A Journey Around My House

Note: Text in italics are quotes from Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane. The title of this piece was inspired by “A Journey Round My Room” by Xavier de Maistre (1794).

A mild autumn morning. Light breezes caress the trees, then fall still. Bright sunlight glints off deep green bay leaves. Butterflies flit through the long grass, sampling the dandelions.

Call of currawong, coo of pigeon. Somewhere up the street, a lawnmower’s metallic growl cuts through the air. From the other side of the fence, the rhythmic squeak, squeak, squeak of trampoline springs accompanies the high-pitched voices of children calling happily to one another.

~

Saturday afternoon. That’s the answer to the question I ask myself, standing in the kitchen, looking out the window. Later the same day, perhaps. All days, all daylight hours, feel the same.

Saturday morning went by, slow, unhurried; now gone; the memory already stale, lacking variety. I ate toast in bed, read a book in bed, and played with the cat in bed. We are not a family that spends a lot of time together in bed, but then again, these are not ordinary times. This morning, for an hour or so, four of us (including a cat) were sprawled on the bed, my partner helping our daughter find a textbook on the university library site, and me, attempting to read.

After a week of working, reading, writing, and socializing online from the same position on my bed, a change of scenery is desperately needed. I gather up my laptop and journey from the bed to the wooden chair in the corner of the room. It’s a journey of about three feet.

~

Follow a path down the stairs from the bedroom and turn left. Take three short strides through the tiny kitchen and turn left again, passing the bathroom (on the right) and a hastily reinvented office (on the left). The distance is only small. The final door on the left does not close properly, but it’s important to knock: each closed door marks the border of someone else’s world.

~

A week before Australia went into lockdown in March 2020, I rushed across town to Readings bookstore in Carlton. It was mid-afternoon on a sunny Saturday, and the usually bustling Lygon Street was empty. Uncertainty and unease circulated in the air. Cities around the world had locked down. We didn’t know what we should or shouldn’t be doing, but it seemed like a good time to stock up on books.

In Readings, to avoid the few people in the center of the store, I side-stepped into “Travel Writing” only as a detour. I intended to plot a quick, if circuitous, route to Essays, Poetry, or Memoir—but as I darted through Travel, the citrus orange spine of Underland: A Deep Time Journey by British author Robert Macfarlane caught my attention. I knew nothing about Macfarlane or the book, but it had been mentioned in a podcast I’d been listening to the day before. It seemed as good a sign as any, so I purchased it.

~

In lockdown, my physical world—and everyone else’s—is shrunk to a tightly restricted territory, bordered on most days by the walls of my house. Reading Underland, however, I’m transported into vast, other-worldly landscapes where time is measured in epochs; ancient underground caves, glaciers in Greenland; stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. These environments, Macfarlane tells us, are keepers of deep time, formed on the earth before we arrived and will remain long after we, as a species, are gone.

While reading, I’m deeply immersed in these landscapes, yet awareness of the current pandemic has sunk deep into my body and the recesses of my mind. I forget, quite often, that Underland was published a year before COVID-19 hit. As Macfarlane describes the evolution, over aeons, of ancient structures formed from layers of rock and ice, and then circles in closer, to explore how the Anthropocene is affecting these environments, I keep expecting his next sentence to refer to the current pandemic.

Trying to comprehend the immensity of geological time, with its older, slower stories of making and unmaking, I can’t shake a rising awareness that the COVID-19 pandemic is an inevitable event in an ancient, evolving biosphere, in which humans are merely one, temporary element.

~

Thursday evening. For no apparent reason, there’s a catch in my breath. A sting of fear follows: is that it? The virus? Is it in there, getting comfortable, before it gets to work? Suddenly, we are all walking bundles of bacteria (all walking so much more than we did before!). We are all bodies, soft and vulnerable. A friend writes: we are porous; things get in.

~

“Why knock if you’re just going to walk in?” my daughter asks, annoyed. “Because I don’t know if you’ve got your headphones on and won’t hear me,” I reply, smugly. Ha!

But she’s right, it’s disrespectful to barge into her only private space. After this, I wait to be invited.

~

Inside our houses, we all circle around, occasionally widening our orbit to incorporate the local park, the local supermarket, the local post office; then quickly spiral back into the house again.

“We,” meaning those of us privileged enough to have houses to shelter in, a local park to walk around, and an ongoing income we continue to earn in lockdown to buffer us from immediate financial crisis. More than ever, the absence of these things divides the lucky from the unlucky. I’m aware that privilege, and good fortune, allow me an indulgence: the ability to consider the present with the removed curiosity of a writer. I worry about my elderly parents, and a sibling living in Manila, but often, when I’m walking around the park, or staring out the kitchen window, I’m wondering what I will remember most about this time, when this time has become the past.

~

Friday morning. In the bedroom, a yoga class on Zoom. We focus on our lungs, and on actions to clear them, which seems like a good way to frame a yoga class at the moment.

“Autumn is the season of grief,” says the teacher. “In Traditional Chinese Medicine,” she adds, “grief resides in the lungs.”

In Australia, I think to myself, the virus arrived with Autumn. Maybe the virus is following the season of grief as it moves across the earth. So much grief, contained in so many pairs of lungs.

~

Time slows, swirls, repeats.

~

Sunday afternoon. An earlier year. Spring. A cloudy, grey, overcast day. About 4 p.m. A woman embarked on a journey up the stairs, from the kitchen to the bedroom. A short walk, just fifteen steps.

At the time of departure, everything was as it had always been, as far as she knew. Her partner, A., walked up the stairs ahead of her. Half-way up, she realized he was crying. One of his elderly parents must be ill, or worse, she thought, in alarm, and hurried up the stairs behind him.

~

Time slows in the glacial landscape. A mile from the Knud Rasmussen Glacier in Greenland, Macfarlane and his friends observe a major calving event: where a whole city (of ice) falls off the face of the glacier. It’s appalling, and thrilling, and for a few seconds, the obscenity appears to occur in silence, until the roar of noise traveling through the air finally hits them.

~

Creaking of stairs. Thud, thud, thud, of two sets of feet. Fifteen steps from the kitchen up to the bedroom. Soft, regular inhale and exhale of two sets of lungs. Quiet sobbing.

The almost indiscernible pulsing of two heartbeats.

The tick, tick, tick of time, inexorably passing.

~

Days in lockdown meander, morphing slowly into weeks and months. In emails, in blogs, in endless online meetings, everyone speaks of feeling lethargic, sticky, slow. The concept of linear time seems to have fallen away. It’s never been more apparent: time is cyclic. Each morning, we rise. We contemplate another day in lockdown: a lifetime stretches ahead. I try to embrace the opportunity it offers—all that precious time.

I write paragraphs like the previous one, featuring, far too often, the word time. Time takes over weather as the first topic covered in every online meeting. We marvel at how it has become simultaneously slow and fast; elastic; pulling us in and out of each minute, hour, and day.

Early afternoon is nascent, brimming, potentially endless. Then, suddenly, darkness skids in, its abruptness taking me by surprise, every single time.

Life seems to be on hold, yet rapidly passing by. The Southern Hemisphere is heading into Winter: days are becoming shorter, darkness closing in earlier. Our soft, defenceless bodies are physically contained; even imagination is constrained—by constant reminders of our vulnerability. As individuals, as communities, as a species.

~

Time moves differently here in the underland. It thickens, pools, flows, rushes, slows.

~

From the top stair, the woman stepped into the bedroom. The final second ticked past, the closing moment, the one that would divide everything that had ever occurred since time began, into before and after. The boom it made should have reverberated through the house like an earthquake. Like the groan of gigatons of glacial ice, plummeting into the sea.

“John died,” said her partner.

~

At first, the woman did not react.

~

The sky is overcast, the air is chilled. The light is a dull, soul-destroying grey, unbroken by highlight or shadow. Neglected for months, the garden is an uncontained mess of green. Ferns poke long, unruly fronds through the hedge that’s meant to neatly contain them. The wind rises. Branches, leaves, and weeds all writhe, wobble, shake, and tremble across an undulating sea of knee-high grass and dandelions. Inside the house, the door frame creaks. Heavy drops of rain begin to hit the glass.

Watching through the kitchen window, I think: Around the world, we’re all lurching and heaving together on a green sea of uncertainty. Each of us standing alone in a room, peering through glass at the world outside. It’s grey and watery, and there’s no horizon in sight.

~

Weeks pass like this. I walk around the local streets; I stand in the kitchen and look out at the garden. This year the trees seem taller and leafier, the bushes and grass greener and lusher, the birds louder—even, perhaps, more plentiful—their song more beautiful. Their lack of concern for the havoc cutting its way through the human species is not merely natural, but almost heart-warming, lifting my spirits.

I’ve caught myself wondering if the number of insects has increased. If the sunlight is more golden-hued than in previous Autumns. I think about the magnitude of non-human life that was once here. Here, in the park; or there, by the creek; or here, on the land where this temporary structure—my house—stands; with me inside it, in the same position, in the corner of the room, or sitting again on the bed. I try to imagine this small, five kilometers territory I inhabit and move around in, before human occupation; how it looked and sounded, brimming with tree, plant, bird, animal, and insect species that no longer exist. Its richness. Its wildness.

I leaf through Underland again to find where Macfarlane talks about attempting to understand, and speak about, the Anthropocene. It’s one of those points where I can easily forget, for a moment, that the book was written prior to the current pandemic.

(The Anthropocene) is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss—of species, places and people—for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope.

I think again of grief, residing in lungs, and the pathogen, circling, spiraling outward from a first case on the other side of the world, feeding indifferently on an outpouring of grief that expands proportionally as it does. As its reach grows, it simultaneously seems to spiral inward, coming ever closer to our own centers; geographical and bodily.

We are porous: things get in.

~

A second passed. Perhaps two seconds, or ten. The woman was puzzled. Who was A. referring to? Her brain ran a scan: What Johns did they know? Who could have died? One came to mind—she’d worked with him years earlier—but she was not in touch with him. A. had never even met that guy. A. was crying. Something did not make sense. She could think of no one it could be. She must have overlooked some John they knew, some John that was the obvious answer to this puzzle.

~

Not only time, but words, too, slow on the glacier, Macfarlane finds.

I would struggle often to stop language from sticking in my throat. The blank-inked words in my notebooks seemed sluggish, tar-slow…

The slowing down of language on the glacier, says Macfarlane, is like cultural theorist Sianne Ngai’s notion of “thick speech,” experienced when we are shocked or grieving.

A drastic slowdown of language occurs, a rhetorical enactment of fatigue and confusion…We are challenged in our usual ability to “interpret or respond.”

~

“John who?” she asked, finally. A. didn’t answer.

~

A powerful dissonance overtakes my mind, whereby everything seems both distant and proximate at the same time.

~

Another second churned past, heavily. Slowly. Excruciatingly. Devoid of any other possible answers to the problem, the woman’s brain presented an appalling solution. An unthinkable solution. With it, a rupture occurred. Suddenly, she was observing the scene from a distance. She watched herself—or the robotic automaton that had suddenly replaced her—demand to be told that A. was not referring to her brother, John.

~

In that vanishing point, neither of us speaks. Language is crushed.

~

Standing at the summit of a glacier in Greenland, Macfarlane realizes that language is insufficient, irrelevant, pointless. No metaphor can capture the experience. It is like nowhere I’ve ever been.

It’s a human tool, language: Constantly evolving; always reactive; always scrambling, after the fact, to attempt to define and describe things already in existence: mountains, birds, atoms, electrons, sounds, colours, emotions, ways of doing things, states of mind, the human experience of being in the world.

The idea of the Anthropocene, says Macfarlane, strikes us dumb. We don’t know how to interpret or even refer to it.

~

In its scale and reach, the current pandemic is like nowhere we have ever been. Suddenly, even the present is unexplored and unknowable. The stories we told ourselves about the trajectory of our lives—as individuals, as communities, and as a species—have been thrown a plot twist we can’t (yet) see beyond. While we are in it, we don’t know how to feel, or how to speak about how we feel. As if we are in shock, or grieving, words and even thoughts feel thick, slow, and often, pointless.

~

Time slows, swirls, repeats.

~

That journey up the stairs, when did it take place? On a linear, human, timeline, about nine years ago. But it takes place still; replayed a thousand times over, shaped into something slightly different in each re-imagining. I wrote that the ticking of time could be heard as the woman went up the stairs. There was no ticking, but for a long time after, I was obsessed with a sense that those were the final seconds of everything; as if time came to an end at the top of the stairs that day. I still am.

~

Late morning. Hanging out washing. Over the fence, a small child is crying. A woman, possibly the child’s grandmother, reprimands “Freddie,” for pushing his little brother, who is “a baby,” and making him cry. “You’re very lucky to have a baby brother,” she scolds. In response, Freddie, who sounds not much older than a baby himself, starts crying too. The boys cry together.

On this side of the fence, my stomach tightens. Suddenly I am weighed down with sorrow, for the little boy, who doesn’t understand how lucky he is, and for all of us, who never realize how lucky we are, while we are lucky.

~

Early evening. Late Autumn. The air cools and thins. Blue drains from the sky until it’s a pale, glowing backdrop for black, tree-shaped silhouettes. Warble of magpie. Caw of crow. Soft hum of distant traffic. Somewhere up the street, a dog barks; even further away, another dog replies.

Sunday evening. Friday evening. Any evening. We’re in lockdown.

~

Each day. Here on my bed, on the chair in the corner of the room, standing in the kitchen, or walking around the park, I wonder if it will be the sound of birds I’ll remember most about this time.

~

Suddenly, it’s dark again. We pull the curtains shut and bunker down for another night.

We are bunkered down in the daytime, too.