It May Be No One Should Be Opened

January 16, 2012

Thinking about this really amazing post. I am interested in how living in places of extreme weather affects your psyche, how much it colours the rest of your life. When I think about the first 15 years of my life, the overwhelming memory is heat. If it were an embroidery, heat is the colour of the thread. Heat as one of the lenses of my life. And I’m interested in how that gets in you - heat or cold becoming a colour that stains everything else. Growing up with that sense of the uncanny lying beneath the surface of everything. And the land being a kind of character in your life in a strange way, and all that discourse around ideas of deadness or having ‘a head heart’. The idea that at the centre there was nothing - the big Never Never. I remember being small and lying in bed in the dark heat and sweat, thinking about the dead heart across the big darkness. And what a terrifying idea that was. I imagined the whole country stretched out before me in my head, imagined racing across into that nothing, that it was out there now, unimaginably large and everything dark and silent. I remember that acute feeling of being unsafe, that no one could protect me. That loneliness under everything. When I was six, I would fall asleep by imagining I was dead. I would play a game where I was dead in my bed and everyone who knew me would come to say goodbye. It was generally always the same and profoundly comforting. I had this preoccupation with performing mourning and grief. When I was eight and nine I would use my dolls to act out death and sadness. In the imagined narratives someone had died and the play time was structured around that grieving process and the sense of being inconsolable. And I would act it out over and over again. I think the best paper I ever wrote was in the final year of my undergraduate degree when I wrote a long and very precise paper on safety and the uncanny in the work of Russell Drysdale and the Hill End artists. That dark weight. I remember the palm fronds that hung low over the salt water near the rocks, hiding behind them every night until it got dark, looking up at the house and seeing the kitchen light come on. And how, when sleepwalking, I would go down to the water in the dark and stand looking in.

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