Jan 2

Jan 2 3 Rebirthing

Writing in the third person – possibly to free up storytelling – Amanda takes a break from agriculture to talk about a period in her life where she sheds her glasses and a carapace at a Down To Earth Festival in rural Victoria and takes a hard right down a different road.

For her the pulse of existence quickened / She hesitated less in doorways / She ran into the receiving sun.

Poem fragment found in Patrick White, (edited) from Voss

EARTHFEST

In the early summer of 1983 Amanda went to what must have been one of the last of the ConFests, a return-to-nature romp near a river in Wangaratta aligned with 70’s values of communality, vegetarianism, enthusiasm for all things eastern in robes and that quaint old idea; conservation. She was new to Melbourne, living an urban life and going to the country was a nice extension to her Friends of the Earth sensibilities.

She went and had a wild time. She ate fabulous vegetarian food from an orange robed mob, swam in a cold, fast flowing river and watched with interest as a long snake of people jammed together on their hands and knees, breathing in and out as one, formed an undulating tunnel to recreate a birth canal for the staging of a rebirthing session.

The person who was the last of the line got up and moved to the head of the snake where they were instructed in a breathing technique and fed into the mouth of the tunnel to crawl through the heaving bodies to emerge some time later at the other end. She has a memory of people in colourful outfits helping/hauling limp bodies from the rear end of the snake and laying their inert bodies in the grass side by side like so many emergent pupae. Did she enter the maw? I don’t think so. She watched breathlessly half impressed half repelled from behind a tree trunk at a safe distance.

THE MUD CREATURES

The tent that really drew her was the throw-away-your-glasses mob. They ran a workshop inspired by exercises formulated by a Dr Bates in his 1920 publication Perfect Sight Without Glasses. These practitioners promoted simple eye focusing techniques that in retrospect were designed to relax the muscles around the head and neck. This had a galvanising effect on Amanda. It was probably the first time she had even thought about relaxing her neck in years and under this benign influence she found herself free of glasses and clothes rolling in the mud on the bank of the fast-flowing river that ran through the property.

Being a mud creature turned her into an anonymous human animal, the no glasses made her invisible so she threw herself wholeheartedly into the moment. (She didn’t really throw away the glasses; any truly short-sighted soul would rather gnaw their own leg off than lose theirspectacles – they were probably stowed neatly in a glove box somewhere}. But she felt the potential of another life, a freer, wilder, less constructed existence where she was a more fearless, alive person.

SNAKES

Someone had constructed a sort of sweat lodge on the banks of the river that the mud people moved in and out of. There was a resident groper, but the seediness of this long-haired creep didn’t take the edge off the general exuberance such was the energy of the day and the pleasure of being at one with nature and fellow savages.

TEMPTATIONS

Amanda met some fascinating people and was especially taken with a sophisticated olive-skinned man with a beautiful hooked nose, bright blue eyes and gorgeously accented English and thrilled beyond measure that he seemed to find her interesting. Was he from Afghanistan or did she make this up? He had some marvellously potent hash, a line of spectacular velvet waistcoats and a way of looking at her that completely drove the thought of the boyfriend – unfortunately present at the weekend - out of her mind.

AFTER BIRTH

After the festival and close to this time of change Amanda, went shopping for a new work outfit. Bewilderingly to her newly emerging self her ego chose a black trouser suit. She was not playing to her strengths: black was not her colour and the suit was a cover-up that mimicked a notion of efficiency and business readiness that she feared she wasn’t getting across in a job that left her increasingly isolated from the self that was trying to break through the old skin.

With hindsight this suit sticks out like dogs balls as a much clearer signpost to neurotic personality disorder than any of the other unfortunate outfits that Amanda occasionally adopted in her efforts to fit into the world. She had very little experience of jobs beyond the throwaway restaurant and pub gigs common to people her age and it hadn’t really occurred to her that a few years in a lowly paid, physically taxing and lonely sales job with a couple of publishing companies was probably what was helping to send her slowly around the twist.

Festival over, the ‘relaxation’ of Amanda continued as she followed through with the throw-away-your–glasses sessions. She remembers a small room filled with people with coke-bottle lens-type glasses and a group leader attempting to persuade this group of myopes that they were really radiant and shining beings worthy of all that life had to offer.

Looking back Amanda supposed they all took their glasses off to get into the exercises and can now laugh at the thought of all those eyes peering from their pale puffy skin settings like so many snails, lost without their protective shells.

At the same time as Amanda was shedding a baked-on carapace that no longer served her, another part of her psyche was scrambling to keep this very same self in place. She hadn’t really grasped what was going on or that the untrained ego that held the Amanda self together, that was concerned with self-survival, that attempted to fit in, that wanted to play a role in the ‘real’ world and always looked to that world to find out what she should be doing - wasn’t going to go without a fight. She had no idea what she was up against.

Amanda was nearly two years into the job as the rep for two independent Sydney based book publishing companies which involved making appointments across the state, driving around and attempting to sell books that languished at the less-than-bestseller Lesbian poetry end of the scale, enlivened by occasional hits like ‘Build Your House of Earth’ whose popularity kept the sales figures, if not high, at least sustainable.

WHAT SHOOK LOOSE

The throw-away-your-glasses technique eventually came to a sticky end. The sessions acted as a powerful release on Amanda’s emotional body and no amount of black suits was going to stop it cracking. To give herself credit Amanda dimly recognised that she was in out of her depth and attempted to get help from one of the practitioners running the course. They either had nothing to offer her or under the you-can-change-your-life rhetoric they might have been as blind as Amanda to the power of the forces that can be released when someone starts shedding a false self.

One morning she woke up and started to cry and kept on crying. She sobbed for a time in the little outside courtyard in her Smith Street rental and then moved upstairs to sob in her bedroom. She sobbed in the living room and then moved out the back again to sob outside. She was incoherent and inconsolable. She cried for 24 hours straight.

The housemate, initially worried, could not quite hide his exasperation that on top of being an appalling dishwasher (part of the throw away your glasses deal meant that cleaning details weren’t part of her vision), Amanda was now threatening to contribute a seemingly endless flood of tears to his otherwise well-functioning household. Her boyfriend was sympathetic but as helpless as her in the face of what was happening. She had no context for this misery, no advice to follow, no idea what to do.

She wonders now what happened to the other myopic folk that wandered like her into this spectacle-less scenario. Maybe some broke through, rather than down. Perhaps a follow up study could have gone both ways to reveal either disastrous reactions or transformational insights in response to the relaxation of the body and sight. Anyway, it was what it was and change indeed was effected.

Within days Amanda nearly killed herself and someone else on the road by making a suicidal turn in her beloved turquoise blue 1976 HR Holden with three gears on the column,– she did have her glasses on at the time. After a few hours sitting on the side of the road somewhere in rural Victoria – probably sobbing - she limped home shaken and sick, and promptly came down with a bad case of tonsillitis, an illness she had not had since she was a child, that kept her bedridden for four days.

REBORN

When Amanda recovered she emerged from her sickbed, reborn. From grub to scaly looking butterfly the transformation came complete with a full body case of psoriasis – a non-fatal but unattractive skin disease that was usually confined to her elbows and now turned her into a walking flake. …Change was upon her and demanding attention.

In face of a crumbling of inner defences Amanda launched into the all-encompassing task of transforming her physical circumstances, rebuilding a more appropriate carapace. She knew little of the art of self-development and what was required for a human being, as distinct from a human doing, but what she lacked in insight was well compensated for by strong and optimistic energy, and she took off running.

Long-time Perth friend Kate, living in Melbourne and on the run from a disastrous relationship had just taken a job as a teacher at a high school in Mansfield a small town some three hundred kilometres north-east of Melbourne near the snow country.

Kate had rented an old wooden cottage on a wheat and sheep station at Maindample, a dot on the highway, 20 kms out of Mansfield and Amanda, knowing a lifeline when she saw one, wanted to live there. She asked Kate if she wanted a housemate and Kate agreed. So she quit her job, packed up the tortoiseshell kitten that had recently been born in her boyfriend’s wardrobe in Prahran, kissed the boyfriend goodbye – she cried a lot here too knowing she was being very mean to a man who really deserved more attention that she wanted to give him - bought a new ribbon for her Aunt Judy’s Olivetti portable typewriter and set sail for the regions in her turquoise blue 1976 HR Holden with three gears on the column.

THE EGO RISES

Never one to be short of ideas or enthusiasms she decided she was going to write a novel. It was 1984 and she was twenty-eight years old.