Elephant Skeletons in the Closet Room

The right moment for the monthly post has long passed, but here I am, left with a curious dilemma: the referent of my 'here' has switched hemispheres. The danger of cultivating a routine is that, should the routine break down, or be written off entirely, you're singularly unprepared for dealing with it...because you've become very good at maintenance, woeful at innovation. When my menstrual body clock is angling for some verbal flow, ordinarily I find something mundane and Cambridgey to talk about. But what to do now that I'm back in...Australia? Surely separation throws a spanner in my authority to talk of towers and acceptable autism. Writing about Cambridge now would be tantamount to writing about the Romans: a remote subject without the redeeming aid of autopsy. A futile pursuit. Combine this with the fact of my ailing imagination. Sometimes I sit in front of my computer trying to create objects from scratch - you know, weird animals and stuff - and all I get is a mouse with the head of a computer (even the range of animals is narrowed by the semantic greed of technology), a man with a pillow for a bum, a giraffe crossed with a desk. I think I'm heading for the imaginative ground zero whereat the only thoughts you can have are dictated by your immediate environment, and all they are, are names: 'curtain', 'fan', 'floor'. Right now I could probably manage a thought of modest epigram dimensions, but the containers are shrinking every day. And the last Russian Doll is hollow anyway!

We've quite obviously changed topic. So let's move cities.

To Sydney, Christmas Day, 2009: drizzle does a convincing visual impression of England, and it might have carried it off, if not for the short and shirt signposts of humidity, the enemy of those trying to keep up the dramatic illusion of green Buckinghamshire in the semi-tropical colonies since 1788. Like a flashy rolex in a period film, sweat gives the game away every time. It was a blast from the past for me: salads as far as the eye could see, my aunt's famous bean dish, one terabite of meat, red, white and pink. Two plates later, on went the fly guards and out came the tiramisu and mango ice-cream, coffee so strong it dissolved your food for you and burnt the image into the walls of your lower stomach (a hint of grappa to give some real kick), and finally, some port for dad, who definitely wasn't driving. Mutatis mutandis, it was much as I remembered it: a sustained exercise in forced consumption. The indigestion is self-feeding: as stomach fills and lethargy grows, you're even less equipped to defy the command from above to eat again. For Aunt and Uncle, bless 'em, seconds are never questions. They are vehement, military statements. Speech acts that whack you on the widening arse and wobble you towards the serving spoons of never-ending more.

Weaned off the dripping udders, I had to chase away the withdrawal either by siesta or bustling activity. I jumped on the latter, for my mind had been pressed for weeks by mother's gentle suggestions that I clean the junk out of my old room - all of which had been flung into the wardrobe over the years in a desperate strategy confusing problem solution with solution deferral. In addition to the longer term accumulations, there was also the rubble of an impressive last minute effort at storage before I left for Cambridge: clothes I had put in the 'probably never wear this again but just in case because I wore it once and for this reason has sentimental value' category brushed shoulders with past HSC Latin exams...which also received mercy from 'in a rush, can't trust judgement, don't be hasty, might need them' thought processes. There were precious bank statements and phone bills dog-eared into my abortion of an expandable file. Complete with envelopes. Keeping bank statements - ok, perhaps still excusable, but definitely approaching the anal end of the sphincter spectrum in this online age. But keeping the envelopes? The worst thing was that my collecting mania wasn't even ob-compulsively comprehensive. Phone bills from June and December were there. Envelopes from June, Augustus and December were there. My hoarding was only superficially effective. Everything was crammed into the reusable green supermarket bags which were all the rage at the time. No order was discernible; the only governing principle was opportunistic utilisation of space. If it was empty, I filled it.

And that was only the top stratum in the unique geology of my wardrobe - time-capsuled, the thing would have baffled scientists of 2500. It would have baffled scientists of 2010. The upper compartment was packed with every bit of paper I had ever collected during my later school and early university life. So very many trees, felled so that I could: churn out practice papers for extension maths in the shade of uneven parabolas, gain very vadose understanding of physics but follow a syllabus to the dot-pointed letter, write sophistic aphorisms in the back of my first year English lecture book which were designed to distil the TRUTH I had learnt that very term: 'The uncertainty of existence exists as a certainty.' No joke. That was scrawled across the back of my book, given pride of place in the structurally important cardboard section. The embarassment isn't even remedied by placement amid more obviously spontaneous squiggles and vandalistic wisdom, of the kind that appeared on my Yr 10 pencil case: 'Nazis are Gay.' I'm sure I recognised the self-confuting humour in that at the time. Anyway, you can have that little gem of an insight - and hold onto it, because it took about 24 lectures, lots of French Revolution reading, a bit of Victorian poetry, and Heart of Darkness to craft it - for your kids if you like. I'll throw in 'Nazis are Gay' at no extra cost. Just be sure to quote your source (there's no such thing as free wisdom): the Sydney-based philosopher Tom Geue. You know he wrote them at 18 and 15 respectively? Precocious insight!

While the fact that you could find exact replicas of these nuggets cloned across numerous exercise books and pencil cases throughout the adolescent world doesn't breed nostalgia in itself, the feeling that engendered the nuggets does. The misapprehension I laboured beneath as a youth - that I really had life pegged - produced some entertaining cliches, sure. But an enabling spirit and enquiring mind gave rise to moments of genuine wonder, palpable excitement. I remember sitting on the front lawns of USyd, reading my Norton Anthology of English Literature, pencilling the odd annotation in my variable handwriting, the legibility of which was inversely proportional to the importance I invested in it. My body started to tingle and I knew I was on the edge. Suddenly, lightning struck brain, and I could 'see' what it was all about, like innumerable identical sheets on an overhead projector, randomly coalescing into one after eons of manual manipulation. Moments like those, I'm certain - can we suspend my all-embracing dictum, or is it water-tight? - caused me to incise the cardboard with a nib of fool's gold. I could leave the product. But fark, what I would give to feel that galvanic force of enthusiasm coursing through veins, pumping life into and extracting interest from everything!

That enthusiasm is still there, somewhere. But the appetite for omniscience has been stapled with a kind of prohibition: an awareness of its own limitations. Clearing out a space I used to inhabit has given me a sense of loss far, far beyond the donation section of the charity shop. Buried with the dead, processed trees, gathering dust and fallen clumps of ceiling vermiculite along with them, was my former zest - displaced by a tempering cynicism which had tricked me into thinking it had always been there. Ousting skeletons from the closet often uncovers elephants in the room.

Appendix

I also struck an unpublished seam formed in the heyday of my rap career. Tons of poor metrics and backing myself into tight rhyme corners. I think it was begun with a future 'Team Cool' project in mind - 'Team Cool' being our rap crew of four members. G-Real, Slav Daddy, D-Rock, and myself, the Toad. Editorial commentary in square brackets. Enjoy.

Yo, yo, yo...
Well it's the universal entity, structural anomaly
Designed for you dissers who diss us while playing monopoly,
Vocalised integrity, Team Cool will give you dysentery,
Galvanising microphones like energiser batteries, [getting out of it with a simile - clever]
Hey, ho, what's the word Slav diddy?
You mean to say this quarter pounder only cost a fiddy?
We'll bust it right and take it down as if it were a middy [a relatively small measure of beer served in Australian pubs)
And though we sure ain't wiggidy, we enjoy gettin' giddy,
Coz giddy's for the kiddies that can't afford the moon, [the meaning of this is obscure]
Big Toddler blast you off with a few litres of goon, [Australian slang for cask wine]
Stanley our compadre gets a monetary boon [Stanley is a famous and particularly execrable variety of goon]
Every time, everywhere you see a Tizzle Cizzle hoon [Tizzle Cizzle = Snoop Dogg speak for Team Cool]
To all you bottled MC's, heed these rhymes as decrees [bottled - a pointed reference to rich peoples' tendency to drink bottled wine, but also their tendency to repression and narrow rhyming]
You can never inflate the silver cushion for your knees [goon is traditionally packaged in a silver bag]
Please, please Mr Venerable Bede [I think I'd been reading Simon Schama. I've definitely never read Venerable Bede.]
Chronicle the history of these sinners by degrees,
Condemn their capacity to pay full uni-fees [I too could have paid, being firmly middle class, but they let me in for free on account of the quality of my rhymes]
Rebuke the posing potentates with unrelenting bees [can you rebuke someone with bees? Whatever the answer, bees surely rhymes with fees]
Send them overseas, throw away the keys [awkward conflation of exile and prison metaphors]
Wealth and social conscience will play out the final scene [The meaning of this is obscure]
So if your school is private, beware the team's wrath [ooh, political]
Incurred coz we're sick of equality for the froth [Cf. the sentiment in George Orwell's Animal Farm: 'All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.' Patently an allusion to this, given the next rhyme.]
Of society, piety has no place in the troff [sic - variant spellings of 'trough' were common among rap artists of this period]

Here the text as we have it breaks off. Scholarship worldwide can only mourn the loss.