Dateline: at home, locked-down in self-isolation, 23rd April (St George's Day, Shakespeare's Birthday) 2020.
C-word continued....
Made my first tentative, creative response to SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, Coronavirus or whatever you want to call this zoonotic nemesis, a virus by any other name would be as virulent, on fateful Friday 13th March 2020.
When trying to put something about it into words, the title of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, a novel I have long-loved & read several times, sprang to mind immediately. I adapted it to current circumstances & considered how this contemporary disease might impact amatory matters now.
Not being a writer of novels (tho I have a few abandoned ones to my name & my writing is perhaps a bit novel in another sense), instead I ventured into verse, which, in the example I managed, has the virtue of brevity, if nothing else.
Fairly platonic Liebestod lyrics for lovers of alliteration, with some would-be bardic, quasi-Cynghanedd thrown in for luck.
I posted it online the following day (14th March) in my website, under the title Love in the Time of Coronavirus (vide).
Advertised it via Twitter where at present I have only one follower (& that's my partner, understandably partisan) - don't laugh (or rather do, as it's therapeutic & I'm keen on humour):
Not a single retweet, nor a married one from my partner. But she did give me a heart. Sweet!
Making the page, I searched for photos of masked, kissing couples. Couldn't find any quickly so instead settled for a stock image of a stylish older masked couple walking in the park, which I had to pay for & edited into something tastefully monochrome & restrained, as accompanying illustration to my lonely words.
My poetic image ("kissing thru face-masks"), verbal rather than visual, received no coverage, though, am glad to say it now appears in Google, at present ranking 14th under images when you search for "kissing thru face-masks." Fame at last, eh?
Subsequently (if not consequently), images of couples kissing thru face-masks began to proliferate online. They seem to be everywhere. Later, discovered a photo dating back to February:
(Newly-weds kissing thru face-masks in Philippines,
22/02/2020)
Stylistically, this looks as if it's from an earlier era:
Such depictions even appeared on walls. Here's one in the process of being painted:
Dig the authenticity of those drips. No photoshop there, tho not quite Jackson Pollock thank goodness:
Already vandalised with added graffiti:
This variation on the theme is rather erotic & raunchy:
Maybe I should break the curfew, I mean lockdown, & go out with a tin of gloss & a paintbrush, do some guerilla graffiti, making a splash, painting the town red or a rainbow of colours.
When up against the wall, decorate it?
Not sure this would be described as pretty as a picture or magnificent as a mural.
I suspect it will remain strictly digital graffiti. Yet another example of a picture being worth a thousand words.
bye Yours Truly, Davy King
Love in the Time of Coronavirus
Free printable poster of author in face-mask
PS Magritte prefigured all this most surreally:
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Corona? Crown? Or Jester's Cap?
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Let me colour your opinion?
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