Abstract
Seeking to examine the implications of social distancing, isolation and the silencing of public spaces brought about by the COVID-19 epidemic, I offer an interpretation of Kafka’s short story ‘The Silence of the Sirens’ contrasting it to the Homeric original. In Homer’s story, Odysseus resists the temptation of the Sirens’ deadly song by having himself tied to the mast of his ship, while his oarsmen, ears blocked with beeswax, sail quickly by. By contrast, in Kafka’s telling of the story, the Sirens fall silent. A solitary Odysseus, indifferent to them, sails by peacefully, his ears blocked, his ‘great eyes’ staring in the distance. Homer’s story has long been seen as a warning against the seductions of Siren voices like those of opportunist demagogues. Throughout the Odyssey, Odysseus himself offers a complex archetype of heroic leadership, navigating adroitly and prudently the dangers of stormy seas. Kafka’s character, by contrast, proposes a different archetype, one akin to the Stoics’ homo viator, the individual who sails through life’s adversities by accepting them and turning them into a source of inner strength and wisdom. In this way, Kafka offers two things: first, an insightful explanation of why silence and isolation can be deadly when they leaving us alone with our darkest fears and fantasies, and second, an archetype of hope that is attuned to our times on how to cope with pain and anxiety.
Introduction
The COVID-19 epidemic has confined millions of people across the globe to their homes. Restaurants, cinemas, theatres, shopping malls, sports arenas, places of worship, the streets and squares of many Western cities have all fallen silent. Millions are living in fear and anxiety. Boredom too, Baudelaire’s ‘delicate monster’, is creeping in after weeks of compulsory lock-down and isolation. People, stuck in front of TV screens and computer monitors, follow a steady flow of near-identical news and stories while a cacophony of voices compete to make sense of a senseless calamity. Meanwhile the COVID-19 virus is doing what viruses do. Silently.
Kafka’s retelling of Odysseus’s meeting with the Sirens in ‘The Silence of the Sirens’ casts a unique light on noise, silence and boredom in modern life, especially since the onslaught of the COVID-19 epidemic. Kafka dramatically subverts the Homeric legend of Odysseus navigating past the rock of the Sirens who, with their piercing song, seek to shipwreck passing mariners. In the original, the hero has himself tied to his ship’s mast while protecting his companions by blocking their ears, as they row rapidly past. In Kafka’s telling of the story, the Sirens fall silent while Odysseus, indifferent to them, sails by, his ears blocked, his ‘great eyes’ staring in the distance.
What prompted Kafka in this radical reframing of the Homeric myth? And why does he insist that the Sirens’ silence is more deadly than their song? What makes his telling of the story such a compelling parable for our time, what can we learn from it about our own time, its sirens, its silences and its noises? In this piece, I will offer an interpretation of the Kafka’s narrative in which silence is fatal because it is unbearable. It is dangerous because it leaves us alone with our demons, our dark fantasies and our dark thoughts against which we seek noise to sweep them away. While the Homeric character offers an archetype of heroic leadership, navigating successfully the adversities of stormy seas, Kafka’s character proposes a different archetype, one that copes with life’s adversities by seeking to turn them into a source of inner strength and wisdom.
Sirens of myth, sirens of war
October 1917. World War I is entering its final phase. The Russian Revolution is about to cast its defining shadow on decades to come. In Prague, Franz Kafka, deferred from army service for what his employers claimed as ‘crucial government service in the insurance sector’, has just been diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that will kill him seven years later. At this precise moment, Kafka turns his attention to the Odyssey, writing his short story ‘The Silence of the Sirens’, an audacious retelling of the Homeric story. Kafka’s narrative raises many interesting questions when contrasted to Homer’s original. Two master storytellers working with the same characters across three millennia throw up some fascinating insights for our own times, regarding the nature of leadership in conditions of crisis, and the management of risks, external and internal, visible and invisible, noisy and silent.
The story of the Sirens has intrigued many commentators over the centuries, from Cicero to Dante and from Adorno to Seferis. It is also part of everyday culture, the word ‘siren’ used in many languages to describe a device emitting excruciating noises to warn of imminent danger. Sirens are now regular features of city life where ambulances, police cars and fire engines alert the citizens’ of the private crises and dramas that are being acted out of their direct sight. Sirens also warn of imminent public dangers, such as fire, flood or aerial bombardment. A siren is an instant trigger of anxiety. Of panic too.
The encounter of Odysseus (I use the Greek name when referring to Homer’s hero, the Latin when referring to Kafka’s) with the Sirens features twice in Homer’s long poem as the hero recounts his adventures to the royal court of the Phaeacians. We first hear about the Sirens from the mouth of Circe, the enchantress who turned Odysseus’s crew into pigs, and who is now prepared to help them on their homeward journey. She warns Odysseus of his imminent meeting with the Sirens and of the deadly threat that their enchantment poses to mariners, their beguiling song drawing them towards the rocks where they meet their ruin. Circe advises Odysseus to block his companions’ ears with wax. If, however, he is intent on listening to their song himself and safely return to his family and home, he must ask his men to tie him on the mast while sailing by and ‘if you beg and pray the men to unloose you, tell them to make sure to bind you even tighter’.
We thus first meet the Sirens as figures of danger and death, posing a mortal threat to family life by seducing men and driving them to their demise. Are not women seducing married men away from their families still referred to as Sirens? In Homer’s narrative, the Sirens are among the many agents that seek to wreck Odysseus’ homeward journey and frustrate his attempts to be reunited with Penelope and Telemachus and see his beloved country once again.
A little later in the Odyssey, Odysseus describes what actually happened in his encounter with the Sirens which essentially dramatizes the earlier account, while adding the honeyed words with which the Sirens seek to tempt him: ‘Come here,’ they sang, ‘renowned Odysseus, pride of the Achaeans and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without pausing to hear the sweetness of our song. He who listens will go on his way not only charmed, but wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.’ They sang these words most beautifully, and as I longed to hear them further, I indicated by frowning to my men that they should set me free. But they quickened their stroke, and Eurylochus and Perimedes bound me with still stronger bonds till we had got away from the Sirens’ voices. Then my men took the wax from their ears and unbound me.
It is a dazzling story, a story that enchants most people who hear it. It is a story of temptation, a constant theme in the Odyssey as various forces conspire to deflect Odysseus and his comrades from their journey – lotus eaters, Calypso tempting him with immortality, Circe and even the cattle of the Sun God.
It is also a story of seduction, one to which Odysseus only partially succumbs without having to pay the price, thanks to Circe’s advice rather than to his own cunning, as he readily admits. There are no mishaps, no recalcitrant fellows (as there are in several other episodes of the Odyssey) unblocking their ears or catching a sound from the Sirens which would lead to their death. Odysseus’ pleasure is incomplete, since he does not get to hear what the Sirens would tell him, but it is a non-addictive pleasure. There is no lingering desire to return to the Sirens to hear the rest of their song once he and his comrades are out of harm’s way.
Homer’s story leaves some ambiguity about the Sirens and their song. Who are the Sirens? Undoubtedly, they represent a primal force that threatens home life. They are instruments of death and indeed an ugly and terrible death, unmourned and unburied. We do not know their motives or purposes. As to the content of their song, Homer is not ambiguous. They seek to tempt Odysseus with flattery and with the promise of information if not knowledge. Odysseus would love to know the fates of Agamemnon, Menelaus and his other comrades-in-arms since they left the conquered Troy. Nor is there ambiguity over the quality of their song – it is ‘sweet as honey’. It would not stretch Homer’s story to view their sweet song that leads sailors to their ruin as the Siren voices of populist leaders who seduce their followers with the sweet rhetoric of empty promises and easy solutions to complex problems (see Tourish in this issue).
Homer’s story has all the qualities of a great narrative – imaginative, short, full of meaning but allowing different ways in which his audiences may imagine those Sirens, be seduced by them and resist them. It is not accidental that over the centuries it has lent itself to many different interpretations. Cicero (Cicero and Annas, 2001) saw Odysseus thirsting after knowledge, a view shared with Dante who had no access to Homer’s original but only knew about the character from Virgil’s consistently hostile portrait. Early Christians saw in Odysseus Christ resisting temptation and then dying on the cross. Montaigne, more conventionally, saw Odysseus as tempted by flattery, a fatal flaw of most Homeric heroes but, I suspect, not Odysseus. Adorno (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979), in the The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, presents Odysseus as the archetypal capitalist who can savour half-pleasures – the full pleasures will always elude him – while denying his comrades any pleasure whatsoever and getting them to row for him. For Adorno, Odysseus is the calculating and rational enlightenment man, dominated by the reality principle at whose behest he dominates those around him. In a rather different interpretation, George Seferis, in his exalted poem ‘Foreign Land’, sees the Sirens as part of the superhuman forces that stand in the way of Odysseus, a man in exile, who wrestles with the world he inhabits in body and soul.
Before we delve into Kafka’s phantastasmagoric re-working of the classical narrative, it is worth pondering on the world of the Odyssey, a world brought to us by an illiterate and probably blind poet. This is a world with no rules, no regulations, no documents, no offices and no roles. There are no filing systems and no records. There is no written law or system of justice. There are no information storage capacities, beyond individual memories. There are no ‘K’s in Homer’s world, like the ‘heroes’ of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle. Even the smallest incident involves named people who trade information, blows, bluffs, gifts, insults and reputations. This is in a large measure an economy based on gift and plunder relations rather than impersonal market exchanges or organizational procedures. In these and many other ways, the world of Homer could not be more different from the world inhabited by Kafka and his heroes or indeed the world we inhabit today.
If Homer’s world is in many ways a world apart from our own, there are several aspects of his world that are still in evidence today. There is the immensity of the sea, now azure, now wine-dark and the brilliant blue sky filled with blazing light. There is earth and shrubs and animals grazing on dry thorns. In parts of Greece, today, there are shacks and hovels that would have been instantly recognizable to Odysseus and his father Laertes. There are rocks rising out of the sea where with a modicum of imagination we can see the Sirens as they taunt their prey.
And then there is Odysseus as a leader whose complex qualities of cunning and improvization, honesty and deceitfulness, caring and ruthlessness, make him surprisingly modern. He navigates dangerous and treacherous seas, every bit as turbulent as those described in most leadership manuals today. He is the most versatile of characters, a man of many wiles, many devices and many machines, the embodiment of practical intelligence. In his encounter with the Sirens, we encounter his rampant curiosity, for the sake of which he is prepared to submit himself to the humiliation of the lowest slave. His thirst for new experience, however, is coupled with caution and indifference to how others may regard him.
Undoubtedly, Odysseus cares for his followers but neither invites them to share his experience not explains what this charade with the Sirens is all about – in the incident of the Sirens, as elsewhere, he stands aloof and separate (Grint, 2010). In critical moments of their long journey, his inclination to keep them in the dark about the risks facing them is close to infantilizing them. Not surprisingly, his followers never fully trust him (Sawyer and Sawyer, 2020). On the final stretch of their journey, with Ithaca in their sights and with Odysseus asleep on the deck, his followers open the ox-hide bag that Aeolos has gifted Odysseus, the one containing unfavourable winds, and allowing the gentle Westerlies to blow the ship gently homewards. Ignorant of the gift’s true nature, the followers suspect it contains a treasure that Odysseus intends to keep for himself alone. Opening the bag instantly unleashes the furious winds that send their ship to the bottom of the sea and all of them, bar Odysseus, to their deaths. Organizationally at least, the Odyssey is a disastrous journey, since the leader alone among his crew of 12 ships ever sets foot on Ithaca again, a failure for which Odysseus must surely shoulder some responsibility.
The Sirens fall silent
Let us now leave Homer’s world and enter Kafka’s world, a world in black and white or maybe one in dark Nordic colours. Did Kafka’s eyes ever see the sea any more than Homer’s blind ones? Numerous conversations with Kafka experts offered no conclusive answer to this question but it is certain that he never set his eyes on the Mediterranean. Against the Odyssey’s open and mobile universe, Kafka’s is a highly static world of prisons, doors, rooms, corridors, walls, barriers and boundaries. It is a world of rules and laws, offices, procedures and documents. It is a world of secrets, lies and misunderstandings, not least between author and his readers who are never quite sure if Kafka means what he says and why. This is world of mysteries, many of which remain unresolved.
Unlike Homer’s world of named persons, Kafka’s world is mostly inhabited by ‘nobodies’, individuals who even when they seek escape to the mountains never cease to be nobodies. As the protagonist of ‘Excursion into the mountains’ states: ‘I don’t know,’ I cried without being heard, ‘I do not know, if nobody comes, then nobody comes. I’ve done nobody any harm, nobody’s done me any harm, but nobody will help me. A pack of nobodies. Yet that isn’t all true. Only, that nobody helps me - a pack of nobodies would be rather fine, on the other hand. I’d love to go on an excursion - why not? - with a pack of nobodies. Into the mountains, of course, where else? How these nobodies jostle each other, all these lifted arms linked together, these numberless feet treading so close! Of course they are all in dress suits. We go so gaily, the wind blows through us and the gaps in our company. Our throats swell and are free in the mountains! It’s a wonder that we don’t burst into song.’ (Kafka, 1999a)
Kafka’s narrative, terse and synoptic like Homer’s, opens with a moral ‘Proof that inadequate, even childish measures, may serve to rescue one from peril’ and closes with a codicil. The body of the story is made of some 500 words, in which we hear that Ulysses blocked his ears with wax and had himself bound to the mast of his ship, knowing that such measures were of little use against the piercing song of the Sirens, yet fully trusting that his little stratagem offered him full protection.
The story continues by alerting the reader to a still more powerful and mysterious weapon of the Sirens than their song, their silence. It is with silence that the Sirens meet Ulysses as he sails by, lost in contemplation, his blissful face entirely indifferent to them. As his ship moves on, he briefly notices the Sirens, who soon fade from his sights. The Sirens, for their part, no longer had any desire to allure; all that they wanted was to hold as long as they could the radiance that fell from Ulysses’ great eyes. If the Sirens had possessed consciousness they would have been annihilated at that moment. But they remained as they had been; all that had happened was that Ulysses had escaped them. (Kafka, 1999b: 431)
Kafka’s retelling of the story is so audacious that undoubtedly it leaves us, at least for a moment, speechless, silent. At the heart of this reimagining of the Homeric text lie two disappearances and two metamorphoses. Gone is Circe and her warning and gone too are Odysseus’s companions, those hard-working nobodies tied to the oar. This leaves the limelight on the two protagonists, Odysseus and the Sirens, who undergo dramatic transformations, Odysseus form an active to a passive character, the Sirens from noisy into silent ones.
Like Homer’s tale, this is a tale of temptation and seduction, but the temptation here becomes a test of wits between Ulysses and the Sirens. If Odysseus’s triumph in Homer’s original was not good enough, Kafka augments it. While Homer’s Odysseus is kicking and screaming to be let loose, Kafka’s Ulysses is the model of placidity. Enraptured in his self-contained cocoon, Kafka’s Ulysses is indifferent to the Sirens. They, unlike their Homeric counterparts, are entranced by the radiance of his eyes, by his very indifference and self-containment. They are possessed by desire; they fall in love with him. In doing so, from forces of nature, mysterious and inscrutable, they become women with passions and desires. Engrossed in seeing him sailing past their rugged rockface, feeling a swelling of desire, even the early onslaught of passion, they remain silent.
We the readers easily overlook the total disappearance of Ulysses’ companions, those pesky ‘nobodies’, from Kafka’s narrative. This story has little to feed directly the interest of a leadership scholar. Kafka’s story acknowledges neither followers nor leader. More importantly, however, we the readers, along with several commentators, may be deceived into overlooking the crucial fact that in Kafka’s story Ulysses blocks his own ears, not those of his companions. How remarkable that Kafka turns Ulysses, that Ciceronian model of universal curiosity, into one of zen-like detachment. Could this be one of the ‘little tricks’ that Kafka enjoyed to play on the readers ‘when he got to work on legends’ as Walter Benjamin (1968a) suspected?
A narrative of covert and silent meanings
Kafka’s narrative is a game of misperceptions – Ulysses misperceives, the Sirens misperceive, and we the readers are tempted to misperceive thinking that Kafka is misperceiving. But is he misperceiving or is he just pretending to misperceive? Kafka had considerable knowledge of the Greek language and mythology and this radical twist of Homer’s tale could hardly have been an oversight on his part. Why then does Ulysses, in this telling, plug his own ears instead of those of his fellows? This single act, so untypical of the Homeric hero, seems to transform him instantly to a character who seduces Kafka along with his readers, a figure oblivious to feminine temptation, serenely pursuing his own journey. Thus, the Homeric Odysseus, ever speaking, ever listening, ever seeing, ever active, becomes a passive hero, a Ulysses cocooned in his own tale, whose very passivity turns him into an object of desire for those silent Sirens.
Kafka’s text, like Homer’s, seduces us the readers, but for entirely different reasons than his Homeric counterpart. Rather than his cunning, his industriousness and, less attractively for our times, his heroic leadership of men in times of crisis, we are here seduced by Ulysses’ self-containment, serenity, indeed his narcissism. We are seduced by his ability to sail blissfully, unharmed through a sea of silent killers, not unlike today’s COVID-19.
Seduced by a text that is mysterious and opaque, we are likely to miss the trick that Kafka has played on us – that of turning a story of a dangerous noisy and musical encounter into a story of silent and invisible danger. Leadership heroics have no answers to the dangers facing Kafka’s Ulysses, unlike his Homeric counterpart. Ulysses is here reduced to a solitary presence. He can turn to no leader or god to provide protection from the dangers of the silent Sirens. What he requires is a cocoon of isolation in which to lock himself. This he achieves by blocking his ears, or, as Kafka’s casually mentions in the codicil, maybe not: Ulysses, it is said, was so full of guile, was such a fox, that not even the goddess of fate could pierce his armor. Perhaps he had really noticed, although here the human understanding is beyond its depths, that the Sirens were silent, and opposed the afore-mentioned pretense to them and the gods merely as a sort of shield. (Kafka, 1999b: 432)
This muteness of the Sirens as evidence of the loss of hope is in line with Adorno’s dismissal of recorded music as the ultimate degradation of modern culture (see Levin, 1990). Recorded, processed music represents, in this view, the self-alienation of music, where production turns into reproduction, part of the general tendency for spectacle and simulation to replace the ‘real’ thing. The Sirens’ silence may then be seen as the by-product of a culture in which people lock themselves in their headphone cocoons of sounds furnished by the culture industry, seeking escape from the very regime of commodities that lies at the root of their alienation. The silence of the Sirens stands for a culture that denies music its critical and subversive potential, turning it into the latest opium of the people.
Interesting as this interpretation is, it flies in the face of Sirens as seductive portents of death. It also clashes with Kafka’s notorious lack of musicality (a quality he shared with Freud), as reported by Max Brod, one that finds some support in Kafka’s own admission that ‘the essence of my unmusicalness consists in my inability to enjoy music connectedly, it only now and then has an effect on me, and how seldom it is a musical one’. While Kafka’s unmusicality has been the subject of some debate (Self, 2012), it seems unlikely that he would choose to muffle his Sirens in acknowledgement of the musical decadence of his times, although admittedly it may account for his unwillingness to equate seductiveness with sweet song.
A different explanation for the Sirens’ muteness is provided by Renata Salecl (1997) who sees it is the result of their subjectivization. The Sirens fall silent once the gaze of Ulysses has turned them from forces of nature into women with desires and passions. Their silence is proof that they are no longer forces of nature transgressing human laws. Instead, they are now subjects in their own rights, subjects with desires for the other, the other who remains indifferent to them. One may risk saying that their silence mirrors the silence of a young woman at a party who fails to attract the attention of the man she desires. Compelling as this interpretation is, it opens up another mystery: why should silence of the Sirens be ‘even more fatal’ than their song?
Death, nirvana and silence
Written during World War I, a more tempting approach is to see the Sirens’ silence as the silence of death. As Freud (1920) observed in his famous essay ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’ written shortly after that war, in contrast to noisy Eros, death works silently and invisibly seeking to return all life to inorganic inertia. In this view, silence, exemplified by the silence of Cordelia in King Lear, is the symbol as well as the portent of death (Freud, 1913). Death in this conception represents in the first place a primal longing to return to inorganic inertia, a state of peaceful Nirvana from which all tensions and stresses are removed, a deep sleep from which we never wake. It is only later and in response to the different vagaries of life that the death instinct assumes violent, aggressive and destructive forms.
The connection between Ulysses, the muteness of the Sirens and the peaceful state of Nirvana surfaces poetically in Goliarda Sapienza’s (2015) novel ‘Appuntamento a Positano’: Running under the bright sun, as I arrive out of breath at the beach with the pebbles, I understand why the legend says that this is exactly where Ulysses had his encounter with the Sirens. It is simple, their song is nothing other than the silence I hear just now, the silence from bullets that follow each other in space, the silence of the voiceless and serene wandering of the souls in the endless meadow of non-existence.
Silence is dangerous because it is unbearable, especially when it is forced on us by isolation and lock-down which leave us alone with our dark fantasies and fears that threaten to overwhelm us. ‘All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone’, claimed Pascal in 1645. Sitting quietly in a room mostly on our own is, of course, what the coronavirus has forced on most of us. It has deprived us of our usual defences in noisy social interactions, a deprivation from which the second line of defences, hooking ourselves on-line and on-media, offer but scant consolation. Depriving us of our customary noisy opiates, the arrival of the coronavirus threatens to unleash our darkest fears. As a germ that operates with total and ‘ruthless indifference to motive’ (Dodds, 1968: 36), one that does not discriminate except on the most arbitrary and flimsy grounds, a virus that isolates and silences, COVID-19 awakens fears of being left to die alone and forgotten, unloved, uncared for and unmourned. Unlike Ulysses and his Homeric predecessor, Odysseus, we will vanish leaving no trace, sinking to the level of those Kafkaesque ‘nobodies’ or the sailors whose bones lined up the rocks of the Homeric Sirens. This is a silence from which our clamorous universe of spectacles and sounds has failed to protect us.
Yet, Kafka’s Ulysses with his blissful defiance in the presence of a silent killer can also provide us with a more positive alternative, a more reassuring archetype for discovering new strength and fortitude in times of darkness. This is the Stoic archetype of the homo viator ‘a patient and enduring hero who knows his lifespan is a sequence of departures which he cannot control, but has to accept. For the Stoics Odysseus and his persistent 20-year long journey to return home was their model for the homo viator’ (Smith, 2020: 70–71). In his retelling of the story of Ulysses and the Sirens, Kafka appears to connect with the old Stoic tradition that was inspired by Ulysses’s patience, endurance and piety, but above all his self-control (Stanford, 1963/1992: 121). It is known that Zeno, the founder to the Stoic school, admiringly referred to Odysseus in many of his writings none of which survives, unlike those of Seneca which reveal the Roman philosopher’s deep admiration and identification with Homer’s hero (Smith, 2020).
The stoic ideal of homo viator in our times is what is exemplified in a blog by Alexandros Karayiannis, an old man who describes himself as ‘retired lawyer and engaged citizen’, in his philosophical reflections on the changes brought by the COVID-19 virus to his life: For old people, our lives have changed little since the epidemic. Even before this evil, we spent most of our time alone, in our homes. We have long been on a waiting list, a list without firm priority exits, labelled ‘destiny’. Those of us who are left, are now living out the remnants of our lives and our times. … I took my afternoon stroll walking on the veranda. The streets below were deserted and silent like a wilderness. On a branch of the plane tree which stretches each year as if to shake hands with me, two sparrows were playfully flirting. It is now getting dark. The unavoidable night is approaching slowly and creeps into the house which is getting dark. Evening phone calls with children and a couple of friends. Then silence. I don’t turn on the lights. From where I am sitting, I want to see the part of the night sky that I am entitled to see. If I am lucky, the moon will appear for a short while. The moon with her ‘beloved silences’, the moon that comforts and soothes me. (Karayiannis, 2020) (transl. Gabriel, 2020) Beloved silences of the moon, A stream of thought, A way of speaking of things that you find hard. (transl. Gabriel, 2020)
There is however some hope that the current epidemic may spawn new streams of consciousness, new ways of speaking and running our lives, and, at a stretch, effective calls for reformed and enhanced social and economic institutions. It may indeed spawn new forms of leadership and followership that highlight civic responsibility and solidarity within and across nations (Harari, 2020) and may sweep away some of the neo-liberal doctrines and institutions that have done so much to raise walls and divide people.
Ulysses sailing serenely past the silent Sirens may then be approached as an archetype of hope. Following in Homer’s footsteps, Kafka’s radiant story, uniquely attuned to our times of silent killers, quarantines and social isolation, may offer us a symbolic way of coping with pain and anxiety and open up bright windows with positive images for a revitalized future.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge the support and insightful comments of the helpful reader whose ideas greatly contributed to the argument presented here.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author biography
). Of late he has been developing the concept of narrative ecology and writing about conspiracy theories and nostalgia as elements of post-truth political cultures. His enduring fascination as a researcher and educator lies in what he describes as the unmanaged and unmanageable qualities of life in and out of organizations.