It is the end of the world we knew. Just as cancer presents a schism in personal timelines, a radical before-and-after, we exist inescapably in a timeline where this pandemic is taking place.

Here, at the edge of dystopia, time has finally caught up to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982). Critiques of Scott’s accuracy in near-future prophecy usually focus on the lack of hovercars and the fact that android sophistication isn’t much more advanced than the ice-cream scooping robot team in Federation Square. The other possibility, of course, is that we can’t see the future clearly because we are looking at it from the other side.

In the beginning, Godzilla was about us. The monster was made to show the ways in which we fail ourselves and harm each other. 1954’s Gojira, directed by Ishirō Honda for Toho studio, was the first in a franchise spanning more than 30 films. Gojira famously drew on Japan's recent experiences of nuclear horror: the city-destroying, unfathomable monstrosity of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Hidden in the pages of a thirteenth-century Vatican Library manuscript is a curious illustration of a cockatoo, said to be a gift from the Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik Muhammad al-Kamil, to the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II. Dr Heather Dalton’s article from June concerning what appears to be the earliest cockatoo in Europe – ‘How did a cockatoo reach thirteenth-century Sicily?’ – caught global attention. My social media lit up with academics expressing equal parts caution and wonder.

The visions of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon haunt me, more than a decade on. No glowing heroics, their battlefield a terrifying, futile sound-and-fury for ‘these who die as cattle’ (as in ‘Anthem for a Doomed Youth’). Sassoon’s ‘Counter-Attack’ is a disorienting frenzy of terror and violence, in a landscape ‘rotten with dead’. Owen’s hellish gas attacks in ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’ linger vividly: ‘… the white eyes writhing … blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, obscene as cancer …’ Considering the body-destroying horror of our technological advances in weaponry – atom bombs, napalm, semi-automatic rifles – Owen’s words ring out like an accusation, a trauma collapsing time.

Flight finishes in Melbourne on 21 October. But it is not the last time Australians will be presented with the lives, names, terrors and dreams of people seeking refuge. People like Aryan and Kabir, like Behrouz, like my family nearly 70 years ago.

As Tobin Siebers observed, ‘Art is the active site designed to explore and expand the spectrum of humanity that we will accept among us.’ Despite attempts to exclude disability from the art world, for Siebers it is central to the experience of ‘aesthetics’: how certain bodies make other bodies ‘feel’.

Maybe I can’t blame Stalin for my disordered eating, but I think we must allow for unexpected ways that trauma persists – the cycles and resonances following the wandering migrant; the lost community, incoherent and unpredictable.