Day 266 - Resurfacing - Chapter 5 - (1060 words)

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RESURFACING

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 5

The Village, if that is what they call it here, is old. Old in a way that redefines the world old in ways that don't sit well with antipodean dwellers like me. The idea that the building where I can buy a causal trinket or time at an internet café, is older than the 'civilised' history of the land of my birth, my home. Sure there are older things back in the Lucky Country, but they seem like myth and legend. Make believe fairytales of aboriginal settlements older than the cathedrals of Europe, but with nothing to show is it any wonder it doesn't feel real?

Nature is older, and so the people at one with it seem as impassable as it is. The mark they left behind, only footprints and some paintings. When in the presence of a modern age-old artefact it feels more real though it's probably youthful by comparison. You don't stand at the foot of Uluru and think about millions of years of geology, it's too oblique. You don't think about the thousands of years of a nomadic existence, there's not any easy reference points for it.

Standing the arched doorway of a shop, hundreds of years old and not uncommon enough to be listed as heritage or as worth protecting, it is mid boggling to a younger country man. At home buildings over a certain age, barely older than a generation, require preservation. Buildings here just carry on, preserved by virtue of being kept. Unconscious and not at all deliberate, preservation is an act of conservation by default.

So every second doorway is a melange of styles and ages, the Village takes pains to remind me of it's decrepitude and it's modernness all the while declaring it's age like it was the fittest octogenarian offering to do push ups in the Plaza, the benefits of clean living and exercise on display. The oddest thing about the visual age of things is the mask they put over the top. There is a patina of ancient attitude smeared over everything, even the more modern of components. Like Mutton dressed as Mutton, but the best and most tender of Mutton you can find. Ok I get that it's an odd way to think of it, but unlike the women who are in deepest of denials the ageing gracefully is a mark of pride, not a skin to be pulled taut over the cracks.

The cracks are the features to be proud of.

Here if the cracks are simply not pronounced enough, then accentuate and develop them, make them known and make them the centre piece of your display.

Why here? Why anywhere, really? It was a pin on a map, a random act of defiance and rebellion from the structure of an itinerary that choked it's hold on the necks of teenagers. If things were different, if the past had played it's course in more traditional methods, would she still have made it here? Questioning the past is a colossal waste of time and effort of course. Doubt is pointless and an exercise in frustration, the past has not changed and it is the future that I am interested in, no matter the path there.

She waits.

Impossible to determine what shape the future may take, the laws of nature and physics have their own sense of propriety, and an arrogant belief that they are the only truisms in the world, but obviously they are not, or I would not be here and she would not be waiting for me. Human behaviour is madness all the time and no one questions it, why would they? Everything is complex if you examine it too closely, and simple if you leave it be. Why unravel the loose thread and destroy the sweater when you can wear it until the thread disappears or resolves itself? Why does anyone do anything? Is human behaviour so predictable and logical at any point in time, why start pulling it apart because it's meaningless to attempt it.

Nobody really knows the answer to most of the questions, like the women in physical denial about their age, the rest of us less concerned with the image of our bodies and the side of our faces we show, still lie about who we are and more importantly why we are. Just because we believe a lie, that does not make it true or trustworthy. That's a modern fallacy, say it enough and it will come true.

Maybe not that modern looking at the blood soaked floors of churches, the blood dried invisibly on ancient stone cobbles and pathways to wars. Horses and swords marched and swung beneath the roofs, the sky and in between the halls of history. You'd think more than twice before stepping on someone's grave, it's disrespectful and vain to tread so lightly on the sum of someone's existence. Then you scuff your feet on a paving stone that has known more death than you ever will. It is now a part of daily life, you walk it every day and while it was once the end of someone, someone(s), life, now it is...

Pedestrian.

Clichés and stereotypes all come from somewhere and we decry them as hiding the truth, but the truth is dullness and repetition ad nauseum, that is it's legacy and it's future. There is nothing new under the sun, how apt that is and it's older than the buildings who tower over me like a elderly relative. Who is their senior?

Two decades it took me to live a life less truthful and more deceitful than the cliché of a runaway boy-man looking for the lost love of a teenage rebellious period. It could not be more clear about what and where my past had imprinted on me and yet I married, denied and slathered the make up on me until the clown faced mirror image screamed at me and could be heard.

I did not question it then for nearly twenty years and what happened when I started the process? This is hardly the best outcome for me or my ex-wife, the as yet undivorced narrator's partner. She would say I am mad, fixated on the memory of something I don;t know at all and cannot possibly be true.

She'd be right.

And yet.

Here we are. We are.