The Universe is Not in the Cedars
My brain has been impoverished recently; I’ve had no reason to leave the house for months. Not that anyone cares, of course, but prolonged emptiness cramps. “Give me the Mariana Trench for an inkwell!” I’d yell in my head when trying to write. So to escape the humiliation ritual that is finding a job or talking to people, and to avoid pacing about the house imitating a funeral procession, I decided to walk up a mountain. As a way of staying a step ahead of catatonic nihilism and imaginative waste, I try to get out and walk as often as I can. Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” What beautiful vistas the Alps must have afforded him, pointing the compass of his thoughts to cosmic straits before him. With literary, philosophical flourish, I blink and step into the sun.
There is a kind of everlasting luxury in going on walks, especially in nature. Life itself—its brevity and harshness—becomes innocuous, and affiliations come in droves. So when I find my mouth drying up, when I want to substitute the sun for an egg yolk in the sky, I count it time to get to nature. Unfortunately, where I live, being in nature runs the high risk of either getting bitten by a snake and dying or getting a little shot and dying. Off we fuck then.
Mount Gibraltar lies on the north-east end of Bowral and is a haven from the town’s festering tourism. I’m not at all athletic (I have the build of a cinnamon stick), but I go there seeking solitude and a more ecstatic form of life, away from the ridiculous, disingenuous society of most. Traces of fall hang in the air: gnats huddle and revolve above the ferns, mourning the dying summer, the normally cobalt sky assumes a celestial verdure as the light precipitates in the spaces between the cathedral of leaves.
I come to a clearing where the plateaus rise roughly thirty metres above me. Crickets and finches rhapsodise in the shrubbery by the cliff’s cheeks. Scrapped gravel crushers, hoppers, and washers that impale tall grass mounds or are embraced in willow vines remind you, lost in the solitary wood, that more than a wilderness, Gibraltar was a metal graveyard. At the foot of the cliff are the remains of a bonfire, bearded with rocks like some ritual site. On one of these rocks, you can find the sketch of a bow aiming its arrow back the way you came.
Every time I go out to one of these places, it is as though I am expecting to find solace in something external from myself; that I may meet some minister of life—maybe a monk or a Heraclitus, who abominates social toils. They would tell me some “enlightenment lies within” rhetoric, but was Eve not plucked from Adam’s rib? Not that it’s bullshit, but we honour what is perceived through the senses; thus, we uncover truths like a caramel core. The Aztecs would clap before the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, and its architecture would diffuse the sound and echo back the call of a quetzal bird—their god’s Venusian answer. Now and then, on the trail, I would clap in all directions, hoping some bird would sing in return, but the forest hushed and heaped a malignant silence instead.
As I idle around the clearing and hop across loose stones, finding cobwebs in the crevices covered in dewdrops like a city of pearls, the sudden sight of a half-buried dark coil nearly trips me over my feet and traps the air in my larynx. I stand at a distance: the red-bellied snake is dead but cryptic still in its death, in the brilliance of its eyes and scales.
Like a dead star, whose obsidian light still glimmers,
At once dead and dying, divided by light-years.
While resting on a log listening to the lyrebirds—oooo-wik, oooo-wik—a sparrow emerges. The black of its blunt bill moustachioed the ringlets round its eyes, with reddish-gravel plumes on the back. The underbelly is white, fanned with black wafts. Never had a sparrow been still for so long. In the excitement of it all, I lean forward and reach my hand slightly. Only the sighing empty promise of this curious animal, the beckoning of its tilted look—tilted as though stiff—nowhere else for fear to hide—seemed to suggest, conversely, its retreat. I leave it alone to sing.
It is the purpose of nature to preserve itself. Things like love—in the modern sense—and its armoury cake the brain. For the sake of that great irreverent word 'love', people hope to carapace their souls with some kindred substance. But the soul never matches reality. So they disguise distortion, burdens, and resentment as the spice of love. They subjugate their identities to someone else, twisting all intimate connections out of recognition. With this in mind, is love not a corruption of life? If great thoughts are conceived while walking, it is love that sweeps us off our feet. I hate myself for this logic without affection or decency. Our associations appall us sometimes, so we fall in love anyway (well played, gods of romcom). But even here, nature is thrust with scrap metal. Where can we find something genuine?
As the ascent steepened, the mud became ochreous: octopus mud that clung to my feet. Still, it became so steep I had to bend on all fours and dig my fingers in to climb, assuming the form of a leopard or some other hunter.
Up ahead, a flashing shadow of a kangaroo leapt through the eucalyptus and vines above. Its curled tail swung the body on. By the time I scale the rise, there is no sign. I began to wonder what, if anything, I am chasing. All of nature seemed a phantom, tendrils of Gibraltar itself. Amplifying this atmosphere are the charred trees, reaching out like hands, transformed into spectres of death. But they preferred that. To animals, humans are the only thing worse than death. At every turn, the wildlife appeared before me through a keyhole, and I would need a keener eye for this sort of thing. The eyes of a falcon weigh an ounce each, and its fovea is several times more magnifying than ours.
On I climb. Now and then, I hear the invisible kangaroo clumping and thumping through the thickets just beyond my reach. I count fourteen alternate paths on the way up (infinity to the Minotaur) until, veering off the trail through thickets, I come to a massive flat rock overlooking Bowral. Rivers of lichen covered it like the veins in marble. The sky was a dome welding of cold adamantine clouds. Wind pulled my clothes around. The poplars surrounding Old Mick’s hybrid house, the fenced-off quarry next to it, the chimney for the brick supplier with its white fuck-off-sized ‘Bowral Brick’ running down the side, the water tanks that overshadowed the lower Gib; Bowral now possesses a precision and rough casing that reminds me of a miniature tabletop model, made painterly through the frame of eucalyptus trees.
Fuck, I need to get to Japan.
The fact I’ve never been overseas tightens the desperation. Show me Himeji Castle! Niigata prefecture! Let it tip the scales of my ideas, quick! Before the cheese slides off my cracker! If this walk doesn’t fix my crisis, maybe the Appalachian Trail could. This is a lie. Those who seek that ultimate reality somewhere else deceive themselves in fear of their devouring circumstances. In his essay “Self-Reliance”, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:
Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty and lose my sadness. [...] I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.
This is in agreement with Heraclitus, who said, “He who travels on every road would not find out the limits of the soul in the course of walking, so deep is its account.” The giant following us always, starves always. When fulfilled, a larger one grows.
Perhaps I am an Ismael. Whereas the Ahabs will hunt the whale and command its severed head to speak, others will sit alone atop mastheads, listen to conches and think it the nostalgia of the universe.
I hear the thumping again behind me. The thickets and underbrush rattle. I round the corner, and standing erect, frozen among the thickets, are two kangaroos staring at me, bubbles of dusk in their eyes, not ten metres away. I start to whistle the calls of tits and lyrebirds and watch as their puzzled ears rotate. At once I turn my head with them, and I begin to unconsciously mimic the movements of these animals and crouch as they lower themselves. I turn my head about, alert for the heads of people, swimming like jaded sharks in that sea of switchgrass. They watch me, gripping the neck of a sprouting weed. The distance closes in behind them.
I look, it looks, we look; we live, we shun,
We leave.