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He was always looking in at other people's lives, even the dead. Just passing through. He envied them their stolidity, their established purpose, the rotines and comfortability of knowing who they were. Always, in these stark reaches, there was someone else calling. It had all gone on for too long; the harshness, the unfolding disaster. Someone had to reach out and say a kind word. But of course they never did. Plucked at by ravaging dogs, by jackels hunting in packs, vermin snapping at the edge of the herd, always there, always there, his own mind racing towards a fulfilment that never came, always in this dazzling cruelty, the baying of the pack, there was a kind of salvation in moving on. They were rough climates, rough ledges. There was determination, grit as a new study called it, a forlorn flapping of wings in the higher reaches; something that could be called but was already gone; and that was it.
He's sitting on a gold mine, someone said, but he shrugged and ignored them, as he had so many others. They had backed away but they had not disappeared. Not yet. Frightened, yes he had been frightened, as the camp dogs picked over his already decomposing flesh. Frightened that so far away in so many places, he could hardly resonate without colour, could hardly claim to have even been alive. Time telescoped at the beginning of life. "How do you look back on it all?" Martin asked. "I remember you fondly," he said. And they retold tales from their chaotic youth, hitting him with a typewriter, trying to run him over, fleeing, fleeing, in the empty spaces between realms, between Amsterdam and Berlin, between a wild past and a devestating future, between everything they would be and everything that had passed.
"My career, my career," Martin had repeatedly declared as they followed remote tracks through the Himalayas, surrounded by snow capped peaks and fields full of spring flowers. Insanely beautiful. And decades later they sat in a comfortable Sydney backyard and reminisced; as if nothing could be said that hadn't already been said. But as if peace at last was coming into the final sentiments of their final days, a terrible kind of resolution. "I envy you the stability of your lives," he told the boyfriend, and when Martyn raised an eyebrow he muffled the response, "Well, not really, but something." He might have died of boredom, and he might never have been happy, but perhaps it would have been easier than beiong alone at a time of life when he did not wish to be. As if everything had broken and fallen down; and only other people carried off the rewards of so much suffering.
That was it really, the end of days, when everything came full circles; amongst those who were still alive. The few who were still alive. Red rain is falling down, the old Peter Gabriel song went, and yes it did, thin blood wiping across the windscreens, a parallel ghost, voices that would persist long past their use by date, interspliced with moments of wonder: nobody's watching you. The howling of the mob had died. If not retreated licking wounds, then stepped dismissively away into daily obsessions, with no apology from the jeering circus; their cow like intelligences already obsessed by new levels of hatred and intrigue for some other hapless drone; a delight in a soap opera world, in manufactured crises dribbling on screens. Set in large houses most of them would never see. And looking up and looking lost. "They were very dangerous people," Robbie said. "I think it's a good thing what you did. But you will always have to be careful."
Yes, careful of being kind. And careful of thinking you can ever buy love, or even loyalty. And careful of trusting anyone.
THE BIGGER STORY:
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| Cemetery, Conistan, NSW, Australia |
He's sitting on a gold mine, someone said, but he shrugged and ignored them, as he had so many others. They had backed away but they had not disappeared. Not yet. Frightened, yes he had been frightened, as the camp dogs picked over his already decomposing flesh. Frightened that so far away in so many places, he could hardly resonate without colour, could hardly claim to have even been alive. Time telescoped at the beginning of life. "How do you look back on it all?" Martin asked. "I remember you fondly," he said. And they retold tales from their chaotic youth, hitting him with a typewriter, trying to run him over, fleeing, fleeing, in the empty spaces between realms, between Amsterdam and Berlin, between a wild past and a devestating future, between everything they would be and everything that had passed.
"My career, my career," Martin had repeatedly declared as they followed remote tracks through the Himalayas, surrounded by snow capped peaks and fields full of spring flowers. Insanely beautiful. And decades later they sat in a comfortable Sydney backyard and reminisced; as if nothing could be said that hadn't already been said. But as if peace at last was coming into the final sentiments of their final days, a terrible kind of resolution. "I envy you the stability of your lives," he told the boyfriend, and when Martyn raised an eyebrow he muffled the response, "Well, not really, but something." He might have died of boredom, and he might never have been happy, but perhaps it would have been easier than beiong alone at a time of life when he did not wish to be. As if everything had broken and fallen down; and only other people carried off the rewards of so much suffering.
That was it really, the end of days, when everything came full circles; amongst those who were still alive. The few who were still alive. Red rain is falling down, the old Peter Gabriel song went, and yes it did, thin blood wiping across the windscreens, a parallel ghost, voices that would persist long past their use by date, interspliced with moments of wonder: nobody's watching you. The howling of the mob had died. If not retreated licking wounds, then stepped dismissively away into daily obsessions, with no apology from the jeering circus; their cow like intelligences already obsessed by new levels of hatred and intrigue for some other hapless drone; a delight in a soap opera world, in manufactured crises dribbling on screens. Set in large houses most of them would never see. And looking up and looking lost. "They were very dangerous people," Robbie said. "I think it's a good thing what you did. But you will always have to be careful."
Yes, careful of being kind. And careful of thinking you can ever buy love, or even loyalty. And careful of trusting anyone.
THE BIGGER STORY:
BANGKOK -- Seventy-four Chinese fishermen were missing on Monday after a typhoon sunk three fishing boats in the South China Sea as Thailand and Vietnam braced for torrential rain and flooding.
The ships were hit by Typhoon Wutip on Sunday as they navigated gales near the Paracel Islands, about 205 miles from China's island province of Hainan, state news agency Xinhua said, citing sources with the Hainan maritime search and rescue center.
Rescuers had rescued 14 survivors, the sources said. The boats were sailing from the southern province of Guangdong.
Rains from the storm are expected to reach Vietnam on Monday before hitting Thailand on Tuesday.
Thai officials warned that more heavy rains could inundate already flood-hit areas of the northeast. At least 22 people have been killed in this year's flooding.
Julia Gillard has thrown a thinly veiled barb at Kevin Rudd for disloyalty and for destabilising her prime ministership, declaring the difference between her behaviour and his was that she always worked for the re-election of the Labor government.
She said while it was difficult to accept the outcome of the ballot which returned Mr Rudd to the prime ministership, she had quickly concluded the best course was to give her party "the gift of silence" deciding not to make any public comments before the election.
In the only public comments she has made on the explosive events of June and Mr Rudd's role in eventually replacing her, she justified her original move on Mr Rudd in June 2010 as "legitimate".
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