24 February 2023
Today marks the one-year anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I feel a weight of sadness accompanied by anger deep in my chest. It’s as if my incredulity at so much hate and ignorance in one man is transforming into a hopelessness about the state of the world, with Putin driving the crushing machine. He signifies all that is insecure, monstrous and territorial in the history of patriarchy and its repetition of horror and errors.
He is shitting on Ukraine. That metaphor feels inappropriate – not strong enough, too psychoanalytic? Shitting conjures the venom of Putin’s intentions: his self-obsession, retrogression and filthy malevolence; his corrupted mind that is driving this war while also flinging Russians into a tomb. He performs like a two-year old hovering over a potty, and with that level of emotional intelligence.
I swim where the river meets the sea in the southern suburbs of nipaluna. The Derwent here is an estuary where you would once see whales and where now the absence of kelp – due to the warming of the east coast currents and the invasion of spiny sea urchins that munch kelp off at the roots, making them less resilient to the increasing advent of storms – reminds me of the local diminution of diversity. A preface to the planet’s noir tales so riddled with the cancer of disregard.
Swimming here feels like I’m dipping into a warm void, a salve, bliss that sponges off the detritus of despair, if only briefly. The sea-floor is bare of sea-grasses and I avoid the blackened sand washed across the shore from a storm-water drain. Last week, at my granddaughter’s birthday party, a falling eucalypt branch narrowly missed the children playing on the grass above the beach where the drain ejects: a terrifying reminder of how being alive can be being dead, in an instant. And as one Ukrainian woman said today on radio (paraphrased): now it’s like my grandmother described it in the second world war: it’s all horror and shock and overwhelming fear.
I clamour
like a bug
tapping under the archway of new
what I see is not always
the getting of wise