"A Sequence of Privacies" Dada text

A Sequence of Privacies

Wrenched into stargazing the wintery Northern sky, I begin a futile search for the Southern Cross. Although a myriad stars carpet this sky, it is not yet familiar. On the pebbled shore the full moon's liquid light illuminates the hunched silhouette of a battered shoe, shucked by the icy waves. This shoe becomes a metaphor for remembered journeys and a tangled yearning for my roots. Soon I am slithering down a long and precipitous slope towards the syrupy, jumbled honey of nostalgia, in which haunting scribbled messages from the past are suspended, guttering lanterns of fragmented rememberings.

In the clearest of light, a changing landscape with its red perimeters of silence stretches into invisibility; the memory of the sun's destructive brilliance; the remembered strains of a bush fire's crackling, its malign power encompassing the dusty plains; the fragrant wood smoke of campfires signposting nomadic settlements, where ancestors' footprints, long-erased, carved wide paths still trodden. Often inanimate, the canvas of endless horizons is populated with dancing, shimmering phantasms of heat, mercurial mirages.

The strangely silent space is woken from its stupor by the chirruping cacophony of cicadas, which shatters the stillness, a crass rumba of conference with the land and the azure sky. Harbingers of storms, cumuli nimbus, congregate. Soon, vertical sheets of lightning – the electrical grandeur preceding the thunderstorm – rupture the afternoon heat and rolling thunder booms ominously, signalling the deluge. The sun-baked earth sucks up the downpour greedily, which offers momentary relief from the cloying cobwebs of heat.

A jubilant time warp of madness, my inheritance of southern origins and northern ancestry, I am a chimerical narrative endlessly being composed. I am a fragile, shapeless tapestry without borders, on which is embroidered, shiny and familiar, all that is past; and in ghostly outlines the suggested possibilities of the future are etched. I restlessly explore continual re-imaginings of potential futures; the unknown almanac flattening out into a succession of liminal horizons.


© Erica Böhr, 2011