Una Mullally: Out of the darkness and into the light

While watching the livestream of the winter solstice at Newgrange, I was reminded that it is not a one-day event. The winter solstice offers multiple opportunities to engage with the light flowing through the passage and into the chamber. We often think of things in regimented calendar terms, on the clock, and less so in how they spill out across time. At this point of the year, the wheel is turning, away from the darkest nights, and gradually towards longer days.

At a time of echoes, it’s important to mark the winter solstice, as philosophically we can probably now point to the summer solstice in June 2021 as a potential marker of sorts, a rough completion of the new cycle we are in now, of healing and remedies, which has begun through the vaccine rollout.

There has been an eschatological quality to this year, particularly in the early months, when the fear, terror and confusion gripped many of us, as we struggled with the apocalyptic threat of the pandemic. In the National Gallery on Friday, walking through the beautiful Mondrian exhibition, I was reminded of a painting I visited in the aftermath of a cancer diagnosis, Francis Danby’s The Opening of the Sixth Seal, which illustrates a section from the Book of Revelations (6:12-17). The sixth seal foretold cosmic calamity, its opening instigating a multitude of disasters all at once.

There has been an eschatological quality to this year when the fear, terror and confusion gripped many of us, as we struggled with the apocalyptic threat of the pandemic

The section is interesting in how it outlines the universal – almost egalitarian – experience of terror and suffering. “Then the kings of the earth, the nobles, the military commanders, the rich, the powerful, and every slave and free person hid in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains.” You can go back and forth on various translations and versions, but more or less, it ends with: “The great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to withstand it?”

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Artwork insights

Like many people this year, for me certain artworks have landed very differently, more acutely, loaded with new meaning garnered from the new lessons we have learned. How do we carry these new insights forward? Danby’s terrifying – almost Mordor-like – painting can really scare you in dark times, but the flashes of light are still there.

Viewing Mondrian’s work, which progressed brilliantly in post-war Paris, it’s natural to reflect on the artistic booms that emerge from disaster. How are we to really know that the Roaring Twenties were not only a release of creativity and hedonism emerging from the ending of the first World War, but also the end of their pandemic? Does such a golden era of creativity await us, if the stifling forces of late-stage capitalism can get out of the way? The echoes are pronounced.

While many rushed to watch Contagion to encounter the rhymes the disaster film had with a real life situation, I found myself watching the film Buddies, arguably the first semi-mainstream film to deal with the Aids pandemic, released in 1985, and where there are echoes of what we now know as “social bubbles”. As I wrote back in April, the HIV/Aids pandemic offers multiple lessons, insights and echoes of the current pandemic, with plenty of documentaries to watch and learn from, such as Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989), We Were Here (2011) and How to Survive a Plague (2012).

Fire in the Blood (2012) documents the corruption and greed of both governments and pharmaceutical companies, and how that impacted countries in Africa and south Asia, suffering greatly from HIV/Aids. We see an echo of this now, with global health inequality exacerbated as wealthier countries scramble to buy up vaccine stock.

Urban shift

United in Anger: A History of Act Up (2012) is Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman’s documentary on the organising and activism of the grassroots group Act Up, which is still in existence in many jurisdictions, including a chapter restarted in Dublin because of the scale of the HIV epidemic here. In 2019, the number of newly notified HIV cases in Ireland rose to 536, the highest on record. More recently, the French film BPM (2017) dramatised the work of Act Up in Paris during the Aids pandemic.

We are seeing changes, from people leaving urban areas for  the countryside to the stark irrelevance of the office block

As Schulman outlines in her essential 2012 book, The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination, deaths from Aids in particular neighbourhoods in Manhattan were one of the instigating factors of New York’s cycle of gentrification, as the Aids plague dramatically increased the turnover of apartments and available housing stock due to the number of people dying in the East Village, West Village, Chelsea, the Lower East Side and in Harlem. With this pandemic, we are seeing elements of changes to urban life – although much less heartbreaking, brutal and tragic – from people leaving urban areas for the perceived “safety” of the countryside, and also the stark irrelevance of the office block as a centre for work. The pandemic has also laid bare the antisocial corporate gentrification and development that has taken place in Dublin over the past decade, underpinned by Fine Gael governments and Dublin City Council, and rendering large swathes of the city devoid of life.

And so, to light. Neat echoes might give us pause for thought, but we don’t necessarily need to search for them if we’re grounded in the now, and open to the synchronicity that comes from paying attention. So, watch the sunrises and sunsets this week, and know that the days are getting brighter.