When I was young, really young, perhaps three, I had a sandpit in the back garden. I’m not sure if it was meant for anyone else, but I seemed to be the only one that ever used it. It became my home away from home. I could sit in said sandpit for hours at a time…days, months, who knows? Time is a strange thing when you’re three. Much of this time was spent eating sand and plotting out a future. I must have eaten quite a lot of sand when I was a kid. I guess it did me no real harm…who knows?
Recently, I found my mind wandering back to more simple times, those golden days of sand and dreams, when the future was not yet etched into my face, before real, tangible things such as toy cars and mashed potato with salt (Woolworths salt, not Nepalese sea salt) came to be replaced with less tangible things, such as ‘terrorism’ and ‘smoked salmon amuse-bouche with smashed avocado and Peruvian black artichoke honey dip.’ And then it hit me like a Saharan wind: we could make a sandpit in the apartment: we bring in some sand, mix some cocktails, and play “Ocean Waves for Relaxation – Part Two” on YouTube.
There is one thing that Chau and I have an excess of right now: time. What we don’t have is money (or jobs…or futures, but that’s another story). The sand would have to be sourced for free, locally, perhaps from a local construction site. But that’s stealing! I hear you cry. Not necessarily. Okay, actually it is, and there’s no way around it. But whom would we be stealing from? The rich, that’s who. At this point, I should come clean on an aspect of my family history that has, thus far, remained deeply buried in the collective corridors of our familial consciousness (similar to what Australia has done with those pesky First Peoples): I come from a great family tradition of stealing raw materials from construction sites. There, it’s out there…a fact that cannot be now unfacted. My grandparents did it and their grandparents did it before them. In fact, my grandparents’ house was constructed entirely from stolen materials, removed in the dead of night from nearby construction yards: planks of wood, nails, hammers, cranes…anything that was left lying about was fair game. But this should not be taken out of context. Australia, at this time, was mostly populated by thieves, robbers, and outlaws, hard-living, hard-drinking opportunistic people who were just trying to make their lives in an unforgiving land in which black people with spears, and immigrants from countries whose names did not even exist in the Australian vernacular (and hence had to be made up), were a constant threat. So, in a sense, my dead relatives would be proud of me for keeping up the family tradition: poor as hell, once again, and about to rob a construction site for sand.
Reluctant at first, Chau soon came around to the idea of turning the living room into the sandpit of my youth, and we started planning our operation. We eventually settled on the idea of sewing long, elongated sacks into the insides of our trouser legs, filling them with sand in the dead of night and, on return to the apartment, we simply pulled a string that released the sand from its sacks, which then flowed out from the bottom of the trousers and onto the floor. It was elegant in its simplicity, a kind of reverse POW breakout strategy.
This took quite a few trips back and forth, from apartment to construction site, but eventually we had a good foot of sand over the living room floor. Whilst Chau went out to buy some cacti and a birdbath, I planned on mixing some Margaritas, which, as it turned out, I didn’t even have to do. Funny how, in all the time I have been living here, I never before noticed a bartender in the apartment, but there he was, swizzle stick in hand and ready to go, Lloyd, by name, mixologist by nature.
Later that night, with everything set up, Chau and I settled ourselves into our new sandpit life. Outside of the apartment window I could see the moon was full. It seemed closer to the earth, heavy, and with a slight red hue that created reddish cacti shadows on the walls of the apartment. Chau was next to me, lying down on her back, heavily involved in making a sand angel, moving her arms up and down (ridiculously) in the sand like there was no tomorrow…screaming “sand angel! sand angel!” There are certain words for Chau that cause problems, phonetically speaking, I mean, and the combination of sand and angel happens to be a case in point. Also, the word ‘snails’ comes out as nsails (a word that can’t actually be pronounced by English speakers at all, let alone understood), also ‘kitchen,’ which comes out ‘chicken,’ all endless puerile opportunities for entertainment. Meanwhile, I was telling Chau (who wasn’t listening) about the time I was down in Mexico doing business in a cantina with some of the drug cartels there. Horrific mess, but I won’t get into all that now.
It was then that we first heard it, probably the loneliest sound a man has ever heard, lonelier than a drop of gin on an old man’s stubble, lonelier than a half-eaten plate of room service left to rot on the hallway floor of some cheap hotel in Nowheresville, lonelier than a pigeon, meaning, one pigeon, lonelier than one sock, one shoe, one glove. It must have scared the cat, who stared out into the blackness and the cacti shadows, unmoving, as though in some kind of catatonic state. It was a coyote, and it seemed close by.
What most people don’t know about me is that I’m half Cherokee (on my mothers side), Cherokee Indian, that is (as opposed to Cherokee Chicken, the famous take-away fried chicken franchise). Many years ago, my mother’s father’s sister’s mother lay down with an Indian (and not to sleep, if you know what I mean), and now, years later, here I sit with instincts like an eagle, ears like a caribou, so I know a desert-dwelling coyote when I hear one. My mother claims it was not that kind of Indian at all, but the kind of Indian with a spot on the forehead. She once produced an old tattered photograph of the Indian in question, dug up from who-knows-where, but, to me, said Indian looked a lot more like the Colonel Custer variety, and not the Tandoori lamb korma kind.
In 1991, Bruno Latour, the well-known French philosopher and sociologist, published a book entitled We Have Never Been Modern. One of the arguments he put forward – surprisingly – was that we have never actually been modern at all, but that it is all a collective illusion maintained by some simple foundational beliefs. Modernity, like the EU (which also looks like it might come falling down soon), is a project that requires constant work, and as the medieval-looking scenes of mass burials of unclaimed bodies in New York City recently shows us, modernity is a house of cards; it is just an idea we like to have of ourselves, rather than a law of nature (which are also not laws of nature).
According to Latour, the foundational tenets of being modern, necessitate the continued belief that, what we call ‘nature,’ continues to remain ‘out there,’ the ‘wilderness,’ something that we discover, stumble upon (like a new virus, for example). In distinct separation from this realm known as ‘nature,’ is the ‘social,’ a realm we like to think we humans have complete control and governance of. What this ‘Modern Constitution’ – to use Latour’s phrase – does not take into account, however, is that humans, in large part, create ‘nature’ through science, which is a very social activity, and through other social structures and beliefs. Meanwhile, on the other side, what we call the ‘social,’ is governed largely by non-humans, rather than by humans, by objects and systems, that hold together in enduring stability the very stuff we refer to as ‘society’ (one example being how, right now, technology is constantly trying to second-guess my next move while I type, influencing my word and sentence choices). The main problem with this ‘constitution,’ which forms the foundation of modernity, is that it is founded on false beliefs, and our incapacity to recognize the falseness of these beliefs is now starting to catch up with us.
It seems that the wilderness has finally come ‘in here’ and, conversely, those commonplace tools of the laboratory, thermometers, have now made their way ‘out there’ and are now governing who may enter a supermarket and who may not. As Latour commented in a recent article, the COVID-19 pandemic is “no more a ‘natural’ phenomenon than the famines of the past” (https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/).
Lloyd, another drink, if I may?
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