When it comes to coping with change, the human species is remarkably adaptable. Sometimes, though, that adaptability can blind us to how deep-seated that change has actually been. When everything shut down in mid-March, there was much talk of how strange the lockdown experience was.
Twenty weeks later, with the gradual easing of the most restrictive measures, most of us have settled into a world where what initially seemed bizarre – face masks, social distance floor markings, Zoom meetings and all the rest of it – is now just the backdrop to everyday life. (For some, of course, this has been a much more dramatic, frightening and tragic time.)
But just below that apparent normality, strangeness remains everywhere. Two experiences this week brought this home. One was a trip to Dublin Airport (no non-essential international travel was involved). Happily, I can report that those concerned about floods of tourists coming into or leaving the country at the moment should feel reassured: the place was deserted.
Being there felt simultaneously dislocating and exhilarating – the sun streaming through the immense glass walls of Terminal 2 into the empty departures hall gave the place a cathedral-like quality it sorely lacked if you had been trying to navigate the sweaty purgatory of queues, crowds and scans last summer.
But for the first time in months, I also felt a returning twinge of that dread and anxiety we all experienced in the early days of the pandemic.
Spookier experience
The second was a trip into the offices of The Irish Times, which have now been closed since the evening of March 12th (and remain so) to pick up a few bits and pieces from my desk. That experience was even spookier.
Page proofs for the next day’s edition (Friday, March 13th – make of that what you will) still lay on some desks, Mary Celeste-style. The newsroom, the humming heart of any newspaper, was sepulchral, silent and, to be honest, a bit creepy. More anxiety. More dread.
On my way into the The Irish Times, I passed through Dublin’s redeveloped docklands. For the most part, the shiny glass and steel offices still appeared empty. But the many building sites, where even yet more shiny glass and steel offices are being constructed, were all operating at full tilt (though one had been forced to shut because of a coronavirus outbreak). The contrast was jarring.
In our media-saturated age, major events and catastrophes may loom so large in our collective imaginations that they become off-limits for creative exploration
Obviously, questions about the future of travel or the future of work are at the heart of current political debate and journalistic inquiry and we have no real idea of how they may be resolved in the medium to long term. We also shouldn’t underestimate the power of the desire to revert as quickly and as fully as possible to the way everything was previous.
But some facts can never be unlearned and some things will never come back (it turns out we never really needed to print out all those proofs. Who knew?).
But one wonders how this moment in history will be captured, explored and remembered by creative artists in the years ahead. It will probably take a long time to find out. Most of the early first-draft-of-history attempts have come from the world of theatre in the form of monologues and straight-to-camera pieces, the best of which have vividly captured the peculiar intensity and drama inherent in social isolation.
But isolation is just one part of the story; other parts might lend themselves better to musical or visual work; the opportunities for photographic essays are obvious. And, restrictions on filming permitting, it’s surely only a matter of time before the lockdown and all its quirky constraints on behaviour are put to work in the plots of crime capers, farces and other genres. Many terrible romcoms could result.
Collective imaginations
It’s more than possible, tough, that the best art which arises out of the pandemic avoids confronting it directly at all. Which might be for the best, given the cautionary tale of 9/11, an event that inspired a number of shockingly bad novels from some of America’s most famous authors.
In our media-saturated age, major events and catastrophes may loom so large in our collective imaginations that they become off-limits for creative exploration, at least in any conventional or narrative form. Better to be elliptical and allusive than representational or naturalistic.
And yet there is something about the current moment, in which the familiar has been made strange, buildings lie empty, physical contact is forbidden and we all nervously await each day’s infection count, that cries out for some sort of creative engagement. Right now, someone, somewhere is surely working on the first great work of Covid art.
