Let's pretend it's 2014

Our aerial was never very good and we kind of stopped watching TV and then cos we never watched it eventually we got rid of it and now I don't know what to be afraid of any more sorry. It's a problem sometimes. Like when I had to go to the security office at work one time and they'd hung a big Australian flag above the front desk.

"New flag?" I said.

"Mm," the guy said, looking stern and harried. "You know, because of everything that's been happening." He fussed around with some papers.

"Mm," I said, and looked out the window. I had no idea what the fuck. As far as I could see the sun was still shining and gravity was still holding everything more or less where it belonged. I was still four billion years old: fuck yeah. Capitalism was still eating everything and shitting out commodities but it hadn't eaten everything yet so there was still time to stop it doing that: fuck yeah that too. Air moved around and I could breathe in and out: fuck yeah that as well: what was all the fuss about now then.

That was a while back; now let's pretend it's now. C'mon it'll be fun! Let's pretend it's 2014. Let's pretend you're alive in 2014, and all this is happening in real time, so you can feel the seconds pass. Like you can actually feel them happen to you.

Let's pretend you're alive in this glowing world, feeling the seconds. Let's pretend you also feel separate from the glowing world and from me and from all the rest of life and from the past and the future.

Pretend there's something called space that makes that separateness possible, then pretend there's something called time that stops everything happening at once. Pretend both those things can only have names because of something called language. Then pretend language completely messes them both up, so that sense of separateness just falls apart when you peer into it.

I mean when and where are the words I'm typing and you're reading? C'mon people. I am typing them here and now and you are reading them here and now. So you and I and here and now are all fused together in these words, in these twin acts of the glowing world writing them and the glowing world reading them. The glowing world's all through you. What even are you but the glowing world? It's gorgeous. X

Li

The mound

The other night I dreamed I lived in a big old weatherboard house. I was in my room, trying to work out why it felt weird in there. I looked around and looked around and then decided it was because there was a giant grassy mound twice as tall as me filling most of it. The furniture was all pushed to the side on account of the mound. Once you noticed it you wondered how you'd missed it all this time.

I woke up and decided the mound was dispossession: a burial mound: a pile of bodies with grass grown over. I decided this was the pile of bodies that haunt everything when you live in Australia, the pile of bodies you forget about because we have a kind of unspoken agreement to talk endlessly about almost everything else except that pile of bodies. You walk around and you walk around and if you're like me you have little projects and you try to make your life better because fuck yeah life etc and then suddenly the pile haunts you and it all seems like a dream, unreal.

It's like a whole country built on sand, sand soaked in blood, blood we never talk about. Like in Poltergeist. They were all like "Why is TV so fucking weird all the time? Why every time I watch TV do I feel like my soul is getting sucked out?" and the answer was BECAUSE YOUR FUCKING HOUSE IS BUILT ON A PILE OF DEAD PEOPLE YOU DO NOT HONOUR.

And me I wonder if this is why Australians are so touchy about uninvited arrivals coming by boat. The whole notion of uninvited arrival points back at the pile of bodies, after all, at the shot, the poisoned, the hung, the willfully-infected, the displaced: the dispossessed. But thinking about that would undermine our belonging, and we have no other home. We'd have to learn some manners.

And so we have this agreement to think about other things. I call it a culture of misdirection, an endless procession of - and I do hope you'll pardon my French here - bullshit. It helps us not look at the past, and how our nation got rich through through colonising the land, dispossessing those who came before. And it helps us not think about the future, and how our nation is getting rich through colonising the atmosphere, dispossessing those who'll come after. We get to live in a present that shrinks even as the TVs in it grow larger, large enough to swallow us. The radiant ghosts on the giant screens call to us: "We're heeere.. we're heeere.." with their come-hither looks and their Gold Logies and their Voices You Can Trust.

And all the while the pile towers over us, not going anywhere. Like us it has no other home. X