II
As I drove past the roadworks that day I wondered if any of the workers standing by the machines (most of whom presumably lived in Geelong and surrounds, if not in this specific coastal area) had been struck by the colour of the ground as they exposed it from under the stiff black icing of tar. In spring morning light, after a long Bass Strait winter, and with the twinkling leaves of messmates behind, they would have had to be visually impaired, or severely preoccupied, not to have registered the vividness of the colour, at least in the privacy of their own thoughts.
The mind plays its games though. As we dip an oar in water it ceases to be straight. I once dreamt of the bitumen of one of my favourite local roads being rolled back like a hallway runner for two or three miles along the river flat here in the place the Wadawurrung call Mangowak. In my dream the earth under the road was on full display again, the soil sighing under the sky like an innocent person just freed from jail. The dream finished with a smile for the knowledge that it wouldn’t be long before the grubs and ants and soily macro-invertebrates reappeared and began to thrive.
But as I drove past the roadworks and the clumps of exposed ground, I was reminded not only of that dream of the road peeling back but also of the way the world becomes untethered from our soundings of it. The local colour drifts up into the forefront of my mind, my dream, my imagination, but only as a visual phenomenon somehow adjacent to language, not as something that I have the tools to translate, or describe. Is this then pure psychogeography? I wondered. Or does it speak ironically to the way in which long ago poets like Mallarme and Rimbaud unhooked language from the drudgery of our expectations, untethering words from the objects they were conventionally meant to describe? Whatever the case, the local colour as I experience it, the ground under my feet, teems with inaccurate flailing sounds. Opposites of the mot juste. Remember my list: ‘bright orange, or blood-orange, or orange-red, or ochre-red, or rose-gold’. The place these words are attempting to capture, or to be emissaries of, has similarities to other landscapes of other parts of the earth, other countries and their geologies, even to other planets and moons (indeed jarosite has been discovered on Mars), but they are only that, similarities. Sure, they are kin within the parameters of a somatic and networked concept like Gaia but, like myself and my brother, they are not the same.
I believe this constant missing of our language makes us even more vulnerable than we already are in an Anthropocene climate. We feel the need to ameliorate the situation, if not to outright revolutionise it. Out with jarosite and the paint mine, and in with … ?
This is the silence that as a nation we are only just beginning to properly hear.
As I drove off down the road past the piles and exposed heaps of orange-blood-red-rose-gold-ochre-jaroso-kaolin-jiangxiite-barrabool-foxhued-nyooroo-nyooroo-papool-paapul-jarosite, I had one last unbidden thought upmerge in my mind. I was reminded not only of my dream of the rolled back tarmac, not only of the way we’ve unleashed this teeming vacuum of language (at the same time as our industrial colony has gone about de-teeming the biota and landscape), but also of a thinker I’d been becoming increasingly annoyed by in the previous few days, the ancient Greek philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope.
When it came to language Diogenes was a minimalist. He was the master of the Greek chreiai, or one-liner. He is sometimes known as Diogenes the Cynic, due to the fact that he was a founder of the Cynical school of philosophy in ancient Greece. My interest in him had been initially pricked by how he prized frugality, or euteleia, both in lifestyle and in thought, and also by how he was something akin to an ancient Greek hobo-poet, living rough on the pale streets of Athens after being exiled from his native Sinope (in current day Turkey) for, amongst other things, debasement of the currency. But why, I now asked, had he suddenly sprung into my mind in direct response to the uncovering of my local ground?
In Athens, Diogenes snubbed his nose at the conventions, excesses and illusions of the society around him. He often slept in a ceramic barrel on the street. He was famous, among other things, for rebellious and humorous acts, like eating food loudly during Socrates’s lectures, and telling Alexander the Great off for blocking the sunlight when he came to visit him in his barrel. But during his lifetime he was perhaps most famous for requesting that his body be simply tossed over the city wall when he died, for the beasts to devour. This attitude was radical then, and perhaps would be even more so now. Indeed, I think it holds the key to why, after my initial fascination, Diogenes had become so downright annoying to me. Which also explains why he came to mind as I drove by the roadworks in my car.
