Love in the Time of Corona: Part II
The weekend before lockdown some friends and I went camping. We’d had the date set aside for weeks. It was right before that time of year when things start getting busy, the quiet before the perfect Easter storm of assignments and exams, family time and every project you can ever remember thinking you could get done over a long weekend. And so we headed bush.
I was hoping for nothing less than a glorious and free long weekend in the outdoors with my friends. On the Friday, there was going to be a gig in the nearby country town. The campsite itself was around the corner from some of the best rock climbing in South East Queensland. You even had to drive past the coast — and go for the obligatory surf — just to get up there. However, by the time this long awaited weekend arrived, it had taken on an entirely different character.
The week before had been coloured by two feelings: cancellation and postponement. By mid-morning on the Friday, when the first few of us arrived at the campsite, there were no more gigs. Any kind of mass gathering, whether it be a concert, football match, or lecture, was now out of the question. By the time everyone else arrived on Saturday there was talk about travel bans and border closures. We’d chatted earlier that week about whether to go ahead with the trip at all. Based on the information we had at the time, it seemed like we would be okay if we kept up the social-distancing we’d already learnt to practice regularly in the city.
As if by tacit agreement, the days remained the refuge from the outside world we had hoped for. Every daylight hour we could manage was spent on the nearby cliffs or racing down dirt tracks to the local waterhole where an ancient fig had set its roots to drink. But at night, tired and in disarmingly good spirits we would pull out our phones and check-in. Later, around the fire, whatever thoughts we’d pushed aside during the day, or absorbed in those moments of mobile contact, would resurface. Naturally, the conversation drifted to what couldn’t help but be on our minds.
First, it showed up in the occasional joke about the end of the world. Well practiced with this bit from coping with our millennial anxieties about climate change or an inability to ever be free of debt, it was easy enough to cynically adapt it to this new threat. Why bother with [insert obligation here] now that the world is ending? But as the night went on the sentiment became more explicit. Someone mentioned that their mum was actually keeping a checklist against the Book of Revelations. Another person said the whole weekend reminded them of John Marsden’s Tomorrow series — that’s one for the Aussie teens of the 90’s and 00’s. Would we be surprised if we emerged from the bush tomorrow and our old way of life was gone forever?
Eventually talk shifted to politics and economics, the past and the future. But no matter where our conversation meandered the underlying question stayed the same. Was the future we had known and expected before this weekend no longer waiting for us on the other side? Was it cancelled? Or simply postponed? The week ahead yawned wide and open. And sitting there listening to everyone, I couldn’t help thinking, in my own way, that what we were experiencing was essentially a narrative problem. Was this the end of our lives as we knew them or the beginning of some brave new world? Was this Armageddon or just the start of another year? We were all caught at a crossroads and couldn’t tell whether it was the beginning or an end. Moreover, we had no clue what kind of end (or beginning) we were experiencing.
If this was THE END, why didn’t it feel anything like I’d expected it to? T.S. Eliot’s angsty conclusion to the “The Hollow Men” has always been hard to shake off: “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper” (97–98). But that night, sitting around the campfire with my friends, momentarily disconnected from a situation which escalated exponentially day-by-day, neither “bang” or “whimper” seemed to describe how I was feeling. Things were changing faster than ever. But there was also a sense that we saw this coming and would, in one way or another, watch it go.
White Teeth (2000)
Now, back amidst COVID-19 civilisation and well into lockdown, I am coming to realise the parallels between my own feelings while camping that weekend and a scene I cherish dearly from Zadie Smith’s debut novel, White Teeth (2000).
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal have just met. They will go on to become the father’s of the two families whose North West London lives the novel narrates. But for now, it is the dying days of the Second World War. Both have been newly assigned to the First Assault Regiment R.E. (known as the “Buggered Battalion”), a specialist division of scout and bridge building tanks whose “job was not so much to fight the war as to make sure it ran smoothly” (86). Yet, due to a breakdown and loss of communication with their superiors, the pair quickly become completely isolated from the outside world. While waiting for help on a Bulgarian roadside they miss the end of war in Europe “like a bus” (104).
Blissfully unaware, Archie and Samad spend two weeks waging a war of their own against imagined enemies in a quiet mountain village only to eventually “[forget] the war that had to actually ceased to exist anyway” (98). And it is the twilight moments that follow, “a past tense, future perfect kind of night” (98), that resonated most with my own experience a few weeks prior. Archie and Samad have the disorientating experience of being involuntarily detached from the narrative they expected to find themselves in. Whether that narrative is something as mythic as the end to World War II — “There were going to be no more wars like this one, everybody knew that” (105) — or as everyday as our own hopes and expectations for our lives, it begs the question, where do we look to when the beginning and end are no longer in sight? Half-remembering that Smith might have something else to say about beginnings and ends, I pulled out White Teeth again.
Of course, White Teeth turns out to be a novel obsessed with beginnings and ends. Following the intertwined multi-generational story of the Joneses and Iqbals, the book is fascinated with the ways in which we experience, celebrate, and mourn the weird demarcations in a ceaseless flux of time that we call “beginnings” and “ends”. Often, great coincidences, turning points and climaxes in the lives of Smith’s characters will coincide with some momentous or mundane public acknowledgement of a beginning and/or end. It’s not just the end of war in Europe that get’s a look-in here. The book begins “at 06:27 hours on January 1975” (3) with Archie Jones’s New Year’s Resolution, decided by the flip of a coin, to attempt suicide. Only New Year’s Day 1975 is also the (falsely) predicted arrival of Armageddon by the Jehovah’s Witness.
When the novel ends 540 pages later, its full cast of characters descend upon Trafalgar Square for New Year’s Eve, 1992, amidst Smith’s hopeful narrated allusions to what each character will be doing seven years later on the eve of Y2K. Samad and Iqbal will be playing a game of blackjack with their wives, Alsana and Clara. Their children will be littered around the world well into the beginning of their own adult lives. But why all these coincidences and crossroads? What is Smith hinting at with the presence of so many beginnings and ends?
Starting at the beginning, Smith opens her novel with an epitaph from Shakespeare’s The Tempest:
“What’s past is prologue.” (Act II, Scene 1)
The idea that Smith plants here and elaborates on throughout the novel is that no beginning can ever really be a true beginning. A beginning always has a past — there is always prologue. Presumably this idea can also be flipped to apply to ends. No end is every truly the end — an end too always leads on to something else.
A side note for the nerdy amongst us. The Tempest is popularly thought of as Shakespeare’s final play. So it seems pertinent that Smith should begin her debut as a published novelist with a line from this play.
Beginnings. Ends. Coincidence? I think not.
But returning to the main point, what rereading White Teeth drove home for me was the various ways in which the beginnings and ends that we impose on or crave in our lives can give way to other beginnings and ends. Moreover, this instability works at all levels of narrative, great or small. When Archie Jones meets Clara Bowden, hours after his thankfully interrupted suicide attempt, it is not only still the novel’s beginning (it’s first chapter) but also the beginning of these characters’ marriage and the beginning of their family, whose story will continue on to the novel’s end. But the idea of this being an absolute beginning, clean and free of anything else, is quickly shown up. Smith first presents us with Archie’s perspective, which has adopted this story-like sense of events as a beginning:
Now, as Archie understood it, in movies and the like it is common for someone to be so striking that when they walk down the stairs the crowd goes silent. In life he had never seen it. But it happened with Clara Bowden. She walked down the stairs in slow motion, surrounded by afterglow and fuzzy lighting. (24)
However, it is not long before Smith’s narration takes a step back in order to reveal that this sense of a movie-like beginning to “the entirely random, adventitious collision of one person with another” (23) is but one perspective of where the story begun. Reaching, as per Shakespeare’s medicine, to the past for prologue, Smith deftly reveals that there are numerous other places where this story could have begun.
For one, the chapter is called “The Peculiar Second Marriage of Archie Jones” (3), implying an alternative beginning or prologue to Archie’s own story. But perhaps more emphatically, Smith emphasises that “Archie did not pluck Clara Bowden from a vacuum” (27). Smith throws out this idea of a clean, clear, and free beginning. Instead “it’s about time people told the truth about beautiful women. They do not shimmer down staircases. They do not descend, as was once supposed, from on high, attached to nothing other than wings” (27). We get the sense that Smith wants us to see how such ways of telling the story can prevent us from understanding that “Clara was from somewhere. She had roots” (27). The only way to understand the start of Clara’s story in the novel is to understand that it is not the beginning of Clara’s story at all. There is always past, always prologue, always another story that came before it.
But if our weekend camping was the beginning of something new (part of me felt it was as much an end as a beginning), what was its past? Where was the beginning?
A disbelief in the distant news of corona-virus that started leaking into our world as early as January? For us waiting on an island this was easy enough to ignore. I can remember my brother travelling through South East Asia over the summer. Mum was beside herself when she heard, in the same day, that SARS was back and he was sleeping off a fever in rural Thailand. That seemed no more like the beginning of a pandemic or the end of the world then, than when two months later, I was working at the arrivals gate of the international airport. A suspended screen the same width as the hall displayed advice on social distancing and personal hygiene. ‘Cough into your elbow.’ ‘Wash your hands.’ The nascent voice of a white Australia policy was popping up in a colleague or two’s jokes and suspicions. ‘Only worry about the ones from China.’
These are the roots. But working back through these root beginnings only seems to reveal that from each point where I stand, I will always be able to see another beginning. And if you keeping going, Clara’s roots set into her mother Hortense’s, whose roots in turn lie with her mother Ambrosia, leading us across the the Atlantic to Jamaica, through mass migrations and earthquakes. Smith’s novel acknowledges that we will never reach the beginning. We can keep going further and further until we turn around to come back and, looking the other way, those beginnings start to look like ends.
In White Teeth Clara’s roots can also be read as beginning at the end. This leads us to a second thought: that not only is a beginning never really the beginning and an end never really the end, but the two concepts are perhaps inseparable, if not in some circumstances, indistinguishable. Just as all beginnings lead to an end, so too do all ends lead to a beginning.
Where did Clara come from? The Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witness, Lambeth. The congregation of which, including Clara’s mother Hortense and her ex-boyfriend Ryan Topps, sat through New Year’s Eve 1974 praying for the Watch Tower Society’s predicted Armageddon to arrive while Clara met Archie at the “End of the World Party” she had helped organise to see in 1975. Clara’s new beginning, and the start of the novel, come from an end of sorts. A hoped for (by some) but ultimately anticlimactic end to the world that coincides with a million personal beginnings and ends as one year rolls over to the next.
Like us now, and Smith’s early readers in post-Y2K 2000, her characters have the strange experience of living through a purported end that feels like no end at all, an end that only leads to another beginning. Leading up to midnight, some residual of faith in Clara still hoped for an end to her questioning, for “the all-enveloping bear hug of the Saviour, the One who was Alpha and Omega, both the beginning and the end” (44). Meanwhile, her mother who “had been promised the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees,” hoped more than ever that “this time the entrails of sinners wrapped around the trunks of trees would appear” (32) — that the world would end.
But what do you do when they don’t appear? When time continues on through the end of one year and the beginning of the next without the arrival of a singular, definitive moment? Smith appears to point to two possibilities. You either begin upon the same narrative again, or, you move from the ending of one story on to the beginning of another.
Hortense, like with previous failed predictions by the Jehovah’s Witness “awoke to find — instead of hail and brimstone and universal destruction — the continuance of daily life, the regular running of the buses and trains” (32). Yet to her this only means that “another date would of course materialise, along with more leaflets, ever more faith” (45). For Clara “something [was] gained but something [was] lost” (45). On the night that she appeared on the stairs above Archie Jones, her faith ended and her life with the man below her began.
And in a way, I am beginning to feel that the extended dislocation I have felt from any sense of a beginning or an end might be a similar moment. COVID-19 is as much a beginning and an end as it is no beginning or end, a continuation of what we might choose to start or finish.
More than anything, rereading White Teeth has consoled me at this uncertain time. I no longer feel alone, if I ever was, in this very human need for a clear sense of whether we are at the start or end of this chapter, this new story. I am also coming to understand that it is natural for us to not know. We are in a lurch in which many things are beginning and ending while nothing seems to distinctly stand out to us as either a beginning or end. How terrifying.
When we loose sight of the start and finish, we can feel untethered and adrift in both time and the world. Yet, it’s important to remember that despite all the doomsday prophecies, wars, natural disasters, and personal crises that White Teeth passes through, it is ultimately a deeply funny and optimistic book. People make it through an end to a new beginning. Eventually they come through a beginning to a new end.
Perhaps all that is required is a little patience, or faith (whatever you want to call it). It seems timely that I finish this blog on an Easter Monday unlike any I’ve had before. Who’d have thought we’d have a long weekend not camping or at the beach, not in a church or with the ones we love, at a time when we might feel we need it the most. But maybe we should let the beginning and end sort themselves out for now. We will have to draw up a new one each time we move back to and from this moment, as we talk and write about these times. But for now, why don’t we, rather than look for the whimper or the bang, remember the sage words of the older Eliot, who had lived through a little more by the time he came round to write “Little Gidding”:
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. (214)
Works Cited
Eliot, T.S. “Little Gidding.” Norton Anthology of Eng. Lit. Norton & Co, 2012.
— . “The Hollow Men.” Selected Poems. 1954. Faber and Faber, 2002.
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. 2000. Penguin, 2001.
