mountains and mountains

Everything in moderation, including god and taxes. This mantra, imparted upon her by working class parents, formed the crux of my mother’s outlook on the world. While she was growing up this saying was constantly repeated in situations as varied as dinner table chat to family holidays. It is the kind of humble protestant sentiment common to people of my grandparents’ generation. It is coloured by a tinge of great depression hangover and a slathering of wry Australian humour. Both of my grandparents existed with the living memory of the depression; the susso, the bread and dripping for dinner. Of that unwavering sense that everything you have could at any minute conceivably disintegrate. Like currency. My mother told me many stories about the hardship suffered by her parents as she was growing up. The way my grandmother would rub the hardback covers of red books against her cheeks every morning because she could not afford to buy rouge. The way my grandfather would save the chicken that he won in a meat raffle all year for Christmas dinner.

It is clear how these small privations influenced the way my mother brought me up, despite social mobility having firmly rooted her in the burgeoning strata of the middle class. When I was a little kid my mother often threatened me with the 'rule of diminishing returns’. This rule states that the more you indulge in something, the less satisfying it becomes. My mother would quote this rule at me in supermarkets when I would plead with her to buy me lollies. She would use it a rationale to counter the desire for immediate gratification that all young children posses. And she often used it on herself as a method of self-control. When dieting she would think of the ‘rule of diminishing returns’ to justify why she did not want that second piece of chocolate cake.

I’d never tried it before. It’s sort of like heroin, he said. The way nothing can rival that first time. The original utter fulfilment can never be reached again. The flies kept distracting his hand from the steering wheel as he swatted away like an orchestra conductor. But there are a lot of things in life that are like that. We were back on the road, with nothing but mountains around us. I wanted to keep driving forever. At least until the gullies and canyons swallowed us up into their rocky bellies. At least until we crashed head first into some tender cliff that would absorb us like a portal to another universe. I looked out of the back window. Before us, behind us, only mountains.

And mountains and mountains.

Reckless Behaviour

The car radio was playing cheesy god songs.

Count your blessings, count them one by one.

You were singing along. I was considering the challenge. At that moment, I wouldn’t have even needed one hand:

A dirt road.
A full tank.
The promise of a revolution just beyond the dashboard.

Dust poured out from beneath the tires in a stream of red incense. It was only early afternoon and we were already relying heavily on tiger balm & cigarettes to make sense of anything.

It’s a funny kind of road trip that has you locked up in a stranger’s bedroom, sleeping on the floor, listening to hushed voices planning a mutiny through the thin weatherboard walls.

I felt that for these five days we had started our own little civilisation only 7km from the nearest city. Magical actions had been taken to change the functioning of the most necessary elements of daily life. The operations of time & language & emotion had been altered.

I had spent years learning the rules of the way these things worked back at the city. At first, I found it very difficult to adjust to this amended existence. I failed to master the motions to communicate, to react, to respond. I found myself neither exhausted nor energised, but with a faint ringing in my ears. I told myself it was the far off roar of the city.

I did not make friends with the other inhabitants, although we shared showers, toasters and all manner of disillusionments. I quickly gave up trying to look people in the eyes. Instead, I studied the identification cards that hung like simple bureaucratic nooses around their necks. From these documents I could garner requisite information in short periods of time:

Name.
Hometown.
Political allegiance.

The days here were not divided by regular patterns of light or time. Our schedule had three main elements:

1.We would wait in corridors for unconscionable periods of time. We were forbidden to speak of imagine any kind of future.

2. We would line up, seat ourselves on long rows of orange chairs, and choose another inhabitant to sit opposite us. We were close together, knees touching, our faces poised 2cm apart. We would then begin to scream abuse at one another. Until our skin was crimson with rage. Until empty tears streamed down our faces. Until we were shaking with a righteousness and disdain that transcended politics or love. This exercise was similar to the Orwellian notion of Two Minutes Hate. Except this was more banal. Our ravings were incomprehensible, completely undirected and unguided. We spoke in tongues, in a language of apathy.

3. We would consume unfathomable amounts of food & alcohol. Sent into an epicurean delirium by our senseless outpourings. Having given everything of ourselves in the Two Minutes Apathy, we emerged as dark empty basins ready to devour. We threw ourselves greedily into a large mess hall and proceeded to gorge. Filling the void of hours of expenditure with bread, potatoes, beer, fish and fruit. These were the only periods that laughter could be heard. Sometimes chants would break out, but they were quickly silenced, either as the perpetrators forgot the words, or fell over drunk, bloated, shivering slightly.

In the corridors I would continuously overhear people speaking about deals being made.

It’s all stitched up, they would say. Everything has already been decided.

I took to carrying a small notebook around with me. I wrote down brief observations. I noted which party had broken with whom, which rivalries were sustained and which were destroyed. I wrote down some of the slogans printed on the back of the uniforms:

Could the last one out, please turn off the light.

These notes were primarily references for my own benefit, a small attempt to facilitate my optimal functioning. The notebook was soon confiscated from me. The pages were ripped out and it was thus returned. Two empty black covers and a spiral spine with nothing to bind.

I frequently wondered that if I watched long enough, I might begin to learn the codes of behaviour, rather than merely being relegated to mimicking them. Looking back on my time there, it still seems as if we were living in sign language.

There was no revolution.

On the last day, we considered burning down our camp. Leaving it in ashes like an Atlantis lost to the bush. Instead we simply abandoned it. Those stale grey walls ached for the colour of our bodies, but we left them cold & empty & returned to our respective cities. I had seen some reckless behaviour that I wanted you to know about.

st kilda timezone

At around 4am I started drafting you a love letter in my mind. This is where all of my best love letters have been written. The thing about insomnia is that the night breeds wild notions that are dulled by the break of dawn. There is always disappointment that the daylight cannot deliver on the promise of your waking dreams.

By that afternoon I was crouching on the street in st kilda beneath a tangle of rain clouds & tramlines. I decided that you were too far away to remember. I would have to establish a new timezone to explain this absence to my body. I could not accept that we could possibly be in sync across this distance, that we could both be eating vegemite on toast together, but in different kitchens, in different cites, under different skies.

I have established various new timezones over the course of my life. The most successful of which was one I drew across your face, a line starting at the tip of your left ear and finishing at the tip of your right ear. This created a situation where each time you closed your eyes the sun would set. Each time you opened them a new moon would rise.

For the st kilda timezone I used a small polaroid camera and a street directory. I took photocopies of every page in the directory that incorporated either of our names. This included last names, middles names, nicknames and abbreviations. I placed all of the relevant maps side by side in a tessellated pattern. I used the polaroid to capture our new city. I could see the streets gradually developing like glimmers of fish beneath the water. The time would never change in this city. We would throw away all the clocks.

what would happen if i wrote you

one poem

every day

for the rest of your life?

carcrash

barber chair

smells like art

You told me that you are a

Post constructivist situationalist pop artist.

So what are your paintings of,

I asked.

Well, they’re paintings about fucking.

You replied.

Matter of fact.

You know, paintings with lines & holes,

paintings that are doing things,

but they’re still just paintings. About fucking.

So if your paintings were a language,

I asked,

They’d be verbs?

No.

You replied.

I don’t think you quite get it.

So I asked to smell the red rose

pinned to your jacket pocket.

It had the aroma of musk and sweat and flowers.

I wondered if you would make a painting

about us,

doing this.

Francesca

Your grandmother was hovering behind us in the hallway. The house was dark, but I could still make out her tiny frame bathed in the light from the kitchen.

She was staring directly ahead, her eyes fixed on some half-remembered moment. In her hands she nursed a concealed object. Perhaps it was a tattered photograph or a faded china doll.

She began to edge closer towards us, eyes still focused on a world that you or I will never know. The muskiness of the air clung to the wallpaper like amnesia. I glimpsed the object in her hands.

It was a half-full bedpan.

As she shuffled past, the pale liquid swelled inside the plastic vessel. It washed up against her hands, up against the ceiling, up against her stiff navy skirt. It surged with the velocity of memory and left us warmly dripping on the polished floorboards.

Her refuse formed a sick cologne which lingered on our skin for days. It was only when the smell gradually disappeared that we were able to forget the experience entirely.