Perspiring prose

The months between February and November in this city pass only to soften the memory of how hot the summer is, how persistent the flies are, how loud the cicadas sing. In November there comes a warm day when it seems like every dormant fly egg hatches, and you remember with a sweaty lucidity what summer in Sydney is like. You remember the swearing and swatting of the mosquitoes, the bubbling and peeling of the soles of your feet, you remember the sweet smell of crisped pine needles. Faded tinsel makes a reshow and in every district there is a wealthy street where the neighbours can afford to engage in healthy competition with their Christmas light displays. At night cars drive 3km down those streets and families walk through to see the various arrangements of spitting speckles on strings spasmodically illuminating the drawn curtains and venetian blinds in the windows. It must be hard for them to sleep. Santa flaps around, inflated by a strategically placed fan or flops on the tiles, withering.

It’s hard for anyone in Sydney to sleep in summer. Even at night you can coax egg whites into opacity on the red bricks of fence tops. In the right suburbs, the soulless ones, night time is abuzz with languages and laughter and dawn brings a warm stillness despite the petering out of chattering people. The sun opens its tired, billion year old bloodshot eyes to see us heating up. The moon passes over like a plate thrown across a party – most of us are too busy tossing and turning trying to sleep or having sticky sex to remember its movements. I like summer here, because we all go a little insane, we’re all a little tired from the year. We just want to go to the beach, even if we don’t like the beach.

Maybe everyone is silent, maybe they'd realise if they stopped talking.

I wrote about it when I first met it. It made a return visit a week or two ago and I got to spend some more time with it. It's hard to know what to explain about an encounter where nothing happened.

I was lying in bed and realised my body. I felt my giant dried palm frond hands, curled and fallen on a mount of torso. My body a tent, my silent body an orchard in which was buried something living. Someone watching everything in sight, with eyes that are not eyes.

It's difficult to acknowledge that person as myself. I acknowledge that I can spend time with that person. I don't know if I see them, or see from within them. They are usually wrapped up in a solid mantle of temporal backwash that when the mantle cracks and fizzles away the person inside is so foreign that I feel schizophrenic. However it's hard to be afraid of someone who's contented with existence and doesn't want for anything except to exist and be acknowledged. 

When I was a child there were four people I knew in bed at night, now there are just two. The one which I am most of the time is really just a shell of sorts, a carapace grown from ideas, feelings and reactions. The one which I have only met a few times is there all the time, but just gets ignored in the same way that the roots of a tree get forgotten. When I was younger the outer shell hadn't formed properly, it was awkward and gelatinous and my real self was more fully exposed. When everything was quiet and dark and all the activity of a day had slipped away I was aware of three other people. One in constant activity, one constantly in the doldrums and one with a razor-sharp acumen. 

In 2009 they came back when I was in Mongolia, like people who never age they were exactly the same and yet on this visit they manifested in my actions. Perhaps in a strange way I became three separate people, or maybe I remained myself but was shared between three other consciousnesses. Maybe the altitude was too high for my brain to function as it had previously.

I have feared before for my sanity, but now have the conviction that I'm not crazy for being calm and quiet when I have temporarily departed from the noise and colour of ephemeral phenomena - the hooks, barbs, spines - that are advertisements, a picture, sentences, concerns, emotions, attachments, movements... 

The other week when I somehow fell into a deep vast self I felt aware of having no need for words. Language corrupts. That self was silent, it hasn't any need to build a vocabulary; it has nothing to say. 

Because everything else was and will eventually be silent (in a literal sense), the silence of my self is made from the same silence that is reserved for the time before and after every thing that exists. It feels like a part of death, a part of a place unseen, in communion with a place out of space time, eternally present. 

I talk in this language, dead people talk in dead languages

Today I am upset because whatever culture infiltrated my family history has been blown away. It's not something I can repair because customs and stories are shared and evolve. It's not something I can repair because I feel disentangled from my family. We got scattered geographically and psychologically by circumstance and choice.

I'm also angry and embarrassed of my English heritage because of the way England assaulted this country. Conquest happens everywhere, and everywhere there is heartache for homeland. White history sleeps in carved stone objects that memorialise dead troops in foreign countries while this countries history sleeps in unmarked river stones, worn away by water and the blood of massacres. 

Pulling oars

Have you ever really loved a book or a film yet when someone asks you what it's about you can't even answer them? You might have forgotten because it was a while ago when you last saw or read it, or perhaps it expressed an intangible essence in a subtle way and so its details are hard to describe but the zeitgeist is strong. Such an instance occurred today when someone told me they owned a book that they hadn't read, which I have read and found profound, yet I couldn't explain the narrative.

My life isn't a book or film, but people turn lives into books and films and in a way this blog reduces my experiences into silent written words. The benefit is that they are clear and precise, less velutinous than the instances they speak of.
I come into trouble when something subtle and ubiquitous slips into my life... The weather report reduces climatology to a symbol, it doesn't account for the colour of the sky or the merging of the clouds or the smell of body odour which are the ways that we experience weather. In a similar way I doubt the capacity for this space to hold the girth of something that is native to a world without an alphabet.

I'm shifting a silence into language. It's a dance, it's a game. It's guilty without guilt. It's a colonial invasion complete with disease and foreign architecture. I'm building a house for a love that wants to live in a place with walls made from trees and carpets of grass, chandeliers of stars and the gulf of Carpentaria for a bath. This is just a holiday house, just a place built from phonemes... not luxurious but elastic enough, perhaps.

I am in love, it's hard to describe but I'll keep trying because it feels to be the deepest and widest ocean that I've sailed through. I've no desire to chart the waters, only to occasionally catch a fish, to look at the sea so black that it merges with the night sky and feel how heavy the water is and enjoy that it can be difficult to row around.