Black Death Archives | Carol L. Douglas

If you don’t rejoice in the good times, you’ll have no resilience when the bad times come.

Breaking Storm, by Carol L. Douglas. I missed painting American Eagle’s fitout this year because I’m quarantined.

People ask me how I know when a painting is done. “When I’m sick of working on it,” I answer. All creative work is a compromise between our vision and capabilities. This means not just skill but environmental factors. If you doubt that, try singing through a headache.

Our current crisis involves more compromise than usual. Our supply chain is broken in odd ways; that includes some scarcity of art supplies. Carol at Salt Bay Art Supply in Damariscotta told me she runs low on white and black paint first. The white I understand; black, however, is a mystery to me.

Hammond Lumber has been great about accommodating my quarantine, but they can’t send me what they don’t have. That includes color charts. Each time I climb on a ladder to work on my current project, I wince at the state of the crown moulding. It needs paint, but I can’t match the other white in the room without a color chart. It’s difficult, but I’m deferring the trim to some future time.

Cadet, by Carol L. Douglas

I commiserated with two well-known artist friends yesterday. “This has me working twice as hard to look for ways to continue to make a living,” said one. The other has taken a night job to feed his family. “I can still paint during the day,” he said. They both have school-age kids and are making compromises to survive.

We live in a pandemic mindset. In some ways, that’s liberating. There has been blessed silence about some of our previously-consuming passions. Food allergies, the upcoming elections and gender identity are three things I’m happily not hearing about right now.

The bleak, short days of winter seems halcyon in retrospect, even if I didn’t have the Christmas I thought I wanted. It’s a pity that we so often ruin the present with our anxieties. Seizing the day is not just a recipe for overall happiness; it gives us the strength to roll through the bad times when they (inevitably) come.

Flood tide, by Carol L. Douglas

When a mother takes a newborn home from the hospital, she is overwhelmed with physical and mental fatigue. Years later, that isn’t what we remember first; we remember our joy. I’m not sure why the human mind is wired this way, but it’s something we have to work to overcome.

The Black Death was the most devastating pandemic in human history. It killed a third of Europe’s population and around 20% of people worldwide. If you lived through it, it was an unmitigated horror. Yet it ultimately broke the caste economy of the Middle Ages. Serfs could leave the manor and find work, which freed most people from a life no better than slavery. Land prices dropped. Meat consumption rose, because you can raise cattle with fewer hands than you can raise corn. In fact, the plague set the conditions that eventually led to the creation of the middle class.

All of which is to say that not every disaster is an unmitigated disaster. Sometimes, trouble is a way for society to kick off its stays and try something new. What if these turn out to be our Good Old Days?

The Triumph of Death, c. 1562, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I admit that I’m fascinated by pandemics, and am morbidly curious to see how the Ebola epidemic works its way through the First World.

Doktor Schnabel von Rom, engraving by Paul Fürst, 1656. Plague doctors were hired by towns to control epidemic. Some wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic herbs designed to prevent the spread of disease through “miasma” or putrid air.

The mother of all pandemics was the Black Death, which peaked in Europe in 1346–53. It killed between 75 and 200 million people at a time when the world’s population was only 450 million people. (Amazingly, it wasn’t until a few years ago that the pathogen responsible for it—the Yersinia pestisbacterium—was definitively identified.)

The Triumph of Death, c. 1446, fresco, Palazzo Abatellis, Palermo

Originating in the plains of central Asia—the ‘Stans’—it traveled down the Silk Road to the Crimea. From there, it was carried into Europe by fleas on the rats on merchant ships. It is estimated to have killed 30-60% of Europe’s population.

Knight, Death and the Devil, 1513, engraving by Albrecht Dürer

The plague returned repeatedly in Europe through the 14^thto 17^th centuries. It came to the United States as part of a 19^thcentury pandemic that started in China. It is still active today, although treatable with antibiotics; each year a dozen or so Americans are diagnosed with it. Rather more worrisome, a drug-resistant form of the disease was found in Africa in the 1990s.

Murder of Archbishop Ambrosius in the Moscow Plague Riot of 1771, engraving by Charles Michel Geoffroy, 1845. The Archbishop had attempted to prevent citizens from gathering at the Icon of the Virgin Mary of Bogolyubovo in Kitaigorod as a quarantine measure.

The plague caused great social upheaval in Europe. Those with means left their urban homes and shut themselves off from the world—the first recorded ‘survivalists’. The dead received perfunctory attention, since their corpses were dangerous. Faith was bifurcated: some abandoned it in an ‘eat, drink and be merry’ hedonism, while others became more frenzied. Local and global trade was frozen, resulting in shortages and spiraling inflation. On the other hand, the sudden, extreme shortage of laborers led to the end of the manorial system of serfdom and the beginning of a wage-based economy in Europe.

Danse Macabre, Bernt Notke, end of the 15th century, St. Nicholas’ Church, Tallinn, Estonia. The Danse Macabre is a medieval art genre which tells us that—no matter our station in life—Death unites us all.

Message me if you want information about next year’s classes and workshops.

Category: Black Death

Let the good times roll

Dance of Death