Leviticus

The first thing you remember is the light.

Not sunlight exactly, but the particular Australian brightness that seems to remove shadows rather than create them, flattening surfaces and stretching distances so that houses appear further apart than they are and people seem smaller within the landscape that contains them.

Roads run towards horizons without urgency. Grass along wire fences moves in uneven rhythms beneath the wind. Corrugated roofs gather heat through the afternoon and release it slowly into the evening air. Somewhere a screen door closes. Somewhere else a dog answers another dog that cannot be seen.

The town unfolds through car parks, school grounds, church halls and service stations, through brick facades that have faded at different speeds and gardens planted decades earlier by people who imagined a permanence that never quite arrived. The spaces between buildings begin to carry as much presence as the buildings themselves. Empty verges, drainage easements, sporting fields after play has finished, stretches of bitumen still holding the warmth of the day.

You become aware of sound before you become aware of people.

Footsteps against concrete. The metallic click of gates. The low electrical hum of fluorescent lighting. Wind moving through eucalypts. The distant passage of trucks somewhere beyond the edge of town.

Even indoors the landscape seems reluctant to remain outside. Dust settles across windowsills. Heat gathers beneath ceilings. Light pools on linoleum floors and remains there long after the room has emptied.

Perhaps this is why some films persist less as narratives than as atmospheres. They survive in the body as textures rather than events, returning years later through a particular quality of afternoon or through the arrangement of shadows beneath a verandah roof.

The word that emerged from the dream was vitium.

It arrived without explanation and with no certainty that it belonged to any language that had ever been spoken. Only later came the discovery of its older meanings: blemish, deviation, fault in the grain, the almost invisible irregularity that changes the way a surface catches the light.

The word lingers beside the memory of the film without ever attaching itself to it completely.

A weatherboard wall slightly bowed with age. Paint lifting from a window frame. The faint discolouration left after a picture has been removed. The difference between silence and quiet. The difference between emptiness and space.

In Unsettled Places, landscapes rarely announce themselves. They accumulate slowly through repetition and proximity until one day they seem to possess an interior life of their own. A corridor begins to feel longer than its measurements suggest. A staircase acquires its own tempo. A suburban street at four in the afternoon becomes somehow distinct from the same street at three fifty-nine.

The town in Leviticus inhabits this register.

Not quite memory. Not quite dream.

Something encountered somewhere between weather and architecture, remaining long after the names of streets and characters have disappeared, held instead in the sensation of standing beneath an enormous sky while the day quietly withdraws from the edges of things. Unsettled Places — Notitia Health

“There are places that remain after the map has been folded away.”