By Warwick McFadyen
And so on to the end of the road that is 2021. Sun rises, sun sets. My father was a sailor. That’s what he believed in. Sun rises, sun sets. That and love.
The natural calendar not attached to walls or fridges or within computers cares not for the numbered squares. But we humans do. Society couldn’t function without order. Even those protesting in Melbourne for their freedom still exist within an order. Without order, their freedom wouldn’t exist. Otherwise, as Yeats wrote, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
And that order was challenged in 2021 and the year before. Perhaps it will be challenged next year. This is not the disruption of world war, but after so many years of peace, disruption can seem like a bomb going off.
Perhaps there will be a new order, after all that’s what nature does, and then it adapts. Then again, perhaps the new order will only be slightly less different to what we knew before COVID. Road maps can only show so much.
But the sun rises, sun sets. That and love.
Above one of the urinals in one of Gisborne’s public toilets are the words COVID = HOAX. In an idle moment I wonder, Who would write that? Is it just mischief, just a kid maybe, is it profoundly believed, is it a messenger from the alternative universe of conspiracists come to Gisborne? And then there’s the forum for its message: the wall before which males urinate. There’s an irony there perhaps the messenger doesn’t realise.
In the past two years, this pandemic has killed five million people worldwide and nearly 2000 in Australia, and more than 1200 in Victoria. Some hoax.
One hundred years ago, TS Eliot was in the throes of writing one of poetry’s magnum opuses, The Waste Land. Around this time in 1921, he was finding his way through a nervous breakdown. He took himself off to the seaside; he worked on a section of the poem in a sea shelter. “On Margate Sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing.”
Yet he connected word upon word, like a shell necklace. In the personal, sometimes there is the universal. Why is Gisborne the community it is, even as it expands? I like to think it’s the communion of souls, even the lost soul of the toilet scrawler, that bind all to one through the good times and the bad.
Sun rises, sun sets. That and love.
