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| Photograph by Dan Browne |
For a brief period, between being an infant and a school-kid, I lived in the countryside. Fields surrounded the house that was home. When standing on a hill all you could see was a single straight road, a solitary brick building and a lot of fields. The sight could have been of one huge field divided by carved out rectangles of walled vegetation. It certainly seemed that way. You could imagine the whole world was just one big field, from that vantage point, and that singular road traversed the globe in an unwavering direction, like a straight line drawn around an orange.
Life back then was spent in the
grass. The green blades did not just sit under your feet to go unnoticed by
your shoes. They rose up and grew taller than the bodies upon them. They changed
colour and sometimes they danced for you. We spent a lot of time in the grass
because it was what surrounded us the most. Even when we were in our beds at
night, and bound within solid walls of our own making, the grass hemmed us in
and stretched out for as far you could see.
My earliest memory is of that
grass. I remember feeling lost and alone in a field and the blades enveloping
my tiny body, blocking out the sun and trapping me in a green tendril embrace
that mocked the blue behind it. That grass made me feel even more lost and alone than I already
was, but it was never malevolent, it just seemed to indifferently reflect my
status.
Sometime later, years in fact, a
friend told me, while we looked on at children on a trimmed city park lawn,
that feelings that manifest in your earliest memory organize and determine your emotional landscape for the rest of your life. It
was one of those statements that felt both true and untrue. It felt true
because I’ve never not felt lost and alone. It also felt untrue because I’ve
since seen my childhood memory again. My communion with the grass appeared in a scene in a movie. It played out on celluloid exactly how I remember it. The film even
had the same camera angles and coordination of colours.
This makes me believe that the memory is not mine. Although, I am sure the grass still grows tall, changes colour and dances indifferently in a world of fields, even though I am no longer in it.
Christian Martius (2015)
Christian Martius (2015)
