The Night City

“They move out of the house… so they can look back and see what’s true there” (Russel Banks)

I started dreaming about other places, whether it was on the internet with Sam, chatting to the occasional avid traveller, or experiencing my life through the frames of various writers and their voyaging narratives. I itched to outgrow my bookshelf. The 31st of October was Liz’s birthday, signalled her offer to stay in Cannes as her inexperienced translator.

My bags were packed, and the cab driver was waiting. Just outside the ferry boats pushed majestically on; the yachts were chiming in the sun, the children’s shrills floated intermittent on the wind. As the cab continued down narrow streets, my home enclosed itself, content with families, almost motionless to the bleeping world in front of me. I passed the mansions competing for harbour views, and the crude-oil silos, heaped on one side of the peninsula, leaking fumes into the air. I could see speed boats breaking waves over the oyster-caped rocks. I peered into leafier parts, scraggly, full of intruding weeds and eucalypts that held perilously onto the slope, some having collapsed into the green murky water. Planes left cirrus clouds scattered across the sky.

I had postcards stashed away in my diary from Sam for those vacuous hours between Sydney and Europe. His post-cards contained descriptions of the cicada singing landscapes of Spain, and the frustrations of his clumsy Spanish tongue. The last post-card he had sent was my favourite. Its cover featured a marine fort, looking over the port of Lisboa. Many an explorer must have stared over the same horizon, watching the sea breathe in the haze of a setting sun. I thought of his movements over this landscape. Was he amusing himself amongst the colour of the Spanish party scene? Was he still frustrated with the language and with the brats he had to teach in Badajoz? He couldn’t come and visit me because he was too poor, too disorganised, or, so I imagined, too much of an epic adventurer. I closed my diary, re-arranging its contents and drifted back to sleep.

My flight set down in London. I inhaled the old, musty air of the Heathrow terminal and the sound of Leonard Cohen. There were large Romanian men bickering over their passports who were held back at one of the security points. The labyrinth of escalators and tightly controlled security checks took me to a bus stop that would take me to the departure terminal for Cannes. A black woman, who’d been working for the United Nations on the Iraq war, and security investigations, sat next to me sharing interesting facts about the last American election. We were thrown around on the bus, looking out at the gloomy fog above. I was only barely listening, imagining a vivacious Cannes situated amongst the blue of the Mediterranean Sea.

I was meant to meet Liz at the terminal, but her plane left early. The epic journey now totalled twenty hours, and I wearily boarded the last plane. There was a girl who sat next to me who reminded me of Liz. She casually inquired to the Italo Calvino novel I was reading. She smiled at me meekly. His writing style amazed me, his narrative entanglements challenged my readership, but his mess frustrated me. It contained the clashing narratives of what Liz described as “the first postmodern novel”, which in its euphemistic irony enchanted me. She was my best friend, the feminist, the artist and the actor. She helped me to dream. I finished a chapter as the pilot announced our set down on Cannes:

“You certainly do not exist except in relation to each other, but, to make those situations possible, your respective egos have not so much to erase themselves as to occupy, without reserve, all the void of the mental space, invest in itself at the maximum interest or spend itself to the last penny. In short, what you are doing is very beautiful but grammatically it doesn't change a thing. At the moment when you most appear to be a united voice, a second person plural, you are two tu-s, more separate and circumscribed than before.”

Italo was whispering in my ear as I looked outside my plane window, my vision blocked by the plane furrowing through clouds. The ships and yachts came into view soon to dock down on Cannes.

We lived a pretty stale life in Cannes, enjoying all the hospitality of restaurants, and stuffy English tourists, some of whom we later found out were con artists, trying to manipulate her family into a bogus business deal. Other than aesthetically, the centre of Cannes was a pretty horrible place, stuffed with money and overpriced boutiques. It was a hallowed-out cliché, with pictures of film celebrities lining the streets, a spectacle de la promenade. This attracted vulture-like upper class tourists and the rich French that clung to some 1920s version of the place. Either way, we both got plump on the dirt cheap rosé and the pasta dishes that remained from previous Italian occupancy. There was a charm hidden beneath Cannes, but it was winter. It soon got to a point where our beau couple status dulled the whole point of being on the other side of the world, our eyes tinged by the pink hue of the wine on our lips as we discussed our travel destinations.

We’d come back from a day just past the border of France, in a small village that boasted the greatest market in Northern Italy. It turned out to be full of imported goods, and clothes made of cheap synthetic materials. I didn’t mind. I was enjoying the local French company. Liz had been silent most of the day.
“I can’t act here. I can’t speak the language.” She’d locked herself in her room opposite, having one of her thespian tantrums.
“We’re on the other side of the world. It’s fucking brilliant!”
There was no answer. I slammed my door in frustration.

I left our apartment and figured it was time for some space. The light was fading prematurely, shadows being drawn by dusk. A little brown dog led me on my way through the complex of cobblestone streets, littered with the occasional video store, butcher, kebab shop or bakery until I came to the old part of Cannes. I climbed up and up, every building slowly gaining hundreds of years of age, until I reached the town church. There was an ancient oak grove here, where owls slept and made the occasional hooting noise and a huge statue of Mary with Jesus suckling on her breast surveyed the city below. There were a few benches that had young French people on them, drunk, kissing and tangled around each other. I looked over the whole place, which shone with its azure gleam. Large carnivorous gulls squawked with razor teeth on their beaks, picking at a dead pigeon on the road below. Craggy mountains bordered each side of the city and the brine-heavy air blocked the horizon, pushing the Mediterranean blue into focus. It all reduced out into stillness. My stomach churned with a strange sort of desire.

I woke the next morning with a broken message on my phone from Sam. “Something fell through in Madrid and I’m on my way to Barcelona. Meet me there on the 10th of January.” Liz was still locked away in her room, having slept close to a day. I was jumping around with excitement, relishing in the irony that he was from Adelaide and I, Sydney yet we were meeting in Spain after having shared a year of flirtations and correspondence on the internet. Liz packed her bags reticently. I wanted her to come, perhaps unfairly, as my shield against disaster. I was sure she’d come around. The seats were booked on the next train.

The train pulled into the long platforms of the Estación de Trenes Barcelona-Sants. Liz was asleep on a copy of Judi Dench’s biography until one last jolt of our cruddy seat woke her. There was a little excitement in her eyes as we alighted from the train. Above us sat a huge hull-like ceiling. Signs in Catalan directed us into tunnels leading up to Espana Square. There was a figure peering in the opposite direction dressed in a blue flannel shirt and tight black slacks looking around the square. He responded to my beckoning. He was what I’d imagined from online. Tall, blue eyes, with a well-defined face, rough with stubble. We hugged and exchanged stories on the way back to our youth hostel, hidden a few blocks away.

The night markets were in full swing. Sam and a few people from the hostel took us on our way down the stone black promenades of central Barcelona. It was lit with large shop-front displays that ran down little laneways, alive in a post new-year atmosphere. I watched the tall Catalan men with their blue-green eyes and darker hair, and the waiters from restaurants offering their saffron yellow bounty, paella. There were darker back streets that ran off these squares, empty, and funnelling a chilled breeze. I was ecstatic, a veritable tourist, occasionally brushing hands with Sam.

We were all soon drunk on sangria and cheap pizzas from a plaza that was, unawares to us, a price-trap for tourists. I felt Sam’s feet under the table playing with mine. I was a little heady, Liz getting up to go for a walk; to enjoy the “sights not the people”, putting it with an affectionate tone of sarcasm and jealousy. Sam and I wandered aimlessly, without a map into the periphery of the burgeoning night city.

A week passed and Liz slowly came to, making friends with the travellers in our youth hostel, telling me about the art galleries, and museums and the thriving club life that Barcelona offered. Yet I had become increasingly infatuated, and agitated, my blood thick. It contained no distraction for me. Sam had met other friends, but I’d convinced him to spend our last day together on our own amongst the works of the city’s most prominent architect, Antoni Gaudi.

Parque güell was sitting above Barcelona’s centre built into the foothills as a marker of Gaudi’s influence on the city, a relic from the early 1900s. Its large majestic towers curved, and bent in mosaic-tiled facades. Its quasi-extraterrestrial buildings seemed to fascinate me melding with my hankering mood - futuristic forms that were organic and bodily, ripe with ingenuity and design. The sun was soft on my skin, and Sam, off exploring the cavernous hulls that bulged out of the bedrock was noticeably distant. People were crowded on steps and rocky balconies enjoying the fine weather. The place seemed to glisten, whilst inside, my heart was thumping with the sensation of life, with a sort of alien pain. I found Sam, who was photographing a couple kissing behind a statue. A hand came to embrace me and lips to kiss me, but they didn’t settle. His presence continued on, distant and meandering down the other paths of the park. He was fascinated by the city, a traveller enthused.

Barcelona was quiet on this Tuesday night before our departure. People were emerging from their fiestas only for food to take home and cook. The streets were almost empty, except for the occasional group of sweepers. I was crying on Sam’s shoulder, drunk on cheap red wine. Passers-by stared at me with animosity as if they’d never seen a man cry, as if I were an unwanted guest. Sam just sat silently. He took me by the hand, back through the streets, wet with drizzle.

The next morning the city was bare, council workers pulling down the last lights of the new years celebrations. Liz and I were trundling our gear to the station ready for departure. My eyes were red with dark rings around them.

Liz looked at me with a knowing look, “You didn’t really live with the place”

Amanda Stewart – Poet Vulcana

A slim, athletic woman gets up out of the audience. The black curtained room insulates her against sound. She mutters a few pleasantries to the audience. There is laughter and then a moment of silence. Her voice suddenly sounds in a droning tone:

‘The first sounds filling the mouth with self
My death on your lips
My birth on your sigh.’

Her vocal dynamics come to articulate a sort of poem, laced with surges of extended polysyllables, breaths, chant-like whirs, interweaving registers, accents and idiom.
These phrasal fragments and words arrange themselves in the thick timbre of her voice:

‘and the word is space
and its obliteration
the tongue of sacrifice
at the edge of the other words
Interdetermined absence’

The audience is silent, somewhere between the text, our consciousness, a sort of musicality, and absence. The codes within everyday language lay exposed only to be pieced back together. I’m left quietly contemplating, and a little in awe. I’ve never heard this kind of song.

What is most striking about Amanda Stewart is her poetic style. Her poetry comes alive in performance. She achieves a multiplied voice in all edges, plosives, throat pulses and psssts. When she reads it is a little like listening to a mishmash of the news, radio, people’s voices, and the sounds on the street. You are thrown into an awareness of the intricacy of their music. This is where you realise her ability to both decipher snippets of theory and allusions to Australian identity and politics and to merge many persons in one, many points of view in one. She is a master of “those moments when things become incredibly ambiguous so the mind is in flux trying to classify sound into meaning.” This edgy ingenuity is a large part of the reason that she has gained the reputation as Australia’s Poet Vulcana.

Her life has not been without polemic having expressed opinions on a vast array of issues in contemporary Australian society. Born in 1959, to a world in the shadow of great upheaval and political change, she encountered certain ethical issues stretching from the politics of nuclear weapons, power plants and waves of feminism. It wasn’t until the formation of one of Australia’s most prominent experimental and interdisciplinary sound groups in 1989, The Machine for Making Sense, that Amanda’s interest in sound and poetry came to fruition. She made her film debut, acting as the narrative poet in the Eclipse of the Man Made Sun in 1991 and co-wrote an opera The Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior which was first performed in 1997.

From 1991 onwards she travelled to Germany, France, the UK, USA and Japan. In Germany, she was given a reception that made it her second home and a place to consolidate her poetry. This led to the release of I/T Selected Poems 1980-1996, containing a CD that acts as the notation of her unorthodox form.

Globetrotting days now behind her, Stewart is back where she began, living in a homely terrace in Sydney’s Surry Hills. I arrive at the terrace on a sunny Tuesday afternoon and knock on the door. No answer. I’m five minutes early. I’m looking up at the blue sky. Minutes tick on until I see her walking down the side walk, flustered but smiling warmly at me with grey green-eyes and tresses of unkempt hair. As I enter the smell of dust, old books and cigarette smoke settles. She offers me a couch in her living room. I’m left alone for a moment intrigued by two book cases, records from the 1970s and onwards form a trajectory from the Monkees to Nick Cave. Philosophical oeuvres sit scattered throughout in some erroneous order. Australian literary journals poke their spines out from darker parts of the shelves. Obscure sound CDs are piled in a stack to the side. It’s comfy, shabby and the furthest from derelict. She returns with a huge mug of earl grey.

We start chatting on the obvious subject, writing. “I was either going to be a writer, jockey, or a vet… but I truly came to writing when I had some loss in my life when I was around 10. It was with someone very close to me.” She breaks eye contact for a second. I want to pry further, but she steers the conversation onwards. “I started to write a lot more about the world, death and ageing… poetry became a good friend in hard times.”

“At the first poetry reading I went to I was really quite scared… I was fifteen and I went to the café d’absurde in Balmain… I thought it was going to be an intimidating intellectual environment, but as the poetry reading started someone yelled ‘load of bloody bullshit!’ A brawl ensued. I had to leave the café. It wasn’t exactly the reception I’d expected.” There’s certainly another side to Amanda that her work doesn’t show. A sort of comedian lies hidden beneath. You’re always left endeared by her stories. She’s got that Australian sense of humour, casual and gritty. She gets up and flicks on the heater.

Her laugh is full of open enthusiasm. She’s pretty composed. I wonder if there were any difficulties for her in the pursuit of a largely neglected art in Australia. The public seems to close its ears when it hears the word poetry. “There is a pressure to be prolific and be obvious but bugger it. You have to go at your own pace. When I was young, I sent my poems off to six publications and five of them rejected my work. However, one accepted it and sent back some curt notes. They were gold back then. It didn’t stop me doing it. You have to have a strong interior and internal resilience.” Poets aren’t alchemists. In Australia, they’re expected to be able to wield a spinning wheel of gold, or a day job and support themselves unscathed. “There’s more money in Europe. I don’t believe that Australians don’t have an interest. It’s just that there’s a greater infrastructure there, financial viability, a bigger population and a ‘sing for your supper’ tradition in Germany, and Scandinavia.”

There is a certain marginalisation in Australia for poets, especially of the experimental kind. “In some ways I feel a bit marginalised in the poetry scene in Australia; being labelled as a ‘sound poet’… Sometimes I get irritated because people pigeon hole me in a little experimental sac hanging off the mainstream…” She looks at me with a more furrowed brow. Her poetry doesn’t fit neatly into the lines of any genre just as her personality is free of a lot of the pretentious dogmas that can hang around poetics scenes. “It freed me up from theoretical debates… you can get very wound up in those debates… music gave me the freedom to create outside of that world… My poetry became more oral. A friend of mine, Richard Veller who was publishing the journal New Music Articles recommended that I try and notate my poetry at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney to a computer. It vomited out a rather complex score.” I’m imagining a sheet full of disjoined and scrawled notation, a sheath that doesn’t do her skill of performance justice.

She’s dynamic. A natural performer. Her poetry never seems to dip too deeply into theory, just as when she speaks she never excludes you from her experiences. A large part of her struggle must’ve been centred on contemporary poetic debate and the institutions that propelled them back in the eighties. “Back in those days, there was a big split between historical literary critics and the, what were considered, ‘philistine’ post-structuralists and postmodernists… I don’t feel like there’s any basis for that old antagonism anymore. It was a big deal back then. It’s such a relief that there are people coming onto the scene now who’ve absorbed all those histories and don’t feel a need to wage that old war.” We’re now left with a small underground poetry movement in Australia that is conjured back into the public’s eye with the occasional poetry prize.

This poet Vulcana of the 1980s, however, didn’t give in. She wouldn’t pass on from her reflections on life and their expression for commercial ends. “It is precisely because they do not make easy sense that they (poems) have been excluded from currency except as high art or advertising.” We both have a grin on our faces from the quixotic tone of her old-hat self. We cast the reel back.

“That was back in 1982. Oh dear, what an idealist I was… To some extent it is really difficult. I’ve become more cynical. When I was in my twenties I was having a freak out because I couldn’t get a job. I had some very bad administrative jobs. However, I got a production job… I got a grant for a project. When you go into full time work you have very little time to spend on the side. But in my thirties I fell for Germany and Europe. I knew you could work professionally there, so when I was in my early 30s I wanted to focus on Europe.” I’d felt similar things in Australia, often having reveries about France and Europe. Yet it’s a funny place to be, in between the two places, one so young, and full of creative possibilities, different things to express and the other, post-industrial, full of culture-rich illusions, a playground for the mind. It all seems to play into Australia’s ears. I’m sure it would be a deafening sound for someone like Amanda.

“After five years of working in Europe, I felt really cut off from Australia. I thought f***, I’m getting cut off from my own context. I tried to reconnect here, putting my eggs in all sorts of basket… I’ve now become a Jill of all trades… I’m planning to take a few years off to get back to non-performance based poetry. It’s where I feel most at home. ”

I find this intriguing as she’s naturally entertaining me. Her ring tone bleeps. We’re suddenly in a rainforest with cicadas and bird calls. The travelling bus stops. She speaks to what sounds like her PA who she calls ‘honey.’ We pause the conversation. She pulls out a cigarette. Smoke lifts above the books. I tell her about a certain block I’d been feeling writing wise since I hit university. People rarely talk about their artistic blocks, but they reveal a lot about someone. There must’ve been some necessary obstacles, or hurdles to jump over for this aspiring jockey come competitive athlete.

“When I was studying I was in a block. I worried, but without it I would not be where I am now. I had to change my substructure. You have to let it all sink in…. I was reading Joyce, Burroughs, Lacan, Derrida et cetera... I was completely overwhelmed. I had a sort of confidence in my poetry yet I became blocked. I was writing shit... It was as if I was travelling to new countries and worlds but I didn’t have control over their languages so I couldn’t express myself. I thought I might have to give up writing. Everything I wrote was dreadful and I knew it was dreadful.” Despair is a common artistic vice, especially with the seismic changes that come with growing up next to such huge bodies of theory, such a burgeoning world. It is difficult being inchoate in our society, yet this was the time when Stewart was opening to the world and a represented identity in it. It wasn’t a light-hearted affair. It’s something which is pretty direct for writers.

“I was confronted with my self… I questioned whether poetry was just a crutch for my ego… I hoped that it would lift. I couldn’t stop writing, although I considered it. It’s what I do, who I am. I’m just glad I didn’t release what I wrote publicly. There’s a pack of piranhas out there, and perhaps there should be. You have to wait for when the block breaks.” She looks over at me reassuringly, reclining in her chair, looking out of the window. There’s an understated wisdom in a person like Amanda yet there’s no fuss in her depth of explanation, or if there is fuss, she’s aware of it and openly calls it, in an ironic tone, ‘wank.’ She lends more to me. “I was blocked. My mind was so full. I kept feeling that I’d found something, yet nothing would come. I’d always written from experience, but I decided I wasn’t going to write from my own experience; that it was a way to radicalize form. It really mucked me up. Ironically, it was a terribly important thing to do. It completely changed my substructure. It was like an athlete using a new technique. I’d been exposed to writers that were much more self-reflexive and I was compelled to get rid of the old substructure and when I did there was nothing there. Then something came, and took that space, and my block broke.”

You can see why our poets are so vital when you have conversations like these. In the realm of pop culture it seems that people don’t like this sort of sensitivity. They do in a sense, but they find the intimacy of poetry hard to gulp down and digest because it takes a little more work, especially in our speed and money driven world. Stewart stated in 1982 that “one must control sense to make money.” Those words certainly hold a more urgent meaning now more than ever, with the rise of advertising, and the slow decline of poetry and an independent publishing industry.

“I have a real beef about how badly funded the Arts are in Australia. We have so many great artists here that get treated terribly… There is a propensity for the mediocre and the safe… It makes people feel comfortable, makes them feel understood… Yet poetry is a very empowering thing… Poetry’s a play between form and matter… understanding and the unknown… it is pithy and self aware… a poet is always approaching the text in a very specific and powerful way. They have the chance to look at the complexity of meaning and to test it… Poetry is a key to freedom of thought. It can be a friend in boredom; it can be a friend in hard times. It’s all fine and well having freedom of speech, but unless you have freedom of thought who really cares about what you say.”

As I leave the house I feel as if I've lifted the cover off her work. I got to know that non-author identity that was no longer textual or contained in dusty bookshelves. We shared instead what came from a voice, two mouths and four ears:

‘The first sounds filling
The mouth with self
My death on your lips
My birth on your sigh.’




Research and References
Websites and Online Resources:
Keefe, E. 2008, ‘those strange movements of the mouth and throat: Merging fields of inscription in the work of Amanda Stewart’ accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://whenpressed.net/work/ellaokeefe/those-strange-movements.
Stewart, A. 2005, ‘Postiche’ accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s862622.htm.
Stewart, A. 1995, ‘Absence’, accessed on the 6/10/08, URL: http://whenpressed.net/work/amanda-stewart/absence/

Books
Stewart, A. 1999, I/T selected poems, Split Records, Sydney.
Stewart, A. ‘Statements’ in eds. Brooks, D. & Brenda, W. 1989, Poetry and Gender: Statements and essays in Australian Women’s Poetry and Poetics, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, p. 63.
Smith, H. ‘The transformation of the word: text and performance in the work of Ania Walwicz and Amanda Stewart’ in ed. Fuerry, P. 1994, Representation, Discourse and Desire, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, pp.221-239.
Journal Articles
Manning, J. 2000 ‘Amanda Stewart, I/T: Selected Poems’ in Heat, vol.1, no.15, Giramondo Publishing, Melbourne, pp.301-306.
Stewart, A. 2000, ‘A Comment on “absence” (1995)’, in Heat, vol. 1, no. 15, Giramondo Publishing, Melbourne, p.306.
Newspaper Articles
Clarke, M. 2007, “The road less travelled – THE CRITICAL GUIDE – CULTURE CULUTRE’, The Age, 24 November.
Jenkins, J. 2007, ‘Excerpt from: From page to stage’, The Australian, October 16.
Ferguson, S. 2006, ‘Constantly evolving’, Daily Telegraph (Sydney) November 23.
Eastman, W. 2005, ‘A bold test of artistic nerve’, Hobart Mercury, October 13.
Creagh, S. 2005, ‘So different this time, even though it’s all the same’, The Sydney Morning Herald, October 19.
Everton, D. 2000, ‘Four in the mix Machine for Making Sense – Spotlight on:’, Illawara Mercury, May 12.

Alan Ball's Americana

‘Towelhead’ is perhaps a bit of a misconceiving title for the film. It not only explores the racial tensions in America in the wake of the Iraq war but also goes to the centre of what it is to be displaced. The protagonist, Jasira, is in an almost constant state of dispossession in a country which claims its kitsch values of individual rights and loving your neighbour as yourself. This seems to be an underlying theme in Alan Ball’s work. The film is an expression of political frustration with an intense focus on a 13 year old’s sexual awakening. This culminates with the influences of the fantasy space of her neighbour’s closet full of Playboy magazines.

Jasira Bishil first experiences rejection from her faux-feminist and puerile mother. She is exiled to live with her Lebanese father in a cardboard box suburban house. It is here that Jasira has to confront her father’s warped form of nationalism and his phobia for her own abject fluids. Her racial difference is eroticized by her dysfunctional and predatory neighbour who uses sex as a catharsis from his depressive world. Ball doesn’t hesitate to take a lens to the inhumane eroticization of Jasira’s body. It is portrayed directly in episodes of insidious abuse. Jasira does find a boyfriend at school who shares another side of her sexuality. Here the commodification of her body and her abuse is symbolically broken. She meets another set of liberal neighbours who come to give her the space to regain her identity.

Alan Ball does not hold back with this film’s intensity. This is its strength regardless of the fact that it may be its downfall in a wider audience’s eye.

Persepolis

A graphic film is not something you’d consider to surpass the boundaries of its own artistic or underground scene into the gimmicky market of globalised taste. Graphics of quality and depth now hold a certain nostalgia, however in France, are now a medium that is being rebuffed. “Persepolis”, directed by Vincent Paurronaud and written by its protagonist, Marjane Satrapi, illustrates, in an almost film noir contrast, the rapacious effects of the tumult of Iranian rule. Marjane, a young girl comporting the tactless sensitivity of youth attempts to find an identity in a country deplete of its culture and the liberal freedom of political autonomy. She plays the submissive game of the totalitarian state, casting a veil over her views and the members of her family who come to personify some paradigmatic segment of western thought. She is soon uncovered. In an act of protection, she is sent to Europe, a world that is equally as vacuous in its treatment of difference. It is in this austere intersection of two worlds that Marjane both suffers and finds a sort of resolve from the grey ambiguities of her identity and experience. The ornate simplicity, layered textures and inflexions of her graphic narrating capture a collision of continents, and politics that is all too pertinent and refreshing in light of the worn separations between ‘this’ world and ‘theirs’.

Sense

3.
Body cracks harking back, forth
Scent somber mouillé and wet
dwelling to morph
Gravel crumbled sea won’t set

2.
Mind thrusts thunder echo
Bubbled white fountain falls
Sails, soars, rotund oars, low
Rolling under breathed wind, grey crawls

1.
Heart crust feathered in dust
Egg nest in twain
Tussled, twining
Ruffled fur furls warm

Photograph

Grinding flesh twig break metallic

Music. Sound. Steel wool grated shade-shadow.

SNAP

The trees blur. The globe explodes.

FLASH. FLASH.

The boy's face disjoins.

His eyes slip along a grainy red horizon.

Filling the darkness and rising back

Skin is . stretched there, between (eye) ----- (the lens)

As the camera pricks the pixels

My eyes smooth their rough edges

Some faint heaviness settles

Teeth aching, tasting object

Abject

DRrrrrr eam

OPppp eration

The image

Is re-membering me.

Every grain-saturated -punch

forcing my eyes into their opaque

so-

ck-

et-

ed

p a c e.

l

Hibernation end

Flies littered over the roof

Waking from winter

Across the new light

Covering over the cold

Speckled stones from

Catacomb sleep

Deep in dusk and dawn

The sun splinters black

Green springing

To the subtle touch

Of warmed dry

Air passing up

Flies in a whirl-wind

Unstuck

Weightless disaster

Only to fall again

Up and around as fleck-ed

Flesh

That glows red

In lumen

Hidden to the dark

Concrete Junk Jungle

Tortishell cat is the pelt of a city

Twirling to Jazz chords

Strumming off dissonance

To the string of an electric guitar

Breaking buildings open

Architecture as the moving spectacle

Into concrete bloc-ed

Melodies, Motorways, bridges, houses

The citizen is percussion bound

Step, step, break by another

Till thrown forward in syncopation

Electric speed of car lighten progression

Climactic mid-day of peak hours humming down

Stopping and starting in a frozen back motion

Retrograding heliographs of sound bouncing

Moment of concrete dwelling

Out of the wild palm leaf,

Ibis droppings crawls

The Jaguar hidden roaring

Hunting the subject to find something

Around the next bend

-ing

The world around itself to meet back at

The night-ridden dusk of an orange sun

That blooms again cat pelts

Slowing speed to cricket calls

To the spore light and mellow tune

Of a heart-strung moon

The Romantic pauses to take a drink

From the black river that consumes

All colour-crazed mayhem

And finds no home here in contradiction

Dying away as he searches for new, orient-al

Sound wave, guitar rift of originality

And for nature to reign over the concrete

Bring back the harmonic music

Of a strut down the decay of laneways

Here he flashes a-new after love forlorn

Closing over as a night walker double-edged

Using his sound to make sonic sarcasms

Pushing us forward to come to a point

New light gained, genius in ostensible ideal

Of individual ___ love

That may stay slow as cooled self-obsession

Wielding his yielding guitar of reason

Ego, ergo sum

Dead songs sung

Here I sit waiting for

The new junk jungle

Flower to bloom

Language langage

Language langage

Un mot de francais…

This tool bends itself

As hot iron forged

In unmalleable forms

Of two points

Out there in the dark

That omit to me

Out of brained matter

From a world of infinity

Different for a moment solid entities

Until the clock clangs

All back to liquid form

Cooled down to

Some mercurial curse

Some forged reductive

Here speaking as

‘a word of french’

It is of this heavy penned s-word

That something else

Tells you this whisper between two worlds

Is not every word, sentence phrase a scream and then a whisper?

Some closed over concrete block

slipping?

Know. know, know,

Still.

No.

Speak, speak, speak

Move.

Yes.

Art-iculate.

Be.

Stay in Brisbane

Summer

Slim bridges skim across mud

Meandering across satellite shimmers

Tall hopes

Sky up to blue

Voice scream and conflict cage

‘til I come back

See myself lost

Where sun shines

Enlightening

Summer in the heart

Picasso Faces

Sense crashes image around body

Mmm… taste

The white walls make a fruity Matisse

Buzz numb in brain - paint falls away

To this soft tongue day

The open organs of Degas’ whores

Bleed out over skin

Mixing some tension in cores

Of Contrast

Molding Picasso’s

Ever-twisting face

Chandelier in hotel window

Cased light in the dream

Suspended in glittered static

There surrounds a darkness invisible refracted to gleam

Hope of moths collecting around

Weighty opulence ripe to fall

Below sits some neon

Of ideals hologrammed out

To flowing diversity of ants

That grow beyond

To some individual flash

Back to promises more

What are we society?

Collective individuals

Drowning over this utopia

Lens of eyes around the dazzle

Beyond the chandelier

Be-dazzle by beguilement

A merlin wand of security bound money

Icon Icon Icon of belonging

To those grand keep-safes that circle

Above my head and steal a beauty

Where are you?

Beyond between below the flowing

Movement of skies and the hidden dark of muddy

Voices lost under in the starry dungeon of dispossession

Come back, go away, return, flee

Until stars fade and the mud sits dark and alone

Pressing under weight

Becoming Stone

Miss Julie

Happiness consumes itself like a flame. It cannot burn forever, it must go out, and the presentiment of its end destroys it at its very peak.
AUGUST STRINDBERG

I was sitting at the Belvoir Theatre on tuesday night to see Miss Julie by August Strindberg. My divinaton was that it was a depressing but profound psychosexual drama, or so I'd been told. I found it to be more, and strangely pressing for those who search for love.. Miss Julie, the trapped aristocrat and her servant, Jean, who represented the seed of the nouveau riche are unbridled by dreams, that turn in their way into an inner crisis of truth. Their relationship in its class tension and emotive exasperation existed as a grand metaphor for the narratives of modern escapism. In their dialogue it called itself love, however, it was more a way to cope, to shake the boundaries, to tear up the footlay that was so dauntingly repressive. For that the pain of the character's situation, their delusions found a justification. Did they need it? I had to ask myself "had anything really changed? Was love of that kind an ideology of abandon, of escape from self?"

The stage was constructed of a simple plank of timber that stretched out as a kitchen shelf, suspended two metres or so above and out to the ends of the stage. Upon it objects were placed, and the plank was used as a sort of balancing scale. Every object; every person's perspective never allowed you to hold that objective sympathy with a defined protagonist; a quantative judgement. This was the success of the play for me. Strindberg asked questions I simply couldn't answer everytime the plank-scale swung like a seesaw. All the protagonists' situational dilemmas were never denied their pertinence.

Their situation displayed something, in a hyperbolic fashion that i can't seem to shake off with relationships, or their form in any current version. It's as if feeling in such speed, in such a desperate attempt to escape self is a deep contract we make with pleasure, with sex, with the ecstacy of abandon. Affairs and desires are more than simply an interplay of mind and sexual relations. We sell out for that vivacious sense of abandon and dreams and forget friendship, love. The themes were so heavy on the nostalgia of the life i'd experienced in that strangely austere and vacuous place we call society... that amalgamation of clubs, bars, glam, drunk modernity. The place where postmodern identity politics replace the humble family. I thought we drink, we make a contract to abandon, we make eyes at that dark figure whose face won't show itself in the light, and find ourselves in the dark of a bed, fumbling, hands across each others bodies. Or we deny it and we find platonic contracts, friendships of a greater scope, that let idealism breathe out of that overly reduced obsession with the perfect aesthetic - bleep, bleep, bleep, boom boom, boom.

Strindberg definitely made the suggestion that happiness was a flame for the desireful, and most people i know have had a difficult time lighting it. The play presents this dilemma in that place of modernity, some furious and frustrated abyss, that we've come back out of but can't help but look back at and wonder, and i'm not ashamed...

"What is happiness?"

A list of heavy and grand words, that cast their shadows and their light... states that are always with the "presentiment of their end, causing the suffering, resolve of (de-con)struction at their very peak"

Perhaps.

Nomad

A curious character was sought out by the civilized as a primitive.
They disliked him - he was clothed in secrets and mysteries.

His identity was found
between swaying motions of seas - the slow movement of terrain
between eyes and feet
desire of a home is cradled in hands and heart where shapes move,
fumbling back, cutting around in a slippery surrealism;
dark broken by the sun
morning.

Nomad
was woken abruptly by city
traveled down new streets built in seconds
cultures were singing songs cut-up into transient echo
mouths tasted insatiable fats
bodies loved, and minds were dulled into muddier pathways
all traded in a magnificent aroma that wafted further
to nether -
ether in home.

Reflections on Phantasm, the enactment of my own piece of writing.

Rose Purse (O n&On) and Danielle Maas (Simulacrum)

Theatre is the last beacon of knowledge, stir, critique and substantially the last resort of thought, in our march in this veiled life upon obscure ages.

-- Tandasi Susuki

The theatrical plane stretched out into a concentration, a stage. The excitement of theatre beset me. I sat behind, thudding heart, intimate with exposition and watching my work move in and over heads, missing ears, making some receive, confusing others, angering some, boring the non-believers. It, out there, was no longer me and I was humbled, satisfied. I could have critiqued the awful setting, the dissonant sound of the bar behind us, see the heaviness of my words, or the lightness of enlightenment they might bring in someone. I could critique the actors’ performance, see where they could have reached a greater implication or more of a tension, subtlety or reaction, or been more physical. Yet it was that silence of wonder, of moving within understanding, the presence of moment-um, of a delicious spectacle, a ritual of meaning, life of death and death of life; to know that we’d communed. Could i ask for any better parliament of humanity?
I think not.

Something like desire, something like life

This is all messy prose. Desire is all just some big, wet morass, tangling and tangling around itself knots and moments of hatred and thick blood, moments of greatness... but only delicate moments, volatile moments, that come crashing down to just the bareness of your body-mind alone, bleeping out to nothingness. Find me a reprieve from it, some part of me heavy to the stomach calls. Yet pleasure is coming, oh pleasure, up and up through my throat, till I come to the slight strangling sensation and feel I’ve arrived somewhere. I look into Siddhartha’s light, into Art’s humble- cushy touch, to God’s paternal arm, to friendship, the most altruistic thing I know, embracing me as my self, resolved. This happens to me every day, until it cracks and the cycle starts again, and night falls and the sun breaks the world above, and it sends me hurtling back to a half déjà vu where I gleam again new light and swim in the somber beauty of the dark.

Being past

The grandfather clock,

Humming --- tock

Over sleeves of wet flesh,

Spilling tea over

Dusty sheets --- tick

Moment of there and now,

Tocking ---

tick ‘til it filled,

This word housed room

with the old oak smell of curving strokes

on paper

somewhere other than

ancient men --- tocking

primordial prose --- ticking

the present of dust

the passed from now

to the place of the ticking tock;

--- the tocking tick

PJ Harvey's Music - The Soundscape of a New Flânerie.

“Flânerie is a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness even though it is actually a final resignation to it…” (Keither Tester)

PJ Harvey's Sound posits an insatiable tension somewhere between musical flânerie and dialectical playfulness; a sound that is addictive to my generation’s ear. She pulls me from the infinite, finite, organic, city-bound, the body, mind, distilling them all. She ruptures the eternal from the transitory reaching up to those independent, intense and impartial spirits, conjuring that psycho-semantic world that runs down into my bones. Perhaps a bit much? Let me explain with a few fragmented lyrics.

Is This Desire?

“Catherine liked high places,

The hills

Chapel

Washing herself

Wind

Listen

Children’s voices

Women of the hills

A view of the city,

Now she sits and moans” (The Wind)

“Beauty of her

Under electric light

Tears my heart out

Every time…

waiting” (Electric Light)

Stories from the city, Stories from the sea

“Teach me mummy,

How to catch someone’s fancy

Under the twisted oak grove” (Grow Grow)

“The ceiling is moving…

Like a conveyor belt above my eyes

When under ether,

The mind comes alive…

Something’s inside me

Unborn and unblessed

Into this world and to the next” (When Under Ether)

Lyrically, the idea of the city seems to represent heartache, chaos, and the uncontrollable. Nature some place of refuge, where we only gain moments of culminate feeling when her odes to love climax, always being taken forward by her melodic narratives. The city is present more as a motif than a subject in the background, foregrounding all her undulating sound-concepts and nature-based imagery. This is one of the places where her music gains its dynamism and power from a movement and interaction of extremes, between desirous chaos, and romantic reprieve; city and nature; authenticity and deception; a sort of musical Flânerie, always imagistically tied to, yet anterior to the city. Her music is always bound by some sense of modern idealism and the abyss, yet some paradigmatic opposite is constantly bubbling up from an expression of her subjectivity.

Her music is in a perpetual state of irregularity, change, sliding forward, not keeping in step, collisions of things and affairs, and fathomless points of silence crossing path ways and the nostalgic wilderness of feeling, from one great rhythmic throb to the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms. Overall, I feel like her music's taken me on “a turn from the seething bubbling fluid in a vessel consisting of solid materials of buildings, laws regulations and historical traditions,” (Robert Musil, 1954), and out into some ethereal other and for this I can't but feel that she has some quality as a quasi-heroic, journeying flâneuse, placing herself always in a liminality of being.

The Politic of Conversation

Bombs set off out of my open eyes,

Shapes revolving in a vein structure;

This ethereal rhizome romping,

Tied to beings of ground,

Lost out in air.

Dipolar voices

Make each divide,

Branch after branch,

Ruddy liquid truth never still, astride

Until it spreads and crosses

Blocking beneath,

Another vein shooting beyond

the now and the then explosion of eyes.

Speck

I’m a speck,

on humble knees bare,

bleeding out away under

the house,

tears escape. smashed picket fence,

words precipitate

crowds stare perfections

Minute revolutions

enlightening,

framing image

away from sense

into specks

On crumpled papers

Circling in heads

My translation of Rimbaud's newly discovered poem

Bismarck’s Dream
(Fantasy)

It’s night time. Under his tent, full of silence and dream, Bismarck, a finger on the future of France reflected on his pipe emitting a blue thread… he meditates, his little bent index finger advanced from Rhin to Moselle, to the paper, Moselle to The Seine; from his finger nail, he scratched the paper imperceptibly around Strasbourg; he goes beyond. At Sarrebruke, in Wissem Bourge, in Woerth, in Sedan, it flinched away his little bent finger; he caresses Nancy, scratching Bitche and Phalsbourg, Metz line, tracing on the border of little broken lines– and he stops himself…

Triumphant, Bismarck covered from his index finger Alsace and Lorraine! Oh, under his yellow skull, such a delirium of misery! What delicious waves of smoke come from his pipe, blessed and happy!

Bismarck reflects, wait! A large black dot seems to stop his index finger, wriggling. Paris. So, his bad finger nail, scuffing, scuffing the paper, here there, with rage, finally stopping himself… his finger resting, half bent, still..
Paris! Paris! Then, the chap dreamed much, then opening, slowly drowsiness impairs him.. his forehead inclines itself towards the paper; mechanically, the embers of his pipe, escape from his lips, removing the ugly black dot…
Hi! Povero! By abandoning his poor head, his nose, Mr. Otto de Bismarck’s nose, plunged itself into the ardent embers Hi! Povero! Go povero! In the incandescent embers of his pipe, Hi! Povero! His index finger was on Paris! Finished, the glorious dream…

It was so kind, so spiritual, so happy, this nose of the first old diplomat. Hide, hide this nose! And so! My dear, when sharing the royal sauerkraut, you will enter the palace… with crimes of… the lady… in history; you will eternally bring your burnt, sooty nose between your senseless eyes.
Look here… don’t daydream away…

Away from the pages

“Fluid minds carve their own path in humble, crafted words”

Tonight on the ferry, after looking up over the blurred characters of my philosophy reader I felt this strange merging with the blackness of the water, wanting to get away into some murky depth; liquid slickness that sheaths itself over light, some organic, primordial notion of the world.

‘Authenticity’ I remarked, until it had to recontain itself in some black medium, some opaque limit. Here my body spread outside the corporeal outlines of warmth and out into the cold light where my hands ached, my mind excited itself and landed me here, to spill out, gurgling like the water retaining itself around the vessel; the moving entity, out into utterance. I came to juggle these words, like a joker, who cuts up his mind into moments with their simple truth… until the sensual authentique kissed the lips of perception and reminded me again that I’m moving. Up-ho-ho…skidding, sliding with the water.

Response to Galway Kinnels Poem "The Middle of the Way"

The sonic universe is moving but the heart doesn’t beat. It is atemporal, corporeal, a pump of presence that captures poetry in its stillness. It is the between of the intertwined and the chiasm. It is the ontogenesis; the opening and closing of the flesh that never reaches space, but comes as a flow of silence in which vein like fingers touch at meaning. It is empty and full in an eternal paradox of extremes but its blood-effect will forever spread, in this subtle interconnectedness of our senses and our sense of the world. It is the moment where space envelopes and time is broken open. It is where the wild dark of sense and the heliotrope of language hesitate to touch.

Signs are subjectification and objectification. They come as heavy sound, the drawing back of arteries, ricocheting off the heart’s still beat, pulling it from metaphor to sign and back into the temporal, the epistemological dimension. Words control the beatlessness of the heart – to make it jump away over some invisibility of the mind-body system, to try to abandon the heart’s stillness, to make it move outside its paradoxical and concrete inertia. Words saturate into the flesh of the heart its ontological signification; the self. It is here where metaphor drops out of the storm and ceases to be rain becoming a droplet that forms a puddle that finds its way into a larger body of water or evaporates back into the clouds up and away from perception.