"Your mom goes to Hanging Rock!"

Wow, finally getting back to blogging for a bit. Sorry that I’ve been so remiss, but as I’ve said before, I’ve been busting my butt working on the world’s most involved paper, so I haven’t really had time to post. The paper, btw, is done, more or less, at last; it’s on theology of the body, but if you’d like to look at it you’ll have to e-mail me and ask for it, because it’s 24 pages of text, much too long to post. Anyway, the topic for tonight’s post is our little visit to Hanging Rock, a post which is overdue by about two weeks, and is a very important topic, since it has proved to be surprisingly pivotal to my Australian experience.

Well, to begin this delightful excursion we all got together to watch the film, Picnic at Hanging Rock in preparation for our own picnic we were planning to embark on the next day. And friends, I kid you not, it was probably the strangest film I have ever seen. It was actually in my opinion, pretty poorly written, the plot just kind of wandered all over the place without ever having a really clear direction, and the film seemed to always be trying to drop these little “clues” which never really fit together and introducing all kinds of obscure characters and dialog that didn’t really do anything to further the story. Cinematographically, it was also pretty…uh, I don’t even know what to call it. There was just a lot of stuff done to make it seem really hypey, like when the girls were walking up towards the mountain and there was all this intense, LOTR style music, and all they were doing was hiking up a rock. And then when they got up near the top, they all just kind of spontaneously laid down on the rock. Why? We may never know. Most strikingly was the part where the three girls were walking up into the clefts of one of the rocks, led by the flighty and ethereal Miranda, prone to mid-stream dancing, the main character I guess (“She looks like a Botticelli angel!”). Then the fourth girl was calling after them and all of a sudden she starts screaming her head off and her running is in super-slow motion and the sky turns pink and then the scene just ends. What was that about? Again, I couldn’t say. Oh, I probably should have mentioned that the story behind this strange film is of 3 students and a teacher from an all girls school in about the 1910’s who go out for a picnic at the rock along with the rest of their class and never come back. They are never found and nobody knows what happened to them. Now, the movie is based off of a novel and although there are some who think that there could be some kind of factual basis for the novel, but there were never even any news stories run about the event. The question that we are supposed to address in our journals for this week is whether any Australians think its true. The ones that I’ve talked to seem to be quite aware of the fact that the story is fictional, and yet there is a great awareness about the story. I don’t know, it seems to me like people know the story is not true and yet they still believe in it to a degree, maybe even only subconsciously, but there is always this niggling little doubt of, well, it could be true.

Hanging Rock really is a place that captures the imagination; it is just so strange and unreal. All the rocks are like these incredibly enormous boulders scattered around, some worn incredibly smooth by the trodding of many feet and some that were as jagged as hardened lava. You could see all kind of faces and forms in the weird shapes of the boulders, which didn’t help the place to feel any cannier. The way that the rocks were tumbled about around the top of this giant formation made this complex web of little passages, impossibly steep little valley, turns and crevices. I could easily believe that someone could be lost in there and never be found again. It was a totally awesome place for exploring though, a fact which I was quite determined to take full advantage of, which led to the first exciting occurrence of the day. I was poking around the rocks when all of a sudden I went around this corner and there was this book just sitting on the rock. I left it alone for a few minutes to see if someone would come and grab it, but then curiosity got the better of me and I went over to check it out. There was a sticker on the front that said, “Take me home!” which confused me until I picked the book up and opened the cover. On the front was a panel explaining that this was a book crossing book, which is basically a program sponsored by a website where people can take their books and leave them out in public places for other people to find, read, and then leave out in a different place. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and it was certainly one that tickled me, so the book is definitely coming back with me to America. Most exciting of all, it’s a book of Flannery O’Conner short stories, so I feel pretty sure that it will be something that I enjoy.

Secondly, well, I was having so much fun climbing around on the rocks, climbing in and out, up and then back down, and well, I have no sense of time and I don’t wear a watch…the short form of the story is that I was a bit late getting back down the rocks to our picnic. And when I say a bit late, I mean like, a big bit. The two-hour-long sized bit. Oops. So I finally got back down and they all saw me coming and started clapping for me and I took a bow. I finally got back down to where the tables were set up and people were joking with me, asking, “Hey Shannon, where’ve you been, we thought you’d disappeared too!” And I put my hand dramatically to my forehead and rolled my eyes back and said, “I’ve was possessed by the spirit of Miranda!” which would probably be a lot more funny to you if you had seen the movie. But the point of all of this is that the people there thought it was quite funny, and I have been known as Miranda, especially to my housemates, ever since. This is an important fact because Miranda is not just a name, especially now that the idea of it has developed over time. It is a persona that I discovered I fit quite well, because as I have realized, the idea of it was built around me, like hey, this spirit of Miranda thing is how people here see me. And that’s kind of a cool thing. I like my new nickname. I like being Miranda. Now I suppose the only questions are whether this person really is me, or is just a part of me, or whether it is only a disguise and whether that part will remain when I return to life at home or life in Houghton. These are the kinds of things you have to think about when you are a freaking over-analytical nutbag like me.

Goodnight everyone.
Best regards,
Miranda