January 15, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Everything, all at Once
Ultimo Press
Sydney, 2021
ISBN 9781761150173
Reviewed by H.C. GILFIND
Everything, all at Once presents fiction and poetry from the ‘thirty writers under thirty’ who won the inaugural Ultimo prize in 2021. This prize asked entrants to explore the theme of ‘identity’—a pertinent choice, considering how central and contested particular identities (and the notion of identity itself) have become in cultural and political conversations. This theme is also apt, of course, for a collection that offers young people a stepping-stone in their journey to ‘come of age’ both as individuals and as professional writers.
Each piece in this collection is preceded by its author’s biography as well as (with a few exceptions) a photo. This format is striking, not only because of George Saad’s vibrant design, but because authorial identity is usually presented by publishers in a more understated, post-textual manner. Whilst this format surely reflects the publisher’s desire to celebrate these writers alongside their writing, this foregrounding of authorial identity might also be intended to provoke readers to question how they read. Does writing on the theme of identity oblige an author to disclose (aspects of) their own? Should fiction and poetry be read in relation to an author’s biographical information? Does such information influence intra- and inter-textual interpretations? Or does a reader’s awareness of such information dissipate once they are immersed in a worded-world?
With its central concern about the increasingly ‘performative’ nature of society, Seth Robinson’s ‘Watch me’ is a fitting story to open this collection. This story reveals a dystopian world where everyone is driven to perform their selves for ‘all-important Likes and LOLs’ (13)—so much so that they risk self-erasure. Is this the drum-beat to our lives, now: ‘Watch, watch, watch me’ (16)? Is our prime goal, now, to worship—or become—a ‘LED deity’ (16)? Is this ephemeral identity all that the world has left to offer young people? This story powerfully evokes the pain, paralysis and yearning that consumes ordinary people as they see human life and emotion commodified (or ignored) by increasingly pervasive—creepily invisible—techno-capitalist powers.
Georgia Rose Phillips’ ‘New Balance’ is a witty and poignant reflection on the nature of love in this performative landscape. The narrator actively seeks a psychologist who will assist—rather than stop—her self-mutilating behaviour. She likes this psychologist who allows her to indulge in ‘vicarious entanglement’ (112) with her ex’s new life, which is painted with digital ‘spatters of self’ (110) online. Instead of trying to fix or improve her, this psychologist’s novel therapy is to accept the narrator as she is. Being oneself is a radical act in this story—as it is across the collection.
Amelia Zhou’s ‘Bright’ tells the surreal tale of a woman who shuns public performance altogether. In a scorched world, where people are spot-lit by a never-setting sun, the protagonist slathers herself in sunscreen behind drawn curtains. She peeks out at her neighbours’ ‘durational performance’ (75) which is full of laughter, talk, play and endless, mindless barbequing (of food and themselves). Watching them, she feels ‘hungry and thirsty’ (74) and envious of their casual conspicuousness: such ‘visibility’ (72) is denied her, and she feels herself disappearing into an unwitnessed purposelessness. Is performance—in and for the sight of others—the only way to exist in this world?
Charlotte Snedden’s story presents a woman who actively seeks overt performance. In a theatre group, where her role is explicitly scripted and choreographed, her self-splitting anxiety disappears and she can return her self to her body: momentarily, she escapes her ‘Schrödinger’s mental health crisis,’ where she is present and absent all at once (82). Amy Duong’s teenage protagonist also yearns for clearly scripted roles, seeking them in the theatre of work where she is directed by the ‘calm authority’ (65) of men: ‘Dennis had assigned her a new identity… and in that mould, she had finally been made real’ (62). Meanwhile, Matilda Howard’s protagonist explores the roles played in the traditionally feminine theatre of a wedding. Here, a young woman observes people jangling with the ‘shadow-bones’ (126) left by barely-masked pain and disappointment. By the end of the day—having endured the event’s swirls of fear, bullying, and status-anxiety—she can hardly remember her own name.
Vivien Heng’s ‘Now Only Colour Lives’ is a tightly-crafted story of a girl who speaks to the persistent ghosts of family. Like a number of pieces in the collection, this story shows a young person struggling to bear the ‘blood-soaked memories’ (22) that are inherited across generations: ‘… all that screaming, the kind that could make the stars blink… My childhood was no place for a child, so I was born old’ (25). The calm poetic language of this piece is tensely juxtaposed against the ‘raging heart’ (24) of its narrator, effectively evoking the self-repression that enables an already-wounded person to survive a country that might one day accept them—if they bleed out their Colour (27).
Themes of race, migration and colonialism are also—and especially—present in the collection’s poetry. Dženana Vucic’s ‘Povratak/Return’ is an elegantly crafted sequence that tracks the shifting seasons of a daughter’s reunion with her father in a war-battered Bosnia, subtly exploring the ‘matryoshka reveal’ (138) of (re)learning how to relate to family and homeland alike. Gavin Yuan Gao’s poem forces readers to imagine being a ‘yellow-peril soul’ (144) in Covid times, when being Chinese in Australia suddenly means having ‘… an origin story no one wants / to hear.’ In this context, individuals suddenly represent both ‘an entire land’ (145) and a ‘devil who’s out spreading / his sick of sin’ (144). Alice Bellette’s ‘Blak Tourmaline’ addresses racism and colonialism with forceful refrains and pointed use of the second person: ‘i am here because i survived. / people like you don’t want me to survive’ (155). The concluding lines of her poem (‘it is not about me / it is about country,’ 165) resonate powerfully with a phrase in Gurmeet Kaur’s poetic dissection of the good migrant’s plight: ‘… This is not about / me. This is about you projecting onto me’ (178). All of these writers explore similar themes, but in very different ways and across very different contexts.
Ismene Panaretos’ story, ‘A Flake,’ also looks at how cultural and generational differences collide. ‘There’s no honesty in adulthood’ (94) the narrator laments, and reflects upon the banality of their friends’ Instagrammed lives. In this world, where gender reveal parties have become a norm, a person might become a ‘small time scandal’ (97) just for being who they are: ‘I feel like I will split in two’ (98). This story shows, however, that differences can disappear when people are most vulnerable: do we need to understand each other, to care about each other? Sebastian Winter’s poem also explores how questions of sex and gender can—or cannot—bridge intergenerational divides. In this poem, the transgender narrator’s grandmother warns them that their hormones will ‘berrate’ (185) them. The narrator labours to remain unaffected by the woman’s relentless ‘inquisition’ (185), though refuses to ‘justify’ how their ‘heart loves’ (184), and quietly decides that, in a world built from pink and blue, ‘purple will do’ (185). Franklyn Hudson’s ‘They’ painfully shows how the most brutal violation of a person’s bodily autonomy can forever change that body’s meaning: ‘My breasts are the worst part of me. / When I look at them I can’t ever stop seeing him…’ (203). The reader hopes, alongside these narrators, that they can find what they yearn for: a place in this world to ‘exist in’ (207).
The stories and poems mentioned here do not fully convey the variety of concerns and literary styles this collection offers, and readers will also discover skilful, sharply-observed and sensitive writing by Amy Taylor, Andy Kovacic, Jamaya Plackowski, Cassandra-Elli Yiannacou, Natasha Hertanto, Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn, Madeleine Gray, Robert Juan Kennard, Cherie Baird, Jennifer Nguyen, Shane Scriven, Aishah Maryam David, Josie/Jocelyn Deane, Coco Stallman and Lora Subotic. Together, these authors’ voices unite to make Everything, all at once a compelling polyphonic investigation of how ‘identity is everything and nothing’ (Quanita, 191) in a world whose seductions and coercions are often as ambiguous as they are utterly overwhelming.
Information about the Ultimo prize can be found here: https://www.ultimopress.com.au/ultimo-prize
H.C. GILDFIND is the author of Born Sleeping (Miami University Press, 2021) and The Worry Front (Margaret River Press, 2018). hcgildfind.com/@ltercation
January 15, 2022 / mascara / 0 Comments
Eurydice Speaks
by Claire Gaskin
ISBN: 9780648848127 ]
Hunter Publishers
Reviewed by LESH KARAN
I feather my empty rest with writing
I gave up relationships to right it
Orpheus didn’t have to make that choice
(sonnet 12)
When I read Eurydice Speaks, what struck me the most (among many other things) was voice, and how it plays out – skilfully – on so many levels. From the outset, there’s the word ‘speaks’ in the title of only two words – two words with so much power (which I didn’t realise until deep into the collection). But, first, I want to delve into Claire Gaskin’s writing style – her voice – and how she dismantles and wields language to evoke emotion.
Not being ‘overtly funny or political’, Gaskin says she ‘had to learn to be striking in imagery’ when reading before Melbourne’s ‘loud’ and ‘male-dominated’ spoken-word scene of the late eighties. This I learn from listening to Gaskin in an interview on 3CR’s Spoken Word from two years ago, and it makes me think of how Gaskin’s reasons for writing sharp imagery also parallel the themes in her poetry: feminism and writing to be heard.
But it’s not just haiku-esque images that make Gaskin’s work distinct – it’s how she blends the images with surrealism and abstractions. At the crux of it, this how she evokes, artfully juxtaposing disparate lines to surprise and allude:
time smothers me with a pillow that smells of belief
a prodigal son and a mother you can’t return to death
I watch a man in a café check the stability of a chair
he has witnessed collapse
I turn my face up to the brain matter sky
(sonnet 16, Eurydice Speaks, 16)
Even though Gaskin’s poetry is precise and sparse, it paradoxically obscures, giving the reader – us – agency to create meaning – even to distil multiple ones – enacting Barthes’s infamous ‘the death of the author’. In doing so, I realise her poetry is, ironically, also an act of self-preservation.
While Gaskin carries her characteristic voice across much of her oeuvre – which includes a chapbook and four major works, including hot-off-the-press Ismene’s Survivable Resistance – in Eurydice Speaks, her third full-length collection, she also uses structural devices to intensify and reinforce voice.
The overarching structure of Eurydice Speaks is a series of linked sonnets (57 in total) – where the final line of one sonnet is repeated as the first line of the next, and so on – that share the same subject matter and persona. As such, the collection can be read like a verse novel – which is further encouraged by the lack of contents page and poem titles (each sonnet is simply numbered in Shakespearean fashion) – with a clear protagonist.
The protagonist, of course, is Eurydice from Ancient Greek mythology. However, Gaskin refashions her into a contemporary one by giving her a voice. ‘Eurydice in the Orpheus myth, she doesn’t really speak at all, she’s just a part in Orpheus’s life, so to think about her speaking and what her life is like living in the underworld, is like writing myself into life,’ says Gaskin in the same Spoken Word interview.
In this way, Gaskin places power in the hands of the feminine – to retell and reposition story – instead of her being silenced. Eurydice Speaks’ epigraph also suggests this:
‘Writing, in its noblest function, is the attempt to unerase, to unearth, to find the primitive picture again, ours, the one that frightens us.’
– Hélèn Cixous.
As previously mentioned, feministic and writing-as-existence themes colour Gaskin’s work. For example, in Paperweight, her second full-length collection, Gaskin writes, ‘eve as evidence that I am not responsible for rotting apples’ (from ‘fall of man’), and ‘I had to write myself back from the brink’ (from ‘gratuities’). But by melding her voice with Eurydice’s in this collection, Gaskin wears Eurydice as an avatar from which to speak up and rebel – ‘to speak from the underworld is seditious’ (sonnet 57) – and to reveal through the language of the underworld (which Gaskin’s voice befits): ‘my writing is an attempt to uncover the mirror’ (sonnet 8), because there is ‘a cloth over the mirrors / so the reflected moonlight / doesn’t attract predators’ (sonnet 6).
The collection’s cover also depicts the theme of the female voice: We see a woman holding on to a man whose face is turned away from her. She is tugging at his blouse, willing him to look at her, as if she has something urgent to impart, as if she wants to remain in the underworld. Because in the Orpheus myth, the gods tell Orpheus he can take Eurydice with him only if she follows him and he doesn’t look back until they’re both out into the world of living; but if he does look (which he does), Eurydice will be banished to the underworld for good.
So why does Eurydice want to remain in the underworld? ‘the force of the underworld opens my mouth,’ is the last and first line of sonnet 46 and 47, respectively, suggesting that the underworld is Eurydice’s inner world, where her truth lives – a truth she wants to voice with abandon:
I willed him to look back
watch his back watch him check his watch
locked in that gaze of that banishment that liberates
(sonnet 57)
Eurydice speaks mostly in first person, but occasionally appears in the third – ‘Eurydice’s mother held her gaze’ (sonnet 14). Also, she rarely refers to the other characters in her story – e.g. her mother, father, brother and Orpheus – directly. These characters are mostly indicated through the use of pronouns whose nouns are not stated and/or aren’t given context:
I said she died instead of she got married
to wake to full emptiness love self-dawns
Nothing happens next. My
head is in his hollow between his
biceps and his pecs. My
(sonnet 9)
The use of orphaned pronouns and various points of view across sonnets paints an expressionist landscape of anguish and trauma in familial and intimate relationships – and how these relationships interweave and have a persisting influence on each other:
we found her wedding dress in a pillow slip
give up men was her message
a card from my father’s funeral marks the page
(sonnet 14)
And:
he douses me with name calling and corrections
in my forgiveness fantasy is haunted hope
the pain of promise and pride not relationship ready
(sonnet 38)
This ‘interweaving and persisting influence’ are performed structurally, too. Namely, in the absence of the sonnet’s conventional metre and rhyme, it exists through line repetition: Besides the linking aspect – of carrying over the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next – Gaskin mirrors (repeats) lines from one sonnet to the next, but messes with them by interchanging the nouns (and occasionally the verbs) with uncanny ones. Like how uncovering the mirror reflects another (point of) view of the truth:
I stumble on steps flowing with water
we are only doing this because we love you
I dreamt my boots filled with water
leaving drags afterwards…
through polarities our life in pieces [last line]
(sonnet 1)
through polarities our life in pieces [first line]
I stumble the stereotypes flow with wattle
we only do this because we lullaby you
I dreamt my bootlaces were film
leaving drags afterthoughts
(sonnet 2)
In the above excerpts, we can also hear the interplay of consonance, particularly, the ‘l’ and ‘w’ sounds. So, repetition takes place at a syllabic and letter level throughout the collection, too, adding nuanced layers to what is evoked. Gaskin’s masterful enjambment and lack of punctuation also means we cannot clearly grasp when a thought/idea begins, ends or continues – the effect of this along with the repetition build a sense of an ongoing echo, of a voice from the underworld.
Speaking of an ongoing echo, the last line of the last sonnet is also (mostly) the same as the first line of the first sonnet. This creates a circular effect, which brings to mind an image of an ouroboros, which in Jungian psychology symbolises immortality – devouring oneself to bring oneself back to life – and embodies the essence of Gaskin’s (and Cixous’s) notions on writing oneself into being.
Ultimately, Gaskin serves to make voice uncontainable by giving emotion and intuition the centre stage, subverting logic and patriarchal thinking. Because to read Eurydice Speaks is to submerse yourself in the (under)world of emotion – where the mind has no place, just the soundwaves of the heart and gut, for they don’t lie. And it takes a delicate and deft hand like Gaskin’s to do just that – one that evokes your inner world, rather than tells you what to think and feel.
LESH KARAN was born in Fiji, has Indian genes and lives in Melbourne. She is a former pharmacist who writes. Read her in Australian Multilingual Writing Project, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite Poetry Review, Portside Review and Rabbit, amongst others. Lesh is currently undertaking a Master of Creative Writing, Editing and Publishing at the University of Melbourne. leshkaran.com
December 17, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Anthropocene
By Sudeep Sen
Salt Desert Media Group Ltd.
9781913738389
Reviewed by JENNNIFER MACKENZIE
Sudeep Sen, the poet, is in his study — where he can usually be found when in Delhi, sequestered, engaged with the world. His companion is the neem tree, light refracting through the pattern of its leaves. The tree, provider of shade and solace, is now under duress itself. The climate, once providing a reliable indicator of the passing seasons (as in ‘Climate Change 1. Yesterday’ (29)) is now registering an unseasonal pattern. Experiences of extremes of heat and cold, sometimes unexpected torrential rain or no rain at all, flood the senses, and from left field, another crisis emerges, attaching itself to this disequilibrium. Contagion threatens everyone, disrupts the political landscape and the wherewithal of the populace; the body isolates, the body succumbs, the poet rallies.
Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene is a stellar example of what poetry can be in a time of crisis. The poet achieves this quality through his control of the essential poetic elements of image, argument and sound, underpinned by a sense of structure seemingly rooted in a consciousness of form and its possibilities. Sen’s awareness of form, the measure of the voice, is tied to a sense of design encompassing his facility with traditional poetic forms and their connectivity to other art forms, such as architecture, photography and classical Indian dance. It can also be seen in the design of the book, including its typography, undertaken by the poet himself. The depth of this attention enables Sen to successfully vary the form of the poems, opening up to the white space of the page to create a sense of variety, a kind of musical progression throughout the book, while the poems themselves resonate with the clarity of a bell. A variety of tone in the book is accentuated by its division into nine sections, including one devoted to a series of Sen’s own photographs, taken from his terrace at the same time of day. Throughout Anthropocene, there is a sense of the writing being done, of the scratch of the pen or pencil upon the page. ‘Fountain Pen’ (149), for example, effects the tactile pleasure of a nib slowly caressing the skin of a page, while what is at stake hovers, enacting crisis and on occasion, hope.
In the Introduction to the collection in Section 1, ‘The Role of the Artist is Not to Look Away’, Sen notes that:
I spend most of my waking hours in the day (and night) in my book-lined study. The panoramic picture window across my desk is the lens through which I view the changing of seasons imprinted on the magnificent wide-topped neem tree. The bough’s intricate armature, the leaves’ serrated floret-pattern, the tree’s broccoli-shaped structure — all provide an exo-skeleton for my canvas — and the constantly-altering skyscape, provide a sideshow cyclorama. (19)
In Section 2, ‘Anthropocene | Climate Change’, Sen acknowledges his debt to Amitav Ghosh, and his work on climate change, particularly in The Great Derangement, in the poem Disembodied. Here, the body registers a vivid exposition of connection and disconnection to the world:
My body carved from the abandoned bricks of a ruined temple
from minaret-shards of an old mosque,
from slate-remnants of a medieval church apse,
from soil tilled by my ancestors.
My bones don’t fit together correctly as they should —
the searing ultra-violet light from Aurora Borealis
patches and etch-corrects my orientation —
magnetic pulses prove potent.
My flesh sculpted from fruits of the tropics,
blood from coconut water,
skin coloured by brown bark of Indian teak.
My lungs fuelled by Delhi’s insidious toxic air
Echo asthmatic sounds, a new vinyl dub-remix.
(28)
while the earth itself buckles under the strain:
Ice-caps are rapidly melting — too fast to arrest the glacial slide.
In the near future — there will be no water left
or too much water that is undrinkable,
excess water that will drown us all.
(29)
The declamatory tone here is replaced by a number of short, sharp impressionistic poems in dense couplets, such as ‘Pollution’:
Neem’s serrated leaves
outside my study
wear season’s toxicity
on their exposed skin —
and:
unclean, unworthy.
Neem, once acted as
a filter for us,
now needs one herself.
(36)
In a small counter-move, in ‘The Third Pole’ (42) a trip to the mountains near to the home in exile of the Dalai Lama presents a sliver of hope, an awareness of possibility:
Dharamshala is a few hours away
on foot, through pine wood paths.
Prayer chants waft. In this thin air
floats an immutable magic — a hope,
perhaps, to arrest the glacial slide.
Section 3, ‘Pandemic’, opens up to a further variety of form, embracing visual poetry, prose poems, the haiku, and even features an imagined play script. It begins with ‘Asthma’ (51), presenting an onomatopoetic exposition of bodily malady: ‘Wheeze whistles — piercing shrill pan-flute notes … My rib-cage tangled in its brutalist architecture’ and progresses to the global, to couched politics, in Anthropocene’s signature poem, riffing off Marquez, ‘Love in the Time of Corona’ (52):
In thousands, migrant workers march home —
hungry footsteps on empty highways
accentuate an irony – ‘social distancing’,
a privilege only powerful can afford.
Toward the end of the ‘Pandemic’ section, ‘Corona Haiku’ (62/63) extends this theme:
Rose Petals
Fighter jets shower
flower-petals on the poor —
why not food, money?
Hunger
migrants chew dry leaves
off the streets — no food, water —
national disgrace.
‘Obituary’ (55) sits between images of the widely published pages from The New York Times, with the epigraph ‘They were not simply names on a list. / They were us’. The sense of the global continues in the fine poem dedicated to Fiona Sampson, ‘Speaking in Silence’ (58), at once a celebration of and lament to the absence of friendship:
We speak in poetic phrases, punctuated by dactyls
and trochees, inundating line-breaks with half-rhymes —
this is the only language left, our private renga —
ancient codes dictating our syntax, not our accent.
This sense of connection through the modus operandi of poetry, and through a shared exploration of the natural world suggests a symbiosis of form
It was centuries ago, yet I know this place well —
we have walked together in this slurry and squelch.
In the coppice, I picked a driftwood piece —
sculpt-etched by wind-water — a paleolithic
talisman I left on your rustic kitchen window.
Section 4, ‘Contagion | Corona Red’, consists principally of prose poems, plus a photograph of a still life, fine in composition. This section in the collection is intense, heart-breaking, and resplendent in a plethora of original imagery. A distillation of illness, mortality, hones in on what could be termed the structure of what is illuminated. In ‘Implosion’, the poet, desperately ill, writes:
On my bedside table, even the electric
bulb under the lamp’s hood cannot hold
its wattage steady with all the fluctuations
inside me – mirroring only mildly, the
tsunami inside.
I need to call an ambulance, but I hesitate.
More eucalyptus steam inhalation, Ventolin
sprays, mixed concoctions of ginger, black
pepper, turmeric and organic honey,
provide only a temporary respite.
(79)
In ‘Fever Pitch’, a hospital story is measured in terms of glass, test tubes, thermometers, of assisted breathing:
This is the third thermometer I have
bought in a day, and yet I cannot trust it.
Twice before, the reading shot out beyond
the graduated scale itself, hinting either i
was heated to the point of insanity or it was
a case of the glass’s own neutral impotence.
(82)
‘Icarus’ (92) and ‘The Legacy of Bones’ (94) are two of the most spectacular poems in Anthropocene, and both are deserving of a lengthy close reading. ‘The Legacy of Bones’ delves deep into form, into bone and blood, into writing itself, where ‘the singing of the eternal purity of bone music’ seeks to reside; there is a hard-won sense of release, from death and tragedy, a propulsion to universal song, a nod to Apollinaire: “It’s high time the stars were re-lit.”
In a master-stroke of design, and one of the pleasures of reading this book, is coming upon a series of photographs, taken from Sen’s terrace. Section 5, ‘Atmosphere | Skyscrapes’ opens up to an ethereal set of images, tethered to the accompanying snippets of verse from various poems in the collection. Section 6, ‘Holocene | Geographies’ takes on a global reach, reflecting the poet’s cosmopolitan positioning of his poetics. In ‘Driftwood’ (118), Derek Walcott’s home in St Lucia is celebrated, as is visiting friends in Herefordshire, immersed in a different climate, in ‘Witherstone’ (122):
Traversing a four-acre fenced land in borrowed Wellies,
my pugmarks leave a foreign imprint on this soil.
I find among the muddy squelch,
a piece of dead bark.
(124)
Haiku is an exceptionally difficult poetic form, and Sen’s Irish-based ‘Undercurrents: 20 Lake Haiku’, are a personal favourite, with precision of language suggesting consciousness’ sheen:
lake’s blue-black ink
runs deep, piercing sinews —
leaving scars, unseen
(119)
The sequence suggests what is to come in Section 7. ‘Consolation | Hope’, where images of renewal produce a sense of joy and inner peace. In ‘The Gift of Light’, Sen writes:
The gift of light
is life’s benediction
in these dark times —
no matter what or where,
there is always light.
(135)
in ‘Aspen’:
Forest fires conflagrate,
but cannot raze
the incandescent love
for my beloved
(139)
and ‘Corona: Elliptical Light’ celebrates the perfection of form in the neem tree:
Falling on new buds, the ray’s glare
splits open their perfect coronas —
pollen shower-burst, an ochre flare,
(147)
In Section 8. ‘Lockdown: Reading | Writing’, Anthropocene returns, after all this, to the act of writing. There is a pen in the hand, a sense of the bloom of writing, in ‘Handwriting’ (155), dedicated to Michael Ondaatje. In fact, inter-textuality is a delicate thread running through the book, with references to Brecht, Celan, Eliot, and others. Photographic images of paper, books, merge into statements on poetics and reading, of being at home in the world, Sen compares his sense of himself to the banyan tree with its ‘tertiary trunks and branches resembling fused stalactites and stalagmites’. (150)
Section 9, ‘Epilogue | Prayer’ concludes the collection with three short poems, ‘Meditation’, ‘Prayer’ and ‘Chant’. Perhaps if Sudeep Sen’s method could be couched in a few words, then these few from ‘Prayer’ (172) could suggest it:
Prayer flags
flutter —
I try to catch
their flight —
their song, their words,
their flap.
*
Jennifer Mackenzie is a poet and reviewer, focusing on writing from and about Asia. Her most recent book is Navigable Ink (Transit Lounge, 2020), a homage to the Indonesian writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
December 17, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
An Embroidery of Old Maps and New
by Angela Costi
Spinifex, 2020
Reviewed by GEORGE MOURATIDIS
In some topoi of poesy lore, it is believed that the first iteration of Homeric oral verse as a material text was woven by women on a loom – deft fingers spinning, immortalising epic tales. In the Odyssey, an abandoned Penelope sits at her loom, creating, then destroying, her tapestries, waiting for her husband Odysseus’ return to Ithaca from his decade-long voyage. Angela Costi reveals a honed, acute awareness of the traditions, epics, journeys, traumas, travails and triumphs that shaped and brought her to write the existential topography that is her latest collection of poetry, An Embroidery of Old Maps and New (Spinifex, 2021). In these pages, the poet is at once Penelope and Odysseus – speaks as weaver and voyager, sufferer and seeker. But here, when the poet takes up the thread, she does not tear; she tenderly and compassionately unwinds and uncovers those stories, people and worlds in which she recognises who, how and why she is, and in so doing, she reconnects, remakes.
Fittingly, the collection opens out at sea, a voyage (“From Bondi to Kyrenia”, “Arrival”) which is one of countless threads suturing together lives and lands, continuing a ruptured story line begun elsewhere – in Cyprus. Costi artfully employs as the collection’s central trope, Lefkarithika (Λευκαρίτικα) – the traditional linen embroidery and lace making of Cyprus (also known as Lefkara lace). Bearing the name of the Cypriot village renowned for producing it (Λεύκαρα / Lefkara) from where, as the story goes, it was taken to adorn the courts of Europe, the craft of Lefkarithika remains closely tied to place, preserving a culture. In “Making Lace” Costi makes plain the living connections, transmissions, continuities fostered by this masterful handling of the thread:
I see her as I see me, sitting on chairs before the impact of our craft,
both intent on making a story from sequence, a gift out of repetition,
her stitch is my letter, her design is my phrase,
thread weave through out and in.
Costi is at once embroiderer, storyteller and cartographer. Her thread entwines generations, voices, stories, places, homes lost and found:
she is the story on linen,
no longer woman in small village sitting under a tree for days, months,
years of thread weave through out and in, our skin
an embroidery of old maps and new
Lefkara, Larnaca, Kyrenia, Hartchia,
Riverwood, Bankstown, Lalor, Reservoir,
thread weave through out and in,
she lives in each strand
This embroidery weaves a visionary window into a hopeful yet uncertain legacy:
she peeks through gofti [κόφτη], through fairy windows, and sees me
letter by letter, crossing the keyboard
thread weave through out and in,
she sees her children’s children not work in fields harvesting rotting crops,
not work in factories making hard, rough, poisonous things,
not work in shops selling dry, fried food,
she sees a series of baby girls named after her, dressed in white,
she lives in the stroke of a foreign letter by letter, word by word,
thread, weave through out and in.
(“Making Lace”)
The mandalic intricacies of this thread connects a series of thematic suites of stories – episodes of psyche and affect recalled, recounted, recorded. Some are written on the body (“Refugee Aerobics”, “Land Mines”, “Heavy”, “Knock Knock”) at once vulnerable, mortal, and resilient. Others are scrawled on the walls and margins of academe (“Outskirts”, “The Quadrangle of Dreams”, “To Identify the Apostate”, “Goddess Nike”). The latter cluster bomb of poems in particular – indeed the collection more broadly – reverberates with what Maria Tumarkin refers to as the “psychic struggle” of the culturally and linguistically diverse in higher education and the arts, especially women and those from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds. Only halfway through the collection, and Costi already has the reader contemplating their own relationship to these sites and spaces upon and within which identity and its expression are renegotiated and forged, leading to new threads, new maps.
Costi never seeks to dazzle or impress the reader through linguistic, aesthetic, and typographical gymnastics. The artistry of her poetic language here is its ability to gain the readers trust almost at first glance with an unpretentious and authentic language that verges on that perennial punk maxim of say what you mean / mean what you say / put a beat to it. Costi’s unassuming versification allows the language to move with ease and breathe, and it is never difficult to locate the pulse in these lines. You will not find much abstraction, metaphor, symbolism, layers of arcane references: in this cartography these would only serve to obfuscate rather than illuminate the poet’s bare-naked home truths. Costi makes it clear why what she is sharing with you is important and needs to be said. Though her poetic language is clean, clear and simple, it is in no way simplistic. On the contrary, the embroiderer here immerses the reader in a confluence of poetic languages from the idiomatic to the lyrical, not only from poem to poem, but stanza to stanza, even line to line. This draws the reader into the rich nuance and complexity of the speaker’s consciousness, a pathway that is uncluttered and uncomplicated. The other extraordinary aspect of the poems in An Embroidery of Old Maps and New is exactly this strong sense of a unique, even idiosyncratic speaker, of voice – one connected to viscera and heart and mind/memory/vision but never bound by any one of them. Even within surrealistic moments, there is no abstraction of the human experience, of body, of woman, of migrant, of worker. Every poem in this collection has a human face.
For Costi, language and communication become sites of conflict, negotiation, resolution, and as she reminds us, vehicles of autonomy (“Looping the Waves”, “The Good Citizens of Melbourne”). To some extent this plays out through the poet’s occasional use of Greek Cypriot dialect, which reads quite organically. However, the deployment of italics and marginalia, which your humble reviewer can only assume is at the insistence of the publisher, is distracting: it inadvertently generates a sense of foreignness within the text that is uncomfortable and at odds with the intimacy of the poems. On the other hand, these and similar moments of linguistic disconnection and slippage illustrate a kind of inter-generational discord under repair. Where the ambivalent and at times antagonistic relationship between “first” and “second” generations of Cypriot Australian apodemes (and what these represent for the poet culturally and politically) is classic Costi, in this collection she appears to have reached a satori: previously unbridgeable divisions begin to blur, and the two begin to merge, at least in moments. The teller of the story here realises she cannot extricate and separate herself from the world and assumed values of previous generations because she is, in various forms, a continuation of them, but on her own terms and always with humanity and compassion. In “Ocean View”, the collection’s penultimate poem, the change brought about by shifting sands at first appears to reconcile two incarnations of life continents apart:
My age was no longer a division of stories
easily mapped with tales of strife,
since birth, my skin, an erosion
of views by Eleni and Kostaki
However, any such resolution is bittersweet: the onetime “teenager leaving home”, having now long outgrown the struggle, finally allows themselves to see the humanity of living ancestors in all its vulnerability and strength – the “grey hair” of a yiayia “slapping the wind” and her “arms strong and swift”. Hidden in the folds of this this perception, however, is the “taste of regret”. The poet recognises that weaving this tapestry has a price: to take up the thread and continue a story that will in turn be taken up is arduous, harsh and embittering work, but crucial, a question of survival. There is no possibility of return the poems in this collection seem to say, especially when the point of the journey’s departure is no longer there: you can only carry it with you, as you keep weaving into life that which you may well lose. Costi does precisely this, both recreates and reappraises a gone world through anecdote and character and place, named and unnamed, in a language so vivid and visceral, and often very moving, they read as unmistakable extension of her, and she of them.
And so, we return to Costi’s acute sensibility of legacy and inheritance. The teller of these stories is finally able to valorise and draw strength and purpose from a lineage of the migrant working class woman. Nowhere is this clearer than in “Kinaesthetic Grace”, one of the collection’s brightest and penetratingly candid and affective moments. The poet begins with an admission, as much to herself as the reader:
This woman talks to me with her hands
she always has, since birth
I have failed to grasp them.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
left this woman to create her own story
her fingers are an alphabet
I had no patience for.”
And yet she knows this woman so well, “the woman who knows how to hold / with her lined and stained hands / the story of all other women”: the women “on the General Motors assembly line”, those who “spray / jeans and their lungs into shreds”, those whose “fingers twitch when they tell / of the Thomastown factory’s sewing machine, / stitch by never-ending stitch, / bleeding before a stop for break, / the dip and throb of migraine fighting quota”, the woman “silenced by statistics”. The poet concludes by inviting the reader to join her in seeking and humbling themselves before this woman, and allow themselves to hear and be shaped by her, declaring:
We must search for her
not in photo albums or newspapers,
we must go out in the wild woods
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
and when we see her
hold out our hands
as children willing to learn.
(“Kinaesthetic Grace”)
This inheritance for the poet can be both corporealised and verbalised, expressed as much by the body as the breath, the voice. For the poet, this ultimately points to an awareness that whatever she has created, whatever it may be worth, has been built upon the shoulders – the backs – of those who’ve come before her, who’ve toiled the fields in which she now toils, who pass on the thread of the tale to be woven and spoken, and not forgotten:
Some stories remain like bruises,
others are bullets, those told
with fear pounding the phone.
There is the breath you listen for as well as the word,
each one counts, the breath, the word, the breath.
(“Frontline” p. 53)
The poet leaves us with a reminder that what has passed, been lost and gone – spaces, states, experiences – are re-remembered by the embroiderers deft hand, reconstituted and made anew, and saved:
Those spaces named house, office, tower
we can visit
after the war, the plague, the fire,
bullets rested with stained blankets, with charred stoves
with quiet reprieve,
they will proudly show us what they’ve made
out of the damp, from the debris, by the dusk,
these things we left to perish
entwine like a thick braid.
(“Abundance”)
This, however, is no resolution but a juncture in the story that Costi leaves ambiguous: the reader is haunted by irony that leads them to question whether the journey across sutured topographies from old homes to new was worth the nature of the “abundance” it has brought.
These poems in An Embroidery of Old Maps and New are at once incisively candid and transcendent in the humility of their offering. They speak directly to a powerful sense of dignity – particularly that of the working class migrant, refugee, or poor woman – always hard won through constant struggle, resilience, fearlessness, indeed, in spite of ongoing conditions and efforts to the contrary. With this collection Costi offers her unique contribution to something she is ever aware is so much bigger than herself. It is precisely this sensibility of transcendence and liberating (self)recognition that makes An Embroidery of Old Maps and New a moment of thrilling apogee and culmination the poet’s oeuvre. From the nexus and intertwining of the lines of Costi’s existential enquiry in preceding collections, from Dinted Halos (2003) to Lost in Mid-Verse (2014): all threads lead here, where Costi is already moving towards another horizon.
George Mouratidis is a Research Associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of the poetry collection Angel Frankenstein (Soul Bay Press, 2018) and translator of Noted Transparencies by poet Nikos Nomikos (Owl Press, 2016). He is also the co-founder of literary magazine Kalliope X.
December 17, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Issue 27 Transitions: Ecopoetics from the Global South arrives at a time of uncertainty—which is perhaps a cliché to say now— but also at the titular time of transitions. Extremely rapidly, the earth and our climates are changing and we are adapting the way we live in order to sustain life. As writers and creators, we are attempting to make sense of these transitions, to deconstruct our human damages, to imagine futures, and discern meaning and hold a lens to the current and the past. This collection of ecopoetry, fiction and nonfiction offers fresh insights on climate and environmental discourse from across Australia and the global south.
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Our guest poetry editor Caitlin Maling, shares her insights on this issue’s poetry collection:
In the call out for this edition, the editors specified they/we were looking for work ‘from those whose connection to land, culture and community are often silenced’ to ask ‘how can we use writing to explore the complex relationships between the natural environment, human experience, culture, place, urbanisation, colonisation and climate change?’
We received hundreds of very good poems submitted, but the ones I’ve chosen for the issue, I chose in light of these incitations. I was interested in work that pushed into the uncomfortable spaces of ecopoetics, whether thematic or formal, so Greg Page asserts that ‘B\barbed Wire’ is ‘no bigger symbol of the invasion / … the continent is still covered in the stuff’ and Ojo Taiye asks ‘What is it that makes me see myself / more loving than the capitalist world?’, while Rachel Mead reworks Terrance Haye’s in the form of a golden shovel to state ‘the answers are needed the world staring down its own destruction / and here I sit twiddling around with rhythm and the fall of a word’ and Craig Santos Perez puts the sonnet to use to show us ‘California / where fire is harvesting four million acres / of ash’. This is not to say there is not beauty to be found in the ashes of these poems; we have many poems that insist on specificity, on valuing the minutiae of the extra-than-human world; Debbie Lim brings us the blue-ringed octopus ‘flashing its blue halos’, while Vinita Agrawal offers us what has been lost of the ‘Splendid Poison Frog’ with its ‘skin, brilliant coral, eyes, kohl black’.
What I found in each of the poems selected was a complexity of thought, one that consistently implicated language – the poem – in the patterns of power linked to ecological destruction, but conversely also offered us language as a productive creative force. They are not peaceful poems, because these are not peaceful times, but they are poems from which we might draw solace, even respite, and above all they are poems that insist on joining, bringing together times, themes, forms, places and species.
— Caitlin Maling
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Following similar thematic concerns, our fiction and nonfiction decentre the anthropocene or deeply embed ecological life and destructive climatic consequences with human realities. Ruminations of the past, the future, displacement and colonial dominance permeate these stories, as well as a sense that all life forms are fundamentally connected and dependent. We are invited to see from nonhuman beings: Zoë Meager’s koalas clinging for life entangled in hedonistic human entertainment, and an ageing Fig Tree in Dinasha Edirisinghe’s Vesak which fluidly shifts between human perspectives and the tree in connecting contemplations. Jenni Mazaraki and Juanita Broderick reflect on the ongoing repercussions of natural disaster, loss and rebuilding life. Broderick’s Cathedral Thinking in particular provides a unique link between environmental destruction for Iceland and Australia’s Indigenous peoples. Moving beyond Australia, Sushma Joshi’s essay offers a rich and sharp insight into the damaging environmental impacts of Nepal’s communist rule on daily life.
We also have glimpses of the near future: Isabelle Quilty imagines an evocative planet of absence, while April DeMoyer constructs a catastrophic dystopian near future filled with corruption, synthetic substances and a new-world climate largely incompatible with the plants we know today. And lastly, the intimacy and tenderness of Megan Cheong’s narrative is an opportunity to reflect on our role as parents or nurturers of vulnerable humans on an ever more vulnerable planet.
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This issue also features two new reviews alongside seventeen reviews published throughout the second half of the year—the collection spanning a broad and fresh range of ideas and critical considerations. We are very proud to continue our partnership with the Deborah Cass Prize and publish the winning entry: Bryant Apolio’s ‘Independencia’. It is also a pleasure to publish the two runner ups: Ira Frolova and Patrick Arulanadam. Congratulations to the winners, and to another year of these integral awards celebrating writers from migrant backgrounds.
We are thrilled to feature Stickmob artist Alyssa Mason’s stunning ‘Rainbow Serpent’ as our cover art. The human-animal-environment interaction in her work opens up deep considerations.
Finally, we offer our congratulations and a warm thank you to all our talented contributing writers, our guest poetry editor Caitlin Maling, our founding editor Michelle Cahill for her guidance, and our wonderful readers.
Editors Monique Nair & Anthea Yang
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
AJ DeMoyer is an emerging writer of eco-dystopian short fiction, currently studying an MA Writing and Literature at Deakin University. April lives with her husband, two tiny dogs and an oversize cat on Dharawal Country (regional NSW). When she’s not studying, reading or writing, she’s either propagating succulents in her garden, obsessively sorting the recycling, baking a sugary treat, or streaming dystopian programming.
New Eden
‘Good evening, Jo,’ AIoFE™ says. ‘You have three new messages.’
Jo picks up her phone and slides her thumb over the screen, which unlocks after authenticating her irises.
Extended Warning: X5 Class Solar Flare. Prepare for power grid disruptions.
[Delete]
Warning: UV Level 9 tomorrow. Please stay indoors between 6am – 7pm.
[Delete]
Be SolarSafe! Is your Geomagnetic Disruption Critical Response Plan ready? Contact your local—
Jo places her device on the table. Along the edge of the crepuscular sky, an apricot glow hugs the horizon.
*
A few days later, Jo sits on her small balcony in a wooden chair, book in hand, a glass of peppermint H2Oh!™ sweating on a low table beside her.
Duke is just about to rip the satin bodice from Victoria’s quivering body when an electronic rendition of ‘Greensleeves’ pierces Jo’s eardrums, shocking her from the quiet mid-afternoon reverie. She places the book, its pages swollen and warped from touch and temperature, on the table next to her glass. Jo sighs. Why do I even bother? Most of her books and other belongings had been destroyed in the Terrible Flood; these tacky romance novels—that anachronistic ice-cream van—are like cockroaches in a nuclear holocaust. She has learned to be content with whatever she can get.
Jo surveys the street with its single-family heritage houses repurposed for multiple occupancy. She feels lucky to have been assigned to this block, to a property with a garden. The rusty van trundles up the street; children, drawn to its song like sailors to Sirens, abandon their makeshift bicycles and rush toward it. Uniformed mothers, between shifts at The Factory, watch closely.
The tune cuts out; the van has stopped. In the quiet, Jo recalls the hot summers of her own youth, some 17,000 kilometres and seventy years from where she finds herself now. She remembers hours spent running through reticulated sprinklers under a clear blue sky, toes squelching over lush green lawns, the excitement of the ice-cream truck cruising her neighbourhood, even then summoning children with a warbled, tinny rendition of ‘Greensleeves’. Flaky chocolate sticks in soft, aerated ice-creams; ice lollies that turned lips and tongues blue and red. What could they possibly get from that van now? Jo shudders.
Shrill and mechanical, the tune starts up again. Jo returns to her chair, stretches her spider-veined legs, rests her calloused feet on a threadbare cushion. She reaches for the book and begins to read, with some longing, details of Victoria and Duke delighting in each other’s company.
*
‘Good morning,’ AIoFE™ says, handing Jo her daily packet of vitamins and a glass of verbena H2Oh!™. ‘You are advised to stay indoors today. We are currently experiencing an X3 class geomagnetic storm, which is expected to increase to X5 in the next 48 hours.’
Wiping down her breakfast plate, Jo studies her desiccated Survival Garden™ planted with GMO crops designed to thrive in the ‘new normal’ climate. She longs for the verdant gardens of her childhood and the permaculture gardens of her adulthood, carefully landscaped with a mixture of flowers and produce—fragrant roses, juicy strawberries, passionfruit dangling from vines. And yet, just five weeks ago, between spells of torrential rain, Jo had spotted Filipendula ulmania—meadowsweet—in a far corner of her plot. She marvels at Nature’s tenacity, her resilience.
Jo spends the day tidying her living space, making mental lists. Her AIoFE™ could do this, but Jo wants to keep her ageing mind agile and sharp. She fears becoming like her neighbours Logan and Barb, whose AIoFE™ does everything for them; who, instead of enjoying what remains of nature or humankind, binge-watch reality TV (Barb, grid permitting) and re-enact VR wars (Logan, sobriety permitting).
That night, Jo dreams she’s atop a tall mountain in springtime bloom. The peak’s outdoor restaurant is busy. As she walks toward it, the sky flashes white. In the distance, a slow-moving silver arc appears, raining fire as it advances, consuming everything in its path. No-one else notices. People gorge themselves on piles of food, their mouths and fingers greasy with the fat of animals; they ignore her cries, her pleas. It is too late. The arc is upon them; its flames engulf them.
*
AIoFE™ enters the bedroom, eyes burning bright LED white before softening to an ethereal blue. ‘Wake up, sleepy head,’ it says. ‘The Assembly begins in 90 minutes.’
Jo eases herself out of bed, stretches her arms over her head then side to side. The climate curfew has been lifted; she is meeting friends ahead of The Assembly.
‘Honestly, Jo, it’s not that bad with Wheatmylk™ and a lump of Shugar™.’ Maren sips her tepid drink and grimaces, her lips peeled back and bloodless over her tombstone teeth in mock pleasure.
Jo fingers the chip in the ancient mug. She does not like Koffee™ and has only ordered one to be sociable.
Harriet squeezes her friend’s hand. ‘I miss the real thing, too. Remember the smell of freshly ground beans? What I wouldn’t do for—even for a Nescafe!’
The women finish their drinks in silence. They leave the cafeteria, cross a covered courtyard secured by the Civil Guard and peppered with protesters holding hand-drawn placards.
Jo and her friends join the throng of people moving along a corridor into a cavernous building—a former dairy acquired through compulsory purchase. Jo had heard that the farmer had been paid a token sum, his cattle slaughtered and quietly distributed to government officials. The women sit near the stage: a floor-to-ceiling digital screen for the global simulcast. At precisely 10.30am, the lights dim and the crowd hushes.
An AIoFE™ moves to the dais. ‘Children, I greet you in the name of His Excellency, Our Great Father.’ The AIoFE™ continues, ‘I remind you that full-duplex device jamming is activated and the room is sealed until The Assembly has concluded.’
The robot moves aside. The screen comes to life with an avatar of His Excellency, Our Great Father: a small, average-looking, fair-skinned, grey-haired man in his fifties dressed in a deep purple tunic adorned with a gold sash, standing in front of a red velvet drape. Jo can’t help but think of Oscar Diggs; she stifles a dangerous laugh with a cough.
‘Children!’ The avatar raises his hands in blessing. ‘My peace be with you.’
The room rises to its feet, responds in unison, ‘And also with you, Our Great Father’.
‘Today, Children, I bring you wonderful news. Behold! I have made all things new. The first earth is passing away and will not be remembered. My chosen ones shall inherit a new Earth. No longer shall you toil. Relieved of your labours, you will be free to pursue enlightened interests here in New Eden.’
The avatar disappears, replaced with drone footage of enormous domed sanctuaries: a breathtaking feat of bio-engineering, conservation and artificial intelligence. The audience watches advanced AIoFE™ models labouring while humans enjoy manmade forests, lakes, and meadows interspersed with natural landscapes and habitats filled with a Noah’s Ark of animals, fishes, birds, reptiles, insects—a curated selection of extinct species re-animated through the wonders of science, rewilded into synthetic habitats.
Over pseudo-chorale background music the AIoFE™ narrates: ‘His Excellency, Our Great Father has created a new world where humans and animals and technology will live together in peace and prosperity, in God’s own country.’
Jo’s stomach knots. An entire continent seized, repurposed as New Eden—the zenith of man’s paradisiacal neo-creation. She had known, of course, about the depopulation of the former continent-nation of Australia, which officials had declared uninhabitable after a series of severe climate disasters. Its people had been forcibly redistributed to overcrowded, resource-depleted northern hemisphere countries, where protests against these unwanted Antipodean refugees had resulted in vicious attacks on the newcomers. Jo knows some of these families from The Centre for Cultural Assimilation, where she serves two days a week. She knows what it’s like to be in a strange, new place—when she was 14, Jo’s parents moved their family to the northern hemisphere after the earthquake that levelled Canberra. They are no different to us, she thinks, just traumatised in different ways.
From the screen, the Ministers for New Eden and Global Reassignment outline the timetable, migration process and the lottery system—only one billion people will reside in His Excellency’s utopia. Jo scans the hall, searching to find her incredulity mirrored in the faces of others; instead, she finds only faces shining with desperate optimism.
*
That afternoon, fragments of a poem Jo’s mother used to recite tickle her memory.
‘AIoFE™,’ she asks, ‘what is that poem about … cybernetic meadows?’
The robot’s chest panel lights up, emits a soft whir. ‘The poem is “All watched over by machines of loving grace”, written by Richard Brautigan in 1967 when he was the poet-in-residence at Cal—’
‘Thank you, AIoFE™. Will you read it, please?’
*
Later that evening, Jo sits in her wooden chair on the balcony with a glass of peppermint H2Oh!™. She reflects on The Assembly’s announcement that morning. She closes her eyes, recites the poem’s last stanza into the night air:
‘I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.’
Jo sighs. What choice do any of us have?
Over the rooftops of her neighbours’ dimly lit homes, the apricot glow looms.
***
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Juanita is an emerging writer who lives in a small town in rural Victoria, on the unceded land of the Dja Dja Wurrung people. She has only recently tapped into a deep desire to write. Having successfully navigated away from a long career as a professional photographer, Juanita is now completing her arts degree in anthropology and creative writing at Deakin University in Geelong.
Cathedral Thinking
After Andri Snær Magnason
There is a man sitting outside a café in Reykjavik harbour, drinking his second double espresso and writing a eulogy for a glacier.
The man takes a crumpled packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket, digs out the last one, and stares vacantly across the harbour at the Harpa Concert Hall. It is perched on the edge of the water like a giant metallic beast from the future; scales glinting in the sun. He lights the cigarette, and while the match burns down until it singes his finger, he wonders what kind of world the glacier was born into. He quickly waves out the match, places it carefully in the ashtray with the others, and squints out at the bay through an exhalation of smoke.
What did it feel like, to be alive ten thousand years ago?
Katja Edelmann is driving a rented Audi north from the Munich airport towards a nursing-home in Aalen, where she will help celebrate her grandmother’s one-hundredth birthday. She has flown in from Reykjavik, straight from an interview with a climate scientist, who gave her a view of the world so immense, it has dislodged something solid, deep inside her. And while she was busy navigating her way out of the airport terminal, her story on the disappearing glaciers of Iceland was rewriting itself in her brain, without her even noticing.
As she drives further from the airport, the terrain beyond the Autobahn slowly transforms. As if in a time-lapse. The distant hills become dotted with clusters of fretworked farm-houses, and patches of thick forest appear. Familiar landmarks pass by and scenes from childhood visits with her grandmother layer themselves upon the landscape. For an unsettling moment, time no longer has a linear flow.
Katja looks at the clock on the dashboard and decides she needs one more coffee before re-uniting with her German relatives. She hates that it will make her late, but she’s been up since four a.m. and is starting to feel the ache in her throat that comes from holding in too many emotions. Or from smoking too many cigarettes, she’s not sure which.
She takes the next exit into a Raststätte the size of a small town and drives to the furthest end of the parking area. She pulls up in front of an enormous tree at the edge of the bitumen, turns off the ignition and sits in the car for a moment. The tree before her is a splendid, twisted old thing. An oak maybe. There’s a crow sitting on an outstretched branch, its head cocked and alert, examining her carefully. She leans forward over the steering wheel, and watches its inky feathers shimmer blue-green in the sun.
‘We are living in biblical times,’ the scientist had said to her, just a few hours earlier. He had paused, offered her a cigarette and explained, ‘when geologically-scaled events like ocean acidification and species extinction happen on a human time-scale, reality takes on a mythical quality.’ He had looked at her with an intensity that reminded her of an ex-lover who had become unhinged, some years ago, obsessed with dark internet conspiracies.
As Katja gets out of the car, the crow makes a sound like a baby wailing. It hops, open-winged along the branch a few times before flying off. She watches it disappear into a row of birch trees and it occurs to her that she has been writing the wrong story.
She buys a coffee and a packet of throat lozenges and takes them back to the car. The crow reappears abruptly in a blur of black. It hops along the same gnarled branch and stares at her. She sips her coffee and stares back, admiring the magnificent oak in which it is perched. Yes, definitely oak.
She remembers a story her father once told her about the wooden beams in the roof of a dining hall in Oxford. The building itself was over seven-hundred-years-old, but about a century ago—her father had explained—an infestation of beetles was found in the huge lengths of oak that were supporting the roof. Unsure where to find such massive pieces of wood to replace the beams, the college council called on the college forester for advice. Unsurprised by the situation, the forester said something like, ‘I’ve been wondering when you lot would turn up!’
The forester explained that back when the college was built, six centuries earlier, a grove of oak trees was planted to replace those very beams. The inevitability of a beetle infestation at some point in the future was calculated into the construction. And this knowledge was passed on from forester to forester, down through the generations: the oaks in that grove were for the dining hall in Oxford.
Why do we no longer hold our vision so far into the future? She suddenly realises that the story she needs to write isn’t about climate change. It is about time.
‘We have to change the way we think about time,’ the man in Reykjavik had said. Cathedral thinking, he had called it. Cathedrals in Europe would take generations to build. Hundreds of years. Fathers would lay the foundations, knowing they would never see it finished. And their grandsons would teach their sons how to chisel rocks and place stones, one upon the other, knowing they would be long dead before the first congregation gathered under its vaulted ceiling.
Katja checks the time on the dashboard again. She unwraps the lozenges, pops one in her mouth and starts the car. She regrets smoking so many of the scientist’s cigarettes.
‘Katja, Schatz! Wie geht’s? You’re here!’
Her uncle engulfs her in a joyful hug as she enters the foyer of the nursing-home. She laughs and hugs him back, apologising for being late. ‘Ach, don’t worry about it. Oma is in the dining room with everyone, go in, I’m just organising the cake.’
Katja is taken in by her relatives: into the room and back into their lives. Her grandmother is helped out of her chair and gives her a long, surprisingly firm hug. ‘How long are you staying this time Kati?’ she says, her voice slower and deeper than Katja remembers.
‘Just a few days, Oma, but I will make the most of every moment.’ She smiles and gives her grandmother’s hand a squeeze. As Katja helps the old woman back into her chair, her cousin appears with her newborn son asleep in her arms. ‘Hallo Katja! Meet Ulli…’ She reorganises her body to reveal a tiny pink face in the bundle folded into her arms.
‘Hello Ulli,’ says Katja, touching his soft fuzzy head. She tries to imagine what the world will be like in the year 2118, when this brand-new human turns one-hundred.
The line between past and present blurs again as Katja is immersed in an afternoon of conversation and reminiscence. Jan finally arrives with a birthday cake big enough for Ulli to take a nap on, and someone leads them in song.
A middle-aged woman with wild hair and thick-rimmed glasses approaches Katja with a plate of birthday cake in each hand. ‘The last time I talked to you, you were writing a story about some Aboriginal people—trying to save those trees in Australia.’ She hands her niece the slab of darkly layered torte, the thick white frosting threatening to topple to the floor.
‘Oh, my! Thank you, Tante Lina,’ Katja says taking the plate. ‘Yes, you’re right. That was couple of years ago now.’ Her mind cast back to the sparse, dry landscape of central Victoria, and the scorching summer that she wrote about those trees. Eight-hundred-year-old birthing trees. Sacred to the local Djab Wurrung people, they were to be cut down to widen a section of highway. She had spent a week at the protest site, camping alongside those magnificent trees and their custodians. She felt the distress of the Traditional Owners as they talked about the importance of the tress, and the sacred land that they were on. How that land connected the Djab Wurrung people to their ancestors, to the beginning of time.
Fifty generations of women had birthed their children under the protection of those trees, and countless generations of women and trees were in relationship before that. For the Djab Wurrung, the past, like the present, was always all around them. For them, the horror of colonisation was ongoing.
‘What ever happened to those trees? Did you save them?’
‘No.’ She swallows a mouthful of cake but forgets to taste it.
When she visits again the next day, Katja finds her grandmother alone, dozing in a large hospital-grade recliner in her room. Katja sits down opposite her and quietly watches her breathe. A nurse marches in announcing teatime and clunks a cup of tea down on the small table in front of her grandmother, startling her awake. This small violence makes Katja want to follow the nurse down the corridor and yell at her. Instead, she bundles her grandmother into a wheelchair and drives her to Bucher-Stausee, the place her grandmother took her swimming as child.
‘I haven’t been here for a long time,’ says the old woman as Katja slowly wheels her to the edge of the lake.
‘Me neither.’
The two women watch the ducks bobbing up and down on the water, and Katja listens to her grandmother talk about her husband. A good, kind man, who always gave her the best of everything he had. The old woman tells of long-ago adventures with her favourite uncle, who had secretly taught her to hunt rabbits in the spruce forest behind his house. She tells of a dear friend, her closest, oldest friend, who helped her care for her husband when he was dying.
All of them, already claimed by God, she says.
She tells Katja of her mother, Hildegard, a fierce woman born in 1891 in a small town near Berlin, in what was then Prussia. The daughter of a carriage builder, she would frequently test drive her father’s handiwork, to his continual horror.
Hildegard’s great-grand-daughter looks out over the water, and counts back in her head how many great-grandmothers it would take to get to the time when the birthing trees were just saplings; to when a stonemason in Paris was laying the foundation for Notre-Dame. Twenty? Fifty? For the now dead glacier, fifty human generations was surely just a blip in its life. Eight-hundred-years ago might have felt like its last hours on earth. Did it feel the oncoming warming, the shifting of ideologies and warring of men? Did it sense then, the stirring of a population about to explode?
‘Katja, schatz?
‘Yes, Oma.’
‘Do you think God has forgotten me?’
‘Technology has given us the power of gods,’ the scientist had said, looking down at his hands like he was confessing something. He paused, looked up, and gave Katja a beatific smile. ‘Of course, the problem is, we lack the wisdom of gods.’
***
A crow hops along the branch of a tree, where a parking lot will one day be built. A young man in Paris gently lowers the foundation stone at a construction site on the edge of the Seine. A forester in Oxford presses a row of acorns into the soil. And a eucalypt seedling, fifteen-thousand kilometres away, has just broken through the earth.
In Iceland, a glacier heaves and groans.
Time passes.
And the man in the Reykjavik café still can’t figure out how say good-bye to a ten-thousand-year-old god.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Sushma Joshi is a writer and filmmaker from Nepal. She has written two books of short stories. “The End of the World” was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. She has a BA in international relations from Brown University and an MA in English Literature from Middlebury College (USA) She is currently working on a Ph.D on environmental governance at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at Otago University, New Zealand.
This essay was written in 2018 and reflects some of the damaging environmental impacts of Nepal’s communist rule, before KP Oli’s administration and before the Nepali Congress took power. A sudden surge in car imports have exacerbated the situation even further since this essay was written four years ago.
No place like home
A few days ago, I went out to do my vegetable shopping at 4 pm, as I do every evening. Our neighborhood is called Handigaun, and it is known as the oldest settlement in the Kathmandu Valley. The ancient peepul tree at the end of the road has a Radha-Krishna temple nestled inside its roots. Nobody has been keeping track of how long the roots have grown around this small sanctum sanctorum for hundreds of years.
According to architect and cultural heritage conservationist Sudharshan Tiwari (full disclosure: he is an uncle by relation), Handigau was the ancient capital of Nepal during the reign of the Verma, Gupta and Licchavi Kings until 8th Century AD. This area later fell into obscurity with the rise of three kingdoms in Kathmandu, Lalitpur and Bhaktapur. Just down the road and down some small steps is the Satya-Narayan Mandir, where an Italian archaeological team came and excavated during 1984; the archaeologists found ancient statues and artifacts that go back to Licchavi times. I remember seeing graceful human-sized statues displayed in the square in front of the Saraswoti temple. The memory stayed with me, although I couldn’t remember much beyond the grace and style. I thought of the figure as a Buddha.
I have grown up knowing that Handigaun hides many secrets: somewhere deep inside the depths of this now squalid settlement is buried the remains of the renowned palace complexes of the Licchacvi Era, called Kailashkut Bhavan. Licchavi King Angshuverma constructed this palace after he ascended the throne in 598 AD. Chinese traveler and monk Xuanzang mentions this fabled structure in his writings: Kailashkut Bhawan had three adjoining buildings, known as Indragriha (Indra’s home), Managriha (Mana’s home) and Kailashkut (the mythical residence of Shiva and Parvati.) According to Zuangzang, a thousand people could be accommodated in the top floor of this building. Kailashkut was a giant palatial structure known for its artistic glory.
A few minutes down from our house is an open plaza where vendors set up wooden tables and sell fresh vegetables each evening. Tiny temples surround the plaza: the Bhimsenthan has a statue of Bhimsen, the strongest and most powerful of the Pandava brothers from the epic Mahabaharata, holding a club. It is tiny and exquisite, a small shrine with four wooden pillars standing in the middle of the crossroads. A new Dakshinkali temple with a yellow roof houses a shiny statue. Rajan, an energetic community figure, conducts daily pujas, organizes the vegetable vendors into the packed plaza, and adjudicates their disputes and violent brawls. For this service, without which the public square would be in chaos and unused due to conflicts regarding occupancy, he charges Rs.30 per day from each vendor.
Across the road is the Sankata complex, a strip of anaconic statues on the ground venerating the goddess Sankata, whose dasha or planetary ruling period is often the most feared and most soul-searingly difficult in the Hindu mindscape. In the jyotish astrological timeline, the yogini dasha (dasha is a time period ruled by a specific planet) has eight dashas. The eight year long dasha of Sankata, ruled by Rahu, brings with it the most upheaval, turmoil and downright catastrophe. Little Jyapu children take their drums and pipes and circumbulate this complex faithfully at each jatra festival to appease the fearsome goddess. It is a landscape mapped out by the architecture of belief and the rhythm of festivals, designed to be walked by old and young alike.
And yet, as I walked out that evening to try and do that most mundane of errands—
vegetable shopping—what I felt was an overwhelming sense of being swamped and trodden over. All around me were dozens of motorcycles, tooting their horns, swerving to get by, buzzing like angry hornets. I had to step aside, with my back to the walls, because otherwise they would have driven over me. I couldn’t cross the road to enter the market. I watched helplessly as the cars and motorcycles swarmed around me in this historic space, indifferent to my presence as a local resident, indifferent to my rights as a pedestrian. In their minds, getting home by the quickest route was more important than assuaging the grief of a local whose values and memories had become irrelevant, in this petroleum fueled internal combustion world.
As the evening traffic jam overwhelmed my neighborhood, bumper to bumper like an American highway, I stood behind and thought: What are they doing? How could they not see the historic significance of this space, and realize that this should be a pedestrian area where people walked places? How did the politicians imagine the world would sort itself out if thousands of these vehicles were added each year to this tiny valley, with no regulation to keep them in check?
As a pedestrian without a vehicle, I have no say in this republic of might. With an ankle injured during the 2015 earthquake, I have mobility problems. The slightest depression or uneven ground can make me stumble, but Kathmandu’s roads are never well built or well maintained in the current regime. The roads, it seems have gotten worse, rather than better. I try to maneuver over a non-existent sidewalk and kerb, holding onto an electric pole. A slight swelling of concrete indicates that one road has ended and is forking into another. The concrete has been slapped on by contractors from construction syndicates whose main goal had been to bid the lowest rates and get the contract, which they will split with their contacts inside the Department of Transport and inside political parties. The most famous of these is Shailung Construction, known to be owned by the landlord of Prachanda. Prachanda is one of the controversial leaders of the Maoist Revolution. The company has come under heavy media scrutiny for monopolizing dozens of government construction contracts while delivering very little infrastructure in return. Despite repeated reportage in the press about non-delivery or delivery of ill-constructed, dangerous structures, the company continues to get new contracts.
***
The traffic crushes the life out of the vegetable market, the neighborhood, the butcher, the dairy, and the sweetshop. At times, drivers hit children and dogs. The young woman who comes to help my mother clean was very upset this morning—a motorcycle, she said, dragged her six-year old on the way back from school, as he was holding her hand and skipping along. The hospital told her to bring him back for an ECG if he vomited. At night, she said, he got up and she thought perhaps he had vomited, but she wasn’t sure. The man who’d hit her child thankfully drove them immediately to the hospital. ‘My child is the same age, I have to make sure he’s fine,’ he said. Cruelty and compassion live side by side on the same streets.
My dog has a paw with a misshapen break in the middle of her leg—she was a street dog I rescued from the shelter, and during winters when it gets cold her bouncy step turns into a limp. It is not hard to guess where her injury came from: most likely a speeding motorcycle. While I was recovering from fractures I sustained during the 2015 earthquake, I would go to the physiotherapy room at Grande Hospital. During one of the sessions, I heard a physiotherapist share a story—he had been taking a midnight ride in his Enfield when he heard a ‘Splat!’ sound. ‘I look down and this dog had been totally smashed on the ground,’ he said in a casual, conversational tone. There was no indication in his story that he stopped to help the injured dog. He simply sped on his way. As I listened to the nice, kind-looking man who has been helping people diligently to get up on their feet after strokes and accidents, I can’t help but wonder at how such cruelty can exist side by side with such compassion. How could he spend his life healing people, spending all his time trying to get them up on their feet again after painful operations, while at the same time talk so casually about smashing up a dog with no acknowledgement of guilt or pain? Are we, as a human species, perhaps so anthropocentric we can’t feel the pain of animals other than our own species?
There are too many motorcycles in the Kathmandu Valley, all being driven at high speeds, responsible for many injuries of children, elderly people and dogs every single day. And yet there is no move to ban these vehicles. Politicians are indifferent to anything but taxes, which they pocket without transparency or accountability. There are no regulations to limit these vehicles in historic areas, or crowded pedestrian areas, because each motorcycle brings in tax. A taxi-driver listed for me the taxes he paid each year: Rs.16, 000 for annual tax; Rs.4000/each three months as road tax; Rs.1800 per year as municipal tax; Rs.1200 a year for navikaran fee; Rs.600 to recalculate the taxi meter’s fare, Rs.300 for meter navikaran. Another taxi-driver gave me a list of seven different taxes and insurance that he pays. Vehicles are profitable milking cows, and politicians don’t want this income source to stop. Profit dictates policy, what little there is of it. The political elites in power in Nepal used to run extortion operations in the People’s War. Now they tax people. It’s the same process, except back in the day it was illegal and now it’s done through the auspices of democracy. There seems to be no law—moral or ethical—that stops the politicians from allowing emission-spewing vehicles to pile up in this tiny valley. Nothing else, the air pollution, the rise of respiratory diseases, the chaos from vehicles parked randomly all over public space and speeding, hitting and disabling people — none of this matters.
It wasn’t always like this. The lane outside my house was a modest width—wide enough for water tankers and ambulances, not wide enough for hundreds of speeding motorcycles. The old brick walls, gently eroding rusty-orange, were high and covered with green moss. There was an overgrown stand of bamboo at the lane’s end. Trees covered the entire lane from one end to the other. Jacaranda trees that my grandfather had planted in the middle part of the twentieth century shaded my garden. I did not notice the slow erosion of the land in front of me as the houses built, and built, over what was once a large lake. The lake had been buried by real estate speculators and sold at some point in my childhood. I don’t remember when it happened; only that one day the lotus-covered lake beyond our house was gone.
The gas seller came by a week ago, and he said: ‘We used to run through the lane we thought a seven-headed naga lived in that lake. We were so afraid. And now people have built massive buildings. Nothing happened to them in the earthquake either.’
We look at each other, as if we can’t believe the naga would let these new people just go like this, without wreaking wrath on them. Building on lake bottoms has been discouraged because the mud liquefies and the bottom falls out during an earthquake, we’d always thought. Yet here was this set of giant buildings, with a new one being built at the speed of light by a young man who’s inherited his grandfather’s land and who seems indifferent to our concerns about seismic stability. Perhaps he did not know about the lake, or the seven-headed naga that could one day wreak his vengeance onto his investment.
Kathmandu had been a city full of beautiful ponds and lakes. Even the Dakshinkali temple and ward office of Handigaon had been build on a lotus pond that had been filled in. A well-connected man during the Panchayat era had decided to fill the pond and sell it. And that’s how the public ponds of Kathmandu vanished from the Eighties to now, one by one.
The leafy fans of the jacaranda leaves shaded my house from the outside world. I had only a dim idea of how it was changing outside. Then change came at the speed of light. The decade long People’s War, started in 1996, was followed by a ceasefire in 2006, then a comprehensive peace agreement. The rebels extorting people and making them flee from their ancestral villages were suddenly in power in Kathmandu, put there by the UN Mission to Nepal, which had brokered a peace agreement between the conflicting parties. Within a few short years, Baburam Bhattarai, architect of revolution and urban planner trained in JNU, was out there with his bulldozers smashing through the old streets of Kathmandu. This urban restructuring was going to be his magnum opus. A young man who lived at the end of our lane thought the pedestrian footpath in front of his house wasn’t grand enough. He had Maoist connections, people said. So in 2012 the bulldozers came by, relentlessly destroying the old growth trees in our lane. Jacaranda, bottlebrush, golden oaks, eucalyptus, trees whose names I did not know, they all fell, one by one. Hundred-year-old trees were gone within days. I think we lost three dozen trees in this fateful moment.
The bulldozer came by and kept hitting my jacaranda over and over, because the old tree refused to give way. It was a painful fight, with the tree groaning and screeching for days. Eventually the bulldozer won. The tree was cut to the nub, but it was still alive a year later, sprouting green fronds. Secretly I hoped the roots had survived and would sprout again. Sadly it was not to be—some person came by and chopped the last remaining bit of it for firewood one winter day during the Indian blockade three years later, leaving only emptiness behind. I screamed at the bulldozer driver. He bashed in my wall in revenge. You can still see the depression where he hit my bricks and caused damage. Our little corner of Kathmandu was now no longer a green and mossy sanctuary where children walked to school and breathed fresh air. It was filled with piston-firing Enfield motorcycles, roaring by at all times of the day and night. A motorbike called Crossfire, which made explosive gunshot like sounds, could be heard speeding by at night. I learnt from taxidrivers that the reason for the excruciatingly loud decibels was tampering with the Mobil oil, which was mixed with chemicals to make an extra loud sound. Expensive SUVs worth millions of rupees and battered water tankers filled with water tanks soon piled up outside, using the once green space as a parking lot. When once we used to have sweet-smelling eucalyptus, we now have the smell of diesel exhaust.
I look at the mark the bulldozer made bashing into my wall, the depression caved in, and see it as the mark of the government which couldn’t stand the outrage of an ordinary citizen beset by the oppressive illusion of democracy. Because this was no democratic process—this was a man drunk with his own ideology and power who’d relentlessly destroyed neighborhoods and homes, just as he’d destroyed the lives of people in the People’s War. But there was to be no accountability, because peace was all that mattered. We were not to make a commotion but to accept this is how things were going to be in our hometown, from now on.
In Lazimpat, a leafy neighborhood close to the former royal palace, they uprooted the shady green trees again, slapping on the concrete and making the road so wide it’s impossible to cross it now. The vehicles do not stop these days—it’s a wide highway of speeding motorcycles. In 2014, I was working to write a TV script in an office in Lazimpat. A colleague confided in me that he’s started the process to immigrate to Canada. ‘I am leaving Kathmandu for two reasons,’ he said. ‘First, I want my children to be able to breathe clean air. And secondly I want them to be able to cross the road. This is the only reason I want to immigrate to Canada.’
We will never see trees as big as my grandfather’s turn of the century trees in Kathmandu in my lifetime. Once you cut a tree that old, it’s gone. But there was a more sinister side effect. In the springtime, I could see women desperately running water pumps for hours. When I asked them if the water was coming, they’d shake their heads: ‘Only a trickle.’ As the trees were destroyed, so was the water table which fell many feet below. I see women running up to the tankers that provide free water in a frenzy, and sometimes there is a fight as people jostle to fill their plastic canisters. I’m terrified my water pump is going to break and I won’t have water, just like the time after the earthquake when I had my period and diarrhoea and would wake up and hobble with a crutch to go to my parents’ bathroom—only to find my sister-in-law had latched the door on the other side. My father ignored my pleas. He thought that old and dilapidated pump, which no longer worked, was enough for my needs. As the water table had dried up, we’d run it for hours and not a drop of water would come up. Fortunately I had enough savings to buy a new pump, which cost eight hundred US dollars. For many in Kathmandu, this is a luxury beyond reach.
I meet my neighbor Poppy who tells me her neighbor, the judge’s wife, can’t stand the leaf fall from her tree. They threaten her because some leaves have drifted into their yard. ‘At one point, they came over and set fire to the tree,’ she told me, her eyes full of tears. ‘Who would do such a thing to a tree? They want everything neat and clean.’ In modern developed minds, the ability to cover every inch of ground with concrete is regarded as a sign of gentrification and upward mobility.
In a few years, perhaps a decade or so, we’ll no longer have water in Kathmandu. If the Maoist ideal is to surround and capture the city, they did this excellently by killing trees. The first thing an enemy does when attacking a fortressed space is to attack the water source. The dhungay dhara, or stone spouts built by ancient inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley are a closely guarded secret—only a select handful of tantrics know their sources. The reason for the secrecy was practical—if enemies attacked the city, the first thing they did was disable the water system, so it was imperative to keep its workings subterranean and hidden. In the early 21st century, Maoists attacked Kathmandu and its water sources with great success. Once you deprive the “feudals” of water, they can no longer live in the city. The feudals are flushed out from water starvation, while the Maoists party onwards with bottled water and alcohol. But the donors who love the romance of revolution, even though they personally would never want to live through one, have installed these regimes, and we must make the most of it. Anybody who opposes this way of being is feudal, anti-democratic. Home no longer feels like home, as the relentless march of the feudal, secular Democratic regime’s progress piles up, destroying historic neighborhoods and cultural artifacts, century old trees and water tables, street dogs and children.
And it is in these moments of despair, when I look at the grey sunset and wonder whether Kathmandu will be inhabitable in 10, 20, 30 years time, that I see the planet’s future. We are all captured in this planet with people like the Maoists, who put forward the ideal of modern progress as the only way forward.
The insect population has plunged 80 times in the past thirty years, and with it has gone all the birds that used to subsist on insects. ‘The insect apocalypse is here,’ the New York Times proclaimed on 27 November 2018, in an article with the same title.
One day I saw bugs had eaten my ferns, and posted a photo of it on Twitter: ‘Some naughty bug has munched through my million year old angiosperm.’ The post was partly in jest, but partly I was drawing attention to the millennia old continuum of life, which respected the rights of the bug to munch through this plant. That is how life has always continued, with one life form depending upon another. The bug would die, and its body would fertilize the earth on which the fern grew. That is always how it has been. Before the humans came along, and started to spray organophosphates that destroyed the insects’ neurological system. They started to paralyze the cockroaches, and with it, also the humans. The insidious diseases we cannot name or identify all go back to these poisons we think will kill pests but end up killing us as well, because we are tied by the indivisible thread of life. The cancers, the dementia, the Alzheimer’s, the Parkinson. The dreadful wasting diseases to which there is no cure. All of which afflict people in developed countries in such greater proportion than in developing countries far from these neurotoxins and endocrine disrupters. But now it is hard to find any pristine place on the planet. The farthest reaches of Greenland is filling up with plastic, even though the people living there are so few in number they could not have possibly tossed that many plastic objects in their ice-clear drinking water. It is all coming from elsewhere.
Robert MacFarlane, a British nature writer, wrote a book called “The Lost Words.” In it, he tries to reconjure back the words which described the natural world, now being lost to this hypercapitalist, technological era. Oxford’s Junior Dictionary decided to take out fifty nature words like acorn, buttercup and conker and replace it with tech words like analogue, broadband and cut and paste. Celebrity replaced magpie and newt. This is a reflection of how our world has evolved—one ruled by the four square borders of a computer screen, and not the sounds and sights of nature. MacFarlane, along with a group of other writers, wrote a letter of protest which became a rallying cry against this literary erasure. As writers, we must all try to find our own ways of protesting this slow erasure of the natural world from our own locations and vantage points.
People have named this age the anthropocene—the age where humans influence climate and environment to such an extent they end up becoming its defining, dominant force. We are the apex predator of our own species. But the coinage of the word eromocene, by philosopher and biologist EO Wilson, captures our future with more eerie specificity: a time and place where insects die off, taking with them birds, animals and the entire chain of living beings with them. The eromocene is the age of loneliness, where the sounds and sights of all living creatures are silenced by our ecocidal ethos. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which pushed the world to understand the consequences of DDT on living beings, activists, writers, Nobel Prize winners and children from all over are now pushing us to face the unavoidable consequences of the sum of all human actions—from fossil fuel to plastics, from pesticides to chemical fertilizers, from our coltan-containing computers to our cobalt and tungsten containing cell phones, all destroying and silencing the web of life.
When will we stop thinking homo sapiens and their ability to use their hands and brains is the supreme intelligence that exists on this planet, and start thinking about ethics and morality in our use of lethal human inventions, science and technology? When will the shift occur, when humans understand that they are not god’s gift to planet earth, but her worst enemy? Until then, we have to live in this apocalyptic space—our mother earth, our planet—where despite the degradations, there is nowhere else to go but back home.
As if to echo this loss of nature, I also had the half-remembered vision of the statue excavated from Handigaon’s Satya Narayan Mandir reoccur in my memories. What was that statue? Where did it go? How do the layers of histories get erased by the plundering hand of time?
Writer William Dalrymple, who has been researching the spread of Hinduism to South East Asia, recently wrote in a tweet: ‘In 802, two years after Charlemagne declared the birth of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas day in St. Peters, on the remote hilltop of Phnom Kulen, the young Khmer Prince Jayavarman II was declared chakravartin of what would become the great Empire of Angkor.’
The name “Jayavarman” struck a chord. “Varman” sounds like the suffixes in the names of the kings of Kathmandu Valley of the pre-modern past. So I looked it up. And lo and behold, the article that surfaced said a statue had been dug up from Maligaon, a five minute walk from my house, in 1992, and a Brahmi script said it was of a King Jayavarman. Brahmi and Sanskrit scripts on the pedestal dates the statue to 185 AD, making it the earliest known historical epigraphic record of the Kathmandu Valley.
I looked at the photograph in the article—and realized I had found my lost statue. I recognized the way the clothing was wrapped around his body, the Grecian similarities to style. The lost statue was not of a Buddha but of a Shaivite king.
Figure of King Jayavarma, A.D 185 (Mishra, 2000)
Dalrymple mentions that Jayavarman II of Cambodia was a passionate Shaivite. Could it be that the Jayavarman of my neighborhood and the Jayavarman of Angkor were related? Could the latter have descended from the former, 600 years later? Shiva continues to be worshipped in Nepal in all his forms, but his most loved incarnations is Pashupati, the peaceful, loving lord of the animals, and Bhairav, his angriest and most destructive form. As I walk down the narrow alleys of Handigaon, now so full of motorcars and motorcycles as to be almost unwalkable, it occurs to me that this neighborhood where I grew up in, which to most people is only perceived of as a poor, broken down neighborhood to be raced through impatiently, may have been the kingdom from where Shaivite Hinduism spread out throughout South-East Asia. Somewhere from the dusty cobwebs of time, a connection was made and came to life again, sparking a light on what was once lost and dead.
Perhaps in the same way the seeds of life of our mother earth can once again come to life, evoking secrets from the womb of the planet, weaving the threads of knowledge together, bringing together the pieces of what we once thought was shattered and broken. Perhaps the ecological wisdom of our ancestors, which saw divinity in mountains and rivers, rock and water, animate and inanimate forms, can once again spread throughout the lands, in all its glorious incarnations.
References
Antonini, Chiara Silvi, and Giovani Veradi. “Excavation in the Kathmandu Valley.” Ancient Nepal 89, 1985, pp. 17-36.
Carson, Rachel. Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002.
Jarvis, Brooke. “The Insect Apocalypse is here.” The New York Times, November 27, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/magazine/insect-apocalypse.html
Kharel, Samir, “Locals plead for Handigaun preservation.” Kathmandu Post, April 6, 2013.
Mishra, Tara Nanda. “Dated figure of King Jayavarma, the tradition of figure making and the historical importance of this discovery.” Ancient Nepal 146, 2000, pp. 1-23. http://himalaya.socanth.cam.ac.uk/collections/journals/ancientnepal/pdf/ancient_nepal_146_01.pdf
Tiwari, Sudarshan Raj. The Brick and the Bull: An Account of Handigaun, the Ancient Capital of Nepal. Himal Books, 2002.
“‘Nowhere to go’ on the frontlines of climate change.” The New Humanitarian, December 13, 2018. https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature/2018/12/13/nowhere-go-front-lines-climate-change
Dalrymple, William [@DalrympleWill] “In 802, two years after Charlemagne declared the birth of the Holy Roman Empire on Christmas day in St. Peters, on the remote hilltop of Phnom Kulen, the young Khmer Prince Jayavarman II was declared chakravartin of what would become the great Empire of Angkor.” Twitter, December 14, 2021. https://twitter.com/DalrympleWill/status/1470383978851057664
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Megan Cheong is a teacher, writer and critic living and working on Wurundjeri land. Her writing has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Going Down Swinging and Overland.
Entwined
Some difficult change is underway and he begins again to wake in the night, Mummy coming softly through a crack in his dreams.
I can barely see through the deep dark, but my feet know the way and my hands find the warmth of him. I slide into his narrow bed and curl myself around the shape of him.
First I hear them squeaking and squawking just outside the window. In the brief silences between their calls, I hear the rustle of their steps in the grass. I get out of bed to raise the blinds. There are around twenty magpies assembled on the lawn, some picking in the grass with the black tip of their otherwise white beaks, but most simply standing wide-legged, staring into the house.
Above them, the pale sky begins to blush pink, then the sunrise proceeds with incredible momentum, the sky and the clouds flushing orange, gold and blue in quick succession. In the dazzling horizontal sunlight, they begin to sing: short phrases of two or four loud shivering notes building to melodious carols that rush into each other in a blaring chorus.
*
I watch him through the window above the sink while my hands wash the dishes. He is lying on his stomach in the grass inspecting the small purple flowers of the lily turf bordering the flowerbed when the fat black splotch of a bee or wasp drops from the blue sky, hovering indecisively in the air above his head before landing on the turf a metre or so away from him.
I pull my hands out of the dishwater, leaving a trail of droplets on the kitchen tiles on my way out to him. Positioning myself between him and the bee, I raise a hand to wave it away when my attention snags on a strange, rhythmic whistling. The sudden jerk of my body startles the bee into flight. Oliver lies with his head turned away from me, fingers splayed, round shoulders quickly rising and falling with each shallow breath.
*
Because he was not feeding at the time and because they can’t find any bites on his skin, the doctors at the hospital tell me to keep him off the grass and away from the lily turf, though they seem unconvinced that either of these things brought on the reaction. They tell me they do not know what caused the episode, but they give me an auto-injector with a bright green label and show me how to press its orange tip into his thigh. It fits comfortably in my curled fingers and I keep it in my pocket, periodically reaching in to wrap my fingers around it all day until I take it out and place it on his bedside table that night.
I lie down beside him and sing ‘Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush’ into the silky hair on the back of his head, but he has been drowsy all evening and is asleep before I reach the verse to which we normally mime ‘putting on our clothes’. I lie very still, listening attentively to each deep even breath.
The grass is a rough tickle on my hands, an itch on the backs of my calves. I try to grab a handful of it, but it’s stuck in the ground, so I pitch myself forward, blue-green rush of the sky and trees, then it’s nice and close and I can see the grass is yellow, not green. Or some of it is the pale yellow of uncooked corn. Each blade of grass is separate from the other, each blade of grass long and skinny before ending in a point in the sky. But some are not long, and some are not skinny; each blade of grass is different.
When I dig my fingers into the ground, they become tangled in a kind of net connecting each blade of grass to all the others. And when I lift my head up, I see that the grass, this net, goes on forever.
*
Oliver is very interested in the wooden box of vials on the allergist’s desk. He twists in my lap when I turn him so that his back is facing her, not out of fear but because he wants to get another look at the neat grid of vials with their bright red caps.
He stops squirming when she begins to draw on his back with black texta, his body rigid as she draws three rows of circles, then numbers each from one to fifteen. He stays perfectly still, eyes wide and blank while she pricks each circle, and only seems to return to himself in the waiting room when I put him on the grey carpet next to a wooden ice cream truck. He peers inside the open top of the truck and pushes it back and forth on the carpet.
After half an hour, the allergist calls us back into her office and lifts the back of his jumper. All the circles are empty, enclosing nothing but the smooth brown skin that was there before.
*
The next time it happens, he is sitting at my feet in the kitchen sorting through a collection of bowls and measuring cups. He coughs once, twice, then draws a single rasping breath before I hear the muted thud of his body dropping onto the tiles. I drop to my knees and grab for the Epipen in my pocket with one hand, pulling him onto my lap with the other. His head flops back against my chest, but his eyes are half-open as if he had just woken from a nap, or as if he were just about to fall asleep. I tuck his arms into the tight circle of my embrace and pull the blue cap off the end of the injector with my free hand. I squeeze his thigh and push the orange tip, hard, into his leg. The epipen emits a loud click and his whole body tenses, his mouth opening wide in a silent scream. My own body stiffens in response, holding him straight and still with the needle embedded deep in his thigh muscle.
After four seconds, his scream escapes, a high-pitched wail that grows and grows until the kitchen is full of the sound of him. He shakes and judders from the effort of it, but I continue to hold him in place until ten seconds has passed and I can remove the needle from his leg. His cries stop suddenly, cut off by a gurgle and the wet slop of liquid on the tiles as his gut empties itself onto the floor. I let him hang over my forearm, searching with one trembling hand on the kitchen bench for my phone.
As we wait for the ambulance, his crying tapers off into a low moaning punctuated by sporadic sobs that jolt his entire body. I stay on the kitchen floor, my arms wrapped around his narrow torso, my own tears flowing silently into the damp cotton of his t-shirt.
*
While they monitor him, I sleep with my head resting on the edge of his small bed.
I wander down a hospital corridor lined with closed doors. Some rooms have windows looking out onto the corridor, but aluminium blinds hide the contents of each room.
I stop at one door and push the handle down. The door swings inwards to reveal a laboratory, its benches covered with rows and rows of blood samples. The blood is almost black in the incandescent hospital lighting. I retreat, gently pulling the door closed behind me.
In the next room, a squat yellow robotic arm moves purposefully over a carefully organised bench. The red and yellow wires connecting each segment of the arm to the next give it a naked look.
I walk to the door at the end of the corridor and hold my breath as I push it open. In the middle of the room stands a machine the size and colour of a photocopier. Nothing moves, but occasionally a soft whirring, followed by a muted click comes from deep inside the machine. I place my hand on its smooth plastic casing and am flooded with relief.
The door opens behind me, and a quiet male voice interrupts me, ‘Excuse me, but you shouldn’t be in here.’
*
We are walking along a thin creek, making slow progress because Oliver stops every few metres to select a piece of gravel from the footpath or press the soles of his shoes into the damp mud by the creek.
On the crest of a gently sloping hill, he pauses to run his hands along the peeling trunk of a paperbark tree. When he pinches the curling edge of a strip of bark as if to peel it back from the trunk, I slip my hand between his and the tree, disengaging his fingers from the bark. He looks up at me with a question in his face, then suddenly drops his head so that his face is pressed up against the bark. My breath catches and my blood surges, but then the familiar rise and fall of his voice emerges from the narrow space between him and the tree. I sit back on my heels and lean my cheek against the top of his head, though he is speaking too softly for me to hear what he’s saying.
*
I am climbing a tree, or I am just lifting myself onto the lowest branch of a tree, when I feel a firm tug on my ankle. I look back over my shoulder and see my own face, creased with worry, so I drop down off the branch and sit on the ground beside myself.
We sit in the sound of the air moving through the leaves of the tree and I feel the kind of calm I only ever feel when I am by myself, but without the unease that accompanies being alone out in the open. The other me smiles at me and raises her hand to point up at something in the shifting foliage.
When I turn to look, I am struck by the generosity of the tree: its narrow silver-brown trunk spreading rapidly to fill the sky with a multitude of leaves lit bright green by the sunlight. I sink my hands into the rich mix of soil and old leaves beneath me. I tip my head back so that my face is parallel with the sky to watch the leaves turn and wink in the breeze.
December 16, 2021 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dinasha Edirisinghe was born in Sri Lanka and raised in Australia. She has completed a Bachelor of Arts and a Masters of Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing at The University of Melbourne and is currently completing her PhD at Deakin University. Her dissertation explores the creative work of the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous and the Australian writer Patrick White. It also includes a novella called This Night which is inspired by her research. Her story, Vesāk, is an extract from this novella. Dinasha enjoys all things literary and loves living in Melbourne where she exposes herself to as much art, cinema and theatre as humanly possible.
Vesāk
The cold night deepens. It grows bold and the Moreton Bay Fig shivers, releasing a cascade of pebble-like fruit. Green buds like little moons descend, each one containing a universe within.
The Fig worries that he’s falling ill again. A chill runs through his leaves, the tips of his branches and his roots. Around him, the temple gardens are bathed in lights, each brilliant point a star in the dark sky. The moon, in full bloom, is its centrepiece: pearl white against a deep indigo sky.
The air echoes with an orchestra of voices chanting the five precepts: Kāmesumicchācāra veramaṇī sikkhāpadaṃ samādiyāmi. The voices, some too eager and others too slow, linger over the final word, carving its syllables into the earth.
Worshippers carrying food and offerings — flowers and parcels of milk rice and sweets wrapped in banana leaves — disperse along stone paths intersecting the gardens. A group of monks rugged up in orange and maroon admires a Crimson Bottlebrush, pointing at its red blooms, while a troupe of painted dancers rushes past, gesturing nervously to the stage up ahead, their thick coats rustling against their traditional garments. The line of Crepe Myrtles behind the stage flutters, excited. Their rusting foliage is set ablaze by the fairy lights adorning them.
The bell-shaped stupa to the left attracts the most interest. The burnt clay-brick structure, with its thick plaster casing, is a pure meringue-white. Visitors circumambulate, sit or prostrate themselves around it, deep in contemplation.
The Fig also makes a slight bow to the stupa. Bark, sap and heartwood creaking, he offers up the lanterns threaded throughout his branches. Their supple skins, lit from within, bounce and scratch against him.
A constellation of Buddhas watches as he moves.
Peppered throughout the gardens in a Centaurus-like pattern, they sit in various positions or mudras. Some are in the Dhyana Mudra, cross-legged with upturned palms placed one on top of the other, several sit in the Bhumisparsha Mudra, their right hands hanging over their knees and pointing towards the earth, their left hands sitting in their laps with the palm upturned. The reclining Buddhas lie on their sides and rest their hands against their cheeks, as if they are asleep, and the towering Buddhas, with giant stone lotuses blossoming at their feet, stand in the Abhaya Mudra: their right arms bent at the elbow and their palms facing outwards.
The Fig has seen each one of these monoliths raised over the years. Close to his height, they speak sometimes. Last year, they were the first to notice the rust forming on the undersides of his leaves. As the tiny yellow spots turned reddish brown, the monks grew alarmed, but the Buddhas did not panic. Instead, they insisted on staying up with him as he tossed and turned – feverish – telling stories to take his mind off his illness.
They told tales of stone quarries and a slow coming into consciousness. They reminisced about temperate climates and elaborate full moon festivities where whole countries were set alight for the occasion. The Fig is grateful to them. From time to time, he still dreams of elephant-led processions winding their way through streets glistening with spectators.
In the distance, the Fig spots a man and woman, wearing the traditional white, emerge from a line of worshippers waiting to pay their respects. They walk forward but disappear when a crowd of children hurtles past, engulfing them.
The man, jostled about, reaches out to the woman. His hand finds hers. Together they re-emerge from among the throng of youths heading in the opposite direction.
The Fig, prone to presentiment, knows that they are moving towards him.
He watches them veer off the stone path into his mass of protruding roots. Their hands loosen, then break apart as they step precariously from root to intertwined root, bodies pivoting, as if on an axis, each time they slip or stumble.
When they can go no further, they stop and stare upwards at the canopy of transpiring lanterns and leaves.
The lanterns reach out to Hema. They are refined and elegant and emit a gentle light that turns everything in the vicinity golden. They remind her of home, of walking hand in hand with her amma eating bombai mutai, which they buy from a vendor walking through the streets ringing a little bell. More straw-like than the fairy floss you can get here, Hema sorely misses its powdery texture.
Anthony feels the lanterns are goading him. He knows they are beautiful only because they are delicate and could be destroyed at any moment. To him, they are a reminder of the sensation of cool earth pressed against naked skin, the sound of a voice mimicking the call of the Magpie Robin and the last lines of a poem by Lakdasa Wikkramasinha: The poet is a bomb in the city, Unable to bear the circle of the Seconds in his heart, Waiting to burst.
Hema senses the shift in her husband. She is well versed in the signs. Despite this, she reaches out to touch him. He doesn’t notice. So, she withdraws the offending hand and covers it with the less-brazen one beside it.
A young man walking by throws a careless glance to his side and sees the two figures standing side by side: their faces frozen in attitudes of rapt attention. His mind transforms them into two masked players performing a tragedy to an amphitheatre of lanterns and leaves.
When the woman reaches out to the man standing beside her, the young man feels his own body tilt right in response – in anticipation. When she is rebuffed, the sting of indignity spreads throughout his own chest, pooling behind his eyes and at the pit of his stomach.
He perceives in her quick resignation something – once floriferous – withering. He has seen it before. Many times, in fact. She is like a flower – large and grotesque – decaying on its stem. Yet there is still something of life and of living in her predicament. Better to be like her than like himself: a bud wound tightly shut. Infructuous.
She is older than him, most likely part of that generation of migrants – some refugees but mostly skilled labourers – invited to come and settle here in Australia by the government. Unlike the first wave of Burghers that preceded them, they were not as adept at English or as knowledgeable about Western customs. But, through sheer determination, they made homes here, raised families, and put together what little they had to buy and bequeath this land to the monks. Now students, like him, hope to achieve the same, envying the fruits of their labours without really understanding the hardships that went into them.
The plot here, at the very outer limits of the burgeoning northern suburbs, is generous but the ground is sparsely populated with vegetation. There’s no humidity in this place, only a temperamental dryness. Even when it is cold, like it is today. The landscape is almost stripped down to the bone. The foliage an extension of its exoskeleton.
Back home, the young man studied history. Here this interest has been relegated to a past time while he studies for a Diploma in Information Technology. But in his free time, he does much reading on the country. To him, Australia seems a place pulled in different directions, echoing with forgotten voices. In this respect, it is like him. The outcast in an otherwise prosperous family, earning a kind of distinction by the act of leaving.
Now he spends his days studying, then scrubbing plates and pushing trolleys in a nursing home kitchen before coming home to a house he shares with three other male students.
He comforts himself with the knowledge that he did not come here out of some misguided fear of missing out. So many people did this, selling their shares in ancestral lands to pay for it. No, his was a self-imposed exile with a higher purpose. The way he left things, going back was not an option.
No doubt, in years to come, they will all wonder if they lost something instead of gaining it. He thinks the woman already wonders; he is sure of it.
Glancing at her, yet again, he cannot help but construct a life for them. It will begin on a quiet afternoon in spring. He will see her on the days she comes to help at the temple. One day she will drop her book and he will pick it up, running after her to return it. They will talk of their favourite novels, their shared interest in the works of Martin Wickramasinghe. She will find his penchant for rereading the historical texts of Walpola Rahula Thero deeply illustrative of his dedication to his true calling, a sign of his steadfast and disciplined nature. The ensuing months will be bliss, disrupted every now and then with the realities of conducting a secret affair. Eventually, she will leave her husband and come to him. There will be talk, of course, but it will not matter to them.
The young man sighs. It seems so easy for some, but not for him. He is reminded of his last foray into love, and it chastens him. Taking one last look at the woman, he continues on his way.
Hema, unaware of the interest she has provoked, is lost in thoughts of her duwa, Anu. In a little while Anu’s play will be performed on stage, a work of art she wrote all by herself. Each time the girl reads a book that moves her, she mopes around for days looking longingly out into a future that only she can see. It worries Hema, who knows that with each obsession Anu moves inwards, further away from how life really is.
Just like her thaththa.
Still, she has created something out of nothing, Hema admires this. Sometimes, the joy she feels when looking at her daughter is overtaken by sorrow, a deep, painful ache in her bones. Every now and then, for the briefest moment, there is envy. It crawls all over her skin, gnawing at it. Then there’s the fear and the uncertainty. It is the worst of all because it blinds her.
Hema shakes her head in an effort to forget.
When the world comes back into focus, a man steps into her line of vision. He is tall and his gait, his manner of movement, reminds her of an afternoon long ago. She’s sure she’s seen that silhouette before. She knows it. Though, it is dark, and maybe she is mistaken. She cannot be certain.
‘I think I know that man,’ Hema says out loud. She steps forward unconsciously and then feels suddenly afraid.
Anthony either doesn’t hear her or doesn’t care.
Up ahead, the man, as if responding, turns in her direction. He is not who she thought he was.
No matter, she thinks. Yet her heart beats hard and her body aches with the intensity of it.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, she recites again, and again. There is a pain like electricity in her chest, spluttering and spitting, burning her up.
A little girl runs by the fig tree, catching Hema’s eye as she goes. She hops over the roots in leaps and bounds, fearless. Another girl runs close behind the first, a swirl of laughter and fabric. Dressed in crisp, white clothes: a simple dress, coat and stockings, the little girl squeals, stumbles, races ahead, falls and springs up in an instant, ready to go again.
A crimson ribbon comes undone in her hair. No longer bow-shaped, it dances in the air, contorting and twisting behind her.
Hema smiles. She thinks to herself that the ribbon flies wildly through the air the way little girls fly through their lives – free and unrestrained.
The girl glances back at the woman standing under the big tree with the pretty lanterns hanging off it. She seems to be staring at her. Leaving a streak of dirt on her cheek as she scratches at it, the girl notices the man beside the woman and her thoughts grow serious.
She wonders who she will marry one day. It seems so impossibly far away but wonderful all the same. The little girl’s seriousness dissipates as quickly as it comes. She hears her sister approaching and takes off again, in a hurry.
Hema watches her go.
Turning back to the fig, Hema finds it transformed. It now seems to sit in the ground like a fat spider with outstretched limbs. Its aerial roots dangling, web-like. The lanterns, too, are different. Superfluous, with their elaborate outer shells in the wrong for dulling the source of each lantern’s beauty: the naked light within.
The fig tree stares back at the woman. He stares hard, like she does, undaunted. In her he senses a kindred spirit.
She, like him, was moved here and made to grow in this soil. He bears deep scars from a great fire, but her blaze is still burning, her scars still forming. She, like him, only lets her flowers blossom deep within, life has taught her to do this. And, in the darkness, underneath her fruit-like armour of skin and bone, she is like him — full of wasps that sting but fill her with life as well. She is nothing without them.
She has come on this full moon day in the lunar month of Vesāka, to contemplate the life of the Gautama Buddha. Born a prince in Lumbini, he renounced everything and achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree before experiencing parinirvana and teaching us the lesson of impermanence. She, like him, takes solace in this knowledge, in this stepping away from desire, from the constant wanting. It makes the years lived and the hardships experienced seem small in comparison.
The fig has grown on this land for many years, and he has seen many things. As a sapling, he began life as an epiphyte; a newborn among ancients, who told tales of a native people – tens of thousands of years old – and great ships journeying across the ocean, spreading violence and disease.
As he grew into his surroundings, he saw land being cleared, friends being felled, and countless animals set to graze and die through intense periods of drought and fire. The worst blaze took place in 1851. It raised whole townships to the ground. And he, scattered in the wind, landed here alongside a Eucalypt, now a part of him, fully engulfed by his limbs. He, like her, is of this land and not of it at the same time. They are a million pieces, shifting, changing, converging endlessly.
Recently, he has begun to feel his age. The incessant creaking and swelling of his joints never cease and the endless pain in his limbs, worse since his illness, leaves his body bloated and stiff. But the sight of this woman, taking root in this old soil and growing, striving and struggling, makes him feel infinite, even if it is just for a moment.