Great Southern Expedition ~ Part 4 ~

we're beyond the tipping point of the trip now, so everything has a sadness to it as i watch lived reality petrify into memory. driving to the airport i will look back and see all the world crystallize into salt, while i arch my back and sigh, sliding back into liquid life.

Explosions in the Sky - Greet Death



we went to a smattering of north hobart venues today to absorb the hot august jazz festival. so much living culture there that the vibrancy shone out the slightly blustery day which was prelude to the cold front landing (to deliver steady rain late this evening, snow above 500 metres the crackling wireless informs me {lies! oh the liberties he takes ladies and gentlem(a)n}). one gig was from a wonderful gypsy duo, Serenation, in a fish and chip shop. it was satisfying to have the lunchtime crowd break out in applause over their gelati and deepfry. a purely capitalist space penetrated by culture, gypsy standards in accordion and violin yarn-bombing boutique counter lunches. jazz people are wonderfully unpretentious, possessed as they are of a musical culture and tradition that reaches far, far back into our post-colonial history... which brings me to what i was grasping to remember last night - overlayed reality. something in the landscape of tasmania shows you the teeth of our land, where the maw of existence still slathers.

so much of australia feels impermanent and scrabbling that i can't balance it against the incredibly heavy counterweight of our black history; our overlayed reality a thin film of terra-nullus mythology. No matter what i read about the beginning of the colony, the first fleet, Nue Hollandia, our industrialisation and centuries of politic/art/behaviour, i always feel i am waiting for some fulcrum moment wherein the coiled rainbow kraken of our continent's living history blazes out our shallow set cityscapes, an iridescent fire gorging itself on the vestiges of our vain, frantic desperation. the omition from history burns with all that guilt and entitlment we have built into our power structures, and informs my deep and abiding inability to empathise with the mundane complaints of civilization in the face of our terrifying, ancient continent and our impotent, inherited contentment.

i really, truly feel as though at any moment our whole modern australia could turn sideways, thin as a sliver, and fold into another passing dream, while the slumbering island asserts another dream-form as simply as a fart in your sleep.

where is this 'real' world, this mainstream australia? this supposed consensus reality no one is happy with yet accedes & subscribes to, like rubberneckers unable to drive on without turning to glimpse the pornography of carnage? take it with you, leave me my atomised, dissenting humanism. messy and fertile from centuries of mistakes and love, the compost of the soul.

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on a lighter note i think you can say a place is home when you start repeating behaviours there, which is much of what today was. pleasant, living ritual filled our morning and evening. more tea and soup and rumpole, more avocado toast and building fires from a single ember. i wonder if this is how life would be here, shackled to animal husbandry and piles of unopened cd's. avoiding praise like so many men and their sons of those generations before me? what's that all about baby boomers? sheesh.

i am so very glad i made the choice to take this trip, the obscene amounts of de ja vu would seem to indicate it was a good one.

*and so, he chose to live.

a person very close to me, to my heart, has chosen to continue living.

making this choice and following through with it is the most empowered action i can remember having heard of in a very long time, and one that i am so very proud they were able to make.

in the depths of yourself there is only what you have placed there. often without noticing yourself doing so you will fill the corners of your attention with so much that it seems impossible to espy anything beyond that false horizon. it is a ring of mountains and valleys made our our impressions, and the view from wherever we stand presents only a finite landscape, one which we know in our fibre.

If your landscape is surrounded by places you harbour no love for or have come to despise, if you're blaming yourself for being there at all and there seems no break in the ken it could well seem time to fall into the sky, rather than make a journey to another plateau.

my great companion has elected to live, in the face of all that was set to kill them, they have chosen, and i feel, have chosen well.

-{}-

most of us are here by default, most of us have not made the conscious choice to be alive here and now, and it is something i am beginning to value; the conscious and deliberate decision to live. all of this, everything you perceive, act upon and allow for, is your choice. if you do not perceive it, it doesn't exist; if you do perceive it, it is thn your choice as to how you react.

had they chosen otherwise i like to think i would accept my friends decision, as a secular humanist i believe we all reserve the right to that most selfish of choices; to make the sound and considered decision to not live anymore. but that is false bravado on my part, it is beyond me to accept self immolation as a choice, because i'm selfish and want everyone to myself. there is simply too much to share in this life for me to so easily accept that suicide of an otherwise physically sound person is the right choice, but it is not my right to impose that value, simply mine to express.

as i go on from the shock and this mode of acceptance i have refused to see this from the stand point of victimisation, either my own or for on the part of my friend, i will not allow myself to blame the other for what they have elected to consider. their pain is only my pain by choice, thus i choose to see the immeasurable positivity in electing otherwise (simultaneously their decision to live as well as my decision on how to accept that). it's the difference between compassion and condemnation, both are mirrors on the mind of the viewer, not the stimulus. and the consequence of both love and vilification is only more of the same. seeing this from the perspective i choose brings me to choose love*