Flight

Oh how we stretched our new wings on the day that everyone learnt how to fly! We left the room through the window and joined the aerial throngs milling and swooping around Sydney’s metal and glass peaks. A thin stream twirled in a loop around Centrepoint, gulls hurtling around the rocks of Eden. People laughing and flocking, their exuberance a delight against the dour illustrated angels in the city’s cathedral. Wings of thought and fancy sprouted from everyone’s backs, feathery masterpieces that shifted and spun like otherworldly ferns of unimaginable hue. For days we played in the air! We sucked what sustenance our bodies needed from human joy and delight, our mingling and our togetherness. To be anywhere! To see everything!

And yet, as time went on and into the second week, members of us became bored. Their senses became dulled by the experience of the unbelievable and impossible. It started with the physicists and philosophers, who joined the priesthood on the ground, who had been determined to avoid the sin of flight from the start, figuring the will of god to manifest itself in corporeal wings, not imaginary ones. The wise-men nodded their heads and stroked their beards, agreeing that these thought-tassels worn shamelessly around the shoulders were a foul temptation. Thus the men of religion found new unity on earth while their congregations flew as one in the sky. The physicists and philosophers, closer to the priesthood than they would have liked to hear, rejected the material manifestation of an immaterial wish. New age baloney! cried the physicists, hating the downfall of their faith. The philosophers were mortally jealous that they had lost the exclusive ability to soar, within the four walls of their heads yes, but soar unbound nonetheless. Next the financiers, bankers, stockmarket-men, gangsters and entrepreneurs. There was no niche in the perfect sky, no profit, no suckers or roll-overs. The ground is for us, they decided. On the ground we can escape these shackles of equality, we can excel, dominate and subjugate. The world needs ditchdiggers, they say, and thus it must need people who demand ditches be dug in the first place, around and under their fabulous palaces. Soon followed in their own wave high society, fashionistas, magazine editors, Anna Wintour (a category all by herself), scenesters, models, designers and tastemakers. Flying? Everyone (anyone) can do that. Others gave up their wings, those who would always need a place among others.

But who to sew the dresses? To thread the needles? Who to take the loans? Who to fill the pews and pay the taxes and read the books and go round and round and on the mill? Not us in the sky, no, we wheeled and screamed and hollered our joy! We were expected to relinquish our pretty sky-silks and come to the ground, pulled down by stern glances and a palpable wave of condescension. As we ignored the call to give up our gift and get on with our lives, our ‘real’ lives, our two worlds pulled apart. New fashions appeared on the ground, caps with brims and visors blocking the joyous melee of colour above from view, we were unmentioned, unmentionable. Those below did not leave their warrens and their cities extended underground, fabulous burrows of activity and squalor extending miles into the crust. Our intransigence to part with what they could not have, what they were now too bitter to take back, was intolerable. Underground for years they missed what we did to the earth, how we decked the even the tallest buildings in haunting skyscapes of golden colours, each piece of ironwork interwoven with a glisteningly soft filigree of imagination made manifest.

* * *

In time, those below have forgotten, they call us the angels, bad luck by night and good by day, beings of light and splendour, mystical creatures somehow left over from an age of legend. They occasionally venture up and outside, not ever to live, but simply to see. For the world does not look like a home any more, it is too beautiful, too heartrendingly plumed with our endless thought. The polar lights are a flickering bulb against our glory. The earth-people take their young up to see us, to prove we are not like manticores or dragons or mermaids, that we are real. The children see our magnificence, but do not know that their ancestors gave up our effortless flight. They have new wonders to see each time they leave their anthills; we work slowly and painstakingly, for we have forever; we shall never die.

Rebecca was a girl

Rebecca lived in a tiny terrace in the inner city. Her room was in the attic, accessible only through a complex hierarchy of staircases that narrowed progressively as they climbed higher. One could, possibly, enter through the single window at the top of the high brick side of the house, but that would entail scaling foliage too meagre for any romantic tryst. Her neighbourhood was a jumble of old warehouse facades, only brick-thin, pubs, cornerstores, coffeeshops, vintage stores and Bollywood video rentals. The house was one in an identical row, each unit distinguished by the relative dilapidation of what had once been enthusiastic paint colours.

Rebecca was a dour girl, yet prone to laughter. When she failed to stop herself smiling she would shake it off like chicken feathers on a petulant fox. When it rained she would sit at the window looking out at the grey, reduced city, affecting a moody face. It would only last a few minutes because she became terribly bored. This was just as well, because it gave her more time to indulge in her passion. Rebecca’s favourite pastime was making costumes for parties she never went to. When a sci-fi party was announced she would immediately begin work on a towering robotic creature, equipped with flashing lights, glowing tubes and tantalising buttons, for her to crawl inside and metallically rage and roar. When the neighbours threw a Halloween party she locked her door for three days, eating only Saladas, making a the most grotesquely gothic gargoyle she could imagine.

The point was not to go to parties, because while Rebecca liked people by themselves, she detested their plural. No, the point was to know that, had she gone, she would have had the best costume and thus be the most fascinating creature there. She was satisfied with potentiality, so much the better to denounce those merry congregations.

Bats #2

Flap flap the first bat courageously emerges into the barren strip of sky over the Brisbane River, braving no-man’s land before the sun has even truly sunk into evening, sparking babble and gossip among its more staunchly nocturnal peers. Eventually, however, as the horizon’s glow blunts into dusk these conservatives follow their outrider, first in groups then in a steady stream of determined shapes flap flapping across the unbroken river into the fig trees where they will feast and squeek and revel in the opacity of the humid night. The ground under the figs gains another layer of fruit shaken loose, to be pounded into jam by joggers, cyclists and commuters when the sun completes its half-revolution. To me, unlucky enough to be without shoes, the figs ooze between my toes and give me the horrible feeling of stepping on snails after rain (if the snails came almost up to my ankles).

The endless migration of bats across the river at this appointed hour is making me uneasy, because I may be able to distinguish them now against Brisbane’s bruised sky, but when it becomes truly night, the whole sky might as well be bats. They will only be briefly revealed when they flap flap in front of the towers over the water, or swoop near the park lights for insects. Standing under lights at night makes me uncomfortable, like being interrogated, like being on stage. Good thing I don’t mind the bats themselves. But against the dark I wield only the last half of my smoke, and then that’s gone and ground into the ground I won’t be able to draw the lines anymore, I won’t be able to make the divisions, it won’t be night, bat, me but just flap, flap, flap and the patter of falling figs.

Dessert at Customs House

Turns out, turns out, that the platter, be it cheese or desert, is remarkably good value, being split between three or four, and would perhaps satisfy five (as a post-dinner of course). Me, I prefer my main meal to be satisfying or cheap: Bill and Toni’s or Tropicana as a preference. Byron would prefer something ‘nicer’, but I would disagree, although I also argued about expensive cars (and their undesireability) with K, so I think the disagreement is deeper than mere pasta. Something that feels like you’ve swallowed a boot, but a good, wholesome boot. It was cold, but my companions did not believe so. They said it was only so by the water. Turns out all of Sydney is by the water, idiots. I have to be all Hannibal Lecter with my scarf, it’s chilly.

Wildflowers

I’m hurtling through the green under a scummy soap-sud sky, the countryside verdantly lush because of the rains. Pools and ponds have burst their banks, joining already swelling rivers or turning roads into watercourses. Flooded forests stretch their downward reflection into infinity, a living chasm in the landscape. The tops of the gently undulating hills are crowned as always with gums but occasionally breaking out in serious thickets of bush and tropical foliage. The changing types of wildflower growing along the tracks are perhaps the only variation, the proportion of black to crown cows apparently unchanged from state to state.

Human habitation punctuates the dullness with its own brand of monotony: coal yards, scrapheaps, electrical substations, forgettable towns and the reassuring power lines, leaping over and beside the train like dolphin or gulls on more buoyant transports. Lying sometimes in gullies, riverbeds or in distant clearings are mysterious piles or deliberate constructions of corrugated irons in various states of decay, begging to be explored. The train, unfortunately, has no sympathy for my curiosity and roars on in its own bullheaded, implacable fashion. Charging into the primeval darkness of a tunnel and out again, only to plunge into another a few steps along the mountain. In these passages the train windows become completely reflective, and we are without warning confronted by our own faces, ravaged by sleeplessness, discomfort and boredom. It is very disconcerting, and the end of the tunnel is eagerly anticipated. Back in the foliage again, a bright yellow and green portable toilet splashes its antiseptic fluorescence by the rails, a curious contrast to the lack of people. Perhaps the local cows are modest.

In the late afternoon the taller, more fully forested hills in the distance are smothered by the sky dropping under the weight of all that boorish rain. Oh look, black and white spotted cows, the only herbivore Frances will allow the title of “real” cow.

Twin Bins

I was dwelling on two bins entrenched side-by-side on George St. Why dwelling on the bins? Well, in the city it’s best to dwell on things below head level, to avoid the horrible mistake of making eye-contact with a rushing anybody. It’s terrible exchanging that anxious animal glance between people in the city, herbivores agitated by the crowd and the smell and the speed. So: dwelling on the bins. Funny bins, placed so close together when the block to either side was decidedly free of rubbish recepticles. Fitingly, outside the station there was also a clutch of postboxes; another utility characterised by its loneliness. Commuters were hurling their butts into the curved metal container at the top intended for this purpose, being too busy of course to stub them properly. The bins were both spouting smoke vigorously. Both combustions were uniformly affected by the wind blowing from the Quay and sweeping up the funnel of glass and metal of George St, so from these two bins, huddling together and immobile in the isolation and compartmentised hurry of those busy, busy city folk, spilled out twin dancers that would waft and twirl in perfect synchronisation, oblivious to the background roar and sharp air-brake sounds of buses.

Bats #1

On cloudy, windy nights, bats are given grace by their sillouettes, looking like silent seagulls as they drift and coast and soar in the breeze coming off the harbour, flapping about the street lights for their meals, until they fly directly above and expose the prehensile fingertips of their membrenous wings. Their noiseless flight is the only spectacle of motion, interrupted perhaps by the glint of a late night car on a distant suburban hill across the harbour, or a ferry drifting gaily in the blackness between two piers, told always by the flashing reds and greens of the bouys. In the morning their bodies can sometimes be found in the street, killed by the wires powering the bulbs that attract their morsels of nurishment. Their deaths, surely noiseome, must occur at that perfect moment when everyone is unconscious, or, like their flight, it is soundless, and the bats hanging on the wires droop silently and gently slump into the dark bitumen of the street.

So maybe that’s what we’re like, ugle and graceful at the same time, or depending on your point of view, the sole creatures ducking and diving through our local stream of consciousness. Then, just like the bats, all at once, we are dead, and it is either silent or ignored. But there will always be more bats, because there are so many bugs.