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JULY 1ST, 1997, MY EVOLUTION
I wondered about character of this big park, the angry distressed swallows who chased the dogs through the grass, pecking at their heads, and how Binda enjoyed his naughtiness, even when it was a bird who now chastised him, and how Kindi was always on the look-out for other dogs, 'who's there? who's there?', they were always guarding against what was there even if it wasn't, a bit like me in some ways, 'no-one's there,' I'd say, as I knew that kind of kelpie paranoia or border collie expectation could have us on edge for most of a windy night, 'no-one's there', to talk canine I'd stay suddenly still like a dog, smell it first then not bark, afraid that my dogs would start barking at the wind, and scare us all to death during a hailstorm, like the ones we used to experience out at Royal Park, so that we stood under trees and screamed but the wind was still louder, I wondered about my own character, and how in your thirties your body and face seem to want to settle into their shapes, so that the fat and the wrinkles could lodge there and grow stable and solid, yet I wanted to keep evolving, I wondered how much of my character had settled into these comfortable patterns and how predictable it had become, firstly to myself and then in what I projected, observed by others, I knew in reality that no one gave a fuck, so really I am only wondering about my appearance, so long as I liked myself it didn't matter, I just didn't want to become so predictable and stable that I bored myself, but in your early thirties your body seemed to be making a house of itself, like it had been very tired and walking and walking for a long time, in much the same way as I was walking through this big green park, and suddenly you hit thirty-one and it says, 'Right, I think I will settle on a nice comfy spot right here', it's maybe because you've had a hard bed, and now need a bit of a rest, peace and security, or it may just be an age or a hormonal thing, or it may be that it was right to now become your own house, when all your life you had wandered the earth homeless, but I didn't like the feeling of being a house, and watching the sun passing and the moon passing and the birds passing and the leaves passing by outside, I wanted to keep moving with it all, even if I was getting slower, at seventy I wanted to be like that Australian couple who travelled all around the deserts, touching and scraping in the hot sand, with their white sunhats refracting the inland heat, collecting little shells and things, there was something delicate and lovely about their serenity and their hands brushing over all those pieces of old white shell out in the desert that used to be an inland sea, their ingrown wrinkled hands with all the sun freckles splotching them like a giraffe's colourings grown into each other, and the scalloped shells powdery and this couple, old and powdery like the shells and the sun baking them all into timelessness, and yet they were moving by moving the shells, I wanted to be like them, by the time that they stopped moving they wouldn't know that they had stopped, but your busy life moves from this knowledge, and just like the desert you are in operation aided by insects, and even then the bones move and shatter in the sun and wind, and are tumbled and cracked by rain and animals, always there are points of rest and stillness, I believe in long movement, it can be as empty as desert light, it moves tirelessly and in doing so creates movement around itself, like moving your hand back and forth in the air around you now, you can feel the air move past your skin, you are creating this movement by taking the initiative, why wait for storms to come to us and try to move us, when we can meet them head on and mingle?, I am not a house and yet I admit to shifting foundations, although parts of me are predictable cycles like the moodiness of the late afternoon skies, I attribute this to a fear of the dark and also of death, but dawn always comes, it makes the world golden, every day I live to see it, especially I like dawn after a full moon, it is like light followed by light, then the dawn sky is all glowing pink, purple, and baby blue with the moon sitting in it like a bright relative of the sun, on my last day on earth, I would like the sun and moon to exist together, both squatted like reflective ponds in the one daylight sky, one for each of my eyes to focus on, at night I like to go to sleep with the full light of the lamp shining over my face, light behind my closed eyes gives me very peaceful sleep, I'm sure that if the daytime sky was lit up by moon and sun that I would rest easily beneath it often, my pillow is that old and decrepit that I think anyone but myself would be frightened to put their face near it, I realise I can stuff up when meeting new people, if the play button is switched on, and the record begins to slowly turn, and the old needle from the childhood gramophone owned by my parents begins to squawk out its strange music, like an injured bird hopping around in the dark, this dance I enter into with my damaged self, how I could kill some people but not others and for whatever reasons I like, and I will consider how I would want them dead, and if I will shoot them in the chest or in the back and the consequences of that, and by the time I have looked up from my dirty old pillow and into the room, it is very empty, the person having left their coffee untouched and the breeze from the open door creaking in the sunlight, I am a bit shocked now that I have emptied it out, shaken all the queer birds out of the net so that they have run off squeaking, all the imaginary fishing line from my outcast's heart wrapped around their little swollen legs. |
