Hey Plain Jane

I’m not in the habit these days of putting an image of myself on the web, but I will make an exception because this photo is so weirdly not me but it is me. The other Saturday I was prevailed upon to do a photo shoot for an upcoming play by my theatre company.

I’m not actually in the play, but the show requries some media (slides projected on the stage). One of the subjects of the play is a real life bag lady who lived and roamed the Outback in the 1930’s. Her name was Annie Bags, and she was one of those famous itinerants who get themselves ingrained into the history as being both peculiar and noble.

Annie is said to have wandered back and forth between the outback town of Charleville and the coast for many years, no-one is exactly sure why I suspect. She was always surrounded with animals, hence the small dog collection in the photo. Annie never appears in the play but her story underpins the action.

What I can tell you about this photo and the photo shoot. It was hot. I had several layers of clothes on and a ferociously matted and heavy wig. The dog I am holding is the sweetest little Jack Russell called Tilly owned by one of the crew. Honest I could just brought him home in a handbag. The other dog is Tiger, and he is stuffed. Tiger has a longish history with the company; he originally came as a prop for one of my plays in 2004, and has been hanging about both back stage ever since. He crops up every now and then on stage. He really is quite old and moth-eaten and fusty. I like how the photographer has aged the picture with a heavy-duty Photoshop make-over.

Strangely enough it feels a bit like a bag lady mentality going on around here lately. All grubby and every which -way. Mountains of stuff are slowly being sorted out; this pile for storage, this pile for charity, this pile for the dump.

We are employing one of our friends to complete a long list of maintenance jobs for this house so that we can get it on the market as soon as possible. He will be working here for three weeks….yes, the list really is that long.

It will be good to cleanse ourselves of ten years of junk we have accumulated here. 

I think I do believe in race memory, whatever that may be. It is quite an intangible feeling of knowing you belong to some place, being pleasantly aware of the weight of your own ancestry, seeing unfamiliar things and having an emotional response to them that comes not from the head but from a place somewhere in the heart.

They say the heart has a brain. Scientists have discovered we do some of our thinking from a place inside our own hearts. There is evidence to show ‘brain-like’ activity occurring within the human heart, and most commonly thoughts to do with our emotional life. This is something we kind of know metaphorically, but this discovery means expressions like “thinking with your heart’ and “heart-felt” are based in fact.

When I go to Sherwood I am overcome with heart-felt memories of my race. These feelings are so easy to dismiss as fancy, but I do allow for the possibility that humans do not understand everything, and do allow for the notion that I am somehow emotionally linked to forests and especially the forests of England. It is only two generations ago my people lived there, as they had lived for thousands of years. We are all but vanished from that island now.

As we sat about Sherwood Forest and watched Harry and Jack play in the hollow log of a giant fallen Oak for well over an hour, as I took magic photos one after the other of these two boisterous and calamitous friends, it became so clear to me that a part of my being never left this island at all. In England I feel a constant sense of being drawn into the earth.

Continuum is beautiful. It is the meaning of having children. It is overwhelmingly truthful. Implanted within the idea of continuum is the utter and peaceful acceptance of life, death, joy and hardship. Continuum is almost “Zen”.

Another layer to this photo is that Jack and Harry are the sons of two friends, John (my husband) and Nick, who have been best friends since the age of three. Jack and Harry are both three in this photo, and they too have only just met. Like their fathers, they took to each other so well it was a pill to separate them at the end of the day. Nick’s mother commented to me that she was struck by the physical likeness between Harry and her son Nick when he was a boy, and Jack and John when he was a boy. So, John and I, and Nick and his partner Jo, had in effect re-created a strikingly similar image of the friendship between two boys forty years after it had first been seen.

Does it ever occur to you that your face is by no means unique? There are quite possibly relatives of yours walking the earth who you don’t know about who look spookily similar to you? They are part of your continuum and you don’t even know it. Even more intriguing for me is the absolute possibility that copies of your face have been seen on the earth quite a few times over the many centuries, as members of your continuum strutted and fretted their hours upon the stage, and then were heard no more.