Will Stone

Selling Van Gogh

all traffic to be diverted before the Chidlows turn-off, via Wooroloo, onto the Great Eastern Highway, then back south to the Lakes to hook up with the Great Southern Highway... I drove down the Great Southern this morning... three days on the same road I suffered a kind of death, sucked into vacuum by a speeding truck, blanking out and thinking hell, I’m caught in some kind of vortex, I’m still driving, but driving dead... seriously, no joke... full moon has meant roos out and the gravel shoulders are littered with carcasses caught in that supine praying position (there’s no parody in this)... I can’t stop thinking about Paul Celan’s ‘ichten’, and the paranoia that keeps you constantly looking in the mirror, watching out for police traps... looped together in myth, we can’t talk our way out of allegory or cause and effect, as trapped in the body of text is the archetypal flower that pokes its head up to be lopped off: I saw this when the birds undid the sheep, when the sheep ate the grass and there was nothing left.

John Kinsella