In suburbia

There are two leopard trees set in the pavement in front of our house. They are unusually broad for Queensland trees, with a lush canopy that houses countless birds -- mostly honeyeaters, I think, but when they flower, parrots and lorrikeets visit. They hide the lounge from view and shade the house, so it is not as fiery in the summer as I remember its being a few years back.

When I walk across the lawn, the thick broad leaves of the grass are uncomfortable under my feet. It has struck me often that the settlers did not bring fine-bladed grass with them. The soft lawns of English front yards are not to be seen here. Perhaps our grass would struggle to survive in this climate. Here, the grass can be brown, flat, dead as a doornail in one season and rebound to astonishing lushness in the next. However, you can't help noting that it takes a long time to establish itself when there is a bare patch. This is the Australian story: what is there grows but when you plant new, it rarely does. The land is not good. When we first came, we thought it was, thanks to its lushness, but that had taken centuries, millennia to establish itself. We have made a dry land drier, salinated it, made much of it unusable. Now the dreams of an Australia of fifty million -- a power in the world -- that some on the right harboured have foundered on a lack of water.

***

This is a large room but sometimes I feel it is as small as the monk's cell. It is my prison. I have tried to feel at home but something has hollowed me out, emptied me of feeling, and left me brown and sere like everything else in this sunburnt country.

I cannot change anything. I mean, I feel I cannot. Of course I could. Sometimes I glimpse a life I could lead, as though I was seeing it through the leaves of the leopard tree. But events conspire.

A numb person cannot do anything for the people who know them. I cannot discuss it or explain it because the words seem flat and unreal.

I wish sometimes that those who claim to love me would feel it was worth pouring on water instead of demanding that I should just be green. But perhaps it is the lot of men of my age that they are not nurtured, that no one feels they need it, want it or would benefit from it. Perhaps people only see what you can be for them, and not what they might be for you. Or perhaps I don't see it.

I am not pretending to have answers.

***

I begin to feel liberated when I drive the Smegma. I am taking a big risk, because I do not have a licence, although I'm perfectly safe when I drive. I have always hated cars -- symbols of the death of our world, in themselves sources of immense danger that we barely recognise -- but I am changing my mind as I begin to taste what being mobile will mean to me. It is a vagary of the system here that you must hold your learner's licence for six months before you can be tested, so I cannot be licensed until October, but when I am, I will no longer have to rely on others to cart me around. In England, this is practically of no account. Here, it is almost life itself.

I will walk the hills of Brisbane, the scent of eucalypts carrying me. I cannot be a flaneur here but I can be a walker.

***

I cannot be a flaneur because the crowd does not thrill me. They do not inspire me. Perhaps I should stay away from shopping centres. I come out of them profoundly depressed. Bosch would have only needed a camera had he lived in Carindale. I could forgive the clothes if they were adorning less ugly people, and I could forgive the ugliness if it housed people who were gracious or good-humoured. I confuse them with my English courtesy, as I allow them to barge past me through doors, or apologise for their stepping on my feet.

If you ever doubted that materialism is a stain on the human soul, you need only visit Garden City shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon, and watch the lumpenproletariat of Mt Gravatt drift aimlessly from shop to shop. I advise only those of the strongest constitution to venture into the food courts, where the herd lows and chews the McCud.

I fear most that I am becoming one of them. The number I become, the more I resemble the neutered lumps that pass as men trailing in their wives' wakes, their slack faces parodies of the lively maps of the heart that we can carry when we feel.

***

For a long time, I have looked outwards through the interwebnet in one way or another to try to fill the void. I meet interesting people, who form pictures of me that I shatter sooner or later, leaving them with fragments of a person that, generally, they discard. I don't mind that so much (although sometimes a person, albeit a virtual shadow of a real being somewhere out there, can creep beneath your radar and when they cut you, the blood is all too real). It can be exhausting enough being what other people want in meatspace, without needing to keep up a role in the virtual world. Sometimes, I feel I would be better off if I switched the PC off and never turned it back on again. It offers tantalising glimpses of other worlds -- the world -- but that simply increases dissatisfaction with the world you have to live in.

***

I do sometimes picture myself under the spreading tree, laughing and content. But when I look more closely at the picture, my vision swims, and what at first I took to be me turns out to be someone else, a face I don't recognise, a man I'll never be.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:36 am