The Poetry of Detritus
2015
As I boy I would sift through the detritus of old sites, camps of cast off equipment and general rubbish, always searching for an elusive and old gauge, a tin toy or an odd piece of forgotten machine.
When young a nail can be a trigger and a stick the barrel of your homemade Springfield rifle and you can fight the American Civil War in your bedroom. The searches of the pre plastic rubbish heaps had all the adventure and excitement of an adult archeological dig.
In later years I would ride a motor cycle to odd town dumps, still looking for enlightenment (or even modest ideas) in refuse and junk. In the central western town of Gulgong I returned to the hotel brandishing a magnificent horse hair brush, only to be told by the sniggering local crew that it had been used by the night soil collector as a cleaning aid. Sometimes insight is difficult to attain.
In 1889 Vincent van Gogh painted his own chair and that of his friend Gauguin, a more elaborate and elegant seat. A book and a candle heighten the differences in the chairs. These paintings evoke the void left by departed bodies. Van Gough’s depiction of a pair of working man’s boots suggest not only the wretched feet but their travails.
On a dark night in October 1957 my father took me outside to look up at the stars – ‘sputnik’, a small dot of light moving steadily through the heavens. As we returned to the fire at Umagalee homestead, the warm light was a flickering glow on Dad’s armchair - empty now without his presence and yellow sweater. He died in 1997 but the old chair is still around us in a different livery.
In 1974, Nancy, my mother was dying. It was late afternoon, a Saturday in December and I took some time out, or rather time away from the fetid aroma of her bedroom. There was a ‘throw out’ in the area and I picked up a damaged bentwood chair. We returned home and Mum had gone. The westerly sun slanted through the venetian blind, glistening on my father’s damp cheek. I would never see him cry again.
Memories of my mother have become vague with time, after all fecundity is amorphous – but the chair with my wire repair returns to me still on Saturday’s in December.
PS In the end I suppose everything is lost, all gone forever. The only thing we leave is the miserable detritus of our supposedly exalted existence.
Tim Storrier