Books and planes go together for me. Or usually they do. This time something caught my attention and wouldn't let it go, pausing concentration like a video still. There was a time when the book was a stationary thing. There was a time when they were chained to monk's desks. To stop them flying away, presumably. Then books became more portable, bound for ship and train. Now they fly with us, too.
Perhaps this is just the book of the west, of which I am thinking. Book of prophets, traversing the desert. Book of abstraction, uprooting gods from their special places, making god and space uniform and empty, leaving us wandering... the desert now a world. Here and there linger places that have their local gods -- or where the powers-that-be mint new ones.
Watching the TV news, en route from Sydney to Melbourne. Watching NATO launch its first air strikes against Serbia, news airtime plays host to another kind of strike. Images of what we are told are Tomahawk cruise missiles. They pop from ships like jack-in-the-box. Then cut to images of something burning in what we are told is Belgrade, or some other site in Serbia -- little brightly coloured maps give a crude approximation of locations. These reports were all vague and sketchy, except concerning the type of weapons used.
I think of my father, building airstrips in New Guinea in the 40s, while my mother worked in an office somewhere, moving the bits of paper around the desk that enabled the stuff of war to be moved all over the Pacific. At least that's what I think they did during the war. I'm sure there's a record of their movements somewhere, too. People, books, missiles, crossing out the blank pages of the world.
Travel isn't valuable until thresholds are crossed or discomforts carried across borders. Until you find the time to consider why you are heading this way. With a good book, a new and engaging one by a beloved writer, at Heathrow, I sit for hours and clock up some of the twenty seven hours to reach my destination. Watching and listening to the Poms, particularly on the public address, and their visitors. This is now an urgent boarding call. Run, miscreants!
Thinking again about family. The two girls, still teenagers, hopping on a boat to Australia in 1852 and arriving four months later at the height of the West Coast summer. Before tourist slogans, and during a time of punishing and disordered colonial rule. Punishing, anyway, outside of that sphere of influence, if you were a domestic servant, Jewish, young, and escaping something at home in London.
When we arrived we were herded onto buses; it all felt makeshift, this move to our onward connections. Before that, landing onto the gold lights of the imperial city of London as it was coming to life startled me. Then, in an approximation of the journey to a death camp, we are pushed roughly onto these buses and taken around a perimeter. Past smokestacks, vans of all sorts waiting for something or another, waiting to service us. Our coming together is based on mobility; on a choice to move, or necessity; enunciating these details in all of our languages. We are most of us sleepy.
Ours is the century of displacement. Anyone can tell you that. On the radio this morning, in the morass of the mess of current brutalities, we are told of half a million people in Kosovo who are now homeless. Footage last night showed some of them walking away from villages. Where to?
A small blue and red boat breaks the waves, bobbing under a constant sun. Something falls from the boat, a human shape, and floats away. A toy boat, a toy soldier. The girls are indoors, making a home for an eclectically dressed collection of Barbies. The boys are outside, with boats and planes, the backyard and pool their theatre, where soldiers and weapons from several product lines form unlikely battle fronts.
No amount of gentle suggestion or persuasion ever breaks these children out of their gendered worlds. I wonder who, in the long run, comes out better equipped for work and life in the speed factory? Movement is easy now, so much of the jagged line of the world ruled flat. But home, being at home, making oneself at home, making others at home -- this is what becomes harder and harder.
They know about home, those Barbies. They encode a weird suburban knowledge of the good life in repose. She may be queerly shaped, oddly coloured, remote from the ambitious flesh of human girls. She may like the trappings of fashion. She may be conflicted about her job and role. But Barbie seems at home in a world without refuge. A world with nowhere to hide, hides in her. No Star Wars X-wing fighter can dent her moulded gams.
It was over and gone in a second, a television image, a Barbie in a little girl's hand, as she waits, while her family waits, to cross the border, to escape the war. I think immediately of my niece and her Barbies, and their home under the bed. Words fail me. As mobile as they are, words can only gesture to what is absent in them. They are mobile homes that gesture towards resident referents that they cannot contain.
I scroll through the details of the neighbourhood looking for scandal. Find none: only remnants and legacies. Elizabeth Street. William Street. Birmingham Street. London Street. Rummage through my house looking for something. It might be compassion, it might be a harder edge. Find amusing the little stash of speed and an e that I forgot I still had. Am I too old for this caper? That's what I keep asking myself, but what is irresistible is the drama of the rush I recall in a big warehouse, the music filling it, the drive of sex and other pleasure filling it, setting us up. The former furniture factory turned speed terminal. This memory is a conflation of at least four nights, epic night-days. In it the chemicals transform me, as you'd hope they might. Stretch me out, but I'm still fast.
Tonight, in lieu of coffee beans, I begin a sequence: coffee liqueur from Mexico, koffiewafels from Holland, iceblocks from the freezer, then down to speed writing and thinking about houses, and privacy. Thinking about my neighbourhood.
A girl named Lisa Brown has been missing for more than this year. She was 21, a mother of 2, a street worker in my suburb. Street worker is the euphemism for women who do their business in the front seats of cars parked in laneways around here, or parked right there on the street. Forty bucks a blow-job and seventy for the full monty. That's what folks say.
Her boyfriend pimp told no one for nearly a week that she was missing, and the police took another week to admit she wasn't the nice, funlovin' girl they had set her up to be. And the city erupts into people talking their differences: property values; serial killers; moral imperatives; basic safety matters; heroin trials.
Thinking again about cricket. The English players, young men, hopping on a boat to Australia in 1932 and arriving few weeks later at the height of the West Coast summer. Before tourist slogans, and during a time of depression and economic uncertainty. A relief, surely, if like fast bowler Larwood you had escaped the coal mines of Nottinghamshire.
The Perth matches were uneventful, but this was the infamous bodyline tour, where English captain Jardine had Larwood bowl what they called 'leg theory'. A fast ball pitched short, bounces high and speeds toward Bradman's body. If he doesn't offer a stroke, it hits him, high on the forward leg. If he strikes, the ball will likely go to the closely placed fielders.
Just not cricket! Ah, but it is. This genteel game that threaded men of empire together revealed its red right hand. The pitch is no safe haven, it bristles with ballistics.
The surprise of it wore off. Ray Robinson could write a decade later, having seen war and empire come and go: "Nothing the War Office did from 1939 onward puzzled Australians more than the failure to make use of D. R. Jardine's talent for generalship by setting him up alongside Field Marshall Montgomery (who called his staff his First XI and foretold that he would hit Rommel for six out of Africa)."1
The 40s and the 80s, the more I think of it, are the signal decades when the speed factory sped up, when space became consumed and liquefied in the rush to make the world over in it's image. In the 40s, its the metal-bending factories that make a world according to the leg theory of Henry Ford. In the 80s, its the shrink-wrapped digits of Bill Gates. The 40s and the 80s, amphetamine years.
Tired of the absorption method, of soaking up tonal considerations, pace, paragraphs, pathos, the world of worthy stories, I'm taking off for a sprint. Cranking up the pace, going for a burn. Partner, I'll leave you behind. I am ready again after all of these years. Once upon a time the hurdles star at school, hopeless at everything else, I went at the obstacles without fear, just fast. Up and over. The song 'I can see clearly now' always confused me with its acknowledgment of the obstacles in his way: I wasn't used to such honesty. Come on, girl, with your big claims to speed, get fast! In life I'm fast; when I write it is ponderous, too often ponderous. The speed of the week is liberating me. I want to do my stuff and project into a future perfect. Needing stability in these times. God, that Husker Du version of 'Eight Miles High' has been hitting me since I took up my post in the speed factory. The energy sounds loud; it's a buzz through torso and then legs. I'm dancing, the habitually private dance of the sole occupant/householder. Circling into satisfaction. On the big wooden dance floor at the Passenger Terminal in Fremantle, with everyone else I know from this place, dancing for what might be the first time to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and I'm near my sister and her partner and the floor is bowing so dramatically and we are about two floors up and she says, well, if we go down the children will be all alone. So one of us gets off, goes outside for fresh air to watch the dolphins play at the edge of the sea, and ensure the children their good adult friends. Music makes the world go around.
When did this party start? This dancing world? These creaking timbers, barely holding? Everyone mobilised, meshed for production. I'm reading about the 40s, that time those 60s people never told us about. I'm reading Jean Devanny's Bird of Paradise, about the home front.2 Where even remote and inaccessible forests of North Queensland get drawn into the big bop.
"The primitive and elemental is the original source of victory. In the history of the propeller there comes first of all the searching of the forests for the special timbers which alone can perform and survive critical service." The forests become a standing reserve, a logistical factor. "Every board sent down to Aircraft Production carries on it the number of the log from which it was cut and that log number is an index of its place of origin, its location there, its kind of soil, its stance, whether straight or leaning, its position, sheltered or exposed. In short, its log number is a dialectical record of the tree."
This resource, borne away from the forest, is of unknown value -- until it reaches the Aircraft Production, where "each board is subjected to the most rigid mechanical laboratory tests." Here the raw material has added to it information about its properties. "Of the timbers so laboriously won from nature's treasure house, the proportion finally used in the propeller may be less than one percent of the original log volume." The war machine includes a complex process of categorising timber and assigning it to a use, depending on its properties.
"Organisation holds the trump card." In principle, nothing should be wasted, although the honest writer in Jean Devanny cannot quite submit to the organisation of the text around the war aims. In this wayward writing, little facts -- chaos and fuck-ups -- foul the factory.
Forgive me as I pre-empt even my own steps. Dancing ahead of time. I write because I have to, getting a tired body out of bed to sit and compose and dream of dance, awake, and then lose the draft and then find it intact, and then follow multiple threads of music across my life and over the World Wide Web. And then find your night's work, read it and see the congruence, the red right hand, the move out of an utterly un-danceable Cave period right into do you love me? So I send. Is it just the two years between our birthdays that throws up such chance? Everytime I obsessively check my words, obediently, disciplined, I get the count at 106. Is this the first pause, the breath-point? Today is a day not to think about vacuum cleaner factories with a workforce of 5000 pummelled into the ground by, presumably, Nighthawk stealth fighters. I dunno. It's a holiday, not even a newspaper to refer to. Pristina. Such a pretty name. Do they know it's Easter?
Bill T Jones motion-captures his dancing, choreographed body, and then other artists do things with it: drawings, computer compositions.3 Separated from musculature and the mass of what is usually there, it becomes ghost-trading; movement and the body different elements. These ghosts multiply and dance together, dance Jones's choreography. He has removed the flesh and blood, banished that; showing only lines and paths that are left, a de-commissioned living: traces, crystalline threads on the edges of former body occupation. I'm distracting myself with questions about traces, the ghostliness left behind for us to meddle with. Numbers on logs, the origins clearly stated and detectable; the history of horrors, painstakingly documented. In this wayward world, little facts -- chaos and fuck-ups -- foul our factory.
Motion capture -- isn't that what this half century is all about? Motion capture -- such a useful word bequeathed by the digital techheads. Motion capture -- the tape rolls snap-freezes Charlie Parker's alto break. Separated from musculature and the mass of what is usually there, it becomes ghost-trading; movement and the body different elements.
This feels more like jazz than dancing. Riffing on great old mid-century tunes. The ones that code for the new world, then yet to come. Kenneth Slessor, Australia's Official War Correspondent, records the work and days of No. 10 Squadron of the RAAF. The reports are motion capture: "With their detailed masses of figures and code letters they look more like mathematical propositions.... senior airmen of the squadron have to combine the violence and adventure of actual operations with the executive office work of preparing charts, logs, statistics and other reports."4
The Operations Record Book is an alien literature. "Here in clipped, official sentences, as curtly scientific as a cardio-graph, the living history of the squadron is laid bare. Masses of mathematical detail tell the story of all aircraft flown, of every bomb dropped or lost...".
A writing of a world yet to come, which we now know too well. "At first, reading these bald statements of height, speed and temperature, of miles covered and work done, one almost loses a sense of that reality which they so dispassionately record. But behind each line, if you pause, you can hear the wind screaming and see the skyline rolling itself up like a map and the grey waters flowing continually underneath. Infinities of sea and air are compressed into the curt entry: 'Patrol safely carried out'." Not many of Slessor's despatches made it into print back in Australia. Ahead of their time. Premature motion capture.
There is a recording made in 1957 of Thelonious Sphere Monk playing with John Coltrane at the Five Spot in New York. Late summer, the recording device a portable tape with a single microphone belonging to Naima, John's wife at the time. The balance and sound quality is certainly an impediment, but what cannot be doubted, not for a minute, is that those guys were flying. Raw, elemental sound laid over with the extraordinary lexicon of abstraction that Monk carried in his head all his life. The piano sounds like he is playing his teeth. Coltrane blows like the wigged-out master he was, these long phrases, breath-in-the-body virtuosic signature. Ira Gitler calls it "sheets of sound -- the technique of playing double, triple and quadruple time, using irregular fast clumps of notes in order to explore several possibilities over each chord."5 I can see Monk sitting there, weighing it all up; in control, but you might not be able to tell that until he began to play. Coltrane recovering again from smack and on the edge of exhaustion, but this was his turning-point year, the year his habit broke. Enjoying a gig with Monk for some of its fringe benefits, the benefactor Baroness for one with her "scotch that flowed in a stream."
What of the note that a part of 'Epistrophy' is missing because it was recorded over at a later date? I remember recording myself singing 'Harper Valley PTA' on a little portable machine. We finish with 'Crepuscule with Nellie', delicately; this time the producer informs that this was what opened the set. They have to let us wind down at the end of the CD: it's that fast and furious. By the way, the executive producer is T. S. Monk, the son and a minor funkster from an earlier time.
Playing more Monk and Coltrane while I pack my books in boxes. It's a rare studio recording, from the same period.6 Monk approaches 'Nutty' as deconstruction, picking apart his own melody, spinning new stings of notes out of folds in the tune, the melodic order undone and undone again. A lot of what passes for deconstruction in critical writing strikes me, by comparison, as sounding more like those endless guitar solos in 70s 'progressive rock' -- so much technique wasted with so little to show for it.
Monk was present at the creation, playing with Bird and Diz at Mintons in the 40s, present for that moment when the melodic fabric unravelled in Bird's hands, exposing the harmonic threads from which it was made, the fibre of American music, from which new claddings could be made.
On those 40s recordings, its all pure speed, intense elaborations on merry melodies, so many ideas crammed onto a 78 rpm disc. By the 50s, the long playing 33 rpm disc opened a space for a new art form -- the jazz recording, on which Coltrane could blow for 20 minutes at a stretch.
Packing books, the dust making me sneeze. Silverfish resent this redevelopment of their neighbourhood. All these paper books and vinyl records, pounds of dead men's flesh. I'm working up a sweat lugging this patrimony. Oh, there is the dead breath of women, too, from Virginia Woolf to Ella Fitzgerald, but I think of all this mass, this weight of information as the rock they tried to roll from their path.
Perhaps we're of an age to be on the cusp. Children of the analogue age, soaking since birth in television and radio and big black records. Immersed from childhood in all that the manufacturing revolution of the 40s delivered to the suburban home.
Skipping ahead again and it's worth it, for me anyway. Pre-emptive strikes, following my fancies. I got caught up with Monk in the afternoon, write before my turn, save it for later, go to a party next door: all gay men, about fifty of them, and three other women, but I'm used to this. I'm reliably told the others are fag hags or straight, and I have no reason to doubt. But tiring of the scene of cigarettes and chunky men wanting to be svelte, and wanting my own music back -- more, more -- I slip out quietly, end up eating Japanese, and getting the coffee beans I have needed for days now. Then home. And there was Ken: This feels more like jazz than dancing.
I open a new document: Good Friday.
With their detailed masses of figures and code letters they look more like mathematical propositions. So he just stands up and moves away from the piano. And begins to dance. Spinning around, a spastic dance as they would have once said. Shuffling, arms akimbo, looking like a man who has never danced before. Someone else is soloing so it's ok, not a dereliction of duty. Can you hear the silence in his composition and in his playing? You turn some of those corners, or angles, in his work and sometimes there is a sacred space of silence, a respite. Singing to you, if only you know what you are looking for. Like brilliant corners. Art Blakey with his sexy percussive work, knowing properly Monk's shapes, filling up some of those spaces with delicate colours. I wanna hold your hand.
But it is the big man in his funny hat dancing as if he might fall over at the front of the stage that I want to end with. Be careful opening documents -- the Melissa virus is out to get you! Newspapers with screamer headlines warn that the BAD GIRL is on the loose. Love the way the print media misses no opportunity to demonise its electronic rival, the internet. The internet isn't the information superhighway in newspaper diction, but a back alley infested with virus laden crackhead whores called Melissa.
This fusing of information and virus in the demonology of the times -- I just watched another X Files video, which has this down cold. Phillip Adams may rail against this show, but really, its the only one that tells the truth. An unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable, self-appointed elite, who use information and bio-technology to advance their power, but who are really just the agency driving the world towards a posthuman future, where we are transformed even faster than before, so fast that we no longer recognise ourselves in the mirror, or even in the mirror of art. The truth really is out there. The military entertainment complex even makes a show about it.
And of course, in the epic saga of the X Files, it all begins in the 40s -- the coming together of centralised state, corporate and military power. Built to fight off fascism, but which became what it beheld. Only more subtle, diffuse, centreless and leaderless. Not a conspiracy, just a new way of life. One dedicated to making the world over, one product at a time. Everything a potential input; no limit to the potential outputs.
And this way of life is not a bad life. I eat Japanese take out to Thelonious on cd, pure popless sound. And in Monk you can hear it -- this world in which there are so many possibilities, where even a simple tune hides sublime concertinas folded within.
Melissa isn't the only girl on the block, isn't the only virus running rampant. Don't forget the April Fool's shows. Out to humiliate their work colleagues, middle managers become lame in the face of one joke they might do well. Ritual humiliations are really just good fun, bloody good fun on that one day of the year. I wish that I could push a button and talk in the past and not the present tense, and watch this hurting feeling disappear like it was common sense.7
The hardest thing for me is to hold it all together, bunched up to my breast, the precious harvest of these yearnings and satisfactions together, little losses and big ones, hard to not explode with joy. Hard-earned joy, I hope; all about observations and observances, influences and pleasures, confluences and the critical mass that has allowed me to move through the multiple doors I have of education, mobility, confidence, choice. To this. To be able to say, I am a writer and what I do is write. My Jewish forebears used incantations to remember the dead. Nowadays we swallow names. Stay silent. Implode with our knowledge of specific pain and what is no longer there. The absence of nourishment.
But not me: I'm gathering up some of my pleasures to keep going with. Thelonious Monk, Eric Dolphy, but whatever you do DON'T get me started. Everything a potential input, and as we know, intimately, there is no limit to the potential outputs.
I was thinking that I don't know anyone who was actively adult in the 1940s, and then I remembered how surprised I was last year and this year to find how many people I know or love were born in 1948 and 1949. But even my parents weren't adults until the 50s. And all the more reason to try and evoke the 40s, while people who remember that time are still with us. They won't be with us for long. And we won't be around for long, either. Others will come along and question what we chose to pass on to them, in turn, too.
There's something strange about Easter in Australia. The eggs and bunnies, images of new life, celebrated in Autumn, time of decline. Is there any choice but to take it ironically? Visiting friends and chewing on the hot crossed buns, I couldn't help but reflect on things, anyway, on beginnings and ending, making and unmaking.
A pessimist by nature, I found a cheery mask for social occasions. But the mask became part of my face. And so, mask and all, I try to keep dancing. Joy would be the word for it, had it not fallen into decline in the English language. The joy of going down to the river, the river of Heraclitus, the river of Al Green. All-moving river, immersing and all moving. There's nothing constant in this life, only things that move very, very slow. Wash me in the water...
Packing my library in crates, I pack my Walter Benjamin, and resist a temptation to flop on the lounge and read Benjamin's essay on packing his library. I think instead of those little houses in Amsterdam. They line the canals of the old city. Each has an arm projecting from the eaves with a pulley, on which to haul furniture -- the stairs are too narrow to move even a chair. I can only marvel at the genius of a people who can make buildings that honestly announce the temporary nature of all that passes through them. Buildings which, appropriately enough, have now survived centuries.
A mask of joy, a time to ask questions. This tripping across words, this selecting, carefully, and throwing back at each other; the game across a telephone line with words, is something I haven't done for a while. The only way I can recall doing it anyway is as part of conflict with lovers and best friends, that throwing action, a backhander, involving quotation, selective, but often in whole chunks of text memorised, bloodily.
But we don't know each other. So how does it feel for you? What is this vector product that you are currently living in like? For me it is surprisingly scintillating: I, looking forward to your words, am ranging as wide as ever in anticipation. Jumping ahead of myself. Pleased to have been home more than I usually am.
Two films, two parties. Cherry ice-cream, my current favourite, with both of the films. I bought some tonight for home, but it is much more sophisticated that the cinema version, which is entirely a nostalgic trip. This is my yield for the weekend. And twenty hours of government work, cleaning up a bad general history of the women of this state. It'll get me a trip around the world, and such invitations always makes me feel like an infiltrator. Working editorially just with tone, to salvage their propaganda.
Of course you want to know the two films (don't you?). The Exterminating Angel and Lolita. Bunuel hypnotised me this time, I couldn't keep my eyes open; it was a fight and I wasn't even tired. Lolita better than I expected: in a cinema of people thrilled to be transgressing, it took me back to sneaking a look at Portnoy's juicy confessions at twelve under my mother's bed.
Must your books go in crates?
(Thank you for Al Green.)
"Having nothing to write about (nothing particular to write about) suggests a question: what this morning do you particularly not want to say?"8
Harry Mathews, from 20 Lines A Day. The title comes from Stendhal: "twenty lines a day, genius or not." That's how Stendhal got his art history stuff written. Mathew's uses the technique to write, not about something else, but about the day itself, and the lines, and the "or not".
"Is life less a part of life than talking on the phone? Than riding in taxicabs? Than taking naps?" I'm quoting Harry to draw another voice into the conversation. "Writing is the translation of one body into another." Only most usually, for me, this writing by email -- it's a translation of a translation. It's the letters of lovers, spiralling around each other, quoting each other, tugging on the body via the screen, via flows of photons, electrons.
It never works.
Neither does writing to strangers who might, in the abstract, share an interest. Unless it happens to be the writing itself. Maybe that's what Speed Factory was always all about: making a way of making that would have the medium itself as it's inexhaustible source.
"What matters is to address, unhurriedly and without procrastination, the page that, because it is the first of many to be faced during the day, is the most discouraging and the most liberating. After all, it is nothing but the happiness of writing that awaits me."
Why should that source of joy not be shared? Words poured into the modem that seek another object of desire, emotional or sexual, they miss their mark. Not the joy of writing itself. No book you can buy will set you free, redeem your hopes, refloat your love boat. Reading incites no satisfaction other than writing.
No book you can buy will set you free, redeem your hopes, refloat your love boat. Refloat your love boat -- did I type that! Reading incites no satisfaction other than writing. It starts with a sighting of thick ankles, a trademark of the women down the generations of family, through a sea of legs and feet. A recognition. Doesn't matter where this happens, far from home; the distance is probably what makes it work, what makes it potent.
I am in a Russian bar in New York City, the Russian Samovar, listening to a poetry recital. Because I arrived late I am trapped on the staircase up to the performance space. But I can see the poet's face and hear clearly his words, and am faced with a room filled with legs under tables. Here is a pair of legs enclosed in school-supply grey stockings with ankles that are solid, as impressive as a horse's fetlocks. A private peepshow, seen only by me. They take me back to home, to Perth and the site of family. When I was a girl I was appalled at the idea that I would follow into this monstrosity at their age: that my legs would grow into horse's legs.
Thankfully they haven't, but for a while it was a spooky idea.
Wasn't Harry Bar in Venice named after Harry Mathews? Or am I mixing my muscular-man-writing figures? I went in to pay homage to something: my literary heritage, perhaps, but it was too fucking smoky for my good. Anyway, I already do that regime of words every day and now I'm doing it with a stranger.
Here is what I am doing: making a way of making that would have the medium itself as its inexhaustible source. Now: Elizabeth Bishop! She refloats my love boat.
By chance, its a book I've not packed away: Victor Shklovsky's account of Mayakovsky's life, loves, work and suicide: "He died, having surrounded his death like a disaster area with warning lights; he died, having explained how the love boat crashes, how man perishes, not of unrequited love, but because he has ceased loving."9
I was attached to those revolutionary Russians of the 20s once, but I gave them up, gave their books away. I kept Victor because he displayed more sense, in difficult times, than the others.
A sinister face watched me from the walls, walking around in New York. I was there at the time of the big Rodchenko show at MOMA. The poster for it was his portrait of Osip Brik, whose wife Lili Mayakovsky loved, and ceased to love. Brik gave up art and literature and joined the CHEKA, forerunner of the KGB. This didn't surprise me. There was something rotten at the core of those modern-isms for which Brik was just a bit too enthusiastic.
It's when things crash that they reveal the accident waiting in them all along. Accidents of love, war, of genetic inheritance. These club feet of mine, attached to skinny ankles, they are my accidental inheritance. This war in Europe -- the Serbian Socialist Party holding out against NATO's imperium.
People can choose to (pro)create their descendants, but have no choice about having ancestors. With writers, it is the other way around.
Which leaves the problem, as a writer, of a double belonging, of belonging by blood and belonging by words. I'm just not convinced these should have much to do with each other. I don't want to make words that are trapped by accidents of identity, but rather which escape it, which seep and lodge elsewhere in the world.
I want to make words that are not trapped by accidents of identity, but rather which escape it, which seep and lodge elsewhere in the world, by telling the grand secrets, by animating those secrets. This isn't nostalgic yearning but I hope a harder kind of yearning that opens up some of the spaces of family, of precious lives that came before me. When nothing has been passed down, not even the ankles, I am obliging myself to dredge things up.
Elizabeth Bishop starts the poem with:
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their losing is no disaster.10
And my Word program wants to clean up her punctuation. It's late, and I'm yearning: this time something quite out of my grasp. Something coiling out of my chest. I wish that it were something easy like being lonely: it is much deeper than that. The reminders of dissolutions and true terror, of everything changing; they keep coming in, on the hour, through the wireless.
She feels mortality on her skin: she wears it; it is a cloak, close-fitting. Not oppressive, though, just resonant and reverent. People came before her. Some, her peers, also suffered early deaths and some are suffering still. The cloak protects and reminds her of real pleasure, of acquaintance, of intimacies that follow friendship and love.
So which way to the making of the family picture? Impossible to choose, so I set off in one direction and then another. I begin to tell a grand daughter's story. But there is too much already to do in a life without digging up the past. Too much suffering without wilfully digging it up, without forcing people to relive that pain. The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Here is what I want to do: a desire to make a way of making that would have the medium itself inexhaustibly. Like the erotic repertoire of lovers who go for years and years. Finding rhythms that sustain each other: fast slow fast. The variety is inexhaustible. Getting used to quirks, tics, petty annoyances; staying in that grand drama: love, erotic attachment. What I am fantasising about isn't ever habitual, premeditated.
Writing my primary erotic expression now, entering into new spaces and explorations. The making, over and again; the erotics of learning and testing out this, and then that. It is spreading all over this joy, my face now pink, I am primed, opened up. What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could hardly hold onto.11
The utility of language. The bare bones of that dream. The return back to a former place, an earlier self, a happier time, or even more confusion. None of that ever matters. Telling it first in a plain and everyday form and then transforming. Some real things have happened lately.12 The sentence, in its closure and its "neatness", seems to me, then, the fundamental determination of writing.13
Driving around the river, the winding road between escarpment and water. The light is leaving the sky, the water glistening in the way you imagine it does in a dream. The sky is leeched of all late-day colour and now it is the palest shade of, what? How could you describe that? As if in a dream, it's so soft you could wrap yourself in it because you have never seen anything so extraordinary. A shade of salmon, but not pink. I dare you to describe it.
-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied.14
1 quoted in Ric Sissons and Brian Stoddart, Cricket and Empire, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1984, p. 21
2 Jean Devanny, Bird of Paradise, Frank Johnson, Sydney, 1945, pp. 11-15
3 Ghostcatching: a Virtual Dance Installation, Bill T. Jones, dancer / choreographer. January 6-Feb 13, 1999, Cooper Union School of Art, New York
4 Clement Semmler (ed), The War Despatches of Kenneth Slessor: Official Australian Correspondent 1040-1945, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Qld, 1987, pp. 102-107
5 Ira Gitler, notes on Live at the Five Spot: Discovery!, Thelonious Monk Quartet. Blue Note, 1993
6 Thelonious Monk with John Coltrane, Jazzland, 0JC-039
7 Elvis Costello, 'Brilliant Mistake', Girls +Girls = Girls, Demon Records, 1989
8 Harry Mathews, 20 Lines a Day, Dalkey Archive Press Illinois State University, 1997, p. 92, p. 15, p. 51, p. 60
9 Victor Shklovsky, Mayakovsky and His Circle, Pluto Press, London, 1974, pp. 202-203
10 Elizabeth Bishop, 'One Art', Complete Poems, Chatto Poetry, 1991
11 Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family, Picador, London, 1985
12 Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted, Flamingo, London, 1997
13 Roland Barthes, 'Style and Its Image', The Rustle of Language, FSG, New York, 1986
14 Elizabeth Bishop, 'One Art', Complete Poems, Chatto Poetry, 1991.