COVID's brain fog is bewitching me in a weird way

"Brain fog", sometimes described as "lack of mental clarity" is a famous accompaniment/lingering aftermath of a bout of COVID. Last Saturday morning and Googling for new news (and while waiting for my latest RAT test to go about its mysterious alchemy) I found some of my trusted sources bedecked with some incredible stories.

So for example on the always-authoritative Hyperallergic online arts news blog there was the story headed "Prince Harry to Star in New Van Gogh Biopic: The estranged prince said he took the role to raise awareness of mental health issues."

Harry had told Hyperallergic that "we [Harry and Vincent] are both redheads, which is a burden that should not be underestimated".

A burdened redhead myself I nodded rapt affirmation of this searing insight.

Moving on deeper into the Hyperallergic bulletin there was the breaking story "Discovered Trove of Vermeer Works Reveals He Mainly Painted Dogs".

It was a report of how "a cache of 243 paintings found in an English castle, all depicting canine subjects, suggests Vermeer's true aspiration was to become a dog portraitist". A rapt admirer of Vermeer and hopelessly fond of dogs I read on, enthralled, learning of how "the unbelievable discovery explains why there were have been thought to be so few works by Vermeer, as only some 35 paintings were previously attributed to the artist".

And the most world famous of those 35, Woman With A Pearl Earring now turns out, Hyperallergic reported, to have been only a rough sketch for the just-discovered masterpiece Hunting Dog With a Pearl Earring (1665). A reproduction of that actual work, a portrait of an adorable, bling-wearing golden labrador, illustrated the story.

"Gosh!" I gasped, enraptured, sending the link to the story to my dog-loving, art-loving friends everywhere.

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Of course, as my friends soon began to chortlingly point out, the Vermeer story, posted on April 1, All Fools Day, was an artful hoax. I had fallen had fallen hook, line and sinker for the trick.

This was blush-making at first for someone like me with so many intellectual-artsy tickets on myself. But then I saw that my gullibility in this was just the latest of the several COVID befoggings of my mind in recent weeks. COVID had done it.

And anyway I quite liked the way in which my fogs were somehow enabling make-believe to use my mind as a plaything. Fogs were making my mind child-like and amenable to the wonders of all that's fairytale in life. Surely this is a sweet and good thing?

During my isolation I have been reading a great deal of fiction and noticing how, somehow, the fogged mind was especially receptive to it. So for example for the umpteenth time I re-read Madame Bovary, this time finding my heart and soul far more engaged with Emma Bovary's tragic plight than ever before.

My theory is that when it comes to the reading of fiction the softly befogged mind is more feminine, more imagination-receptive than the sharp, clear, sceptical, fantasy-repelling thing the male mind usually is.

Relatedly there is the way in which fog, as celebrated in W.H. Auden's great poem Thank you, fog, block out extraneous and inessential things and enable one to focus on what really matters.

Befogged at last by my COVID in recent days I have got to the true, humane heart of Flaubert's heartbreaking Madame Bovary for the first time. Thank you, fog.

Then, too, even without one's COVID fogs it is difficult today to tell fuzzily-outlined truth from mistily-defined fiction.

Playing Vincent in a woke biopic is just the kind of thing Harry really might do. Is the thought of him winning a woke Oscar for his sensitive portrayal of his troubled, redheaded brother-in-angst any more improbably foolish than the rapturous but daft thought was of Labor actually winning April Fool's Day's unwinnable Aston byelection? No federal government had won an opposition seat since the olden days of 1920.

And is there anything more inherently implausible about Vermeer being sweetly besotted with dogs and devoting his genius to them than everything one hears every day now of the narcissisms of the self-hoaxed Donald Trump?

Foggy days indeed.