Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
The first time I looked at this …… this thing, funnily enough, I saw Saturn, Venus and Mercury …. One through each whole, perfectly aligned aloft over the Pyramids of Giza. ‘It is a very rare event’ I am told, that these planets should align so perfectly – a serendipitous moment in time. But I know the idealised, romanticised and spiritualised version of the ‘event’ is not completely true – nothing lines up quite like that, the alignment is actually quite skewed; our imagination succumbs to symmetry but imagining such serendipity is sometimes enough to inspire.
The second time I saw the crocodile that snapped in stories of my younger days; from Peter Pan to Cape Tribulation; ‘what the fuck are you doing swimming across here’ I asked myself at the time. I have seen those jaws snap shut in my nightmares, surely they will snap shut in my waking hours? The third time, I looked closely at the spring mechanism and I saw ‘Mr Chopsticks’ himself, revealing how being so hopelessly gutted after several failed attempts at marketing his spring-loaded cutlery to urban Australians eventually led to him making a fortune. I wondered what purged him out of his gloom, and think perhaps it was a combination of chance and a long period of time. In my imaginary conversation with this entrepreneur I ask him, “How did you figure out that your crazy spring-loaded chopsticks would be a blessing to the arthritic ageing folks of Beijing – what took you so long to see things this way”?
I wasn’t expecting that when this ‘invention’ was put in front of me, I could be so curious and so full of imaginary stories that link up in some as-yet unexplained way. Again, serendipity is part real, part imagination. In my journey toward wherever it is I am going, my doubt is the tundra of procrastination; I see that my hands have thawed, my mind is not so far behind, but for now at least, my feet are freezing. Despite the good fortune of others, I shouldn’t wait for serendipity to rescue me; the task is now mine alone. Dev has been talking of how to push on through, regardless of obstacles, forging ahead, unrelenting, kami-fucking-kazi. The only answer is to keep fighting.
So I think I am accepting that to thaw my frozen feet and step toward my own progress, I must fight and write and write and fight; in little pieces, in set times, standing up and sitting down, with music, in silence, very straight or slightly bent, in strange places, in less than ideal circumstances, in terrible circumstances, regardless of what anyone thinks, free of judgement, for the pure joy of just being able to write …. until finally I can take that first step away from the tundra.
The invention, by the way was a plastic clothes peg, and I shall invent the great ice thawing lever, although I think Dev has beat me to it; my foot is coming free.