Watching

Hours of my life are siphoned into buses, my body fetched up and dispatched across the city, bobbing and jerking with inertia along the nonsensical, divergent and congested paths that are Sydney's ill-planned roads.

Did you know that all the country highways are traditional Aboriginal walking routes? Evolved over hundreds of thousands of years for their ease of access. Sydney roads by comparison are an artificial web cast across a landscape which I have always felt sighs underneath its itchy and tightly wrapped synthetic skin, that just continues to grow like bacteria. 

Bees plan their cities more intelligently. 

There is, on these meandering journeys, hugely romantic and aesthetically ingratiating treasure to be found. The combed current of a black head of hair heavily saturated in brilliantine, fluent Mandarin sounding like a sweet small bird piped from a four year old, impossibly thin white hairs protruding from a pink spherical mole on the neck of a sweating obese woman. These things are free for everyone to look, and you don't have to strain your eyes. Just calmly cast your gaze.

Yes, I am being effusive. What's to be expected? I'm 23, in love with lots of things.

Aquarium health

I love listening to people talk about what they do. If I could, I would spend all my time listening and asking questions.

My mental illness is one that is a bit green and gluggy. My heart clogs up with algae. Listening to other people is like putting a hose down a coronary artery and blasting the slime out. Listening leaves no space for introspection. 

My algal blooms aren't the kind of bouquet you want to give someone you love, they would be a weed. A man at an art show once said that weeds are just plants in the wrong places, that all weeds are native to some place. My mental illness is native to me, it evolved over the duration of my life as the plant which was best able to thrive under the environmental context of my childhood. Happiness was definitely going to wilt, the conditions weren't appropriate for happiness. 

That's why I have felt comfortable living for so long with a giant kelp infestation inside me. This is also the reason why other people find it so foreign, like an extraterrestrial life form. Of course it would be nice not to have this seaweed problem, to not come home to a thin velvety veneer of slime coating my vision or giant black scratchy kelp forests clogging my emotional life, but the truth remains that in actuality it isn't a problem, there is no blame and there is no cure. It's just the predomination of one species. I just need a more diverse ecosystem in my chest.

I find on the whole that there are hugely gratifying and worthwhile engagements with people that make me fall in love with listening and talking and lustily urge me to chase after communion. As my appetite for stories and people grows, my kelp infestation doesn't lessen, but I learn slowly how to introduce new species, ones which filter the environment and provide nutrients, maybe some little fish, a sea snail to clean the walls, a bêche de mere just for laughs.

Spell it out

I heard artist Jonathan Jones talk this afternoon, he seemed uncomfortable and embarrassed speaking to a group of people, but nonetheless he told stories which seemed to be already written in our brains. His stories were familiar, communal. He spells better with his artworks however.

I saw the film Ship of Theseus on Tuesday night as part of Sydney Film Festival. The writer/director gave a brief introduction to the film, and he spoke quietly, he said nearly nothing at all, except for phrases one learns by watching others who are more socially adept "thanks for making it out tonight guys". After which ensued a rich, long, living stream of beautifully articulated cinematography. Some people are very shy when it comes to vocalising their message. Some people just can't say what they mean, so instead meaning flops out of them in funny amorphous blobs which we call art.

Mmm blobby.

Fishslappin'

Being the soft creatures that we are, it can be difficult to withstand big hurts, physical and psychological.

When life gives you a fishslap in the face it can be quite the cold wet swot! I've noticed that for some people, seafood propelled injuries can have such a deep and lasting impact that they become highly sensitive to the smell of fish and nearly expect to have bream wallop their snouts.

I've noticed that even some time after having undergone a traumatic or unpleasant experience, when confronted by a wholly new problem in an entirely different context it is common to paste ones knowledge of the past onto to the current predicament. You see the head of a pig, yet expect the tail of a fish. Then you start to treat a pig like a fish and accidentally drown it.

I think we may all be guilty of such illogical behaviour at times.

Guess you've got to listen for the squeals and grunts.

Curious flavour.

Stories

History and myth articulate the human condition. We're all compelled by ethics, by adventure, by journeys... We're all cushioned in the grand narratives that seat us somewhere within humanity, goodness and evil constantly punch each others noses in pantomimes which play themselves out in literature and art. Stories about ourselves get formed out of ideas and comments from others, and the texture, size, mass and colour of your physical body also becomes a framework for a certain story about you. I begin to hear a story or write a story and somehow I end up believing it.

Stories are dangerous because they condense experience into some sort of language, they codify knowledge. They may be beautiful mirrors of life, but they are not life. Storytellers are sculptors who carve out a theory from the solid block of being. The stuff which was the negative space surrounding that theory gets thrown to the wayside, despite it being of the same substance as what is kept. In the end I wonder why the story itself isn't considered the off cut. 

Maybe it's the distance between stories and reality that allow us to feel comfortable. Without stories, maybe we could see reality without any filters. We're all authors, and I recall writing stories in my mind about things I don't really know just to make them familiar. Most often stories about people. If you parcel them up then you'll know how to unwrap them.

But when I stop telling myself stories, the world expands. 

I love ingesting and on occasion chiselling out stories, but what I love even more is letting the story die, like any other living thing in the creation, and watching that narrative as an arrow, which can be located within space and time, shooting in one direction towards reality. It has it's particular trajectory, but its path and the many diverging paths of stories all aim towards something so large that it is all pervasive.

Believing stories about yourself.