The Plague, At Last

Early on in the pandemic, I told myself that it was only a matter of time until I got COVID-19: not if, but when. And behold! The time has come.

I woke up feeling sore and congested in the middle of the night a couple days ago, and on a hunch took a COVID test, which came back resoundingly positive. I have since spent my time quarantined in our guest bedroom, and will be here for several more days. Physically, I think the worst is over, and it hasn't been all that bad in the first place, thanks to vaccinations and what I hope is a fairly robust immune system. Any discomfort at this point is due mostly to spending far more time sitting or lying down than I'm used to, and to congestion, though I still have little energy or motivation. (I'm surrounded by books and want to read none of them.)

I quite smoking about three months into the pandemic. My habit had dwindled down to a few cigarettes a day by then, and most of those were purely routine nicotine addiction maintenance, so along with the concerns caused by COVID's penchant for pulmonary damage, it wasn't too hard to stop completely. It's now been two years and two days since I had a cigarette or used tobacco in any form, and I'm grateful that I didn't get COVID any sooner. I've got over 20 years of lung damage to cope with, and I sure as shit don't need that compounded.

I'm not proud to admit that I've been lax these last few months about COVID protocols, primarily mask-wearing, so I bear a good deal of responsibility for my current state. Things seemed to be getting better—or rather, not getting any worse, at least among the vaccinated population—and restrictions were lifted at work and elsewhere, so I got complacent. I'm less concerned about how this has affected me than I am about how my behavior has impacted others, so from now on I'll be more cautious.

All right, time to get some rest. I had to stop writing in order to repair the bed frame, which collapsed under me, and I did not have the energy for manhandling mattresses and box springs in a tight space, not to mention hammering nails. I am, as seems to be the case every five minutes since I got sick, exhausted.

MMXXI

Even before COVID-19 smeared plague across the globe, 2020 was already going to be an especially ugly, desperate year here in America, thanks to the election. As it stands, we—Americans, that is—have collectively limped past the December 31 finish line (an illusory goal if ever there was one), having only barely gotten our shit together enough to vote Donald Trump out after his administration spent the past eleven months doing nothing about a disease that much of the world managed to handle with at least a modicum of common sense and rationality. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died needlessly, huge swathes of the population are unemployed and/or about to lose their homes, and around the world nation-states (including the US) are starting to rehearse for the next phase of the ongoing and ever-worsening climate crisis, which usually means foregoing the sort of species-wide solidarity we actually need in favor of shoring up artificial borders, dehumanizing outsiders (or insiders who don't meet the criteria of a "real" citizen, a category that grows narrower by the day), and generally doubling down on the us-versus-them mentality that got us here in the first place. 

So yeah, 2020 was been a bullshit year. It was by no means the worst in human history, but that's cold comfort for everyone who suffered, or is still suffering, at its numb, infected hands, and it feels like History (capital H) decided to give us a tightly-scripted preview of what awaits us over the course of the next, I dunno, 50 or 100 years. It ain't pretty, and I am not at all sure that humanity will rise to meet the challenges we've created for ourselves (and every other species on the planet, but it's been pretty well established that we do not give a single fuck about them or anything that stands in the way of making profits and fulfilling the sad-ass failures of imagination that pass for "dreams"). That said, barring a heavy-duty nuclear exchange that renders the whole thing moot—an outcome as possible as it's ever been—I don't think we're straight-up doomed. Shit will get bad in unimaginable ways, but the species will scrape by. Hell, we may even outgrow some of our worst traits. I have no idea. Or, more accurately: I don't know.

Not knowing is one of those skills I'm always honing. Not knowing isn't ignorance, though of course ignorance involves not knowing; not knowing is a refusal—albeit not too militant a refusal, since that leads to its own set of conundrums—to mistake one's one thoughts and feelings for reality. In this case, reality as it'll play out in the future. Forecasting the future is a sucker's game, and like most such games it's sometimes just lucrative enough to make us think it's a worthwhile pursuit. While I like throwing around ideas of what may be coming our way as much as the next dude, I like to think I have a sufficient grasp of how complex the world is, and how unpredictable people and nature can be, to avoid conflating the notions I toss out on IRC or over beers with what's actually going on. But again, I don't know, so I generally avoid prognostication. You're better off consulting the 易經 I Ching/Yi Jing than talking to me.

This blog is entering its 18th year. I still don't really know what I'm doing with it, but I plan on keeping it around. Maybe I'll do more writing and less translating this year. I wouldn't mind sorting out some of my ideas about, say, Buddhism or martial arts, or trying to write more critical album reviews. I may write more in Portuguese. 2021 is still a newborn, though, sticky with afterbirth, so I may let things unfold at their own pace before worrying too much about what exactly is said when The Corpse Speaks.

In the meantime, I'll direct your attention to Erik Davis' new venture, the wide-ranging and always compelling Burning Shore newsletter; the Korinji Rinzai Zen community, home of some deep Zen practice; Herman Melville's marginalia; the Ploughshares Fund, working to rid the world of the threat of nuclear weapons; and the mind-shattering vajra doom hammer that is the music of Neptunian Maximalism.

Happy MMXXI, y'all.

 
微臣
史大偉/D.A.S.

Dungeon Crawling, Heavy Metal: Throne of Iron's "Adventure One"

Getting folks together to play Dungeons & Dragons or another tabletop RPG is always a chore these days, and by "these days" I mean "ever since college." The pandemic has made things somewhat easier for those who play over Zoom, something I haven't tried yet but probably will, sooner or later. Still, ever since I started playing in 1989 or 1990—I never remember which year it was, but it was fifth grade—one of the biggest appeals of the game, and role-playing in general, was reading the rulebooks and setting material and writing up all the characters, places, and events you might someday use in an adventure. As it turns out, the solitary side of what's meant to be a social pastime is as meaningful and fun as playing the game itself! Well, kinda; during all that time spent drawing dungeon maps and creating NPCs, you always hope you'll get to put it into action with some friends after school or on a Friday night, sharing a pizza, a two-liter of soda or a sixer of beer, a bunch of dice, and, inevitably, one measly pencil sharpener.

My experience with heavy metal parallels my D&D career, and is probably similar to a lot of other metalheads'. You get into metal at an age when music is just starting to mean something—entertainment, the source of a burgeoning identity, emotional catharsis, you name it—and it just makes sense. It fuckin' rules. If you're lucky, you have a metalhead friend or two with whom to share the experience, first of listening to shared albums and then going to shows, but it's basically a solo endeavor. If going to concerts is like playing D&D with a proper group, listening to metal records in your bedroom is like reading the Dungeon Master's Guide or the Cyclopedia of the Realms and figuring out what magic items to put in the stash the PCs will find if they don't fuck up too badly. (This is something you'd likely do, of course, while listening to heavy metal in your bedroom, so the comparison is even more apt, I'd say.)

It goes without saying that heavy metal and D&D have a long shared history. Orcus only knows how many metal records contain songs about the band's player characters, or how many D&D monsters and villains have been inspired by metal.  Throne of Iron, however, is one of the few bands that puts the D&D connection front and center, which is one of the things that drew me to them. The band's logo uses the distinctive font from the BECMI D&D boxed sets from the '80s, they've released four singles in the "Roll for Metal" series, which utilize randomly-generated riffs and lyrics, and Adventure One, the band's first full-length, plays out like a D&D adventure, complete with a Dungeon Master, the clatter of dice, and player commentary (The disappointed "fuck" when someone makes a shitty roll for initiative is something we've all uttered.) The combination feels natural, and the somewhat jokey gameplay elements don't detract from the musical at all. Hell, it's all just fun. Watch the "Lichspire" video and you'll see what I mean.

Throne of Iron, you'll be shocked to learn, plays heavy metal in the traditional early '80s vein (which you'll have figured out if you watched the video I linked to a sentence ago.) Think Manilla Road, maybe, with less distinctive vocals, but don't worry about comparisons too much. It's not ground-breaking, but it doesn't try, or need, to be. It's just good, solid, heavy metal full of reliable riffs, mid-tempo chugging, and that admirable quality of being equally worth listening to carefully while you're rolling up stats for that sentient magic sword, or putting on in the background while your party sets out to cleanse the lair of a long-dead wizard of the gelatinous cubes who've moved in. 

So grab a Lone Star—or whatever cheap local beer they drink in Bloomington, Indiana, where Throne of Iron is from—and your dice bag, put on Adventure One at a suitable volume, and enjoy the best of what D&D and heavy metal have to offer. Whether you're alone or with friends, you'll have fun, which is something everyone from the lowliest nerd to the most beer-fueled hesher needs in these dark days. 

May all your 20s be natural, dudes, and long live heavy metal!

"Outonais" por Judith Teixeira

Howdy, y'all. Apologies for the silence, but as you can probably imagine, given the overall tenor of 2020, time moves strangely and most of my attention has been elsewhere. After all, America is still being ravaged by COVID-19 due to a toxic combination of zero leadership, willful ignorance, and the stupidest form of individualism imaginable, and there's a fascist threatening to remain in the White House if and when his manque Baron Harkonnen ass is voted out, so I've been trying to stay healthy and do what I can to keep this country from gleefully sliding into an abyss lorded over by an even worse assortment of Bible-thumpers, capitalist vampires, and emotionally wounded reactionary swine than we already have.

Those same wretched figures, albeit in older Portuguese forms, appear to have ruined the career of Judith Teixeira (AKA Judite dos Reis Ramos Teixeira). A poet, writer, and publisher of a short-lived magazine called Europa, Teixeira's works were denounced by the Action League of Lisbon Students (Liga de Acção dos Estudantes de Lisboa)—a name that reeks of the particularly awful conservatism of the young—and subsequently ordered to be burned by the Lisbon government. 

Why, you may ask, did these miserable children dislike Teixeira? Because she numbered among "the decadent artists, the poets of Sodom, the publishers, authors, and sellers of immoral books" due to lesbian subtext in her work. Judith Teixeira went on to live in obscurity until her death in 1959 at the age of 79. In a better world than ours, where people weren't slaves to rigid notions of family, country, and god, she may have gone on to write a lot more, and maybe even made a long-standing impact on LGBTQ literature in Portugal. Sadly, we'll never know.

I only recently learned of Teixeira's work, so I don't know if anyone else has translated her into English, but here's one of her poems, chosen for its seasonal relevance. I intend to translate more, too.

If you live in the US, go vote ASAP, and be prepared to step up if things get ugly after November 3. No matter where you live, remember that anti-fascism should be your default political position. If it isn't, ask yourself why, and fix it.

Abraço,
DAS

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"Outonais"
Judith Teixeira

No meu peito alvo, de neve,
as claras pétalas dos teus dedos,
finas e alongadas,
tombaram como rosas desfolhadas
à luz espásmica e fria
deste entardecer...
E o meu corpo sofre,
ébrio de luxúria, um mórbido prazer!

A cor viva dos teus beijos,
meu amor,
prolonga ainda mais o meu tormento,
na trágica dor
deste desvestir loiro e desolado
do Outono...
Repara agora, como o sol morre
num agónico sorrir
doloroso e lento!...

........................

Noite... um abismo...
sombras de medo!
Tumultuam mais alto os teus desejos!
Sobe o clamor do meu delírio
e a brasa viva dos teus beijos,
num rúbido segredo,
vai-me abrindo a carne em sulcos de martírio!


Entardecer — Janeiro
1925

 

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"Autumnal"
Judith Teixeira


On my snow-white breast,
the pale petals of your fingers,
long and slender,
fall like plucked roses
in the cold and spasmodic light
of this late afternoon...
And my body suffers,
drunk on lust, a morbid pleasure!

The bright color of your kisses,
my love,
further prolongs my torment,
in the tragic pain
of this blonde and bereft undressing
of Autumn...
See now how the sun dies
with an agonized smile,
painful and slow!...

........................

Night... an abyss...
Frightful shadows!
Your desires in a greater uproar!
The clamor of my delirium rises
and the glowing coal of your kisses,
in a red secret,
opens my flesh in furrows of martyrdom!

 

Sunset — January

1925