Papyrus Diaries I: Jeanette Winterson

In the lead-up to my Bundanon residency, organising anything AB (after-Bundanon) was pushed pretty much to one side. That was even going to apply for the Sydney Writer's Festival; I'd gone as far as making sure I put the festival guide safely away for my return, but wasn't going to fine-tooth comb it until this week.

That was until sister Sally pointed out that the opening address was by Jeanette Winterson, at which point we promptly booked tickets (an early birthday present from the sweet thing). Now sadly Sally couldn't make it, something about marking tests to discover just how illiterate
and innumerate our students are these days, so it's best if she's reading this now she doesn't read any further – you didn't miss a thing, I assure you.

Okay, now for the truth of it.

Winterson's address was erudite and inspirational, drawing together so many strands and threads to tie the practice of art into nothing less than the future survival of the planet. Her manner was beguiling and her points clearly illustrated, while the striking turns of phrase
that litter her books, seemingly so effortlessly, followed one after another. So much so, as pointed out by my fellow rapt attendee a little hummingbird you would be busy digesting and trying to file away one salient point and another three gems would go gliding by.

While it would have been an inspiration at any stage, it could not have been better timed in terms of my reflections on art both in general and specifically in terms of my own pursuits since Bundanon.

From her captivating opening: "History is not a suicide note, it's the story of human survival", the gauntlet was thrown down and we were taken on a ride through cosmology, melting ice caps, Marx, cave paintings, Captain Cook's amazement at being unable to entice Indigenous Australians with shiny new things (the population that seemingly wanted for nothing, the adman's worst nightmare), Chomsky and much much more.

Winterson traced the journey through the 'suicidal' 20th century to the first glimmers of hope of a new beginning – the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of Thatcher and Reagan – to 9/11 and the sudden return of 14th century notions of evil and the new Crusades. Her aim, it soon dawned, was to tie art back into the centre of all this, to make it make sense at a time when we wonder: surely there are more pressing matters?

The need to return art to the centre of our lives, the centre of our culture, is something Winterson feels passionately. Most artists do, of course, but not many explain it so well, show us why it is more than elite indulgence. For in Australia in particular and no doubt many other parts of the world, the arts are very successfully painted as elite, as indulgent, as detached from 'real life'.

Yet Winterson showed how art belongs at the centre of a life lived to its potential, that it exercises our brain as it is intended to be used. Her discussion of the mind as a closed off, resistant system that abhors change and struggles against the unfamiliar was not
exactly new, but the way she tied in the idea of art as the 'connector', as the conduit to understanding and opening up new potentials was revelatory.

She reminded us of Susan Sontag's own reminder, that we should ask not only what art is about, but what art is.

The idea that art predates history, that it's only through paintings, poems, oral histories passed down to today, that we only know of a history because of art, was followed by the discussion of art as not existing in this history, but always as part of a perpetual present. Hence we don't go and see Shakespeare to learn about Elizabethan England, but about ourselves, our relationships, our struggles.

Winterson made us think about the value of art outside a system that must see everything in terms of its potential to increase wealth, the bottom line that overlooks the cost of reaching it.

What I found very interesting, listening to Winterson with what I guess is my writer's hat (not a label I'm prone to using), was how different I found the message to that in her interview in the Sydney Morning Herald over the weekend. Approaching that with my reader's hat, writer's hat and journalist's hat all struggling for limited head space, I was left a little flat by what had seemed a world view that verged on nihilistic in its casualness about the future of humankind.

While I share similar sentiments about not wanting to get overly excited about this one particular species in the context of the greater universe, fate, design or sheer dumb luck has lobbed me smack bang in the middle of it, and it is something I tend to care about to some extent. Even some of my best friends are human. Hell in a handbasket we may be aheading, but in the meantime I'm still interested in what we can do to avoid hastening the self-extermination process. If the planet needs us to go ahead and do ourselves in all the sooner then fine, but if there's a way to undo some of the damage before we go, I'd quite like to at least explore it a little further.

I took a very different message from last night's address. This gave me a little more respect for Winterson's position on the one hand, but also made me put my journalist hat back on and wonder what happened to have such a disjunct between the direct Winterson experience and the mediated Herald one. In many ways a lot of the content overlapped, but I think the final message was very different. This reminded me, I suppose, about how much the media can steer certain angles, whether by design, ignorance or even by utter accident. Maybe Winterson has
shifted her view since they talked, or maybe...

It's got me thinking about those themes that keeps coming up at the moment in my work and those around me - truth and death. Or perhaps that's just one them, as death is perhaps the ultimate truth. But I've begun to see that there is perhaps far more truth in fiction than ever credited, and far less of it in real life than I've been realising.

The main message I think I will take is the idea that we can have a return to imagination, without infantilisation. The trick , now, is to ensure the creative life is a central part of life and not allowed to be deemed a luxury, a peripheral part of life.