Skullthorpe's Blog

Limping behind, Suzie’s shattered cool began to reintegrate.  She was in.  She was in!  Now she had to get out again on the other side.  If she had believed in luck she would have thought it good.  As it was she believed in Suzie and wondered what would happen next.

The corridor curved around the lift shafts at the back of the dock.  They passed door after dirty door,  scuffed, with brown grey stains around the handles.  Hazchem warnings gave clues to the purpose of the rooms behind them if you knew what they meant.

‘You OK’ Ariel over her shoulder.

‘Sure’ limping less with effort.

‘First thing is Medical. Not far’

Turning left down a cross corridor they came to an alcove with chairs and a door in it with a green cross.  The chairs were empty.

‘What time is it?’

‘Late.’

There was a meshed grill on the wall next to the door with a big red button.  Ariel depressed the button. ‘Ariel from dispatch got a newby who fell into a dumpster.’ The mesh squawked. ‘No she’s not bad. she’s with me.  Needs looking at.  Squawk.  A videye centered above the door lintel swiveled and panned. The door clicked. Ariel opened it and went in grabbing Suzie by the wrist.

Inside at a desk a dark man sat.  Indian? Pakistani? White coat impeccable.  After the sordid corridor the clean almost hurt.  ‘Ariel is it? you are?  He had a form.  It was light green.  He had a pen it was blue plastic.

‘Suzie.’

‘Suzie ‘…….. Writing, he looked up.

‘Smith..’

‘Smith… I suppose someone has to be. Number?’

‘Number?’

I said, she’s as newby, only started this shift.’

‘I lost my tag in the dumpster, It was 143 something something I think.’

‘Doubt it, that would mean you were a dog handler, security..’

‘I am not good with numbers’ She cursed herself, first rule – don’t offer… take.  She put on a shit eater grin.  ‘Sorry.’

 

“This vanishing world is beautiful beyond our dreams and contains in itself rewards and gratifications never found in an artificial landscape or man-made objects.”
Quote by early Tasmanian conservationist and nature photographer Olegas Truchanas (1923-1972)

This is the signature quote on a friend of mines’ email. My eyes flicked over it the other day and were caught. I wrote this piece in my head while taking a shower this morning.
One the face of it it looks like an innocent motherhood type statement concerning the disappearance of, and need for, the preservation and celebration of the natural environment. On one level it is of course that. On another level it is a stark window into the unconscious world of heuristics and how our lives are governed by more or less automatic processes far and away removed from ‘free will’. On another level the statement is almost sense free. I met the person in question down the street and blurted out in my usual callow fashion that I was writing about his signature quote and I thought it perhaps didn’t mean anything at all. My usual tactful self – creating quite the wrong impression of what I actually meant.
There is much to unpack here. ‘The vanishing world’ refers to the disappearance of the untouched human free landscape. It is arguable that such landscapes haven’t existed since pre neolithic times, even the heart of the Amazon jungle has been inhabited for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years. However the sense is that of the high impact intrusion of agricultural/industrial/post industrial cultures.
The assertion that such landscapes are beautiful creates a degree of tension because of course beauty (as far as we can know) is only perceivable by the self concious intelligence. More – notions of beauty are culturally explicit. Certainly the Eighteenth Century European sensibility abhorred unmodified landscapes. After the romantic movement dominated peoples sensibilities the rich spent millions (in our money) creating ‘improved’, ‘natural’ landscapes – levelling hills, uprooting forests and dispossessing peasants in the wholesale pursuit of the ‘natural’. It is arguable, though not of course provable, that the Pre European Central American cultures either did not perceive what we would call beauty or whose sense of it was so alien that we cannot appreciate it except in the sense of craftsmanship and treatment of materials. The Anglo Saxons in their literature were silent about landscape except in elegiac doom laden ruminations on the ruins left behind principally by the Romans or their own t neolithic ancestors. The natural world can only be ‘beautiful if the perceiver has in their cultural toolbox notions that make this possible. We carry around complexes of ‘aesthetic heuristics’ that create the interface between us and our raw perceptions.
Clearly it cannot be ‘beautiful beyond our dreams’ because the visual impressions of beauty that give us pleasure in our dreams are identical to the ‘heuristic aesthetic set’ that governs our waking appreciations and recognitions. Unless one invokes a Platonic notion of forms (for which there is no evidence based method of determination) then beauty is dependant on people to invoke it. A landscape is not beautiful unless it is observed by a self conscious intelligence with the appropriate culturally derived sensibilities in their heuristic toolbox.
The notion that the natural landscape is more beautiful or in possession of a better sort of beauty than the technologically derived or built landscape is not absolute either. As I mentioned above the Anglo Saxon appreciation of landscape is exclusively relating to the built environment and the ruins of it in particular. Notions of beauty are deeply fashion derived and change over time. Not only fashion forms our aesthetic judgement but necessity must also have played a part. Our ancestors of not too far removed, must have deeply feared what lay beyond the circle of firelight, ‘the fields they knew’ or the lands beyond their experience. ”Here be dragons’ is seen as a quaint assertion made by ancient cartographers concerning lands beyond the their knowledge, but there is fear there as well.
The signifier of human intervention – the straight drystone wall, the windmill with its’ weir and quiet fields were seen as beautiful and touchstones against the chaos of a threatening natural world.
On the face of it you can’t really use an aesthetic argument for the preservation of the natural world. All such arguments are culturally derived.
The argument must come from the needs of the environment itself. That the global network of energy gradients – both entropic and emergent, are all interdependent is becoming increasingly clearer as our environmental knowledge deepens. Also the old socio-anthropological principal that ‘you can’t just make one change’ is becoming increasing accurate at every level, not just the culturally derived.
So what has come out of this long meditation on that innocent sentence is that it is not really meaningful to argue for preservation of the natural on aesthetic grounds because the arguments are not supportable. The exponentially spreading human population is exponentially spreading the potentiality for the appreciation of the the natural environment aesthetically while destroying it in the process of its growth. This appreciation is sadly not universally recognised in any effective way because if it was we, as a world population, would be radically restricting our population growth and draconianly invoking environmentally protective safeguards.

What we are dealing with here is one of those epistemological paradoxes  like the net increase in knowledge causes a net increase in ignorance.
As the number of people increase reducing the amount of natural environment, so the number of brains increase capable of appreciating beauty. Beauty only exists in self conscious entities, so the amount of beauty in the world increases as the source diminishes. 

As we know from highly mannered cultures (like Imperial Japan) aesthetics and concepts of beauty can be parred down to the extreme minimalist. maybe in the future some one will write a very similar thing as 25 billion people ragard the last tree over the internet each viewer overcome with wonder.

Ariel shucked off her coverall revealing an almost transparent tank top. The dark nipples starred at Suzie. Speculatively she touched one with her finger.
‘They for looking at not touching’
‘Really?’ She raised her other hand and finger-touched the other.
Ariel did not move away. ‘Mostly.’
Just before their saliva mingled: ‘What the fuck am I doing?’

Her subjective time slowed as she was caught between fight and flight. No where to go and no way to get there. The girl caught momentarily off-balance by the wayward rack turned and saw.
‘Shit! What happened?
Suzie looked around, ‘Happened…?’
‘Are you bleeding?’
‘Bleeding…’
‘You a fucking parrot or what?’
This was not going well, she was too tired and her ankle hurt. The drug rush had fled leaving her feeling pain,dazed, disoriented, flat.
‘I, I guess I fell…’
‘Into that?’ She indicated the dumpster with a badly plucked eyebrow.
‘I guess..’
‘You guess? You did or you, didn’t. You bang your head?’
At last her wits kicked in, ‘The lid fell on me and I fell in, knocked me out I think.’
‘Shit, we had better get you to Medical, where’s Jacko?’
‘Jacko?’
‘Shit head with pimples, Jacko.’
‘Oh yeah, him, dunno.’
‘How come you doing the crap, it’s his job. You new?’
‘Only started ….’
‘Shift just came on, yeah. That shit skivved off and left you with the crap. Shit!’
‘Look I…’
‘….don’t want to get in the shit, yeah ok. Where’s your ID?…ID!’ She waved the lanyard with plastic tag that was around her neck, ‘ID.’
Suzie put her hand to her neck. ‘Must have fallen off…’
‘Fuck it, I ain’t grovelling in there. They probably give you new one, no worries if we don’t make a fuss.’
‘Fuss….’
‘You are a fucking parrot. Look, if we don’t go on about compo and that crap, they can just pretend it didn’t happen, no paperwork, no snot faces from upstairs butting in. OK?
‘I guess.’
‘Good, you walk?’
She tested her ankle, ‘I guess.’
‘Right!’
Pushing the the rack up against the wall, she turned back to the doorway and then said over her shoulder ‘Ariel’. Seeing Suzie go blank. ‘Ariel! It’s me fucking name.’
‘Oh right…. I’m …Glinda.’ And she followed Ariel out of the loading dock.

Suzie briefly considered taking off her boot to examine her injuries. Looking around at the filth splattered interior of the skip made up her mind for her. Cursing for the umpteenth time the mantrap that had almost took her foot she winced to her feet, braced, eased up the lid and slipped over the edge and out. Fingers narrowly missing being crushed by the crusted edge as the lid slammed. The noise, loud in the hollow space of the dock, frightened her. She waited crouched between the dumpster and the cement block wall.. Nothing. Pimples was gone or noises were common. She waited some more. No Security, so probably no audio pickups. Good so far.
In a limping crouch she eased along the wall feeling exposed. At least the cameras did not seem to be dirigible. Neither had turned at the sounds she had made. This part of the dock had been hidden by the lid when she had taken her brief look. Skirting a large pile of prolapsed cartons destined no doubt for her recent refuge Suzie came to a door. Scared with careless utility, a grubby sign and a push bar handle indicated an exit. No good. She wanted in.
What she most wanted was a plan. Actually, what she most wanted was a shower, a ploughman’s lunch and a long sleep. What she most needed was a plan. She had, as always, acted on impulse. The current series of impulses had lead her farther and farther from her familiar ersatz demi monde to the sharp edges of trouble and death. Impulse had got her from the inside of the outside to the outside of the in. Now what?
In answer, from out a doorway, further along the wall, hidden by an RSJ, sounded, then appeared, a rattling clothes rack crowded with garments. Its motive force emerged last. A young thing, skinny in a blue work smock. An out-of-a-bottle black razor cut framed her sharp cheekbones, pink with effort. She was too preoccupied with steering and pushing to notice Suzie, frozen, crouched in the shadow of the boxes.

The chemical rush ebed.  The organ that filled the inside of her skull stopped momentarily shouting at her about the outside. The jolting ceased abruptly and the cavity in which she huddled rang like a gong. Pimples had run into something. The monotone peaked suddenly with the ubiquitous bogan expletive, “Fuckingcunt!” The sounds of Pimples receded.
Suzie Cream-Cheese waited. She waited some more. All seemed quiet. Either when she stuck out her head she would be staring into the barrel of a tazar and the pinpoint pupils of some Security beef or she wouldn’t.
She eased out of her cramped crouch and with the top of her head slowly raised the lid of the skip till her eyes looked out over the rim. She gently lowered the lid and sat. She took off her beret and rubbed the top of her head. The lid heavier than she had expected. She replaced the hat, tucked in the hair, wishing without much conviction for a mirror.
The coast had been clear. The loading dock was brightly lit. Empty of people. Only two security cameras, neither looking at the skip. One was pointed at the roller door, through which she had recently trundled, the other the loading platform, backed by a bank of goods lifts. The good and the bad news. The cameras while not looking at where she was, were looking at where she needed to go if she was to have any hope at all.
Suzie wondered. She wondered a couple of things. Thing one was what where the chances of Pimples or some other Mall stiff being out of site but within earshot. Thing two was speculation on the likelihood of the area having audio as well as video monitoring.

The shopping mall sprawled across the desert rendering it foul like the footpath outside an all-night licensed pizza joint very late on a Saturday night.  The starry sky was spiked by multi-pitched roofs, and the glare from the innumerable ads, shop windows and security lights triumphed over it.  No stars shone in the lives of these people except from the predatory talent and reality tv shows in a lattice of multiple images flashing from a Harvey Norman Mega Barn.

Suzie Cream-Cheese viewed the scene sourly from the shadows of a dumpster in the mouth of a loading bay.  She had been skirting the huge complex for days trying to find a way through to the mountains beyond this arid strip of rain shadow.   24/7 under the daytime blazing, blurred sun or night scarring halo’d sodium lights the vast asphalt acreages were kaleidoscoped with four wheel drives, people movers and commuter buses.  Streams of people dressed by Kmart tributaried and deltaed eagerly to the glowing entrances. Other streams emerged, capillaries of pushers of wayward rattling trolleys piled high with plastic bags and gaudy packages. The children straw-slurping on polystyrene and the adults catching up from the deprivations of smoke free public spaces.  Men gulping surreptitious, paper-bagged cans of bourbon and coke and the women trolley wresting and children wrangling.  Under the surface sparkle of pharmacological enchantment all eyes are dull and flat as a goats, bleached by the eternal tedium of choice.

On the edges of the shadowlands where the asphalt met the desert stalked the moving guard towers on legs like water spiders.   They blended with or emerged from the perpetual photochemical smog like the bad dreams of a 1950’s B grade movie director.  Their guarding ambiguous – to keep the shoppers in: to contain the compulsory compulsive consumption or to keep out and stop the refuseniks, the shadow people, the Suzie  Cream-Cheeses from making it to the mountains.  The cluster of ariels and stubby barrels that nestled between the observation blisters constantly waving, seeking, emitting brief bursts of coherent light relentlessly reducing the shadows that scurried and crept.

Suzie Cream-Cheese was dirty.  She hated being dirty.  She snarled to herself as she shifted her weight from the injured foot to the healthy.  It seemed like weeks not days since she had abandoned her motor bike somewhere out there in the badlands its fuel spent.  She had waited for dark in the meagre shadows of the tumbled boulders.  Guided by the sky-glow it had taken her all night to reach the Shadowland and huddle with a few fellow travellers in a gully during daylight as the moving towers stalked about.  There on the fringe of The Mall amid the vast hectares of solar collectors, automated yeast farms and food factories the refuseniks existed as parasites.   She had been surprised to find so few.  So many set out drawn by the dubious promise of the distant mountains to attempt the crossing of the The Mall. Come the night, the dark was sparsely inhabited by their deeper shadows meeting, greeting and probing for a way to cross to something like freedom.

Suzie Cream-Cheese had crept and stumbled for 6 or 7 days along the broken edges of the eternal sprawl.  She had watched the cars, streaming in from the freeway. It ran like a spinal cord through the bony excrescences of the infinity of shops. Cars streaming in and streaming out again.  Outbound to the ganglia’s of hives where the shoppers stored their purchases, poked at their touch screens googling for bargains and slept between shopping expeditions.  She had heard the stories of the Churches where on Sundays shoppers recycled their week’s purchases clearing their apartments in readiness for another week of busy choosing and consuming.  Another week of being happy, free and prosperous.

Suzie Cream-Cheese had walked out on all that years ago.  Suzie had opted out before it had got to the rabid compulsive hell it now so clearly was, at least to her and her fellow seekers after mountains.  She had split the scene, to use an archaism, and had been happy enough with her ecstasy and an endless stream of lead guitarists until the mountains called.  Her startling mop of white hair, caught up in a black beret, and dark dry skin told the plain story that she was no longer the cream of her name but very much the cheese.  She still hated being dirty.

The dumpster behind which she lurked, even though empty, smelt bad.  Suzie smelt bad.  Suzie’s ankle was swollen and crusted with blood.  Things were not good.  However she had a plan. For the past two nights after the dumpster had been emptied into the maw of the giant orange garbage truck, a pimply kid, his skin pale against the tartan of his shirt, had heaved  and pushed the dumpster into the dock while swearing inventively in a monotone. The roller had then lowered, shutting out the night and Suzie’s curiosity.

It was a desperate chance, if chance it was, but Suzie meant to take it.  She carefully looked around.  Her senses alert for the skittering watch towers and the plodding Security who lurching along, always in pairs, always chewing the gum that kept them chemically alert and psychopathically suspicious.  Seeing her chance and taking it, she monkeyed up the side of the skip, quick as a rat and was in.   She supressed a groan, her ankle protesting violently over the sudden action.  Fumbling open one of her zippered pockets she palmed a small blue capsule, pushed it between her lips and bit down.  She sighed, going momentarily limp. Pain fled and every speck of dirt, crust of rust and splash of the un-nameable competed for her attention.   She felt the skip lurch, realized that Pimples had arrived as she heard his swearing.   Suppressing an urge to cry out she hunkered down and waited every sense coruscating like sheet lightning.  She was entering Bogheamia as a piece of rubbish but who knew what transformations she may achieve.  Suzie Cream-Cheese suddenly grinned feral and waited.

Human beings have never been my favorite.  I prefer dogs.  Another reason for my antipathy was rubbed into my nose the other day.  On the bonfire pile at the radio station was the shattered remains of a flowering banksia.  Sad enough that any tree needs to be cut down at all,  but what sort of tragically weird person cuts down a flowering tree?

I don’t get it.  Was it really urgent that tree had to go NOW?  How ineffably sad the person responsible didn’t see what they were doing was dreadful.  It flies in the face of all our art, all our music and all the love we hold for each other.  There is something more frightening, in some ways, about unconscious evil than there is in premeditated horror.  To practise infamy without noticing is all the explanations we need for our oceans full of rubbish, our skies full of poison and the worlds forests on fire to make way to grow feed stock for Mc Donalds.