The Immortality of the Crab: Jennifer Down

Featured music is ‘Now We Gather’ by Joseph Beg

About the Author

Jennifer Down is a writer and editor. Her debut novel, Our Magic Hour, was shortlisted for the 2014 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript. The story collection Pulse Points won the 2018 Readings Prize and the 2018 Steele Rudd Award in the Queensland Literary Awards. She was named a Sydney Morning Herald Novelist of the Year in 2017 and 2018. Bodies of Light, her second novel, won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. She lives in Naarm/Melbourne.

Transcript

This city is not mine: I have no claim on its land or history. But I was born here and grew up here, and now I am growing older here, and increasingly it feels as though this place has a claim on me. There are pockets of it that I could walk blindfolded. There are tram and railway lines that I travelled daily for years, and even now, I recognise their rhythms: my body knows when to reach for the hanging straps, when to plant my feet to steady myself. 

There are streets I’ve never lived in but whose history touches me obliquely: I went to a house party there once; or I dated a bloke who lived in these flats; or my mother lived around here with a cruel man. (I don’t know which house, exactly; only that they used to walk over to Lygon Street to have gnocchi every now and then, which made her, a Dandenong girl, feel very cosmopolitan.) 

There are, of course, suburbs I don’t know at all. To pick up an item purchased from a stranger, or to visit a friend in a hospital I’ve never been to, I plug an address into my phone and follow the instructions of a disembodied voice. 

I still keep a Melways in my car, just in case. It is ten or fifteen years old, already outdated. Already this city has shifted, morphed, redrawn its edges. 

* 

When I write about a place, I want to resist nostalgia. But this desire is troubled by the very fact of memory. This city and its suburbs are weighted with it. I have grown up moving through its veins, and now I am growing older in them. And of course, my life to date is a tiny speck—both in the sense of time (history is long, and this place is ancient), and in the sense of granularity (I am only one of many millions of people who have existed, will exist, here). 

Street corners and schools and cop shops and bus stops that mean nothing to me represent sites of significance to others. A footy oval or hospital or roadside cross might be a stranger’s tabernacle or shrine or wound. There are, too, places shared between several or many different people. These might be sites of communion (‘We were all here when such-and-such happened’), or nondescript locations that hold innumerable individual meanings or memories. Other people have lived in houses where I too lived, in rooms I’ve long since departed. I used to like going to the bathrooms in the old Myer building and contemplating all the old ladies’ bottoms that had sat on the loo seats before mine. 

* 

There’s a Spanish idiom—pensar en la inmortalidad del cangrejo, which means ‘to think about the immortality of the crab’. It describes the act of allowing your mind to wander constructively; of being engaged in contemplation, rather than idle daydreaming. 

I tell students that the best antidote to writer’s block is forward motion. Go for a walk, a run, a bike ride. Ride a tram from one end of the line to the other and back again. While you are waiting at a red light, or watching houses and factories and flats and offices and car parks stream past the scratched Perspex of a train window, you’re still at work. Somewhere beyond the slick surface of consciousness, your brain continues to make links, dissolve them, and form new ones. In this way, we keep on. Something will happen eventually. 

Occasionally when I say this, I’m met with a dubious expression—mentioning the subconscious can feel like sliding slightly too far towards woo-woo. But I believe in it, because I know from experience that it works. It’s my only trick. 

The hours I’ve spent in traffic: peak hour on Punt Road, looking out towards the silos and the tall Collingwood flats; half-thinking about a handbrake start, but half-thinking about a problem of logic or plot. The years when I worked night shift, driving to work at 2.30am, seeing how many highway green lights I could beat, but also listening to the same short story I’ve read dozens of times over, trying to work out the author’s magic trick. (The story was ‘His Final Mother’ by Reynolds Price—I am still trying to decipher, or emulate, the way he charts the metamorphosis of grief with such economy.) The years when I worked in restaurants, driving home at 2.30am with the windows down to keep me alert, while I listened, in some telepathic way, to conversations between characters I’d invented. I forgot most of them immediately—I was just glad to get home, fall into bed. 

* 

This alchemy reaches beyond story, of course. In transit, we might be drafting shopping lists, sending text messages, reading books, scrolling on our devices. But sometimes we’re rehearsing conversations; inventing disagreements or enemies or indignant replies; composing emails; indulging fantasies; imagining a different day or job or life. Motion is not a prerequisite to this, but it certainly helps. 

What helps, too, is tracing the same journeys over and again. I like to walk the same long route for months at a time; one day I’ll decide I am bored of it, and then return some months later. Commutes are like this too—making the same loop to and from a destination, watching the world through a windscreen or window. These itineraries, however monotonous, permit the witnessing of change, however gradual. In a season I watch hard rubbish appear and disappear from nature strips; a section of road undergoes resealing; magnolias bloom, grow heavy, then drop; an L-plate becomes a P-plate; a SOLD sticker appears on a real estate billboard. The handwritten sign on the front window of my local grocery store says INJERA COMING, then INJERA—WILL LET YOU KNOW!, then INJERA COMING SOON! 

I keep moving through the veins of this city, keep making the same repetitive journeys. I am noticing patterns. I am thinking about the immortality of the crab. 

Something will happen eventually.  

This initiative is supported by the Metro Tunnel Creative Program which harnesses the innovation, imagination, and expertise of the creative sector to help manage construction impacts.