God says:
Man has places in his heart that don’t yet exist. Pain permeates them, and brings them into existence.
—rien ne va plus by Margarita Karapanou

Javelins of light denote the presence of the god that threw them. A litany of all-purpose made devices exist. One shaft can be seen to exist. Arrowheads exist, too; tools that look like missiles exist. One weapon extends forward like a sharp from a bow, another like an easily replicable nail you’d find in a hardware store, a third like a figment exists (a talisman or torture device, a slew of items in the armory, an ancient hunting item from a story once heard in passing all exist) the edges all glistening and warped, each passing continuously through a surface, as in fiberglass, as in walls. Shards exist, daggers and diadems that blind; soldiers exist, and arrows, and spears and knives.

Javelins of light and fear exist, and jouissance and jigsaws exist, and glaciers, projectiles, and soldiers and sheaths, and machetes. Javelin like the name of a boy who stands the same as they do, looking of the same stature—javelin show me your highest tip and how mighty you look in your overgrown habit today. Joy is said to exist. Jars full of rocket fuel exist. These are the available forms of evidence. The white hall they stand in is inescapable, and the force of it blinding. There are no details as far as the eye can see except there the effigies are, looming, a person looking up liable to compare the structures, high as Roman candles, to mountains. When I illustrate them, in their filmic soft focus, what is the image you conjure? What does it matter? And is it possible there are too many of the gods to name just one, too many to identify by sight alone? Wounds made by fire exist, and warriors with weapons, circular cuts exist, canards and catapults, some other power like salvation exists; strips of flesh that peel away to reveal muscle exist. A weapon goes into you, takes something out, leaves a mark akin to a crucifix.

Javelins of light are true. Blunt force trauma is true. A shade caused by a building collapsing against another, creating a mass that cast its size away, are true. Explosions caused by haphazardly stepping on land mines are true. There are few things of which we know to be true, but we recognise that each person can wield a weapon; each god can forge them. Light that cuts through the skin, also true; livery and exsanguination and lies, and inventions of the mind are true, and myths, and holes, and lists, all of them true. In the book of Enoch, the presence of space and gravity is called into question, and a spaceship which breached Earth’s gravity or otherwise went too far into the stratosphere actually bends and arcs past the firmament to the edge of the determinable world.

That is what a friend told me recently. I did not necessarily believe them, but I believed in the deliberate power of the image. I am bastardising their words, partially by accident, not because I distrust what they actually said, but because I am a romantic and believe that fantasy is part of what makes the charge of memory all the more significant. It helps to be on a very conservative dose of medication. To have some clarity. For this reason we thank god for Irish Australian Telehealth psychiatrists, who in their assessments are unlikely to offer more than 5 to 10 emotes. We were outside of a rave—though the word feels inaccurate to wield given its provenance—the party slowly ending, like the world will soon, once we have all had a million descendants. Until then prayers take different forms like the ones I will try to describe to you now. I looked to the west where light was glowing through where the mid-sky sat. It could have been an omen, or it could have been a trick of the light. I’ll tell you what it reminded me of. You know how, in the aftermath of earthquakes, the ions from the earth’s friction sometimes create little hues of brightness in the atmosphere? Like when you’re staying in the middle of the country and the world shudders once, and you think you might not be alive? It looked all of that. It looked like it was emanating from little spears—like it was really something, something that lives. When you see it, at first, you might think your mind is betraying you. When you gaze upon such an image, you momentarily understand the sense of devotion an 80-something year old woman does, when she looks towards her dresser to see a rosary hanging, totally alone in her town of 5000 people—no husband or children or grandchildren around, some dead, some long since left—and the proceeding knowledge, that of the world unfolding slowly to reveal its one real secret: which is to say, the sublime.

Javelins of light descend upon a centre of near nothing in the deep south-east of the continent known as Gondwana that slowly breaks into pieces and later becomes known as Australia, the impact scarring the earth for aeons to come. Actually it was not a javelin—no hide had been ruptured—but the impact of a meteorite. Though not yet verified, like the Vredefort impact structure in South Africa which was until now considered the most significant, the ‘Deniliquin sculpture’ is the largest of its kind to ever make impact with earth, and it is, apparently, 40 kilometres out of the town where almost all of my family was born. Sometimes campers encroach upon this area for an event called Confest, which takes place near Easter, and people camp out, turn off their phones, do workshops, and ‘soak’ up the ‘vibes’. The collision happened millions of years ago, so researchers say, meaning the impact of the meteorite has not been preserved like the one in Wolfe Creek, or the one widely documented to have fallen in rural Tennessee, being far too large for such a thing to have happened. An article on the phenomenon gives rise to the belief that something unique took place here: “magnetic readings that reveal a symmetrical rippling pattern that would have been produced by the impact’s extremely high temperatures, a central low magnetic zone corresponding to deep deformation above the mantle dome (the top of the dome is shallower than the top of the regional mantle), and radial faults moving away from the believed center that are typical of large impact structures are among the indicators.” It is as if someone was asking a child actor to spring forward, like an apparition, to make sense of the conditions. That area is quite strange, a friend from Sydney says, when I talk about the many generations of Anglo-Celtic ancestors I had who had lived or passed through there, and after discussing the ways that sediment would have moved to obscure any residue left by the impact after millions of years. My eyebrows must have raised in response. He smiled vaguely. I stared, somewhat autistically. He replied, I’m actually very knowledgeable about geography.

I am in town for my grandmother’s funeral to discover that this has become the subject of local discourse. They are all meeting that week, the experts and the observers and the truck drivers and true believers, and all other apocryphal figures. Someone is convening some kind of regional discussion involving all who care to involve themselves; I arrive in the town one day late. I imagine them all standing there in the RSL, Akubras on, hands synchronized on hips. In this vision, the men speak two octaves lower than would be possible, so that there is no possibility for them to be perceived as unusual, i.e. homosexual. Anecdotes in the local paper speculate as to why it would be an appropriate thesis. One wise guy suggests that the way the water typically runs in the surrounding areas has always been a sign, no clear rivers or local identifiable rivulets populate the area, despite the obvious—an enormous one cutting through the town. That seems fitting. Everyone is talking in circles, eager to speak their turn, everyone wants to offer forth a unique viewpoint, and most remarkably of all, there is the expectation that they can. Everyone is ‘listening’. The real answer is more finicky. “The buried 520km-diameter Deniliquin multiple-ring impact structure in southeastern Australia,” according to official scientific phrasing, “is regarded as likely to have triggered the 1.4 million years-long Late Ordovician (Hirnantian) glaciation and mass extinction event which eliminated about 85% of species.”

It would not be unusual to find, in other towns, comparable scenarios with different subjects of discussion, a rare fish appearing in a pattern where once there was only carp, a vanished road with no owner, a strange weather pattern that someone’s uncle swears used to be different. What feels unusual is the scale of the thing they’re trying to metabolize: something geological suddenly entering the conversational range of everyday life, but then also to address the psychic turn, a turn in what—history? Fate? Collective purpose? This is how regional life works. To say this is not overt, a break from individualism or an embrace of communitarian spirit, is not to condemn the tradition. But when you see everyone gather around an unanswerable question and act like it is not above them, that a problem could even belong to them, it is a welcome change.

I looked down and had the impression, not entirely rational, that the ground had already broken apart once and might do so again. It’s like I am splintering, it’s like I’m seeing the events of a million years ago, of this continent having split in many parts—not because I am a keen geological observer, but because a sort of asteroid has landed upon me. Something arrives from outside the system of ordinary explanation and lands squarely on the day. That is the reason I am in this town, why I am left alone by God to find the answers myself, and though I know it and have recognised it my whole life, it feels like a con, that some illusory power has kept me from feeling this knowledge until now. I had sought, from this wellspring of information, a correction—it yielded nothing. Grief now feels like a problem that can only be studied ‘out in the field’. Grief does not resemble mundane sadness in the way one expects. Sadness has an in-built, shrinking circumference. It moves toward relief. Grief does not seem to move. Rather, it as if it completely rearranges the scale. I saw how my grandmother was treated in the lead-up to her death by professionals, how she had dealt with little catastrophes across the whole of her life, of which there was little chance to bounce back or reorient from. I thought that at least near the end of her life, the treatment would be different. And yet.

There is no fence around the perimeter of the self. No outskirts can measure on a fallen planet, no tools remain. Pain cannot be easily cordoned off—the body removes us from the present and returns us, one by one, to others. There is no accounting for this and no predicting the ways in which it might happen. All of which is to say, this has splintered my sense of place, materiality, of time.