If the ‘Blackboards’, (see previous blog posts) are an indulgence, that should be the extent of it. The ‘Blackboards’ are the extreme end of a deviation from seriousness from which I shall not deviate further.
Employing the same marker, challenge, to a different surface however seems to have more opportunities.
From having given permission to myself to mount a broad platform from which to mount my life’s focus, that platform wants to spread further. Not concrete at all, this foundation I have laid over fifty, sixty years wants to spread further. It now has a watery base. There is no roof to protect a ‘Chalk’ from being deleted by the next shower, no shield to withstand the next overflowing high tide.
This place though, from my spending so much time here, despite it being a mere working dock remnant and therefore perpetually anonymous and un-nameable does deserve a name.
The Footbath Mort Bay, Balmain
So this is not a Chalkboard. It is a place name. ‘Footbath’. Its name exists in relation to the users of the space, dogs who swim together, (they swim together more than they do anything else together). Humans too discard their shoes and ‘have a dip’. I call it ‘swimming’ with laps mostly imagined and not numerous.
A ‘Footbath’ might be more a venue for reflection on the hop. A spot to meditate briefly on the prospects of the day emerging.
A dog contemplating.
We do emerge finally from The Footbath, cleaner. The human skin and dog skin too seem to delight in the afterglow the ‘bath’ provides.
A footpath reliably takes us to a place. It is not a track but something that others share. A trampled track finally becomes a path. While a footpath might offer the opportunity to travel at some speed along it, a Footbath offers limited destinations even, none at all.
Although the chalk will wash away, the name will stick. This is how culture works. Stuff gets thrown up and some of it sticks if it hits the mark, if it identifies something that was there that just needed to be identified.
The great thing about Australia is, that while we do make stuff stick the right way we are still so deeply in the middle of making that we can’t focus.
We miss it and that keeps us alive.
