{"id":139433,"date":"2019-09-11T09:00:37","date_gmt":"2019-09-11T13:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=139433"},"modified":"2019-09-10T17:38:05","modified_gmt":"2019-09-10T21:38:05","slug":"the-sticky-tar-pit-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/09\/11\/the-sticky-tar-pit-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The Sticky Tar Pit of Time"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

A cat running. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. Credit: Wellcome Collection, via Wikimedia Commons.<\/p><\/div>\n

This morning\u2014that morning, rather\u2014two men in my train carriage lift their heads\u2014two men in their fifties in silky, understated ties\u2014then there is a little snap, like a red light camera going off, and even before the next stop gets announced they\u2019re leaning into each other laughing, How long has it been? Must be forty years give or take. What\u2019s been happening? They run through their classmates: two cancers (one in chemo, one cannot hack chemo), a property development fraud, one guy (just on the other side of a protracted settlement) with too many ex-wives (stupid bastard, he and them deserve each other). A pause. Please don\u2019t tell me it\u2019s all there is. Fraud, cancer, bad marriages, being caught, extricating yourself, chance encounters on trains; can you remember the last time life felt long or kind, or like it was yours and mine?<\/p>\n

My phone vibrates, one time only for texts. \u201cMake sure you don\u2019t have scissors, nail files, anything sharp.\u201d It\u2019s Vanda. Thank you, Vanda.<\/p>\n

Shhh.<\/p>\n

In front of me is time. Time is not a river. It is two strangers on a train whose briefcases touch as they hold each other. Two men who\u2019ll never ride the same train again. <\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember getting off or walking. Somehow I reached the courthouse doors on William Street where my bag was screened, nothing sharp in it, and the structure that looked dull and huge on the outside, a building without qualities, was alive and brown inside with wrappers pulled off chocolate bars, doors slamming, others opening, kids in school uniforms who were not, as I\u2019d guessed, witnesses to inexplicable suburban crimes but legal studies students bored on a field trip. Several of the magistrates looked like Karl Heinrich Marx. In an elevator, I stood next to a lawyer with the face of someone who sometimes forgets he has not, yet, seen it all. I looked at him. He looked at the crease in his hardworking pants.<\/p>\n

What is the Court 8 clerk wearing today? Orange jacket, there you go, bold choice for the setting. And what is Court 8\u2019s loudest sound right now? My fineliner pen making notes about courtroom silence. Big silence in a roomful of busy-looking people is jarring. Then the magistrate appears\u2014once he\u2019s seated, that silence is gone\u2014and to a man on the stand whose second drunk-driving offense is the day\u2019s first matter he says, \u201cI cannot take your past away,\u201d and it is like some subterranean conversation underneath the one everybody can hear is flowing about how to be alive is to be caught in one web or another. \u201cI know your first offense was twenty years ago, but your past doesn\u2019t disappear. If police stop you, they\u2019ll test you.\u201d The magistrate means it\u2019s your last chance, your cufflinks can\u2019t save you, the taxes you pay won\u2019t save you. He also means: nothing is more human than the experience of feeling trapped. And everything\u2019s a trap, your past, family, genes, addictions, loneliness, that feeling that pretty much everyone else is galloping gaily ahead while you are crawling backward like a lobster or lopsided baby.<\/p>\n

All morning I wait for something but nothing much happens. After the man on drunk-driving offense number two comes a retail manager from Elwood who\u2019s drinking because her IVF is failing. Next is a well-dressed Somali man charged with not wearing a seatbelt and accompanied by a well-dressed Somali interpreter. After that it\u2019s a Turkish taxi driver caught going 105 in an 80 zone. I move courts. Sit in on an aggravated burglary hearing. Go to the room where a meth syndicate (the most lawyers I\u2019ve seen all day) is being sentenced. \u201cThere is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.\u201d So said Goethe. Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto<\/em>. That\u2014\u201cI am human, I consider nothing human alien to me\u201d\u2014is what the Roman playwright Terence said. \u201cThere are no fairy tale endings.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vanda says that. How come, I ask her.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause people are people.\u201d<\/p>\n

People wear UGG<\/small> boots to court. You may find yourself one day staring down at a court floor and seeing UGG<\/small> boots next to high-heeled, calf-extending leather numbers worn by female lawyers, and this image might lead you to believe that lines have been drawn and you will always be able to tell who is who. Don\u2019t believe it. Sometimes it is like that and other times\u2014not at all.<\/p>\n

That morning, this morning, I walk back to the station past the cafe where a week ago a deputy chief magistrate, Jelena Popovic, was telling me how it took her years as a magistrate before she understood that the people appearing in front of her were, in the main, neither offenders nor victims of their own circumstances, but rather people at the point of crisis. The crisis was the hopeful thing. \u201cIt started crystallizing for me during a late nineties heroin scourge. It seemed to me we were doing nothing to help people when we should have been capitalizing on this point of crisis.\u201d The word, when she said it, had a nobility, a scale, and seeing myself so struck by it I thought about how this word, crisis<\/em>, can recast a human life\u2019s brokenness. No laughter spilled out of my half-empty afternoon train home, nobody was falling into an old friend\u2019s lap. Each one of us was alone. With our bags, jackets, leaking umbrellas, wandering eyes, with the big silent phones we were kneading in our hands.<\/p>\n

I have always dreaded movie sequences in which a human life\u2014a normal, long life, untouched by illness or war\u2014gets condensed into a few emblematic scenes. A child, carefree and pure, becomes a young adult with shining eyes, then in no time is a parent of someone whose eyes are soon to be shining, and when next they\u2019re beaming out of your screen they are the same only their hair\u2019s graying, eyes woolly, and their frame is thicker or perhaps slighter, it\u2019s as if their form and content are pulling away from each other, and you know where it is headed, where else, and despite these characters being fictional and this life-to-death-in-three-minutes business being just some hillbilly director\u2019s device there is something intolerable about seeing life with time sucked out of it like the air from an air mattress. A few occasions, bumping across a movie sequence like that, I\u2019d put both hands over my chest.<\/p>\n

For a long while I could not work out why it hurt. Until I understood: time. Time is what makes everything okay. How it flows forward and circles around itself, both; how life, suspended, zero gravity, in time consists of so many things repeating. Getting up, the brushing of hair, toasting of bread, sun shooting up in the sky, taking keys out of your pocket to open doors. Seasons. In the benign repetition of daily acts an invisible net is cast, holding people up, protecting them. Because the things being repeated\u2014\u201cnon-exchangeable and non-substitutable singularities,\u201d so said Deleuze\u2014are never the same. That imperceptible difference, same damn thing, same blessed thing, is what rescues it. So yes those movie sequences hurt. Time as a straight line is a monstrosity. Sometimes, though, what\u2019s being repeated is hope\u2019s absence. A child comes into a world that is like a tar pit, a tar pit of prehistoric ferocity, the kind that could suck in a Columbian mammoth. In this world a little creature still sorting its hind legs from its front legs does not stand a chance. Cannot stand. Time is not a river pushing people forward as they lunge at floating branches\u2014inelegantly, so what?\u2014but an oily, seeping substance. Black and sticky.<\/p>\n

Most of Vanda\u2019s clients come from a tar pit. The term regularly used, entrenched disadvantage<\/em>, is ugly; like much of the language to do with people who don\u2019t get to do much choosing in their lives, and whose every creep forward\u2014in a good year every couple of creeps\u2014gets followed by a bone-splintering triple tumble backward. Poverty, abuse, addiction, mental health stuff, they are what\u2019s in the tar, the sticky parts.<\/p>\n

We met by accident in North Melbourne Town Hall\u2019s corridors the spring that I was pregnant with my second child and Vanda was volunteering at a fringe festival. She was checking tickets at the door, helping out with shows. The shows (as you\u2019d expect) were of varying quality. I wondered what she was doing here, this woman whose big polymath mind was straight-away apparent, even to me who was sick with around-the-clock morning sickness and not noticing much. I remember thinking I don\u2019t get the whole community-volunteering thing. Thinking also that in another time\/place this woman could have led armies to battle. I did not know then that she loved theater, directing, actors\u2014actors especially\u2014and years before had started a theater company for young people that had a policy of turning away no one at auditions. The result was large, happy casts and full houses. I wasn\u2019t aware then that after a disheartening year doing articles at a suburban law firm she needed to feel surrounded by theater to feel okay. And I was there why? Involved in one of the festival shows if you must know. In a nonperforming capacity and due any minute to alight on the discovery of how lucky writers are compared to the men and women of theater. Writers are not required to be present at their trials.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Maria Tumarkin is a writer and cultural historian. She is the author of three previous books of ideas, <\/em>Traumascapes, <\/em>Courage, and <\/em>Otherland, all of which received critical acclaim in Australia, where she lives. Her most recent work, <\/em>Axiomatic, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature\u2019s Best Writing Award. It is her first book to be published in the U.S.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from <\/em>Axiomatic<\/a>, by Maria Tumarkin. Used with permission of Transit Books. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by Maria Tumarkin<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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