DANCING NURSES.

There are some incidents and pictures of the recent past which stuck to my mind.

Take the dancing nurses.

There is something vulgar about the whole scenery. When I first saw the nurses dancing in full uniform and masks, I felt immediately appalled by that sight. These dancing peoples seemed to mock me.

Now, when I tried to dig deeper into this disturbance of my mind, it was this, what disturbed me: This frivoulous expression of freedom of opinion.

The single nurse, who might otherwise feel invisible during her daily duties, had, as it seems, for the first time the impression to count something. It was as if she had been going to be casted for a movie numerous times in her past life, and never was picked out for a heroic role. And then, finally, in the year 2020, she felt being freed from this dependence on finding a broadcaster. There was this one in a lifetime chance to be seen on screen, from coast to coast. To finally being granted the fifteen minute fame.

The satisfaction which those dancing nurses must have felt, I imagine, must have been grandiouse. Without the slightest doubt, without any insecurity, they thought they danced the dance of virtue. While I did not buy it and thought of it as "only signaling virtue", since this is the fashion of our time.

They seemed to say: "Look at us! We are united in solidarity. We are adorned with the confidence of a privileged group and we do not hesitate to show our pride to be seen as the essentials of our present time! "

And while they performed their skillful choreography, while they moved in beautiful synch, you could see their happiness and cheering smiles even behind their covered mouths.

While I myself wondered and tried to find out what virtue exactly they were signaling. I still find it mysterious and not easy to fathom.

Did they dance for the sick? If so, were those sick ones invited to be their audience? Apparently not. Seeing the nurses dancing in those empty hallways produced - at least for me - the image of imprisoned patients behind closed doors. It was the absence of those for whom one might have danced, not their presence which stirred my mind.

So they must have danced for their personal joy, it seems. I mean, if the hospital hallways are finally emptied out of patients and for the very first time give room for moving freely, it transports the message that it's indeed lovely for all those hard working nurses to find that space, which is usually busy, in such tidy and clean circumstances.

Also, my irritation was poking me, asking: "If a killer disease came upon humanity, why on earth is that taken as an occasion to celebrate?" I mean, did not every journal and tv-show and newspaper scream with hysteria that we all will die? Apparently, those dancing did not think so. They almost made the impression as if this whole thing shall not be taken too seriously. A voice told me: Rightly so.

So, in a weird sense, I thought of those dancers as somehow smart, smarter than any serious faced politician who sold to the peoples that "everyone now must take care of everyone and be kind and considerate towards one another as not to spread that killer thing."

How do dancing nurses fit into the deadly serious warnings and legislation acts, if they were not smart? Not only did they mock the me (thinking of the isolated old and dying ones) but also the frightened of a deadly disease ones?

Is it not so that we were all well educated by the movies that once a killer virus escaped into the world that not even a full protection suit with separate oxygen-tank can guarantee to stay safe?

But then, after all, we do not believe in fiction, do we? On a level hard to describe, we simply do not follow the protocols, but we pretend we do.

The vulgarity behind those scenes may be this: If I show openly that I do not believe in the deadliness of a thing, it means that I am not afraid. If I am not afraid of something, I need not sell a double message. The double message was the nurses wearing masks. But even that is not really what I meant by frivoulty.

It's more like when I have an impulsive that I haven't thought through at all and then put it into action. It's one thing to do it in the company of someone else or, say, your family at the dinner table, but it's another to present yourself in front of an audience of millions.

But this act of "we dance lightly and to rhythmic music and spread good cheer", this very contradiction, was, on another level, something that millions of people perhaps needed to see in order to become aware of the ambiguous message.

Moreover, such a message also signalled the opposite of all the other doomsday and death messages that were all too intensively spread. The dancers also seemed to be saying: "people, we are dancing happily and how can that be at all when the Grim Reaper is around and it would generally be considered impious to dance when the dead are piling up in the streets and the misery is palpable."

During the tsunami catastrophe in Indonesia and Thailand in 2004, did we see US-Americans performing or Frenchmen tap-dancing like Hollywood heroes in the face of the totally destroyed coastal areas? At any rate, I don't remember such things.

I'm not talking about it to get ugly. Rather, I want to say that the contradictions and paradoxes of such an event only became apparent through such dancing. And since I don't know who was behind the mask of a dancing nurse, I can't say what her motive was.

The jester, the buffoon may have been behind it as much as any other character.

Anyone who knows any of the dancers personally may want to know or ask what made that person dance.

It may well have been what are called the deadly sins and we certainly got a taste of that. Pride and vanity are to be mentioned.
It may indeed have been compassion, I don't know.

For, if I take a film as a model and I choose the heroes of the story, it would probably be the dancers and the fearless rather than the fearful and the clumsy.

Isn't it also always the self-sacrificing doctors and their assistants who, in a story about "the great plague", overcome trouble or hesitation in approaching even the smelliest and most bubbling sick people and cooling their foreheads for nights on end?

Do these people not have those who encourage them when they threaten to despair? But nowhere in the film do you see these heroes distancing themselves and trying to protect themselves, because these are not hero stories. Those who do not want to be infected at any price, who shirk the important tasks, they are assigned the role of the coward, aren't they?

Even in a film not set in the Middle Ages, even in a modern story, a hero doctor would remove his mask from his face in the face of a seriously ill or dying person, take the patient's hand to console and accompany him because of the serious circumstances.

You may want to trick a human beings mind by telling him that the new hero is the protocol following one, but in the end, it's not convincing. The hero follows his conscience and that always connects with something divine. Protocol and conscience may be in synch and then you have an ideal situation. But this is not what stories are about.

“We believe that we are doing a noble work,” said Northover warmly. “It has continually struck us that there is no element in modern life that is more lamentable than the fact that the modern man has to seek all artistic existence in a sedentary state. If he wishes to float into fairyland, he reads a book; if he wishes to dash into the thick of battle, he reads a book; if he wishes to soar into heaven, he reads a book; if he wishes to slide down the banisters, he reads a book. We give him these visions, but we give him exercise at the same time, the necessity of leaping from wall to wall, of fighting strange gentlemen, of running down long streets from pursuers—all healthy and pleasant exercises. We give him a glimpse of that great morning world of Robin Hood or the Knights Errant, when one great game was played under the splendid sky. We give him back his childhood, that godlike time when we can act stories, be our own heroes, and at the same instant dance and dream.”

This was written round about a hundred years ago. Replace "books" with "movies" and you see that notions haven't changed that much.

When people talk enraged about "I have almost died!" and they don't understand that this is the story of their life time and instead belittle their very personal adventure, because, after all, they almost, but didn't die what can top that? Really? The adventure of life is to venture it, not to avoid it. If what is inconvenient is not understood as an adventure, I shall almost quit with - again - G. K. Chesterton:

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

In this sense, what made people reacting ghastly towards the "It's just a little inconvencience to wear a mask" was that they thought of it as avoidance to venture life and not to face it. Therefor, this "little contribution of solidarity" was felt as nothing but avoidance. Which you can translate as a sin, the "omission" to be a lively human being instead of a living dead.

On another level, was this whole "pandemic" a trick humanity played towards itself? I mean those parts of the world where people live more or less comfortable and without being anxious to openly walk the streets. Was this a self created phenomena in order to create an adventure? Because, reading books and watching films may inspire our fantasy, but we all know that this ain't it.