i found myself thinking "the time machine" not as in a machine for time travel but as the mechanism/conceptual apparatus with its differing historical rhythms that humans have made for themselves to live in & how it takes over pounding us out like biscuits or cheap alarm clocks or some shit who gives a fuck.

last ngiht walking home from newtown. all the way, but the length of brighton street in particular, it struck me, came over me. by the time i reached the corner of brighton and west, those isolated gums, dim pale slender poles with the moon effulging behind them. i didn't think it, i felt it.
that primitive moon and those trees standing and throbbing millions of years ago. the same that shone on far-apart campfires and lands before humans and even, i thought later, diprotodon. i felt so strongly the manmade nature of clock time i felt the same moon was there and it was the same though things were ckeared there was still the warm humid heat in the air, the same medium, the same high sky and sense of being in this almost primeval landscape. i might have been another scuttling instance of marsupial life in some sparse and quiet path of undergrowth nearing a clearing long, long, long ago with the insects and the humid quiet medium warm and high around and the long gums and the white bark and the moon behind, behind, above, above and me and all alive, alive.
not anthropocentric in the least, this world i felt, i saw, was there around us all the time, perhaps behind but there - the leaves, the gums, the half moon high, behind. a snake far more fitting to document it in art, in signs, than any human hand. i didnt feel that. not anthropocentric, or anthropomorphic, not even my human eyes, that's how it felt.
the feeling rising and me into the feeling rising losing self in sense - me gone just present humming in that insectsong alive, alive, the warmth of air, height distance hug, the moon.
not reading hardy, i don't think, just the atmosphere, the time, the night.
but i did think of tess looking at the moon and transporting out of herself over that distance concentrating herself in the gaze on the far distant moon and i felt rather the moon brought down here, the moon burns in my atrium heart, one chamber, but then i reversed it and did what she did for just the glimmer of an instant and i was there, yes, a moment, and that was a human act, a focus of the eyes with a thought - transport.
i could have renamed that west/brighton corner there and then, with the trees and their undergrowth gone, standing pale tall long. the words came to me so unfittng to the place for the daily gaze: the moon at bone's gap.

from emails i sent today:

on the 1979 moon treaty --
did you know the moon is leaving? i'd like to call a book that. "The Moon is Leaving." Leaving orbit that is. Then again, once u start thinking in astronomical time, you damn yourself to the concussive horror of human insignificance. Best to stick with nice antrhopological concepts, like Law and Love.

so glad you feel better. i feel different. i feel oddly revamped in some quintessential sense. maybe
it's getting to sleep ok last night, but i think it's more than that. i feel like my body contains some
new hormone called Vividerone.

====

yesterday there was this insane wind.
i told marc i couldn't do a 6 oclock start, "i absolutely fullstop couldn't." i don't know how he was doing it.
marc boyne plumber yesterday, somehow he always has this rustic hardyesque light in his face and makes some regional country compliment, its so strange. its like a film.

wrote on saturday, late:
I had a hell of an evening. Went out for dinner with a friend - Commonwealth ATM ate my money &
then I lost my glasses inexplicably which i needed to drive home and spent seemingly hours looking for
them, failed miserably. Harassing pollution of Saturday night hoons. Came home to axe-weilding mother. Made friends with her & confiscated axe. Am now feeling relatively cheery since I'm peacefully at home & next stop is bed.
too many projects going at the moment. i feel less than lighthearted about [attempted novel's] fragmented & unmaneagble state. it is insane how many thousands of words i have written in the past 5 yrs. what i wouldnt give for a clean
slate. it's distressing.

where is my time lapse hidey-hole? to be on a stopstill freezeframe plane of time for a little, for just enough to get it done, something done, one thing amongst all the many many many things done.
intensity of experience is returning i think. for a long time i was feeling wooden, closed off, in a sensory sense. too many screens - too much "looking at" not feeling within. now i'm being a pisshead romantic. i should seek chemical help. drink and dance.

also a saturday email:
went to animal park today!! so good. there was this wallaby with such a soft little nuzzle, and it had
such a hot body temperature, the poor wary little thing. so pretty with its eyelashes. there were so
many beautiful things there. i love the different way they all move.

==
i have so many old emails. i suppose they serve to sort of auto-diarise my life, to some extend. i hope i dont lose them all somehow.

also wrote:
I just (tearfully) read the Mayor of Casterbridge over the last couple of days
and so have a hankering to see some Hardyesque regional characters. Hardy har har.
You sound relatively brighteyed & bushytailed gov. Hope everything, workwise & otherwise, is going
fab. Had wonderful afternoon at Symbio wildlife park. Morning hell though: trying to wade through
messes of own writing.

Yeah, look "Middle Eastern Appearance" up in the revised Oxford and you get three definitions:
i) Evil
ii) Satanical, threatening or diabolical in aspect
iii) Opressed minority

Tim cheerfully broached the topic with me once telling me how much flak he gets at airports due to
his "middle eastern appearance." Imagine: terrorist Tim.

I was wearing someone's ear off for 1/2 hr yesterday about how I want to go somewhere
with a creek! A pebble creek! This may require me to move to NZ though.

during last week:
(i have been shortening schoarlship titles to 90 and 45 characters)
other great scholarships include a one-off grant for research into
"The Cyto and Chemoarchitecture of the Echidna's Cerebral Cortex"
and an enticing sounding one entitled
"The Drug and Alcohol Scholarship"
---a year's supply, perhaps?
There was also one for "Preventing Throat Lozenges Sticking Together."

speaking of lockups, the other brilliant thing i used to do was leave my
violin behind in classrooms on days when i had a lesson later & have to go
back well after hours when everything was locked up & find the cleaner
lurking under the stairs. i'll never forget that ghostly smell.

when i zipped home after meeting you the other day alas i had locked myself out... nothing daunted, i had a nap on the doorstep.
ive done laps at night@leichhardt pool a coupla times & it's sort
of amusing - people glow all blue-white like pale frogs.

it's a bit of a flat pancake today (the brain) but not in a bad way. in fact i'm not at work, i'm clocking
in at work from home, one of the (over)privileges of nepotism.

when you get a moment in front of a monitor, tell me what
you're doing. coming back to the fatal shores at all this year?
it's almost february. so in a month or so it'll be back to law school [...] meanwhile, these few days, i've been
trying to organise old unfinished stories, collated chunks of prose, 1000s of
word files, and i'm lost in a hell of words which is also a hell of myself, a
monster begat out of my own nowhere efforts, efforts that led nowhere, seeing
what i can salvage. that's one thing i'm up to just now. the others - working
2 jobs (usyd[for magsy!], unsw) and music and loving the sun and not being away all summer as it so often
feels i am, and looking after family & canine & dental problems. sleep has
been scarce, not for want of putting my head down on the pillow & wishing it
would hit me.
met up with an ex yesterday and found the experience
somewhat deflating.
in general, though, there's been a lot of (the right kind of) intensity, and a
sunny yellow feeling, and i feel alternately childish and grownup.

[edited/altered]
took me days
to recover from the brilliance of brokeback mountain in which not all concur, in fact im not sure i recovered. i could feel
salt in a slick running off my hands in the when i got home and was washing my
hands, thats how many tears had been running down them/my face/everything.
actual public sobbing took place as i was walking home. bittersweet
wrench. it was quite life-moving.

kit away 6 nights for a conference in tasmania.

How was the rest of Saturday? [at glebe markets] Sorry for my sudden exit. Was on the verge of
collapse. Walked into a car/side mirror. Am finding walking in a straight line
increasingly difficult. Could this be love, or just a terminal illness?
Anyway was home with hours to spare to go to Observatory Hill with my mum. I
think she enjoyed her massage but then, you can never be too sure. ... it seemed to me very hot.
I hate
my face.

I fear on the inside I may be a brickie's labourer - I
just lack the manpower. And i completely agree about the frightend child
feeling inside (incidentally: your singlet suits that geist exactly!) I am
increasingly thinking of myself as overgrown child. I need to get out of this
somehow or I will turn into one of those old women who wears pigtails with
daisy clips and mumbles to her thumbs as she strides along King St. Not based
on any actual person, but you know the general idea. Sometimes I think
innocence & real childhood and the memory of it is the saddest thing in the
world. Truth be told though, I was never particularly innocent - i think i had
quite a naughty streak as a kiddywink. Not in the worst way.

Yes, looking at my computer and the sheer indeed insane volume of
unfinished and unfinishable and i suspect essentially shitty creative writing
projects it contains is deflating. The neurotic rant
ends now. BANG! Boink, boink, boink. The cheerful and onamatopaeic descent
into nonsense.

i think you kissed me just in time
it felt like a diving catch
we made it by a hairsplit breath
i don't know what i would have done if you hadn't done that.

the scene was bursting in on me
my heart was gulping hard
i was terrified that there could be
so much vision, so much time.

in italy my eyes trained me
to see with a happy broken heart
the distance between them and me
and here and there and then

the past - i trained my gaze
on sights that peeled my eyes
and sharpened stars in my dumfounding view
of heady waste. the stars! the stars!