L’ordre du jour pour le roi.- The day begins: let us begin to order for this day the business and the festivals of our merciful master who is still deigning to rest. His majesty has bad weather today: we shall be careful not to call it bad; we shall not speak of the weather – but we shall be a little more solemn about our business than would otherwise be necessary and a little more festive about the festivals.
Nietzsche, Die Froliche Wissenschaft
I wake up in the morning by eight o’clock. Even if I have been awake drinking the night before, I cannot sleep in past ten o’clock. This morning I am awake at half six. Today is my day off. I am going write. I have had five hours sleep but I cannot return to slumber. The work-in-progress awaits.
I get up and make a coffee. I use freshly ground, fair trade coffee beans from East Timor in a one-shot, stove-top coffee pot. If the hour is too early, before eight o’clock, I won’t use the grinder to spare my housemate sleeping in the room adjacent to the kitchen from the noise. I use my housemate’s coffee but this morning its frozen to the sides of the freezer.
There is coffee powder left in the grinder from the previous day. I roll a cigarette while the stale coffee is cooking on the stove. I feed the cats and smoke. My writing day is ready to begin.
I sit in front of the computer and pore over the headlines from the ABC website for an hour. Armed siege between a teenager and police in Perth. Climate change minister Penny Wong is getting hard about the carbon emissions bill that the Greens won’t pass and neither will the opposition.
I fiddle with the music on my computer. I re-discover Barry Adamson’s As Above So Below. I copy Stranger On A Sofa off my disc onto the computer. I wanted to copy The Necks too but the disc is missing when I open the cover. God knows where it is. I make a couple of playlists – “wednesday morning with a cigarette hungover” and “black and white keys” – with Barry, Beethoven, Tom Waits, Mike Patton, Masada and the music of Islam.
I surf the Net for Escher drawings. I found an old Escher calendar the other day and I thought a piece of his art would make for an innaresting desktop.
I’m nearly ready to start writing. I need another coffee (my housemate has gone to work – I grind a fresh batch of beans) and a cigarette. The sun is shining, the mid-morning is clear but clouds threaten the afternoon. I practise my bowing for an hour. I have a violin lesson this afternoon at four and I have to correct this downbow. My bow still trembles on the downstroke.
Now I am ready to write.
An unexpected text message arrives from a lover. Meet me at Ceres for a coffee.
N. and I braved an early wintry evening last week for the music of Mozart’s Magic Flute at the State Theatre.
We ate a quick meal at Sahara restaurant upstairs on Swanston Street. This restaurant has been renovated again since I last ate there. Several years ago there was a long communal table down the front overlooking Swanston Street and you could still smoke cigarettes with a Coppers Pale Ale longneck. The grungy casual atmosphere has generally been replaced by the atmosphere of a warm art gallery though at the back of the restaurant, there remains some of the soup kitchen ambience – except at the cash register.
We strolled down to the Arts Centre smoking after-dinner cigarettes. We were running late but the Arts Centre was close to the restaurant. The Arts Centre is opulent: soft carpets that absorb sound and mirrors everywhere. The place is a bit of a maze. Info booths and helpful staff directed us downstairs to the box office to pick up our tickets, booked a few days before hand. We had seats in the second row from the very back in the balcony. Not ideal but for fifty-five dollars, they were okay considering the seats on the ground were over a hundred dollars or two hundred for the premium sounds and views of the stage.
The stage formed a huge square favouring our bird’s eye perspective of the action. Elaborately decorated with jungle vines, performing artists costumed as wilder-beasts and an incredible dragon puppet, the set for the first act was astonishing. The second act even more so, as the forest was replaced by the spinning room in the walls of the temple, covered in tiles decorated with Masonic symbols.
The plot is complex and esoteric. Basically, Pamina, the daughter of the Queen of the Night is kidnapped by an evil sorcerer who turns out to not be such a bad guy, just a little misunderstood in otherwise trying to make the world a better place by instituting a common society of free men (and women – eventually, following in the footsteps of the first female initiate, Pamina, proving herself worthy by facing death for her love in a suicide scene). His mortal enemy, the Queen of the Night, descending to the stage atop a crescent moon, gives Tamino – lost in the forest, all alone – a magic flute to help him fight off the minions of the evil sorcerer. His sidekick, Papageno, a Pan-like character, is given magical chimes. With the help of these devices, Tamino gets the princess and they live happily ever after a smashing finish with all the followers from the Temple of Isis kicking in the chorus and a round of applause lasting ten minutes. Good show.
Basic meta-narratives of Sun versus the Moon, Day and Night, play out in the conflict between the high priest and the Queen of the night. The elemental, back-to-basics trials undergone by Tamino and Pamina fulfil the blessed unity ordained by the gods. There is a whole ancient and occult mythos at work here in The Magic Flute, an opera set in Egypt, origin of the occult knowledge incorporated into the eighteenth century movement of Freemasons. It’s the ages-old story of the Fall: They lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin.
What the hell it all means is beyond me (a bit like Finnegan’s Wake) but the tale struck me as similar to the monomyth Joseph Campbell wrote of in The Hero With A Thousand Faces. The monomyth is divided into three stages. The first stage is departure. The hero crosses a threshold (the Forest), answers the call to adventure (the Queen’s summons, the portrait of Pamina) and receives supernatural aid (the magic flute). The next stage is initiation: atonement with the father and an encounter with the goddess, woman as temptress. The hero goes through trials and tribulations to attain a secret knowledge concerning the moral tradition he has inherited. Tamino learns the evil sorcerer is a holy man of the goddess Isis – his corrupted servant kidnapped his beloved, Pamina. He experiences a reversal of values: what was initially evil is now the good. He summons his companions with the magic flute. Later, the trials of initiation are literally manifested in the Masonic rites of passage: the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting and Pamina try to break Tamino’s silence.
The final stage is the return. Once the hero has garnered all his secret knowledge gained from the otherworld, he must return to the real world with his boon. Tamino and Pamina emerged from their trials to form the blessed unity ordained by the priest of Isis, Sarastro, and defeated the Queen of the Night and her ladies-in-waiting despite help from Sarastro’s treacherous servant. The spiritual marriage of Tamino and Pamino represents the synthesis of the Sun and the Moon, the unity of a fundamental difference and institutes the beginning of a new age of free men and women – as envisaged by the priest, Sarastro.
The occult subject-matter for the staging of an opera in the twenty-first century can be seen to be antiquated and old-fashioned. Even in its day, the libretto was viewed as childish and well-written for blockheads. But Masonic symbolism is making a comeback in novels (Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code) and films like Walt Disney’s National Treasure. Hell, you can even visit the Freemason website.
Plus de secret, plus de secret: that is another secret of secrecy, another formula or shibboleth that depends entirely on whether or not you pronounce the final s of plus, a distinction that cannot be seen literally. [Translator's note: The final s of plus is pronounced in the expression plus de secret to mean "more secret(s)/secrecy" and not pronounced when it means "no more secret(s)/secrecy."] (Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death)
The music of Mozart keeps The Magic Flute alive. The iconographic elements of the play supplement the score. The story is the stage for the muse. The Magic Flute plays on over two centuries by virtue of Mozart’s prodigious talent as a composer. That love and brotherhood should still endure instead of hatred and slander remains a refrain today.
Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni, finished playing at the National Theatre Saturday week ago. I caught the last night of the performance with Bella. Through wind and rain we made our way on the tram from Brunswick across the river to St Kilda for a night at the opera.
The performance was enchanting. The lyrics were in Italian but the English subtitles took nothing away from the comedy and tragedy of Don Giovanni. The strength of the performances carried over the meaning of the plot in their actions to a great extent. A hopeless womaniser, Don Giovanni, a nobleman only in name if not by virtue, is in the process of having his way with Donna Anna – betrothed to Don Ottavio – at the start of the play. Her cries for help draws the Commendatore, her father, to the scene and he challenges the masked man to a duel. The Don at first refuses to fight the old man but after his blood is drawn by a blow from Anna’s father, he takes up the challenge and easily defeats the honoured nobleman. Fleeing the scene, Don Ottavio rushes onto the stage with his men too late for the old man. He vows to avenge the slaying of the upright citizen of the community and the father of his bride-to-be.
The opening scene sets up the action for the remainder of the opera. Don Giovanni’s servant, Leporello (played hilariously by Andrew Collis), will take the brunt of his master’s burden as an accessory to his evil deeds. Like The Marraige of Figaro, there is a comical irony in the reversal of roles played out between masters and their slaves, a wonderful double movement (the servants, in the end though, often prove wiser than their masters) reminiscent of Aristophanes’ The Frogs. Giovanni attempts to woo away the peasant bride, Zerlina (played by the voluptuous Michelle Buscemi), making bold promises to marry her and end her pastoral life of poverty, but is foiled by Don Ottavio, Donna Anna and Giovanni’s spurned lover, Donna Elvira, who crash his party for the newlyweds (a ploy to seduce Zerlina) wearing maskes to conceal their identities. The set for the Don’s party is luscious, draped with red velveteen curtains and accompanied by woodwind musicians performing live onstage in maskes and phallic hats (a nod towards the Dionysiac). The insurgents pounce on Don Giovanni when he makes his move on Zerlina. Donnie G. escapes using his servant as a human shield.
In the next act, the insatiable Donnie G. aims to seduce Elvira’s maidservant. Leporello wants nothing more to do with the Don but promises to come back if he reforms his ways. Donnie G. will not (making love to women is his only reason for living – he is a free agent) and persuades his servant into a new scheme. He swaps his hat and cape with Leporello, disguising himself as a servant while Leporello plays the part of the Don to seduce Elvira away from the house (since the party scene, Elvira has sufferred remorse for her actions and is pining once again for the Don), allowing his master free access into her house – and her maidservant. He encounters a hunting party, led by Zerlina’s husband. They spy the Don but mistake him for his servant. The Don splits the hunting party up and beats up Zerlina’s husband once they are alone. Once the hunting party finally catches up with Leporello (disguised as the Don), they start to beat on him.
The play on appearances in cases of mistaken identity, is characteristic of the two Mozart operas I’ve seen. The roles of master and slave, lover and beloved, turn over and revolve in a frivolous merry-go-round until the ride comes to a happy resolution where true love masters the baser emotions to triumph in the end. Donnie G. refusing to feel remorse for his actions even in the face of the supernatural and sufferred the revenge of the statue of the dead father.
The week thereafter started with a dinner date with N. at the Wesley-Ann and the initial tendrils of a new romance. Perhaps too easily hypnotised by the promises of a love made in an opera and frightened of an immoral affair, I took the adventure too far. That “every action is of identical value at root” presupposes the hidden ideal, a guide to action whether that be instinctive or contemplative. The different roles we play, the turn of the dice, is the freedom we enjoy and exercise in remaining open to evaluate and guide our actions, rather than acting on impulse. Saturday saw a bright sunny day, lunch on High Street, an hour’s walk down to the Darebin Parklands to see hippies banging their drum, a film (Slumdog Millionaire) and a couple of drinks at Kelvin’s in Westgarth. The outcome of the day was less than I had hoped for and that hope bit me on the hand the very next day. Well, we can say, at least we tried the experiment. Better to act than to not act at all. Which seems to be what Mr Nietzsche is talking about.
Yet I feel humiliated and out of touch. I suffer from remorse. And all this “wounding” from a week. Donnie G. is bleeding. There were hints, signs, and I chose to read them in my own way. I am, in fact, the very subject Mr Nietzsche despised – the enthusiastic, sentimental, full of secrets; it has the woman and “beautiful feelings” on its side – despite what I am emale writes. On our walk, N and I conversed about ethics, Kate Holden, writing and blogging and how writers might act just to create subject-matter for their art. Does Kate Holden go through her whole week, thinking about what she’s going to write for the A2? Inauthenticity can start to creep into the writers’ life if not their work.
I’ve read Kate Holden’s column in the A2 and its boring writing. And here I am, writing up the week that’s been and have my own future selves in writing been guiding the path I took? Or other people’s perceptions of my self? And what compulsion fuels my desire to write about my week? An ordering of the affects. A play on appearances. Raising my own visibility, an inner life (that might be better kept secret). Idealising my life by, on the one hand, reading and writing about these wonderful and lofty philosophical and cultured activities; on the other, I suffer alone, feel remorse and I hold myself responsible with a sigh of resignation.
The two naturally go hand in hand. The moral of Don Giovanni being the tyrant who is unable to let go of his pride, is condemned to damnation, a victim of hubris.
Ultimately, I want to be able to render an account of my voluptuous desires, write a story for the Human Comedy. Nietzsche’s evaluation does not take into account the singular recorder silently writing amidst the pipes of Pan, the multiplicity of roles we trade and play on in our social circles. The more you can incorporate these contradictions, maintain a social decorum and speak freely, the more one actively enjoys one’s freedom, a free agent. A moral purpose being better then no purpose at all, to explain this sufferring (which really isn’t that bad, just a nick), is what I’m striving for here.
Last week, I went to the Malthouse Theatre in South Melbourne with my friend, O. The new production of Woyzeck was playing, with a score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. I have recently been re-introduced to the music of Warren Ellis again in his band, the Dirty Three, in particular the album, Horse Stories. The soundtrack to the play – a nineteenth century piece by Buchner, loosely based upon the true story of a man whose lover is seduced by a drum-major – is a perfect accompaniment to the passionate tale of murder and fornication, featuring Warren Ellis’ seething trademark violin composition.
The nature of mankind is put on trial in the figure of Woyzeck.
Morality and virtue are all very well for the wealthy but I am a simple man and cannot afford to be virtuous. I merely act according to my nature. Woyzeck in conversation with the (fat) Captain
For money, Woyzeck not only shaves the head of a captain of the army (who offers Woyzeck some moral and fatherly advice) amongst other menial tasks – Woyzeck is a soldierly parasite upon the armed services fighting a war one never sees but often hears – but is the subject of experiments for the army doctor (played up in a wonderfully camped up role, crowned with Mickey mouse ears). He is fed exclusively on peas, hung upside down by his feet and a stainless steel apparatus is attached to his genitals for urine samples.
Oooh I am going to give you a raise, Woyzeck. Well, another kind of raise. Army Doctor with Mickey Mouse ears
Woyzeck begins to grow weak and hallucinates. The walls begin speaking to him, especially after he is unceremoniously informed by the army captain and doctor about his lover’s infidelity with the drum-major. Marie, the mother of his child, takes part in an extravaganza – Hell on Earth – conducted by Tim Rogers performing a devilish role – a sexy, amoral Pan-like character – and a mandolin. (Tim Rogers’ opening act has a chorus: everybody dies… except for me.) In the course of this orgy of music and wine (a hilarious scene, the participants wearing Santa hats, jaunting about the stage to a thundering bass beat about silver streamers), the drum-major takes Marie.
Haunted by images of his lover in sexual embrace with the drum-major and the murderous voices of revenge from the walls, Woyzeck is in his own living hell. Tim Rogers comes along and finds him in such a state, and sells him a knife with which Woyzeck may cut his own throat. Woyzeck confronts Marie. She would rather he put a knife in her guts rather than judge and accuse her, punish her for living. The lovers embrace upon a couch at the rear of the stage behind an open crack in the wall and the deed is done; the background light turns blue for tomorrow.
What are you looking at? Do you see a murderer? Woyzeck screaming at the audience
As a footnote, I might add Tom Waits’ album, Blood Money, is also a musical rendition of Woyzeck. The track “Children’s Story,” is from Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers and Bastards.
Dionysian theatre. The thick and chthonic subject of contemporary musicians’ art, Woyzeck still stands tall amongst the tragic working-class heroes, fallen though he has amongst the rusty institutions of modernity.
The mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls. Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that’s where Ren came in. William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands
I’ve suffered a little death. A good friend of mine left work at the SRC this week. Her resignation was abrupt. I am devastated by her departure and a little shocked at the depth of my attachment to her. Often it is only when you lose someone that you realise how much they mean to you. Not that she is completely lost to me. She lives around the corner from my house. But in the habit of modern living, I’ll hardly see her as often as I do now and there will be some time I imagine before I see her again as we drift apart and get caught up into different circles and plots we devise and invent.
The event I present here is essentially for my friend, an extended version of what I would like to be able to show but for a lack of resources from the studio (in the theatre of conversation, talking to her about the thesis on Wednesday night I turned into a rambling, mumbling fool, tripping over my own feet and often stepping upon hers – fell flat on my face), I wasn’t able to say all the things I wanted to say. The director’s cut doesn’t show everything but still shows a lot more than the regular feature.
Her departure from the SRC cannot be reduced to a dispute over a discrepancy in her wages. There had been some underhanded play with the rates of pay and she has fairly had enough of the insect politicking and poor rates of communication in the gap between the directors at Vic Street and the workers at Peel Street, mediated by middle management. She is taking off for the hallowed halls of the English and Philosophy departments at Melbourne University, to write her honours thesis. I hear the halls of academia are corridors of power, sites of conflict, political infighting – not the heights of the Enlightenment I had imagined. Maybe it just happens at the humanities department at Latrobe. But it will undoubtedly be an improvement upon the tension she’s experienced at times at the SRC.
On Wednesday, she emailed me a copy of her thesis proposal. An interesting (and impossible!) project concerning the personification of Death in 19th and 20th century literature, covering Schopenhauer to Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics. In giving Death a face, a persona or mask, we better understand an aspect of life not often presented in modern streams of consciousness.
Danse macabre
A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death. A free man, that is, one who lives according to the dictate of reason alone, is not led by fear, but desires the good directly, that is, acts, lives, and preserves his being from the foundation of seeking his own advantage. Spinoza, Ethics, Book 4, “Of Human Bondage or the Power of the Affects”
A pointed and weighty argument resting upon “death” not to be read as a moral imperative or a critique of her thesis – I’m not some sort of Spinoza to jump around doing entrechats (Chekhov, “The Wedding”) – but Spinoza speaks thus to me: don’t dwell on a little death. Learn to laugh. Every order-word contains a little death. I hardly have to find myself restricted by “habits of modern living,” nothing to constrain me from calling her up for coffee and overcoming the inertia of acting upon only what’s present before me in mine eyes. The Net provides an easy means for staying in touch, regardless of time and space, but still (as do all of our actions) requires a human investment (what the poets sentimentally label “love”). I guess this will be a real test of the depth of my attachment to her and my “meditation on life.”
Well, her email sent me into a frenzy. I say “an interesting (and impossible!) project,” because to personify Death, is to give Death a life. Let us begin with the impossible. Later. Of course the paradox is the object of art and art is the proper metaphysical activity of mankind vis-a-vis moris. Memento mori. Immediately, I wrote back, reeling off must-read references and essays. Derrida, Foucault, Burroughs, Bataille…
Much of Derrida’s work concerns the play of binary oppositions towards a deconstruction of the primacy assigned to an element in the hierarchical form of binary oppositions, occluding writing (death) in favour of speech (life) where speech and life enjoys a puissance at the (hidden) expense of writing and death – something at which it is absolutely forbidden henceforth to laugh (Nietzsche, The Gay Science) – in an economy of differance (a deliberate error, a will to untruth or a necessary fiction, to differ and to defer). He attaches a great deal of importance to the line drawn between literature and philosophy, aesthetics, the arts of presentation and formal discourse.
Look at Plato, for example. Now this is where man becomes interesting. The foundations for the philosophy of Plato-Socrates were laid down in dialogues, semi-fictionalised accounts of Socrates’ conversations with the people of Athens. Plato’s early works like the Trial of Socrates were monologues or soliquoys. An added innovation - perhaps to compete or to compare with the tragic and comic poets in his style of writing – was to include others in dialogue with Socrates. No longer the voice of the master but worked over and critiqued in dialectical reasoning – an essential style and aspect of Socrates who would go around testing people’s ordinary knowledge and raising awareness by getting them to talk about what they really know, testing gold coins between the yellow teeth of the dialectician. Agenbite of inwit. Socrates was the voice of the bad conscience in Athens.
Derrida’s essay on Bataille, “From Restricted to General Economy: a Hegelianism without reserve” inWriting and Difference, would be essential reading:
The independence of self-consciousness becomes laughable at the moment when it liberates itself by enslaving itself, when it starts to work, that is, when it enters into dialectics. Laughter alone exceeds dialectics and the dialectician: it bursts out only on the basis of an absolute renunciation of meaning, an absolute risking of death, what Hegel calls abstract negativity.
Hegel is the quintessential modern philosopher, ”…the thinker of irreducible difference. He rehabilitated thought as the memory productive of signs… the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing” (Derrida, Of Grammatology, “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing“) Plato incorporated into books the gap between the playful arts and technical discourse, in an effort to overcome the rule of superstition, the proclamations of the oracle and a present day Athens still ruled by myths and legends and, even worse, sophistry. Socrates did revere the gods (they were the only ones that could be truly called “wise” so men were called merely “lovers of wisdom” or philosophers) but believed free men should be ruled by dialectical reasoning. Several centuries later in Holland, a lens maker called Spinoza writes his Ethics via the geometric method. At first sight, a steady, quasi-mathematical build-up of arguments for the immanence of God to existence and the meaning of true freedom, of self-determination. But there are amazing leaps in the winding course of Spinoza’s Ethics that light up my mind like a cathode ray tube in sharing a common notion. Much like my mind lit up at reading my friend’s thesis proposal. As Spinoza puts it, joy is an increase in the ability to affect (affectio, the Latin root for “affection”) and act, striving and participating in a common and immanent idea.
Now my friend has left the SRC, she is enjoying a work-free life (for the present). I’m going to miss her around the workplace but I can’t begrudge her decision to leave. Her new lifestyle – reading and writing, researching and talking philosophy with her new colleagues and supervisors – is the kind homeless yuppies aspire to.
I did not want to write about “philosophy” here, compose a “meditation on life.” Homeless Yuppies would be only an account of my actions and desires. The eye doesn’t show people’s thoughts and desires (except in gestures and body language) but only alludes to their motivations and desires. In a lettered correspondence, my penpal wrote me a couple of months ago, she is used to letters describing what one sees and does in their travels. She saw a hidden sadness. I failed to make the “movement of faith” correctly. My letters and posts ramble off like the wandering Jew on philosophical muses upon an event I would begin talking about at the start of my letters, writing a wealth of words that ecko and resound in a cacophony of language.
I do not mean to fit my life into the boxes of ancient moralities and dead philosophers. I was myself surprised in my first (serious) year of university to discover modern books on philosophy. I had thought philosophy was dead (now we have psychology). In letters to my recent penpal, I gushed, inspired at the time by Henry Miller in the novel, Sexus, writing to Mona (real name June Edith Smith, who would go on to become the subject of a long obsession for Henry that he carried with him for several years, from New York to Paris) whom he has just met at a dance hall. He writes his first letters to Mona on the kitchen table in the home he shares with his first wife and daughter:
It was here I wrote the maddest letters ever penned. Anyone who thinks he is defeated, hopeless, without resources, can take courage from me. I had a scratchy pen, a bottle of ink and paper – my sole weapons. I put down everything which came into my head whether it made sense or not… I said to myself over and over that if a man, a sincere and desperate man like myself, loves a woman with all his heart, if he is ready to cut off his ears and mail them to her, if he will take his heart’s blood and pump it out on paper, saturate her with his need and longing, besiege her everlastingly, she cannot possibly refuse him.
Today, these lines taken from those pages I read in books, letters and emails, intersect with mine if, in making an allusion to death, we might consider the book of life to be written in flesh and blood. Writing is an opening upon a life. We’re all gonna be dirt in the ground. Still we repeat, we all take up that impossible task in a modern ars moriendi: how to give oneself up to language, to paint a picture of one’s innermost and invisible intentions and desires in words (gifts as gestures, going-away presents, can speak volumes).
Kierkegaard wrote in “Attunement” from Fear and Trembling about leaps of faith, portraying different possible scenarios around Abraham sacrificing his son, Isaac. The instant of decision is madness. Every generation must invent faith anew. But this doesn’t mean we utterly re-invent ourselves, that we cut ourselves off from the past, from the ground that came before us, with no more than newer and faster information technologies to show for our advances. Inertia is death. The lofty ideas, Faith, Truth, Beauty and Love – those human, all too human investments – must be continually mediated and created anew in an action without activity. In the immortal words of Chris Isaak (”Isaac” is Hebrew for “laughter”) – I keep on dancing.
Slice an opening at the top, then gently pull the halves apart with your hands.
A line from a letter by a former lover, my pen pal, a fellow student of Foucault. Attached to a gift, a pair of pomegranates, sent to me in the mail from Anglesea. These bold letters are instructions for opening the fruit that lies within; a program for building a BwO; and words of wisdom for the would-be newly found lover. Every word is an opening. The temptation of Persephone, a story from the Greeks, lies in diametrical opposition to the story in Genesis of the Fall from the grace of God. Unlike the Fall where the woman tempts Adam with the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge Between Good and Evil, Hades, Lord of the Underworld, attempts to keep Persephone from her mother, Demeter, in Hades with a few succulent seeds from the pomegranate.
Two halves of the same story? There are many ancient pagan tales incorporated into the Christian religion. The philosophical arts of ek-sistence became reified and deified in the Church. The Christian Church as the Bride of Christ – the ascetics of nuns, for example – comes from pagan notions of the Earth goddess, Demeter (now the feminine is bound in wedlock to the figure of the Christ-Dionysus). Unravelling the threads of mythology entwined about History’s tree, I find more of myself and free my belief in the ecstatic and divine nature in mankind. The Christian religion I followed for so many years (I used to preach the gospel to my friends in high school!) can be put into the perspective of one of many, a creative evolution in the community of men and women celebrating the spiritual aspect of our collective being. Sexuality is not the most important part of that collective being but it does play a vital and lascivious role. In other words, the Christian religion is one spiritual form among many. The idea of the “One” though is deep-rooted and unconscious.
There was a cool change in our relationship the day before I left Point Roadknight. She had decided upon a path of solitude. She had the human expectation in inviting me down to the coast, hoping it might work out. The experiment didn’t turn out as either of us had hoped and expected. After a painful conversation and an awkward departure from Anglesea, I left feeling despondent, cursing myself as one with an inadequate idea of one’s self does when you feel pain. I punished myself for being seduced by her billets doux and my own wild and unrestrained imaginings, and for not talking about her recent past but choosing to believe I was making a clean break for S. to re-invent herself. Another letter I received later in the week confirmed the extent of the misunderstanding, extolling me to look life in the eye and to “be proud for fighting the toughest of competitors.” She would not be put on a pedestal.
Now I have met another woman. I dreamed of her three nights in a row this week and she was my first thought in the morning. When I saw her a few days ago, I had to get a hold of myself to actively converse. The fear now pinned me: do I have the courage and the strength, the cool celerity, to attract this woman?
The weather can be unpredictable – no-one knows what the skies hold in a couple of weeks – but the world, as always, keeps turning. Persephone rises up from the Underworld, Demeter returns to the earth and spring is here again. It’s the not knowing that destroys me; it is the “love of a woman that creates doubt in us.”
What does the tragic artist communicate of himself? Does he not display precisely the condition of fearlessness in the face of the fearsome and questionable? – This condition itself is a high desideratum: he who knows it bestows on it the highest honours. He communicates it, he has to communicate it if he is an artist, a genius of communication. Bravery and composure in the face of a powerful enemy, great hardship, a problem that arouses aversion – it is this victorious condition which the tragic artist singles out, which he glorifies. (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols)
Taken from an aphorism entitled “L’art pour l’art” it is the conditions for art to take place that concern me here. I failed to make my intentions towards S. clear and played the part of a wounded heart on the morning of my departure, powerless to attain my desires and feeling every bit of the naive nineteenth century romantic that Nietzsche wrote so scathingly of – a Rousseauist.
Still, Nietzsche hardly wrote a philosophy to live by. All this talk of fearlessness and the tragic artist – with chapter titles like ‘The Hammer Speaks” – come across as romantic and metaphoric. Anyone who followed his writings to the letter would indeed go insane, burning with ardour, as Nietzsche himself, ending up in a catatonic state for the final decade of his life. Nijinsky wrote Nietzsche went mad because he grew afraid of people. Nietzsche became trapped on the path of solitude. But there remains a challenge in his writings to live the live the life of the philosopher of the hammer, to become “hard as diamond.” This does not mean one has to be cruel. In fact, that could be the weakest interpretation, the figure of the tyrant, dominated by his or her desire to rule over nature like some evil mad scientist controlling the environment. We are the environment, the cosmos experiencing itself subjectively. I detest the gravity of the situation, the ponderous weighing of hearts and values. In time, I will laugh and learn the Ars moriendi. Its absurd. The “tragic artist” lives and loves for the burning question, learns and evolves, without regret. The doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same – the (perhaps poorly named) “will to power” – is a peaceful and joyous notion. How can I forget?
To put it in the simple way it came to my mind, I would say that it was like this: everybody becomes a healer the moment he forgets about himself. (Henry Miller, Sexus)
Use a little pressure but not too much or you may bruise the fruit inside. It’s most likely you will have juice all over your hands by now, but no matter getting sticky is never a bad thing. Work the beads out with your fingers and once in your mouth burst the sweet drops between your teeth, being mindful not to swallow the pips. Sweet, sticky syrup. Yum.
I have returned to Melbourne after six weeks spent in the sun, sand, surf and dust. I have travelled thousands of kilometres by rail, road and air and swam in the Southern and Pacific Oceans. I am utterly exhausted but it’s a good exhaustion like one gets from working out muscles one is unused to exercising.
I flew up to Bris-vegas on the twentieth of December where I was picked up by my little sister, Nadia, at seven in the morning. Nadia sacrificed her customary Saturday morning sleep-in to pick up her big brother. We met my brother for lunch with a half dozen other people at the Paddo Tavern. I haven’t been to the Paddo for over ten years and it is nearly unrecognisable. When I first moved to Brisbane as a teenager, it was one of the first bars I ever went to – saddles on the walls and by the bar and a drinking trough with a bare wooden dance floor, looking much more like the barn its saddles were intended for. Now it resembles a modern pub with two massive bars, swirling red, green and blue carpeting, a functions area, dining tables a metre and a half high and plasma TVs on the walls.
A few days later I was driving up with my mother from the Gold Coast, back to Brisbane to visit my grandfather who I hadn’t seen in nearly thirty years. I grew up with my father in Bundaberg as a child and Pop didn’t have much to do with the family over the years we celebrated gatherings with my mother at Christmas time. He would generally have gone fishing. At eighty-three, the old fella still has his vital senses. His hearing has gone a bit hard but he is switched on, still driving car and boat. Over lunch, he told me a couple of tales about my father, keen as he was for smoko on a job they worked on together, and that after the Second World War, Pop joined the army and lived in Occupied Japan for two years. After lunch at the RSL (Pop had three pots of XXXX Gold and I had the feeling he could have easily knocked a few more back), we drove past the house he built where he and my grandmother had raised my mother and her three sisters. Still standing strong over fifty years later. As we were leaving his house, he said to me, “I’ll see you in another ten years time,” half-joking and half-inviting another visit. An easy space with Pop.
Christmas day we spent at Ray’s sister’s house. Beautiful home they have, swimming pool and air-conditioning. Ray cranked the Weber BBQ and roasted the meat in the tradition of Donnie (R.I.P.), his father. First Christmas without Donnie and he wasn’t remembered in a melancholic mournful manner for the duration of the day but, as he would have wanted it, over a cold beer and a full plate of roast meats and cold cuts. My sister Kim poured the gifts onto me: macchiato cups with Asian prints, Turkish-style drinking glasses, and a platter dish, all very practical and aesthetic.
For my part I paid for half her ticket to Woodford folk festival that Saturday. I travelled up early on the train from Nerang on the Gold Coast to Caboolture bordering on the sunshine Coast where my good friend Guy, picked me up. It was Boxing Day. He and his girlfriend Estelle had already largely set up the camp where a half dozen of us would be camping on-site, right next to a dam which was not fit for swimming (something about snakes and poisons) but the large body of water did cool the heat – somewhat. There were thousands of people and when the festival was in full swing, the campsite stretched for kilometres over gullies and hills. The music was phenomenal and my sister had a great day: it was the first time she had felt she had actually gotten away from her everyday life all year. You could wander around every night and you would be guaranteed to find music to please and rock your Dionysian soul. Two bands stood out for me: Doch – covering “traditional” Roma music from Romania – and Kafka – a jazz fusion band. We ate every day at The Common Ground restaurant, a Christian religious group who resemble Amish people. Every year they transport their two-storeyed wooden building from Sydney to Woodford and serve delicious scrambled eggs and Amazonian jungle juice and pamphlets and newspapers explaining their philosophy of kindness towards mankind. Of course, Lee rightly observed their women are trapped under the Christian patriarchy.
I stayed for a week and picked up a lift with Nicola back to the Gold Coast a day early – the heat was becoming too much and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to sit in air-conditioning for two hours. The sun was burning hot, sweat pouring from my body as I dismantled the tent at nine in the morning. My mother had the air-conditioning cranked when I arrived back at her home at Broadbeach Waters, my “base-of-operations.” I had a day to recoup, swim in the lake bordering the backyard not twenty metres behind the house, wash clothes and sleep in a queen-sized bed before getting on a train to Brisbane the next day.
I scored a lift to Childers, a half hour from Bundaberg and three and a half hours from Brisbane, with Scott and Jose with whom I had been partying with at Woodford. It so happened they were driving to Woodgate for a week and they were kind enough to offer me a lift as far as the turnoff at Childers where my father could drive down to and pick me up. I jammed myself and my backpack into the back seat of the two-door hatchback, as snug as a lug. The rain came down all the way from Brisbane to Bundaberg which wasn’t a promising start for a holiday up the coast. The sun came out a day later fortunately, as I camped for six days next to Dad and Jeanette’s caravan at Nielsen’s Park, a caravan park next to Bargara beach, fifteen minutes from the town of Bundaberg. My father and Jeanette come here every year and I can see why they love this dream holiday. We had a sabai time, eating our fill of fruit and cake, beer and wine, playing scrabble and periodically refreshing ourselves in the surf nearby. On my last night, as we walked back from dinner at KayCee’s in Bargara (lousy service and a barramundi dish you had to saw through), a turtle came up to the beach and laid eggs in the sand over a good hour and a half and then took twenty minutes crawling in stops and starts over the sand to make it back into the water. The park ranger told us (half the caravan park was there to witness this act of creation) the turtle doesn’t eat for a month before she lays, hence the sluggish pace. The poor beast was assaulted several times with flashes from cameras to boot, undoubtedly addling the starved creature’s senses.
On the tilt train back to Brisbane, I continued swimming and laughing through Infinite Jest, a novel by David Foster Wallace (R.I.P). At nearly a thousand pages long and almost four hundred footnotes, the novel was my holiday reading. Set in the near future, this novel is a dark look at the extremes of modern society. The film, Infinite Jest, is being sought by a terrorist group called the Wheelchair Assassins. Filled with anecdotes and rambling prose on substances and their abuse, tennis, family, friendships and film, this is some kind of cultural studies textbook rolled into a sprawling work of profound fiction. The daunting size and attention to detail requires wading through at times (400 footnotes!) but the waves of laughter carried this reader through.
I spent the final week at Ray and Mum’s sanctuary on the Bronze Coast, making a train trip north to Bris-Vegas to commune with old friends on my last weekend, re-entering the river of my past to find fresh water and the easy ride that comes with company you are well-comfortable with. We saw contemporary artwork at an exhibition called Optimism and we watched the cinematic meditation, Doubt and the entertaining new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, at new cineplexes. We shared dinner and visited the organic markets in New Farm. I left my mother on the verge of tears at the Nerang train station on the afternoon of the fourteenth of January to make the six hour trip (including a three hour stopover at Brisbane airport) back to Melbourne. A splendicious sunset at the airport train stop in Brisbane. A moment of confusion when I forgot which airport/city/state I was in but the plane was delayed – no rush. Arrival back in Melbourne after midnight, local time.
A couple of days later I was on the train and bus again, heading south for Point Roadnight near Anglesea along the Great Ocean Road. My arrival down the Victorian coast was well-timed – summer had only just begun down under. I spent a few days with my pen pal (we share, amongst other subject-matters, a love for the ancient Greek mythos) sleeping in a tent in the backyard of a house near the beach. After weeks of warmer climes, my body endured the cold waters of the Southern Ocean long enough for several quick baptisms before sunbathing in (eventually) over thirty degree weather. I met surfers and architects, nurses and musicians, all celebrating the spirited freedoms and beatific tragedies of life as only creators and artists can, in the eternal comedy of existence. I was taken to the world’s greatest beer garden at Ayre’s Point near Lorne for a birthday dinner, atop a hillside, a perfect spot to pay witness to the sun setting in reds and oranges over the hills by the headland covered in a mist. Until squadrons of mosquitoes attacked.
O divinity of sky, and swift-winged winds, and leaping streams, O countless laughter of the sea’s waves, O Earth, mother of all life! On you, and on the all-seeing circle of the sun, I call: See what is done by gods to me, a god! Aeschylus
I have been swept away, travelling like a nomad, camping in a tent for days, close to the elements. I have been pulled from my home to journey by my friends (Guy has been trying to get me to attend Woodford for seven years). The culture shock of returning home to Brunswick is a continuation of the stranger, returning all bronzed and ebullient and slightly bruised and burnt, skin peeling, I have had such dreams from my travels. Upon my return from Point Roadnight, I dreamed Mum, Ray and I had gone to a fair. Wandering through the arcades I lost them and found a set of stairs near a fire exit. Atop the stairs were switches for lights and fans. The stairwell was deep and wide. Along the descending wall, a plasma screen covered the area, a console hanging from a socket. The game console twisted in my hands: rotating the left side moved the body while the right side turned the head. My pen pal from Anglesea came down the stairwell behind me while I was absorbed in the game and startled me, thinking she was an enemy from the game but, in reality, she turned out to be a friendly. Grateful and humbled from the time and love I shared with my family and friends, the dream is now over and work has begun, back at SRC, until the next wave takes me travelling back to the beach, Bargara, Broadbeach and beyond, overseas.
I was recently introduced to the pomegranate. I have not had the pleasure of tasting the pomegranate, having only seen the picture but it is a curious looking fruit with pearly seeds that remind me of salmon roe but of a dark purple colour.
The pomegranate has a part in a story in Greek mythology and it so happens that the woman with whom I am friendly and who introduced me to the fruit, also shares an interest in Greek mythology.
Persophone, daughter of Demeter – goddess of the Harvest – was taken by the brother of Zeus, Hades – lord of the Underworld – for his wife. Hades was a lonely god, surrounded by dead things, bones decayed, offal in flesh, writhing maggots and the like. It was hard and solitary work ruling the dead, passing judgements and keeping the peace amongst millenia of enemies gathered together in one place.
Unlike the Christian mythology with its binary opposition of Heaven and Hell, the Underworld was where everybody ended up when they’re buried. Hades’ work was necessary and the cthonic deity was equivalent but not quite opposite to the world of Olympus. True, the Underworld was less aesthetically pleasing and the smells were less than perfume but nonetheless, Hades was Zeus’ brother and deserved some form of respect.
Hades did manage to entertain distinguished guests who had passed over the river to his domain. Aristophanes wrote a play called The Frogs that details Dionysus’ journey to Hades’ palace to bring back a tragedian for Athens as there were no more great dramatists left since Euripedes died. Hades reserved a seat at his dinner table for his most honoured poet. But the succulent touch of flesh that is so nice, was missing from his life. He needed a woman and the voluptuous daughter of the ever-fertile goddess Demeter naturally caught his eye.
Demeter was heart-stricken at this effrontery by Hades and withdrew herself from the Earth. The crops died and the earth became drought-stricken. All the green grass turned to dust and the fruits of the trees died and shrivelled up, barren and infertile.
And the earth died screaming,
while I lay dreaming,
dreaming of you. Tom Waits
Zeus could not let the Earth die. He demanded of his brother that he return Demeter’s daughter back to her.
Now Hades had played a trick on Persephone as he did not want to give up his beloved woman. The Fates had long ago decreed that anyone partaking of the food of Hades should never be allowed to leave. Hades fed Persephone a handful of pomegrante seeds – those delicious-looking, dark purple seeds like salmon roe.
Not even Zeus could overturn what the Fates had decreed. A compromise was reached. For part of the year Persephone would be allowed to spend her time upon the surface of the Earth with her mother and for the remainder of the time (roughly one month for every pomegranate seed she ate which – like the seasons – is not set in stone), she was to dwell in the Underworld with Hades.
The veracity of this myth was born out for the Greeks by the change in the seasons. In the autumn and winter months, Persephone would dwell in the Underworld as Hades’ bride but in springtime, the leaves would return to the trees and planting could begin again as Demeter returned home to the Earth to meet her daughter ascending from the cthonic. It was a cause for celebration, planting seeds and making love, dancing and singing, drinking and eating the fruits of the Earth as part of the orgiastic spring festivals.
I work for a company that researches social issues for various government departments, universities and non-governmental organisations. The company conducts surveys over the telephone and the interviewers will call private numbers from time to to time using what is called, random digit dialling.
Random digit dialling involves simply entering the first six or eight numbers to know what region of Australia being called as most surveys are conducted on a geographic basis. The information is relevant to particular communities for the purposes of allotting funding and determining the level of services and the salience of certain social issues.
The last two or four digits are randomly generated by a computer to ensure a representative sample of the population, getting the opinions of a good cross-section of the community. No statements could be made about the community as a whole if the numbers weren’t generated randomly. For example, the Victorian Population Health study aims to measure health services and the level of general health and well-being of Victorians. Short of calling every single household in Victoria (a hopeless task), taking a randomly selected cross-section of the community makes a good picture of the health and well-being of Victorians as a whole, even if we only speak to a certain proportion of Victorians.
It happens at times that numbers listed on the Do Not Call register (a federal initiative that forbids telemarketers from calling certain telephone numbers (research for public health, charity organisations or other social issues are exempt from the register)) or unlisted/private numbers. At times, these individuals called by the interviewers will be irate and suspicious, even outrightly hostile at the call for a telephone survey on public health or social issues, as if they live in a bubble world, set aside from the rest of society where they don’t pay taxes and there is no living colloquium of ideas being exchanged in the public sphere on what constitutes our values as a whole whether that be at a community or national level (the Australian constitution is itself, a dead book, composed by cattle-ranchers and wealthy white men, the “improvers of mankind.”)
The majority of individuals with unlisted numbers are kind and will often participate in these studies once they learn the purpose of the call is to improve the community’s state of affairs. There are many good and excellent reasons to have a private number – I have a private number and I am on the Do Not Call register. I can well understand one’s surprise at being called by a stranger when one has taken these measures but the anti-social attitude demonstrated by some individuals is significant of a slave mentality.
An interviewer was threatened by a householder the other day if we ever called his house again. People who never want to participate in the research for public, social goods we conduct, may be put on the company Do Not Call register where even if their number is randomly generated, its crosschecked with the register and, obviously, we do not want to disturb their peace and serenity. But threatening to visit an interviewer’s house and kick their door down is violent, unnecessary and unkind.
One is entitled to privacy and the freedom to refuse. One has the right to be skeptical about the outcomes of surveys and their impact on the community as a whole. But the soul and spirit of a tyrant lives in the person who behaves like a thug, threatening interviewers with legal action and damage to their personal being. It undermines the interconnectedness of our being and the freedom we do have to exercise and change our social circumstances. It is poor form and – all lofty ethical and social ideas aside – “it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified.” (Nietzsche)
Ray’s father, Donnie, passed away in a hospital on the Gold Coast on Wednesday, finally crossing the river Styx after a four week extension of life with one kidney operating at less than five per cent, major organ failure, cirrhosis of the liver, and diarrhoea constant until the doctors pumped seven litres of fluid from his body last weekend.
In the country’s capital, the water broke on Thursday evening. Birth of a new life – Michelle and Billy’s baby girl (Siduri – 3.68 kg, 49 cm, full head of hair) came out caesarean yesterday after trying to exit the womb, feet-first.
I received the good news in a text message, standing outside ACMI (the Australian Centre for the Moving Image). I watched the new VCA (Victorian College of Arts) graduate films last night. My friend, Qing, was screening her short film and the subject matter was, ah, sensitive, concerning the meaning of father and mother, the sacred ties of family.
The story involves an incestuous relationship between a father and his daughter. The daughter (speaking her mother tongue, Mandarin) askes her father in bed – did you love mother like you love me? – In a heart-wrenching moment.
I love everything that flows, even the menstrual flow that carries away the seed unfecund. (Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer)
Now. Quite apart from the fact that her primary collaborator and husband is well-versed in psychoanalysis and the story lending itself to all kinds of sloppy, oedipal interpretations, why would you select such an uneasy subject matter for your film? Not only that but then screen it for your family and friends (her husband felt the screening had the atmosphere of a wedding as different streams of his life and his wife’s, intersect and juxtapose themselves about the couple’s work), sell it to industry folk and have this crazy film on your CV for the rest of your life?
The film is brilliant. The subject-matter stands outside her husband’s influence – she came up with the idea alone. Red Water Red stood out from the nine or so short films shown (other notables included The Boxers and Thirst). Her film follows the flux. The tried and true sweeping generalisation of the incest taboo as a universal moralising tenet, is put on trial in this film – a litmus test (acidic substances turn blue paper red) of morality. Amidst the ever-swirling flows of desire (and all desire flows IE it is action without activity, a striving: time stands still in the moment of its consummation), the river rocks against the walls of good and proper associations of the sign to measure up against the mark of a natural taboo, dammed and contradicted. Here thou shalt not pass.
A dead baby is served in a watery bowl after the wife/daughter/mother cooks up a dinner (and here, the colour of the film changes to a graphic yet surreal black and white) for her husband/father/lover leaving in the morning. He will leave her money.
Two literary sources from the ancient Greeks sprang to mind.
Heraclitus the weeping philosopher is attributed with the saying:
On those stepping into rivers the same, other and other waters flow. (A fragment)
2. King Oedipus accuses himself before his daughter-sisters, blind and crying:
How I weep for you – I cannot see you now…
What more misery could you want?
Your father killed his father, sowed his mother,
One, one and the selfsame womb sprang you –
He cropped the very roots of his existence. (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex)
Billy is a new father and Michelle is a new mother. Donnie has died and Ray and Cheryl are without a father. Will their stories ever be read, the flux of their lives and deaths fixed on the written page?
We went out after the films and drank too much – flows of money and plastic exchanged for wine, beer, champagne, cocktail no. 8, sour no.10 – ending up at an upstairs bar next to Double Happiness down an alleyway in Chinatown, drawing connections from snatches of conversation – a touch of pathos… a brand new life has begun… another beer? I’ll have whatever you’re having… – with old friends and new. I left Chris, Adam and Qing searching for more substantial fare on Russell Street to soak up the booze as I retired down little Bourke to catch a number eight tram back to Brunswick, into bed where I could drown myself in the blessed waters of forgetfulness, dreams of motorised scooters armed with machine guns riding down concrete carparks, cop cars in pursuit, red sirens flashing.
David Grann's novel The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsessionis story of the legendary British explorer Percy Fawcett who in 1925 disappeared with his son in the Amazon while looking for an ancient lost city
work – I grind a fresh batch of beans) and a cigarette. The sun is shining, the mid-morning is clear but clouds threaten the afternoon. I practise my bowing for an hour. I have a violin lesson this afternoon at four and I have to correct this downbow. My bow still trembles on the downstroke.
