Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

The Sydney Morning Herald

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.

By Christos Tsiolkas

April 3, 2020 

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. – Talleyrand

We are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused to our sense of time.

Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie Jim

Three weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.

Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from home announcing that first this festival and then another would be cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to return home.

We are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion, too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.

There is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American, many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to breathe on one another.

I am two seats away from a young woman, poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed, everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”

And it’s at that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing. It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.

“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”

“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”

“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”

''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty Images

On returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality, in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are cancelled.

Again, time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.

It isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.

Of course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the Great Depression.

Writers and filmmakers and artists have always imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction. But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema, what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous – to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In this moment, community trumps difference.

In between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched, is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.

In some ways, I have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.

I’m not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club, a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.

This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia, a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.

I miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who think the same way you do.

There will come a time when we can return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now, physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.

So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.

Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?

I worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus. They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned, but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to a present generation of writers and artists.

An equal shock has been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its own citizens.

I worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have. After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer still adhere to certainty?

When we emerge out of our isolation, the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.

I also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.