Gilgamesh

Friday afternoon, still playing around with different design ideas for the website. Outside, a forever blue sky as I take a long walk through Prahran, all the way up to South Yarra station. In a book store I find the novel by Joan London which Robyn talked so lyrical about, Gilgamesh.

The back cover blurb brings back a stock of recent memories: London, the Caucasus and then Australia. Set in the late thirties, just as the “modern world is waiting to erupt”, a time of closure which I always have been fascinated by. Be it the Weimar republic or those mist-drenched Mediterranean ports that offered a last overseas escape route. Reading the opening chapter made me think that conditions on a tiny farm in south-west Australia were probably not so different from what my grandparents experienced: hard work in the fields, a culture of male silence and emotional attrition.

I write this at Cabinet, a lounge bar with a solid Victorian charm, considered to be one of the hidden gems of the Melbourne bar scene according to the Herald Sun, obviously a selling point immediately falsified by the very act of printing the newspaper. On the outset, my life is so completely disconnected from that farm existence in south Sweden, yet I think it reverberates through my soul more often than I consciously recognize. Delayed casual chains of family history. Beyond melancholia it leaves me with an urge to do good to all the opportunities that have been given to me.