'Taking. From whom?' I asked.
'Our land,' said a fairly drunk Aboriginal. There was a didgeridoo among the assembled musical instruments.
Dello tried to lighten the mood by bursting into a funny feminist lyric. Cybil looked horrified, but it had the desired effect on Sofia. 'You lie, oh, you lie,' she sang. Her friends joined her in the Shameless Hussies' song. Some mourners patently disapproved, and others smiled softly.
What lights were on suddenly went out. 'Where's the fuse-box?' 'No, leave it, that's Maria.' Among other things, these were called out in the dusk. It seemed to get dark quickly in the blackout. Soon candles were alight and faces were cast into more melodramatic mien.
Sofia was beside me again. 'My suitcase carries my conscious life in words. I lug my suitcase everywhere. I'll have to push it down the street in a wheelbarrow like a laughing stock. Mad Rosie. I will have no home.' I could understand her distress, all her and Maria's things were vulnerable to plunder in this atmosphere.
'The mind of the madwoman flows like a stream through the landscape, seeping from the earth in individual springs, making a creek, a crik, a crack, then becoming a river. Watch out for the flood!' she warned me.
It truly was surreal. I had to get out of there, or I'd be next for the loony bin. Stumbling over the preparations for tomorrow, I went towards the front door. Outside it was just as crazy. Lightning still flicked though the windless air was warm and clear. The kids were shouting. 'Victoria, the horse was scared.'
Sofia followed me out the front door, lugging a heavy old port. 'I have rehearsed all methods and means to deliver justice,' she said. 'The devils or the angels can take over at any moment and weapons will come to hand. Beware, liar in your lair. Vengeance is mine.'
'Go for it,' I muttered.
On the porch, under a hurricane lamp, she unstrapped the leather belts. And said, as she took out a hard-bound book with gold motif and frieze, 'My mother would have wanted you to have this.' She handed it to me reverently and the gold lettering glittered in the flickering light. While being stunned by her words and her present, I thought there was meaning in her madness: everyone who had come would go away with something of Maria's. Sofia was curtailing possible pillage by proffering objects of significance. She was anchoring herself with the weight of Maria's possessions and her interpretation of Maria's relationship to all these people. The centre pole of the circus tent had fallen. As I held the gift, tears came to my eyes. Sofia had elicited genuine grief in my emotions and I pulled her towards me to cuddle and embrace her shaking, thin loneliness. But her body was stiff, as rigid as a board. She seemed to suffer my solace with a reluctant patience. We backed apart. Another guest came up the steps, immediately to be button-holed by Sofia. I said, 'See you tomorrow' and looked around, hoping to say something to Chandra before I left. She was with a group of women gathered around the fuse-box. They had a torch. They resembled, I don't know, a coven of witches? Lola pointed the light at her lap while Chandra worked, replacing the burnt-out wire. I touched her shoulder. She glanced up at my puffy eyes and rueful is the word for her smile. I left, hounded again by the sound of canine hysteria cooped up in a car.
The electrical storm was out to sea. I drove towards it, feeling, for once in my life, completely useless.
Hope finds Rory on the web.
'For the first month, Internet time is free. I would have to travel,' she tells Hope, 'if it weren't for this!' Then added, in explanation, 'I'm a stay-at-home by nature.'
Hope, grounded and reassured by Rory, says, 'I just used tarradiddle to frighten Ci away from my camp. I think she wanted to steal something.'
The chat page waits, the cursor blinking in readiness.
Rory doesn't want to leave the cyber-village. Geographic and social limitations are totally negated by the rise of online communities. But, she never knew it would be as exciting as it is. Hope is happy to share her enthusiasm.
'Look at the herstory of this,' she shows Hope. 'Women's Electronic Battalions, the web within the web.'
Witches Entente Brooms, 'web' and women have flown on sticks and now they grasp the concepts of instant transmission with ease.
Wicked Ecclesiastical Bitches, 'webs' danced provocative ecstasies claiming god or the devil entered us (it didn't matter which). 'Webs' have no trouble with impending doom. 'Webs' are not disturbed by murder of the enemy, nor by devious intrigue to subvert the course of his justice. His justice never served us. Not as a group. We are not a group, we are gropers in the freeze-us-out dark, groping about trying to find the overlay, the common blanket, which can warm our individual icy-lation. The coverlet. Succeeding is not believing, but knowing the covenant.
Hope reads with her, then asks, 'May I?' She sits on Rory's chair, and types, with all eight fingers and one thumb.
Hope laughs. 'Let's find Tartarus?'
'Come again?' Rory pulls one of the dining chairs up to the old Chinese desk, and is entranced by the downright facility of the girl; she digs into lists, finds menus behind menus, chooses, clicks and the computer responds with a complexity of stored information, random memory, access to places and programs she didn't know it was capable of, not to say the whole wide world on-line.
'The sunless abyss below Hades, where Zeus imprisoned the Titans, you know?' Hope comes from a techno-Biblical axis foreign to Rory's practical and political endeavour. When in her short life did she have the time to learn all this stuff?
The night wears on as Hope discovers more and more witches on the web. In the old days they believed in tracks of electricity, lines of magnetism, grids of ley-lines within the earth, understood in all cultures, microwaves, patterns of energy, power. Electro-magnetic fields affect everything, and always have. Animals respond to them. They are getting choked by the hyperactivity of the global village. Hope's Tartarus is the hell-within-hell of the re-identification of the ley-lines, their eruption into common society through the clumsy progress of male physics, of naming, measuring and inventing machinery, harnessing the force, as it were, the marrying of ancient and contemporary witches. To wit, to know. Yet their communication creaks in the overcrowded band-widths needing more than ever telepathy to interpret the symbol, the suggestion, the meaning within the meaning, the poetic echo of forgotten chords in the dearth of shared belief systems.
'The tower of Babel, see?' Hope brings it back to the mundane dictionary of Western mythology.
But Rory needs words, even though, by now, she has gathered hell itself is not a hellish place, but something else, probably real, as everything was, apparently, something else. She is weary, tomorrow is a big day. She doesn't have time for Pagans and Warlocks.
'It is so easy for you,' Rory says, with not a little bit of envy. Hope clicks in and out of cyber-places with such speed, even going, at times, into the operating systems and software programs, Rory is worried she will alter settings or messages so that she will not be able to find her way around with her usual methodical, plodding technique. She suspects computers to be very individual tools. Hope, however, returns to the familiar desktop and suggests that she download what she wants rather than use up on-line time reading, demonstrates, tells her how much hard disk space she has left and asks would she like her to clean up the window a bit, create some short cuts.
'No no,' panics Rory, afraid she will lose something.
'Okay,' Hope shrugs, not the slightest bit concerned.
'Turn if off. I want to see how computer geeks do it.'
Rory is relieved when Hope goes through the procedure she usually does. She is not that much of an idiot. Just a slow old boiler. Chook trying to be an owl. Hope rolls out her thin mattress, climbs into her bag and is in the arms of Morpheus with the face of an angelic babe before Rory turns out the light and climbs to her loft. Hoots, scratchings, sounds of wings flapping and bats screeching in the thick foliage, instead of he
r usual reading, send her to sleep. The barking owl woofs twice.
In the thunderstorm which hit soon after I had gone to bed, I read The Golden Notebook.
33
The Golden Notebook by Trivia
A Diary
1
She, you and I walk abreast for a moment and in that moment cast one shadow. The shadow of the trio ripples across the mat of grasses, descends into the trench of tyre-tracks and, with ease, rides along the rocky ledge. The land rises steeply upwards to our left above the rough vertical made by the grader and, after the rutted horizontal, drops away to the right. The deep green fronds of bracken and the lighter green fronds of false bracken cover these slopes like repetitious curved brush-strokes. Beneath the bracken, the bush is regenerating with ferns, grasses, climbers, creepers, orchids creating ground covers and a nursery of big trees, leaves dying and mulching, preventing weed growth. Holding the dampness, rather than being tinder fuel for bushfires, the pyromaniacal society believes. The shadow becomes one with the trees' shadows. Although it moves, it is at one with the rooted.
I am all three. High-minded, foul-mouthed, and simply mediative, vegetative: the one walking; the other talking; the third thinking—the trivial self. She who speaks repeats and repeats. One walks, the other sees. The view shows deep viridian gullies of rainforest giving way to tall forest, dry sclerophyll eucalypt and pasture land on shaved ridges. Like a backdrop painted in greying blues, the mountain ranges seem to stretch higher and be denser as each dip reveals a further rise until the clouds met on the horizon are small with distance.
You walk now off the road where drivers can go and begin climbing.
I am afraid to go with you.
A frosty shrub of a colour like eau de nil reminds you of the snow country and you look upwards where the gums are sprung in three trunks. You have walked through a shallow gully concentrating on the placing of your feet. Now you look back and sigh, not only for the beauty of the ancient grass-trees, their spiky heads on twisted, leaning black trunks bent towards each other in timeless conversation, but also because the sigh was forced out of you.
We are walking because this is no place to dance. The dance occurs in the nervous system. The dance at this point is in the stillness of the landscape, in the ringing industry of the native life as countless insects play dead or leap with amazing agility or clap their wings together in contrapuntal code and birds' eyes concentrate to pierce their camouflage and disturbed wallabies suddenly thump through the scrub on long lower legs like a pair of sticks beating a carpet, rhythmically.
I did not realise I was dancing and lying to myself until I heard myself singing, 'this is no place to dance'.
If the light is perfect and you yourself are nothing but pure observation, you can see, to the east, the line of the sea, equivalently to the west, the flatness of the plains where the Range stops.
The space-ship.
There it is in broad daylight hovering shamelessly.
I feel the freedom here, the rarefied atmosphere. I feel the glamour, the enchantment of the female lands. Of course alien beings would come here! To a friendly place. My pack for some reason has become lighter. I am not afraid of the Bush, this is our land. Even though it cannot be possessed. It possesses. I am more likely to encounter a ghost than I am to meet a man. If I meet a woman, she and I will have the positive experience of making the journey and being here to share. But generally the women don't come this far. The western tracts of Lesbianlands are left to the wildlife. You make the decision with renewed energy. You want to go forward. Down. You have decided to walk the 'lands, you want to find the right place, the spot which speaks back to you. The northern end of the Campbell valley is swathed in low cloud banks. Somewhere down there in the mist is the mysterious far corner of our freehold, the boundary with State Forest. The Immediate descent is sharp and rocky, manageable because of old cattle trails. You zigzag forward, losing the view. As the bush thickens so the land flattens a little as if you have found another ridge, but it keeps dividing, presenting you with choices. I am lost. In some places there are springs, puddles in the earth where water breaks the surface and tadpoles blindly swim. Others, almost identical, are dry now. You have to pause in your stride at the end of a stand of casuarinas. You are faced with a hedge of lantana. If you crawl you can follow the paths of wallaby or, once, cattle. Well eventually they must go down to the river, one says, and you drop to your knees. We continue, looking for a camping spot.
2
Such a cold night in September and you shiver. Nan says, 'It does snow here, higher up. Sometimes.'… No chance of a dance, Nance. Who said that? Truly, it was a voice in my head, but it was not my own voice. No. I am clinging on. The copper rocks are blue. If you had a mind to solve our financial worries willy-nilly a lorry load of this sent to Sydney landscape-gardeners would do it. But the land is sacred. I would be moving the spirits of ancestors from their resting place.
Money calls the shots. Always a call for money.
3
Widows Peak rises behind her, a jagged forbidding rock. The beak-shaped mountain on our land to the north-west of Widows Peak, on which it snows if there's snow around, is higher still and called, believe it or not, Mount Ararat, on the maps. From where she stands she can see the highway making its line through the pass in the Great Divide, some of the pasture of Campbell River Station and across the central downs of Lesbianlands. They do not know my camping gear was lifted from Army Supplies in Stuart. I must move on to a more gentle spot where the bush absorbs the threatening sounds. The walk has become something more primitive, she notes wryly to herself as she crawls downward and forward. A little fear rises, drying the mouth. As long as I descend one should be all right. The lantana seems endless. How many cattle-ticks or paralysis ticks or any sort of ticks are falling down her neck, I wonder. The only thing that seems to grow with lantana is a savage thornbush. Skidding now on loose soil and large stones on a sudden change of gradient, I am falling. Tumbling with marginal control, I crash into barbed wire. There is a path. You are with her but you do not feel very well. She is bold. She is descended from the Amazons while you have amazing memory. I come across a clump of Yucca filamentosa, Adam's Needle. Horrid plant. I think I am cactus. Fucking finished.
We know there are no fences on Lesbianlands except those that separate ourselves from neighbouring farmers, and those built around kitchen gardens near dwellings. Tents for the most part. And a couple of old ones on the downs of Horses Hangout.
She, you and I struggle back the way we came, defeated by the barbed wire fence. You feel vulnerable, super-sensitive, and involved in our own drama. It's downhill all the way to my lover's arms. She favours the colours of ochres and tan. She wears a black Che beret with a red star sewn to the right of the centre, the felt flopping over the leather band on long, straight dark blond hair. She is dated, and proud of it, street-fighter of the 'seventies. But is that what I love? Her uniform? Her anachronism? But only one-third of me can love. I have come up here alone to sort myself out. Will camp one more night.
4
And sat that night on a flat piece of hillside amongst the blady grasses and allowed my soul to open to the past and the future and presence of the nocturnal chorus of mammals and birds and frogs and insects, I suppose, singing out and arguing about sex and food. The lights came silently at such velocity a less aware person would not perceive. I was not stoned nor am I in delusion. Struck by shooting stars which came to a stop to regard me watching them. Not a meteor shower. She, a part of me, hummed a deep melody in memory of a past life that haunts me to this place.
Now you smile: they are here.
Wow. They burn marks onto the ground to prove that my time in meditation beyond my own will, my own mind, is real. The spirit, I am told, is of finer essence than the soul, which in turn is finer than thought process and astral bodies are atmospheric shells. The ego floats through the warps of time and space until it attaches, an anchor catching the sand and rock,
pinning a person to a time and place, the tail on the donkey. It seemed so sensible as the funny lights danced before my eyes and my ego dissolved into the collective mind like sugar in warming water. I closed my eyes and opened them again twice. At first they are still there, and in the second, when I am very tired, they are not. My girlfriend will think I am way off the planet.
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