There was a time when I couldn’t wake up without the aid of an alarm. I usually woke up before 7 and on weekends I would indulge myself to stay in bed until around 9. Living in a loft in Denver next to the Coors Field brought to my early mornings a limited spectrum of sounds: the engine of a vacuum cleaner, the bell of a microwave, or the soft barking of my neighbor's pointer.
Every morning, before heading to teach at the University of Denver, my body constantly begged me for a CrossFit workout at the building’s gym, where I also spent hours practicing batting swings with resistance bands, while listening to David Bowie’s Blackstar or Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, as if I was scheduled to replace Arenado in the lineup of the Rookies for the upcoming game.
Even though I never hit a real ball, the mere action of hitting invisible fastballs brought countless waves of adrenaline to my whole body, which in turn allowed me to tune myself on "The Success Channel" before going to work. One of the perks of this morning routine (besides that it allowed me to stay fit and muscular to the point of often being asked while running or walking in the street if I was a professional athlete) was being the only professor in my department with a six pack abdomen.
Before moving to Denver in 2018, I lived in college towns in North Carolina, where nature used to greet me each morning with the chirping of robins or the wind currents hitting against the windows during hurricane season. Sounds, like people’s idiosyncrasies, change from place to place, that is inevitable.
During the end-of-year season of 2019, while in Buenos Aires, only a few steps from La Casa Rosada (the government palace of Argentina’s capital), the ringing of plates and cutlery from a restaurant down the street was my waking up alarm, so I knew that it was time for my yerba mate infusion and a plate of blueberries, which I ate while reading the world news and starting to take notes for my daily writing.
Back then, the world was still unaware (only a few months away) of the new sonic realities that the novel Coronavirus was going to release into our brains, as if the virus had made us develop an inner jukebox where sounds, voices, and sonic memories were constantly colliding.
Often, the voices of Coronavirus (as now I call them) wake me up in the early morning as if they were desperately attempting to coil around me neck. However, the truth is that so far, since the beginning of the Pandemic, based on my personal experience the sonic textures of Coronavirus is quite limited and any attempt to synthesize them renders the fact that Coronavirus is a set of vocal, yet iterative sounds that easily turn into a noise cloud that constantly attempts to make my mental health fall into shards, often leaving me awake in the middle of the night looking at an empty street that echoes, in my case, distant childish lamentations and repetitive monotonous voices that remind me that something inside the world wants to surrender to the triplet Coronavirus/COVID/Pandemic.
It would be naive to avoid linking climate change to the sonic iterative texture of the novel Coronavirus. There is a cenesthetic principle that links sonic temperature to how we assimilate it in our body and consciousness. For example, a heated wave of sound, during the current pandemic, produces in my body a sense of invasion that my immune system immediately attempts to repel, often with virulent maneuvers that range from a sudden set of crunches and pushups to a desperate shriek that aims at silencing those repetitive heated voices coming from an invisible Hell.
In Dante’s Inferno sound is a constant narrative device that illustrates that punishment is accompanied by torturing heated sounds. For instance, in the canto XIX Dante invokes the rage of the French horn as one of the punishments for those trapped in the third grave due to prostitution and procuring carnal favors in exchange of gold and silver.
In the same canto, the reader witnesses a sonic image of punishment: Dante draws a scenario where from the mouth of tiny wells emerge the feet and legs of sinners, while the rest of their bodies remain underneath the darkest depths of the wells. Even though infernal sound doesn’t resonate in this image, it is indeed pure silence, or the muting of the sinner’s lamentations, what this episode from Dante’s Inferno brings to the consciousness of the reader.
Nothing could be more eloquent, when the intention is to mute the mouth of a lamenting well, that stuffing that mouth with the bare bodies of sinners. Just imagine a swelling, drooling, and burning mouth made of stone that is choking with slimy human bodies. Now, while living in Cienfuegos, Cuba, I have daily experiences that expose me to Dantean-like heated waves of torturing sound.
One would imagine that the early sounds of Cuba, even during the Coronavirus pandemic, are a fluctuation from oceanic whispers to tropical echoes that suggest a natural feast. But the reality is quite different. When I open my eyes in the early morning due to the iterative and sickly sounds of that we are getting accustomed to simply call COVID or PANDEMIC, the distance to the ocean, even if it is only a couple of miles, seems an unfathomable and uncanny path.
When I attempt to put my shoes on, it could be either the cracking and burning feeling of my shoelaces meandering in my fingers like dried serpents, or the sudden rise in my blood pressure, but even if I succeed at getting ready to leave while the entire city seems to be still asleep, the tapping of those voices inside my head attempt to convince me that there isn’t a way out, that no one can leave Cuba, and that in the best case scenario I have lost my mind and eventually I will end locked in an insane asylum. However, this inexorable experience of condemnation is becoming more common as the Coronavirus pandemic keeps invading all the corners of our private life.
In Italy, for instance, a place where I have also lived and know better than any other country, people are deeply concerned about the toll that their mental health, and personal economy, will have to pay back due to the imposed lockdown measures.
On the other hand, in Cienfuegos, a place where the constant atmospheric heat of the island constantly mixes with the dull modulation of those “infected sounds”, the echoes that take over my body can get me to the point of materializing into a burning gravestone attempting to smash my body against a wall until I can feel my blood throbbing like a drum right on my forehead. In such moments, I open the window of my rented room and look at the empty street, sweating and feeling a burning sensation in my chest and throat.
The experience is both selfish and apocalyptic, for the vision of the gray asphalt, and the wind fluctuating like a motionless curtain of smog makes reality look like a labyrinth without an exit, similar to what Italians are experiencing as a consequence of the estate-imposed lockdowns, which in many cases are also the result of a strange form of fearing the outside, even though it is quite familiar and Italians have been historically accustomed to explore their public spaces as if they were extensions of their own property.
At the end, while we keep trying to find everyday maneuvers that would allow us to maintain a politically correct form of existing while dealing with a pandemic that seems to transgress all types of social contracts, and that ultimately seems the youngest child of an irrational human disease that privileges heinous forms of punishment, I often wonder if COVID didn’t emerge from the drains of Dante’s Inferno, drains resembling clogged mouths attempting to devour infected bodies whose final words is a begging, uttered so weakly, that no one, not even Virgil and Dante, can hear or recognize as human voices.
In the final pages of The Invisible Militia, a fragmented multi-genre fiction book that engages our current post-apocalyptic imagination, Dr. Crank warns those who inhabit the thinnest layer of human reality that the current pandemic entails a complex set of battles that will escalate to the status of a global war. And Dr. Crank is right when he underlines that one of those battles will unavoidably become a perpetual SONIC WAR.
