#he looked impossibly beautiful for a video where he looked sicker by the moment

[gogycule]

this video was a rollercoaster

[misswanderings]

24

The twenty-four hour news cycle that is: the internet, facebook, social media, news, opinions, noise, advertising, sensation, obsession, trend, meme, crash, burn, story, image, cute video - the ‘did you see’? The 24 hour breath. In out. In out. The beat, the night, the day, the blur. The blah. The round up of the world, the end of the old world. The end of day and night, of on or off. The idea that you whisper something to the night, to the stars, the heavens; is gone. The soft prayer has been stolen by the internet as a mythological muddle of world and life and people and gods and opinions and feedback and whirlpool.

Each twenty-four hour cycle I feel like I have been spat out of a whirlpool cycle of love, abuse, bullshit, beauty, fury, wisdom, hypocrisy, guilt, pain, desire, dream, gloom and doom. I wash it off me, go back and vomit into it, detox myself from it, cry over it, repent for the world, cry for it’s beauty, share it’s morsels and then crawl into a lonely corner at night and wonder if the world would be better off without me. The world of the internet I mean. I plot a life with no internet, no social media - just cups of tea, touch, conversation and wine. Eventually no car, no news, no screens, no outside noise but the letters sent to my letterbox at the end of my long dirt track. I make efforts towards it, and yet my kids then miss out on knowing about soccer trials, the school bus being late back from camp, the day to day logistics that have become more and more about us finding out through social media than any personal letters or messages.

The last personal letter I got to my letterbox was a typed letter from Mr Van Klaphake, a gentleman who runs walks in national parks where you are shown how to identify native flora. A course I had expressed interest in and written my address for, on a piece of paper at his mother, Alice Klaplakes’ art gallery in  Leacock Lane in Casula. The gallery itself, almost impossible to find in the world of new estates that is Liverpool, and obscured by the council sign-posted buildings is an oasis in time, from when Sydney believed in buying land, not to make money off, or renovate, or build and subdivide on, but to create worlds on, to share art and ideas and conversation. Old Sydney.  Van was writing to tell me the course was cancelled for the moment, but he would write again when he would be able to run it. I savored this letter, with the mistakes from his typewriter and his beautiful signature at the bottom. Not digital, not photocopied. Individually created for me. Stamped and put in an envelope, for me. And not because he would get anything from me, or was demanding anything from me. In fact, quite the contrary, he had gone to all this effort to make sure I would not get my hopes up about a course I had, rather absentmindedly, put my name down for, and that he had not been able to do at the moment due to illness. I loved this letter, a relic from the past, before anyone with an email address or facebook profile was sent countless invitations to events and courses and offers every twenty-four hours. A world where our news of Cyclone Irma is charted by the second before it is due to hit Florida tomorrow, a world the Ancient Egyptians who invented the twenty four hour cycle of day and night by observing small star groups, they called decans. as they rose on the horizon each hour and counting the number of joints on the fingers (not thumbs) of their two hands as they did. Leaving us with twelve hours of the day and twelve hours of the night.

I get exhausted every twenty four hours, and clearly I am not the only one. The Wellness Industry, The Slowness Movement, Mindfulness and our endless Yoga, Meditation and Retreats that come into our daily feed, feed off the fact that we are all exhausted by it. Like those merry-go-rounds that you jump on for fun initially, smile at your friends on it with stronger constitutions and progressively feel sicker and sicker on, until you look longingly for a chance to jump off, hurting yourself on the way, and sometimes you feel it has got so fast you never will be able to get off it. Strange that the merry-go-round looks very similar to the shadow-clocks created by the Egyptians centuries ago as they invented time.

I take solace in my reading of writers such as Jay Griffiths, who in her wonderful ‘Pip. Pip: A Sideways Look at Time’ urges her readers to look to the way societies not so reliant of clock time chart time as a collective endeavour. I wonder sometimes if the reason we have taken so obsessively to Facebook, is because we crave collective time over cold clock time? The danger with a collective time programmed and censored and sanitised by the logarithms of the software developers in Silicon Valley, we will lose that early connection to the number 24. To our hands, and the stars, the day and the night, our earlier peoples and the wilderness of late night discussions lost to the wind, or the letters posted to just you at the end of your long walk to the post box.  I will meet you one day at the post box, covered in weeds like this ghostly old image of the merry-go-round. I'll smile and hold your words and heart in my hand, as I open your envelope to see your marks on paper, to me, and i will treasure it, because it is just you, to just me. It is personal.