chrisbhanlon

A particular and very strange feeling came on me while running on an unsignposted track I had chanced upon, having just reached the crest of a grassy hill where sudden delightful views opened up on every quarter. The feeling’s causes you could try to determine.

First there was the sighting just before, of the open range farm and bushland receding to the violet distance, so that my lingering fears about trespassing on this property and the possibility of an armed farmer for instance, were dismissed, and I was clearly quite alone under the sun, and would be able to continue my delighted exploration on the twisting strand of dirt ahead that drifted through the undulating hills.

Second, might be the mauve tone that hovered down lower when my dreaming eyes paused, it was a tone I could just barely discern – was it really there that flossy mauve or was it not? The leaves also on a remnant forest tree that stood alone in the wind, were oddly not moving on the gusts I could feel rummaging quite strongly at my shirt. Why were the leaves not moving on the stunted tree?

This sort of gentle aesthetic figuring that I so loved, I indulged then with nothing to fear since I was so clearly alone. But I was not. With a sudden shock I became aware that there was company. Someone had arrived during those moments when I was distracted looking at the grass and trees, and now they were already present with me, leaving no chance for me to deny or reject them.

But I was not scared. I spun across the points of the compass on the pyramid hill in disbelief that I could not see the intruder. The company was indulgent and nurturing. It was as if a parent had been watching their loved child and just stepped out from a hiding place, and smiled in love as the child looked and realized they had been under observation for some time. This was someone who knew all about me, and knew the reason I was running across that hill on the farmer’s land better than I ever would myself. This was the only mystic experience of my life. It was after the style of Moses or Rimbaud perhaps.

Significantly, there was a family called Christian who had pioneered the area. Most now were resting in the cemetery on the pine top hill. Harry Christian in his football guernsey with dark athletic build and unabashed grin cradled the football as captain in the sepia tones of the nineteen twenty four team portrait. That day when I reached home I scrambled for the street directory to find the light brown line of my track where it petered off the page away from the train terminus of the town we had just moved to. When I turned the page I found it did indeed have a name. It was called Christian Road.

The subconscious has precis skills to encapsulate in an image what would take days to calculate and verify rationally on pen and page. When I saw the name of that road, I felt the hills that flexed and rolled slightly underfoot as though I was standing on the back of a living body. By contrast my conscious mind stepped by habit carefully ahead seeking to hammer in an intellectual stake that could be trusted.

I immediately began to calculate in the map’s index using finger and thumb to count out blocks of names. There was only one Christian Rd out of sixty thousand entries. There was no Islam Way or Buddhist Path. My once in a lifetime mystical experience, or once in a million lifetimes for all I knew, occurred on an unnamed road that had a one in sixty thousand chance of being named after an iconic religious cliche. How could I not accept this as significant? Rational success at drawing conclusions so often was about noticing a connection between separate events. Turn on a certain switch after which the pump starts up.

There were ways ahead to weigh and test this first reaction, and a future lifetime to add the grist of future observations. It seemed on that day that everywhere were arrangements in what seemed like chaos. My plodding and barely capable mind had work to do while trying to figure this out, the skeptic in me still intact though shaking.

Took observations in pencil on the move that I wrote balancing the page on my thigh, would never look at them again, ripped out of something that hardly belonged to me. Dad would ask respectfully, as we coughed out our shared rheum nosed allergy, stacking hay bales in the last acts of the working day, what value I saw in my work driving a taxi, and his response, when I told him, involved his Shakespearean uncle, the peripatetic chemist who walked the streets and recited to empty streets well into his dotage. I knew it was a compliment. On a bright day the airy panorama on one side of that property, which stretched toward the bay, had the power to give perspective and confidence as if to explorers imagining their future navigation through the distances. But the same wind grew and wailed as it closed around the outlier at night from the mountain side, and seemed to inhabit the insides of the metal roof as we looked at each other askance with each new violent rush. 

When I worked it seemed like a city of millions lurcing along only well established arteries of escapist grog and grief. My notes were published for a while but this must have been unnatural to me for it gave a deep unease which suggested there was something premature at that time and worth protecting. It seemed to me what I wrote down was removed from the main highway of belief of what is generally known, and perhaps valuable for this reason alone, so I should not let it slip through my fingers unexamined. Humus on the forest floor, the edge of knowledge, edge of my knowledge anyway, truth sought for its own sake, the scrub fantail surely would scratch and turn over my observations into some redeeming use. Perhaps I was eyewitness of the almost missed or the lost drunk overboard washed up with red eyed on some undiscovered continent. Sensed something deeper felt there was no sense to it or way to articulate, to do with this sort of ebb and flow of events in the cab. Meaningfully parcelled, performances alcohol loosed, random, festooned, staged, threats coiling off the tongue – seek the heroin hit straight out of jail, then a minute later the richest man in the country arrives, they changed seats and I could hardly tell the difference. In the background one arrival posed a question for consideration, answered by the next.

A mother’s child, now in my headlight on the outbound lane made a mistake that was now immaterial, for he was crushed and encased in the metal cloak of roof and doors nowhere to look but straight back at me. His breath heaves, I took off my shirt. Elsewhere young man alone on the footpath, would be like a piece of cardboard detritus if he was left there for a day or so, his viscous blood flooding the cigarette stubbed grey the centre of his thoughts loves dreams. In this sort of lowering background we were married at 30 and 27 at the farm next to the creek, her grandfather from the old country proud and resplendent but with no English, a beaming talisman for our future. Easy  to choose we were both free, my first nephew in arms of the new generation present. Red bellied black snake in langour on the site when the guests arrived which they were told to disregard, hay bales from our stack were placed around as seats. 

In a smaller city drifted off with no option for return then became sick in a beachfront house. Sequestered in its dark centre then to escape sweating dreams took a long walk along the strand to the hub where the bronze skinned generation always seems to be, and had found the flattering glow their unawares chatter sought sprawled against whitewashed walls. By contrast with others she liked the desert.  Soon on the red corrugations our windscreen disintegrated then we lodged in a deep red bog after against all likelihood it started raining. She moved slowly to greet the thorny devil who had stopped us in our tracks; followed a bustard radiating the most casual compassion that had it still retreating but ambivalent. The child would try to play the role she needed, the twelve volt battery smashed, she saw I knew about electrical circuitry and leadership. After sleeping pressed up at midnite on the sand, nosing tyre tread, I watched her wake to sketch out her unearthly hidden experience of the painted deserts in line and pastel. We crossed the country in motion perpetuum to the tropical north at the start of the wet without a battery. Call it a highway, all manner of little amphibious creatures were revealed aurally when the rain stopped, had been rehearsing their bass and tinkling crescendos. And everything I saw she saw it too. Had been sent to the address of the place where the manager asked if could recognize and pack engine parts and could use a long range radio. Engineering in remote areas from the town, where I packed and delivered parts for rebuilds. My diesel fitters wondered what we did; we slept on the fire coals, our friends had not much to offer except a woven yellow basket. They sold us fuel at a cattle station to get rid of us, we had interrupted the manager’s aura of intimidation. Hint of threats, a hole punched in the earth’s crust drew warm water from the depths enough at least to nurture a dark green mango dominating the bent grey iron littering all around.

As they attacked the boards of the lounge with tasselled boots and hand held sticks, I soon gave up on sleep, and added my presence to the flamboyant overcrowding bookended by a distant oriel framing next door’s weathered fence outside. The more talented drifted to the stables which was roofless but for the smouldering amber dropped from the stars, where their stringed instruments were furthest from the noise inside and the possibility of bagpipes. Mallards were disturbed by the musicians, who now began to watch each others fretboards intently seeking the other’s secrets, and from somewhere out of the cracking of codes flew the most beautiful unearthly melodies twining in the air. My own instrument was left hidden in the face of such virtuosity behind grandmother’s oak wardrobe in my little room but I merged incognito with a proffered harmony. My housemate’s recitation of a mountain chase of wild horses was in progress when he hit the toilet bowl at speed and cracked it in two.

I worked at a jail for children, some of whom ran errands for myself as Assistant Secretary. The boy thief was either a present or future murderer who only that day stole my trainees watch as I packaged it on my desk into an envelope for storage, while my gaze and thoughts were directed elsewhere by his sleight of mind and sleight of hand. And there she was my future wife, narrowing the distance at the end of a long corridor, past the Superintendent’s, narrowed it further past the tea room to where she had been assigned alone in the furtherest room. Burnished and beautiful any concerns of mine she defeated without a struggle, although I was still thinking it mistaken identity. Her family wanted us to marry; at about this time I began importing thoughts and observations into my journal, whatever I did not know but caught the tail of, which soon once hoarded filled the passage and the attic of my mind, and would go up surely in any firestorm. Her father wanted to know if I could catch a fish or change a tyre, which I could do but not to his satisfaction, he thought to feed me to a snapper or dislodge me coming in on a feathery surf.

I needed to pay rent in advance for our new home so took to taxi driving. Aged philanthropist impossibly weathered stepped out of the bluestone portal said, you know there is an island where I have been, where the possibilities are endless. I was a kindred spirit he thought, the dogs could be sure it was him at his estate across the unseen lawns, they knew his kind voice disentangling his sounds from mine, were barking his name, the custodians of the gate as he called them. The taint of food, her family day just departed, loved ones around her, she recalled about the kindergarten where we stopped that she was an activist, that this was her great public achievement, where the fruit bats that moment climbed the stairs of the Moreton bay fig. Funding was scarce and she courted power in government and raised money however she could; they named the kindergarten after her in gratitude, memories are sweet she said, I had my first kiss on this spot, she said, from the man I would later marry, I resembled him she was thinking, but she did not resemble her I was certain, as the westering moon beamed through a grubby cloud ring, there was a scratched image of an animal, high above the roof of a stock truck, where a steer had hoisted itself in protest approaching the abattoir in stark silhouette. That same day the image still seared as I arrived to find dad had killed our old philandering dog on his last legs. I could see father at the aunties as a child holding his loved spaniel hit by a car, aunty watched him in compassion helpless, father watching the dog’s lifeless eyes all the same, today he buried our own family pet  and withdrew to silence, would never mention it again. 

My blonde beauty and I were on our way but what she needed I only discovered later in regret, perhaps with luck and skill but where to find either at a pinch. Brilliant long entablature of summer cloud extended slowly north over the suburbs, watched it spellbound and traced it in my notes exactly as it moved.

Absent from their lives that year, whereas from mother’s childhood no one ever went missing like that short of the ultimate tragedy. Here her eldest had returned on his motorbike; I was a healthy enough colour she finally decided, and I started to recognize signs of quiet joy at my return, along now with waning flickers of reproach; she noted need for dental work and a warmer anorak, but then finally with a ceremonial smudge, emphatic rouge was placed on my cheek as she claimed the spectre as hers again. While she was hurt by her son going incommunicado, father’s response in contrast was silence from his grim determination against all odds, since past abandonment would not allow deeper forebodings to be directly expressed. I was smart capable and could wear a suit and so joined the public service on an impulse to redeem since I could do anything anyone wanted me to if so I chose to and sometimes it was good to please. At the back the steady feed of love, networks of family, the large joyful gatherings, left me with an abundance, that I still dip into unconsciously and which never needs replenishment. I roved around in that time oddly disconcerting to view I suppose in leather jacket goggles and hanging meerschaum, packed up the gear in a corner wherever I went, but inside the armour weighed some steady strength and self belief carried from my year alone.

Learnt how to lacerate my arms while manipulating razor edged metal onto a lathe, then move it to the vaporous scourge of the acid bath, while the skinny kid with fresh callouses was rejected immediately on sight in the pre dawn in the railways work gang lineup, his soft skin would soon help to fertilize the northern country farms and get blistered while bagging packham pears in the heat.

I would share the mess with seasonal workers, intermingle with fly by nights many escaping psychological heat from their crimes in their own downtime for a while from a separated life much as I was. There in the pub in the centre of town reading the paper while I ate, companion and roommate with the prodigious appetite sat at my elbow silently, in the bar later he would start to wag about the magnum in his kit at our room. I had to have my wits but was a quick learner, matched them with outrageous bluff, needed it so found it. Felt neither above nor beneath these men, who rammed at life daily with their bodies as manual labourers , whose strength and fitness were the only check between them and destitution.

Previously lived on a predestined boulevard toward a degree and professional life, now I was on Booze Boulevard where the old bloke out to it on the weekend unleashed his drunken sensibility among the rest of our room’s shambles which included myself, and which reverberated with his perturbed and irritated tones. Then at daybreak he would restore and align himself and his few accoutrements under the fledgling day, prepare like Buddha for the week that awaited of excruciating efforts with his broken back. I argued over cards then in bitter vainglory packed up and stormed off the property for good.

The storming off was the making of me, I slept that night in a forest turned the bike off and pushed it roughly some way through the grey veils of belah at dusk. Then at midnight suddenly an unhinged inconsolable screaming in the treetops, a slow drawn out murdering. Even when I was viscerally frozen at the agonised pleas I was still aware of an inordinate excitement at what I was encountering. That night a symbolic surreal unanchoring of my soul, my young ears primed for just this waiting moment that was now joined. On the bike in full load no one could hitch a ride I hid it in the bush again and walked down though abandoned mining towns breaking the snagging regrowth with my ungainly airman boots.

For the rest of that year found a job in a regional town assembly line. My burning spot welds hissed as I spun the harness there may still be an appliance with my pimpled spot weld preventing it from debouching its contents. It was possible in that factory to arrive and enact perfectly a specialized task, without ever knowing what the final product would look like or even what it was. Is there unwitting purpose in our human situation, possible as a species to perform an ordained task with courage and skill, and only later view in amazement the final product further along the line which ski

Sometimes I felt more sometimes less than anyone else never the same. I had no acquaintances but that was OK with me I was on a journey of discovery, I had imaginary friends that followed me from the library where I read books about the underbelly of human experience where once-trusted powers had become obliterating forces whatever side you were on, raging characters whose explicit voices and dramas filled my caravan; I burnt my steak with a book propped against my helmet while the steaming veg hissed, a single bar radiator between my feet to get me through the tableland night.

When the 17 year old slept all manner of dream characters would burst onto his stage, bred from tremulous excitements each desperate to attach its own exotic half life to whatever narrative began to run as soon as the poor boy’s  eyes closed. 

However all I could remember after the dream was that somewhere in the middle of the imbroglio a faceless interloper had burst in delivering to me the weekend football scores. In the dream I had opened and held out the local broadsheet’s sports page, to find that the scores were exactly the same for both teams, and that the unusual result between the two dream teams was an identical score draw.

At my own helm on waking that Saturday I decided on a whim to ride across town to the football game my team was about to play. I pushed through apologetically to a place in the standing room at about half time among the twenty thousand already present. We were a dominant team in those days with some great players and were expected to win. We led all day but from nowhere in the last minutes, the other team kicked some goals and with sweeping unease I remembered for the first time my forgotten dream. One kick now could tie the scores. I remember for some reason looking at the lowering sky to see dark scud from the west rolling through just overhead. Duly next moment the ball moved rapidly left to right across my view and the last goal was kicked. My team had played 400 games since this last happened 24 years earlier before I was born.

This did not fit my self conception. Young man on the move in life grounded in modern rational education, who stepped out with confidence onto any bridge knowing that because of scientific learning and engineering principles it would stay in the air and not collapse under my weight. No one ever spoke about dreams that pre delivered sports results. How was this possible? It would be an embarrassment amongst friends  to relate what had happened so it was quickly buried and forgotten. 

Over time, from other observation and thinking, I have had no choice but to accept that some moments, even dream moments, could be sculpted and timed deliberately from the distant past. The dream was timed from the past organized to intersect with the real result of the match played out next day.  Later in life other events challenged old ways of seeing. I have now been forced to take this dream and the event at the ground more seriously – future examples would later stack up that I would be a fool to deny. 

Recognizing the baize ruffle of the hills, we were soon at the fence posts of the derelict farm of our ancestors who had made their lives on this now indifferent sorrel strewn paddock.

A misshapen brick he picked up as though weighing the generations. The pine at the broken chimney had fallen theatrically decades ago and rested on one last blackened branch as though gesticulating. Dispassionately I would later think it was like a work of art here on that day with dad as he told the stories from his grandmother about the children born here and the drowning of a cousin; with a charcoal line I would be insinuated on the artist’s canvas holding out the just found horseshoe.

Grandmother needed a boy’s eyes to thread her needle mine were chosen; she had been a dressmaker but now in her tender dotage sang with tearful eyes the songs emanating from the transistor radio, remembered her husband’s lilting tenor that charmed passers by through the corner door of the grocer shop.

All I wanted was to play football, was good enough to play for the school but too slow I soon realized. I could not move across in time to complete what I knew how to do at the goals. But in the outer I jostled with the crowd, arm against flesh, heartbeats, loose contacts. I was one of them after all, thought I knew the players, famous roads so many walked along in myth, heroes even when I saw the champion overbalance and fall trying to urinate at the pub, one act at least I would soon be capable of emulating.

Our dog looked for bread at the neighbour’s and would take his chance bringing a stolen loaf over the pales at the back. If he had a better conscience he would not do this, I figured, not understanding that my own conscience as a child was being manipulated, amongst so many others, on an industrial scale.

I seemed to figure it however, more quickly than others. I remember they gave me the real body and blood of Christ which I consumed, but it clearly had no effect, so I must be abhorrent and damned I thought; by the time the headmaster prayed to the group of us in the chapel, a voice in my head which I know with certainty must have been my own, heretically and very loudly was saying that I do not believe any of this.

At the back of the church chattering with the mountain lowries and at some embarrassment no doubt to his place in the community, was my father. Heaven was only guaranteed apparently according to some theologian actuary, to those in the body of the church not on the porch or at the rear. I so wanted him to be there with the rest of us in heaven at the end of our lives, had nightmares of him in the conflagration simply because of a minor locational issue. Felt better about my Dad when I got rid of those beliefs.

Main problem were the dreams, internal dramas of the nightly kip; we thought these worrying experiences came through a veil from the spirit world, but they were really just through a veil from the subconscious mind where scenarios belted along just beneath the surface waiting for sleep to flicker at which time they seized the moment and took the wheel. Mistake spirit world for your own subconscious that is some error. Trace the egregious error back through the ages and once acknowledged observe every one of those doctrines collapse.

We learnt these sort of unjustified religious beliefs at our wooden desks then moved paradoxically straight on to the observation of a living cell. Harry Christian’s family in the meanwhile, managed their futures when their orchards were exterminated as best they could, found other endeavours such as carting goods or running cattle in the rural area on society’s edge where I would later spend most of my adult life.