The red high heels won't disappear
At the beginning of April, you wrote on your Facebook page, “And when (if) all this ends, I am going to cry just a little bit”. Have you cried just a little bit yet?
Not yet. I don’t feel like it’s over yet. I am still waiting.
Yet, I managed to get hold of you on Skype during your seaside holiday. Does it feel like there is a pandemic there?
None whatsoever. I maybe saw one person wearing a mask. Apparently, one family decided not to stay at our hotel after seeing a restaurant with several dozen people in it and a lobby full of children. We are all close together here and any precautions are purely symbolic. It is simply not possible to keep a distance. People want the pandemic to end so much that they act as though it has been called off.
You did decide to go on holiday though—did you not have any concerns?
I just couldn’t say no to my children and grandchildren. You have to balance fears against risks. You cannot live in fear.
In April, I was thinking of my children and grandchildren, that we are all locked in our “bubbles” and each of us has to cope with our lives on our own. That was when I wrote that I felt like crying. But right away someone replied that I should not be so quick to cry, as things might be like this for a while.
And to date I have had no time to soothe myself with my tears. Especially since in my professional life, the lockdown is still on.
You teach at a university. You wrote recently that you were apprehensive of the new academic year because if studies continue to be conducted online – and there are a lot of indications that this might be the case – it will be the end of the university. Some students and lecturers were happy about the online classes, were you not?
The classes that I gave in small groups went quite well. You could also say that studying from home gives you freedom: you don’t need to leave your home or commute, and you don’t have to be on alert – sometimes I used to just sit in an empty office waiting for students that never came. From a practical and selfish point of view, teachers benefit from online classes. Seemingly, everything works just fine and all the formalities are satisfied. However, there are many differences between teaching in a physical environment and teaching indirectly, and these differences are a decisive factor in it no longer being a university.
What are the differences?
Online courses. A university is not only about practical classes, lectures, and the communication of information, but is also a place where people meet, a place for extracurricular talks, and an opportunity to learn beyond what is on the study plan.
Besides, these days a lot of diverse skills or certificates can be acquired online, but – allow me to use a phrase that was in fashion in March – “their curve is being flattened”. I believe that education’s “curve” is also “being flattened”.
What do you mean by that?
I mean that it doesn’t really matter if you enrol for a programme in Szczecin, Poznań or New York, because, eventually, all the studying is done from home.
I can sit at my computer in a small town and study at a university in New York? That doesn’t sound that bad, does it?
You might think so, but it means that all we need is a single worldwide university in New York, or a single huge university in Warsaw. A couple of years ago, we discussed threats related to higher education reform in academic circles. We observed that growing centralisation will close down small academic centres and will leave large regions without any universities. The pandemic is accelerating this process. There is a distinct possibility that everyone will enrol at the University of Warsaw because, since you can study from home, it is easy to figure out which diploma is the most desirable. Why would anyone want to choose smaller universities?
Why is this a problem?
Because an online central system will allow you to complete a course and get a respectable diploma without important accompanying life experiences.
An online university is another example of productivity over everything, which we have identified earlier as a threat to the humanities. Knowledge can be transferred via online tools, but to study also means to become distracted, to waste efforts, to end up in blind alleys, and to make mistakes.
What good is it to make mistakes?
Well, by learning we should have the right to ignore knowledge, change our mind, listen, and digress. Only this way can we develop our creative mind, sensitivity, and empathy. Online, anyone will be able to “pass” or “click through” a course online, and over time – and I find this rather discouraging – we will start to chase increased efficiency, making classes more attractive by applying technology, and eventually optimise and parametrise communication. Despite all this, we will not be able to simulate the in-between time – the period of transfer between a Physical Education class and a test in poetics, a discussion that someone had started in a hallway and whose mood was carried through to the conversation class.
We have had social media for a long time now, but I find it hard to imagine a hybrid between MS Teams and TikTok which could accommodate the wide variety of classes I know. Remotely you can only teach corporate machines or award diplomas. A lecture room is also necessary for us scientists, so that we can think out loud. A camera is an unsatisfactory substitute which cannot ensure interaction. It is merely “talking to an image”.
Also, with time, it’s not just lecture rooms that may turn out to be unnecessary, but it will also be possible to do job cuts at universities. Why repeat the same topics in several groups when a person with good acting talents – not necessarily a scientist – will be able to record some material and make it accessible to students nationwide, and perhaps even worldwide – a huge, online, almost televised university. Direct contact will become an exclusive type of education for the well-off who will then acquire social and emotional skills that no online university can provide, no matter how sophisticated.
Unnecessary lecture rooms and savings on lecturers sound like a tempting vision for those managing finance at universities. The pandemic has shown that many things can be eliminated. Even a pandemic can be used for financial gain, can’t it?
Loss and a feeling of being lost can be capitalised upon. On the one hand, all around we have heard diagnoses that our mental well-being is at risk and that we should take care of it, and that during the pandemic we have become more empathetic. At the same time, there is a constant chorus saying that going forward people should be left stranded in their homes and we should develop new technology so you never have to go out.
People working remotely are already beginning to talk of the mental toll it takes. In my opinion, universities should take remain vigilant of this, provide support, and conduct research to this end so we can better understand it. People’s perceptions range from extreme fear and withdrawal to over-optimism and pretending that there is no pandemic. These are ultimately tasks for education. And it cannot be done remotely, because being online is forced upon us. When talking to students about literature, I am constantly reminded that the conditions of the conversation are a source of their anxiety.
Even now, we talk while looking at a screen. I can see you, but I can also see myself in the window. It feels weird.
A lot of my friends have agreed that staring at each other on a screen is one of the weirdest and most alienating experiences that we have had during the pandemic. When talking to a screen on which we can see ourselves, we control our own reactions, and we try to adjust, to deliberately ‘appear’, if you will.
Because we want to look good?
And, above all, because we are not familiar with our faces talking from a screen. We are pixelated and processed. Our avatar is looking back at us.
Sure, we become used to things quickly. After a month, we had already learned how to do it, and after three months it seemed normal. I think that if the next semester takes place remotely, we will acquire habits which will facilitate it even more. But I don’t want to lose all those students along the way.
We can talk of the most splendid university programmes with great professors, but student group dynamics create values which cannot be replaced. What are all the people who enrol for year one online supposed to do? Not meet the other people at all? Exist in parallel universes? That’s dystopia in the making. We will never exchange thoughts about life. We will only get the instructor’s signature in the student’s electronic record book. It is in fact the perfect way to prepare people for work in specialised corporations in which all that matters is satisfying metrics. It is a pretty discouraging vision if you ask me.
I understand that you don’t want students to flood into lecture rooms in October regardless of the scale of the pandemic, merely stay in front of their screens only for as long as it’s necessary.
That is correct. I have observed, at my university and at other universities, that people are enchanted with technology. Jacek Dukaj wrote in his essay in Gazeta Wyborcza that the pandemic has accelerated everything which needed to happen anyway, and that the accelerated use of technology is a positive change. Similar views were put into the election programmes of candidates for university rectors, in the run up to the elections which were to take place at the end of the academic year. I, however, don’t believe that this change actually helps create the desired world of tomorrow. Instead, it simply excludes us from something we never realised was important. If we invest too much in technology we will completely forget that a meeting – person-to-person, not online – is the essence of a university.
You say that lecture rooms may become unnecessary. Given that people have managed to work from their homes, aren’t offices and editorial offices also a waste of money?
A large part of the world could disappear without a trace. Community centres, museums, and theatres have been closed, and literary festivals have been cancelled during the pandemic. There are a lot of areas that have been shut down and may be gone for good.
Because somebody will figure that since we were able to do without them, they are not indispensable?
They are too costly, too heavy a drain on government and local government funds. We will exclude them. We definitelyneed commerce, hospitals, and leisure. But community centres?
You mentioned on Facebook that you had reports that people want meet-the-author sessions live at community centres and libraries.
I get such reports from libraries which send me invitations. People don’t want me to read to them on Facebook. They want to come and meet me. It proves that fleeting moments also matter. Such meetings can have different values to different people. People have individual needs that no transmission can satisfy.
Some of the online meetings should definitely stay, because they give people who cannot move an opportunity to participate in culture. At the same time, however, people do want to go out. Not necessarily to meet an author who visits their town or city, but at least to have a cup of coffee with their friends or even just live out the sequence of events which make up a meet-the-author evening.
During the lockdown you read aloud your novel “For a Short Time” online. Why did you choose this particular novel?
I was looking at my bookshelf, wondering what to do, and I noticed this novel. The title seemed optimistic to me.
Implying that it won’t last long?
Implying that we should face the fact that all things in life are short and that they will pass eventually. It’s a cliché, but I found it uplifting. But only when reading the first fragment in front of a camera did I realise that this prose contains a lot of themes which are still valid today, and in fact relate to the pandemic. “For a Short Time” is a novel about going on a business trip to a place which is a bit claustrophobic, but also more traditionalistic than Poland ten years ago. The passages about walking around the city, recognising streets and people, and filling gaps in memory seemed to me a projection of how we might come back to the world.
The world after, you mean.
Well, not after a great disaster, but after a turn, a change. I imagined that something like that might happen to our world after the pandemic. I was certain that the world would quickly recover, although not everywhere. Seemingly, everything will look the same, but underneath it all there will be a lot of scorned, forgotten, and neglected things. And we have to take care of them. We cannot allow ourselves to get carried away by euphoria, thinking that we have already been set free.
And the pandemic has added a new chapter to your latest book “Chronicles of Resistance and Love”, “written when we all took to the streets” during the “black protests”. During the lockdown it was not possible to protest in the streets, despite the fact that this was precisely when the government decided to vote on making abortion law more restrictive.
For the first days or weeks of the pandemic, it seemed totally impossible to deal with anything other than the pandemic. You could say that, in reality, history had stopped. But it didn’t last long. I quickly realised that I had to do more than just deal with taming my fear of the virus and organising my work at home. The culture of protest and community care still exists. It hasn’t melted away and it hasn’t been suppressed. Instead of mass demonstrations, other forms of resistance and engagement have appeared.
After the lockdown I took part in a demonstration – a protest against the slogans of Andrzej Duda’s presidential campaign targeted at LGBT communities – and I realised how crucial it is that we can deploy different forms of protest. I was very moved people were together again, and that despite all this were not afraid to be together. At one point it seemed like a purely sanitary existence would prevail, where we are reduced to biological beings, protecting only ourselves and our families, and every human on the outside would become a threat. It felt as though in order to protect our health and life we had to lose our civic bond, views, and needs.
You described the symptoms of your own fear on Facebook. On the third week of lockdown, you felt like you were short of breath.
It was very strange indeed, as I rarely somatise my mood. I would suddenly be short of breath or even stop breathing for a short time. First, I thought it was allergies, as it was spring and everything was in bloom, but I was wrong. Back then I would start every day by checking the news and I would always think that I was having breathing problems. The way I see it, my shallow breath was a method for not inhaling too much fear into my lungs: I was hiding. It was very interesting. I thought I felt calm, almost cheerful, but at the same time I was trying to preserve the air in my lungs. I would react to things in ways that I didn’t understand and couldn’t name. I wrote feverishly. I planted flowers and ate chocolate. I had very intense dreams.
You also wrote, “I was surprised most by seeing a woman wearing a woman’s suit and red high heels”. You saw her in an empty street at the onset of the pandemic, when it seemed that we were all witnessing the end of the world. “And this is when I heard the sound of high heels clicking. I thought that there would be no more wearing uncomfortable shoes and tight clothes, that this would be gone together with well-done artificial nails, but I was mistaken”.
I fantasised that we would lose some of the appearances and the world would stop valuing uncomfortable shoes. Why hold our bodies captive when we need respirators, right? This suggests a false analogy between the discomfort of diseased lungs and chafed feet, but there was no shortage of paradoxical observations. I was dumbstruck by this woman, even more considering that at the time I was wearing a tracksuit, and instead of a handbag I started carrying a backpack. My clothes reflected my mental state. I felt like I was on a mission. I figured that I would survive since I had my backpack, a mask and comfortable shoes.
I had a similar experience at a cemetery – the cemetery in Szczecin wasn’t closed, you see. I saw a middle-aged couple wearing smart clothes and luxury perfume. How odd, I thought. Where did they come from? They seemed out of place. I instantly, however, admonished myself. There was no end of the world after all: how can there be when people still wear their favourite perfume?
Ultimately, people won’t go through a miraculous metamorphosis, even if they say “Oh, I will change dramatically. I will no longer waste time and do unnecessary things”. Such statements were a kind of a New Year’s resolution. The power of the claim that after the pandemic nothing will be the same is proportional to the degree of confusion that we have experienced. The red high heels won’t disappear, and most likely we won’t have to review our biographies.
Nevertheless, you have already put your dresses into your holiday suitcase as well, not just your tracksuit, haven’t you?
These dresses are still quite loose-fitting dresses. Firstly, I don’t wear other dresses. Secondly, it’s the holiday season. And thirdly, I am yet to cry, so I need comfortable clothes.
Violetta Szostak talks to Inga Iwasiów
Graphics: Marta Frej
- Inga Iwasiów - writer and specialist in literature. She works at the University of Szczecin, and is the author of critical and prose books. Her latest novel is titled “Chronicles of Resistance and Love”.
The interview was published in "Wysokie Obcasy" on 8 August 2020.