make-believe.org

The lens of eternity

Been transmitting radio silence to the land of make.believe. for a few days cos, well, on Tuesday I got way smashed, but yesterday I started researching a short piece of fiction, and today I wrote it up. It was intense to write it all in a day, I remembered for the first time in years why I do this, and why I identify with it.

I'm not allowed to put the whole thing up here for various reasons, but this is an excerpt:

It is now obvious that, with remarkable prescience, Sir Thomas More was prophesying Australia. Despite various points of difference between the two social structures, the similarities between Utopia and Australia are too numerous to be merely coincidental.

Michael Page, Out of this World

I would like to tell a story about all these stars. These pinpricks in an inky, bloody silk — portals onto a bright and blinding eternity. Tiny rips just enough to keep us breathing. I would tell you this tale, but perhaps you'd prefer the one involving the old white Chevrolet bouncing over the red riverbed highway below? Way down there. I will tell you that story. This country is called Utopia. It is plains of grass clumps and dark sandhills. It is patches of kurrajong bush encroaching torn and windloved rocks. In their ravines, ecstatic acacia throbbing to the suck of sweet fat grubs on their marrow. Under mountains surveying the shadows of their lands. Cicadas wailing the night. And coursing through, tracing the journey of ancient and extinct waters: the Sandover Highway, a rivulet of crusted blood, a named thing in country that defies names — country that regards its own ironic label with half-lidded disinterest. But on this one named thing, more names. The Chevrolet spearheads a wide thick wake of dust. She, behind the peeling leathered wheel, is Hymn Parker. He, fiddling with the radio, is Ben Hirmingdale, Ben Hur to his old college mates, just Hur now because he once so strenuously insisted on it — it was something of a joke, you see. It's not funny anymore. The pun belongs to another world.

There is a (hopefully!) final post on the MUSU ongoings coming up soon I think.

Joseph | 2 Oct 2003