliness. But one such program occurred this week, as the academic calendar collided with the worldwide health crisis.
As a featured speaker at the event, Sir Jonathan Mills, director of the Edinburgh International Festival said, “Today, there is no room for theoretical courtesies.”
That’s why I had hopped on the Yale shuttle and took it to campus to have the privilege of sitting through what may have been the darkest, most informative, worrisome, uplifting and delicious hour-long presentation imaginable in the year of the Coronavirus.
The turnout was surprisingly small considering the urgency of the subject matter, perhaps a twenty or so undergraduates, some grad students, and perhaps two dozen curious New Haven citizens eager to hear about the unusual but intriguing premise: the connection between pandemics and the arts.
Jonathan Mills has shown up on the campus often this academic year as guest lecturer, and on Wednesday afternoon acquitted himself well with an accounting of how painters, poets, playwrights, architects, sculptors, composers and performers have tried to translate the experience of major health crises, and trying to portray meaning.
He showed us paintings from the 14th century, the time of the Black Plague that killed a third of European residents, and he brought us through the time since, including a portrait by Egon Schiele in 1918 of himself and his wife, Edith, just before both died of the Spanish flu pandemic.
The visual arts, Mills demonstrated with the help of visual aids, have been represented well in the attempts to portray human suffering. But literature has suffered in this regard. He argued the great themes of the novelists and playwrights — love, family and war — have ready-made vocabularies, and the advantage of having Shakespeare, among many others literary icons, to speak eloquently on their behalf. But illness, not so much.
“There is an inadequacy of language to express this,” Mills said. He quoted Virginia Woolf on this point: “It is an undiscovered country.” And yet though illness is common to everyone, there is a “poverty of language” to describe it. Walt Whitman tried when he visited a hospital of wounded Civil War soldiers. “I sit by the restless all the dark night.” But to describe their pains, their mental states, he found limits.
Mills argued that all of the arts, in a time of world-wide fear and panic, “must go far beyond entertainment and politics to the crevices of our physical existence.”
Meanwhile, there are the facts, too, as pointed out by another panel member, Dr. Sten Vermund, dean of the Yale School of Public Health, who used his time to bring the audience up to date on the spread of the virus. He had that day emerged from a meeting on campus of all departments, medical and otherwise, charged with preparedness in case the virus hits our area. “We are ready.” But his role in the panel discussion seemed to be one of reassurance, and to limit any sense of panic.
He said there is no evidence yet that “this will come to New Haven, though it might. So as always we have to hope for the best and prepare for the worst.” Part of what has complicated the issue has been the lack of reliability of information coming from the Chinese government. “They wasted a whole month,” he said, referring to last December, when the virus spread and Communist Party officials were intent on keeping it quiet, even scapegoating the doctor who warned of its dangers, Li Wenliang, who had to sign a confession, and who later died from the illness.
When Dr. Vermund said this, I couldn’t help but think that even in this country, where propaganda is not supposed to rule the day, there were the beginnings of a coverup of the danger, as directed by the White House. (The president was scheduled to speak on the situation that evening, and, as it turned out, echoed the Chinese official position when he said soon there will be no cases of the coronavirus in the U.S.)
Dr. Vermund said that the good news is that some of the victims of the disease won’t even know they have it, because the symptoms will be mild or nonexistent, and that the younger the patient is the better chance they’ll be among the 98 percent of victims who survive it. Like in the cases of chicken pox. That’s why, to date, there have been few young victims.
Well, at the point I couldn’t help but do the personal math, which indicates that at age 76 I am not in a prime position to be among the relatively lucky 98 percent.
Other relatively good news is that the actual spread of the virus is roughly at the same rate, and requires the same level of human contact, as that of the flu. This may not seem a positive sign, but the doctor put it in perspective this way: If he had measles all of us in the large auditorium who didn’t have it earlier or a vaccine for it would be infected just by his presence. The flu and Coronavirus is contracted in a much more intimate way, requiring close contact.
Nevertheless, as the final speaker on the program demonstrated, the illness can seem overwhelming, and blot out any sense of optimism, though she had an optimistic answer for that, too.
Robert Blocker, dean of the music department and moderator of the program, introduced Sun Yue, a Chinese pianist and arts leader whose family ties connect her directly to the citizens of Wuhan, and to the effects of the virus.
“Every Chinese, including me, have been full of fear. Doctors in my country don’t know what to do.” And yet, as she showed through music, something of a miracle, and managed to provide evidence that made the program’s premise seem prescient and genuine.
First, she spoke of her mother, who at 70 suffers back home from a heart ailment. “She has been singing. When I heard this, I thought she might be in love again. But it is her way of staying positive, and feeling happy again.”
Then Sun Yue showed two videos, both hammering home this point. One showed a new portrait of the city of Wuhan, and its empty streets, juxtaposed with a song sung by a chorus of 17, “I Love Wuhan,” where “children are dreaming in their bamboo beds,” and where “the land kisses my feet,” and where “people will again have hot dry noodles for breakfast.”
Finally, she showed what I thought was the most remarkable triumph of technology and the human spirit I have seen in a long time. The song this time, “I Believe,” is sung by 900 children, each of them quarantined in their own homes in Shanghai, each singing alone to the camera, but brought together in one enormous chorus as a magically visual demonstration of hope and youthful hopefulness.
Film of each of the 900 is displayed on the screen, and many of these young kids, the viewer could easily see, have natural gifts as entertainers, swaying with music, using their arms for emphasis, displaying heart-melting smiles, as if to say we are all in this together, and we’ll come out of this together. What had begun in a dark hour on a cloudy day had suddenly turned to light and hope.
What an hour it was. And, as often happens in free Yale programs, all of this was followed by a reception with a beautifully-catered platters of fresh fruits, cheeses and breads. All included in the admission price: zero.
So then, why aren’t you, dear reader, looking on the Yale website, and coming to such free programs to learn, to be uplifted, to eat well, and, on the best occasions, drop a tear or two?