End’s always nigh
DEMONIC times right now. Plague, death, lockdown, stocks crashing, job losses, anxiety and paranoia. Food rationing surely can’t be far away.
In this touch-wood lucky country, however, cabin fever’s the main poser many people are facing — loss of income aside. Netflix and Stan, delivery pizzas and UberEats, experimenting in the kitchen? Sounds like a regular Sunday night.
Sure, you can feel for people living on their own, in solitary confinement, but they were already doing that. Likewise, those cheekto-jowl in crowded homes.
House arrest’s awkward but we’re not exactly in Calcutta. It could be so much worse.
I’ve been scribbling away, reading books, papers, old comics and way too much Twitter. I’m dabbling with Duolingo Francaise and making an innovative mess of DADGAD guitar.
I’ve also been reading a spooky little book called The Genesis Plague.
Ever heard of Lilith? Nice girl but misunderstood, this book contends. But she’s up there with the Whore of Babylon and Typhoid Mary.
Lilith, you see, is an old-world demon brutally murdered in ancient Mesopotamia for killing oh so many men and boys. Cast a murderous curse or whatever over them all. It supposedly led not to the Dark Ages we know – started by a couple of volcanoes in New Guinea, Indonesia and maybe Iceland around 530AD – but to the Dark Millennium of some indistinct period up to 10,000 years BC. So the story goes.
For all the wicked hags and shedevils that Lilith spawned throughout folklore and other superstitions, author Michael Byrnes suggests she wasn’t really nasty, just misunderstood — and an unfortunate supercarrier. And how many of them are among us right now? Without universal testing, anyone’s guess.
Lilith, for those unfamiliar, was Adam’s first wife. So says the apocryphal book of the
Bible called the Book of Lilith. Eve was Adam’s second wife, after Lilith was turfed out of Eden by His Omnipotence for being too demonstrably forthright in the garden bedroom stakes. She returned to
Eden as a serpent armed with an apple and revenge on her mind. Ideas probably spawned with her new bloke, Satan-El. She was subsequently cut from the mainstream Bible, although she still gets a guernsey in the Talmad and the Kabbalah — even the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Sexual appetites aside, Byrnes’ story has Lilith carrying some serious bug she infected all these blokes with – but she didn’t really know what she was doing. Bit like dropping into parties after an Aspen ski trip.
The combo of Lilith and self-isolation got me thinking apocrypha and apocalypses. Coronavirus is the latest in a long list of existential threats. A clear and present danger we’d been warned and warned about. And pretty much ignored. Not to anti-vaxxer boss Meryl Dorey, mind you. She says it’s a hoax and she’s revving up thousands of followers to break self-isolation and storm hospitals. Like Trump and Bolsonaro, she’s making pyromaniacs look good.
And you thought the problem was climate change.
Funny how so many humans worry about weather killing us all while wars, starvation, privation and other diseases are already doing so in super-pandemic fashion.
Now I read the coronavirus shutdown is good for us because it’s reducing emissions as businesses fall over. Tell that one to all the jobless breadwinners you know.
Annihilation rears its menacing head regularly. Not always in your preferred fashion, though. COVID-19, like most of these assailants, is democratically indiscriminating. Like our snaky little goblin Lilith.
This might be never-so-mind for people who think the flu’s a greater threat, of course. They tend to live pretty happily with HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Hendra, Zika, meteors and volcanoes. Some even celebrate the global extinctions of 440, 365, 250, 210 and 65 million years ago as evidence we’ll all prevail.
The great old ‘She’ll be right, mate’. Yep, you could be run over crossing the road this arvo. And true enough, in all honesty. You’re never really far from the great beyond. It’s nasty out there. Every mad thought-bubble gets a platform these days. Loons everywhere. Invisible threats, too. We all take our chances getting out of bed each morning.
What I’m not chancing right now, though, is Eastern Park. Especially its pine plantation beside the golf clubhouse. Lovely place, sure, but I’m dodging it like the plague.
Way too many bloody bats.