A week of HY culture, these past ten days, I’ve seen the Liquid Desire of Dali at the National Gallery of Victoria, heard the London Philharmonic Orchestra play the Eroica of Beethoven at Hamer Hall and witnessed twenty-first century German opera in its gruelling best interpretation of ancient Greek legend, Medea, at the State Theatre.

Culture doesn’t get much more decadent than this.

The Dali exhibition had a momentous line-up to get into the building. On the last night, the queue stretched to the St Kilda Bridge, several hundred metres from the entrance of the cloakroom. Twenty-four hour Dali attracted thousands of spectators across the kaleidoscopic, socio-economic spectra.

On the last morning of the exhibition, the line was down to the fountains in front of the NGV. There was an end-of-footy season BBQ in a couple of hours for work and there was no way I could make the barbie and see Dali.

The choice was obvious.

I stood outside for half an hour to check my bag in the cloakroom and then faced the prospect of an hour wait to buy a ticket. Fortunately, one of the attendants invited me to attend an introductory lecture that would secure my ticket and inform my viewing pleasures inside the gallery. The line for tickets to the lecture was about five minutes long and brought me up to speed on my next-to-nil knowledge of the surrealist master.

Dali was a country boy from Spain. His mother died when he was young. He never finished art school, claiming there was nothing he could learn from the teachers that he had not already taught himself. In his early twenties Picasso saw his work and flagged him as a potential. A few years later, Dali went to Paris and he visited Picasso in his studio.

“Master,” Dali told Picasso, “I have come here before I have even been to the Louvre.”

“You made the right choice, my young apprentice,” Picasso replied.

Dali was heavily involved in the Surrealist movement (duh) and collaborated with surrealist film director Luis Buñuel for the short film, Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog). He designed the Lobster Telephone. He painted his famous masterpiece, Persistence of Memory (not included in Liquid Desire). When he was later expelled from the group after a falling out with one of the leaders, Dali answered “I am surrealism.”

Packing his encumbering ego onto a ship with his beloved wife, he sailed West to America where he lived in New York for a decade during the war. He would spend half o his remaining life between New York and Europe. He worked with Walt Disney and designed jewellery. He was the author and subject of holographs and photographs. He designed a film set for Hitchcock and built a pavilion – the Dream of Venus – for the 1939 World Trade Fair. Dali performed for television and even starred in a television commercial.

These were some of the eras and artistic events covered in the exhibition. The television clips were shown repeatedly on a dozen retro television sets piled up on top of one another at the end of a corridor.

The paintings were also there. From the landscapes of his homeland in Spain, the multiplicitous vision of Dali would emerge with his play on shapes and images, juxtaposed contents to disturb and desire. Disappointed the Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by Her Own Chastity
(c. 1954)
was not showing, there was nevertheless, a stream of
paintings to fill the eyes from a self-portrait done at the age of fifteen through his period of “nuclear mysticism” and beyond. Throughout his cutting edge career, Dali insisted upon the need for the art of painting to re-visit the old masters like Vermeer and continued to pay tribute to them in his own art, a delicious composition of the old and the new.

Over the course of his life, Dali moved from the coast of Spain to the psychoanalysis of Freud to the atomic physics of Heisenberg. This was all too much to digest properly in three hours on top of the hour or two to get into the gallery. In the dying hours of the exhibition, my eyes were drying up. Next season of winter masterpieces, more pint-sized portions of HY culture will be required to sate the soul and open mine eyes.

One week ago today, my little brother celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday. He had a sickie from work during the day and went out for dinner on Thursday night with one of our three sisters.

I called him up before he went to dinner and asked him what he wanted for his birthday. In the past I usually bought JB Hi-Fi vouchers but this year, the year of my little brother’s Saturn return, required a more personal gift.

Ant asked for a

Vox amplug headphones amp

(actual size)

A “useful tool.” Ant plays the bass guitar for a punk band, Forefold. The Vox Amplug headphone bass amp is handy for those inspired moments to jam but you can’t be arsed setting up your amp. The Vox Amplug headphones bass amp has an inline for a CD/mp3 player for you to jam along with your favourite artists.  The Vox Amplug headphones bass amp can also serve as a pre-amp at gigs. Also doesn’t wake up your housemates.

I need one for my violin.

I spent a couple of hours trying to find the damn thing. I thought he was talking about a little amp but not this small; one of those old school amps, blues players would busk their electric guitars with. After a brief conversation, I was able to ascertain the device pictured above was the desired object and ordered one from the only store in Australia to stock them. Sure I could have used eBay but I don’t want to sign up to eBay and add another source for my habit of online shopping.

The Vox headphone bass amp is in the mail.

Happy birthday, Ant.  Many rockin’ returns about the sun.

The reader and I will preserve the fiction that Monsieur G. does not exist, and we shall concern ourselves with his drawings and his watercolours (for which he expresses a patrician scorn) as though we were scholars who had to pronounce upon precious historical documents, thrown up by chance, whose author must remain eternally unknown… pure poetic hypothesis, conjecture, a labour of the imagination.

Do you remember a picture (it really is a picture!), painted – or rather written – by the most powerful pen of our age, and entitled The Man of the Crowd?  In the window of a coffee-house there sits a convalescent, pleasantly absorbed in gazing at the crowd, and mingling through the medium of thought, in the turmoil of thought that surrounds him.  But lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death, he is rapturously breathing in all the odours and essences of life; as he had been on the brink of total oblivion, he remebers and fervently desires to remember, everything.  Finally he hurls himself headlong into the midst of the throng, in pursuit of an unknown, half-glimpsed countenance that has, on an isntant bewitched him.  Curiosity has become a fatal, irresistible passion!

Imagine an artist who is always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent, and you will have the key to the nature of Monsieur G.

Monsieur G. is an old man… The crowd is his element, as the air is that of birds and water of fishes. His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd. For the perfect flaneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite… The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito… “Any man who is not crushed by one of those griefs whose nature is too real not to monopolise all his capacities and who can yet be bored in the heart of the multitude, is a blockhead! A blockhead! And I despise him.” [Mister G.]

Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life

I went to the Melbourne International film festival last night and saw a great – uh – “documentary” called The Yes Men Save the World. These two guys give seminars to important CEOs that take the neo-liberal philosophy behind the free market economy to a wholly new level. Brilliant film.

S, A and I were standing about the front of ACMI after the film, talking about appearances and how the Yes Men were able to discourse with their “ideological enemies” on their own level. S was telling us about how much her hair intimidates her colleagues at university. “Normal” people look at her like she’s some kind of tough bitch because her hair is closely cropped. And this morning that conversation got me to thinking about Sammy.

That’s Sam on the left. This photo was taken several months ago at the SRC Christmas party, Queensberry hotel in Carlton.

Sam died in a car accident last week. People often say of someone that he was the “nicest guy” after they pass away but in Sam’s case, the label couldn’t be truer.

Not that he was an angel or a saint, but he had a manner that would set your anxieties at ease – the guy never let himself become perturbed or agitated. If I had a problem, whether that was personal or work-related, Sam was an island of serenity amidst the stormy seas enveloping my sabai at times. He kept his opinions to himself for the better part and he knew how to be discrete – a rare talent in an age of blah blah from tabloids to twitter to cyber-bullying. The modern age is characterised by the opinion, the subjective will to self, self-righteousness, the cult of narcissism.

Now Sam had a beautiful head of hair. I don’t mean to wax on all homosexual but he had curly locks to die for. A very unconventional style (one he lost a few months ago when he had his hair cut short because he was tired of comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite – fair enough). To look at the guy, you might be forgiven for thinking he was some kind of mad pianist (which, it turns out, he was – he loved to plonk out Ben Folds Five on the black and white keys).

Sam was a conservative – a diehard sports fan and a Liberal party voter. Politically and aesthetically, the two of us couldn’t be further removed from each other. But he had this eccentric hair, a nod to the belief in personal freedom in the cultivation of the arts of existence. He believed in the Good, not in some abstract, metaphysical cloud, but in making a difference in everyday life. He was generous with his time, moderate in his opinions and charitable towards the vulnerable. I think the following passage could have been written of Sam. I don’t mean to come across as a wanker, quoting ancient Greeks literature but if what Thucydides wrote could be true of us today, then there must be a truth in his words that spans the ages above and beyond his lifetime and epoch.

We make friends by doing good to others, not by receiving good from them. This makes our friendship all the more reliable, since we want to keep alive the gratitude of those who are in our debt by showing continued goodwill to them: whereas the feelings of one who owes us something lacks the same kind of enthusiasm, since he knows that, when he repays our kindness, it will be more like paying back a debt than giving something spontaneously… When we do kindness to others, we do not do them out of any calculations of profit or loss: we do them without afterthought, relying on our free liberality.        (Pericles’ funeral oration for those who died in the first year of the war between Sparta and Athens from the History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II 40-1)

Not that Sam would ever have agreed with me here in what I’m saying about his hair or his “philosophy.” We never really spoke of philosophy and politics and he would have probably had a go at me for quoting a passage from some dead historian and talking about the “arts of existence.” But in his manner and the way he conducted himself, he spoke volumes on his attitudes towards other people. The community he was a part of, whether that be with his family, friends, his girlfriend and her son, was always foremost in his mind. One thing about John Howard is that he certainly had a unitary vision of what it means to be one community, one people (even if the content of that vision lacks any subtle appreciation of difference) and Sam’s political preferences is consistent with his personality, even the crazy hair atop his head.

I would be going too far to say Sam was a “casualty” in a war. His death had no purpose, it was a tragic accident. At times, life feels like a battle with lovers and friends, with colleagues and interviewers, bosses and clients, and with the clock. But Sam had a strong appreciation for the contest and a considerable love for the people who were a part of his existence. Sam has taught me and many others whose lives he touched that most important of lesson: how to be a whole person (without taking oneself too seriously). He was always there, his whole self, actively and purposefully, in his sports and at work, in his friendships and in his loves. And now his strong presence will be even more sorely missed for all that, in his absence.

R.I.P. Sam.

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.

Okay. I will.

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.

I, the blockhead and romantic idiot that I am.

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.

…..and he still lies there to this day.

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 19^th and 20^th 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)

Time perhaps to ex-doctrinate myself and enjoy the fruits of H.Y. labour.

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.