The French writer Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower so much that he regularly ate meals in its restaurant so that he didn’t have to look at it. I very much admire his creative method for dealing with what to him was an eyesore. I wonder what Mr de Maupassant would have thought of Federation Square? Now that I have been basically living here for the past month, I must say it’s grown on me more. And the river is so close, too. Now the weather is hotter, some of us have taken to sleeping on the banks of the Yarra, but Fed Square is our gravitation point, our kitchen, our toilet. We roam from one to the other.
Some things take time to grow on you. I wonder if Mr de Maupassant would have grown to love the Eiffel Tower? It seems strange now to hear that someone thought the Eiffel Tower ugly, but maybe that’s just because the image of it has become so stuck and solidified and universally accepted as a beautiful object, that lots of people who think it’s horrid don’t say so for fear of being thought to lack taste. But when it was built, Guy certainly wasn’t the only one who hated it.
It is his particular way of dealing with an abhorrence that inspired me and kept me focussed before the Shutdown. I reframed my soul-corroding corporate job, everybody’s tedious consumer existences, into a hero’s journey where the end result was change coming from within. It sounds wanky but it worked better for me than eating any of the other bullshit stories the media fed me day after day. To make meaningful the meaninglessness of partitioned office life into a quest where the people entered right into the guts of the beast and ate it from the inside was what kept me sane while they sprayed stuff overhead to block out the sun. Actually, no, that’s not quite the flavour of the description I’m after. While De Maupassant may have been able to enter into the Eiffel Tower and eat from the inside, entering into the matrix and eating it from the inside sounds like a cancer or a parasite, and I do not care to take on the behaviour of the oppressors. I was going to say the old oppressors, but really, I don’t know if they are still here or not. Perhaps they are like fleas or parasites, and can never be entirely eradicated without killing off the host. Maybe we need shit like that so we know what the light is. I don’t know if they have self-combusted. I don’t know anything anymore. I know a lot now.
What I was hoping was happening to us was that we were heading towards a case of Bluebeard’s wife. If the characters in fairytales all represent different parts of a person’s psyche, then that story represents entering into the guts of the predator in order to disarm him, and taking his power and recasting it into something else. Like alchemy. Transmuting the parasitical into something that fits us better.
That was what it felt like we were all moving towards, slowly, inside myself. Until the Shutdown. And then, everything just stopped. And then after that the Colours came. And now we’re all disorientated twice over, because the Shutdown and the Colours are kind of opposite on the colour wheel. The shutdown was like some kind of dark olive green. The Colours are like violet. I think the Colours have thrown me even more than the Shutdown. I had a feeling about the Shutdown coming. Whoever could have predicted the Colours?
Guy de Maupassant’s name in International Phonetic Alphabet-speak looks like this: [gi d(e) mo.pa.’sã]. Phonetically, it would look something along the lines of: Gee Dee Mow Par Soh. The G of his first name is not a soft G, though, like giraffe or geraniums (neither of which I have seen since the Shutdown). It’s a hard G, like in gruff, or gouache. I have seen much gruffness since the Shutdown. And gouache – well, I’ve seen a fair bit of that, too. I still have a good stash. As far as I can see, I seem to be the only one in the city who is raiding the arts supply store a few streets over for gouache. If only they stocked premixed violet.
Since the Colours, I’ve had this continuous craving to paint with violet, which I am still finding awfully hard to mix myself from scratch. I am kicking myself for all of those times that I could have practised mixing colours myself to make it but instead opted for the quick trip for premixed tubes of Brilliant Violet.
The Colours that spilled out of Joe yesterday were mainly violet. They were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen since the last lot of awesome colours that spilled out of someone else a few hours before that. It’s like being stoned without smoking anything. Everyone, even ugly-hearted people, is looking beautiful, and it’s doing my head in. (It has to be said, though, that there is obviously some rhyme and reason to the Colours, though I haven’t yet learned how to read them. They are another language entirely. For instance, the snarly bastard who hangs on Flinders Lane and who strikes me as a Bastard-From-Shattered Ego-and-Rich-Parasitical-Privilege rather than Bastard-From-Mental-Illness – he has some shitty colours going on. Colours that look muddy, as though someone inexperienced in colour theory has mixed too many together and come up with Poo Brown. But even he has Cerulean Blue sparks, Deep Yellow, turquoise sparking underneath all the murk.
It does my fucking head in.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Guy de Maupassant. In his most famous story the villagers of Rouen peer through their shutters at an invading German army, people who are post-traumatically stressed, terrified and unable to control the evil that has come upon them. I used to feel almost jealous of these people for their post-cataclysmic terror. At least they had a visual cataclysm on which to hang their hats of trauma on. We had the nameless and faceless and unvoiced and mostly unrecognised invisible simulacra, the 21st century version that did not march in the streets of the West, but instead operated remotely by frequencies, and aerially by spraying not bombs but chemicals, and oppressed us via greed and fearmongering and consumer sentiment. Of course, they oppressed others in other places by raping their land and instigating their wars, and sometimes outright killing their people. And so then I got to experience that familiar Western jolt of guilt when I compared my First World nameless and faceless evil with their outright one. But then of course that guilt was appeased when the terrain levelled out, and the drones set in and so then for them too it was now nameless and faceless destroying, and then the drones started coming for us too.
The odour of invasion remains the same though the world and two centuries separate Melbourne from Rouen. The odour is invisible and smells entirely of fear. The invasive odour swept through the houses and the inns, the parks and the kitchens and into the food of Rouen via people with big boots marching in the street where yesterday you spoke with your neighbours. But what happens when there is no need for big boots to march in because they can just watch you from the sky? And then what do you do after that when suddenly it all shuts down – the internet, the stock exchange, the planes overhead? This is how it has been for a month now. The Shutdown. A week of panic, murder and mayhem on Flinders Street, and then a couple of recalibration and relearning, and then came the Colours.
The Shutdown was when the true freedom began. If indeed we are now free. But it felt like death, the way it must feel to a baby being expelled from the womb. We have been suddenly expelled from the invisible enclosure that has kept us from each other and ourselves, working to pay the bills, pay the interest back to the top of the pyramid. The craziest thing of course is that so many of us hadn’t even known we were captured and that we were naive. And so many of us now don’t know that we are free, if in fact we are. But I guess in the end that’s what constitutes a slave. Someone who will stay in their cage even when the door is unlocked. You don’t want to know you’re a slave because then you’ll have to do something about it. Not wanting to know is like living inside a giant pigpen while the bullies roam outside, eating free range organic.I am ambivalent now the internet has started up again. Or some sort of a version of it, anyway. That conversation about how the internet actually works was hilarious. I think it was actually the first time I really saw Joe, as he and Prabhu and Carmel all added their bits in to try to explain what meshnets were, and solar panels and generators and stuff, and how it was that we could now “get online” after a fashion. Except it wasn’t like before, because now there are just pockets of other people online. But still, they are in France and Turkey and London, and so I guess that’s the internet, right? There’s just no one logging onto Amazon. And then other people were asking questions about things they didn’t understand, though they’d used the bloody thing all day every day from the time they lay in bed in the morning, and who were able to walk around all day amongst real live people and not talk to anyone in front of them. You could see how twitchy people were, wanting to look stuff up on their smartphones, but of course they couldn’t because we are conserving the electricity we have started generating in order to power the meshnet thing. There was something about that conversation between a technology-reliant bunch of wildly disparate people putting together all the pieces that made me laugh until I thought I was going to go maybe a bit hysterical.
I’ve been doing that a little lately.
So I can’t help it, worrying about this new meshnet thing. I have gotten used again to only talking to people who are in front of me and now yesterday I tried to talk to Jasmine but she was using the connection, talking to one of the groups in France about what is going on there (much the same as here), and she had that distracted “Hmm?” that made me realise that she wasn’t listening to me because she was too busy online and I thought, “Oh, fuck, not this thing starting up again” because even though we’re all scared to the shit we’ve actually begun to all learn to depend on each other to make whatever this is we’re possibly stuck with work, and now everyone’s going to go AWOL again.
I never did like technology all that much. I guess I’m one of the lucky ones now. In that respect I feel a little like the homeless people. They’re the ones that people are turning to now for help on how to cope with “being out” – which is 100 times ironic, considering they’re mostly homeless because of mental illness and drug problems. I’m not sure what they’re going to do when all the chemists have run out of their drug supplies.
This meshnet starting up has made me panic a little. It’s like this panic after this lull, because the silence of the lull made me able to think, even though I was worrying about what was going on in the places where the invisible pullers of the puppet strings dwelled. What if the beginning of the net is the slow decline towards degeneration again, this rejoining and rebirth? See, I have switched sides now. I used to be such an activist, boring everybody on Facebook with posts about our manipulation and the injustice of the system. Feeling despair at the amount of people who didn’t want to know what was going on around them. Now, all of a sudden, after a two week lull in string-pulling, I suddenly feel like I don’t want to know what’s going on out there. I want to bury my head in the sand. I have become, suddenly, a technophobe. I don’t want to know what is going on because I am scared that the machine is still chugging away somewhere, and this freaky respite will turn out to be only be a respite.
Some say there is a great wheel of life that starts off beautifully. The golden age lasts for millennia and then people become complacent and slowly the wheel turns over centuries and centuries into degeneration, only to die and then be reborn again into another golden age. Like in Daniel’s dream, where humanity is a person with a head of gold, a chest and arms of silver, a stomach and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, and feet of clay and iron. Getting less valuable and more dense as you go on. As the world descends, it sinks into itself like vegetables into compost, only to be reborn from rich soil into a new era that starts again with the golden head, where the first become last and the last become first.
Is that where we are at now? I don’t know. But I must say, I think the Colours will make it so much easier to see who is who. Now, your flag is sort of flown all around you, like a cape. Which is proving good in some instances and horribly exposing in others. The ones who I like to call the psychopaths, who probably worked in stock exchanges and nodded vigorously at the system that allowed them to screw other people for their own benefit – I like to think I can spot them, slinking around the edges of the streets. They have a surprising uniformity about them now, that regulation brown muddiness. But like I said, even they still have the Colours. And so my hope clashes with my contempt.
In comparison, Joe’s colours are swimming together like a kaleidoscope I had when I was a kid, dancing in and out of each other in patterns that speed up and slow down according to his mood. I can see them even as he swims in the brown murk of the Yarra, shooting out and skimming along the water. They make me feel incautious, and I don’t know if I like that feeling very much at all. They make me want to jump in and swim right over to him and merge our colours into Birrarung.
It’s funny how quickly you get used to things. When the Colours first came it was as if a switch had been flicked but dimly, so that they were just suddenly there, so faintly around people at first that it was like everyone had their own little mini fog around them, like Silky’s hair in my childhood love, The Faraway Tree. I thought my eyes were beginning to lose their ability to function, maybe some sort of vitamin A deficiency.
There had been so many weird things going on by then, so much discombobulation, that it was only later that we knew that everyone else was aware of the fog but nobody said anything until the day after they first appeared, when the fog slowly cleared and the Colours started. I was busy making giant pots of dahl, and Joe said a soft “Oh,” beside me, and sat down slowly on the chair that was in the open doorway of the kitchen, looking out on the coloured cobblestones of the Square.
I looked up at him, and there were these fine particles of blue and green swirling round and through the top of his head. Joe was staring at me, and then he looked out at Remadie, who was sitting on a table outside in the sun and who had colours of her own. Back and forth he looked at us, like a game of tennis. I looked down at my own chest, my legs, this swirl of orange colour that was pooling around my feet.
How do you describe the first experience of seeing your own colours? Seeing what has felt both beautiful and ugly on the inside, now suddenly born outwards for others to see? I had dreamt of this before, lying on my bed, mourning for Ricky English, thinking that if he could just see how I was inside that he would love me. I would have relished the coming of the Colours when I was 12. Now, their coming was the most intimate, scary and comforting moment of my life all rolled into one, and I do not remember ever before being amongst hundreds of people all day and yet nobody being able to speak verbally for hours on end out of pure awe and pure adjusting to the fact that suddenly we were as exposed as a new birth.
I felt like a kid again in an adult universe where I didn’t understand what it was that I was speaking so loudly, speaking that which had previously been hidden, needing to work out what this new language meant.
When I looked at Remadie, I felt so confused that I had to look away so that I didn’t cry. The purple and grey floated and pulsed around her head and explained in one long, inarticulate 10 seconds what was going on with her better than the chasm of incomprehension that had been our miscommunication style before. And I knew I’d been wrong about her, judged her harshly, would never have been able to see her … purpleness, whatever it was, before. And so we played this triumvirate of tennis, Remadie staring at me, then staring at Joe, then Joe staring at me, and at Remadie, and me staring at them both until the combination of seeing them so raw like that made me turn away, in inexplicable tears until I could compose myself to try to rescue the dahl from burning itself into an inedible mess.
That staring that went on will haunt me. It was like my first experience ever of what the feeling of romance is like. I’m talking about non-sexual romance (although to add to the confusion there is something going on with Joe and me. I just don’t know what it is). But this was like global romance. See, I don’t even have any words to bloody well describe it. I think of what the word romance used to connotate – awful bloated violin music, the poor old violin taken hostage by Hollywood and TV commercials and made crass, a signifier for simpletons. Now with the Colours doing all the talking all that stuff seems even more crass, like children trying to speak of mysteries they have no conception of. The Colours have done magic. They have come in and cut all of my cynicism off at the knees so that suddenly I can’t talk because there’s no space for the words. And it’s beautiful. But then I realise my own colours are speaking for me, and it terrifies me so that I want to run away. Even though nothing bad has happened. But ever since the Colours there’s been a few delicious times where Joe has acted in ways that make me realise that he understands what I’m feeling without me even needing to say anything. And the feeling that rises up is so beautiful that it makes me want to go throw myself into that murk of the Yarra and swim to the bottom and hide.
Like, the other day I was feeling that familiar isolated aloneness, that cut-off chasm. Not the good sort of aloneness that has always felt like communing with the Colours. The other sort of aloneness that makes you want to say fuck it to everything and go and impale yourself on a bong to forget, the way that I often did. I was feeling like that, and then I caught Remadie’s eyes accidentally across the table and I felt like I knew from seeing her colours that she had seen how I was feeling.
This is Remadie, who I’ve clashed with from day one. Geez. Again, that beautiful ache, so much beautiful swimming in that again, I wanted to run and hide and run and hug her so much that I thought I would twist up into a knot and all my colours would fall out on the ground.
I came on Joe yesterday as I was off for a morning swim in the river and to water the seedlings. I came round the corner and upon him looking at himself in the mirror. He was looking down at his arms where green and silver wove themselves round and round and swirled around his torso and his head. He was moving his eyes backwards and forwards between looking down at the colour swirls around his hands and arms and then looking up at himself in the mirror. The colours changed slightly every time he looked down. They slowed, as if responding to his gaze, opening themselves up. Then he looked up into the mirror and they moved a little faster again, but in a languid sort of a flow like a bunch of rollerskaters round a rink. It was more of an intimate moment than if I had walked in on him jerking off.
Then he saw me watching him. And the colours, the green and silver weave like a beautiful tree, began to pulse. And then they began to change, to fade out from one thing so beautiful I didn’t want to see it end into another thing so beautiful I didn’t want to ever see that end either. Pulses of tiny red circles began flowing out from his chest, shooting out towards me. Then threads of gold and yellow, interspersed with the tiniest flickering little circles of violet, like tiny little stars that had little round middles shooting tiny little beams out from their circumferences.
Joe looked at me so shy, with the sun coming in the open doorway and puddling on the floor, shooting colours spilling from his chest.
We smiled, and I turned for the river.
Published previously in Tincture Journal #7, Spring 2014
Discombobula 