30.9.09

ghosts of the red dust


Around dusk I'm driving someone to the airport when I see the big black cloud towering in the south. Storm is rising . . . blues fall down like drops of rain . . . later on, after the forked lightning and the heavy showers, a drunk lawyer going to Bankstown tells me that the forecast, which he does not believe, is for one hundred kilometre an hour winds. They come through in the night, bringing the red dust, and next morning the air is a sinister orange colour, car headlamps and streetlights glow silver and beamless, unable to penetrate the murk. We can feel the fine particulate matter in our nostrils, in our eyes, on our tongues as we wait out by the letterbox for the taxi. We are early or it is late so we hail a cruiser, a mad Arab who nearly tears M's fingers off as he grabs at her suitcase and drives through the apocalyptic streets as if he himself has a date with destiny. On the railway overbridge at Sydenham a truck has spilled its load of turf, the driver is out on the road with a mask around his mouth rolling up the unrolled rolls of someone's new lawn while the red wind whips by. No planes are leaving because no planes are coming in: the dust sucked into their jet engines might turn to mud once they fly up again into wet layers of atmospheric cloud. The airline disavows all responsibility and leaves it to us to re-book on a later flight. When that is done we check into the Ibis for the day, eat, shower, rest, unaware that the ferrous dust contains microbes, viruses, that have lain quiescent out there in the Lake Eyre Basin since before the Phanerozoic Eon began. They came perhaps from that epochal collision between proto-earth and the very large, Mars-sized planetesimal that split off the moon; and have been biding their time ever since: older than the 4404 Ma zircon crystals of Alcheringa, older than Cryptozoic bacteria found in the Greenland permafrost; almost older than time. We don't at first realise we are playing host to aliens, the knowledge comes upon us only slowly, as blessed incomprehension gives way to the kind of clarity I wouldn't wish upon anyone else; except that we are all equally infected or soon will be. For instance I did not know that the molecules of blood and chlorophyll are nearly identical, iron in the one replaced by magnesium in the other, but now I see it at a glance. I look down at the palm of my hand and watch there, past skin and fat and bone and blood, the double helix untwining, the mitochondria exorcising their vesicles, the RNA . . . I keeping thinking Rodinia but that is the wrong word. These Martian viruses are not responsible for our arcane nomenclature, they have no interest in any of that, all they want to do is replicate as fast as possible. I have a nose full of the red dust that I don't unload until we are in the hotel room in Auckland and have slept and woken and it is morning again. It's in the creases of my big black sports bag and all through the back pack I use to carry smaller things around. Auckland is rainy, all grey and white and blue, muted and dazzling at once. I get wet walking up to the publishers on Anzac Avenue and notice a slightly orange tinge in the drips falling from my eyebrows. Out on the island we explore military fortifications from World War Two: gun emplacements, observation decks, radar rooms, underground bunkers where the big shells were stored. Long concrete tunnels for unspecified purposes. All the stock has been taken off while some poison that thins the blood is dropped to make a dent in the populations of rodents and mustelids and feral cats infesting the island. It's killed all the native wildlife too, as well as a few dogs, and without sheep to crop it the grass grows tall and lush and green and looks like something out of a film, perhaps of the Mongolian steppe . . . or would if there were not saucers and slabs of blue gulf everywhere you look. Our X Ray eyes trouble us less out here, it's only in the city, among the uninfected or not yet infected populations that the extrasensory seems an affliction. After all who really wants to know what others are thinking? Or rather, not thinking so much as just aimlessly moving around the clutter we keep in our minds. I weary of this too great an insight into things, I try instead to open up a channel of communication with the beings I now harbour; but the only language they understand is chemical. On the plane back we drink Bloody Marys and watch a very funny film about a Bucks Night in Vegas. At the duty free I buy a bottle of Kentucky bourbon because I've learned that alcohol sends a strong signal into the recesses of my body where the particulate beings have established their beachheads. In Summer Hill I see the red dust everywhere, all over the cars in the street, in the cracks between every paving stone up at the village, gathered on the leaves of the dry sclerophyll trees. My apartment smells of it, dry, slightly metallic, utterly without aura. We have left two wine glasses in the sink, rinsed but with the grey water still in them. A skin of red dust has formed on top of each one and when I look closely at it I see cities of the red night incandescing, their outlandish tribes contending for mastery, their orgies and massacres, their carnage, their sadness and their fear. I quickly tip the glasses' contents away down the drain even though I know it is useless: the ghosts of the red dust are with us now forever and those changes of perception noted above are only the beginning of a process of mutation that will soon make us unrecognisable to each other; except as the aliens we are now fast becoming.

.

17.9.09

. . . the andromeda galaxy




empurpled . . .





.

cyborgs at the junction


Some things are hard to shift out of the head. Monday arvo I saw a guy knocked down by a taxi ... he survived what was in the scheme of things not that bad an accident; but still. I was idling third on the Bondi Junction rank when I saw him cross between the two cabs ahead of me. Youngish, chubby, non-descript clothes. Soon as I realised he wasn't getting into the point cab I lost interest, but did see him give a little skip in preparation for running across the road after the bus just then passing had gone by. Then, the bang. Looked up again, there he was, spread-eagled on the tar-seal, having apparently bounced off the side of a moving taxi the way people bounce off invisible force fields in the movies. Accidents in the aftermath are strange: you see things with great clarity but don't necessarily know what they mean. This fellow scrambled to his feet, went over to the passenger side window of the now stationary cab and, with hands together as if in prayer, bowed to the driver within. It was then I noticed that the wing mirror on that side of the car had been torn off and was lying next to the front wheel of the cab in front of mine. I climbed out and picked it up, just as the driver of the damaged cab, looking exasperated and ignoring the guy he hit, came out to retrieve it. Thinking about it afterwards, watching the guy massaging his upper arm and shoulder, I realised that the mirror must have hit him there with force strong enough to rip it from its mooring. Here's the strange thing: somehow my mind has transposed the mirror, broken off, glass still intact, trailing electrical wires, with the guy's arm. As if he were a cyborg and his arm some kind of bionic attachment. I mean when I close my eyes I see him holding his dun shoulder with wires protruding from the empty socket where his arm used to be. Waiting for the robot repair men to come and make him whole again.



.

3.9.09

Neptunian


The sky through the Venetian blinds is the colour of Neptune. The pale blue of ponds and evenings, across which the errant moon, Despina, casts down her queenly shadow over the clouds of hydrogen swirling in 2100 kilometre per hour winds. I would close the blinds if I did not see, far away in the west, the faint sigla of our future happiness setting. It's hard to make out against that faded ultramarine but looks like this:

Astronomical symbol for Neptune.

which means I think that the sea holds whatever promise there may be for us now. I used to imagine Venus, I used to entertain Mars. For half a decade now I've been haunted by Saturn, Cassini pictures beamed back across 8.833 A.U. directly into my visual cortex, scrambling the synapses until I saw rings wherever I went. Fingers, toes. Now I think of the Ninth Men, designed to live out there beyond Uranus: Inevitably it was a dwarf type, limited in size by the necessity of resisting an excessive gravitation ... too delicately organized to withstand the ferocity of natural forces on Neptune ... civilization crumbled into savagery.

Astronomical symbol for Neptune.

And the Tenth to the Seventeenth: Nowhere did the typical human form survive; but the Fifteenth and the Sixteenth achieved a great civilization and learned to study past minds. Then there was the Eighteenth: Superficially we seem to be not one species but many. Extinguished with the rest of what remained of the Solar System in a supernova n million years from now. Or so the book says. As if the future might be written from the past, as if the study of past minds might reveal not this future but another: there have been so many worlds / between th bell & th blue star !

Astronomical symbol for Neptune.

Neptune. I'm still going to close the blind and go about my business, but just before I do I take a closer look at that strange now deepened blue. And it isn't the colour of the sky. It isn't the sky at all. It's like in Quiet Earth, that blue planet has come down to this blue planet and we are having congress with one another. I hear the bells of St. Andrews, tolling out a final evensong. I see the black rags of birds flung up against the void. I feel the unholy chill of hydrogen creeping along my skin, minus 218 °C. Can you name that colour now, azurine, berryline, gridelin or bloom?

Astronomical symbol for Neptune.

I should close the blinds but don't: go instead out the door onto the balcony. I'll swallow blue or let it swallow me. A last thought: Raymond Chandler's favourite piece of American slang: Aw, turn blue ... I do. And while there's still time step off into that darkening sky.


image: Despina, Moon of Nepturn; quotations from Last & First Men by Olaf Stapledon (1930) except the lines of verse from David Mitchell, laughing with th taniwha, Pipe Dreams in Ponsonby (1972)


.

1.9.09

The Disappearing M


This review of the book my publishers like to call ZoM appeared before the book is even out - and before I had seen a copy of it. It - the review - popped into my inbox this morning, before I'd had a chance to go down to the local PO to pick up my six author's copies. Looks good ... I already knew, from an email the other day, that an inexplicable error had appeared on page 18; somehow, nobody knows how, the 'm' in Gilgamesh had disappeared. I checked back on the last proof I saw, and the 'm' is there; ditto at the publisher's end; but now it is gone. Here's the sentence: It’s curious too that Gilga(m)esh reaches the Waters of Death by travelling east, towards and then past the place where the sun rises: the Egyptians, the Greeks, and all subsequent major cultures in the Western tradition locate the land of the dead in the other direction, where the sun sets. Actually I quite like the version Gilgaesh; and, inter alia, wonder if in fact the errant 'm' wasn't itself eaten by the waters of death.


.