There’s been some discussion about better seating in the Adelaide Town Hall and if it has done nothing else it has focused attention on an undeniable human phenomenon—we all need seats sooner or later.
The world is full of seats, and I’m glad!
There are the Victoria Square park benches flecked with sunlight through prim, urban trees, benches Inhabited by quick-sandwich office workers, girls lettuce-leafing through their calorie lunch and sad, drifting people for whom the seat is a solace and also a grandstand from which they must needs view that world that seems to have ill-used them.
But seating preoccupies us. Seats are for sitting, but also for interrogation and being restless in when the bank manager (or the tax consultant or the boss) cries “Take a seat.”
Take a seat! I would take one to some wild headland and sit there enthroned in breezy majesty, in draughty state like some modern Canute crying out at the inflation rate and saluted by gulls and shouting waves.
And little people would ask: “Is that a lighthouse on the headland, mummy?” “No child. It’s just a big man with a red nose.”
Take a seat. I would take one to the river where the weir spills like a liquid cafeteria and the pelicans walt with serviettes of feathers.
Take a seat. I’m not a man of standing, so why not?
Seating always bothers me on aircraft.
“No Sir,” says the booking clerk, “you cannot sit with your back to the engines.”
On planes I so often sit between two people who haven’t seen each other for years. I call them seat socialisers. I find myself on a busy intersection of words, craning necks and destination discussions.
The layback railway seat on a long-distance train has its perversities but also its poetry with the staring eyes of farmhouses at night, Tailem Bend, romantic under the Mallee moon, the dreaming Wimmera below the Victorian stars and the old vacuum flask yielding one more cuppa in the long watches of the Overland night.
Yet, seat me in a crowded bus and my personality changes. When those standing look at me for succour, my fleshly lips curl in disdain, my eyes narrow into a rush-hour squint, my hands grip my newspaper like claws and I give some over-laden shopper the kind of glance which Genghis Khan must have bestowed on the latest pyramid of his victims’ skulls.
Sometimes chairs strike back. I once found a particularly vicious folding seat in a local hall. One moment I was sitting there tranquilly and the next the seat tried to foreclose on me.
My legs came up around my neck and for a moment I felt like a victim in “Jaws They finally dragged me free from that aluminium and plastic rat trap. It was still snapping at me as they dragged it away for disciplinary action.
Certainly one keeps one’s favourite chairs and an old armchair Immediately springs to mind. In fact its springs are on my mind most of the time I’m sitting in it.
Yes, they subside and oh the buttocked rapture of one’s favourite armchair. My chair is so old you can even find concealed in s cracks money pre-dating decimal currency.
There are pieces of petrified food (and so would you be petrified if I sat on you for 20 years); there are tiny toys long before Star Wars and men on the moon.
When my armchair finally expires I am thinking of having an autopsy on it and presenting the relics to the nation.
It also has stains which would baffle all but the most skilful analysts; compounded of old tea, rare cordials and generations of fragmented chocolate. They are blended with heaven knows what strange fluids and solids but they make a heady mosaic which could be worth an interior decorator’s studying.
Of course nobler chairs are called thrones, although the statement that a person is on the throne doesn’t necessarily mean he is a regal person.
But there remains for us this precious anticipation that while the baleful world rattles on the window, or glares from the telly, or shrieks on the telephone, we can still have this most primitive of pleasures—we can be seated.
“Sit” people cry at dogs and men.
Gladly. Bottoms down and feet up. I’m a chairperson, man
Max Fatchen