JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature, Continental Philosophy, Phenomenological Psychology, and the Arts. JANUS HEAD Janus Head: Volume 19 Issue 1 Copyright © 2021 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA, All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Trivium Publications, P.O. Box 8010 Pittsburgh, PA 15216 ISSN: 1524-2269 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 67 8 9 0 0 JANUS HEAD CONTENTS ESSAYS 05 Editor's Note John Pauley 06 Plague, Prejudice, and Possibility: Four- teenth-Century Lessons for Our Own Troubled Times Maeve Callan 18 Art and Race in the Time of Covid-19: Focus on Asian Americans Lenore Metrick-Chen 36 Weightier Matters: Examining CEO Activism Issues in Ghana’s no-western Context Eric Kwame Adae 59 Play and Interruption as a Mode of Action in Arendt, Dostoevsky, and Kharms Simon Ravenscroft 75 The Rhetoric of Demonic Repetition:The Two Deaths of Osama Bin Laden and Other Stories Tom Grimwood 89 The Poetic Task of “Becoming Homely”: Heide- gger reading Hölderlin reading Sophocles Norman Kenneth Swazo 107 The Balkans Geo-psychoanalysis Dušan Bjelić POEMS 125 Editor's Note on Featured Poet Arthur Brown John Pauley 126 Bird/Wind Tall Grass As the Crow Flies The Stranger Eye and Mind Modern Art The Medium Featured Poet Arthur Brown JANUS HEAD Three Essays On COVID-19: Interrelated Perspectives and Methods All rights reserved. Copyright © 2021 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 4 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD Editor's Note In keeping with the mission statement of Janus Head, as well as our history, for this issue of the journal we sought out essays on the COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate effects on marginalized groups/persons. We were fortunate to receive three excellent essays from very different perspectives that still connect in vitally important ways. In short, these essays gather religious, philosophical, historical, artistic, and sociological insight for the analysis of the global COVID-19 problems. We urge everyone to read these essays together so to see the vital connections between the perspectives and methods. We have also included, in this round of publication, an open essay section. The essays included have been gathered from far and wide. Most importantly, all the essays fall within our purposes as a journal and are of unusual philosophical interest. Janus Head is a small operation with ambitious goals, and we believe this issue demonstrates our commitment to high standards. Last, but certainly not least, we have a "featured poet" Arthur Brown. Janus Head continues its commitment to poetry as inquiry. John Pauley Editor 5 JANUS HEAD Plague, Prejudice, and Possibility: Fourteenth- Century Lessons for Our Own Troubled Times Maeve Callan All rights reserved. Copyright © 2021 by Trivium Publications, Pittsburgh, PA 6 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD ABSTRACT This essay explores connections between the fourteenth-century “Black Death” and the current COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the ways in which prejudice and inequality exacerbate their impacts and considering how the upheaval created by catastrophe creates opportunity for greater equity and community, but also exploitation and oppression, depending on human response. Keywords: Bubonic Plague; COVID-19; Christianity; Medieval Europe; Modernity; Racism; Anti-Semitism; United States Catherine of Siena; Julian of Norwich; John Lewis 7 JANUS HEAD Plague, Prejudice, and Possibility: Fourteenth- Century Lessons for Our Own Troubled Times1 1. Adapted from a Simpson College’s Summer Faculty Speaker Series talk given July 29, 2020. Opening image by Philip Culmacher, Regimen wider die Pestilenz, https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fra5xxxy/images?id=cfaeuh28 s the world wrestled with the other heretics laid the groundwork for ACOVID-19 pandemic in spring his successes over the previous centuries, and summer 2020, some turned to the and what really enabled him to succeed Middle Ages for hope and inspiration. (apart from the protection of Frederick of Since “medieval” has become a byword Saxony’s army) was a development the for barbarity and ignorance, the Middle previous century, the printing press. Ages itself didn’t provide the hope; rath- In the Middle Ages, literacy was er, it was what people over-simplistically reserved for the privileged elite, in part think caused the end of the Middle Ages, because communities couldn’t spare the the Black Death. Sometimes historians labor to allow more people the time to themselves provided fodder for this learn. And writing generally depended 1 problematic parallel, but to many it on an arduous process that turned an just seemed common sense, given how Middle Ages as starting with the “fall” of animal—or more precisely its skin—into history has generally been taught in the Rome in 476 (although it fell before that vellum, or what was used for paper in me- West: after classical antiquity, we fell into as well, and it got back up again after), dieval manuscripts.3 The entire process a millennium of ignorance and error until and ending with the Protestant Refor- was done by hand and took exponential- we were rescued by the Renaissance, mation, more precisely October 31, 1517, ly longer than creating a book did with a which ushered in enlightened modernity. when Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses printing press, which also standardized In this we loosely follow Petrarch, who on a Wittenberg church door, according content in a way hand-copying couldn’t.4 is credited with coining the term “Dark to tradition. These bookends matter, but The printing press and its impact aren’t Ages” for his own time the decade before dating the Middle Ages as 500-1500 com- particularly relevant for the plague, but the Black Death struck, whereas he saw bined with the fifth to fifteenth century, they are for their similarities with our the Roman Empire as a Golden Age of round numbers that don’t quite match current time of transition, when people accomplishment, in part because of all (the latter specifically means 401-1500), can communicate all around the globe the Roman propaganda claiming the helps convey the sense that these dates in seconds through a computer that fits same. Such a narrative, however, grossly are somewhat arbitrary. People didn’t in our pockets. Martin Luther’s ability to distorts the past and follows propaganda wake up on November 1, 1517, take a spread his ideas relatively quickly to oth- of not only the Romans but certain look around and say, “oooohhh, we’re in ers who were receptive to his views was Humanists and contemporary scholars, early modernity now!” These eras are cre- essential for the success of the Protestant 2 some with anti-Catholic axes to grind. ated centuries later , by historians trying Reformation and the end of the Middle In the field of Religion, especially to make sense of past patterns. Moreover, Ages, in partnership with a million other among those of us focusing on medie- Martin Luther was far less revolutionary developments—just as our ability to val European Christianity, we date the than people often assume. Countless 1. For example, Dr. Gianna Pomata, early modern historian of medicine and professor emerita at Johns Hopkins University, in Lawrence Wright’s “How Pandemics Wreak Havocs and Open Minds” (The New Yorker, July 20, 2020). See also Adam McBride’s more nuanced but still oversimplified analysis, focusing on economic aspects in Salon. 2. For additional context, see Ada Palmer’s useful critique of “the myth of the golden Renaissance and bad Middle Ages.”. See also Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant, The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020). 3. For an example of the process, see https://www.bl.uk/medieval-english-french-manuscripts/articles/how-to-make-a-medieval-manuscript. 4. The Chinese had invented something similar roughly four centuries before, so this wasn’t new to humanity, but new for Europeans. 8 JANUS HEAD JANUS HEAD share information, innovation, and ideas 20/20, but only if the picture is complete. Gabriele de’ Mussi’s Historia de Morbo, c. all around the world in seconds is com- This picture has a great many gaps—and 1348, which may have derived from Caffa bining with a million other developments not just because a third to a half of our survivors when they arrived—along with as we transition into a new age. potential witnesses died within days, if the plague—to Piacenza. But, returning to the fourteenth not hours, of their community coming "Oh God! See how the heathen century, the Black Death clearly had a into contact with this disease. Tatar races, pouring together from major impact on European civilization. Nevertheless, we know far more all sides, suddenly invested the city After all, it killed at least a third of the about the medieval plague, or the Great of Caffa and besieged the trapped population. But it didn’t prove as decisive Mortality, or the Great Pestilence—it Christians there for almost three an end to the Middle Ages as it seems to went by a few names; its most common years. There, hemmed in by an people today, stuck in their own far less name, Black Death, was given to it only immense army, they could hardly deadly pandemic, desperate to make centuries later—than medieval people draw breath, although food could sense of their world and its future. And themselves did. It first hit Europe in 1347, be shipped in, which offered them any consideration must be prefaced with after emerging in China a few years ear- some hope. But behold, the whole an awareness of how limited our sources lier, spreading over trade routes, as seen army was affected by a disease are.