I’m learning that there’s an art to making the most of the final day of a holiday, particularly at Christmas/New Year when much of the break is spent at home with family and friends and pets and books and albums. Oh, and the food, the MOUNTAINS of food, and the booze, okay, MOUNTAINS of booze, though that should really be OCEANS, shouldn’t it. But when the excesses are over and done with and we feel and look like beached whales and the chill-out days are fast coming to an end, a decision has to be made about how those final hours will be spent. I’m lucky that not only do I have a job I enjoy – working in the arts has plenty of rewards to balance out the challenges – I also get to return to my writing routine, so it’s not like I feel as if I’m being sent to jail. But still, how exactly to spend that one last glorious day of anthing-goes freedom?
In recent times I’ve thought that the last day should be set up to be a slice of the ideal life. So it could be waking up in bed to the smell of bacon and eggs being hand-delivered on a tray by someone you love; or getting up at the crack of dawn and diving into a wild ocean; or, if this is your thing (and it’s certainly not mine, I can tell you that for free) finally waking after a walking-dead night on the town, not a skerrick of memory left but some stranger in your bed and in your mouth a taste that reminds you of newly laid bitumen and green chicken – the gone-off green, not the green-curry green. For me, I decided, rather than reading the newspaper while eating my way through a large bowl of cereal, muesli, lecithin, yoghurt and milk with a side of lite cranberry juice, I’d have brekkie on the couch whilst watching the final half-a-dozen episodes of Six Feet Under. I love this show – along with The Office it’s in my top three TV series of all time. (The third, rather embarrassingly, is the BBC’s Brideshead Revisited series from the 1980s.)
How great it was to sit and watch the death throes of a show about death: a show whose thesis is ‘Everything. Everyone. Everywhere. Ends’. Because holidays die, that’s the inescapable fact. Because holidays are a microcosm of our lives: they have a distinct beginning, when we know little about how our festive (or festy, as more than one person I know has been saying) season is going to pan out; and then there’s the middle section where we start to feel that the end isn’t that far away; and then, all too soon, we’re beginning to count down the hours, because soon this brief summer life will come to an end. After I cried my way through the extraordinary final ten minutes of Six Feet Under where – and SPOILER ALERT for those three people on earth who’ve not yet seen the show – everyone dies, I decided that I better do something else, something…practical.
So I redecorated the wall of my writing room with a new series of photos.
Being a Polaroid freak, most of the photos I usually have on the wall above my computer are of the instant square variety with the thick strip of white down the bottom for witty captions. And since over the last few years I’ve been getting crazier and crazier about taking Polaroids (probably because the technology is fast reaching its own demise) I have hundreds of them so there’s quite a few to choose from. But this year I decided to reach a wary hand into my vaults – cardboard boxes in the cupboard, in other words – and put together a brief series of photos that illustrate significant places in my life. So there’s a shot of a rock garden I built at the back of the house in which I navigated those nasty teenager years; nasty for me and everyone around me. There’s a shot of my family’s rented green weatherboard cottage in the Blue Mountains; how I loved that place, and so often do I think of visiting, but if it’s not there any more, or has been turned into some grotesque mansion, then I’d fall apart, I really would). There’s a shot of a dream house at Cottesloe Beach in Perth, a messy humble shack with the million-dollar view, a shack that no doubt has been turned into some grotesque mansion.
There’s a shot of a herb rack in an inner-city grouphouse I shared for a year or two back in the 1990s. There’s a photo of a black VW Beetle on an island called Inishboffin off the south-west coast of Ireland. There’s a photo of He Who Is Still With Me when we went down to Melbourne to visit a photographer friend. And there’s a photo of the house I now live in, a nondescript ex-government thing that was built in 1959, which is very old for this young city – a national capital – I call home. Oh, alright, I should admit to including just a couple of Polaroids in my display: one of an 1830s farm cottage where I stay when I need focus and solitude (and to commune with rats and mice and snakes and lizards, and the odd stray lamb), and another of a desk I’d used when on a residency last year.
Of course, once I Blue-tacked the photos on the wall and then sat in my chair to admire my handiwork, I began to cry at this as well, because there, in a handful of photos, was the entirety of my life so far.
Despite my forty-one years (and rising), it seemed so…slight.
So what else was there to do but spend the last few hours of my holiday scrubbing the bath, because, quite frankly, it was so disgusting houseguests had been refusing to use it.
Now I’ve thought about this issue – or is it a challenge? – and have written out these words, I can’t see much of an art to having a memorable, or at least meaningful, last day of a holiday. But I am glad that mine has turned out to be a day of thought and depth, a day that moved me, a day that got me thinking about my impermanence. The makers of Six Feet Under said their aim was to encourage viewers to consider/confront their mortality (I actually typed immortality then, which is a Freudian slip if I ever saw one, or just a desire, or a wish, or a useless plea for mercy) and that’s exactly what happened to me. And the cliché goes that a picture equals a thousand words, though I think photographs of your own life equal novella-length stories, if not the whole novel shebang. And they say that there’s nothing more centring than soaking in a bath for an hour. So now that I have a bath that’s actually white I reckon I should get the water running, pour myself a glass of wine, crank up the stereo with a great album, which I’m guessing is going to be Hospice by The Antlers (yes, yet another reference to that album on this blog), because it fits this mood I’m in, a mood of holiday endings, and lay myself down and close my eyes.
Perhaps that’s where the art is: just being still as the end comes.
11 comments
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January 10, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
itallstarted
Some random thoughts that occurred to me as I read your post:
I’m one of those three people you speak of who have never seen Six Feet Under.
In addition to a Canon digital SLR I now want a Polaroid as well.
My bath is also in need of a damn good clean.
I hate the last day of holidays too.
The Antlers are awesome.
January 10, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Agnes, thanks heaps for your comments. Based on the music you seem to enjoy, I get these sense that you’d really like Six Feet Under. And Polaroid cameras are brilliant, thought they don’t make them anymore but you can quite easily track one down on eBay. They’re also phasing out the film, though there’s still a fair bit in Australia and it seems likely that another company will make it when Polaroid stops. Over the summer I bought a Canon digital, and it’s great, but there’s nothing like the weirdness of a Polaroid shot, especially when they turn out brilliantly. And the colours they fade to over time makes it all just priceless!
January 10, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
itallstarted
I was looking online at Polaroids last night and there are these new digital versions that come with an instant print function but they don’t look anywhere near as cool and iconic as the classic Polaroids. Customer reviews say they’re pretty clumsy too. Ebay is my only option I think!
And I’ll have to track down Six Feet Under – it was on really late at night as I recall which would be why I never got into it I think. Bloody Aussie TV. They did the same thing to Weeds as well – I just order the DVDs online now. They do themselves no favours when they faff about with their scheduling all the time!
January 11, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Mia
Someone once said that death is a relief for the soul.
I don’t know about the soul but I reckon that my death will spell a freedom from the monotony of certain everyday chores. For example, I am sick to death of having to go to the toilet. I don’t mean merely inconvenienced. I mean actually bored of the ritual of it of it. I don’t want to be too graphic but I have a complete and effective system starting from the easiest way to take my undies off to the best way to hold the toilet paper. I have even wondered if my tendency towards wearing skirts and dresses is really just a manifestation of my desire to make my toilet going system more effective, ie: its easier to go without having to undo pants etc. But look whatever, effective or non effective, I just think, right-o here we go AGAIN, for what is according the averages probably the 58,400 and something time in my life to date. For the record I am also sick of cleaning my teeth, vacuuming and I could also give sneezing and blowing my nose a big miss.
I imagine when I am eighty I will be not just sick of but completely over these things. On my death bed I’ll be lying there thinking, well at least I don’t have to endure another season of hay fever and Channel Seven programming. In the mean time maybe I’ll take up reading in the throne room.
However I digress, what you made me really want to talk about is that as a silver smith and as a jewellery maker permanence and impermanence is something that I am deeply concerned with. Part of my motivation has been to choose materials that encourage the owner to treat them as heirlooms. I make things fully thinking about what you would need to do to repair them, I imagine them in one hundred years. I choose and recycle objects, sometimes as an effort to press pause in the life cycle of that material, to stand between it and the face of oblivion as it transitions from one material form to another. I take something relatively ephemeral, a cicada wing off a beach and prevent it from becoming the beach, well at least for a while longer. Maybe this is why gemstones are also so intriguing, they are ancient when we dig them up, the product of earth’s mysterious alchemy, involving forces no less impressive than a volcanic eruption (in the case of peridot) and super heated high pressure water passing through boulders (like emeralds). The results are spectacular and we value these relatively tiny stones enough to pass them down through families for centuries. In fact weirdly, you can even have your carbonised ashes turned into synthetic diamonds as a keepsake for your friends and family.
At any rate I take comfort in the idea that as artists our legacy our words, music, plays, and paintings will in many cases outlast our physical presences. They are a shout into the blackness, a final struggle to resist the inevitable journey back to the centre of stars (isn’t that where all matter starts and ends?)
You say that the art is just being still as the end comes.
Maybe the art just stills the end coming.
January 11, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel
Hi Agnes, yeah go to the classic Polaroid camera – the 600 is (was) very popular and is the one I have; it’s been nothing but perfect to use, and so very reliable. Good luck with the camera shopping! I look forward to seeing the results on It All Started. Oh and Six Feet Under is very much worth hunting down as well – extraordinary TV.
And, Mia, thanks heaps for your kind, brave comments. Yes, there are quite a few things about life I’m getting a bit bored with. Grocery shopping has lost its shine, though visiting my local independent record store still fills me with much pleasure. And I still completely LOVE eating breakfast – weird huh.
But I take your point about the arts and impermanence. I’ll be mulling over your ‘the arts are a shout into the blackness’ for a few days yet! At a bbq on the Saturday just gone someone said to me that no matter where we’re born, where we live, how lucky or unlucky we are, there’s a certain heaviness to our days, and that’s our commonality. Perhaps the arts – music, stories, images, the whole lot of it – helps us to accept that heaviness, or explore it, or, sometimes, just sometimes, soften it.
January 11, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Ms. Moon
Hello! You visited me and now I am visiting you! What a nice blog you have.
I, too, love The Office and Six Feet Under. Have you watched any Deadwood? The best. In my opinion, at least. It is addicting and wicked and wonderful.
January 11, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Ms Moon, thanks heaps for dropping by. I’ll have to check out Deadwood!
January 19, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Sarcastic Bastard
I’ll admit it, too, then. I loved Brideshead Revisited. What a great cast!
Now, I’m really enjoying Californication. Haven’t seen Six Feet Under yet.
Thanks for visiting me, Nigel. I hope you’ll come back. I will be back here.
Best, SB.
January 19, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
Thanks heaps for the comments, SB. I’ll have to check out Californication. Keep in touch.
January 24, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
larooblog
hi nigel,
it seems i’m not the first “returning the visit” visiter that was pulled into this post! i loved your closing line. was your exit from 2009 what you imagined it’d be? stillness is a quality i wasn’t born with a vast supply of, so i’m always curious how others cultivate it. in any case, all the best to you as this new year stretches it’s long days out before us. hope to hear from you again.
cheers,
lex
January 24, 2010 at 9:16+00:00Jan
Nigel Featherstone
Hi Lex, thanks heaps for your comments. Yeah, stillness is a quality I’m learning more and more about – when it’s done well it’s a cracker! 2009 finished quite nicely and I’m now riding 2010 like there’s no tomorrow. Thanks again for dropping by. Cheers, Nigel