A PERFECTLY BEASTLY STATE OF FILTH: HECTOR GAVIN, SANITARY RAMBLINGS, AND THE ABOMINABLE I

8 8 Y A P E R F E C T L Y B E A S T L Y S T A T E O F F I L T H H E C T O R G A V I N , S A N I T A R Y R A M B L I N G S , A N D T H E A B O M I N A B L E I G E R A L D M A J E R The Black Death, King Cholera, Ebola! – vividly fonted against black, purple, or blood red in gilded gothic or sober executivesummary medical, such titles came to my hands with a nearautomatic motion, as though I didn’t want to know what I was touching but nonetheless had to absorb those bare phrases which, along with their brave faces, seemed like indelibly tragic mottos of mortal despair. In my mental library, I called them plague books, as if admitting at the same time that they plagued me. Sometimes soberly historical, sometimes sensational, they were books that attempted a reckoning with epic, ultimate dirt – malefic particles, epidemic diseases, and spectacular, statistical mortality. I absorbed vignettes of exposure and infection; of presenting symptoms; of physicians or clinicians or hospitals skeptical, negligent, or justly alarmed, as if the narrative must track an evolution from wild tale and myth to uncertain science and finally the triumph of empirical truth. I considered theories of infection and contagion – evil eyes, fever seeds, clinging miasmas – some prescient of modern medicine, others stubbornly and fantastically wrong-headed. I partook of prison and carnival – the actions of the authorities, draconian or slipshod or, rarely, marked by wisdom and foresight; 8 9 R one physician’s pleas against or another’s connivance with assorted panicky machineries of segregation and quarantine; the resistance of the populace, some of whom would rather perish miserably in hiding or on the run than be inspected and confined; some of whom, with death abroad, indulged in every excess of pain and pleasure as if to exhaust the body’s powers in anticipation of the disease. Perhaps it all was a factitious history of my own mind, its assorted prophylaxes and malingerings, and more particularly my abiding fear of being fatefully marked – no matter if for blessings or dooms – so that a book about identifying and classifying, where the signs of plague led in turn to the delineation of spaces and territories for mastering it, o√ered a species of evasion or anticipatory vengeance, like a mark crossing out an earlier mark, the former becoming indecipherable or at least hard to read under a distorting scrawl. In those matters of fact was something freer, brighter, cleaner – the public eye of a newspaper page or the school blackboard inscription; the window-display gloss of the social studies textbook approved by teachers and used by students in the years before me; the tables and maps and photographs a sort of management program with areas, regions, and peoples apportioned as if the world were a vast company of which I was learning the organizational chart. Ultimately, a memento mori by which the minutiae of empirical particulars would blur into the general lot the unhappy prospect of my last humiliation, my epitaph a ghostly integer among the statistical almanacs and mortality tables of some unimaginably compressed file of the future, beyond the digital, perhaps beyond anything I would be able to recognize as language or number. My little stat: an information particle liable to countless encryptions, code corruptions, and automaticupdate deletes. As much as I would like to escape the stroke that marked my fate, it would anyway leave scarcely a trace. Like the contours of a skull ghosting a looking-glass visage, it styled my final impossibility: some ultimate convulsion of a naked speck of living matter, the bare fact of my life recorded by an infinitesimal graphic quiver. In the meanwhile: the pleasures of discerning objects, sorting things into groups, taking command of time and space. After a plague book interlude, I might personally lay siege to my apart- 9 0 M A J E R Y ment with...