I have locked myself in the shelter and there’s no way out. I worked for months to ensure this would be the case. My only companion aside from typewriter, paper, and books is a seismograph. The rest of the installation, even my camp bed, is barely companionable. I have not told anyone I am keeping myself down here. To those I know, I was acting much as usual before disappearing — going about my daily activities, making my points, socialising when I felt I had to make the effort. The usual. What was expected of me... of ‘someone with his condition’.
Explosions rock the bunker but the seismograph seems to be in denial. It doesn’t register a thing.
I am processing all that’s happened to me with regard to the urge, the compulsion to commit myself to this course of action... how it got to this... why it was necessary... working over the small details... or as much as I can remember and configure. I try to place matters in a geological context. All I have done, which even now I can’t quite admit to having done, or at least to having done anything wrong. You see, that’s the word I get stuck on. Wrong...? By whose estimation? Not mine, but I am trying to make it my own. Still, mea culpas don’t register in any noticeable way on the seismograph; but maybe I’m not looking close enough, or maybe my eyes just aren’t up to it. A seismograph might expect that its keeper might be attuned to its speech and its needs. I am failing in my duties. I am forgetting my purpose and obligation.
This is a big story that has to encompass everything. All those wrong thoughts and immaculate actions that flake around the edges of scrutiny. All the time I have left will be spent in self-examination, and it can’t help but make pinpricks into the supermassive mining voids. I am excavating myself. What’s dug up will probably serve little purpose, but the process compels itself.
Of course, I mentally travel. I have to — to collect data, confirm or question memories, sample other viewpoints. Yes, that will bring its own problems, but those problems can be addressed in another lifetime. I try to keep my observations unintrusive and abstracted. Consider the swathes cut through the tall wild oats and the lashings in high breeze after a cropduster has swept the outer walls of the valley — it’s messy, imprecise... a reckoning of the damage. I remember that as if it’s happening now, in here... the bunker is full of the external world and I look to the seismograph to confirm this, but it is moody, preferring to keep its own council. It can be lonely, but I expected it to be.
Where to go was my life’s question. I travelled away from where I was born, and I returned. I acknowledged the intrusion and it drove me to despair. I have never been mentally fragile, not till now. I’ve dug in and exposed something far more devastating than irony. I’ve disconnected from discourse so any word or expression I knew is stuck in the time, and what I knew of that time, when I went below. When I took shelter in a shelter that could never protect me from the truth of my intrusion. A shelter caught in the irony of excavation, of voids. I spent the first days watching the seismograph and thinking of dwelling. Not of Heidegger, just of dwelling. Almost dictionary definition (last update to hand), but augmented with my own haphazard ‘building’ techniques. I craved for the seismograph’s attention... for intelligent conversation.
Submerged, but denying myself the paradoxical joy of the sun. I have a supply of Vitamin D supplements, but I am sure I won’t use them. The breakdown of my health is necessary, whether the ground wants me or not. That kind of statement embarrasses me and exemplifies why the self-examination must take place. Leaves will clot the bunker’s breathing holes — the pipes to the surface... fires will suck the air away and maybe even ‘cook’ me. A flood will circumvent the flaps designed to keep rain out. I tap into a natural underground stream, but it will either dry-up or turn saline. All of this is expected. It is what I’ve brought down here, and also why I’ve taken to ground. Why I’ve taken my shallowness deep.
I try to forget so I can remember. Days of smashing asbestos cladding. Shooting bottles and cans with a .22 rifle. Childhood. The damage committed under the guise of innocence. Thing is, if it were anyone else at that age, I would say and believe it was innocence. But not for myself. That doesn’t mean reactionaries should be able to make oppressive laws out of my confessions of awareness. No, I don’t want them taking advantage. That’s why this is a silent confession that will deteriorate as my body deteriorates. Now, just now, the seismograph registered a little something!
I can hear it gusting above, up through the concrete and the earth covering and brush and leaves... a sweeping wind driving the eucalypts, shaking their crowns. I am not insulated from sound. I hear it all — right down to the chewing of kangaroos, the flights of red-capped robins so delicate between acacias. A bat catching mosquitoes. I know it’s night and the tawny frogmouth confirms with a call that both soothes and bothers my bones. I want all these things, these delicate but immense things of the external world, and I crave that they’ll register on the seismograph, that the device will enjoy their sonic fragrances, but they don’t, not usually. The line remains steady in its drum-graph.
Only when I am facing up to the strain I placed on a relationship or the protest I failed to attend or the rabbit I shot not that long after my twelfth birthday, does the seismograph stir, and maybe note the passing of a praying mantis over the leaf-litter above me. I am deep, but never too deep to miss the movements ahead. But other times, I am so insulated I cannot hear even a tree fall or a bulldozer riding over to start a hell pit for a miner who would paint the world green. This is what it’s like, and I have brought it on myself because there’s no other choice. Where can I go? Which cemetery of the world would have me? I have tried the oceans, but they have, on more than one occasion, spat me back out. Spat me out while remaining mired in plastic.
I am beginning to think I am the pen that stays still. My body the weight in a seismography, while the shelter — the bunker — the pit — the void — moves around me. The pen of palladium recording the blows against the crust. In the light away from the sun, every particle is visible as it vibrates. I wanted to let loose on the boxwood recorder at school but my musical urges were suppressed. I should have broken out then, but I didn’t. I am not complaining, not really. Not in this, anyways.
I can write faster than I speak. In holding myself to account, I write so fast I can’t read what I have written, which is good, because nothing is gained in reading back over things. Once it is written, it is out there. I have just written of a mining ‘plant’ that tried to consume me when I was about twenty and working part-time as I studied (what did I study... geography or geology?)... the machines of gouging, crushing, extracting. I have just written of the chemical dissolution of earth. Why would I read back when what I write next will be the same, dissolving as it is written? Anyway. But this is about self-blame and not pointing the finger, not signing the deeds of witness.
As a child... that statement of escape, verification, validation of being. As a child, I thought that I was a dragon jar, dropping marbles into the frogs’ mouths I’d made from Lego to show the impact of seismic waves... the blows inflicted by other children registering... as a child. As a child, I built things other kids destroyed. I took a Lego house to school and broke it up myself before other kids could wreck it and steal the bricks. I said: This is the settler house you all built out of hardship... making a new life. They called me crazy and said that I smelt funny. It’s true that the night before I had emptied the entire bottle of my sister’s bubble-bath into the tub and tried to float through the open bathroom window. I got into heaps of trouble from our parents, but it was worth it to know I couldn’t in fact float away, but rather sank and came close to drowning. I am working on the complexities and crossovers in those many wrongs now. Everything counts. I look eagerly to the seismograph... almost imploringly.
An orange snake has slid down a breathing tube. A gwardar. A deadly snake. I won’t allow it to evoke memories, but I do know it’s a mutual judgement and the pen shakes on the drum. This all registers as noise on the graph. An event. I do not know how to feed the gwarder ‘back up’ the tube, to liberate it. I cannot feed it — I have nothing down here that will suffice a gwarder’s dietary requirements. Insects come and go through the tubes, but they are not enough to sustain it and I wouldn’t want to catch them anyway.
I was bitten once by a snake and survived without anti-venom. It was another ‘brown snake’ and I think the anti-venom for one brown snake does for another, but either way I didn’t receive any and I don’t have any down here. But I will compose an anti-venom chant in as many words as necessary in the same way I write charms to keep the ghosts within reason. Have to be wary of ghosts down here — have to finish my task before allowing them haunt me into hallucinatory loss of reason. The snake is crawling around the room — marking time... testing the horizontal axis. I am standing on my writing table, marking the intensity of my heartbeat... the vertical axis... hitting the typewriter keys in time with each beat. I wonder if the seismograph might work as an ECG? Standing on the desk, I am almost touching the crumbling roof which is a patchwork of rock, dirt and roots... taproots and hair roots... of trees living and trees dead, or soon-to-be dead. The table is the spring, and I am the mass. Evidence of my egocentrism— denying of the agency of snake if not its desperation. It will circle and even lift to find purchase, to sliver a way out of the inescapable. There are so many literary references and subtexts, but none serve any purpose down here. Maybe they never didup there— outside, externally.
I once encouraged someone who was almost moribund with anxiety to join me on a fierce showground ride. I thought it would alleviate their anxiety through being caught up in the adrenaline rush moment. I thought it would help. But now I think of my insensitivity, and my failure to see that what worked for me might not necessarily work for them. That it might make their anxiety worse. When I grew so conscious of the problems of my being on this land that I decided to leave only to return years later because I could not identify with where I had travelled... or, if I had identified, felt something was missing in me which meant I couldn’t give to that land what it required of me... I realised I had condemned myself to this reckoning almost as if it was an excuse. I listened to the starving white-tailed black cockatoos struggling with their settler-namings as they overflew cars that spewed carbon monoxide along with those smiling assassin ‘green cars’ that cost the forests and the air in so many other camouflaged ways, and I could not face their laments, their losses. That was, relatively speaking, recently, but there were so many other instances of incongruities I could not unravel to understand. Again, the seismograph registers nothing discernible... nothing I can cling to.
Defying the horizontal, overcoming the vertical constraints, the snake has now climbed into my head, waiting. Brumation. A flicker on the cylinder... the pen marking the graph on its drum.
I am shedding my need to worship and my need to better understand the need of others to worship. I grow dizzy with such humility. This is why I removed any chance of finding a way back to the surface — I am learning so much about what disgusts me about my own presence, that I am also acquiring even more subtle ways of masking. Imagine what uses such self-awareness could be put to in public. People would believe my 'I understand...’ and ‘You have my sympathies’ and believe me as empathetic as my colonial status might allow. The seismograph would show that all is steady... there are no earthquakes.
Back when I half-believed in the surface, I made own house earthquake-proof, as if to prove that I had a skillset that could serve the community. And yet here I write: And through giving houses over fault lines more flexibility, I ensured the settler entrenchment. The house absorbed the tremors, even quakes, and took for granted it could weather the after-shocks. Even now, the memories of seeing the damage done by the '68 quake makes me feel assured that my motives, my work, was outside the settler project. And yet. And yet. I have entangled myself. And there’s no way out. Even when the ground is scooped away for another ‘green energy’ mine, I will not be unearthed. I will remain suspended in their void, and they will operate around and through me. And yet. And yet. I will remain an anomaly, unfixed, disconnected, and not understanding the nature of my presence.
So, holding myself to account. Another explosion — a barrage on the firing range close to the mine site. Practice for wars that will stretch around the globe. The state of warfare that has existed here for almost two-hundred years. By any measure. ‘Green metals’ will feed those wars, too.
But the snake will find its way out and make its own testament. Seismographs will register around the globe, though I fear few people will bother interpreting what is actually written. Maybe I will in fact emerge, semi-intact, and tell my small circle of acquaintances that we should make the effort to understand, to translate. That I have been close to a seismograph, that it shared with me. They will laugh my ‘views’ off, and say I need to get over my relationship break-up. They will say many things, and gradually the pen will be stilled, and the drum and paper jolt up and down revealing a memoir of inaction, of ratification. They will know the seismograph told me nothing and that I cannot read what is in front of us.