(My mother’s garden)
It took me a while to get here, but I finally arrived in Tasmania. LA was a blast, but the 15 and a half hour plane ride over the Pacific exacerbated my world-weariness and soul-lag. I spent a few days in Melbourne eating steak, going to the beach, and catching up with friends. I have returned to this city a hundred times each time with a new set of eyes so that it gets even bigger and more complicated. It is a city that breeds ‘normal-o-paths’ but then again, so does London. The normal-o-path never knows the boundaries of their own thinking; except that there is something that is not-normal. Nothing is normal; inquisitiveness and the will to enter worlds bigger than ones self has nothing to do with geography. Normal has a long history; if the day-to-day is about forgetting each previous day then there urgently needs to be a stronger conceptual power to escape the intellectual tedium of short-term practical, empirical, and positivist thinking. If we don’t; then we will cook the planet like a steak; cook it up minute by minute, unable to connect the minutes so we cook like frogs on low heat in a saucepan; frying our narrow Google brains of facts with no narrative (remind me to cut back on the flyer-miles!).
Tasmania is at the centre of the world. It is where institutional Green politics was invented in the 1970s. More on this later…
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