Lot 22

Year:

2022

Duration:

4:17

Recorded:

2000

Recorded on the 25th of January 2000, near Wisemans Ferry, New South Wales, Australia.
This is a chapter from my long-form video The Bodies of Nobodies.

Driving along a nondescript road along the Hawkesbury river, I noticed an electrical box with Lot 22 painted on it.

In my youth I had read Thomas Pynchon‘s classic – The Crying of Lot 49 – and felt compelled to stop.

With the car engine switched off, it takes a while for the droning numbness of driving to slowly give way.
The silence of this completely arbitrary place in the Australian landscape descends.

Slowly your shadow catches up with you, and you become aware of your surroundings… So generic, arbitrary and nondescript that you can’t even describe where you are and what is around you.

Trees, grass, gravel, some sort of deserted building, an “electrical box” – I never know what those things are called, or what they actually do…
A makeshift post box, a scattered letter, ants…
The sound of a passing car, of gravel under my souls, of a kookaburra?

Some lines by Wallace Stevens come to mind:

“… The proud and the strong
Have departed.“

or

“The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.“

I love places like this.

This is what most of the world is like.
This is what most of life is like:
Not glamorous, not exciting… It just is.

But that certainly doesn’t make it worthless or meaningless.
You get out of it what you put in.

If you give it your presence, your attention; it starts existing to you…
And you start existing because it exists.

With apologies to Stevens, I end with a remix of the poem quoted above:

Little by little, the poverty
Of this deserted place becomes
A look, an acknowledgement.

Each thing completely touches us
With what it is and as it is,
In the stale grandeur of annihilation.