No better place than the beginning

Apparently it’s all about the beginning. Who knew?

There are plenty of satisfying things to do. Walking the dog is one. Reading is another. Working in the vegetable garden. Helping a friend move house. Baking a cake. Listening to music. Finding your way through an unfamiliar city without a map. But there’s something I know that’s even more satisfying. It’s something that happens so rarely, at least in my humble abode, but I always look forward to it. When it’s done my body feels lighter, better, and my mind is settled and free. Come on, Featherstone, spit it out. What on earth are you talking about now?

I’m a jar cleaner, as in I like – love – cleaning a jar, getting it ready for re-use.

Perhaps the jar used to contain pasta sauce, or some kind of pesto. Maybe it had contained herbs or ginger or garlic. But once it’s been emptied the real fun begins. The scrubbing and cleaning so the glass is crystal clear and the lid as perfect as can be. Then the label must be removed. Usually the label itself comes off easily enough. How good it is to tear it away with a finger – it’s like removing old skin. But that sticky, stubborn glue residue: isn’t it awful, it barely budges. So, in the jar goes for a soak in warm soapy water, for an hour, for hours, for an entire day if necessary. Slowly but surely, perhaps with the aid of a knife, the glue residue is removed. And there it is: a new jar.

It’s an empty vessel, that’s what it is. How can it be used now? What will it hold? Perhaps that’s what all this is about: the future, hope, wishes and dreams. Might it also be about renewal? That we all believe so passionately in recycling, in minimising waste? The thing is, in my place, the jars are almost never refilled. They just sit on their shelf, a dozen in a row, waiting there like birds on a fence. To my mind, it’s actually about emptiness, about emptying out, about not holding on, or not filling up. When we’re empty – of expectation, of busyness, of desire – we are open to everything that might come our way. When we’re empty we can feel that lightness of being that novelist Milan Kundera called ‘unbearable’.

When we’re empty we’re no one. We’re back at the beginning.

And there’s no better place than the beginning.

(First published in Panorama, The Canberra Times, 13 September 2014.)

Borders as ends and beginnings

Borders: lines on a map but not necessarily in hearts and minds.

Borders.

They’ll be the end of us.

I’m not talking about the ill-fated book shop but those lines and marks that scare the living shit out of you and me.

There are the geographic borders: a sandy beach, a cliff-face, a wall of impenetrable rainforest. There are the borders that are nothing more than a flashing light on a computer screen or an invisible line somewhere in the ocean.

People want to cross over; they would do anything to go from one side to the other; they might risk death to be ‘over there’, where it is better. There are ways of doing it ‘legally’ and there are ways of doing it ‘illegally’, depending on the circumstances, and the level of desperation. It seems borders and desperation can go hand in hand, especially in this world where the difference between hope and hopelessness can be so marked.

Each week I, too, cross borders; at least, I drive past a sign that indicates I’m going from one place to another. I cross borders because there are opportunities on the other side, in ‘the big city’ as I’ve come to call it. Because these days I live in a country down in regional NSW. Because where I live the only arts work involves packing shelves. So I come into the ACT to do paid gigs that I enjoy, that are meaningful, that help to keep the wolves at bay.

But I’m not suffering political persecution.

Or religious discrimination.

Or threat of incarceration because I’m spending my life with another man.

Or because I’m a woman.

I’m lucky, supremely so, and just like everyone else who is lucky there is an obligation to cross borders at every opportunity. In the way I think, in the way I act and react, in the way I create – especially in the way I create. If artists can’t (or won’t) cross borders, who will? We should be crossing between forms, between materials, between genres, between ideas, between audiences. Because we should always be wanting – needing – to be uncomfortable. Because, perhaps, when uncomfortable we’re more productive, we’re alive, we’re fighting.

Inspiration is everywhere. There’s Oscar Wilde and his ability to move between prose and poetry, between stage and page, between the ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ and risk his freedom and, ultimately, his life in the process. Closer to home there was, up until 2008, the Melbourne-based poet Dorothy Porter, who blurred the lines between collection and novel and reached the point where one of her works, The Monkey’s Mask, made it onto the silver screen. Closer to home even further, we have artists like Andrew Galan, who cross between the written and the spoken and the complex and the simple. And we have Katy Mutton, who slips – almost effortlessly – between the painted, the drawn, the political, and the personal.

Yes, borders are the end of the line for some of our number. And that’s our eternal shame, our immeasurably heavy burden.

But for us lucky ones, borders should be our beginnings.

*

(First published in BMA Magazine on 23 April 2014. Thanks to Sir Allan Sko.)