Tautology

I think my brain might be freshly broken in ways I don’t yet understand. I think this in part because I can’t stop listening to Cardi B scream about coronavirus. In the three weeks since Cardi posted the clip on Instagram, I’ve probably accounted for an outsize share of its nearly 28 million views, and I find myself wanting to sing-yell in reply.

“Corona-viiiiii-rus!” She dips into a double-knee bend. “CORONA-VIIIIII-RUS!”

I’ve watched and rewatched Charles Cornell’s piano accompaniment and laughed out loud to myself that he nailed the notes like that and sent it to at least six people and also tweeted about it. I’ve listened to iMarkkeyz’s dance remix on repeat; I’ve read the Times story, which called the utterance an “ominous but oddly musical cry”; I’ve seen the TikToks.

Why can’t I (or anyone else, I guess?) seem to tear myself away from Cardi wailing the name we use for this virus? Why do I hear it as some call awaiting a response—a demented game of Marco Polo?

I watch the clip again.

“Corona-viiiiii-rus!”

Yes, I think. Yup, exactly. CORONA-VIIIIII-RUS!

Someone on television, or in an email, or over Zoom mentions coronavirus.

CORONA-VIIIIII-RUS! my brain offers, and I think, well, yes, I mean, that pretty much sums it up.

Maybe it’s because Cardi’s howl seems to bubble up from something primal and raw that I recognize—that seems to vent our collective terror, the bellow gathering in each of our throats.

Maybe it’s because the repetition it invokes feels like an endless cable-news chyron, an infinite scroll, the drone of ambulance sirens. Or because it sounds like an airhorn ripped from the opening bars of a club banger and restored to its function of warning.

But mostly I think it’s because there’s nothing else right now. If we’re lucky—as I am—we are just vacuum-sealed into our chambers. There’s only the virus and its reverberations in empty space, on loop. There’s just its brutal tautology.