It’s not a shock that the choreographer Bill T. Jones would be thinking about AIDS right about now.
“‘This is my second plague,’” he said he told his company recently. “I know it’s kind of a coarse thing to say. They’re different, but they have things in common.”
Yes, the circumstances of the coronavirus are different, but there’s a sense that the dance world, which suffered tremendous losses during the AIDS crisis, has been through this all before.
Well, this is all really bloody interesting, isn’t? Absolutely shitbiscuitly fascinating. Words, in fact, fail me when I attempt to describe how spafftwuntingly mesmerising every facet of life in the shuntspackled UK has become. I mean, who knew it was possible to run so many thought experiments simultaneously in the real world? Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of sci-fi and stories that begin “What if?” But did we have to run all of this, all at once? And did we have to make our experiments in thinking involve non-theoretical, living (at the moment) and (currently) breathing human beings? I may be a caffeine-addled hermit swaddled in army surplus lockdown athleisurewear and have a drunk marmoset’s haircut. I may be only partly sustained by brief Zoom views of unattainable domestic interiors and smiles other than my own. I may now speak mostly to my dead-eyed sourdough starter. (Yes, I know the eyes are just stuck on the jar, but sometimes... it judges me.) Still, even in my degraded and manifestly twitchy condition I can still count: one sheet of toilet paper, two sheets of toilet paper, far too much toilet paper... See? I can studfracking count. And by my reckoning we are currently running at least 10 experiments of the kind that give thinking a bad name.
The role of the automobile has been reinvented in the coronavirus era. Once just a way of getting from one place to another, the car has been turned into a mini-shelter on wheels, safe from contamination, a cocoon that allows its occupants to be inside and outside at the same time.
It took a global pandemic to give the automobile a new role. When people pack up their families and friends, they can still adhere to social-distancing rules. They remain under a roof, within closed doors, sealed off and separated from the rest of their fellow human beings.
Mobile safe distancing has generated a new way of life — a society on wheels.
I moved my four strawberry plants to the four corners of my house; they are as distant from one another and from the rest of my seedlings as possible. During my coffee breaks, I pace from plant to plant, hunting for aphids too small to see; I search the internet for pictures of infected leaves, trying to predict the unknowable. I go about my day, trying to focus on normal things like lunch and laundry. But if I’m honest with myself, the only thing that I am really doing is waiting.
For little happening is partly the point. The game and its rules, both spoken and unspoken, are a thin screen. Behind it is the higher-stakes game of feelings, unspoken because it is so hard to name them, or to face them, to make accommodations for or even understand them. Peace Talks turns out to be a moving and direct study of frailty, love and time, and luck and grief, of what is left when all the noise – of machination, violence and competing stories – is stripped away.
Esteemed Class of 2020,
your commencement speaker this year
should be a destroyed celebrity
or the Fool from King Lear.