Temporalities of HIV/AIDS

The academic examination of HIV/AIDS, has a biography dating back to early late 1970s and a somewhat multi-disciplinary narrative. The event of infectious disease, particularly those which are life-changing or life-threatening, bring to light our relationships with the inevitable death of our-selves and our loved ones. They hold a mirror up to risky habits in our lifestyles (eg diet, exercise, alcohol consumption, smoking, sexual activity) highlighting the insignificance and fragility of life when dealing with a passage of time dictated by a potentially fatal pathogen. When what is happening in the shared, external world is ruptured and beyond our control, our internal worlds may begin to demand us to sit with often uncomfortable, fearful emotional spaces that are reflective on the time between the present and our death, in which we must confront our own mortality. 

Andrew Irving explores this in his ethnographic monograph chronicling individuals living with HIV/AIDS in New York in the 1980s at the beginning of the outbreak. Irving endorses the importance of an ethnographic, fieldwork-based approach to time, preferring to see it “not as a philosophical concept but as part of embodied life and experience” (Irving, 2017. 10) he pursues this line of the exploration further that “time cannot be perceived in itself and is instead discerned in things such as rhythm, movement, the passing of seasons, and bodies that grow, age, and die” (Irving, 2017. 10), in other words time is not prescriptive, it fluctuates depending on the space it inhabits.  

Irving’s ethnographies make observation that acute or chronic sickness subjugates a person’s capacity to contribute to society and marks a disconnect between the self and society through the demands of the disease. Suddenly the pace of the disease will take precedent, including hospital visits, stringent and often severe treatment schedules, inability to fulfil previous responsibilities in relationships, work and pleasure activities. The capabilities of people in good health, openness to moving through time and space uninterrupted by a dissonant schedule of ill health, allows for sensory stimulation from life, whether this be weekend trips away in nature or the pleasures of city life (as in Irving’s depiction of New York). With ill health comes its own schedules, and the sensory spontaneity of city streets often transforms into hospital waiting rooms, time-checking to ensure medication is taken on time, and persistent monitoring of the body, responding chronic pain and physical weakness to carry tasks or stay active. In the case of Holly who entered a palliative care hospital at the age of 22, four years after contracting HIV “her city was reduced to the hospice bed and her sensory world extended as far as the walls and the view outside…spending extended periods in bed constitutes part of the apprenticeship to illness” (Ibid, 49-50). For a bed-bound sick person, there is a lack of opportunity to engage with stimulating external environments, and time is spent oscillating between thoughts about the future, memories of the past, the experience of pain of the present condition, and existential questions about the cycles of life, all while staring at the same wall.  This experience of rapidly changing temporalities can be both humbling and messianic, creating a “mental atmosphere” (Ibid. 63) to confront mortality through understanding time in relation to history, to evolution, to God, to planetary configurations, to the natural life cycles, to humanity’s insignificance in relation to the universe, to imaginations and to the coexistence all of the aforementioned phenomenologies that too perhaps remain so unexplainable, like death itself.  

The emergence of HIV/AIDS in New York also found itself deeply entangled with socio-political stigma as it was associated with the queer community, a marginalised yet newly recognised population, following the legalization of homosexuality in New York state in 1980. It is interesting to note the connection between art and HIV/AIDS as no other illness has been so well documented through artistic expression with HIV-positive artists like Keith Haring and David Wojnarowicz being notorious activists of the movement creating awareness and support for access to ART whilst trying to relegate the social stigma of the disease.  

Irving’s interest in artistic expression is rooted in the notion of art as an insightful offering that is able to depict an individual’s internal world of suffering, functioning like an ethnography, yet not limited to external paradigms of observational ethnography as we usually see in the social sciences. When attention is given to observing and attempting to communicate fluctuating sensory moments, uncomfortable emotions and feelings that arise from confronting one’s own relationship with death, we develop “an embodied awareness of what it means to be alive in the moment and in the world, and the different possible forms this might take” (Ibid, 14). Connections with art and nature feature greatly in Irving’s ethnographies with Benjamin Timmier returning to Central Park daily to sketch “Yoda” an aging tree, who’s art became interested in the decay of natural life (Ibid, 53 – 58), as well as Rebecca Guberman-Bloom whose creative practice turned to visually narrate the biography of blood as a presentation of a life-giving substance while hosting such a debilitating virus (Ibid, 116), a return to natural truths and away from social constructs. We can see that literature, art and nature allow us to momentarily transcend linear notions of time and space through the imagination, creating a channel to communicate the complex workings of the internal world through times of uncertainty, fear and feelings of otherworldliness.