The Seventh Seal and The Modern Plague

Silence

A gong is struck once at the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. There is no image and sound slowly decays into a dark silence. The silence is not the silence of death, but of life. Life where God is silent. On Saturday morning, the second saturday of the worldwide quarantine, New York was quiet enough to hear birdsong.

No one ever lives in silence. There is always sound. Sounds that we have not heard yet, sounds we have heard but not noticed, sounds we only hear when everything else is quiet. 

“And when the Lamb opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour... And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound.”

This quote comes after the silence of the opening moment in The Seventh Seal. It implies that after the silence there will be sound, and hope. It will be a chorus, a choir of angels, accompanied by the orchestra of the heavens. We are affirmed by that sound. To hear it means that we mean something, that our struggle means something, and that we are not alone. But for now it is silent.

Death

We are terrified by what we can’t see, what we don’t understand. We make a figure of death. The ashen face, the long black cloak, the scythe. 

We have not been out of the house in 23 days and counting. Everything is delivered. We wipe down the boxes and each item with disinfecting wipes. We shout at my daughter to stand back if she approaches an unwiped box. All of what makes up her life, going to school, seeing friends, playing in the park, taking the bus, all of it, has stopped suddenly.

Since the disease began to spread uncontrollably in New York, I have been sleeping in my three year old daughter’s bed with her. She falls asleep in my arms. I feel her body go heavy, deeply relaxing into me. Some nights, after about a half an hour she wakes screaming. She has nightmares of bumble bees and flies coming through the windows. She is terrified by what is outside that could come in and harm her. She has given a figure to death.

Sickness

There must be a reason for all this death, just as there must be a reason we are alive. The fear that propels Block through the story in The Seventh Seal is the desire to make one meaningful act before his own death. He fought in a Crusade, only to return home to the worst pestilence in human history. Surely there must be a meaning to it? A reason for it? But there is not. His squire Jons says to him: “Our crusade was so stupid that only an idealist could have thought it up”.

Witch: You can see him any time.

Block: How?

Witch: If you do as I say. Look into my eyes.

Witch: Well, do you see him?

Block: I see terror. Nothing else.

We need to make meaning out of it. Attacked by an invisible force our instinct is to retreat to superstitions. Witches are to blame. Only religion can save us.  Even the (sick) accused witch believes in her own demonization. Surely you can see him, everyone else can.

It is the Chinese virus. It came from Europe. It is an outside force attacking us. It is our Pearl Harbor. War is our only metaphor for a force of nature, a fluke of biology. Whatever we can do to avoid self-reflection.

If I look into the eyes of my neighbor, taking a wide 6 foot radius around me, all I see is terror.  We can ask all we want, but perhaps there is no answer. There is no meaning to be made. All we hear is silence.