Every essence of your beloved one is captured forever

Every Essence of Your Beloved One Is Captured Forever 2021

Emily Parsons-Lord

I have been to Bundanon exactly once. It was an unremarkable occasion, except that we were there. It was with my mum when I was 8.

Mum worked for the Department of Education. We moved around a lot as a family, my mum, sister and I. It was common to be invited to get-to-know-you social occasions when we were new to a town. It gave the local people a chance to decide whether or not we would be compatible. It was unlikely that we would ever see those people again.

I can remember the day. I have a feeling of safety, knowing that mum is nearby and distracted with new adults, so I have the freedom to explore. I am alone, but that is comfortable. I play invisible, quiet games; merging people with place, visually lining up the perm of a stranger with the cliffs in the distance. An absurd hat.

It’s a crisp day, the later end of winter. The sky is blue and the air tingles. The Sun threatens to become hot, but it never quite does. I’m standing on clover. There is a smell, or maybe it’s an atmosphere, that is perfectly preserved but impossible to describe. There has been dew on the grass in the early morning but has now mostly dried.

This memory is crystal clear to me.

Diamonds are made under intense heat and pressure. They are carbon, the same material as trees, charcoal, and ashes. Most diamonds started forming around the time that life on Earth began.

My sister’s not here. I’m not sure why. There are some other kids around, but they all seem to know each other. Mum has told me I can visit the artist studio behind the homestead, but I haven’t yet. I feel too shy and obvious. What if I’m not actually meant to be there? The lawn slopes away from the homestead and I shut my eyes and pretend I am living in the non-specific era of the olden days.

The trees and the coal are connected. 350 million years ago, trees invent their own trunks. Lignin evolves as a hard cell wall, allowing trees to grow to enormous heights for the first time. When they fall they pile up, the bacteria that would eat fallen trees will not evolve for many more millions of years. So the trees fall into layers, uninterrupted by bacteria and slowly, over time, compress into coal. It was a moment of novelty in history.

I only have one recollection of Bundanon, and that’s how this memory can remain so pristine. The memory is unencumbered by visiting the place again, unadulterated by subsequent memories. It exists as a bubble, unconnected to geography. I have no sense of the roads in or out of the site, or how it is orientated to river, except that there was a windy dirt road and I’m slumped low in my seat watching the light flicker through the dust on the window as we drive under the canopy of trees.

Trees are made from air, this is unbelievable to me. The actual hard body of a tree is made from carbon dioxide in the air. The carbon is sunk into the biomass of the tree, and the oxygen (di-oxide) is released. I was thinking about this when the great bushfires passed through the area in 2020. Millenia of carbon returned to the air by the fires.

My mother passed away recently. The sum total of her; thought, laughter, breath, gesture exists as pristine memory now, unable to be altered or extended through further shared experience. Quantifiable. My memories of her are compressing under great heat and weight, collapsing time into a diamond. Perfect and strong, that will persist for millions of years. Humans have learnt how to mimic the forces of geology to grow diamonds in a lab. All you need is a source of carbon and the machinery to apply 330,000kg of pressure.

I am floating in the intersection of these ideas: my mother as compressed memory; trees compacted into coal; the invention of the infrastructure to make diamonds; the charred trees of recent bushfires provoked by climate crisis; and the scales of time that carbon can slide so easily between, and Bundanon is at the meridian.