There's something about the concept of Christmas as I know it that has always seemed a little distant to me. I don't know if it's growing up in a place where the imported traditions are so disconnected from the reality - where you eat a huge lunch in 40-degree heat, or celebrate cozy candle-lit togetherness at a time when it would make more anatomaical sense to stay far away from each other's sweat. Maybe it's the concept of "family" which is forced upon you by a relentless media barrage of Australian magical thinking, giving you a superficial version of happiness that ensures that any celebration will be never quite satisfying enough. Maybe it's the equally relentless consumerism, offering you a life out-of-reach and presenting this as normal.
But I always experience a special type of disconnection, on top of what is a part of the cynicism of everyday life. In a situation of this 'doublespeak' dual-reality, as Orwell attempted to define it, where one veneer presents an available source of power, while the supposed conter-argument, the "alternative", reveals itself as equally false under interrogation. Christmas seems to represent this binary well. Originally a pagan ritual, later adopted by Christianity, it is today the ultimate gesture of mainstream categorisation, leaving no space for variation, thriving on exclusion. So follows the line of many conversations at the dinner-table, as nuance, empathy, and understanding give way to the violent reinforcement of status quo. Is a charitable Christian gesture still possible at Christmas? Yes, but as an exception only, itself designed to excuse the impossibility of charity itself.
I am always lonely this time of year, and I don't think I'm alone there.
It is important to write about alienation at the moment, because alienation is the defining characteristic of our contemporary moment, and addressing it is largely impossible. The COVID-19 pandemic began 3 years ago, but its presence echoes in a fear of intimacy and togetherness. We live now a life hollowed-out by the knowledge that at any moment those rights we think of as sacred, and hard-won through the struggles of many over time, might be slipped away from us. Our places of safety are banal technological reflections - halls of mirrors, architecture defined by Big Tech and sold to us soft, where we can safely avoid the difficulties of contact with 'the other', thinking of this as too difficult and unsanitary. And indeed, when contact with other people comes, it is in the form of a cry for help, a relentless demand which we cannot possibly satisfy.
One of the most disturbing parts of the last 2 years has been the casual, almost relaxed way we turn to war, and how easily and naturally this mode has been assumed. I have been close to this in my own way, and it is disturbing how the mechnisms of culture, especially social media and Hollywood narrative, serve to smoothen the delivery of war as a mode of life - not so much a state of emergency or crisis, but as something unremarkable. Amidst the carnage expressed as emojis and the men-in-suits geopolitical game, you need to turn back to the poets to get any sense of the reality of war in this moment, it is so lost in a mix of spectacularity, emotion and simplification. What is reality like on a front line? I think of it as the same as it's always been: awful, banal, somewhat bodily, with moments of sublime but ultimately robbed of the most precious of human tools: purpose. What is it like as a civilian hiding from a coming attack? Again, not some brand-new story, but a reflex that shows the worst of humanity, reduced to an animalistic, no-win game between dominant predator and submissive prey, where control and autonomy are lost for both.
If the mode of war reveals anything, it is the absolute imperative of nurturing and protecting the parts of ourselves that are capable of stepping outside this reality - not as a fantasy, but as imagination. To imagine different worlds is the job of the poets and artists, and the gesture of doing so is to act against the world-creation-by-force occuring on the other side of the trenches. This is the best definition of the power of art that I have. When it is done as a collective practice, through collaboration, it is not only an act of preservation or salvage. When based on togetherness and co-operation, that overcomes the baseness of aggression. This is far from the definition offered on social media, a world of surfaces where art is something a beautiful afterthought: no, it's the whole point. Love, togetherness, and finding this in these moments where the pressure of atrocity is close, are likewise not afterthoughts - they are everything.
Orwell is often falsely quoted with the famous line "in a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act." But his comments on the function of "desire as thoughtcrime" are more telling, as is the final section of Part 2, Chapter 2, of 1984, in which the act of sex between the characters Julia and Winston (in this context, meaning the resolution of desire, a bit romantic) is exposed as something resonant outside of the individual:
"No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act."
The theatre is a different type of togtherness, but equally, staged reality is a place where we can situate our desires within the mess of fear and hatred, to be set free of the violence of dominance, emotional control, and aggression that defines the mode of war. The stage reduces these things to objects of play, where they can become gestures at our disposal - and not ones that dispose of us.
I wish all readers a happy and safe 2024, and thank you.
Image: Australia from the sky, December 9th, 2023.
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Note:
Current publication is done with the understanding that colleagues and
communities from Kharkiv, Mariupol, Kyiv, Lutsk, and Lviv among others
in Ukraine are currently under attack in an attempt to erase Ukrainian
culture and identity. No artist should be forced to rehearse how to pick
up the gun.
