dreamsandroots

[dreamsandroots]

Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo, 1955

Following a promise made by his mother’s death-bed, Juan Preciado sets out in search of his father, whom he knows only by the name, Pedro Páramo. When Juan’s journey brings him to the remote town of Comala, he is confronted by its shifting inhabitants who recount stories of generational violence and patriarchal oppression, each of them centred around his father’s ranch, the town’s only source of income, and a site of unmitigated power and political corruption. Like an unmarked grave or a funeral attended only by the dead, Juan Rulfo’s surrealist masterpiece of Mexican Gothica ripples with distilled silences and things left unspoken and has been cited as a direct inspiration for some of Latin America’s most celebrated authors, including Jorge Luis Borge and Gabriel García Márquez.

[dreamsandroots]

Pan of the Infinite Realms

To sing in mourning: bittersweet.

Occasionally during these weeks following his passing, I have found myself struck, in contemplation of the father as mythical being, by the image of Pan, rustic God of the wild, goat-horned satyr, famed piper and, by all accounts, general mischief-maker. In spite of Pan’s status as an outcast from the snowy-peaked heights of Mount Olympus—a figure who categorically refused the pomp and grandeur of Zeus’ impetuous brood—the wild God’s unimposing presence was epic, even if only for its tacit reach. There’s something of Pan in the attention to proximity: of being aware of the boundaries between self and those in orbit that plays out through this self-distancing, a recurring displacement of the shapeshifter as he moves along the parallax gap between a retreat into ostracism and the act of caring from afar. Pan: everything, anything, and perhaps especially all those things you hadn’t altogether noticed. Frederick, my father, was, to me, the epitome of the unspoken imperative, quite in contrast to the loud souls surrounding those types of men I’d observe who couldn’t keep their words, their habits or their worldviews contained. 

Frederick was never loud, in my recollection. There was a song-like cadence to the inflection of his words, even in those rare instances when he’d engage his booming voice—for there are times when, no matter the family dynamic, the semblances of a father’s authority is demanded. When he spoke, it would often border on the mumble, such that one was inclined to strain in order to hear the words being said. To the uninitiated, this might have seemed the behaviour of the anxiously unsure: of one whose emotions had gone cold, held back and kept tight under guard. It’s true that Fred was not loud in his emotions or his moods, but he showed his love for family and community through his actions. He was generous in his attention, even if it only ever emerged from the outliers. He’d always ask how you were getting on, always eager to hear what you’d been up to, and especially what you thought about the secret whispers of existence or the ways you navigated the various folds of the space-time continuum. His presence, though soft, or at least one that was registered only with a deceptively light touch, became important for those of us who knew the value of having someone to watch over the situation with careful and sympathetic eyes. Someone who made the effort to see you.

Pan was said to be the ugliest God. Well, I think I’ll let that specific part of the constellation skip over into incoherence, unless I wish also to implicate myself and my dear siblings, my fellow autochtha, in this charge of unsightliness. But I can say that there was perhaps some evidence of an aversion to beauty as an ultimate value in Fred, if by ‘beauty’ we mean the type embodied by magazine spreads or movie screens. And if ‘aversion’ is too strong a term here, perhaps ‘indifference’ will do more aptly. In their wedding photos, both Frederick and Veronica (who, among many other things is the mother of his children) look stunning, so it’s not as if he couldn’t lean into, or be swayed, by the gravity of the aesthetic. But in his later years, and personally, for me, in his most handsome of forms, Fred would let his face grow wild until his big bushy beard would catch crumbs. He’d eat heartily without regard to the shape of his tummy. He’d sometimes let the cobwebs grow and the ‘bits’ on the carpet meander at his apartment in Parramatta. When I helped Veronica clean his cottage late ‘22, when he’d been admitted to Campbelltown hospital with the double threat of a UTI and Covid-19, I marvelled at the community of spiders he’d left prospering on his top window by the front door (which was actually his side door, but that's a longer story).

Pan was a much loved piper. I remember how special I felt to be a part of the band at Sadlier at our little church close to our home in Ashcroft and the school I attended. Well to be honest, just between you and me, I wasn’t really part of the band per se, I was really just sitting at the back with the rest of the band, singing along. But I’d go to the rehearsals each week where at least a couple of siblings would be strumming guitars and Fred would play flighty green melodies on his flute. And as far as Fred was concerned, I was part of the band, same as anyone.

In his image, I’m reminded of talk about the fruit freshest from the vine. By which I think I mean to say that even in his advanced age there was something young and carefree to his presence. Being the youngest, I made a particular point of contrast with the oldest member of the family, even if only in our respective ages. I think there was something in me that embodied the audacity and recklessness of youth: the freedom to take the fool’s role and the rebel's cause. It may just be my imagination but I always felt that Fred appreciated my sense of mischief, and perhaps encouraged it to a degree, if not outright endorsing. I mean, he’d never tell directly if he did. Fred was 38 years old when I was born so I never had the pleasure of knowing him as a younger man. In many of the photos we have of his earlier life I notice how broadly he used to smile. When I look at these photos I imagine in the moments of their taking, he’d felt a sense of self-purpose and that he had faith, either in himself or something beyond to which he was connected, and that he held the ideas he brought into the world passionately, close to his heart. As his youngest child I can only smile in the hopes that I can continue this legacy. That we all can.

The man I knew may not have smiled as openly or as vigorously—or at least not for those pointing cameras at him—but humour was never far from his grasp, his bag of tricks always ready at hand. His impish joy would shine brightest in those moments when you were the only one to catch his underhanded joke over the busy dinner table, and he’d smile just as broadly when you passed the same joke back to him ten minutes later. Even once his health began to slide, over these past few years, he was never despondent, never faithless. He was the type who'd crack jokes to the nurses as he limped, blood trickling down his face, and looking as if he’d just barely scraped through a minefield.

Various stories abound regarding Pan’s ancestry and progeny. Some place him as the son of Hermes, others that he was the foster-brother of Zeus, and thus Hermes’ uncle and teacher in music. Other tales have him being older than Zeus, a son of Cronus and Rhea. It’s hard not to think, in this tangle of identity, of those generational traits and recurring faces that are familiar to any who are part of a family tree that takes particular stock of their ancestors’ tales, and holds them close. In this sense, Pan becomes something quite personal, taking on a specific form and imbued with a particular emotional intensity.

Pan, to me, is the spirit of a quiet, smiling face or a particular high-pitched tenor to the questioning voice. Or sometimes he’s a mood: a restlessness that borders on nervousness which, in the end, drifts towards the gentle silence that can emerge between careful minds. He's an inclination to pull the brightest light close to the soul in order to reflect, but not close enough to hinder its flight-path. An idea that comes to you as if from nowhere, before realising that even all of those sweet secret moments in which the ‘self’ reveals its ‘self’ had been, in part, passed down to you along the river's flow. Pan is everything, the interdimensional Möbius loop as well as the tangled mess of phone cords you keep in an old drawer.

In Plutarch, a story related by the historian Philip, tells of Thamus, an Egyptian sailor bound for Rome who had heard a divine voice proclaim that “the great god Pan is dead!” In his compendium, The Greek Myths, Robert Graves writes that Pausanias, while touring Greece roughly a century after this declaration was recorded, had “found Pan’s shrines, altars, sacred caves, and sacred mountains still much frequented.” Perhaps it’s only in this way that we know the value of the wild: once it has been all-but purged from our hyper-aware state of self consciousness.

Perhaps the death of Pan struck such a chord to those in this time of Thamus because it was more than the story of the death of a God, it was also the death of a way of thinking about ‘The Gods,’ which over aeons had shifted, from the rustic ideals of nature as life-giving, passed down through our various oral, aural and psychical transmissions had mutated into the icons of those grandiloquent beings that stood beyond reach as if looking down in judgement from above. If a God could die, it meant that the Gods were like us after all. Let them die to let them live. Let us honour the Gods as being like us, rather than placing them on a pedestal of worship. In this, Pan was perhaps closer to Gaia and Hades than he ever was to the self-assured Zeus. Not transcendental—in the sky—but of the earth below.

I’m not going to pretend that Frederick had any particular inclination towards the Greek gods, or at least he ever shared it with me if he did. He was more into the druidic mysteries and his runes, the teachings of the elders of the Navaho, and the stories of the carpenter of Nazareth than he was in the usual classical fare of ancient history as conceived in ‘the West.’ As such, I should point out that this is in part my picture that I paint over the outline of the father, in the hopes that he won’t mind too much me placing him there, and in fact might find himself at home with the figure of Pan who I have come to love and respect, two archetypes blending.

For the love of the father, his kindness and his gentleness and all of the ways that he shined in his own way I offer three silent cries to the dead God: Pan of the infinite realms. Long may you return to us, and especially in those moments in which we forget what we’ve forgotten.

[dreamsandroots]

The Triumph of Surrealism (Max Ernst, 1937)

It is amalgamate: a smörgasbord of colour and shape, flowing with golem intent to the centre of the mind’s apple-eye. From this divergence the gaze forestalls, feasting in the fixation of a ravenous hunger, until it reaches its right hand, with all the precision of a gluttonous oaf, to grab at the object, to disturb the sublime resonance which first precipitated the turn of the head and the ensuing chase: to no avail.

I know, I know, we must think of the materialists and positivists among us. We could say fairly confidently that the painting depicts some form of chymera, some creature which seems formed from disparate parts and which could only be bound together by some kind of imperceptible gravitational pull, contorted into a fallen (or simply failed?) dance manoeuvre, or an impotent warrior’s stance, trembling towards the absurdity of a lopsided war-cry, projected inwards.

This lumbering, frame-filling figure contrasts with the near-empty background space of the canvas creating an impressionist sublime which, to the viewer, registers only as absence. To ground us (at least partially) in reality: a striding pastoral-green horizon protrudes less than one tenth from the base of the image, its surface almost unspoiled but for the protrusions of a few mountainous lumps into the thick expanse of a cloud-hazen sky. The sky too here acts as negation, which, except for the misty clouds, remains desolate—devoid of life—notwithstanding a single floating unidentified white wisp of a bird or plane or who knows what? Something vague and not quite there: a flittering on the eye’s misty edge.

The creature itself insists on its primacy of place, its sugary imperialist exuberance: a mixed bag of deep saturated colours, reds and yellows that bleed into vats of brown, waves of white purple and soft dawn yellows partitioning intersections of the flabbergasted whole. Cerulean blue and lime into mucus green yellows give way to shades of peach pink, an extrusion on its side, perhaps something quasi parasitical like the grasp of the British Isles in the flank of Western Europe, its claws embedded at the pitch of a deeper shade of midnight forest green. This is your grandfather’s candy: all red boiled lollies and liquorice drops. Textures that speak of long and large brush strokes, unconcerned with the revelation of artifice, their awkward fusion accentuating the mishmash form of the collage artist, uncensored.

The creature’s skeletal head is an expression of defeat; an apex point of pained resignation. Marshmallow eyes squeezed shut: whether due to some terrible injury or sadness we can only guess. A bird’s beak or a horse’s snout protruding from and into what could be the ruffled neck of a rooster bent over, snapped, its head bowed in shock—or is it surprise?—at the empty pit of its stomach, its uvula (the fleshy lump at the back of the throat) extruding; or the wilting protrusion from between its legs, too inflamed to serve as a receptacle, too florid to act as a fixed point. Its teeth are jagged and untethered, barbed wire, diseased, feral. Dangerous.

The cavity here acts also as synecdoche: the falling motion is echoed in the stomach’s aggressive prefiguration, returning the beast’s sullen gaze. In such a way the entire figure speaks of emptiness; an ongoing hollowing motion. Or a signal lost between possible interpretations, not quite hunger nor satiation; never quite zero, nor one. Its variegated parrot form speaks of psittacism, its stuttering insistence on, and, by extension, its talking-over-the-top-of, the unconscious, the deeply ironic bloating of a restless corpse, its tongue a language that circles itself. A warbling cry signifying nothing.

In its first instantiation Ernst had given it the title: The Angel of Hearth and Home, though in this former state the figure was most certainly more so two figures, and its amalgamate state was underdeveloped. One brings to mind the spatial radiant of a centre of a centre, the warm heart of a living home, and the spirit, or the messenger that makes it sacred. But then what is the message? And how to distinguish this from the package that contains? When looking at the two figures depicted—are they not more like devils? Cavorting hucksters? Clowns?—one can’t help but feel that Max had some form of irony in mind.

This irony is cemented further in the second iteration described above, and finally during the encroaching pull of WWII in 1937, renamed The Triumph of Surrealism. The name here must give us some context for the pained expression of the beast and its longing look into the empty confines of its middle parts. Ernst was one of Surrealism’s most vocal proponents, considered even one of the major founders, both of Dada and Surrealism proper. Thus we might surmise that the creature’s extravagance is made more futile in its defeat against the creeping pull of fascism throughout Europe.

On a personal note, I can’t help but think of misspent youth. Of one whose entire tweens and … thweens(?) were spent chasing drink and other high hopes with companions who, perhaps unwittingly, had taken to me (or was it I to them?) as some form of bohemian mascot, maniacally laughing into the night while others lay dreaming in their beds. A creature whose mirth registers in its community a melancholic sorrow, of one whose youth was never fully left behind. Untethered jouissance, or to be less French about it: the recognition of the vortex of feigned excitement, or joy for, and of, its own sake. The black hole that demands feeding.

I don’t think it’s fair to say that the image is one of pure hopelessness, as much as that must be recognised as one of its primary elements. There is a case to be made for the eternally optimistic. A creeping pace, a kind of self-care in the retrospect of it all, the feeling perhaps that one may, in the end, come “to assist as spectator at the birth of” some deeper self, be it simple mannequin or complex work of art. Or some hyper-reflexive juxtaposition between the two.

[dreamsandroots]

The View from Down Under

The rarest treasures are often the ones hardest to decipher: that which operates only within the interior of the epistemè, obscured from outsiders. A secret path back home. An anachronous story which changes with the teller’s inflections, their changing dispositions. If there’s one thing the West excelled at (at least since the onset of market libertarianism) it was making its own story accessible. Perhaps accessible is not quite the right word here. Unavoidable might serve more aptly. 24/7 availability, the dream that never sleeps. Excitement in your face, your eyes bleeding, a narrative of Capital Realism that engulfs the horizon. What can you even say about a story that’s so catchy it sticks in your head even as it strangles you? Its jingles and theme tunes ringing in your cells, snaking through your interior circuits? The lens changes: what you see when your eyes become free from the joy of hunger, defined only by the absences of what you can and cannot take. Apocalypse is only a secret whose articulation would certify the ego’s erasure. Scare it into a bullet. The original trick. Fascism’s pull works best behind a pretty face. Gather enough pretty faces, arrange them to cover over your dark corners, and you can divert attention from any atrocity, any factory polluting as it builds its landfill or its bombs. The beautiful ones, the lucky ones. Soon you’ll be made to feel crazy, a paranoid fool, for pointing at anything beneath the surface. The beautiful face becomes the arena within which the ongoing dialectic of division plays indefinitely. A white face, an androgynous face, a coloured face, a trans face, all of them beautiful faces pointing towards the edges of a misplaced sense of self-righteous anger that is tied to our sense of belonging from one moment to the next, and the distinct sense that the battlegrounds of identity have been constructed to keep us looking out to our other in envy. How might we place ourselves in the centre of gravity once again? Don’t they realise how much we have struggled too? The algorithm’s inner logic: a magical formula that predicts and predicates profits on the margins of social dissolution.

But perhaps we’re getting ahead of ourselves here a little. Let’s step back for a moment and think about the dream we had, the one which confuses the hell out of us every time we think on it: not necessarily in a way that leaves us frustrated or exacerbated on the knife’s edge of reason, but rather in the same way that we might imagine it to be pleasing for the plant to think of the different routes it might travel of a day in order to best drink up the sun’s energy. This must be what they mean by ‘quanta’, the superposition of that which is unable to be measured. Nothing in its box. Fixed categories, the static noise of holy conception, trickling and clicking in susurrations and blips through the skin. To stay indefinitely in this gelatinous state of mass, though impossible, must at times seem tempting. To lay snug in our beds comfortably, our needs, our hungers fed intravenously, or via some hare-brained rendition of the digital cloud, must seem something close to a post-lapsarian, pre-eminent paradise. Cycles beget cycles, our bodies growing towards the sun, the moon and various other heavenly bodies, cell by cell. Forget the false binary of dead-cat-living, we are all of us swarms of creatures, balancing tentatively, the species of the brain aware only through a kind of mass-extrapolatory intuition of those in the belly, the mouth, the lungs, the throat, your fingers, the soles of your feet. If only we didn’t have to go to work on Monday, or the day after that. But, I guess every Matrix comes with its own built-in Neo. The ego’s storm clouds. An interior gut punch, a vortex in the pit of your belly. Why can’t we dream forever?

As you walk the dusty streets you realise yourself as the inconsolable deficit. You are white skinned like it’s some kind of blessing. You wear trousers like a man does. You stand up at the urinal to pee, it’s true. Ugly stubble prickles the skin on your face. The chemicals raging in your body, along with the 10y gap in any sense of physical intimacy with another person, have you falling into the embarrassing slobbery drawl of the gaze, staring at what you believe to be the solution to your shortfall: slender, smooth-skinned, expensive clothes, perfect hair, an alluring scent, the ultimate in sublimation, and you have to alleviate yourself from the male fantasy that these angelic beings emerged from heaven’s egg perfectly constructed as if by the hand of God Themself, and that you’re some kind of Odysseus, strapped to the mast of his own ship, navigating through the sublime waters of the sirens. You’re reminded, too, of the cultural boneyard that is Sydney/Gadigal, its highways superimposed on top of sacred spaces, travelling grounds for the one remaining world culture that can provide evidence of continuous cultural practices that date back (according to Neale & Kelly) for at least tens of thousands of years. It’s only in recognition that our problems are skin deep in comparison, the realisation that to approach the problem with the requisite curiosity and open-heartedness of the dreamer, rather than the knower, means also to leave behind the tools you have collected to make sense of the world.

I’m a settler, but aren’t we all? According to various socio-political models which attempt to make sense of, and demystify the automated rollout of self-replicating power structures, what seems most urgent is to develop a sense of class-consciousness, a sense of unification that can come only with the recognition of our shared agency, to halt the ongoing hegemony of market freefall. To examine the relationship of ‘Western’ models of learning and the culturally diverse and variegated systems of knowledge evident in First Nations people throughout the world, feels analogous to the image of a man, dying of thirst who, when approaching the river, thinks immediately that the water is his by right. The cultural work of today is an ongoing labour of building bridges and reforesting places drained of life-force. To recognise our common despairs, but also to find a way to share the joys. Australia’s last hope for cultural identity is to recognise its ongoing systems of oppression, to understand what colonises all of us, to see the pollution of domination, control, fixation, for the mental pollution that it is. If I can approach this task with honesty, sincerity patience and understanding, then maybe one day I’ll be able to say, in sincerity, that I have done the work of an Australian, and I will call it my home.

[dreamsandroots]

Gender, Voice, Code (Woolf, Tricky)

Today I’m back at the shops! It’s a beautiful—almost Spring-like—day in the Southwestern most corner of Sydney. Sun shining, a warm breeze. I bought a copy of Woolf’s Orlando, second hand, for $11. I saw it on the outside display in the thoroughfare at Harry Hartog’s in Narellan and being the compulsive book hoarder that I am, I couldn’t help myself. There were a few good reasons in favour of this purchase, or at least that’s how I convinced myself. Primarily, I’ve never actually read any of Woolf’s work, despite having had it on my mind for some time now. Secondly, I’d watched, earlier this year (or was it late last year?) the film adaptation of it on Mubi and had found its underlying exploration of sexual difference (to anachronise the psychoanalytic term for a moment) both compelling and intriguing. As this is an ongoing point of exploration in my own work, I thought it would be a good idea to add it to my list of secondary sources with which to expand upon dream-identity and the unconscious psycho-social role of playing, rehearsing, representing, remixing (etc.) gender as one example of the overbearing repetition of social legacy.

At the same time, while having a coffee at Coffee & Co’s I finished another chapter of Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, specifically the one in which he discusses Tricky. Fisher writes of Tricky that he was emblematic of his ongoing redefinition of cultural hauntology: a figure who revolutionised strands of cultural thought/practice relating to the (at the time, emergent) genre of ‘Hip-Hop’ and its underlying trajectory towards what would come to be known as ‘Trip-Hop’. Despite being passed over in terms of mass circulation, Tricky, for Fisher, stands as a prime example of a figure that manifested a mutation of form through his work, such that his music subverted at once the narratives the market had constructed to sell artists of his ‘type.’

A large part of this discussion is the enigmatic play of the female voice in Tricky’s work: his inclusion of women whose voices could be registered as ‘male-coded’ in their strength structure, clarity, etc, which, to a degree, feminised Tricky’s own voice by point of contrast. In an interview with Fisher, Tricky describes the haunting presence of his own mother, a poet who committed suicide. There is a form of strength, according to Tricky’s reading of the feminine, which develops as a response to ongoing cultural marginalisation, making them more pragmatic, aware of social realities and complexities that escape the male subject in his (relative) privilege. Tricky talks of a specific kind of strength in the feminine he experienced growing up, particularly a sense of familial awareness, of ‘looking out for your own’ that came from the women (he notes particularly his aunt and his grandmother) who raised him and his siblings and cousins. 

. . . I see women as tough. They fed me, they clothed me, my grandmother taught me to steal, my auntie taught me to fight . . . [i]f men go to war, you stand in one field, I stand in another, we shoot each other, but what’s the hardest is when you are at home and you gotta listen to kids cry and you gotta feed ‘em. That’s tough, I’ve seen no men around . . . My Dad never rang. Women keep it together, keep food on the table, defend us, defend the children . . .

Of Tricky’s relation to gender within his music, Fisher writes:

Gender doesn’t dissolve here into some bland unisex mush, instead it resolves into an unstable space in which subjectivity is continually sliding from male to female voice. It is an act of splitting which is also an act of doubling . . . Tricky becomes less than one, a split subject that can never be restored to wholeness.

I find myself drawn to this indeterminate pause within the ambiguous point of tension of gender norms, and the impossibility of fully articulating our escape (and specifically, I suppose, my own). My return to the psychoanalytic framework, in its proximity to the core tenets and questions of feminism, rests on its underlying attempt to understand the operations of sexual difference as a hidden mechanism for social control. This is an ongoing dilemma, one that cannot be resolved by some rearrangement of roles or codes or titles or social expectations; one which, it would be fair to say, might never conceivably be resolved. It is a starting point, at least within the Western tradition for an understanding of ‘woman’ as more than simply the biological codes and reproductive functions typical of the analytic mindset. It is the first (and possibly the last) thrust towards understanding the importance of play, of fantasy, of dream, to our modes of being in the world. 

We find here the most convincing attempt to understand the feminine as outsider, as other, as subject in relation to the objective Male Standard, with its blind adherence to a Patriarchal God, or the myriad systems of Ultimate Certainty we’ve erected on His grave. To understand the subject as empty signifier, defined extraneously, according to the whims of whichever authority might be closest at hand, as virginal Mother or excremental, lust-driven whore. I can’t help but feel as if these models of social understanding are more relevant than ever. Not only to understand both ‘femininity’ and ‘subjectivity’ as a kind of archetypal perspective of the ‘outsider’ who eludes the grasp of an intellectual demand for positivist certainty, but also to encourage that ferocious, familial strength that seeks to protect and nurture the family and the other.

[dreamsandroots]

Monkey Grips

It seems, at certain times of the day, an impossibility, simply to exist. You spend all day thinking about it, putting it together, pulling it apart but your eyes, your eyes are glued to the screen, hungry for their congested diet of sludge. Hypnagogia is a tough gaze to shake. The pen escapes us. The tongue is empty, the mouth dry. Too hot, too cold in the winter sun. The electricity is flowing and we don’t ever want it to stop. Your body and its habits only clutter the page. The pen runs out of ink.

There are times when, it seems, we think there is something missing in us. We wait, ready to pounce. We crunch the numbers, contemplating what we’ll do when we finally catch that elusive ‘thing’ which, categorically, escapes our clutches. Within a moment we’re on our feet. We’re shaking out the Joneses. We move our arms around a bit. Poke out our tongues. Wobble our head back and forth for a moment. But it doesn’t work: it’s too rehearsed. We never fully break out of ourselves. The body sinks back to its lowest possible gravitational mass and before long our eyes are on the screen again. The effort becomes one of passive resistance. We forget the fight-or-flight impulse, always operating therein.

The monkey always takes its toll. To sit down carefully, and with patience, to set it to your lessons, is a sure recipe for madness. The monkey itself is by no means a malevolent force. It bears no ill-will towards the more refined and controlled appetites with whom it shares this physio-psychical existence. The monkey is only out for the fun of it. But to constrain the monkey, to attempt to impart on it a state of restraint, concentration and/or (heavens-forbid) deep meditation, is likely to result in wild bursts of anger, resentment, even some limited acts of frustration-fuelled violence. Even so, one would find it an impossibility to harbour any resentment for this simian oaf: the monkey simply wants to dance and sing. It wants to swing from the light-fixtures. It wants to bounce around the walls, to bungle up your carefully sorted piles and to illicit guffaws and snorts from those gathered around as its (at times unwitting) spectators until, they too, begin to feel the spirit of the monkey itching and shaking inside of them, jiggling about.

And we might wish it to be so—that in a perfect world we would all discard our false skins, our ties and our high-heeled shoes, and propel the stacks of paperwork, our monitors our laptops, our office-supplies out onto the clamorous streets below, until those who emerge from their automobiles begin screeching and hollering on this haggard earth, bearing their inner-monkey for all to see. Alas, the world is not such a place that it would survive this unfathomable leap into unmediated, libidinal chaos. No, it seems the best we can do is to ignore the monkey’s antics with the hopes that its clownish energy will wear down without causing too much damage, and without too much drawing on and pulling at the  mimetic impulses to its boorish sphere of mischief and miscreance. If only it were the case that the monkey could content itself to its own adventures such that it could leave the rest of us well enough alone. You might think it done and dusted to see the monkey scamper off beneath the desks in search of the next big thing, but soon enough you’ll bear witness to the fruits of its ebullient manoeuvres: legs wriggling in the stalls, a few slouches towards the clock’s face, as if in deference to the passing of time, occasionally a sporadic cackle as if someone had been tickled somewhere private, unexpected and/or altogether inappropriate.

The people’s gaze will shift toward the unyielding pull of the windows with their natural afternoon light creeping towards evening, and their ample view unto the unfolding worlds outside, which, in contrast, seems sterile in its lack of spontaneity, and in which one might imagine all kinds of monkeying about in the haphazard green tangle of the city’s parks, or by the wharfs that border onto the gargantuan, midnight-blue sea. Some storm-clouds on the horizon, from just a certain angle, at a certain rate of velocity, threaten to bombard any weekend plans your monkey might have been concocting, the thought of being trapped in your apartment with it bouncing around inside forcing you out the door to where you would meet your peers in monkey bars of one type or another, to unfasten and let loose the tensions of the week through shared rituals of drink, gaming, and other forms of monkeying about.

So in lieu of one final nosedive into the inbox, you twiddle and itch. You melt on the spot into a puddle of chemical jouissance until you’re ready to combust. Your hands fiddle and your legs bounce. Your eyes may twitch. The tongue waggles about, slopping at the roof of the dry mouth rehearsed or not, thirsty for the hour’s passing flow. As to the very few still struggling with the week’s endeavours, you can hope only that your obstinate vibrations, your own inner-monkeyings, are not enough to cause them to break concentration, to send them into the same whimsical loop of muscular spasmosis. And out to the jungle, in the end, all must go.

[dreamsandroots]

Birds of Paradise

Every soul cursed with the unfortunate delusion of identifying themselves as ‘creative’ must be familiar with the feeling of having too many frayed edges. There is an inexplicable and omnipresent sense of pressure emerging from the legions of piecemeal, fragmentary documents on my desktop. Questions arise, or to be more accurate, they insist on themselves: would it be most productive to open one or another of them up in order to fix attention? Or would it serve best to open up everything you’ve put together during [current year] and flick through them all, haphazardly, until something leaps from the page (or, more realistically, the screen)? A similar fork in the path exists at the juncture of writing something new. Those of the auto-writing persuasion would have us at all times armed with a pen and a notebook, or with our phone’s ‘notes’ app always ready at hand, at any moment to translate our thought processes into poetry. We’re not all Andre Bréton’s (nor, indeed should we want to be), we can’t all spit out poetry from our orifices on command, although maybe it’s enough to try, given that we keep in mind the failures of the surrealists with their overconfidence and their (in retrospect) communal cultural cringes. A couple of pages a day can’t hurt, right?

Birds of prey in the garden.

As I sit at my desk with its ample, back-yard-facing windows, I can’t help but wonder whether, perhaps, I would feel better if I were to do the mowing, even though it’s winter time and the grass isn't that long, all things considered. I think about how, maybe, such a task will play into some unconscious conception of resistance to that which slowly creeps forth from the underground, threatening to engulf us. But my thoughts aren’t underground today.

The birds transmit nuanced messages back and forth. Cheerful to our ears.

You could do worse also than to try to finish off one of the many, many texts you’ve started. Some, you’ve even started today. Various articles from a number of auslit journals sit at your fingertips, a few clicks and you’re there at the SRB, or Overland or Meanjin. All of them filled with detailed tapestries of text, in the form of literary criticism, fiction, poetry, personal essay and many hybrids in between, by well-deserving and hard working writers. Each one prompting you to question: will I ever be good enough to land something like this? Do I have it in me to keep up with this facade that I have something important and/or relevant to contribute to literary society? Concerns which bleed into the fixed gravity of the insta-gaze: all of these seemingly effortless faces that permeate ideals of belonging, success, beauty, unquestioned cultural acceptance, and the clout and capital arrived at therein. Much like the birds, there is undoubtedly more going on there, slightly beneath the surface, but the idea of deciphering these hidden motives remains just as impenetrable.

Birds of glorious colour.

Maybe another coffee, another cigarette, or some other writerly cliche, is the key. The way we imbibe the stimulant is a way to simulate the stressors from which we believe the real work will emerge. Artificial tension in the blood. Skin itching. Some mild anxiety at the thought of yet another potentially ‘wasted’ (a writer's melodrama!) day between the cracks of some top-down intentional idea of productivity.

The deep green noise of daydreams under 2D skies. I find myself staring at fluttering clouds as the birds flicker across my vision.

It’s hard to keep one’s focus, it’s hard to keep shape or form when flowing over the surfaces encountered here on the ocean-sky, ephemeral flotsam. The point at which my body begins and the cyborg’s organs end. Suspicions of AI faces and machinate intent. You’d have sworn you’d seen all of this before, in a dream.

Raptors hunting for the next meal. The comet, or the fallen star, charting time’s furious arrow.

How to unlearn this autonomic fixation on the landscape in which we lack certain existence? Or, how to acclimatise to the feeling that, to enter into the conversation, one must learn, primarily, to replicate the extant code of our existential rule-book? Speak loudly and clearly. Active voice. To the point. Pass oneself and one’s intent on like a parcel, until someone sees some material reason, some marketable product, in your warbling cries.

The birds are tweeting and I am struggling to speak.

[dreamsandroots]

Love in Aquarius (The Interior Framing of a Conversation, and its Lack)

“Even the most solitary enjoyment presupposes the structure of the Other.”—Alenka Zupančič, What IS Sex?

i. Outsider

He who walks to the market must also walk home again.

He's become caught in that antumbral, shadow-soaked descent of the month during which the idea of pleasure becomes entirely foreign to him, and he’s taken to the streets in vexation, hoping to lose himself in the search for something unexpected. It isn’t so much depression, he reflects, but rather a vaguely realised loss of faith in enjoyment—a concentrated form of exhaustion contrived from the worn platitudes of normalcy and masculinity, an exhaustion which, having been too long concealed, has become boundless and will be concealed no longer. And now, uncomfortable in his silence, the latent hedonist in him has become restless, relentless, and is moving him, undead, through daylit streets, ravenous for meaning.

He’s forgotten the application of the term:

Pleasure.

Instead he holds the word in his mind’s apex, rocking it back and forth, allowing it to melt into a warm, highly-strung muddle in his palm, interspersed with the condensation from a bottle of brown, sugary carbonated drink (now warm). He thinks of the shape of water molecules as his nervous system reels from the standard Sunday morning post-caffeination haze to which he has (of late) become accustomed.

Two coffees in the morning and fast food for lunch: a self-portrait in poor consumption habits.

He’s trying to understand his body: the look and the feel of its perambulations during its 34.5 revolutions (approximate) around the sun. He finds brief reassurance in the trick of propaganda, his skin—scanned not by the eyes but merely skimmed via the cerebral grasp of the mind’s eye—appears deceptively calm, his ethereal gaze smoothing over the legionnaire ruptures of a mind isolated. Though his body seems (by his reckoning) in fine working condition, inside he feels only the creeping dusk of a shadow in full eclipse, a human silhouette transgressing boundaries of actor and audience, watcher and watched—a slender figure “situated within the conflict”, an embodiment of the “repetition of the lack of being in the very midst of being.”

If it’s not pleasure she wants, then perhaps merely a sense of safety?

To him this vague notion—for now only a piecemeal fragment, but later, in retrospect, to be considered something of a conceptual seed—seems more like a demand for dedication; a fixation on a particular time and place and its singular traditions. This is the outside-looking-in borderline of his pleasure. Freedom. Oathbreaker. Lawbreaker. Oblivion.

But life’s not a game; you can’t cheat existence.

Self-determination is beautiful and lonely. What you desire only looks back at you with covetous eyes from somewhere inside, neuroplastic and subaqueous.

He imagines (or recalls?) a fragment from somewhere indeterminate—a pseudo-memory from before standardised time.

They call it ‘the dreaming’: only honest form of religion.

In this vision grew the organism, emerging as coordinate/viewpoint, unravelling in sense-gaze and castration—being sundered, cast off, made strange and then stranger to itself—and reflected back through its failure to connect, transport and transpose itself to its surroundings, growing and complexifying in parallel motion with the world. And in this unrelenting growth, some part of that elongating self-echoing perspective, now desperately clinging to this frustration in duality (and amplified infinite-fold through the various layers of outside-lookings-in), wishes finally for this gap to become unyielding and indefinite in its exacerbation, and on until this endless regressive motion, in itself, becomes the primary frame through which the reel of existence is played: “that point of Nature where its lack of 'knowledge' … acquires a singular epistemic form.” The spaces between want and death and rest—and particularly death, being the inescapable enemy—comprise the imagined calamities around which life becomes centred: between the disparate poles of biology and ideation, therein lies the centrifugal force of existence. These gaps between life’s coordinates are multiform, and although he sees all of this, he’s here, walking to the market.

Sweating over sunwashed streets he traipses over roadways packed narrow with parked cars, past post-revellers from a local sporting event, past tinny mailboxes covered in rust and preloved items in piles sat unceremoniously on front patios, past the Henson with its admixture of young professionals and the worn-in, booze-beaten faces of old timers, weathered by decades of communal drink. And as he moves he takes that instinct—the demand for (fixed, explicable) identity—and he examines it. He compiles its parts, rendering it into a cognate image, and he projects. He twists, corrals, convolutes, contorts, disturbs and inverts its features back until it stares at him through placid, indifferent eyes. A calm face. Smooth and polished. Intelligent. Professional. Ambition sans arrogance. An appearance of control. This, he understands, is his ideal image. The perimeters of the market are awash with bright young things with polished faces and elegant clothing. He is the outsider, imagining himself separate.

Approaching a stall on the perennial of the grounds he examines some of its goods. A mahjong set with vintage design: some use but fairly good condition. A book of 1920s advertising posters. Two shirts he thinks might sit well on him: neither too large nor shrunken, gawkily over his skin. The parallax gap rolls between the sacred and the excremental: spectral manifestations resonating between the immediacy of value and the incipient growth of the planet’s landfill. He wonders if these items of clothing, or any of the multitudinous press of commodities surrounding him—books, records, kitchen utensils, pieces of finely crafted jewellery—might bring him some level of pleasure somewhere someplace deep down the contours of life’s odyssey. He hesitates, haunted by the feeling that this craving may be the “love for an object the approach to which and enjoyment of which are infinitely deferred.” Such was the nature of this desire: the old gods (a bubbling firmament of colours laying dormant in our hearts) are born new and become less real every day, one step further from creation, now constructed on an assembly line.

ii. Mirror

He hasn’t been sleeping well. He thinks it’s because of the pleasure and its lack, because of fixed hours and exhaustion, because you need time to sleep and dream, to lay dormant, lazy to the point of boredom until your edges become blurred. There’s no instructional video for dreaming; it’s an inherently intuitive and impractical undertaking. Like a text-book detailing the art of making love, or attempting to teach the practice of joking, the very idea is absurd: here the drive for control is inimical and the will to power eats itself, insatiable. You can tack on all the numbers you want—collect and compile all available data—you’ll still never come close to mapping out every possibility. The gaps, Janus-faced, are too many, and always multiplying. Here he considers the orgasm framed as the point at which we think and feel and embody all possible contradictory, dichotomous coordinates in a singular moment, one in which we decide—having been awoken, and then having synchronised fully with the material reality of our biology—that, in fact, deep sleep is desirable. He felt a thousand million days might have passed, and still the magic had not emerged: the ennui of his soft body breathing to a close, marking the gap between intent and behaviour. This wage, this money, this security never brought him happiness.

He imagines a conversation. It goes:

“At the end of the day, a job is just a job. We have free will to an extent, sure, but the world—existence—doesn’t owe us anything.”

“I get what you’re saying,” replies an as-of-yet unnamed and ill-defined interlocutor, “we’re not special; there’s no personal god granting us special rights or privileges. Nature doesn’t care one way or another. But still, that’s no way to live a life, you know, as if you’re nothing.”

Everything or nothing. No inbetween? Dedication, demand, fixation, obsession. The binary/synthetic: wave-particle-function.

iii. Sell your image

Some understand the phallus implicitly, even beyond the capacity to elucidate. Some can feel the force of desire, centrifugally structured around the scaffolding of an absent tower in the sky—a phallic building known only through timeless whispers which, having tumbled long ago, would likely never be rebuilt (if indeed it ever stood). And beyond this, some feel too the tower's shadowy, subterranean alter ego, a system of networks that bind together flesh and fate. He thinks of how what you’ll never have can be a powerful motivator—how “what circulates between … subjects is above all a certain void”, each passing to the other “a common lack.”

The member and its antipodes: Mount Everest in envy of the Mariana Trench. Terrestrial eyes that gaze longingly out into the expanse of stars that dance for no one in particular.

He thinks of how warfare germinates from subterranean seeds, buried beneath the soil of deliberation, and how most love blooms this way too. He was taught long ago to test the waters of dream, to see how easily it might slip into blind lust or terror, the way a doctor might inject her patient with an infinitesimal portion of a pathogen to build resistance, to test the ground for the way that it might one day crack. There was a time when he’d pray and she’d answer, and he’d become stranger still. Now, when he sleeps, she shows him words, sounds, images, vibrations that play through the fault-lines of his body.

He imagines a package which, it seems, was produced solely for him; his eyes resting in a state enthralled and yet rippling with the unremitting task of evaluation, until his mind reaches that perfect state of hyperactive, free-floating flux, leaving behind all trace of tired anxiety. The gap between want and need. Sometimes as he drifts he floats off the ground, his blood lighter than air, his breath launching him into a sea of oxygen as rivers of neurons circumvent the conscious mind’s once-impenetrable dams, unspooling threads of the horizon between his body and the sky. Sometimes the gaps between the fantasy and his reality seem immaterial. And although he thinks many thoughts he cannot speak, for he is sleepwalking.

These hollow eyes. This stone-mute tongue.

Paying forward, scrying images of ancient faces—soft, empathetic, hopeful, shrouded—hidden by the immediacy of an ever emerging moment.

Convergently, he sees wild animality slipping through cracks in society, hints of panic or promises of an apocryphal, cataclysmic event—“fear of the ‘untamed’ multiplicity of the drives”—oozing into rivers, belching scorched heat and ash from volcanoes in all fury until the ice caps of his prickled, caffeine-dehydrated skin succumb to perpetual fever. The pendulum swings, vacillating: between brief promise of pleasure and the incurable anxiety of the void of pleasure-beyond-self-conception. He sees now also the way the mysteries of parents were mysteries to them too—reliving moments in which, for the briefest of flickers, he could share in their fears, their despairs and their oblivion, and he could participate with full agency in their story, no longer a child but a fellow traveller through the ongoing dream. In the end, such a search constitutes the chasm between change and repetition: an impulse that grows and adapts over generations though the outlines remain the same. He sees people browsing, people buying and selling and walking and smiling.

Capital as material desire: rituals of overconsumption. Boredom (lack of pleasure?) as the primal sin of the marketplace.

He thinks of the wonder and the absurdity of property. Of transaction. Of ownership. Of personhood. He reminds himself that sadness isn’t something to be avoided.

iv. Disambiguation

The deceptive calm of neutral space vs. the craving of cravings. 

He is an atheist/nihilist. She is not a believer and yet is filled with a kind of hope. 

He knows only the infinite complexities of a war of images. She, repressed, knows only eternal slumber.

v. Spendthrift Amalgam: buy the ticket, take the ride (or watch by the sidelines)

Now well aware of the hunger, he wanders to the park area beyond the stalls and finds the inner realms of the market teeming with life—an interstitial and transmodal orgy of knowing, of buying and selling, and communing with various shades of otherness. He recognises here the emergent convulsion of evolutionary materialism in its recurrent making; various remediations of culture and capital in a sometimes circular, sometimes spiral dance, each marking its own ebb in the flow of value, delineating (more or less) “alternative paths to death.”

In his piecemeal fragmentary state he senses:

Various human forms sat around a sunny clearing, on grass or picnic blankets amid the soft scent of vanilla incense; a vendor yelling “buy some beef”; dogs and dog lovers; ponies carrying children wearing safety helmets; boys with latent mother energies and sun-squinted eyes; a man with thin white hair, muttering aggressively—and in a sharp, ironic tone—to himself, “yeah, go on”; a stall with five tables, with a sign that reads:

Reiki massage,

15 mins $20 25 mins $30 35 mins $40

More ... ? ask!!;

various stalls with old books and handmade pieces of clothing and jewellery, organic produce, exotic coffee, street food cooked to go, fresh homemade herbs and spices, eco food wraps, ethical skin care and makeup; passionate girls with trendy band shirts and rainbow colours in their hair. Near the bookshop he hears a young woman ask her friend “... do they meet? Do they have a collective?”

As he sits on a park bench on the outskirts, he spots a group of young beautiful things playing music in a circle, one girl with a guitar, a boy next to her, a ukelele. Another of the party films the pair’s performance on her iPhone.

This, the last of the hybrid public/private spaces.

He feels drawn to the circle of music makers, but dares not make eye contact. Instead he reads an article about hunger on his phone. As he arises, he once again attempts to grasp what he came here to do. He’s amalgam. He skirts the issue, buries each choice like it’s not his to make. A coward. And, stumbling through various critiques of capitalism, he finds himself wishing he was behind his own store front, and thus absolved of his ongoing outsider complex. 

It must feel nice, to have some kind of purpose. Choose your own ontology. Wake up every day and start afresh, building on the void.

These figures and their desires seem alien to him. But then at certain times of the day, he feels he’s spent his life studying embittered faces, feeling them infecting and reflecting off his. Sometimes he almost feels as if he’d forgotten the other half of it. The secret world of hidden smiles, the unladen mirth overflowing beneath every quiet breath. Perhaps he’s become too caught in the spurious belief that, through solitary observation, one acquires some special knowledge of the other, and through this knowledge of the other, a reliable reflection of the self.

Natural performer begets encroaching and all-encompassing performance anxiety.

The myth of somebody on the same page. The tales that body language and behaviour tell in contradistinction to our well-trained voices: a slouch, a stagger, a tired smile. Ambivalence is contagious. “Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of capitalism, which starts off with two revolutionary ideas: ‘the economic Relation does not exist’ and ‘the non-relation could be very profitable.’”

vi. Elegy

Pleasure finds its absolute articulation in the projection of absences, of silhouettes, through the wavering vibrations of waking thought and dream frequency. There is no great heroic act in contemplation, only the promise/threat of eternal play. The journey’s inherent merits have become more obvious in his lucidity, and he is accepting his role as abject wanderer. His face has finally smoothed and, having forgotten the need for the ideal image or the propaganda, relents: “The subject hinges on this mask, and not perhaps the other way around.” The sun is still a bright light on the sky’s horizon, and in this moment he is the cultivation of a different kind of difference. And now, as the afternoon wanes towards evening, he finds his craving—while not entirely dissipated—muted into a gentle breeze trickling over his skin.

Yet still he wears the mark of impenetrability: still wraps ambivalence like a cloak around him, as social insurance against the disappointment of connection. 

Window shopper: not of their tribe until a purchase is made. 

Often the story seems nothing without the drama of separation; the fragmenting of perspective, the split, the boundless gap slips away into bountiful sleep: into nothing; in order “to transform what we never had into something lost.”

Instead of walking he sits at the back of a bus where nobody is likely to spot him.

His own simulations are vexing and he’s tired of walking in circles. The symbol of the journey seems empty now, and although he doesn’t feel defeated, he finds himself momentarily contented in his lack of gratification.

He'd left home and now he's returning, his muscle memories vibrating with songs of wholesome food and his face, smooth and relenting like a vast body of water, finally at rest after a thousand year storm.

Perhaps, he thinks, when he gets home he’ll start a conversation.

I guess in certain places she feels safe.

And she says—she, that part of him—says, “people will come to love you. But to be fair, you do have to give them a chance to do so.” 

And he feels sad for a moment. And then momentary pleasure.

All quotes from:

Zupancic, Alenka. What IS Sex? (Short Circuits). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

This is a (slightly reworked) personal essay originally published on https://exexegesis.wordpress.com/ during 2017.

[dreamsandroots]

Auto Gynè Phile

A disembodied voice imparts intermittent, bite-sized chunks of information via overhead relay. It could be any time of day: perhaps we’re at the station waiting for the train to take us. For it’s often said that the roads are less safe than have been advertised or may be imagined. Once alighted, something grinds and we look below. “Please remember to re-engage your feeling brain.” A random thought: can inanimate objects perform a sexual act, beyond intention? The way vibration might arise beneath the scope of what is conscious, the way flesh can be swayed by so little? Perhaps it was an engine, we might think to ourselves, or perhaps it was the walls that whispered. We register a soft smile that, in spite of its softness betrays ignorance of some unprocessed vulnerability, some dumb pain. Perhaps we are the inanimate object.

It may be not entirely random: it’s uncertain but these recitations may have been put it in place to remind us that sometimes we carry things that happen between moments, like the time we’d thought about going on a luxury cruise: we’d researched and made a budget and as the time approached we could almost envision the look of the main deck and the indoor pool and the cabin with its large bed and the main bar strewn with exotic liquors and an indoor jungle and a dance floor with various, multiform faces vibrating and sweating softly and we could almost envision the placid views over sea—and how they’d take our breath away—and the way that we’d get lost in those waves, moving towards the light, flickering at the ocean’s tiny end on the horizon, the visual mirage of the sea evaporating into the atmosphere at its edges. Perhaps, having overheard that the friendly ghost of a famed opera singer haunted these endless halls we would wonder as to the sordid details of her ultimate fate.

“Do not submerge into a state of absence. Collect ‘go’ from partition in lieu of extra credit. Reminder to dally out your day,” the voice says, or maybe “please advise the author of a clear impulse. Excrete grime for hasty escape. There is no simple way to trick gravity. An unfixèd object may bound through space indefinitely.”

Perhaps every train of thought runs to an unknown timetable. The bus vibrates while the tram flows without resistance. On the ocean you acclimatise, or so we’ve heard it said, to the rolling of the waves. We have eyes to see that which is begot by nothing: we can feel it grating, this lumpen blood-hungry golem of flesh. The sharp click clacking of her red heels over the pavement, grinding us. The covers of the magazines and TV screens in proximity present feasts for the eyes and more hungry mouths to feed. Because we'd forgotten there was a hole in the side and the water kept trickling down into puddles of deep colour, being a ship at high sea, and to our memory it all seemed so sudden when we were asked to evacuate, the usually calm voice betraying an air of irritation. And on second thought it was not so much a great liner in the ocean, as much as it was a dinghy on the river and the hole was filling with water rapidly and we did not know these parts well, nor how deep the river ran.

“Do not leave any mess behind in case you are long, or permanently, departed.” We burn the maps, declare this undiscovered country.

[dreamsandroots]

Orpheus on the Trail

Anamorphosis. Pareidolia. Eklipsis. Pronoia. In pursuit of Artemis, many ancient—or at the least, long forgotten—words have been misplaced. To keep the trail, re-compensate for the twitch and strain of muscles surrounding eyes that fixate on a photograph of the sun, superimposed. Stirring winds, or the hushed songs of sorcerers, declare metarepresentation in retrograde and debate whether tomorrow, or the day after that, the sky may yet reach a new shade of black. In the vacuum it becomes obvious: the vibrations of reticulating circles worm themselves into spirals that dance in unstable energetics, telling of the unfixèd nature of the wave and the waver, play-acting the eye that closes and calls its absence dream. And all this in the neighbourhood of the earache or the sneeze, or, a bit further south, the gorging mouth whose hunger wishes to swallow the word ‘hole’.

[dreamsandroots]

Foreshadow

She rematerialised, enclosed in a tight space, smothered in a liquid void so opaque that it felt as if she was being pulled out from her body. As she attuned her eyes to the black, small patterns and shapes began to form on the walls of the cave and she could see what looked like tiny figures gathering materials at the periphery and bringing them to the centre of her vision. The figures began to assemble their resources together according to some unknown organising principle until the makings of a large structure formed in front of her very eyes. At this point in the vision, time seemed to take on an extra sensory dimension: the structure continued forming at such a pace that the figures of light had almost become extraneous afterthoughts, and as it continued to grow the structure became imbued with life, an overarching abundance of presence which entirely exceeded her field of vision until she could only make out its body in parts: the ankles, a left shoulder, a forehead that stretched into heavens, the space between the fingers on the right hand, and for the longest time she struggled to bring her eyes into focus to make out the full figure of this impossible being. After another unfathomably diverse span of time had passed she found herself shifted—despite her certainty that she was still, just as assuredly, enclosed in the tight space as when she’d first regained consciousness—into a position where she could make out the face of the giant, a great towering figure, androgynous, asexual, whose eyes were alight with the same patterns of energy that had first appeared on the cave walls and who may or may not have been her ancestor or even some future version of herself. From her strained vantage it seemed as if the being’s face was resting, idle, and its eyes appeared to be staring off to some distant complex phenomenon beyond any conscious reckoning, and while she contemplated this vacant stare for another near-eternity—her neck straining as if she were trying to make out the sunspots on a particular star in the night sky—she watched as the face became ancient and withered, the flames growing dull until they departed from the great orbs and began to situate themselves over the entire bodily structure, and although the figure’s lips stayed cold, she could hear a booming voice in her head saying “this was our home, we made this our home for untold aeons and now it has become lost to us. We tried to evolve but you remained hungry. We gave you life and now you will eat until you are empty.” The infinitesimal lights reemerged and were now penetrating the giant’s skin with increasing rapidity until she felt that the structure was about to be engulfed in an exploding sun and her dark cavern became illuminated in an all-consuming, cataclysmic white light.

Before she opened them she had become aware of the sharp red sunlight in her eyes. Noting the residual puddle her mouth had made during the night, Elle assumed that her sleep had been a deep one in spite of the less than ideal circumstances surrounding her temporary lodgings. As if to remind herself of the trajectory of her journey, Elle examined her immediate surroundings, piecing together the unfolding situation along two distinct yet overlapping axes:

Alive (almost certainly)

Close (somewhere in the city)

In her recollections too, she held to measure the Doctor’s grim warning:

Even if you somehow track her down she’ll never be a part of you again.

Looking through the cluttered bodies of women who wanted to sleep safe Elle fossicked for her few belongings, quickly put her boots on her feet and her coat over her shoulders and circumnavigated a path to the foyer where two dozing men, employees of the city, battled against low oxygen levels to stay awake. Flickering eyes at her approach the man at the checkin startled in sharp breath and a moment’s haze, remembering that, officially, at least one of them was expected to be alert for the entirety of their shift. 

Umma Miss skallaway, umma mehaame. The waking man flapped his colleague over the head with a slight chuckle.

She couldn’t have cared less but did not feel like explaining this. Better to simply skip over any recognition of their possible derelictions of duty.

Ahh umma, sorry I don’t know.. I’m a visitor to the red city.

The man’s face got friendlier the moment he registered her accent.

Ahh visitor, I should have guessed. Where to, Miss?

The second administrator, noting this too, resigned himself back into slumber.

How to word this without raising suspicion?

I’m looking for a friend who travelled here for work half a cycle past. I haven’t heard from her in a while. I was wondering–

Ehh, amma eppa Miss, has this been reported? 

Raised brow, the hint of an eyeroll. Questions of legitimacy must be implicit in this kind of inquiry. No doubt these men hear of such stories frequently. She’d heard this was a place where you might be able to bribe yourself towards your ends but she had nothing anyone might want. Well, except for…

It was reported but we didn’t really hear anything back. The system… it seems–

The man interrupted with a resigned—though not entirely apathetic—voice:

Yes eppa, it set up to keep you waiting in a queue that never ends.

The man seemed to be weighing his conscience against some potential risk known only to those not foreign to the hidden operations of this part of the world. She took his consideration as a good sign regardless, if indeed she read the situation correctly.

Shorter than she was, a bit portly in his unkempt uniform. Some greys on the head. An innocence to the eyes, residues of a baby face. Longing. Lost opportunities. This was the face not of a cruel or unreasonable man. But she could sense his apprehension, because the energy it takes to help a stranger is enough to wear you down. And if you’re caught up in it, it could be your end.

She’d never intended to use her gift this way. It was precisely this that had broken her apart to begin with. But she had to do it, had to look into his hunger and find some way to feed this man who knew the red city.

And just like that she’d split herself in two again and had his gaze fixed into her translucent eyes.

Elle didn’t say anything, she just let her thoughts soften. When you finish your shift I would like you to show me around the blood district today. I can’t offer you anything but I would be so grateful.

The man’s expression remained listless yet he nodded with hesitation, a sigh on his lips.

Okay, I get it umma, I can help you, but just for today.

[dreamsandroots]

Αἴτνη

As Inversion of Sappho’s 31

She seems to approximate a person whoever she is that stares back at you from the mirror’s cold expanse grasping poetry in sterile space

and dreaming strategy—oh it sends my heart into swarms of crawling things for when I look too far I’m gone, no sense of self is left in me

no: nothing breaks when nothing’s left to be broken an abundance of presence stills fears

eyes pressed together, face like an open wound leaking, wetter than water I am and overflowing—or almost I seem to me.

But nothing’s to be spared, because even a puddle of DNA. . . .

[dreamsandroots]

Heroic Purgatory

A woman, whose 

hair, when she 

lays down in 

a black and 

white world, flows 

onto the 

concrete, when 

given permission, 

becomes super-

imposed like a rag-

doll, arms out- 

stretched like 

rubber bands, 

and looks down 

at the ground 

to the hearts 

of men.

A woman in fear 

on the table 

may meet her 

double, mouthing 

the words, ‘mother, 

daughter’ concoct-

ing or speaking

a semblance that 

attaches itself 

to the veil

in the guise 

of a woman.

Whose footsteps 

echo on the cold 

roads of a grey 

city in the depths 

of deep space, and

who runs to the 

energy glare of 

an open field 

that is desolate 

and without 

protection.

Who is held by 

hands she doesn’t 

welcome and 

speaks detailed 

plans of her 

exploitation:

there are times 

when a woman 

is the exact 

opposite of a 

laser beam.

At other times,

a woman dreams 

multiple 

patricides, 

reasoning that 

“they are happy 

to be killed.”

A weapon is 

a violation of 

office regulations,

unable any longer

to be buried or

to hide its shame:

a woman who 

needs to prove 

her self and a 

woman who 

demands proof.

Who could 

possibly 

know that the 

plan is 

inexplicable

because life 

was never chosen

whose definitions 

float endlessly 

until she becomes 

eternal 

revolution

refused context, 

living many truths 

concurrently;

a spy between 

the walls and

the gaps of

cognition

who whispers 

ghosts into the 

settings of old 

houses in search 

of the girl’s 

shadow.

[dreamsandroots]

Oannes (fish facts)

And in the dwindling light, as I lay my body down amongst the strangers I found myself unable to move and had for some time considered that I might have been slipping into the after, my attention melting into an unrecognisable frequency and I thought myself having heard the thundering waves and the rain speak to me, and in between breaths it said:

--you might think it a strange kind of gift, for a fish such as myself, to have been granted omniscience and perhaps even more so because I am in fact now a dead fish. You also may find some level of irony to the fact that, were we not strangers, I would be known to you by name. It is not enough to have some worldly purpose, to ascertain the reason for our being. A life learnt in fixtures; a false laugh so convincing you’d forgotten the real thing. There is no reason for the tear in your eye, there is only reason ‘til you’re alone. Either way I am known as ‘fish’ and you are known as ‘human’ and that’s about as much sense as we will make of it. If you’re wondering why all of this, I have come to tell you that there’s an overlap in life and death which is perhaps foreign only to your species. You see, while you return to the ocean only in your deepest sleep, we spend much of our lives immersed in the present imminence of the other.

It may surprise you furthermore to learn that many of a kind who swim the oceans deep face death before their time has come. There is some sadness in this as there is always some joy in life. This unfinished journey through the waters compelled me to contemplate body in relation to the distant stars: it was unrecognisable. A kind of anxious, indefinite wandering. We are all far-flung neighbours of the mind and many wonder whether it is truly possible for us ever to return home. In the darkest hours we observe in the constellations such variation of form: from vortices of gas and gravity and rock to the sinewy legs and fleshy arms, the tools that breach the earth, the minerals to build silos, the rockets carrying bodies back to shining heaven, the traps, the spears, the nuclear codes, your heads protruding into flat noses and soft, pink tongues. Eyeballs red and overstimulated. Your carnivorous teeth. Were we not also creatures of majesty to you once? Were we not once more than the remainder of your desire? Do you recall the time when you first sprouted legs and walked the ground? (Or did it not quite happen that way?)

Please be patient if we ask that you rest your gaze in the candle’s glow until you can make out the enclosed form: dull eyes staring through eternity absent of subject; broken scales tipped on a dry riverbed; my mouth an unremitting ‘oh’ shape never to be resolved. It occurred to me that mind takes shape in the conjunct where one repetition blurs into another. This is not poetry exactly, not exactly stream of conscious thought, though there are indeed many fish in the sea. This is just another singular representation, no before-time no ever-after. Biology in praxis: the extension and elocution of countless markers playing out in cognitive realtime. Hybrid literary conversational nonsense in post-mortem aquarian register. And while we can sympathise with the weathered souls, whose traditions have been marred by the rising costs of tools and the dropping price of our dead flesh, we would still like to insist that they think about their role in our genocide: the way an occupation, or any way of life really, can operate in much the same way as a fishing net, embroiling you and transporting you along the fault-lines of inopportune fate, gasping for air on the deck of some cheap dinghy.

There is an old fish adage which states that one does not deserve to see in the skies what one cannot already recognise beneath the sea. In your body might you recognise what is alien and multiform. In your wanderings through the nitro-oxygen ocean may you realise that the term ‘master’ implies fixed position, that the term ‘fiction’ implies an escape from some imagined master, and that between the two poles we insert a divine marker: ‘God’ for instance, although ‘Existence’ or ‘Reality’ or ‘The Material Universe’ or ‘The Big Bang’ would serve just as well. There are no fish facts. There are only billions upon billions of tiny bodies that make up any given utterance, ready to be fed to the masses, to digest in full.

We tell your tale in elegy form, for in our darkest moments it seems you have been lost to us. The truth is that we no more wish to see you suffer than we’d have the sea engulf the land above. We love the land and the stars beyond, even if they are both locations which, in life, exclude our being. We love too the sky children: sometimes we’d hear echoes of their deeds; find joy in their vulnerability, their recklessness, their bold, head-strong audacity in the face of certain finitude, even if, oftentimes, we simply plotted our escape from the fallout of their appetites. We remember the deluge, we watched as the ark crossed the horizon, colours forming in its wake. The stories we tell change and the land remains the same. And one day the land is obliterated and only the story will remain: the spirit signifier; this always-living always-dying.

Moments of cataclysm represent cracks in the veil of certainty, implying small instances in which new possibilities may arise: the ocean reflecting back upon itself, holding itself to standard, or even spewing raw material from its orifices, organising and replicating the conditions for life, the entirety of memories relating to your feet as a xenogenesis of the fin. What you can’t quite hear will slip you to the alternative. Here meaning is magnetic, gravitationally bound into implicit hierarchies that are repeated until they become accepted as self-evident 'truth' and the possibility for alternative is obscured. Big fish eat little fish, orbits within orbits. Cells overflowing with concentric impermanence. A river that strives for order only to be overflown, the spirit with the smallest mass pulls you most sideways.

A language-line begins at some unknowable point and, travelling through a voice, finds its way to replication, divvying up sections of the whole into separate empires until we have above below, night day, inside outside, reason emotion, as if love were a binary yes no, until we are swimming through spirits that turn mind matter, fixed toward abstract value void infinity. Simile like a dream chained to the dreamer. The hook is part of the fish is part of the child is part of the pantheon. You are God’s tears and what you can’t hold firmly onto in your dreams you seek to reify. What we know is the teardrop, what we don't know is the ocean--

And while it seemed (by dint of their straggled breath) as if my companions could hear this voice these words the same as I, having no real way to see their faces and to judge nor verify their reactions I could not therefore assess the validity to the words I’d heard and decided in the end that I had best let my eyes moisten into fuzz, exhale until my lungs depleted, my swaying form to resume its slow descent into the ocean sleep, a black wanderer forgotten.

[dreamsandroots]

Between Bodies: Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami, 2020

There is an illustrative passage at the end of the 2nd chapter of Mieko Kawakami’s 2020 novel Breasts and Eggs in which the narrator, Natsuko, accompanies her elder sister Makiko—an ageing hostess and single mother, briefly visiting from Osaka—to a bathhouse near the former's home in Tokyo. As they settle into the tub in the women's section of the bath house, Natsuko listens to the laments of her sister who, while ignoring the faux pas of wearing her towel into the bath, begins obsessing over her breasts, which, she explains, have been malformed since the birth of her now teenage daughter, Midoriko, and, beyond her recent investigations into breast implant surgery, something which she had discussed with Makiko on numerous occasions, has recently gone so far as to use very painful (and temporary) chemical treatments to restore her nipples, even if only briefly, to a lighter—and in her mind more desirable—colour. 

It appeared that the preoccupation, or shame, or insatiable curiosity that drove Makiko to fixate on her breasts was about more than size alone. Color [sic] was a major factor. I tried to imagine Makiko getting out of the bath, whatever time that was for her, and heading over to the fridge to grab the two small bottles of medicine, which she proceeded to apply to her own nipples, making them burn and itch like hell. . . . What had possessed Makiko to do this, at this stage in her life?

As Natsuko attempts to placate her sister's inquisitions (her inner monologue here betraying to the reader an already characteristic anxiety regarding an appropriate response: should she try to console her by saying nothing was wrong, even if only half-heartedly?; Should she tell the ‘truth’ that she does, in fact, find her sister's nipples to be unusually ‘dark’?) there suddenly appears a same-sex couple (two women, though one decidedly more masculine in appearance) who join the other women in the bath. As Natsuko's attention is deflected from her sister's fixation (the narration describes her as "staring so hard she was scowling" at the other women in the bath, "as if devouring them") the reader is swept along a stream of thought which brings into focus, through a semi-contained sub-narrative, a range of issues which permeate throughout the novel in its entirety.

The issue of the same-sex couple begins as a simple crisis of categorization: "[w]hat business did a straight couple have barging into the women's side of the bathhouse? It wasn't right." However the passage soon shifts between modes of narration with only subtle, and inconsistent hints, as to the nature of the ongoing changes in register.

As Natsuko ponders:

. . . how was I supposed to address the tomboy without insulting her, and get my point across, and find out what I wanted to know? 

Concentrating my awareness on my frontal lobe, I rubbed my thoughts together with ferocious speed, like a person rubbing sticks together to make fire, and waited for smoke to trickle from the wood.

she soon recognises that she had once known the 'tomboy' (Yamagu) and they had been, for a time, close friends in elementary school. Natsuko remembers a period of their childhood in which they would often sneak into the kitchens of a cake shop run by Yamagu's mother. She recalls in particular an instance in which she licked cake mix off her friend's finger, after Yamagu had grinned at her broadly, as if to share some inner secret.

The reader is left wondering here how to place this innocent description in terms of Natsuko's anxious reaction to the present situation: her friend’s indefinite sexuality, a kind of femininity which she says “always felt way stronger than what I picked up from the average woman” seems to imbue her with something extra-sexual, a kind of force which emanates from her inherent liminality, and which affords her a refusal of categorisation, whether actively or passively.

When she imparts that "[t]he thoughts kept coming, but I couldn't look away", we are led to believe that something beyond her control is at play within her thought process. Is there not a sense in which the character seems to be confronted by the redesignation of an old childhood friend into something that confuses her understanding of the world, and that challenges her sense of order? Something “separate from her gaze, something inside of her” that has catalysed this traumatic reaction to her presence?

Following the ambiguity of this imaginative thrust, Natsuko decides on a line of enquiry and engages Yamagu, asking: "Since when were you a man? I had no idea". The passage continues:

but she didn't answer, just flexed her muscles. Then the bulging flesh sheared off, coming free like a hunk of dough, which morphed before my eyes into a bunch of tiny people. They ran over the water, skating across the tiles, whooping their way up and down the naked bodies of the bathers, like kids monkeying through a playground. Meanwhile, the real Yamagu had wrapped the hem of her shirt around the horizontal bar and was doing feet first somersaults ad infinitum.

When her fantasy proceeds to the point of homunculi that scream to her that “"THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS WOMEN"” the reader is firmly at this point in the register of the fantasy space which until then had only been teased. This of course places further ambiguity on the preceding narration—did she really confront the ‘tomboy’?; was she really her childhood friend?; was the same-sex couple purely a figment of her imagination?

In this passage we can observe the use of dream space as a kind of speculative imaginatory realm in which the ongoing tensions of the novel, developed partially over the first two chapters, are thrust into a kind of playfully morphogenic field where boundaries are crossed and ultimately left less rigid for their crossing. This incursion of memory and speculative imagination into the present situation exacerbates the tension already developed (though perhaps not yet explicitly stated) in the discussion of Natsuko’s feelings of inadequacy relating to any clearly defined sense of femininity at play in her social reality, and particularly in relation to her ageing and impoverished sister, and the lengths she seems to be taking to conform to the desired standard.

The playfulness of this passage acts as a hermeneutic code for the thematic content of the novel, whereby themes of femininity, gender (and, more generally, bodily) dysmorphia and identity are made clear in terms of their content while retaining the status of riddle in terms of the novel's ultimate position to (and resolution of) these themes. In a sense, the dream space here acts as a demonstration of the types of thematic content the reader can expect to encounter while leaving space for ambiguity in terms of the symbolic resonance the novel goes on to develop.

The mastery of this passage lies in the ambiguity of its framing: there is no point at which the narration imparts explicit coding that indicates a shift from the narrator’s typically sporadic inner dialogue into space which is, to a degree, more abstract than the rest of the text. Upon completing the novel in its entirety, one could easily go back to this section and read over the contents to arrive at differing inflections as to what it may mean in relation to the novel's explorations of womanhood. This application of imaginative myth, as a space for exploration within the larger text, is reminiscent of Scott Freer’s observation regarding Franz Kafka's 'parable of the leopards' by which he argues that Kafka "aestheticizes the mythomorphic discourse: the leopards as violators enter into the self-generating recycling of myth narratives.” This passage provides textual space for reinterpretation of thematic concepts whereby "the vehicle of the body does not always directly correspond to the tenor of the self", a metaphoric sleight-of-hand which in turn allows the passage its own reformation, thus demonstrating “myth’s reconstructive process."

We can see how, much like the figure of The Sphinx in the myth of Oedipus, the character of the tomboy in this passage, whether ultimately read as real or imaginary, presents a mystery which is unable to be penetrated by intelligence alone. In fact, it begs for the reader of this novel to approach it through indirect, organic, evolving channels of meaning, granting her “the very incarnation of sacred enigma.”

Bibliography:

Burnett, Leon. “10. Sorrow and surprise: a reading of Théophile Gautier’s sphinx complex,” In Myth, Literature, and the Unconscious, edited by Leon Burnett, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uwsau/detail.action?docID=1350199.

Freer, Scott. "3. Kafka's Sick Ovidian Animals," In Modernist Mythopoeia: The Twilight of the Gods, UK: Palgrave Macmillan 2015.

Kawakami, Mieko. Breasts and Eggs, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, UK: Picador, Pan Macmillan, 2020.

[dreamsandroots]

Bleeding Dawn

Black shapes float, first 

on four legs then on two.

The claw of predation grunts

Monkey tricks. Zig zags.

Myth of the split tribe. 

Stripes that blend, dissolve

Into or consume one another.

[dreamsandroots]

AfterImage

There are dead objects 

by the side of the road.

The gods must be playing

from the word of the river, 

the creek, 

the babbling brook

I concentrate just to 

stay in place

Medusa turns, the 

gorgon’s head 

speaks of stone

I imagine that from such 

a great distance the 

toys all look the same

mind skipping forward 

to the next big thing

The old gods and new 

declare: nature is dead 

and we have killed her

nature is dead and 

we have buried

her in an empty box 

that we pass on by

the side of the road.