33 Carapace
For her the pulse of existence quickened.
She hesitated less in doorways.
She ran into the receiving sun.
Found Poem, in Patrick White’s novel (edited) Voss
AMANDA GOES TO CONFEST
In the early summer of 1983, I 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. I was new to Melbourne, living an urban life and going to the country was a nice extension to my Friends of the Earth sensibilities.
I went and had a wild time: ate fabulous vegetarian food from an orange robed mob, swam in a cold, fast flowing river and watched 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 re-birthing 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. I have 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 I enter the maw? I don’t think so. More likely, I watched breathlessly half impressed, half repelled from behind a tree trunk at a safe distance.
THE BATES METHOD
The tent that really drew me was the throw-away-your-glasses mob. They ran a workshop inspired by exercises formulated by a Dr Bates in his 1920’s 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 me. It was probably the first time I had relaxed my neck in years and under this benign influence I found herself free of glasses and clothes rolling in the mud on the bank of the fast-flowing river that ran through the property.
THE MUD PEOPLE
Being a mud creature turned me into an anonymous human animal, the no glasses made me invisible so I threw herself wholeheartedly into the moment. (I didn’t really throw away the glasses; any truly short-sighted soul would rather gnaw their own leg off than lose their spectacles – they were stowed neatly in a glove-box somewhere). But I felt the potential of another life, a freer, wilder, less constructed existence.
Someone had made 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 my fellow savages.
GLIMMERS OF A NEW LIFE
I 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 me interesting. Was he from Afghanistan or did I make this up? He had some marvellously potent hash, a line of spectacular velvet waistcoats and a way of looking at me that completely drove the thought of my boyfriend – unfortunately present at this weekend - out of my mind.
THE BLACK TROUSER SUIT
After the festival and close to this time of change I went shopping for a new work outfit. In what must have been a bewildering choice for my newly emerging self, my ego chose a black trouser suit. I was not playing to my strengths: black was never my colour and the suit was a cover-up that mimicked a notion of efficiency and business readiness that I feared I wasn’t getting across in a job and a life that left me 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 I adopted in my efforts to fit into the world.
THE JOB
I was nearly two years into a job as the rep for two independent Sydney based book-publishing companies which involved making appointments across states including Tasmania, and selling books that languished at the less-than-bestseller Lesbian poetry end of the scale, enlivened by occasional hangover hits from the 70s like ‘Build Your House of Earth’, whose popularity kept the sales figures, if not high, at least sustainable.
I had very little experience of jobs beyond the throwaway restaurant and pub gigs common to people my age and it hadn’t really occurred to me that a few years in a lowly paid, physically taxing and lonely sales job was probably helping to send me slowly around the twist.
THROW AWAY YOUR EGO
Festival over, the relaxation of Amanda continued as I followed through with the throw-away-your–glasses sessions. I remember a small room filled with people with coke-bottle lens-type glasses and a group leader assuring this group of myopes that they were really radiant and shining beings, worthy of all that life had to offer
Looking back, I suppose we all took our 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 shells.
THE EGO FIGHTS BACK
At the same time as I was shedding a baked-on carapace that no longer served me, another part of my psyche was scrambling to keep this very same self in place. I 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 be 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. I had no idea what I was up against.
THE STICKY END
The throw-away-your-glasses technique eventually came to a sticky end. The sessions acted as a powerful release on my emotional body and no amount of black suits was going to stop it cracking. To give myself credit I dimly recognised that I was out of my depth and attempted to get help from one of the practitioners running the course. They either had nothing to offer or under the you-can-change-your-life rhetoric they might have been as blind as me to the power of the forces that can be released when someone starts shedding a false self.
THE SOGGY END
One morning I woke up and started to cry, and kept on crying. I sobbed for a time in the little outside courtyard in my Collingwood rental and then moved upstairs to sob in my bedroom. I sobbed in the living room and then moved out the back again to sob outside.
I was incoherent and inconsolable. I 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 the vision), I was now threatening to contribute an endless flood of tears to his otherwise well-functioning household. My boyfriend was sympathetic but as helpless as me in the face of what was happening. I had no context for this misery, no advice to follow, no idea what to do.
I wonder now what happened to the other myopic folk that wandered like me 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 body and sight. Anyway, it was what it was and change indeed was affected.
Within days I nearly killed herself and someone else on the road by making a suicidal turn in my beloved turquoise blue 1976 HR Holden with three gears on the column – I did have glasses on at the time. After a few hours sitting on the side of the road somewhere in rural Victoria – probably sobbing - I limped home shaken and sick, and promptly came down with a bad case of tonsillitis, an illness I had not had since I was a child.
I was bedridden for four days.
THE RE-ENTRY
When I recovered I emerged from my 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 my elbows and now turned me into a walking flake.
Change was upon me and demanding attention.
In face of a crumbling of defences, I launched into the all-encompassing task of transforming my physical circumstances, rebuilding a more appropriate carapace. I knew nothing of the art of self-development, the inner world and what was required for a human being, as distinct from a human doing, but what I lacked in insight was well-compensated for by strong and optimistic energy, and I took off running.
A REPLACEMENT CARAPACE
Long-time Perth friend Kate, living in Melbourne and also on the run, in her case from a disastrous relationship, had just taken a job as a teacher at a high school in Mansfield, a small town 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 I, knowing a lifeline when I saw one, wanted to live there. I asked Kate if she wanted a housemate and she agreed.
So I quit the job, packed up the tortoiseshell kitten that had recently been born in my boyfriend’s wardrobe in Prahran, kissed the boyfriend goodbye – I cried a lot here too knowing I was being very mean to a man who really deserved more that I was capable of giving him - bought a new ribbon for my Aunt Judy’s Olivetti portable typewriter and set sail for the regions in my 1976 HR Holden.
Amanda and Kate on the Maindample cottage front lawn
Never one to be short of ideas or enthusiasms I decided I was going to write a novel.
It was 1984 and I was twenty-six years old.
Julie-Louise the cat and friends
