A Universe in a Dance of Dust
I have been trying to think of what to upgrade my wardrobe to now I’m in the age of prolapsing organs. I keep thinking I should go from being a psychedelic modern adherent of Robin Hood, wearing leggings and tunics and boots, to something more appropriate. Whatever that means. What does that mean? Flowing linen knee-length silk tunics in calming beige tones? I have no idea. And I don’t really want to. So I’m not going to.
Today’s pair of leggings: purple. Like a child, I have overwhelming urges to wear a particular colour some days, and only that colour will do. I don’t look upon this as a childish desire but as colour being amazing, and me being someone whose ancestors lived, not all that long ago, in different shades of brown for the large part. I feel I owe it to them. Although the world’s waterways beg to differ.
Before I can wear the purple leggings, I must do a patch-up. Because my auntie sewed costumes for my cousin’s childhood performances (remember: photo of a leotarded Andreacat with a swinging long tail) I can be guaranteed, as the executor of my auntie’s sewing scissors and a large plastic bag full of myriad coloured cottons, to have a close-enough colour to patch up just about every pair of leggings with busted inner thigh seams I care to own.
Coloured dyes were so expensive once, before we got flooded with the synthetic versions, that apparently when Queen Victoria married, she went not with the usual wedding dress colours of the day – black, purple, red – but with white, to demonstrate her financial thriftiness of not going with a dyejob to disloyal descendents of Gerard Winstanley still chafing over the loss of the commons, and to use up some old lace she had lying around. Reuse, recycle.
So see, white wedding dresses weren’t even about virginity. Queen Victoria wasn’t even that long ago in the scheme of things, but look at the myth that’s grown up that we’ve always worn white wedding dresses, for at least the last 60 million years. But then again, there’s etymological whispers that virginity wasn’t even about virginity, either. That the old matriarchal era idea of virginity was not a woman who had not yet been deliciously deflowered, but a woman who was in possession of her self.
For someone who has often felt in recent years like she is not enough in possession of her self, I am having larger bouts of feeling in possession of myself, or maybe mySelf, which is to say, swimming in an ocean, which feels uncannily like dissociation. Is there no end to the paradoxes which Life throws up onto the sand? No, there is not. It just feels like it from growing up in an era which allows too many tedious spreadsheets to tell us what to think.
I’ve been thinking about time lately, how it weaves and morphs and how some trippers suggest that time, at the end of an era, will reverse back on itself and everything will all roll up into itself like an excited window blind or a retracted testicle. Just as long as we don’t lose anything of value, I think I’m okay with that. Up, down, in out, breathe in, breathe out, change.
I’ve been thinking about time because the last time I wrote on here was only a week ago but it feels like three months ago. And how I still haven’t applied for the dole to the government machine because I first need to go to the doctors for a medical certificate and I can’t easily bear being inside their machine either, and it feels like I’ve been trying to get myself to Just Sit Down and Do the Fucking Forms Like an Adult for at least 10 months but it’s only been a couple of weeks.
I’ve been thinking about space, because apparently time and space are bound up in each other in some way we all learned in high school but I wasn’t listening, and you can’t have time without space, although I’m not so sure about that because look at all the things we think you can’t have one of without the other and then it turns out that you can because of some trippy thing we thought we knew the end of but we only knew the beginning because we keep mistaking totalities for entireties.
I like thinking about time and space. Sometimes I don’t go out of the house because I’ve spent too many hours thinking about time and space and I have played the whole universe in a grain of sand game, which is one of the most beautiful games of all, and so then it seems unnecessary to enter into both and actually go out the house and do something. Which is sad because walking through time and space has a bit going for it bodywise and lifewise and funwise and friendwise, so crack on through the social phobia, Susie.
Space bending: I watched a movie once, when I was living in Braybrook, when I could (barely) afford to live in Braybrook, which sounds really pretty but which I cried about when I knew my choice was to move there and not be in Seddon or West Footscray anymore, which were the trendy places to be, but that I now had to be in the suburb which was absolutely not trendy in any way, but which now I would not even be able to afford to live in. Then again, I can’t afford to live anywhere, so it’s not really saying much. I ended up loving living in Braybrook, once I sloughed off my acquired snobbishness, even though I never saw any brook, though there is a nice sandstone pub, and close proximity to the city.
Living in Braybrook feels like it was centuries ago. There was no streaming internet like you whippersnappers have today, but there was a new thing that felt cool but wasn’t really all that radical in the scheme, which was Quickflix, which was getting rental DVDs posted to me in the mail. This one movie, which I have forgotten, featured a scene involving a dusty empty field and an indeterminate steel building of industry. On the train to work the next day, somewhere between Tottenham and Footscray, I saw the lot in which that scene had been filmed. It was empty, dusty, and had an indeterminate steel building of industry on its plot. In the middle of all this emptiness was a tiny mini duststorm.
It didn’t mean anything, in the tedious way we say these things don’t mean anything, because there’s no measurement involved. But it meant something to me, as an orphan to belonging. It felt to me like all the synchronicity moments do – that the world was giving me a hint that I do belong, that it’s a bit fucking wild, that it was looking back at me in some way. I guess where you end up going with that in the end is towards possibly God, whereas Mike would say it doesn’t need to suggest God at all, and which I think I agree with, even though I’m not sure how, but as soon as I say that, no, I want there to be a God and other times do not at all want there to be a God, but maybe that’s just because our versions are whack except for the bit where God is Love and maybe that’ll do. Maybe God like the Great Spirit, not like the anger management candidate. I would rather God as the Great Destroyer and Great Creator, with wild edges, than the anger management god.
That mini duststorm inside a location I’d seen in a movie only the day before did mean something. It meant something to the only person who it could mean something to, which was me. That tiny little mini duststorm. Spinning around, singing tunelessly to itself, like a universe in a grain of dust.