brogan bunt

Today I had a bill for $1,511 dollars to pay for a new center differential in my car. I withdrew $1500 dollars in cash from my personal bank account, but was unable to pick up the car because the garage closed at 5pm. I had to get a lift home. I collected my mail on the way in. It included two bills. The first was one was from Sydney Water for $223.85. A little bar chart showed that I had consumed 237 kilolitres for the quarter. The previous owner had consumed 345 kilolitres during the same period last year. I ended up switching my payment mode to direct debit so that I don’t have to worry about water bills anymore. Instead they are automatically paid monthly. The second bill was from the NRMA. I must pay $187.50 by the 24th of May to maintain road side assistance for my motorcycle. But now I also need the same thing for my car, so I will have to upgrade my policy to include two vehicles – thankfully this comes with a 25% saving.

A fly at the far end of my table. A rushed ground-level survey of where I had just been eating and then up in the air to land on the bananas, searching for some slight weakness in their thick skins. Then to the apples and mandarins, then to the chair. Seems late in the season for flies. What can it be looking for? It pauses for a moment on my Oulipo book. It sets off again. I regularly lose sight of it, only for it to suddenly reappear – on my anthology of conceptual art, back on the the bananas, on the brown expanse of a bare section of table. How much longer does it have for these circuits? Death seems such an immediate prospect – at once both evident and denied in the urgency of its flight. The fly is my companion this evening. It consecrates the tender surface of my fruit. It ascends high into the air near my clock. It lends tiny wings to the passage of an evening. I will be sad when it goes.

I put on loud music. I am listening to loud music. But the sound scarcely touches me. The blur of still objects. The darkness of incandescent lights. A gap between songs – something can be heard – but then the music starts again like a dumb hairy animal. The evening is heavy of flesh and weary. If only it could carry itself off to decompose. The sliding glass door is slightly open, but with no promise of an unexpected guest. All manner of uncommunicative things. The blue wall. The white wall. The framed painting. I can’t even look at the table. It is the forest at the edge of a massive freeway through a place I have never visited. The only option is to keep driving, to press harder on the pedal. Been listening to the radio for so long, my ears are numb. No use switching stations. No use even imagining getting home. Fuck the forest and the misty night. Fuck this whole fucking road trip.

One cloak upon another. Impossible to determine how many. Lifting one of them, I can see the high tide rushing in, flattening the soft sand – the waves miraculous phantoms, the horizon a fading flame. The cloaks hang suspended and continue to fall. In the gaps between them, other scenes – inaudible and uncertain. Threadbare bits of cloth – the dark and elusive sky. The prevailing sense that nothing can be done. At some stage, there has to be some effort to escape this gentle suffocation. But for every cloak that I lift another descends. They tempt like the velvet sleep of a happy marriage. They are as light as the baffled air. They calm all of my efforts to resist. Each step forward is heavier than the last. The weight of the layers gathers and collects. It separates and dissipates. I tell myself to imagine things differently, to not succumb to any of this, but I am soon enough laden and confused again.

The evil sentinel squatted on a pillar above the castle gate. Blood, viscera and phlegm draped down his dark reptile skin. His towering wings lightly opened and then closed as he lifted to survey the scene. No amount of darkness could protect the approaching army from his awful gaze. With nobody summoning him, with nobody commanding him, the sentinel swooped down upon the invading throng, slaughtering them one by one. Silence, the cracking of spines and the wet sound of organs against rock. The night proceeded infinitely. The desolate army continued to approach. The sentinel maintained his bloody watch. The townspeople lay down upon the streets sobbing and reaching for the softness of one another. They dared not look up. They dared not see the shadow in the sky or acknowledge the awful fluids that rained down upon them. They dared not call the sentinel their own.

I wait for something distinct this evening – some new object, some other light, some other set of sounds. But it is no good looking or listening for anything intently. Things have to approach me on their own terms and within the experience of repetition. It is now almost 6pm. Around the middle of the day I drove into town and bought an ironing board. I went on a long bike ride late in the afternoon. The wind was blowing strongly from the south, which meant that the ride back was hard. Always the soft sound of crickets in the garden and the ticking of the clock. Everything seems utterly precarious tonight, although nothing of this takes adequate shape. I was hoping to have a bath a bit earlier, but couldn’t find the rubber plug. I searched through all the drawers and cabinets. I even tried the metal kitchen plug, but no luck. I guess there may have never been a plug. I ended up having my usual shower.

Just a single pineapple left. Some things shiver in the breeze – loose bits of paper, the covers of books. The apples are now visible. Utterly unconscious, they wait to be eaten. They abandon themselves to whatever happens. I cannot allow myself to slip into inactivity today. I thought I could deal with any eventuality. I thought that I would somehow discover the resources to manage, and particularly to manage on my own, but I am less certain now. It would be best to stop thinking. I need to make a small table. I need to buy a few things. Sometimes that’s all it takes, but I’m wondering whether any of this can genuinely work any longer. Even to look outside seems to amount to little more than an effort to roll over and go to sleep. The sun plays tentatively on the grass and then withdraws. There are light puffy clouds in the sky. The breeze lifts. I had been thinking of going for a bike ride.

With the lights on, everything appears dead. The fruit looks inedible. All the books look unlegible. My hat seems to have sunk, lost confidence and become smaller. All the paper appears superfluous. Nothing at all seems necessary – except , of course, my wallet, keys and phone. This is a time that must be countenanced and endured. Dusk is past. Evening has imperceptibly begun. Darkness has lost its legs and become a heavy and incoherent mass. And it is getting cold. I really should put a jacket on. I had looked at heaters today, but had no idea which to buy. I imagined not buying a heater at all. None of my friends would come around. I’d be wrapped up in warm jumpers all winter long – a huddled, stupid, lonely thing. But still I am disturbed by the light. I am concerned that nothing will happen at all, that there will be no coming of winter, that everything has come to a halt this insignificant night.

It is becoming dark again. This seems to be the time that I write – as the daylight slips away. I have no music. I have no lights. I can scarcely see the keys. Luckily I can just about touch type – one of my few skills. Looking up at the mandarins and apples roughly heaped in the porcelain bowl, it is as though I am looking through a dark camera viewfinder. The mandarins still have their bright highlights, but unnaturally subdued, even gray. The apples have altogether disappeared – nothing more than a subterranean geology. The two pineapples in the wooden fruit bowl are like fat things nestled in bed. The sound of kookaburras, small birds and cars. Always a lift in the sound of cars as the day ends, as people rush about with their varied expectations of evening. And no doubt I should also be looking ahead, considering what comes next. I cannot simply sit in the gathering dark – and yet I can.

I noticed a leech first when I bent down to tie one of my shoelaces. I wagered that there was sufficient time to tie the knot before it reached me. I was just right and headed off quickly down the track. Walking, leeches have plenty time to get hold. Running, they have much less chance. There is a lack of coherent heat to summon their inexorable attention. Approaching my car, grappling for my keys, I recognised another leech cowering on my sock just above the shoe. I was surprised that it had not made the short climb to my leg. It seemed confused by the lack of sustenance. I pulled it off and it stuck to the end of my thumb like a small, flexible and frenetically waving additional finger. A final flick dislodged it. I removed my shoes and socks and placed them on the floor on the opposite side of the car. I washed my shoes with the hose when I got home. Drying on the rear doorstep, they look quite clean and unflustered now.

Necessity need not beckon. Beckoning assumes scope for choice. I am beckoned at – I can ignore the beckoning or allow myself to be drawn to the one who beckons. However, if the beckoner does not actually stand at a distance and beckon, but instead approaches me directly – allowing me no escape – then things are different. Better in this instance to conceive an erotics or an etiquette of necessity. Scrupulously polite and reticent, but always desirous, necessity makes a show of beckoning when it actually imposes itself. Arriving in a split second – in a darkness that cannot be countenanced – it is an intimate breath from afar. The stench of an ancient cloak. Necessity strides along with a spritely step and an invisible laughter. I can only follow. I would inevitably follow if such a grim figure were to appear, but instead we have only this. The table spreads out before me tonight like a graveyard, like the clucking of geese, like the temptation to sleep.

A list of things to accomplish today would be useful. Documents to prepare, include in agendas and distribute. A new front motorbike tire and repairs to my car transmission. A visit to the doctor to attend to my hand. Drop in on a few people. Do some housework. And especially don’t forget to phone the lawyers. After all, I have paid the account. Crazy not to have my name on the will. All I need to do is make an appointment and go in and sign the thing, but I have put off this simple task for months. Once I have neglected something for a sufficiently long time then it becomes tempting to see if I can neglect it altogether. After all, does it really matter if nothing is accomplished? Who will notice? How long will it take them to notice? By the time they notice it is quite likely that everything will have moved on, that none of this will be perceived as important anymore. Neglect is the impulse towards life.

Currents in the grain of wood indicate that the table is not simply a piece of furniture. It incorporates motion within its attitude of quiet reserve. In his late middle age – actually near the end of his life – the guitarist and writer, John Fahey, came to regard his early work as pretentious. He ate popcorn, drank too much beer and let his heart go to ruin. But this was also to permit his spiritual and corporeal self some latitude – some scope for change. It scarcely matters in the long term whether the change was ruinous or beneficial. I have been listening to his album, “The Dance of Death and Other Plantation Favorites”. His music has the capacity to return static objects to a state of flux. Now that the album is finished, I can hear the crickets whirring in the yard and the roar of the ocean in suburban streets. There are always too many surfaces and too many depths. Once again it is time to find my way elsewhere.

I follow a steep track up between two high cliffs. The ground is blue with the anticipation of cold. Patches of snow in the gneiss scree. To stop here even for a moment. To imagine this possible. To remember now that I passed this way. The turmoil of two bags fractured upwards, nothing like clouds. They thrust above the layer of paper and books beneath, which itself lies above the flat, brown tabletop. I must somehow continue. Endless series of switchbacks leading up to the pass. The mountains resemble the diminishing day. Buckles attached to the grim rock. Zippers running along their soaring aretes. I must pick my way between them. I must find my way to the place where the difference between one place and another disappears. I must keep walking – the weight of countless homes on my back, but with their contents constantly spilling out behind me. She smiled at me for several weeks. That’s enough.

If I am being honest, only the most minor things have changed since yesterday. My phone is almost certainly in a different position, although it still straddles the divide between the table proper and its extension, and it is still rotated some twenty degrees away from the perpendicular table edge. My wallet has also almost certainly moved. I seem to recall that it was on my left, now it is on my right. It lies resolutely closed to me. I can only just see the edge of some plastic cards. I do recognise one new thing – a letter that arrived yesterday from the Australian Electoral Commission. Once again, I have not opened it. I must however have placed it in my back pocket last night. It has been folded a number of times. I placed it in my back pocked to avoid throwing it out with the rest of my mail – all unwanted stuff. I will say nothing of changes in the garden or sky. I will do my best to remain simply attentive.

Scanning the table for the horizon and discovering only soft, puffy things or smooth, giggling things, or silent things. An axe, a concrete porch, an immense beast that pulls a plough. The Earth itself is upturned, tripping forward under its own weight. A snorting, bellowing, unevenly proportioned, ultimately gaseous and indeterminate thing. And with that, the wind lifts in the garden. The dark streets, the gentle surf, the twinkling lights. I had planned to write of hardship, but hardship leads nowhere. No amount of suffering can be safely assembled here. Instead I notice a long yellow extension lead poised at the top of a vacuum cleaner box. It has not collapsed into the box. It has not abandoned its sense of coiled resilience. Instead, with its multiple curved horizontal lines, it suggests an intemperate patience. If nothing will take coherent shape then let all lines be drawn. Let the spine of reality itself be sketched. Let the viscera that flows from its absent stomach become food for the poor.

The screech of a cockatoo above my house and out the back. I’m wearing this black jumper with the sleeves rolled up. Actually this is not true – most of the day my sleeves were up, but now they have slipped down. Luckily I have an adjustable spanner to fix the leaking gas bottle. Ended up stupidly buying a whole new connection when all I needed was a small rubber O-ring. Standing in Bunnings with some tough woman and her painted daughters just ahead of me. They placed three wet citrus trees and a thermos on the counter. The daughter asked, “why the thermos?” The mother didn’t answer. She was typing in her pin. The sky above my untrimmed hedge is pink and blue. The pink is rising higher, while the blue slips behind it like a dutiful friend. But already the blue, while never stepping forward, prevails. Dusk is a work of inveigling and false obeisance. I was listening to a long piece of music but it finished some time ago.

The brim of my upturned hat describes an arc at the far end of the table, roughly similar to the arc described by the most distant upper lip of the wooden fruit bowl. The closer porcelain bowl appears as a proximate relation. It too is circular, but – brightly yellow with blue lines – it appears much less gloomy and withdrawn. It also has no patience for fruit. It is full of loose items that would otherwise become lost. Apart from a few coins and my coffee cup, the remaining geometry is rectangular – books, pads, letters and so on. But none of this suggests conformity. Piles of books and paper are arranged as splayed sets of playing cards or as curious pieces of modern architecture with large, heavy concrete projections. One of the jutting roofs curves upwards at a corner to rest on the slightly higher edge of the porcelain bowl. It suggests a level of tentative communication between unlike shapes – a point of passage between one form of abstract identity and another.

A fold in the top sheet of a spiral bound pad of lined paper, like a bed sheet pulled back to enable easy entry into a single bed on a cold winter night. The branches of the trees are laden with snow. The street lights reveals footsteps on the path below. Everybody has left. They went today or yesterday. Their faces are obscure to me. The mountains are hidden beneath a pall of darkness. I walk up each of their steep, pine-bound paths simultaneously. My breath spreads though the night. Demons rise up from their hutches. They drag their long, filthy nails through the snow and across the rocks and the trunks of the trees. Limited creatures – they imagine that they are predators when they are in fact prey. They are prey to the disappearance of the forest, of the mountains, of the cold night itself. I withdraw everything I have given them. I can no longer even recognise the bed – only the folded blank page.

Morning brings other thoughts. All thoughts disappear. I am no longer sitting in the sun. My mobile phone, angled slightly sideways, straddles the line separating the table proper from its extension. A book on the Oulipo faces me much more directly, its title neatly underlined by the top edge of my monitor. I really should read it. Jack runs a service called Top Chop Tree Services. His card is green. His number is 0455 294 499. Beneath Jack’s card is a letter from my lawyers. I have yet to sign my will and pay the account. I know this already. I wonder if there is any point in opening letters anymore. I can imagine what they contain. I leave them unopened as reminders. All the fanciful places that no amount of lingering will lead me to. I have walked deserted Parisian streets. I have been ignored by touts. If only I could find some means of making sense of any of this. If only images could actually appear. Perhaps once the housework is done.

Dusk was blue, red and pearly white above the sea. I headed away from the coast, north along the railway line. The creeks had been recently dredged – inky black with mud, stacks of reeds on the shore. A dark figure avoided me as we crossed in opposite directions on an unlit bridge – his hoodie pulled low over his head, his backpack strapped close. I walked across the grass to the end of Sandon Point. A piece of seaweed covered driftwood blocked the path down to the beach. I noticed solar garden lights glowing in the sand beneath – purple, red and blue – and a dim shape beside them. A woman’s voice yelled at me, “Fuck off and leave me alone” and “I can see you up there, you bastard”. I briefly considered responding, but thought better of it, turned around and made my way back to the main bike path. Crossing another little bridge near the Bulli Caravan park, two little girls were skipping ahead of their parents. They bravely said hello to me.

She observed that the house probably had ghosts and asked me if I was afraid of them. This had not occurred to me, but since she had mentioned it I responded that I was not afraid of any ghosts that may haunt my home. I explained that I was happy here and that most likely the ghosts regard me with affection. Since then I have thought more carefully about this. I believe that the ghosts make no attempt to frighten me because they sense our genuine kinship. After all, I am also in the house alone. I also move from room to room silently. I also occasionally wander around at night. I am really not so different from them. No more than a small accident of time separates us. Indeed, returning to my sensible self, it seems to me that haunting is actually something that living people do. In imagining that I am alive I reproduce the imaginary conditions of death. I am my own ghost. Early this evening, I planted five more plants in the garden.

Bright, sunny day – the clouds return to my table, crumpled, shiny and soft. The yellow one at the rear billows open for a moment and then returns to its supplicant attitude. Translucent catacombs, with curved, straining arches. Just next to it at the left the bulwark of a ship, an ice breaker heading through a black sea and still far from the prospect of ice. Or equally the looming presence of an albino shark, jaw open as it lunges up to bite some blithe seal. And then there is the sea itself – a squashed, black, uneven thing. It presses its lumbering bulk down upon an empty fruit bowl. So there are three plastic bags altogether – one yellow, one white and one black. I have been shopping. I have walked amongst crowds of people. I have spoken to shop assistants. I have nodded at a former student as he walked down the hill towards some kind of retro record sale. His girlfriend wore yellow stockings. I deliberately chose the slow way home.

A bit of metal on my brown bag juts out like a shoulder. A loop of thicker meal hangs from it. The latter is linked to a strap that shapes bold curves alongside the outside of the more passive bag. It is though a quick eel makes its way between the legs of a partly submerged rhinoceros, avoiding being squashed, but still locked to the life of the rhinoceros – still unable to precisely escape. Even when the waterhole is empty of terrestrial things, the eel has only one thought – less a thought than an instinctive inclination – to wait for the heavy legs that will provide its cue to swim and dance. The eel’s bright eyes flash in the muddy, sombre, middling depths. It can sense the pull of the metal at its head and tail. It can sense the risk that this entails, not only of being crushed, but of being held forever by this scene, unable to overcome it, unable to imagine any other way of subsisting – ecstatic in this terminal state.