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‘Can you imagine how chaotic life would be without infinity? Can you imagine what the universe would be like without it? I don’t think it’s possible. I don’t think there can be a reality without infinity. Anythin finite must have borders an boundaries. An when you have boundaries, you have to have somethin outside of em. An there goes your finite universe. Imagine you’re flyin along in your space ship an you all of a sudden hit a bloody wall. Oh, sorry, you’ve hit the end of the universe. Do not continue. Go back the other way.
You see? What infinity does is it removes the wall, an everythin outside the wall, cause there is no outside. An eternity is the same thing on another axis. Oh, sorry, time’s up. Go back. See how they’re totally essential to existence? An they’re totally not understood.
They don’t want to understand em, that’s why they came up with their bullshit big bang.
They just can’t cope with somethin existin without it havin begun. They can’t deal with that. An they can’t deal with somethin existin forever, without an end. Maate, you just can’t put a boundary around your mind, period. An that’s where the universe exists.
That’s the reality. But the ultimate reality is this; only truth is real, only truth exists, an the lie, the big bullshit lie, can’t exist, it doesn’t exist. Actually, it does, but only as an idea.
‘I’ve seen jokers kid emselves right out of their own minds and take thousands of gullible drongos with em. Mate, the most bullshit lie juxtaposes itself right next to the most profound truth, like the sweetest meat is right next to the bone. So, if you’re lookin for the biggest bullshitters in the world, go look for em in their bloody gyp temples of truth. They shut out the whole universe an call it unholy, an they create their own reality inside an say that their bloody lie, that they made up for their own power, is the ultimate truth, an all you’ve gotta do is believe it an you’ll be OK. But they can’t prove any of it.
‘My step-daddy used to say this thing to me when I was just an ankle biter, he used to say, sonny boy, he used to call me sonny boy, sonny boy, don’t believe nothin you ain’t found out for yourself. But that was ages ago. I’ve got me own sayin now. Imperfections only exist in ideas and perfections only in realities.’
Zeke struggled to get his damaged body out of his lounge chair. He placed a couple more pieces of wood into the fireplace as he asked Adam if he’d like another Milo. It was
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July, 1978, and the night outside of Zeke’s cosy little hut whistled with the icy-cold gusts of a winter southwester.
Zeke lived on top of a high plain, about a mile back from the edge of a towering escarpment. Directly to the east of his place was a deep, coastal valley within which nestled the small, beachside hamlet of Stanwell Park. His tiny hut was situated on a couple of acres of land that Zeke somehow managed to procure during his mysterious past. The hut only had two rooms, the guestroom and his bedroom. His bedroom was a total secret.
No one ever got to go in there. The guestroom, which doubled as a kitchen, had an old, ratty, three-person lounge, a lounge chair that did not match the lounge, which was Zeke’s personal chair and no one else ever sat in that, a small wooden coffee table and a giant bean bag that kind of drifted around the room, but generally stayed close to the fireplace in the winter time. Zeke didn’t own a TV because he reckoned that he wasn’t put on this Earth to spend his life watching ‘shit in a box’. He reckoned he’d take the full-colour, Sensurround, 3D TV that nature offered up any day of the week. A TV was never missed, especially when there were visitors around. And even if there had been one there, it would have come a pathetic last to the legendary conversations and great music that saturated that little hut most nights of the week.
Visiting Zeke was always a trip. In the back of his place he had a large ‘veggie’
garden. Amongst the vegetables he grew what he reckoned was the meanest Mullumbimby Madness this side of the black stump. It grew like crazy in a half a tonne of chicken manure, right in the middle of the garden.
Zeke wasn’t what you’d call a woodcarver, but the pipe he carved out of an old piece of walnut was a work of art, and the matching mull bowl he carved to go with it, if it could speak, would tell stories of nights when princes and kings sat around the fireplace, smoking, drinking and laughing as they spun yarns of daring exploits, which transformed an eternal dream into present day reality. This dream, this primal dream, this glorious unreachable dream of all humanity, since the beginning of time, was the dream of flight like a bird.
‘So, you’re not a big fan of churches then, Zeke?’ asked Adam, attempting to kick-start another volley of Zeke-style philosophy.
‘Mate, when I think about it, those bastards started gettin into me way back in school. The bloody government had no right to send me to the indoctrination classes where some dill, who reckoned he knew it all, told a bunch of little kids that they were all
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goin to hell if they didn’t believe in what he was sayin, and the joker couldn’t prove a word of it. Churches, mate, they think that they can serve up truth like McDonalds serves up hamburgers. Fast n easy, nothin to do, just open your mouth and shovel it in. But the truth they’re feedin ya is somethin they been fed by others, who’ve been fed by others before em, an it’s Big Macs all the way, mate. It’s fast truth for the masses, no effort, no danger, no thinkin, just bloody gullible believin. Mate, there’s only one truth worth believin in this life, an that’s the truth you find out for yourself. The world is chock full of people who can’t even be bothered makin their own bloody breakfast. Can you imagine any of them searchin for the truth? What for? Who wants to know anyway? An this apathy creates a vacuum, which gets filled with someone else’s truth, fast truth, no effort an no risk.
‘The most important thing a bloke’s gotta do in this life is try n figure out the bloody truth for himself, without books. That’s the only fair dinkum salvation goin on this planet, mate! Feel like another puff?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
Reloading his pipe, Zeke could never have guessed, in a million years, that his mild-mannered, attentive friend was secretly already much further down that rabbit hole than he could ever have imagined. Adam was one of only a handful of people, alive on the planet at the time, that was actually crossing the un-crossable abyss. Young Adam, whose heart yearned for the freedom that only a personal knowledge of the ultimate truth could bring. Books, or other peoples’ sworn testaments, just didn’t do it for Adam. A man had to find out for himself.
‘Can I put on Moondance, Zeke?’
‘Anythin you like, mate.’
Adam carefully slid the thirty-three LP out of its jacket and cleaned the dust off with the special, record-cleaning cloth. He placed it on Zeke’s turntable and manually lowered the stylus to the beginning of track five, the last track on side one. As he sat back down on the lounge, and took the loaded pipe from Zeke, his emotions rose as Van Morrison’s poetry filled the smoky air.
Adam felt that these evenings with Zeke, the things that he held onto, the things he let go of, his ultra-secret things, his work and his sport, were all part of his drive to discover the truth about existence. He knew that there was danger in his quest, but he had already decided that this journey was worth everything he had in his life, including life itself. He knew deep down that if a man didn’t feel totally committed to the quest, he
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would fail. He knew that to stop half way, having been witness to only a fraction of the hidden truth, to turn back due to fear, would mean a fate far worse than death. It would mean a life of insanity, caught floundering between two realities. Something he once read stuck in his mind. It said that at the beginning of a journey such as his, the world was the world, half way through, the world wasn’t the world anymore, but at the end of the journey, if one kept going and didn’t chicken out, the world would be the world again, but seen in a new light.
Adam was, at that time, somewhere between the beginning and the end of his quest and he couldn’t speak a word of it to anyone.
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‘If you buy that, you not only can’t park it in front of our house, you can’t park it in our street.’
‘You’ll have to park it where nobody can see it.’
It was January, 1969, on a hot Sunday afternoon, up the Parramatta Road. Adam and his parents were cruising the car yards, shopping for a car for him. They were really proud of their son for matriculating into university, even though his father never said so.
In fact, he was so sure that Adam would fail his high school exams that he promised him a new car if he got through.
They were standing in front of an immaculate, orange, VW Kombi camper van, which was fitted out with a set of roof racks, a sound system, driving lights, chrome widies, a fridge and a hot, stainless-steel exhaust that gave the Kombi a deep, throaty burble. Adam drooled all over the van. It was perfect for his trips away. He imagined himself in the Kombi, lost up the coast with Susan by his side. The movie of this wonderful vision played in his mind, until his mother’s voice burnt a hole right through the film.
‘No one in our family ever owned a truck! Do you see anyone else in our street driving a truck? ’
Then his dad weighed in, carrying a mangled scowl on his face.
‘We couldn’t embarrass ourselves with this monstrosity. You would have to park it around the corner, in the next street, so no one could see it.’
And before Adam could even react, his mother pointed to a brand new, shining red, convertible, Datsun 2000 roadster, sitting gleaming in the bright sunshine at the opposite end of the car sales yard, and said,
‘Why don’t you get a nice car like that?’
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Adam was dumbstruck. His brain made a brief, valiant attempt to construct a solid defence for his preference, but his mouth seemed to have other ideas because all that came out of it, even to Adam’s surprise, was,
‘OK.’
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As the music played and its sound mixed with the crackles of the fireplace, Adam looked closely at the features of Zeke’s rearranged face. He had no left eye as it had been dug out of its socket by a tree branch, and there was a line running from the upper left down to the lower right side of his face, which was a scar caused by the knifelike slicing effect of stainless-steel wire. In the subdued light of the fire, Adam could clearly make out the S shape of Zeke’s spine and the unusual angles at which all his four limbs projected.
When Zeke moved, it was obvious that it was with pain, a pain that Zeke would have to endure for the rest of his life. Both men grew quieter as the smoke calmed their minds.
Adam became absorbed with the finer details of the guestroom. He loved the look of the walls, which were panelled with rough-sawn boards. They gave the room a cosy, earthy ambience. The walls were decorated with photos and objects from Zeke’s eccentric past.
Zeke was the eccentric’s eccentric. He was a designer and inventor. His designs were always radical and verging on the bizarre. His mind was intense and he always searched for the edge of the envelope. Adam guessed that that was the place where he found the kind of stimulation that he craved. But as Zeke found out the hard way, the edge of the envelope could be a dangerous place. It was a fine line that separated the things that worked from the things that didn’t work, and to Zeke’s ultimate misfortune, that line was sometimes a tad blurred.
Like a shrine to his body of work, the ramshackle old shed stood in the south-western corner of Zeke’s patch of land. Occasionally, when he visited, Adam found Zeke in the shed busy at his workbench working on some project or other. The rest of an evening like that was usually spent in the shed surrounded by dozens of Zeke’s weird and wonderful inventions. At the back of the shed, standing like two sentinels on either side of the workbench, were two giant speaker boxes, each about six feet tall. The rumour going around was that Zeke purchased them, off a rock band he knew, for a couple of pounds of his legendary smoke.
On some nights, Jimi might as well have been there in Zeke’s shed as Electric Ladyland blasted out of those huge speakers and radiated out into the night. And the
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volume didn’t matter because this was still Australia and there were still places where a man could spread his wings and let his spirit soar. And the nearest neighbour, who lived miles away, might have thought that he heard the sounds of Jimi Hendrix guitar come and go with the light gusts of the summer evening breezes that were cooling him as he sat on his back veranda sucking on his stubby while trying to comprehend the distance between himself and all those bright little stars shining away in the vast blackness beyond.
…….
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