The Paradise Requiem

The world, loitering in suspension, has spun its astronomical web around the sun eighteen times since I was born, and until January this year, not once had I crossed the threshold of a foreign country. There are many things I don’t understand about the world, but this is the most incomprehensible of them all. How did I end up here?

During those fifteen revolutions, the western world celebrated its first decade of the twentieth century by vomiting smouldering clouds of ash and trembling in vibrato. Like some ancient mystical monument, even as the world explodes in extraneous corners, Perth remains virginal to the ecstatic crises of a more prominent land.
We are content in waking and existing in our glass dome of suburbia where every detail reeks of pattern. Pick a house out of a magazine. Don’t be fazed by the labyrinth of steam-rolled streets and the ghostly half-built developments that frame the spawning highways.

I can’t help but wonder how we don’t wonder. Or, even if we do, why don’t we wander? We are a ghost town, sleeping with the stale spirits of the conurbations. Again I ask myself, how did I get here?

Last summer, I went overseas for the first time to Indonesia, and spent ten days under the heady, physically nauseating influence of culture shock. I can’t comprehend how it turned out to be a lukewarm battle between mind and body, past and present. This is the disadvantageous side of a unicultural nation- underexposure. Why don’t we want to leave? Why are we so resistant to the ebb and flow of worldly change, of adaptation, and so content living in the wings of a sleeping, sprawling urban giant? Is it because, as time passes we lose that verve for being? Again I ask myself, how did I end up here?

Enshroud yourself in the ancient magic entwined in the strangler figs and creeping lichens that scope spiny limbs over the ruins of Angkor. Climb the spires of St Mary’s Church in Krakow, Poland, where 7 centuries ago, a trumpeter alerted his city of imminent Mongol invasion, and was cut short by an arrow through the throat. Choke on holy dust at the Great Pyramid of Khufu, where in 1988, eyes aglow, the Pharaoh’s funeral bark was unearthed from its grave beneath the Nile necropolis, encasing the king of your galactic blood.

Like your lost key, it has to be here somewhere. I may be young and naive, but I refuse to fade out, and I’m going to find the real world, even if I get lost in it. When I get there, I’ll ask myself- how did I get here?