clasp in the chain

friday morning, 27th of january, first day of the real working year in this sunsoaked, festival-fed harbour town… a year yesterday since i began this blog, my chain of coherence.

yesterday drew forced me to complete, properly, a task i should have done years ago.

prioritisation.

i now know why i never seem to get what i’m trying to do done. because it takes an 83-hour week, that’s why. so today it’s just me, and the list of things that must be done that simply cannot, will not all happen. and a most unbecoming distress that cannot be properly illustrated, but that drags me again and again from the simple, impossible obligation of the task.

i have also, on the turntable, the consoling anger of Nokturnl, more powerful than Pearl Jam, out of the Northern Territory, whose lead singer reminds me uncannily of my ex-husband – him who disappeared, to the best of my knowledge, into those same red deserts some time last year.

one is black, one white, but they share the same towering, articulate resentment, the same treelike physique, the same cynical lover’s glare… fierce-faced and percipient loners in a world with no room for love.

i am still shaping my own space, but it’s uncomfortably small.

you’re weird

you’re weird

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

A short entry to bear witness to the fact that for the next five days I have custody of my (she refuses to allow me an adjective) niece Shiara.

…teenage, feisty, um… burgeoning…

can’t write more – she’s bullying me already and she’s only been here 2 hours…

you’re weird

you’re weird

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

A short entry to bear witness to the fact that for the next five days I have custody of my (she refuses to allow me an adjective) niece Shiara.

…teenage, feisty, um… burgeoning…

can’t write more – she’s bullying me already and she’s only been here 2 hours…

one glance at two futures

dandelion clock

Originally uploaded by Illuminata.

I sometimes think I would have made a good mother, but it’s not really true. I have the capacity to be an excellent part-time guide; I lack the patience and humility to be a decent parent.

I know this because of the depth of my relief at being childless when I survey the harsh realities of the world, as collated and exposed on a site like project censored…

“CNN reported at 9 p.m. EST on election evening that Kerry was leading by 3 points in the national exit polls based on well over 13,000 respondents. Several hours later at 1:36 a.m. CNN reported that the exit polls, now based on a few hundred more – 13,531 respondents – were showing Bush leading by 2 points, a 5-point swing. In other words, a swing of 5 percentage points from a tiny increase in the number of respondents somehow occurred despite it being mathematically impossible.”

On the other hand, it’s still one of my strongest beliefs that the idealism of youth combined with its forward focus will be instrumental in saving the world from imminent wholesale degradation/destruction if anything can… according to a Massachusetts Institute of Technology program, one third of American teens believe the petrol-powered car will be obsolete in 10 years. I wish one-third were enough…

It looks promising till you realise the respondents were apparently given a ‘pick one most likely’ option, not an unspun question. *sigh*

Better reportage from Project Censored, on the link above. It’s a site and organisation endorsed by US news heavyweight Walter Cronkite for covering stories other media avoid for dubious reasons. Here’s the direct link to the piece about anomalies in the vote count for the last presidential election:

In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things…

Project Censored is an initiative of Sonoma State University, California.

ZenSiren goes to the beach

seventies jaqi

Originally uploaded by genericavatar.

I am back already from the beach yet still my senses are steeped in the light and the water. Drew and I spent a week cruising the central and north coasts in the Kombi; glorious golden surf beaches, briny-fresh lagoons and the peaceful waterways of Myall Lakes. These shaded shores were our chosen Nowhereville for new year’s eve, where we sat on a square jetty at a bend in the many-forked, riverine flow, watching the sun set through the trees, sipping champagne as the paperbarks turned from silver-green to silhouette.

There were a few birds, not many. Ducks swam by in twos and threes from time to time. Crickets, cicadas, dragonflies fell quiet; a gentle insistent breeze ran tidewards all day, lifting to brisk after dark. Golden-orange light was lying low across the water when Drew said, ‘Isn’t that a swan?’

‘Surely not,’ I quoth, peering through the trees at the glittering, half-lit lake. ‘Looks like ducks to me.’ I peered some more; was that neck not preternaturally graceful for a duck? The water shifted, mirage-like. ‘Hmm, maybe.’
‘Not there; there,’ pointed Drew. ‘Coming round the corner now.’
Round the corner formed by a beautiful little silver-barked tree and its small sisters, roots all surrounded by rushes, came two sleek brown native ducks. I looked at Drew but he gestured me to wait. Barely ten metres behind the ducks, and between them as between an advance escort, came a lone black swan, impossibly expressive neck bowed, feet paddling ceaselessly upstream. Swans mate for life, I thought. Why is this one alone, swimming upstream at dusk, heading for the rushes of the inlet behind us as the ducks gain ground and disappear into the bank? She – or he – slowing as the resting place came into view, head drooped like a wilting red tulip, webbed feet working valiantly against the current, took on all my myriad swan mythologies – Odette’s impossible romantic ideal, Odile’s ruthless doom, the exquisite pathos of the Pavlova/Fokine/Saint Saens dying swan, even the tragic elegance of ballerina Marilyn Rowe, splendid in black as the Merry Widow – life lived in the face of loss.

A lone black swan, swimming upstream into darkness, against fatigue and away from sorrow. Happy New Year.