Summertime sadness
With summer only days away, everyone's out and looking super hot. But the question remains: just what kind of summer are we all expecting?
Click here to listen to an audio version of this piece, read by the writer.
Two editions ago, I speculated that Melbourne could be, for all intents and purposes, unsalvageable. Whether these last four weeks have done anything to change that presentiment, it’s too soon to conclude. The signs of life are there – the old smells, the old characters, the old voice. I rode across town last week, headed for a party in Kensington, and felt like I was swimming through a golden daze. A blood meridian was disappearing behind EY House. The lights outside the Palais were all on, dazzling and confounding. The Lonsdale and Swanston St intersection was an unabideable clusterfuck. Plus ça change, I guess.
But just as with the Nicholas Building, that certain feeling of dissolution is unmissable. The air still has a metallic taste, and the weather is still prohibitive, and I still have to wear a mask at work, even though nobody around me is. In four days it will be summer, and this whole assortment of vague impressions is throwing me. It could be a summer of so many things. A summer of escape, maybe. Or a summer of reunification (through shopping, apparently). Or it could be a summer of nothing. Nothing at all. That would be the real plus ça change.
Yet amidst this maelstrom of incoherent signs which Melbourne has offered out since the LD ended, two impressions have held firmer than any others. The first is that everyone’s desperate to make up for lost time. An example. One unassuming Saturday night in late October, Tim Smith, former Shadow Attorney-General of Victoria, had saddled up while nearly three times the legal blood alcohol limit and swiftly crashed his new Jag into a house off Power Street, right around the corner from where I live. The narrative zenith, I thought, had come when it was reported that Smith, an exquisitely vapid product of his private school enclave, was hiding out at mummy and daddy’s house on the Peninsula. But then the ante was upped even more dramatically: Smith refused to resign. (This was the point where I dispensed with everything I thought I knew about self-respect, situational awareness, and emotional intelligence.) Instead, Smith had decided to prolong the utterly delicious capitulation of his mendacious public persona. When his resignation eventually came a week after the crash, I wasn’t satiated. I could’ve gone back for more.
But that’s not the end of it, because the following Saturday I saw him sitting by the window of the Degraves Espresso Bar, accompanied by a blonde woman who affected an air of being either his publicist or his lawyer. Smith was bleary-eyed, speaking solemnly, his pearly blues flickering confusedly. I couldn’t believe my own pearly blues. A man who must surely be one of the city’s most roundly despised, sitting in the window of a café in one of Melbourne’s busiest laneways? But then, that’s what it means to be out of lockdown, I guess. Even Tim Smith gets tired of drinking coffee from a Nespresso pod machine at home. Even Tim Smith’s keen to hang out person to person. Even Tim Smith wants to be out amongst the crowds. Never mind if he’s days clear of a career-ending scandal, and scorned by the community far and wide – what’s a little contempt against a nice, fresh espresso?
Yes, making up for lost time. That’s the first impression which feels to me concrete, unassailable. The second is that everyone’s looking incredibly hot. Sure, there the beautiful faces you catch on your walk to the shops, the bespoke outfits, the lithe men, the curvaceous women. But they’re just your usual, de rigueur encounters. It’s bigger than that; everyone’s glowing. Did I just never notice how many beautiful people there are in this town? Have I been blind to the visual pleasures hidden away beneath Melbourne’s gauche façade? Or is it somehow derivative of the highly contained nature of our existence since March 2020? Has lockdown so amplified our self-conscious anxieties and so deprived us of social approval that, when the doors finally fling open, we’re compelled to put in the extra effort, to glam up, to sell ourselves to the world, to prove there is still real pleasure to be had?
Or maybe it’s a sign. There’s been a lot of conjecture that, if anything, this summer is likely to be the Summer of the Fuck. The one where you date, explore, have reckless or not so reckless sex, come out as queer, emerge brazenly from your celibate cocoon. The #HotVaxSummer, the Slutty Summer, the Summer of Love.
Of course, as with everything in Australia, it wouldn’t exactly be a novel idea – in fact, we’d be, predictably, about six months late. In a piece for Document Journal, art critic Dean Kissick described the summer of 2021 in New York, a season of experimentation, of trysts, of one-night stands, of a burgeoning desire for physical intimacy finally given actualisation. Kissick found the summer so remarkable because of how it posed such a brazen counterpoint to the usual romantic content of contemporary life – by which he means an abundance of content and a paucity of romance. For Kissick, life is now “about doing away with suffering and all hardcore sensations in favor of the constant rolling satisfaction of, and creation of, more hollow, artificial yearnings. But these will not satisfy us. Content won’t make us happy…. We’re kept trapped in this ambient state of desiring here in the eternal present, where everything is at once neverending and meaningless. This big, wide mood. This faint desiring ache; a phantom sensation of a phone vibrating somewhere about your person, of someone trying to reach out and touch you.”
A part of the problem here is that, while certain summers may buck the trend, the rituals and behaviours which engender such an “ambient state of desiring” and its attendant “hollow, artificial yearnings” have been codified into an entire generation of young people. Earlier this year I was reading the Daily Cal, the student newspaper of UC Berkeley – please don’t ask why – when I stumbled across a piece tantalizingly titled ‘Rethinking Revirginization.’ In it, the author paints a picture of Zoomer perversity so vivid and chilling that I almost had to take a cold shower after reading it. “Quarantine,” she writes, “taught me that when I’m alone, I can channel the energy I would have spent obsessively stalking my crush’s ex-girlfriend’s Instagram profile into searching for internships or picking up a productive hobby.” Good lord.
You do you. Speak your truth. Follow your dreams. Be true to yourself. You don’t need someone else to complete you. When all we’ve been fed is this turgid casserole of individualisms, of course we’re going to opt for revirginization. Our desires are no longer pluralist, no longer shared. They have been systematically desiccated and abstracted. To lean into the physical or the shared is a waste of time, and won’t make you permanently happy. Only a life of fruitless managerial positions, careerism, and solipsistically embracing your emotional turmoil will do the trick. In other words, our desires are stripped of the interconnective instinct, and are now exclusively our own.
What this achieves is a total reframing of the concept of desiring, one we can’t escape. And when we do feel like engaging with that animalistic side of ourselves, de-individualising, reaching out and laying our souls upon someone else’s sword, we end up playing a less direct version of the same game. Flat Instagram images in provocative poses, porn-addicted chauvinist men, “subversive” art. It’s seduction with an instant payoff, here one second and gone the next. Ideology, social media, and art have therefore become intermediaries through which we can dress up our self-serving aspirations. But there’s no there there. As Picasso sort of said, our public displays of licentiousness are the lie that allow us to know the truth. There’s no real seduction; only an abstract display of sexual liberation. In other words, a LARP.
This is the unfortunate quandary of an entire generation of young people who have been bombarded with ideas about what to desire, but haven’t really learned how. Nor, for that matter, what “desiring” actually means. This applies equally to Melbournians as it does to any other young people out there, be they in Karachi, Kolkata, or Kansas City. But what’s added to this morose predicament in Melbourne is our self-perpetuating culture of ingrained sexual repression, so that what we’re left with is a potpourri of social alienation in all its forms. And that’s if you even get to that stage; people have to work up a sweat just to land a date here. Can you blame us? Astronomical house prices, pandemic legislation, jobs in PR, traffic… We’re a yuppie metropolis without the furtive primeval underbelly. Last week I came across a poem by a Japanese poet, Tanikawa Shuntarō, which seemed to an almost uncanny degree to encapsulate what us Melbournians do.
“In the daylight, the blue sky tells lies.
While the night mutters the truth, we are asleep.
And in the morning, we all say we dreamed.”
Well, now is Melbourne’s chance to wake up. At long last we have an opportunity to counter our reputation as a world capital in sexlessness. And the hatches are being battened. The Melbourne Sexual Health Centre is bracing for a surge in diagnoses of STIs. “Vax badges” have been added to dating apps. Also working in our favour is the convenient fact that you can’t be revirginized if you were never deflowered in the first place.
Even still, I’m sceptical. One principal reason I’ve been so compelled by this year’s protests in Melbourne is that it’s something which is happening here. As in, nothing ever happens in Melbourne––things collapse, condense, float away, but don’t seem to stick. Things dissolve. I was on the Route 75 last week, sitting across from a young woman (let’s call her M), mid-20s, donning a white pair of those Balenciaga sport shoes with the full knit, moulded to her foot like a sock. She was chatting, loudly, to a friend on the phone when she looked up and encountered someone else she knew. It was an older lady (let’s call her V), maybe 60 or so, who spoke like Bunny from Sex and the City, and looked like her too. V approached M and sat down next to her. The tram was completely silent, and I overheard their conversation in part due to this silence, but also in part because half of my job is eavesdropping on other people, holding my cup up and hoping for certain exquisite moments of revelation. However I didn’t catch how they knew each other because the discussion, from the microsecond of its inception, was dictated by a certain undeviating intensity of focus. “I’m breaking up with my fiancée,” M said. “No!” exclaimed V. “Yep,” replied M.
With what I could only assume was the entirety of the back end of the tram listening in, V asked what had happened. She asked with a kind of indolent melancholy, as if she’d passed beyond her initial shock and was now hardly surprised at all. “He’s just a bit of a gaslighter,” M said. “He’d make me say things I didn’t really think. And a lot of the stuff he said wasn’t true. Like – so I had a breakdown during the first lockdown” (– just to remind you once again, the tram is pin-drop quiet –) “and he tried to tell me that my family didn’t care. But my family was calling and texting him the whole time, asking about me, worried about me.”
It was revelation, and I was riveted, and if nobody else around me was tuning in as well, at least they didn’t know what they were missing out on. When the specifics were hammered out, the conversation rolled into broader territory. V made an interesting point about obsession, passion, and love. M told her: “I was in love with him since day dot.” V’s brow furrowed above her mask. “But darling, that’s obsession,” she said somewhat insolently, in her syrupy Hawthorn drawl. “There’s a difference. Obsession and passion, and then there’s love… I mean seriously, nobody knows anyone straight away. It takes years. Years and years and years.” When V reached her stop ten minutes later, it seemed little had been resolved; M was still breaking off an engagement; V was still living a life discrete from this event, and had dipped her toes in to someone else’s tumult with an uninvited tract of ersatz wisdom. V rose from her seat and put her hand on M’s shoulder. “Oh well. Good luck. I’m sure you’ll be fine,” she said. “Yeah…” responded M, somewhat maudlin. V sighed. “You will. Everybody goes through it.”
So much for the Summer of Love, I say. Over before it’s even begun. So maybe, then, summer will be something else. I mentioned earlier that it could be a summer of escape. But escape to what? To the country? Okay, maybe we all just need to fuck off out of the city, forget all of it for a while, and see if amnesia helps anything. Yet I can’t help but think of Robert Frost, the American poet, a man who thought and wrote extensively about escape. I can’t help but hear his words ringing mellifluously in my ears: “you don’t escape, you retreat.”