I used to think the self becomes an adult when the self feels genuinely compelled to watch the news. Tonight, after par-boiling the potatoes, I hurry downstairs to turn on the television. The anchor appears to me in mid-sentence: that is the world this Tuesday ladies and gentlemen, have a lovely evening.
What is the world? What is the world? What is the world?
I flick through the other channels. Masterchef is on Ten. I mute it to watch the miming bodies move in ungraceful chaos around kitchen benches. People are sweating over the presentation of a plate. One woman cries over what looks to be a Panna Cotta that won’t set. I can’t help but laugh. Is this schadenfreude?
One channel appears to be running behind for their news still has eight minutes more. They are talking about a woman, Kathy Sullivan, who was not only the first American woman in space once upon a time, but this morning, at the age of sixty-eight-years old, Kathy Sullivan became the first American woman to dive to the deepest point in the ocean. The anchor switches to the weather. According to the weather woman, who is resisting at all costs the natural process of ageing, there are thunderstorms destined for Beijing and Mexico tomorrow, it’s going to be fine in London and windy in Ohio. There is a long sign off. The anchors occupy their hands with the gathering and shuffling of papers while there waxy, large heads nod and smile down the camera at this body, at all the bodies on all the couches.
What is the world? What is the world? What is the world?
It’s Laundry Season at Harvey Norman, I am told with exclamation. I can save seven hundred, eight hundred, as much as nine hundred dollars on a front load washer if I want. I imagine the script in all-CAPS. T’s voice travels down the staircase to please turn it down. T is in a late class that makes me grateful for the morning-ness of my course. I like the few hours I have to myself in the evening and wonder if this is also schadenfreude.
I have to turn down the ads to a hard-to-hear-volume of five, so it doesn’t feel so much like they are yelling at this body to get up off the couch and BUY. BUY. BUY. I would like to sit, sit, sit and find out what the world is. I lower the volume and a distinct memory visits me. One of afternoon time between my finishing school and going to swimming training. In the memory I am sitting on the corner of our family’s black leather couch not able to make out what the television is saying because my brother is erratically adjusting the volume, up/down, mute/unmute. I remember this being the very first way his obsessive-compulsive disorder presented to me. He still does this, and I still wonder what the implications might be if he were to resist flicking ten times up/down, mute/unmute. I wonder if it’s ever my life at stake he is trying to protect by changing the volume in this way.
What is the world? What is the world? What is the world?
According to Georges Perec the news does not have the answer to my question. He says the daily news and it’s papers talk of everything except the daily. He says the papers annoy him and tell him nothing.
I’d like to know what’s really going on, what we’re all experiencing; the rest, all the rest. Where is The Rest? I want to know what Dom over the road is having for dinner, how regularly his bowels pass food. I want to know the news anchor’s middle name, that middle name’s significance and if she has any allergies. I want to know what the tradies’ over the road want out of a day. I want to know where the veal schnitzel I’ve just crumbed was raised, who plucked our potatoes from the earth and delivered them to the Winter Beach Town’s shelves. I want to know who the bus driver’s favourite person to pick up is.
What is the world? What is the world? What is the world?
Anne Boyer says the calamity of death, along with birth, then living, is the least unique calamity on earth. I can think of a hundred other calamities that are equally un-unique. For example:
- The calamity of watching Masterchef.
- The calamity of being involved in a conversation about Masterchef
- The calamity of patient forms
- The calamity of passport control
- The calamity of Ikea
- The calamity of Centerlink
- The calamity of taking the bins out
Every second there are more bodies than I could fit in this living room feeling insignificant in the scale of the universe. I bet Kathy Sullivan has never felt insignificant. I type, feeling insignificant in the universe, into a search engine. The search engine I started using because a girl at my university looked at my laptop open on google and said to this body: it’s two thousand and twenty, it’s time to search ethically. At the time I thought she might have worked for them as the words sort of sung out of her like a rehearsed jingle.
Feeling this way is apparently linked to an awareness of our undeniable sameness to one another or an awareness of one’s lack of power to enact actual change on the universe. I read further about how power is not as intrinsically valuable as we may think, it is instead intrinsically valuable as a means to an end. What is immediate to us is our source of significance, apparently. What is immediate to us will reciprocate, will tell us that our bodies are important living entities worthy and capable of love.
I look around at what is immediate to this body. The too-big coffee table decorated in red-wine circles, the heater blasting hot artificial air, dust from nowhere in particular, cobwebs, a television, advertising, immortal news anchors.
I am a body on a couch in a world of couches and a world of bodies. I am a body on a couch feeling the calamity of being twenty-three, which I am often told by anyone older than twenty three, is no calamity at all. I am a body on a couch in a house I don’t own, in a house I’ll probably never be able to afford. I am a body on a couch after the first day of a writing intensive. I am a body on a couch who would like to know how to organise the information of my experience. I am a body on a couch who has hardly worked in months. I am a body on a couch who receives money from the government. I am a body on a couch that I fear is from Ikea. I am a body on a couch wondering
what is the world?
Illustration by Sophie Dickinson @sophie_dickinson
Yellow Days 