astrid had been talking incessantly about the alpacas, but we were yet to see one. i think she has been in love with them ever since we went to an alpaca farm in tasmania, where a rotund man with a grey bushrangers-beard talked breathlessly as he showed us around, emphasising the parental advantages of alpaca cria over human babies in between an information-stream about the minutiae of alpaca farming. a wide-eyed astrid soaked up every last detail and will recall them at any given opportunity. actually, she was sweet on alpacas before that, but the visit to the farm certainly consecrated the affection. two alpacas are now a standard part of her verdant dreams of a future property. my desires are for trees and open living spaces and light. heaps of light. i think our desires can coincide, and in fact, on the balcony of her mum trish's house overlooking the valley from coorabell ridge, just west of byron bay, this coinciding was already happening. trish had mentioned that the house jutting out of a nearby fold in the valley had some alpacas and astrid was giddy at the prospect of seeing them. i'd come up from sydney a week later than her and had brought the requested two longnecks of her and alex's virgin brew, made with the homebrew kit given to her as a christmas present by the family, who referred to themselves on the gift label as the cartel. we sat on the balcony and tasted the beer for the first time in afternoon light, giving considered attention to bubbles, fog, sediment, taste, body and content of the as yet unnamed beer. this was more or less how things were when a black alpaca wandered down an open hillock of the jutted-house property and into view. and there is something impossibly significant about such a coincidence that it doesn't so much suggest as demand itself to be named. there you are, talking about alpacas all week without being able to see one, as though your talking about them made them shy, and as soon as you get out the homebrew in need of a name, out pops an alpaca. and like in the writing of w.g. sebald, like in the given experience of living, something inexplicable occurs, and that occurrence, the two events, as astrid so wonderfully says on the beer label, share a duration of utter pleasure.

and like w.g. sebald i find parapsychological or fatalistic explanations of the meaning of coincidences bogus and tiresome, indeed it seems evident that the magic comes precisely from the fact that it is beyond intelligible explanation. like when sebald was finishing the last section of his book the rings of saturn – a stunning traversal across the history of silk worms and sericulture in europe – he chanced upon the remaining historical dates and information that he needed in the daily paper. it was all there, events from 130 years ago, 220 years ago, just as though he had been writing up until that point. and i've had the same sense of writing up to a point with this piece. i worked my way relatively smoothly from astrid, alpacas and the home brew up to the point of coincidence, but then moving on from there became incredibly difficult. i knew i wanted to introduce sebald, for reasons that will become clear, but i couldn't find a way to move that worked. it's that terror of a decision when the way of getting somewhere is complex, and every real decision is complex. for example, you want to go out on saturday night and there are numerous parties you are invited to, but deciding which ones, in what order and how to get there is overwhelming. buses and trains don't go everywhere, cabs are too expensive, you want to drink so you can't drive, there isn't enough bikes to go around because some of them have flat tyres, and it's just too far to contemplate walking. and so you go nowhere. the indeterminacy of facing a decision can be terrifying and the best solution often seems to be to do nothing. in these moments it's the arrival of something unexpected that frees a path for movement. and for me this messianic arrival was a post card from stuttgart. my friend joel who was living in berlin had travelled to stuttgart, i think partly to escape the wage-slave hell of hospitality in berlin and partly to see a modern triptych exhibition at the art museum there. anyway as astrid handed me a post card with a huge smile on her face it was such a joy to see this image

because it was the same as this

which was a post card my friend tim sent 18 months earlier while he was in prague for a friend's wedding. and as if that it wasn't coincidental enough, as joel's post card arrived all three of us – each in their own metropolis – were engaged in trying to get together an issue for our website project when pressed. holding these two post cards together was connecting events, like astrid says, in a duration of utter pleasure. and here was the point at which i had been writing to, and some unexpected happiness opened a way to move on.

now this ed ruscha painting is a typically witty work of his and i just love the idiomatic phrase now then, as i was about to say... but in a way perhaps the wittiness of the phrase initially masks its brilliance. because while it's language as texture, material and speech, it also suggests having been distracted, of unintended tangential movement that now wishes to finally make it to the desired utterance, but of course the desired utterance is only glimpsed in the motion of the phrase as it acts to set off the next tangent, another distraction. if you've read this far you'll note the resonance. it wouldn't feel inappropriate to me if i started every sentence now then, as i was about to say... but for all it's idiomatic qualities, or perhaps because of them, the phrase is a great example of the flow of time. i asked astrid, who is much more grammatically astute, about the tense of now then, as i was about to say... and she felt that it wasn't going to fit any single tense rule because it's situated in multiple tenses which is its interesting movement, but she said, ask joel because he knows about that stuff. so i rang joel, who had returned to sydney unannounced almost at the same time as his post card arrived, and he told me that the only way he could come close was by explaining to me something that the original phrase is not, and so by moving across languages, firstly through french and then spanish, he supposed that it was some kind of imperfect near future. and i like that. it's a happily plausible scenario where we have a future to come that we are near enough to be included in, and that is imperfect and messy like everything else. but the tense classification only partially gets that sense of the flow of time in the phrase, which is a past/future declaration, it's a now-time assertion (now then,) of a past desire (as i was) that was very-recently a future desire (about to say). so the duration of the phrase has a multiple movement, the past and the future are folded into a present flow, and this flow is not a succession of points or instants. in other words, time is not moving on a straight line. consider, as alfred north whitehead said, our derivation from our immediate past of a quarter of a second ago ... we are continuous with it, we are the same as it, prolonging its affective tone, enjoying its data ... this is the mystery of personal identity, the mystery of the immanence of the past in the present.

this immanence of the past, how the past always stays in the body as we experience flow, or folded time, is exactly how w.g. sebald's books work. often in his writing the immanence of the past produces a vertiginous terror, as though all the unspeakable violence of history spoke continuously through the pained body of a trapped animal, an animal that is both sebald and not sebald. so this folding of time is a constant in his work but it also corresponds, and perhaps less bleakly, to a traversal of terrain, literally, a commitment to walking the folds of the land. and it is, in a sense, a random walking, or a walking whose trajectory is not certain, a walking that is open to that which comes, maybe an uncanny coincidence, and which suggests the next move. it's a kind of walking and writing that follows your nose. as sebald says, if you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. i thought of this following of the advice of your nose when i watched larissa sansours' video run lara run, although in the the first watching i did not realise that she was running alongside the west bank wall, which has very strong reverberations with the themes of sebald.

so by now you are more than entitled to ask: what the fuck do the writings of w.g. sebald, the multiple tenses of a phrase in an ed ruscha painting and a video of larissa sansour running around the west bank in a red helmet have to do with home-brew? well each one of them is an inscription (or, if you prefer, a document) that has given me mobility within a network of relations. in other words, they have been thinking tools that have created a chain between friends who start a microbrewery and friends who send each other postcards, between lovers thinking of a future-togetherness and alpacas pronking at dusk for the utter pleasure of it, between coincidence, walking, temporal experience and boundaries. what i want to suggest is that it is this chain between things in the world (humans and non-humans) and their mobility (or, if you prefer, ecological relations) that constitutes collective wealth. the silent question my piece has responded to is: what is collective wealth? etymologically wealth is related to health, and so, the wealth of any collectivity is determined by the complexity of ecological relations. beer, balconies, alpacas and alpaca farming, afternoon light, w.g. sebald, walking, ed ruscha, painting, tense grammar, time felt in the body, dogs, their noses, walls and helmets are some of the things involved in the duration of utter pleasure that is complexity.