Tales of Quarantine

Walter Benjamin, confined to the corners of his mattress by a persistent sickness, once governed worlds beneath a fortress of sheets. His fingers were the citizens of an alien atmosphere, one replete with ideologies unknown and conditions unexplored. He was the artist, guiding the movement of his subjects as they informed him to do so.

Outside the dome of linen but inside the boundaries of the infirmary, Benjamin’s puppetry cast shadows on surfaces. The projection of his movement was a mirror for his impulses, instincts which spawned dogs that barked back at him the prophecies of tomorrow, wolves that howled at a distant future. Conquering light and dark, he set free the creatures of his most ambitious and disturbing dreams. Accompanied by his shadow pets and appendage playmates, he collected his badge of honor: 173 hours of absence from school.

Decades away, Patti Smith once stared at the ceiling under a spell of Scarlet Fever, the light above her seductive like the fever’s namesake and shiny like her paperback publications. Her imagination bore the seeds of stories, the imagery of lucid dreams, much to the entertainment of an audience of siblings which expanded into a massive cult following. She followed her wandering mind into foreign atmosphere, made familiar by its vitality. When her surroundings allotted her no other view besides the landscape of her thoughts, that is when art became indispensable.

Sickness often subsides with time but the memory of it never does. It makes us cherish the things we consider mandatory, and thus neglect to appreciate until they are no longer available. For many of us now, we sleep in and work at home and take a stroll and wave at the neighbors and look at the clock and the day is halfway gone. We count down the hours until we can embark on our next trip to the grocery store, on a mission like a nurse bringing water to patients in plastic cups that carry comfort on their rims. Not all of us are sick but all of us must pause as if we were. What color will the screen be when it’s time to press play? Will new puppets play in the shadowbox of Congress? Will new vistas take shape through the lens of a microscope? Like a gas that must expand to fill its container, will thought occupy the vacancy of action?