Strange new things
My dad and his friends started a commune in the ‘70s in a farmhouse on a long, twisting rural road. Though it ended long before I was born, his stories of his time there live in my memories, as if I experienced them as well. I lived in a house he built on the same property, and spent my first few years looking under leaves for chantrelles and out the windows at the fog that would fill the valley every morning.
Another out of control fire has swept through this sublime landscape in the last few days, and it’s likely the house and the farmhouse are gone.
I’ve been thinking a lot about a novel I read a few years ago, The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber. It’s a sci-fi story about a priest who leaves his wife on Earth to travel to a distant planet, pursuing missionary work with the local aliens. Things were alright on Earth when he left, but as the novel progresses, his wife sends him dispatches from the slow collapse of human civilization. The garbage stops being picked up, riots overtake her city. Things change for the worse, and those changes become normal.
Far away, the protagonist changes too: intoxicated by unfamiliar chemicals in the alien air, he throws himself into his questionable work until he almost dies. The couple’s shared reality drifts further and further apart until they can no longer understand each other.
I have changed in ways that can’t be undone since I left New York two years ago. At this point, it’s both impossible to imagine returning, and impossible to imagine not returning. I have left behind so much of what made up my life for the eight years I lived there, and I am still trying to figure out what will replace that.
For now, I’m here, in the upside down hemisphere, suspended in space. I wake up in my new apartment, work online, go for a brief walk or to the grocery store, watch TV, talk to friends on Zoom, feed the cat and go to sleep. I check the news to see how many COVID cases were reported in Melbourne today. I hope my family stays safe. I try not to think about everything that’s been lost.
Today, amid the chaos, I listened to the new Julianna Barwick album, Healing Is a Miracle. Her music’s enveloping tranquility feels much to me like looking out over the sea of fog from the house I lived in on Sweetwater Springs Road. It feels safe. We will need all the healing we can get.