Space, Time, Continuum
I sit on the midcentury couch in my living room, reading a book by a postmodern American author of German heritage. My bed is still dishevelled since the sleep-in I enjoyed, while my breakfast plate waits by the kitchen sink, crumbed with raisin toast remnants.
Outside by the curb, my car is parked. A little closer, in the front garden, blooms broccoli I planted, while out the back, lettuce reaches towards the sun as they would in the Mediterranean, from whence these crops originate.
My iPhone 6 – made in China – buzzes with a message from a friend in Copenhagen. And there’s an artwork framed for me in Petersham I need to pick up. But first I visit the bathroom.
As a little piece of me sails through subterranean drains on its own journey, I get in that car – a Japanese make – and I drive to that place in Petersham, as I chat to that friend across the world, via handsfree.
All at once I’m stretched between so many locations – places of origin and presence and foreshadow – like the legs of a spider or the anchor points of her web, points of which I don’t see or can’t call to mind even if I try. There are impressions of me everywhere, traces of pentimenti across the canvas of my life and the life of the world that will remain once I’m gone. As the goanna leaves claw prints or broken sticks or trampled grass for the tracker to follow, parts of me are scattered in my wake – or thrown forward in my path as a future itinerary develops.
Thus, the spatial plane fractures into the temporal as I shift gears in that 1996 Toyota Tarago. The experiences I shared with that friend in Berlin all those years ago echo around the cabin as we chat on that phone purchased in 2021, manufactured in 2019. In Petersham, I stop for a sandwich made earlier that morning, and mayonnaise – invented by a Frenchman in 1756 – drips to stain a button-down that I bought 6 months ago, marketed as ‘vintage’ and produced in 1975. And the drippage angers me and my reaction is disproportionate due to a complex I don’t understand but that in fact stems from trauma I don’t realise has been in my family for generations on either side from Ngarrindjeri dispossessed in South Australia and Celts slain by Romans across Britain and Scandinavians doing their own slaying as they thrash through brutal seas. The fabric of me is threaded by all these memories and genes and atoms that vibrate forward and backwards and side to side in an undulating stream towards supernovæ and that fabled explosion that was both destructive and creative on the most essential level, an explosion that reverberates into tomorrow and every day to come in this life I know and those I don’t yet may affect, if only in a minute, imperceptible way...
I sigh. Wipe away that mayo. And I take another bite from my BLT.