How to Sing ‘Happy Birthday’ during an Epidemic
Topics: handwashing, happybirthday, ourstories, transmission
David Ulin (USC Dornsife English) offered these thoughts about handwashing as soon as we started putting together DecamerOnline.
Response by Veronica Peselmann (USC Dornsife Art History)
In his essay, David Ulin describes the issue of finding your own rhythm, at a time when all habits and routines are no longer a matter of course, and certainly not chosen by yourself. Almost all processes are currently determined from the outside, and rightly so: when is who going to shop, how many packs can everyone buy, where do I go for a walk, with how many and with what distance between us. I am facing difficulties in getting a flowing rhythm, having work and rest periods I do not constantly interrupt, worried to have missed potentially important news.
Therefore, it seems helpful when one of most imperative rules in this contagious time, washing my hands for 20 seconds, has clear and easy-to-follow instructions: Sing Happy Birthday twice in a row. Whether the song addresses the Self in the mirror, imagined or real friends, or the washed hands, which, it now appears, are the all-important spark for health, is initially irrelevant. What matters is the length of singing and how best to keep this time.
Ulin also seems to follow the advice of singing Happy Birthday while washing hands and he describes how he first increased the tempo to get through the bizarre ritual as quickly as possible, which therefore of course means it no longer serves the purpose. He instead invented a more successful solution that even extends hand washing by another second. Ulin explains how he slightly varies the lines of the birthday classic according to his own family habit adding the words “and many more”. He analyzes his personal addition as a plea for a good ending of the crisis with everyone remaining healthy and as a guarantee that other, better times will come.
However, I might also sense here another glimmer of hope, one of self-assertion and unwavering individuality. A small twist, a barely noticeable change, to transform a common ritual into a personalized self-guided performance; giving me as an individual the freedom not to get completely involved in the imposed prescribed song structure, which only leaves room for the personal name at a determined gap. Today I read a comment by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben on the current worlds coping strategies against the Covid-19. Agamben hopes that the world does not fall into the trap of turning everything into a pure question of bare life or death. Combined with a song on the joy about birthdays, Ulin seems to express something similar, that life means much more than bare biological birthdays and death days. For me, Ulin’s individual variance of the traditional standard text reflects on this concern that after a certain point it might not only bare life that is at stake but also a life that we individually carve and design, with its very own dynamics, twists, rough edges, winds … and many more.