in praise of those that remain

the complexity tied to the phrase "i moved" is obscured in that same manner as stalin's observation of tragedy, the economy of scale leaves no room for the reality of the event. when i say "i moved to melbourne" or "we moved here a year and a half ago" there's no way to impart onto the listener how arduous, how wrought with challenge and complexity, how goddamn draining, enlivening and multifarious a thing to do moving was and is. this brevity is considered polite because, in the main, it's not expected of the everyday conversation that i should blossom my life narrative into yours while i make you a coffee. nor is that act of moving seen as important any longer, it's a dead fact, a 'thing' i did, even though it isn't a tangible physical object it is still a thing, some 'thing' that can only inform this moment, not change it.

so even though 'it' was a 'thing' that i 'did', and this massive, rippling upheaval, this rending of daily experience, this catharsis, has had so much to do with who i am now, with how i understand myself and how i value the relationships in my life, that i perpetuate the lie of considering it some dead thing now, partitioned and cauterised.

my almost daily disavowal of my achievement, my selfish giving, is testament to the continuum of human reality. the move occurred in stages, moment by moment, as with all of life, so at what point do you cry 'genesis' of a "thing"? when i first visited melbourne in 2007 and fell in love with it's wide streets and delicious gyros? or when i launched at the prospect of an easily accessible rental through a friend? it is pure historiographical fallacy, there is no knowing, only pinning with words to kill, vivisection for evidence, and all in defence of a predefined answer, supposition, the murder of life/truth.

i don't have a segue.

given all this import i've front loaded about my move i should perhaps return to this posts titular concern.


our* past is colonial, is defined my movement and seizure. there were some who blazed the trail, discovering the outposts that would hold for a time, and there were those who held, who built the daily life of a place so that life as we knew it would flourish.

eros and agape.

something very true to me was said by the comedian louis c.k. a man whose fraud i have invested in and whose conceits** i live in thanks of; he said life isn't yours to own, it's something you take part in. this, this right here, and everything we are collectively, this is all there is of the human experience, and what you see, think and do is only your contribution to life in your own small way. we are the greatest living embodiment of our own art, at every single moment, and we only get this one spin as far as anyone knows.

so for all the sound and fury of the frontier, the avant garde bleeding edge, there must be life that remains, the embodiment of creation. there must be recumbent satisfaction to our experience, life lived as mountains, where gravity knows it's place and healing, love and nurturing can find fruition. it is only a binary supposition that pins and good/evil morality to differing modes of reality, each phase of life and existence has it's own mores, it's on particularities of action and consequence...

i couldn't remain because i feared stagnation, but i don't fear recumbency when i decide on my deep water cove.

in truth there is nothing to defend in these things, only giving over to empathy for life and fostering a cognizant appreciation for it.


*raises glass* 'here's blood in your eye.'


*the privileged white middle class, with our cars and computers, to whom no bastion is deniable.

** actual conceits, as with the aching of john donne.

spotted a bit of an odd correlation, as we drink coffee across from the station

the preponderance of threats is why we accept violence in our media more readily than we accept sex, or even romance.

when confronted by something the human mind can either attack it, or run from it. although this is a binary way of looking at our processes every action taken as a result of confrontation exists nearer of further along the path to one of these conclusions, fight or flight.

sex, in our particular expression of social conciousness, occupies a private sphere, much to our degradation, and being private it encourages flight when presented socially. our social performativity can very quickly dissolve in to the crossing of arms and/or legs, the sighing and tsk'ing, looking anywhere but the screen, conversations about how unnecessary it is to depict the graphic act of, in out in out... the use of euphamisms. any number of symbolic ways to disperse the feeling associated with the presentation of sex, or arousal.

but violence is cherished, savoured. the things around violence are doted upon: pleasure derived from discussion of torture, our fondness for weaponry, aesthetics of agression, colours of conflict, explosions, swearing, alpha behaviour lauded.

i think there is a strong correlation with the activation of our fight/flight response and the comfort of seeing the threat destroyed, even symbolically. we are more prone to assessing whether or not something is a threat than we are for considering whether it
is beautiful, arrousing, smells good, needs a cuddle...

and because our daily consciousness is so filled with threats we become increasingly sensitive to those things which will eliminate a threat, dote on those things more and more, increasing their acceptance.

...just a thought.