The Trojan Hermit

House!

2011-06-24T15:47:00.000+10:00

As of last Sunday, Aaron and I are bona fide Collingwood residents.

House-hunting

2011-06-15T11:59:00.002+10:00

Aaron and I have been doing so for the last two months now (almost negligibly so in the first two weeks, a little less slackened in the second two, and now like hounds on the trail for blood). We have to vacate our property by the 25th of June, as per the landlord's demand, and so far it's been rejections and we'll let you know when we know's and out-of-character 9pm sleeps, each time hoping that tomorrow might be 'the day'.

I'll keep you posted.

In absentia

2011-03-04T13:55:00.005+11:00

Hello. I know I've not posted for a really long time. I'm working on a rehash to the blog so bear with me as I do.

In the meantime, some news:

Independent Melbourne bookshop Readings has opened up an online shop, and for just $9.95 you can purchase the 2010 edition of Award Winning Australian Writing as an ebook from the site. Of course, print versions of the book are still available in selected bookshops for $29.95 and can also be ordered via the Melbourne Books website.
Apple Cart, a zine which features one of my poems, was launched some weeks ago. Check out its site for ordering and other details.
I'm writing the EdCommitorial for Pulp, the upcoming issue of Voiceworks. Updates to be posted soon.

Paper marks

2010-12-14T16:27:00.003+11:00

Paper is dangerous because it leads to all sorts of permanent marks. Whether in pen or pencil or watercolour or ink, any marks one makes are forever embedded in the sheet, seeping through, tainting, staining the fibres that would once have been the alveoli of a sequoia or a narra or blue gum.

Derrida liked to talk of things he called ‘traces’, and I think these, in their simplest form, can be understood through the use of paper. Paper has limitless potential, and what it is yet to contain is ‘always already there’ — ghosts of the written word once there, ostensibly removed, but never truly annihilated. Nihil: ‘nothing’. A blank sheet of paper is never nothing. Each page is a testament to centuries and centuries of creation and destruction, to scientism and oppression and exclusive trade routes. Each page is laden with meaning before it’s even written on.

Paper is also dangerous because it gives you paper cuts. They say the most common way to get a paper cut is to have a single page of a book bolstered by a large number of other pages on either side of it, causing it to be as sharp and stiff as a razor. And despite their size, paper cuts elicit a substantial amount of pain. This is due to two things: first, the pain is concentrated into a single area of the skin, making the nerve endings in that area hyperactive; and second, the cut doesn’t scab quickly enough as there is too little surface area for blood to evaporate.

I like to write on paper. I especially like the way it feels when my palm slides across it, a pencil trapped in the ‘K’ formed by my thumb, index and middle fingers. I don’t mind that my paper contains traces, or is the butchered remains of a massacred forest, or can turn into a blade when it pleases. With paper the tangled mess that is my thoughts can be given a semblance of form. With paper I can tell stories, and explain myself, and make notes, and capture moments. With paper I can even make one thousand cranes and make a wish — this is another one of those things ‘they’ like to talk about, and they say it really, really works.

Euphoric

2010-12-13T13:40:00.003+11:00

I've just returned from the 20th Meredith Music Festival and, despite the aching back and muddy hiking boots and depleted bank account, I must say I had a splendid time. Highlights include performances by El Guincho, Kimbra, Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Kyü, and Sally Seltman; indulging myself in two homemade bottles (plastic, of course) of Pimm's and lemonade; and the festival's rather cheap and scrumptious baked potatoes. Lows include the apocalyptic winds and rain on the Saturday evening (which caused my and several other people to fall asleep prematurely), the last band (they're too bad for me to even remember their name), and festival-goers wearing tights as pants.

On another note, Award Winning Australian Writing 2010 has been reviewed positively once again. This time it's with the Adelaide Advertiser, and the review can be read here.

AWAW 2010 reviewed

2010-11-02T22:59:00.007+11:00

Award Winning Australian 2010 was reviewed in the A2 (30 October 2010, p. 24).

To see a scanned version of the review:

I am rather stoked.

AWAW 2010 launch

2010-10-19T16:19:00.010+11:00

If you're free on Thursday, 21 October, from six to eight in the evening, please come to the launch of Award Winning Australian Writing 2010, which I edited, at the City Library in Melbourne. The event will be launched by Emerging Writers' Festival director Lisa Dempster, and will involve readings and talks by authors featured in the 2010 anthology.

It would be lovely to have you celebrate the 'birth' of this book with me.

Suitcase

2010-10-04T21:06:00.002+11:00

Tired. Too many things going on. It's nine o'clock (Eastern Daylight Savings time, so really, it's only eight) and already I feel like it's midnight; Monday, and already I feel like Thursday evening.

---

If the world would only choose to fit in
to my suitcase then I would put it all
inside. But then where else would I have left,
with a suitcase full of world, to travel?

Civilised States

2010-09-19T22:59:00.009+10:00

i.

I am alone in this forest of disparate
woods. So you I knead from the earth — a burning

womb doused by the tears I have shed, like rain.
With these hands, all hangnails and calluses,

I am a terraformer: a natal agent,
a creator of life. Yet here I am also

Faust, my fingers frolicking like a harpist’s
plucking, plucking; the humid air that is made

striated by the smoke of your everyday
leaving perforations on the epidermal

layer of my palm. And there you are, inchoate,
unsated by my lesioned hands, my fierce monsoons.

ii.

You have grown more wily: you with your self-made
dwellings and your flames that ward off, with their orange-

red, the blackened sky. No longer are you called
‘creatures’ for now I see the others, in your hands,

are tame; they are your handicaps, umbilical
performers of function. From the earth you soar

to heights that match Olympus, to heavens
of infinite stairs and spires, erect like spindles.

And while you weave your tapestry, resplendent
in its complexity, the womb from which you came

spills blood, and I, unable to bear its howling,
repair the severed cord: a suture done.

iii.

There is nothing to feel except absence; nothing
here but the products of your livelihood rising

like pillars impaling even the most deft
of the winged. There’s more of you than I

had expected: more taming, more slaying, more
progress and production. In your ascent

to the realm of the ideal you’ve left
a trail of ruin — corpses of organisms

withered from your corpus of oppression. Now
even I am redundant: the earth I used

to knead in even, tender strokes no longer
cradling life but embryos of mechanism.

---
These poems were written for Aaron Billings's upcoming exhibition — details to be finalised.

Anniversary poetry

2010-08-28T12:43:00.004+10:00

This is something I wrote for my darling on our anniversary. With his permission, it has also been sent for publication in Apple Cart Zine.

---

To A. A. B., one year later

My father always told me
that after every moment
of joy comes a dose of sorrow.
Like magpies, people feel this —
by their lonesome there is nothing
but despair, the nagging, biting
feeling of unwantedness
after pairs are pulled apart.
But joy is not just the inverse
of sorrow — of one and two
in alternation, of the former
expiring and substituted
with the other. No, with you
I am a magpie: two for joy.
And though sometimes I think
I miss that solitude of mine,
the sight of you — all smiles and eyes
that glint like dew on winter
mornings — cannot but remind me
that fathers are often wrong.

Splinter

2010-08-20T20:57:00.009+10:00

I'm working on a poem for Velveteen Zine, edited by my friend and fellow poet Gemma White, and for Apple Cart Zine by artist and friend Katii Ryder. I've also submitted to Blue Dog, the Australian Poetry Centre's flagship publication. Updates will be posted in due course.

UPDATE: received a rejection from Blue Dog today (20 October).

---

In the folds of my forehead there’s a splinter
of remembrance triggered by the patter
of raindrops on my window. They go tap, tap,
tap on the glass as I watch and propel
myself into a stupor. You stood there
(so goes the memory), telling stories about
Ireland and daffodils and potato-chip
sandwiches you ate in childhood. Then I said
just How odd is this? that Empedocles
got it right, supposing we are all just earth
and water and fire and air, a cocktail
of elementary particles jostling
for dominance.
My watch (back in real-time) says
it’s six-fourteen. I’ve been counting down in two-
minute blocks since five. I stop the tap, tap, tap
of my eyes because it’s silly, because
it’s just a memory and it’s not that sad,
is it? ’Cos soon you’ll be en route to somewhere
else, somewhere not with me, and I won’t see
your hand waving through the walls transparent
in the belly of a metal centipede.
Soon, but not yet. For now we keep warm, sharing
breaths and blankets in a makeshift bedroom
of crates and Blu-Tacked wallpaper. For now
we’ve got umbrellas and scarves and tap, tap, tap.

Double Venn diagram

2010-08-15T18:38:00.005+10:00

I had a fantastic weekend with Aaron, Aoife, Ailsa and the rest of the former-Barkly crew (now expanded). We celebrated the return of Lachi and Cecile from France, and bid birthday wishes for dear Liz.

But prior to all that, the Billingses and I had a day of art, visiting the lace and Pacific masks exhibitions at the NGV and being artful along a river in Richmond (the name of which I don't know). In addition to doing a blind-drawing in crayon of the European-looking bridge in the river's vicinity, this is what I'd come up with:

Discs are foxtrotting in concentric
circles, doing twirls in a ballroom
of cumulo-stratus grey.
Below, in trails of four, are ribbons
of light, painting ripples as the wind
rocks the cradle of the night.

Stellar devotion

2010-08-01T23:35:00.014+10:00

In the last week or so, I: have completed all the necessary preparations for Award Winning Australian Writing 2010 — all except my editor’s introduction; finished reading Mary Ellen Jordan’s Balanda, a set text for one of my Masters subjects; visited the SLV’s Mirror of the World exhibition; have moved a fifth or so of my book collection from woop-woop to Flemington; and received a postcard from the lovely Ainslee Meredith (my reply is still in-process).

Today, I: enlisted myself for membership to the NGV; saw the European Masters exhibition with Fi, Aaron and Aoife; and wrote this:

---

Nobody really grows up in this place; it is too neon-lit and polluted by the airs of pretence. Remember this. The people of this town are continually Pompeii’d in mid-conversation or crushed into silt by the clouds that have become obese from their prayers. This place is full of traces: corpses of poppies, slithering between sandstone and ruby pebbles; and pearls dropped by giant clams that had adapted the castanet propulsion of their scallop cousins, laughing as they fled each impending catastrophe. These, yes — but no barns with rain-faded doors and rusted iron bolts, nor giant bales of Rumpelstiltskin hay. I am boating in the townsfolk’s dried-up sea, my vessel’s keel drawing lines on the seabed (facsimiles of the powerlines zigzagging the town’s arteries, like trouser seams that have come apart). I boat because it is a gesture of wanting, because I too want to laugh while escaping this degeneracy. I yearn for green, green gardens where I can develop a real nicotine addiction; where the nylon strums of a rondalla detonate breath, and cathedral parking lots offer the sole form of shelter from the squall and squalor. There, my mouth will emit smoke only when a cigarette has been pincered between my index and middle. There, poppy buds will persist, because they won’t have semiprecious gems as flowerbeds. Not like in this country town that looks deceptively like a city.

pARTy: Exquisite Corpse writing

2010-07-25T22:41:00.007+10:00

Yesterday I had a pARTy (read: 'art party') at my house with a small group of friends — including Jess, Ailsa and Nikita — who displayed creative flair. Aaron and I came up with the idea after feeling that the last couple of gatherings we'd attended lacked a bit of direction. Somehow, we thought, if we could give the party an 'angle' or 'focus', the night might ensue a bit more purposefully.

Hence 'pARTy'. The activities we indulged in include still-life drawing, 'artist heads' (our version of celebrity heads), poetry reading, and, of course, Exquisite Corpse drawing and writing. I had blogged about Exquisite Corpse on Virgule some time ago, but I'll be posting the writing ones below.

The first was a sort of test run, with only a small number of people participating, and Jodie (a fellow Voiceworks EdCommer and very close friend of mine) suggested we use a story starter to kick off. We chose a sentence from a story by Sam Rutter (another EdCommer) published in the fiction edition of the Big Issue, and what the group came up with is:

"Get over him," Molly advised in a manner that brooked no discussion, no retort. She whispered a sleepy complaint and blew her nose on the bedsheets.

Reaching for his wand, he looked straight into her eyes. "Oh, Molly," he said, tickling her lightly between her ribs. "I would like to cavort with you between these 500-count Egyptian cottons all night long."

Long and thick like a well-made sausage. The butcher looked like he hated life. And his wife. She came out from the back before he managed to serve Molly. Instantly the tension invaded the room.

Meat. She liked meat, she thought to herself. It was one of those things that she just loved to eat. Delicious food. Food of the gods that embalmed the dead corpses dragged on the back of chariots that do not decay. As his zombie flesh peeled from his face, she stifled a wave of nausea, turned to the door and ran. The cold froze my aioli. I wanted to cough up ice cubes, but all that came was lung. When my legs gave way to the earth, and the pavement came to kiss my face, then I went no further. Warming cold concrete with warm blood, I knew I'd go no further.

Later in the night there was talk of doing another Exquisite Corpse writing session, and that one mirrored the first. This time, however, we opted for a shared 'theme' instead of a starter, and we chose 'nuns'. The end-product:

She went into the cloister's prayer room and clasped her hands. They were long but chapped at the knuckles and with uneven nails. He liked the way they moved around the organ towards the frontal lobe. It didn't look like how we imagined, insides on the outsides and outsides on the inside. It seemed either ironic or inappropriate or perfectly improbable.

Or was it? She wasn't sure. All she wanted was to ascertain whether her hands needed moisturising. Smooth white chemicals that soak your skin, soak your cells that pull the ooze into your blood. Blood. It leaked and oozed. They didn't know when it would stop Green was its colour. Green like grass. When it stopped he was dead. The only one of his kind. Avril lay strewn on the floor, a sexpot about to boil over. I tipped my hat to the hat-check clerk and he returned my gesture in kind. It seemed a rift had appeared in the carpet. Soft and turgid fabric, disjointed and peeling.

I saw a small black. The night bites sotfly with the heater on, the draft whipping playfully around me, the wind echoing in the body of this old house. Sleep comes and goes like the memory of an old friend, almost lost but for the thought that remains.

All in all, a fruitful night. Thanks to all who attended.

Lunch hours and lucid dreams

2010-07-08T12:55:00.005+10:00

I had that moment in a dream last night, that crystalline moment when the entire dream-narrative pivots on the response I make to a dream character’s inquiry. He asked for the time — we were in the middle of Melbourne somewhere, on some crowded street, possibly Swanston — and I motioned to lift my Casio Alarm Chrono wristwatch (the one I had worn between the ages of six and eleven, the one I’d requested my parents to deliver all the way from the Philippines) to my face. I knew, just because I remembered ‘waking up’ that morning and thinking it, that today (in the dream-world) was the 8th of July. But my watch, petulant little thing, insisted that it was the 20th of December — hardly, considering I was clad in the dark-blue corduroy coat with the furry white collar I’d recently bought from the Flemington op-shop. And what’s worse, the liquid crystal display announced that it was 8.49 in the evening — which just couldn’t be true, for there was an almost-fluorescent glare to everything around me. Somehow, I was certain it was the 8th of July and that it was 11-ish in the morning. I passed this message on to the man, apologising for my watch’s insolence, ‘It’s never usually like this.’ The man thanked me; I walked towards Flinders Street Station, then woke up.

This dream would have been relegated to the doldrums of my subconscious were it not for my enacting the same gesture (the lifting of wristwatch to face) today, now awake, in my office, having lunch. Coincidentally, it reminded me of something from the film Waking Life, in which a character in the protagonist’s dream gives instructions on how to distinguish dreams from reality. Two of those — and these are the two most relevant to my own encounter — are: it is impossible for lighting levels to vary in the dream world, and digital time-keeping devices fail to tell the time accurately (although in the film their failure is depicted as blurred or unstable lines, while in my dream the LCD functioned properly, albeit with the incorrect time/date).

I always seem to have dreams of this sort, with reality and dreams intersecting at such extreme degrees that I find myself referring to the dream encounters in real-life situations, much to the confusion of my companions. There are times when I feel like I’ve already done something, only to find that the task is still undone, my dream-self’s industriousness unable to satisfy waking-life standards. And there’s always the amusing ‘I had this conversation with you once where we talked about X,’ which I often feel catapults me to pathological-liar status in the other person’s eyes — even though, technically, referring to a non-real person, or a confabulated version of a real person, cannot count as a lie.

If dreams are the mind’s way of organising its plethora of stored information, how then am I to make sense of dreams that are so tactile, so vivid, that they seem to embody simulacra of my waking experiences? It’s like vomiting after overindulging in alcohol and swallowing up the whole acidic mess again.

Lunch time over. I cannot turn on my desk lamp. Dream? Inevitable light bulb failure?

Resolve

2010-07-05T01:19:00.012+10:00

I've taken to actually making this blog a, err, blog. I must persevere in pushing myself to update as frequently as possible to both retain the interest of my readers (whom I suspect aren't mere figments of my manic mind) and to allow myself to fully be subsumed into this Web-writing practice.

Onward. (Excuse the preamble.)

***

Tonight I watched Beautiful Kate, an Australian film directed by Rachel Ward, with my housemates. And I really did enjoy it.

I was initially taken aback by the film's distinctly Australian setting (remote, harsh sunlight, vast grassland, kangaroos, verandahs, etc.) and by the characters' slightly broad accents. But as the narrative unfolded I was enraptured by the well-developed characterisation, the superb acting, and the intricately woven events that tied the characters together. The cinematographic elements played a part too, with the harsh lighting and muted colours effectively capturing the soporific aridness of the Australian rural landscape.

As is typical of my taste in texts (typographic or otherwise), I was transfixed by the story's lack of real 'events' and the absence of an easily discernible plotline. In Beautiful Kate's film world everything seemed slow, passive-aggressive, motivated not so much by the characters but by a lifespan of its own, with the landscape coaxing the events into realisation. In place of those the film offered vacillations between retrospectives and moments in the present, which alternated until there was only the one time — a climactic undoing of the tightly-set looms, which left the viewer with a clear (enough) view of protagonist Ned's single thread. In my view, it was the space-time inhabited by the actual characters and events that was the most significant 'character' of all, requiring just as much — if not, more — comprehension on the viewer's part to be effectual.

Since I've not quite honed my skills in reviewing, and lest I inadvertently bombard you with any more spoilers, I'll instead supply you the trailer:

Advertisements, excuses, self-congratulatory posting, etc.

2010-07-02T14:53:00.007+10:00

I went to the launch of Chloe Wilson's The Mermaid Problem, which was part of the Australian Poetry Centre's 'New Poets Series', last night at the Wheeler Centre. As usual, Chloe's words (both written and spoken) catapulted me to a universe full of wonderfully literary things.

On another poetry-related note, the Birthmark issue of Voiceworks is being launched at Bella Union Bar in Trades Hall tonight. Please purchase a copy — it features my poem 'Soldier(ing)', which can be read below, alongside an illustration (also below) by Aaron Billings.

I apologise that I haven't really been posting much of late — I've been preoccupied with putting together this year's edition of Award Winning Australian Writing and finishing off edits for Distance, a novella by up-and-coming author Kingsley McGlew.

---

No, not another word
from you. There’s no need
to force yourself to speak.
Snow globes in your cranium:
a submarine, a rifle;
you leave for battle
tonight, said you’d return
for the last of winter’s kisses.

Just one more, I say,
though your mug remains undrunken.
You beseech me to join you,
comrade, turning away
my gift of drink, a grenade
cancerous in your hand.

I am no man of war.
I cannot, on horseback,
gallop into orange-juice skies
and return home bloody.
But cross-legged I will be
waiting on your porch,
needle and thread ready
to welcome you, amputee.

Precipitate

2010-06-15T12:06:00.005+10:00

There is a vent on the top left corner of my bedroom’s western wall and, like a leak in the hull of a ship, it lets in wave upon wave of winter air. I wanted it to stop, tried to combat it with a halogen heater and another heater of the fan variety, but simultaneously turning both on overloaded the already-overloaded power point. So now I am blanketed with cold – a cold I can run my fingers through like thickened cream; a cold that begets an onslaught of coughing and spine chills; a cold that reminds me of how long it’s been since I saw you last, our bodies jointly homeothermic, making officious the quilt of Pure Australian Wool.

Within a few (or many, I never really know) moments, the Venetian blinds invite ribbons of sunlight into my self-spun cocoon of heat and darkness. But ribbons never dawdle in their transformation into torture devices, waylaying, cajoling tired sleepers into productivity. As a gesture of acquiescence I motion to tidy up the room. Strewn on the floor are icebergs of used tissue paper and islands of shed clothing: by the foot of the bed, a cardigan; near the dresser, a half-unbuttoned long-sleeve shirt; spilled onto the bottommost tier of my bookshelf, your slacks that smell of mothballs. Crumple, toss, miss. Fold, shelve, repeat.

Noontime brings with it a light rain that creates a second frame (of water droplets no more than a millimetre in diameter) within the outer frame of my window. This type of rain, they told me as a child, heralds sickness; demonic disburser of influenza. I know, however, that water droplets that voluntarily plunge into the dust-ridden earth after having escaped to the heavens could not be evil. For even entire highways eventually become drenched despite the rain falling only in drizzles. And highways need to be cleansed of prior travellers’ muddy footprints so that you can see the white lines – amid the fog (which is the true demon), amid the creeping rays at dawn that bleach the skin around your eyes – that were drawn to lead you back to me.

Virgule cross-post

2010-06-09T11:54:00.004+10:00

Read my literary review of Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space on the Voiceworks blog, Virgule.

Mo(u)rning after

2010-05-28T12:28:00.002+10:00

There is a boy asleep on my bed. He breathes heavily, jolts as though an electric current had just passed through his body, then is still for a whole twelfth of a clock face. I tuck the blanket behind the curve of his back – he is now curled up on his side – lest the cold late-morning air pierce his skin like knives of icicle. I want nothing more than to lie free of worry, if at least for another hour or two, like the boy asleep on my bed. But I am already twenty-four minutes (by tram) away.

Josephine

2010-05-06T14:16:00.003+10:00

Last night I submitted a piece to the NGV’s Love, Loss & Intimacy writing competition. Read my entry, entitled ‘Josephine’, here.

Astral/Astray

2010-04-27T00:40:00.004+10:00

Sometimes I wish my scapulas could grow into narwhal horns so I could suspend a film of skin on each of them and glide from the window of my office to a place far away from here. I want to be an astronaut in an outer space of my own creation, convulsing, clambering for something to hold onto in a galactic pool of squid ink. Gliding, everything I see whirls, my entire field of vision a carousel of finger-smudged fairy lights and impressionist paintbrush smears.

I stop at an inter-stellar-section, somewhere between a comet’s light trail and a man-made satellite. While there, you interrupt my newfound quietude and force me to remember how some time ago I exploded into a tirade against colloquialisms. But see, I never really told you why I despised them, did I? Why these phrases so set in society’s word banks displeased me so? It’s because I have issues with the ‘co-’ and ‘loq’ aspects of the word – shared origins, shared points of view. I was never one to anchor myself anywhere, never able to cocoon myself with a particular place’s people’s vernacular. This is why I have allowed myself to be overpowered by inertia, to be powerless in influencing my space travel’s path.

In this vacuum, nothing tickles the hairs on my narwhal-horn glider-wings. My feet press against the nonexistent ground but feel no counter-force. Here, space has no presence; it is not space but time that pervades this astral plane. Here, I am but an overgrown piece of stardust. Here, I am an inimitable combination of carbon, nitrogen and sulphur that will face its end in what, to my companions, counts as a second. Here, only the winking pixies keep me company, and they don’t ever complain when the sounds from my moving lips are incomprehensible.

Run, mongrel dog, run.

2010-04-15T16:42:00.003+10:00

Run, mongrel dog, run. The boomgates have
descended – long, metal curtains – and
the trains have a curfew. Grass fields like
steel bristles comb away your moulting
hairs.

You look into the train, see the lights
flickering as the wheels clickity-
clack along tracks of mercury grey.
You watch as daughters turn into brides,
always wed to men that remind them
of their fathers, and as sons run off
to foreign stations with the same wool
trousers.

You run, and run, and run; you keep pace
but never catch up to the giant
millipede. You’re outside, unwelcome,
running when you do not even have
a ticket.

Captured moment

2010-04-06T19:16:00.017+10:00

He asks me why I don’t write more than I already do. I tell him it’s because I’m tired all the time, because there are so many things fluttering about in my mind, making me unable to stop and think, to capture a moment and shape it into a narrative. He shrugs, proceeding to turn the page of the magazine he’d just bought.

What a model of industriousness you are, churning out stories and poems just like that. I don’t know, I’m really not the type. I mean, I can't plan things like you do, just from your mind. Things have to happen for me.

He elbows my left arm and nods towards the train’s text screen to remind me that we’re getting off at this station. I smile and grab my bag, slinging it on my right shoulder. He stands at the door, waiting for me to disembark.

You’re a charmer, aren’t you? You always know just what to do. That’s a lie; I don’t write as often as I could be because everything just reminds me of—

He catches up to me and begins praising early twentieth century fiction’s ability to capture a mental state in its entirety, as done by Woolf or Huxley. I admit to never really liking Woolf’s excessive use of apposition, to intellectually vomiting at Huxley’s decadent depictions of bourgeois dinner parties. He winces, adamant that they are classics.

Surely writing isn’t solely about pushing limits, about rallying for how things could be? How can people who critique everything ever truly feel? We should turn here; it’s quicker because it cuts through the main road. What’s this Napoli’s place?

He inspects the restaurant through its large window, taming a wayward lock of hair in the process, and castigates how indulgent the selection of food seems. I secretly fantasise about having dinner here with the man in the beige jacket sitting inside, who probably won’t think the food was ‘so unethical’. He asks what I’m thinking.

What are you thinking?

He asks me again. I pretend not to have heard the first time, saying I experienced momentary disorientation, then suggest a different restaurant. He continues his oratory, now delving into the overbearingly narcissistic self-consciousness of Pynchon and Vonnegut.

You and I should go have Korean food. It’s not as ‘morally bankrupt’ as Italian. Yes, but that’s what makes their writings beautiful – they're aware of their createdness, their being fabrications. Time passes; art’s temperament changes.

He complains that I seem disinterested in the topic, asking if something’s wrong. I tell him that I’m just really hungry, that the sun’s in the wrong angle and is blinding my left eye, that my feet are hurting from these op-shop shoes, that I’ve got a caffeine headache. He grins and tells me I look pretty.

You should work in advertising, seriously. Here’s Don Don’s. I think we should just eat here.

He suggests we eat at Don Don’s. I commend him on such a brilliant idea. He holds out his hand to pull back the plastic curtains and let me in.

Deliquesce

2010-03-20T01:58:00.002+11:00

I can see the sea from here, from my glorified position atop this sandstone spire. The waves, like a multitude of festival-parade drummers marching onward, onward, crash into the bricks assembling my fortress. Out there is a forest of algae and coral, seafaring cones growing into mighty aquatic pines. Out there is a world I can only dream about and never visit, never make real. Moments become liquid. They leak from my carefully collected canisters of memory, bottle stoppers installed but failing to halt the trickling from cracks on the container’s bases. Nothing can arrest them; I can only watch as each liquid moment flows quickly, steadily, becoming one with the imperious blue-green around me. Right now all I want is to be cast into these Nordic waters, to become cryogenic and out of time’s reach. Throw me over the balcony, for although this sea is my home it is also my prison.

Ache

2010-03-17T23:41:00.004+11:00

Wayward child, don't spoil your eyes
with salty water. All in time
will heal, each wound erased.

Carapace

2010-03-15T22:03:00.004+11:00

They say it all comes back to high school. He knows they’re right, because they always are. Or if not always, then sometimes, and he’s sure this is one of those times. He remembers how much easier it was when all the decisions were made for him, when all he had to worry about were the blanks that needed filling on his photocopied sheets of paper and the freshly ironed greys and whites of his uniform. He remembers when the slow-moving queues outside the canteen culminated in the thoughtless consumption of red meat and stuff drenched in oil. He remembers what it was like to sit in sheltered bus stops at school’s end waiting for the bus to take him home. He remembers, but doesn’t know how to anymore.

This time he convinces himself he must try one of them again – maybe that last one? – for the sake of the adolescent still lurking within him. The bus pulls up, stopping in the kerb in front of him, but he waves away the driver’s baboon-face invitation. He stays outside because he wants to feel the first of autumn’s kisses on his face, because it’s much more pleasant out there with the ambient car horns and the officious early-evening streetlights. Outside is where all the fun happens, where all the cool kids hung out while he made friends with limits and derivatives and the Hardy-Weinberg Principle. Outside he won’t have to deal with the piles of frayed photographs and origami-ed love letters squatting on his work desk. Outside is where it’s safe, and he knows that’s good.

Inspectors

2010-03-01T23:00:00.000+11:00

Again: a clean slate, a blank page. We’ve been through this many times before, always swaying to the same, barely audible tune. The song’s there, poignant, affective, but difficult to identify exactly. Each time I hear it my ears prick up, my pupils dilating in heightened awareness. But it fades away, always one decibel too soft.

I sway anyway, because everyone expects me to, because it’s what I’ve gotten used to. Sometimes, though, what’s familiar isn’t always what’s best. I’ve too many times had to repel the melodies in my mind – the apparitional symphonies echoing in the chambers of memory or the ultrafuturistic bleeps and bloops of mechanical vocoders. I like to dance to songs I can name, you see. But that doesn’t really mean a thing to any of you, dancing away in this charlatan of a performance, music only just heard.

This song, they tell me, is magical, all-consuming, the most glorious of all compositions made by man.

But I really shouldn’t be here; I don’t believe I’m ready for this. There are so many other songs to dance to, so many others that don’t require me to try so hard. The swaying should be more natural to me, more about celebration, euphoria.

One day one of you will ask me to dance and I’m afraid I won’t be able to oblige anymore. And I can’t say it’s any of you, really; you all just enjoy this orgiastic vigil way too much to ever notice how distasteful it is, to me. No, I just can’t stand this music you play, always one decibel too soft.

Summer's end

2010-02-26T22:56:00.006+11:00

This is an early draft of a poem I've sent off for consideration into some literary journals. In this version there are a number of ill-placed syllables and bad line breaks, and I've reworked it to make it fit for publication — I do hope it gets selected.

---

Noontime sun no longer makes its entrance
at eight-thirty; all is still, asleep,
bunk beds unmade. We throttle the lampshade,
curtains drawn with sweat-strewn, sallow hands.
A smile, a furrowed eyebrow. You run your
fingers through my pillow-ravaged hair,
my mural to all those times I’d missed you.
Like daylight there’ll be less of us to
see; no words exchanged, we know what we’re to
face now. So we lie, prolonging what
is left of this, our piece of summertime –
intertwined limbs, scissor-blade sun-glares.

I'd fall over for you

2010-02-23T11:06:00.009+11:00

I wish I knew what you were looking for, that thing that would finally convince you to keep me forever. I have pined so many times to have fallen for another – someone simpler, easier to please. Anyone but you; you with your transient, inconsistent demands and exceedingly stringent, unheard-of standards. You are no baron(ess) but a dame, a cultivator of class and descendent of nobility. How many women must I woo to get to you, how many men must I turn away? Is it not enough that I have been partaking in this psychological-experiment maze of yours for seven years, scurrying like a mouse in search of holographic cheese? My mother and father had both said that a career in medicine or engineering would have definitely made it impossible for you to resist my advances. But I just couldn't deny myself that one thing that is fundamentally, irrevocably me. I am a wordsmith; there are word-lines in my bloodline, and all I can offer you is a dowry of words. Am I wanting for the one I can't have? 'Cos it's driving me mad.

Deathstick

2010-02-22T15:28:00.002+11:00

Unborn baby squirms in my
nonexistent uterus,
a blanket of nicotine
smothering its nascent lungs.

Panacea

2010-02-21T17:23:00.003+11:00

There are things you hold on to and things you discard. The painted-gold frame rubs your skin like fur with caked-on glue, and on the perspex you leave a cloud of fingerprints – cataracts for his dagger-blue eyes. You blow on the cloud but it lingers, stubbornly, an undefeatable infection that tightens up your alveoli and makes it impossible for you to breathe.

They all exist in that one person, your ghosts, leaving breadcrumb trails along postcard train stations and dilapidated lovers' benches. You filter the rest out and concentrate on the boy in the frame – the now – but find that you can't, his photograph bearing witness to the traits he's inherited from his predecessors.

It's difficult to farewell old habits, you think, a tissue disintegrating into balls at the frame's corners. The panacea sits undrunken on the bedside table, right next to his – their – photograph; fermenting, losing potency, a reminder of what you could have but keep choosing to forgo.

Twenty-one

2010-02-11T12:32:00.002+11:00

They call me ‘Wolf’, terroriser of the
ignoble, strong-willed master of the woods.
I weave through steel-and-cement sequoias,
forever calling out to my kin. For
the burden of solitude can never
compare to the discomfort of
company given willingly.

You call me ‘Fezland’, land of oases
and Arabian sun. We walk along
muddied paths for days and decades,
bunions forming on my somnambulist
feet. There, I develop a deafness
to your (bitter)sweet, consoling words,
and withdraw, exoskeleton.

I call myself ‘Man’, hoarder of names
and purveyor of meanings. We lie
on wooden planks with an audience
of pinprick lights, cotton-wool jellyfish
propelling sideways, never skyward.
You whisper something to me but I
run, the smell of the hunt in the air.

Soldier (on)

2010-02-01T19:32:00.006+11:00

This is an early draft of a poem I'd written, then entitled 'Soldier (on)', about Aaron. It was later selected for publication in Voiceworks's Birthmark issue, after the spectacular editing of the lovely Ainslee Meredith. Read the final version here.

---

No, not another word
from you. There's no need
to force yourself to speak.
Snow globes in your cranium:
a submarine, a rifle,
the call of battle
is strong — an alarm clock
bidding your life 'begin'.

To your toy trains and
half-melted cornerstone crayons
you bid farewell, a grenade
cancerous in your hand.

I am no man of war.
I cannot, on horseback,
gallop into orange-juice skies
and return home bloody.
But cross-legged I will be
waiting on your porch,
needle and thread ready
to welcome you, amputee.

Deadline

2010-01-22T12:44:00.002+11:00

I make a promise to you: that you won’t have to fall back on old habits again, like you’re doing now. Don’t avert your eyes. You need to listen to me. It’s not healthy for you to keep obsessing over the most menial of details like this; to allow something so external, something afforded temporary entry, to consume your whole being. Whatever happened to that person with such strength of character that people found themselves cowering at his feet? Where is that jovial man loved and admired by all for his intellect and good humour? Is he to be found crouched in the corner of a stairwell, blending into the shadows with unkempt hair and tattered clothing for fear of impeding on another’s breathing space? I never dreamed that you, of all people, would find yourself walking a step behind another – such servitude, such humility. Why, why have you become this way? Here, have a cigarette. Don’t worry; it isn’t a menthol; it isn’t good for your health. Do you remember how we used to take expeditions into alleyways and rundown urban kitchens? We were adventurers then, vagabonds. Why, now, do you search for stability, security – boredom? Even in your most reclusive you were alluring; people were drawn to your mysterious avoidance (disavowal?) of company. Please come back to me. And if you do I vow to never, ever let you slip away from me again.

Rain/Drum

2010-01-08T22:43:00.005+11:00

Come on, my little drummer boy, the rain’s not gonna last for long. This heat has consumed all of me; I am withering away like a mummy, detritus. So let’s gorge ourselves in the moon’s bathwater – although I despise it, it’s not always going to be summer. I can hardly move with this size-too-small T-shirt cling-wrapped to my skin, but I run with you anyway, pushing the ground away from my body with each step. Up that hill we go, past the trees of lemon and lime, past the carcasses of fauna unidentifiable in the darkness. Even here, sand dirties my indigo skin, particles causing friction as my thighs rub against each other. The rest walk down to the milk bar with their bear suits on backwards, dorsal chocolate-button snouts bobbing up and down, a hypnotic metronome. You watch them, mesmerised, not noticing that I’d lagged behind. How I wish you’d seen me slowly pulling away! I’m not gonna be here for much longer, you know. Soon I’ll have to fold up my clothes neatly into a polyvinyl suitcase and hide away from the rain, from all of this. They are forcing me out, for I was never really wanted, never really welcome. So one day I’ll disappear, leaving at a time when everything feels perfect – just like I’d said. You’ll still be waiting for me, of course, expecting me to arrive at our meeting point like clockwork. But I won’t, and I’ll have recorded an extended message on my voicemail so that when you try to call me I won’t have to pick up and face your questions. No tears, though; tears turn into sand, polluting the rainwater. Until then can you just dance with me, please? Take my hand and sneak kisses under this eucalyptus tree as possums and koalas watch from their makeshift tree-holes. In 6-8 time now: one, two, three, four, five, six; one, two, three, four, five, six.

Your coat, my umbrella

2009-12-06T16:47:00.001+11:00

Shifting sands populate the fishing-hook coastline. A lone magpie ogles me suspiciously, pining for its mate, accusing me of being its captor. In the time I had spent carousing with you, the faces of the people whose blood is mine have become foreign to me, and I have grown accustomed to the feeling of concrete under my soles. I allow my eyes to close, the sound of Boreas whipping the seaside tablecloth filling the caverns of my ears. Come now, you say amid his fermata, we are too young to continue this vagabonding, your fingers knotted like shoelaces into mine. But your promises scare me – there is a salesmanic prosody in your words and the howling of Arctic seagulls beckons me away. You loosen your vice grip, my palm moist from a cocktail of sweat and anxiety. I know this is my moment; after this it will be harder to break away, vines constricting bricks, foreign grasses making a home in the cracks of driveways. Your lips briefly curl like the end of a cat’s tail and I yield. For how could I pull myself away? We were both immigrants in a place we had begun to call home. I let your gravity overpower me and I become enveloped, a pearl undiscoverable in the vastness of summertime beaches.

Felines

2009-11-11T21:27:00.005+11:00

I’m really trying, I am. I wish I could tell you how much it pains me when you look at me with those eyes that seem to be searching for anything more interesting than me, scanning the wallpaper for non-existent moths to pounce on. Or when you don’t look at me at all, your back towards me, arched, like a cat whose fur has been rubbed the wrong way, hissing in repulsion. You are that cat. You sit on my lap and purr when I caress your licorice fur, purring, purring for me to keep going. Then you hear a squeak and pursue your game, bounding to your feet and out the door without so much as a meow or simper of thanks. I worry about your return – worry that I might find you pancaked on the road somewhere or that you’d decide not to come home anymore, having found a field of catnip or a band of equally roguish cats somewhere. I know it’s futile to ponder these things. I can’t do anything to change you: you come and go as you please, your temperament untameable. Maybe I am a dog person after all.

Half-open

2009-10-02T07:32:00.000+10:00

My ceiling is punctuated with several white lines, arranged with a discipline that is akin to the suturing of an arm grazed by a fall from a bike. In repose my eyes half-open to reciprocate the intensifying morning light, and half-close to resurrect the million adventures that lay waiting for the protagonist whose actions are watched only by himself. Music fills the air, though not emanating from any tangible source but rather an imagined one, a confabulation, a hypothetical gramophone. The white stitches evanesce, the daylight defeated; my dreaming hands stumble for a blanket in the coveted darkness.

In transit

2009-09-27T21:08:00.000+10:00

He likes to sit on trains with Chinese newspapers opened to what he thinks is the business section. He pretends he can read the symbols that look like a child's illegible drawings.

Female hair always looks better dampened by rain, he thinks to himself, the strands wet with adhesive on the face, frizzing.

He likes to salvage objects people have left on trains, smelling them, imagining the types of people these objects used to belong to. A scarf is slithering around her ankle. He bends down to get it.

"I live my life on trains," she says. "Always in transit but never really getting anywhere. It's like I'm almost never here."

"Always going but with nowhere to go?"

"I suppose," she replies, twirling a lock of her now-caramel hair.

That winter night

2009-08-23T13:12:00.003+10:00

All I wanted was somewhere to come home to, a place where the last of winter’s rains could not find me. It was not happiness but loneliness that was the Aquarian's warm gun, cocked obliquely at his left temple in a pitiable display. It was then that I found myself in the intervening space where raindrops transform into needles – a patient in the hands of a novice acupuncturist. No shelter or help was to be found; all that remained were deliquescing buildings and distorted Munchian figures.

Counterposition

2009-08-01T21:41:00.007+10:00

Pull the vermicelli string and draw back the metal-strip floodgates. Let the grains of luminous golden silt permeate the railroad-track crevices we’ve carved into the powdery sandstone walls. It’s insufferable when eternities pass in a single chime of a grandfather clock, when strangers’ words expose the unsaid. Yet I persevere, serpentine colours of envy and nobility wrestling for dominance around my air passages, enormous robotic caterpillars floundering to meet deadlines. Silver blades of grass perform Tai Chi while the hairs on my nape form rows of fine-tooth combs. The dong of wooden spheres colliding with chrome resonates through the deserted subterranean chamber. Here, no phantasms are permitted entry; but I linger, attaching myself to lampposts and pedestrian crossings, to the inert witnesses of a Utopia once dreamed. When fog envelops the area I drape myself in barbed wire, its thorns a subliminal reminder of why I have come on this expedition with you in the first place. A voice calls out from the distance – yours? – and the encroaching miasma is dispelled.

El Cuchillo

2009-07-24T22:03:00.004+10:00

Spherical glass fountains spout water without ceasing, salty liquid congealing into beads as they are overpowered by gravity. To you, the sting is reminiscent of saliva making contact with a cut of inexplicable origins – a taunting sensation that cannot be purged even by the most potent of salves. But you ignore it, of course, impassive as The Thinker.

Onward

2009-07-18T18:07:00.012+10:00

We float on a raft of thickened foam, a batik cloth cupping the wind with its fraying fingers. On our bodies are clothes drenched by the torrents of rain that never came. Audacious onlookers glower at our peregrination across the blackened ocean of asphalt and cement, but we remain steadfast – adventurers out to discover. As we sail the smoky channels that radiate from the vast pool we indulge in a game of word-pong, our utterances much like fillers repairing the cracks of silence that have formed between us. Upon landing we step into a world without inhabitants – a Pompeii of furniture just cleaned, caught in standstill. A piano key remains suspended in semi-play, though without any sound, and its lid crashes like cymbals amid the almost-infrasonic buzzing of a white box with twinkling red. I run, startled, and dive into the discs of tropical blue imprisoned in the gelatine of your ivory orbs. You let out your smile that is the stuff of mythology – intrigued, besotted, you say. Word-pong has become supplanted by Twister, limbs contorting into myriad positions of increasing complexity. A decuplet of worms slithers along a wheat-coloured plateau, barely perceptible follicular growths tickling the annelids’ exposed underbellies. Soon, we find there is not enough cloth to ward off the pestilent cold of twilight, and we shiver with a portable yellow moon in view. When it finally rains we can do nothing but take flight, the getaway boat almost capsizing from the intensity of our juvenile enthusiasm. Onward we sail, to lands unlabelled on any map, to oblivion.

To Friedrich

2009-07-04T01:04:00.010+10:00

Just tell me how you’d like me to be, how my affairs are all but satisfactory and fail to appease your simple, almost simplistic, desires. No, no, not another word; I meant none of that. What I want more than anything is for a silence to materialise between us: a tangible, asphyxiating silence that I can feel with my fingers, its particles filling the room with humidity. Let there be no more of this chatter about dreams and futures and pasts pining to be relived. What I must tend to is this void I am forced to fill each day – the cilice pricking into the flesh of brightly lit sunrooms, causing time to bleed into the crevices of subjunctive contemplation. The stories told by the lines under both my eyes could not be transcribed into verse for they lack the requisite epic quality. Rather, they bear witness to countless hours spent brooding over previously typewritten pages and digitised photographs, idly, fruitlessly. It’s not that there’s an absence of new material – far from it! – what is lacking is the drive to create, to bring into being something as yet unspoken, un-done. There is far too much effort involved in conjuring another narrative, another episode in a life comprised of reruns; there is an allure to avoiding action, to fleeing in medias res. How I yearn to package everything into tidy, colour-coded boxes, placing a desiccant carefully in one corner to prevent any disintegration wrought by age and the elements! In these boxes I would encase every single moment I have undergone (and those yet to be so), allowing me to invoke them in their entirety, as vividly as I had first experienced them, at will. That would be the day when solitude finally overcomes everything else, eating away at the needless struggles for realisation like a pandemic infecting all organisms without immunity. I am the lake that remains still for fear of provoking the nonexistent wind or disturbing the creatures slumbering beneath. It is not extinction that I seek but calm, an intermission from the stirring of all that is alive. Oh, but for what is all this scurrying about, when my soul languishes for nothing more than solitude?

Palindromes

2009-06-21T23:43:00.005+10:00

We must really stop doing this, you and I, playing tag with our eyes in a carriage full of strangers. People uncaringly glance at us and catch our eyes mid-aversion; it’s awkward, unseemly. Yet you do it again, tag me with a single bat of your eyelashes, and I giggle without any external manifestation. You leave with a parting smile; I pretend not to see, though it is probably obvious that I knew.

I could bury myself in this pile of clothing – shirts, trousers, scarves, sweaters, all discarded like snakeskin on the unvacuumed carpet floor. I could probably trip on the foot of the recliner, fall face-first, and still prevent any grazing to my face. That I do, the numerous layers of fabric cushioning my fall with the robustness of a mountainful of fairy floss. Laying in a trance, I overdose on a sartorial sugar rush. I really must stop this foolishness; there is much to be done.

Where has the last fortnight gone? The scores of clocks I recall checking during these fourteen days give no indication of consistency. The one with that infamous yellow rodent – portrayed in monochrome – says 7:49 while my computer insists it is 9:47. The other day I was certain it was only the 5th of June, my essay on the carnivalesque still scrounging for completion, but it has already returned with an almost-perfect mark. A full octave can now be played on my collection of semi-precious, but continually dulling, metalloid badges. The three birds of legend roam the island without any intention of surrender, much to my dismay.

You and I must not make a habit of meeting like this, it is far from what I consider to be responsible behaviour. Was not our encounter just yesterday, the day before? No, please don’t sit next to me; these meetings must be kept clandestine; dart your eyes outward as mine meet yours.

Kraken

2009-06-14T19:23:00.000+10:00

The couch was almost toppling over were it not for the wall that acted as a counter-force negating gravity’s pull on the weight-laden piece of furniture. She counted the number of people that had implanted themselves onto the couch like the Titanic’s passengers onto a sizeable wooden plank post-iceberg – there were fourteen. At each second they gesticulated, expelled bursts of laughter, displayed such vivacity that they were almost a singular being, a Kraken with 28 eyes and 56 limbs, wiggling, writhing. If she tried to seize that moment and arrest it into some medium – a photograph perhaps, or a painting – she would fail, she thought, for there was no way she could do justice to the moment’s trueness, its real-ity. Sighing, she mentally condemned Plato and his polemic on mimesis.

The Crossing

2009-05-11T22:05:00.013+10:00

It was so like the Holocaust, one of them remarked, this being herded like cattle, corralled through inhumane, claustrophobic ramps with steel railings. And she was probably right: my ankles were beginning to cramp from being made to stand without respite in the early evening cold, and my legs were clamouring to be freed from the prison of walking in two-centimetre strides, sporadically, arrhythmically. The journey upward was not as formidable as it may sound, however, and in no time I conquered the wood-and-cement hill. Oh, if only I didn’t have to descend it again, albeit on the opposite side.

Perhaps it was better that way – still corralled, minus the rails. In the time I travelled from one street corner to the other, nine of them had passed, hordes of fellow bovine-men embarking, disembarking, barking. Another two were approaching, waiting to transport us vermin to wherever we were destined. They expelled thick greyish smoke from their metallic rectums, which many of us took to be indicators of their warmth, their safety. The orderly queue reverted to hysteria, and all but one joined the bottleneck forming at the vehicles' single doors. The breath escaping my nostrils, if collected, could have powered a little air-conditioning system, but I stood, unconcerned, with Orion and his reptilian nemesis keeping me company. They left; I was left outside.

From under the trees I then discerned your silhouette, your figure illumined by the light seeping through the circular, chalk-coloured perforation in the black blanket overhead. Your high-cut boots swept away the desert of leaves, clumps of rusted copper, lifeless, unattended to just like us, marooned. I kept my gaze fixed on you; you shifted your head in my direction but did not see me; I was just another face in the flock. Crowd, I meant.

When I finally infiltrated one of the vehicles I was treated to a seat, the elbow of the woman next to me jutting, sparring like a mediaeval torture device. I looked out the window, which was so dusty it appeared frosted, and searched for you among the trees. I wanted to rescue you from that agony, to seize your hand and grasp it tightly, pulling, pulling with a deity's omnipotence. But you had disappeared, the ghostly smudge created by my breath sublimating on the glass.

Cornucopia

2009-04-27T19:36:00.004+10:00

I sat with a metre-long eye staring at me; every now and then it would blink, the light refracted through its cornea momentarily ceasing, drenching me in darkness. He uttered many things in a dialect I did not know; or rather, knew but could not understand. She grasped the pole tightly, frightfully, with her pinkie raised as though the pole were the handle of a lined-blue porcelain teacup and a teacher were appraising her decorum. The belt of her trench coat was fed carefully through each of its loops, but missed one. I jolted leftward as the crowds outside scurried in phobic disgust over the rain, like lipids. That rain reminded me of home – no, a home, a site in my memory that, upon remembrance, simultaneously evoked the scent of charcoal stifled by precipitation and the image of disparate paraphernalia stuffed seemingly haphazardly into nondescript shelves. But order did exist in that disarray, a mysterious, emergent code decipherable only by me. On my neck a ferret with tartan fur snuggled up closer for reciprocal warmth. And time, gilded, wrapped itself around an old man’s finger as the page was filled.

Bilateral Asymmetry

2009-04-01T00:17:00.006+11:00

Calculator

2009-03-30T19:51:00.011+11:00

A calculator stands out like a Gestalt figure from the pile-ground of staples, pens and blank CD-ROMs under my desk. There was dust on its two-line LCD screen; to see the rigid limbs of its digits I wiped it with my black T-shirt, which is now left with a yellowy-grey smudge in the area where calculator and shirt intersected. I calculated the total number of hours available to me in a week (168), then subtracted from that the amount of time expended on university classes (11.5), public transport (11.3), Voiceworks tasks (3.5), sleep (61.15), morning hygiene rituals (6), evening hygiene rituals (3.5), chores (1.5) and nutrition (19.6), as well as the number of hours undergraduates ought to devote to university work outside of contact hours, which I more or less fulfil (27). The difference, however, failed to take into account procrastination (an estimated 12.7 – which includes unhampered novel reading, roughly 4.47; daydreaming, about 3.86; and other mental wanderings like synonym recovery [0.36] and hyperlinking [1.2]), the selection of clothing to be worn in carefully structured combinations for the day ahead (say, 4.5 on average), chance encounters that inevitably result in excursions to cafés (about 2.59), and trips to the lavatory (3.3), all of which I subsequently deducted as well. Ultimately, it seems 8.56 hours of every week remains unallocated. 0.43 has been spent on this entry.

Le Jardin du Souvenir

2009-03-22T10:16:00.008+11:00

There is a garden fixed in my memory, resplendent in summertime, picturesque, like a postcard, and the myriad flowers that bloomed within its quarters were droplets of vibrant watercolour on a yellowing canvas. Mounds protruded from its otherwise even terrain: rebellious, impervious; and the needle leaves of the garden’s hundred-year-old trees would wave, like hands, surreptitiously to me, to each other. Above, the sun would drape itself in clouds, engaged in an idyllic game of hide and seek with no one but itself.

It was there that I first postulated my infallibility, my possession of latent faculties that would allow me to pillage the world. There, I discovered the possibility of disappearing beneath a shrub, camouflaged, invisible, if I had committed myself to remaining absent. In that place I could run and skip and slip without a care for expectations or courtesy or whether my trousers would remain clean for another several hours. It was there that I understood what it meant to be an uninhibited, self-governing agent par excellence.

A part of the garden was on a slope, and I was always prone to stumbling, rolling down its mud-and-grass carpet, scooping up helpings of earth with my elbows, hands, knees, mouth. Upon rescuing myself from the exhilarating spell I would ascend the white marble stairs, unpolished, left au naturel save for the cutting and shaping into cemented steps. Up and up I would go, combatting exhaustion, combatting gravity, with the need to recapture my deposed position an unrelenting catalyst for movement. At each step my underdeveloped legs would flex and extend, struggling, disentangling, in time with a 3-2 son heard faintly, like whispers, from somewhere in the distance.

The aroma of lunch-time, or rather, approaching rain, would begin to pervade the air, but nothing ever could wrest me from those long, lazy summer days. I was in the presence of kindred spirits, dispassionate, stoic, offering company that I foreboded would never be mine again; and I was their master.

Bewitched, Bothered, Bewildered

2009-03-04T14:20:00.008+11:00

I see familiar eyes, familiar lips, facial features of a generalised, idealised person everywhere, planted on the countenances of numerous strangers. Each glare, each sneer, each simper is a piercing reminder of my failure to locate this person, to make him real. And in the midst of this bricolage of imagined resemblances I remain a prisoner, my chest heaving to a pain whose nature is impervious to explanation.

Outside, the rain’s fury parallels my turmoil, the wind howling in unison with the unspoken cry that is emitted by my soul. The sun has set; a streetlamp illuminates the suburban streets with a melon-orange light that is as feeble as my sense of certainty. How long must I wait: a couple more years? a decade? My seclusion has caught up with me, and I am becoming increasingly more melancholy as the days progress.

I have admitted to disliking company of a particular sort; but implicit in this is a desire to connect with individuals whose intellects are able to appease my own. For what is achievement, intelligence, virtuosity without a companion with whom these things can be shared? All of these talents could exist as spectres in my mind, figments of my confabulation, but in the presence of another they could culminate into expressions of affectionate creativity, of life realised.

The protagonist of the novel I had just finished reading succeeded in finding his match. It was as though the author were reassuring me across the centurial chasm, for, to my amazement, some episodes in the story were highly reminiscent of events in my past: the same abrupt dismissal, the same lack of explanation, the same consequential anguish. And when life imitates art, or at least possesses an astonishing degree of verisimilitude to it, one cannot but be attentive to the message that spills from its margins. Yet sadly, whereas Maurice was able to overcome his initial apprehensions, resigning to love “below one’s class” among others, I seem to be even more overpowered by mine.

If each person truly had been severed from his ‘other half’, and all this love business is merely another appellation for the reunification of separated selves, then my fastidiousness cannot be deemed unnecessary. Surely, if Plato were correct, then there must only be one person capable of complementing me, my idiosyncrasies, my caprices – one jigsaw piece with the right grooves. But do measures that ease or accelerate this process exist? Are there tonics that temporarily anaesthetise the void that exhausts my motivations? Can I be certain that my arduous, almost schizophrenic surveying of likenesses will eventuate in a climactic fulfilment of my imaginings, of my intuited renditions of the future? Or is it all in vain, my longed-for companion lost in the serpentine passages de l'histoire?

(auto)biography

2009-02-16T16:38:00.000+11:00

I once found a book that purported to contain my life story in it. It had not aged gracefully, with foxed pages, creases everywhere, and a large tea stain obscuring the by-line of its enigmatic author. As I held the book in my hands, still stupefied by such an inexplicable discovery, my curiosity crashed down on me like a seventy-storey tidal wave. My eyes rapidly shifted from left to right and back again, almost neglecting the need to blink. I became so engrossed with this prematurely completed biography that my comprehension of time and space melted into each other. To this day, I remain oblivious as to whether my actions constitute any true agency on my behalf. Which is confabulation: the biographical book, or my current existence?

Farewell, Scavenger

2009-02-06T02:32:00.011+11:00

Never have I seen so many corpses before, nor so many corpses concentrated within such a tiny space. Each body is languid and brittle, and every step one takes – for it has become ineluctable that one’s feet crush numerous corpses in travelling to one’s destination – elicits the crackle of bodies giving way to the weight of the living.

They had arrived here not by accident, but rather by circumstance. Their communities are composed of numerous individuals – perhaps in the thousands – so it is understandable that their search for food and other supplies escalated lest the overcast skies portended a deluge. With this in mind, and because my lodgings were replete with exactly those things for which they searched, their arrival was something I anticipated.

Yes, I must admit I had taken no precautions to deter their theft of my provisions; however, I did not expect such blatant conduct even from these ruffians. To be indefatigable in ensuring one’s community’s survival is one matter – an honourable one to which even I cannot but bestow praise. But to deliberately impede on the freedom of another through the deprivation of necessities, particularly when it is I that is afflicted with the inconvenience, is another, more reprehensible deed.

It was when their numbers soared that my admiration (or amusement) transformed into spite. The intruders had interpreted my indifference as consent, and it was not long before finding a measly piece of bread in the kitchen proved a laborious struggle. At this point, I had resigned to cleanse myself of these parasites, to purge the world – or at least my part of it – of the boil that had distended on its idyllic topography.

You might repudiate my course of action as unjust, for my decision to drive the nuisances away would leave them bereft of the very freedom that I had claimed for myself. However, the situation I pose is vindicated for I assert not only to my rights to possession (as Locke has delineated) but also adhere to the Darwinistic Code: only the fittest must survive. And with the unfavourable weather looming it must be I that endures and not these particles of dirt endowed with substandard sentience. I must act as an agent of selection and eradicate these inferior beings from my presence.

I began by setting select individuals ablaze; as they burned their limbs twitched, perhaps in pain, perhaps in admission of their wrongdoings. Then, I wantonly intoxicated the creatures, fumigating the corners and apertures of my home with toxic substances, annihilating what remained of the sanctuary that they had sought and exploited hitherto. Most of them had become dead at that point, and those that persisted were subjected to physical torture, a more brutal aspect of my character that had become suppressed in my childhood out of ‘good breeding’, but had resurfaced solely for the pleasure of seeing every one of these pests perish in agony.

I had declared war on these ants; my extermination of their last sentries was a great success. I am regaining my composure now, with the murderous euphoria I derived from my wrath dissipating into a bewildering calm. I feel no remorse for my actions.

A Hirsute Revelation, or Otherwise

2009-01-30T11:28:00.008+11:00

Yesterday, a momentous episode took place in my rather uneventful, hermetic life. After having a conversation with a friend – coupled with the intolerably sweltering temperatures outside – I was inspired to visit a hairdresser to procure myself a new 'style'.

I must stipulate that it had been an epoch since someone else touched my hair. For the last three-and-a-half years, it was I who had been responsible for my own Beatles haircults, bob cuts, fringe repairs and so on. In contemplation, I traced this, firstly, to my general distrust for other people: for another to cut my hair entailed an expectation that the cutter would not slaughter my hair and leave me looking like a carnival-of-freaks exhibit – something which, I believed, could not be guaranteed prior to the cutting. But another justification for my long-drawn aversion to hairdressers is something known in subjectivity theory as the Problem of Qualia. This centres on the uniqueness of experience and perception to each subject, and, by extension, the difficulties this poses to communicating those experiences and perceptions to other subjects. Ipso facto, I feared that any elaboration, no matter how succinct or lucid, I may impart to the hairdresser will fall short of accurately detailing the appearance of the style I desired, hindering the cutter from carrying it out correctly.

At the hairdresser's, I described the look I wanted as best I could, with the hairdresser nodding rather robotically at irregular intervals. Soon she began using the clippers, numerous types of scissors with serrated blades, tools I had never even seen, to accomplish this fastidious customer's requests. But slowly my anxiety turned to amazement as I saw in the mirror, almost picturesque, the hairstyle conjured in my head taking material form. "How do you translate customers' haphazard descriptions into workable instructions?" I could not but inquire. The hairdresser chuckled, probably with the understanding that I was initially doubtful of her capacity to execute my request. "Experience," she replied.

After over 24 hours, I have concluded that I am rather satisfied with the results. What I had undergone was an exercise in trust that has infinitesimally decreased my distaste for strangers with qualifications and experience (Australian doctors with mere M.B.B.S.'s still excluded). And now that this particular hairdresser has demonstrated her aptitude with a tangible product, I will not hesitate to return there in the future.

For Lack of a Better Response

2009-01-26T20:10:00.014+11:00

“So what did you do today?” you ask, a look reminiscent of one I made as a five-year-old after having proven someone wrong painted faintly, but still detectable, on your face.

“Um,” I mumble (for what constitutes a proper response to a question such as this? It seems as though people never truly wish to know what activities one had become preoccupied with on any given day, or rather, are asking questions of this sort merely out of politeness and conventional expectations. Nevertheless, it is a question, and, as such, merits a response that must be considered rather carefully, so as not to appear overly enthusiastic while at the same time obviating the impression that one is impolite. But would you really be interested to hear what I had done today, when you left early this morning to enlist yourselves in some Australia Day festivities, gorging yourself with nationalistic fervour in parades, performances, and the recitation of dry platitudes, all of which probably overshadowing any ‘menial’ forms of recreation that I may or may not have engaged in. Would you like me to inform you, for example, that I had progressed in my reading of Calvino, finishing a chapter that imitated the stream-of-consciousness style that so marked Modernist novels, much to my amusement? Or that, after having read said chapter, I had encountered several words whose meanings were unknown to me – such as ‘lugubrious’, which, subsequent to a brief consultation with the dictionary, I have learned to ascribe to things both sad and serious. No, I find it rather ‘lugubrious’ that when people ask how other people are, it is with the expectation that the other person will restrict his response to a laconic expression of formality, to an exchange of protracted grunts, to something approximating the extemporaneous replies of Miss Universe candidates when stripped of their feigned congeniality. Will my response even be of interest to you? Did the nature of my pursuits, whatever they were, even cross your mind as you traipsed through those overpopulated streets, ice-cream cone in hand, temples dripping with sweat? With your eyes almost squinting, condescending, fixed on me now, I am certain any enumeration, however concise, of my activities for the day would be dismissed, subjected to a derisive swooping of the hand. And what is even more ‘lugubrious’ is that I, whose sense of courtesy is so overbearing that it functions like a hyperactive muzzle, am now burdened with the inescapable task of concocting an appropriate answer to your ingratiating inquiry.), “nothing.”

To Be in Error

2009-01-18T01:00:00.009+11:00

Taking a spoonful of rice into his mouth, Ewan’s attention was captured by the chatter of Mr Aldridge, who, speaking in a volume that was much louder than necessary, was quick to denounce the large amount of time it “had took” his neighbours to discover the carcass of a bird, flattened, on their driveway. Apparently, it had been run over by a group of ruffians cruising at dangerous speeds one evening; the marks left by their tyres could still be seen on the road if one bothered to look. The spoon hovered in front of Ewan’s mouth, agape in expectation, while he remained stupefied by Mr Aldridge’s words. Had took? Had took? Ewan could not bear the idiocy that tainted that man’s speech. For what, he wondered, could cause a man to be so bewildered as to mistake the past participle form of a verb for its past? He decided that it would be advantageous to all present if he corrected Mr Aldridge – Ms Bloomsbury merely nodded her head, giving an air of disinterest, and Mr Jonas had been reticent since the meal began. Perhaps they had noticed his error but were merely ignoring it; but no, who would tolerate something as abhorrent as this? Ewan was almost certain that the rest of the evening – if not theirs, then at least his – would be plagued with disarray if he did not take steps to remedy this oversight.

He would need to maintain a façade of deference while confronting Mr Aldridge, appearing civil yet authoritative. He would inform him of the temporality of perfect tenses, of the need to pair ‘have’ and its cognates with the past participle forms of verbs ('take', 'took', 'taken', he would specify), of how important it was for one not to make mistakes like this in public, of how it would make one appear uneducated and brutish, lacking sophistication, a shameful interlocutor. Ewan faced Mr Aldridge, waiting for a favourable time to interrupt, when the whole table became rapt in laughter: three faces resembling the clownish faces of two-toed sloths expelled all the good humour that they had been amassing, without indication, in the course of the conversation. Ewan then heard Mr Aldridge address him by name, his intonation rising towards the end of his statement – Mr Aldridge had asked him a question. But Ewan, his heartbeat quickening, could not respond, for he not only failed to hear Mr Aldridge’s inquiry, but also his entire story.

He imagined the face that Mr Aldridge would be looking at: its absent look, its eyes frozen out of obliviousness, its lips twitching slightly to the right after being roused from a mental digression to a place filled with spite. At that same moment, for he could do nothing else, Ewan reciprocated Mr Aldridge’s gaze: his eyebrows were raised in bafflement; his lips, pouted, concerned, suspicious; his nostrils were flaring in impatience. The two held their standoff, exchanging unspoken words of contempt for each other for a gruelling four minutes and twenty-nine seconds. It was Mr Aldridge who broke the trance, extending his right arm and procuring himself a glass of water. He shook the glass several times, making swirls of water form at the surface, then, smirking, drank a sip. As Ewan sat silent, shamed, the conversation resumed. Using his fork, he played with the food that remained on his plate – the peas had become soggy, like deflated balloons, and the meat, sponge-like from the excess of gravy he had poured on them. He surveyed the table, meeting Ms Bloomsbury’s eyes, which she averted in haste to thwart any prolonged contact with him. In Ewan's mind it was as though he were the one that had committed the inexcusable blunder.

Anaphylaxis

2009-01-14T17:12:00.009+11:00

What had compelled him to traverse the city in that heat? He knew that there was something about fiery temperatures that exaggerated reality, that made it more stringent, more callous.

It was early evening; the sun had not yet set. He was in the company of other people, brief acquaintances, who were debating outlandish topics like syllogisms and the causes of poverty. The discussion interested him very much, and he yearned to be part of it, to become more than a mere audience to their intelligent chatter. But how, he wondered, would he permeate the invisible barrier that separated those people from him? He remembered how he deemed small talk the root of all evil, and that he had vowed never to resort to formulaic prefaces. At various points the conversation even abated, conveniently giving him opportunities by which to capture their attentions. Yet he became overridden by an inexplicable fear of initiating contact, a reluctance to speak, causing him to purge the words that materialised on his tongue and banish them back to the abysses of his lexical repertoire.

They continued conversing: about flying machines, about the artistic merits of alliterations, about lemurs. As courtesy demanded, each maintained eye contact with the others; but every time a pair of eyes fell on him, he felt that, somehow, these were robbed of sentiment, of concern. It was as though they looked at him blankly, or weren’t even looking at him at all, endeavouring instead to glance at something behind him – a spot on the wall, perhaps. He surmised that they were subjecting him to some newfangled sort of non-verbal castigation, one in which the punished was made to feel insignificant, unworthy, transparent, non-existent.

In their midst it was as though he had been thrust into an alien inquisition, one where allegations were dictated by Francophone jurors. He was made uneasy by each condemning cough, each pursing of the lips: what did it all mean?

He began drumming his fingers on his lap, an inconspicuous act of reassurance that, to him, was sure to avoid offending his companions. In his silence, he concluded that anything would have been more preferable to these subtle slingshots to his pride. Alas, he was paralysed by the agony of hypothesising what they would say about him if he exited the room, and by the prospect that upon fleeing he would repeatedly wish to return so that he could plant himself outside their door, obscured from view, to eavesdrop on their discussion.

But he knew could not stay any longer; he consoled himself that if he left it was likely they wouldn’t notice; that his departure would prove relieving to all parties; that escape was his only option. He slid his chair backward in small, measured increments. While the others were engrossed in an appraisal of vaudeville, he made his way to the exit – at first he walked, meticulously carrying the weight of each foot so as to stifle any inadvertent noise; then, assured of his safety, he accelerated to a sprint down the stairs.

Once outside he saw that the light of day was fading, and in its diminuendo it left traces of the heat in patches: imprinted on a certain crack in the footpath, lingering around certain stop signs. It was over! He was no longer prisoner, and all he wanted now was the refuge afforded by his home – cooled by its unopened curtains, safeguarded from the pangs of ostentatious company. In the dying heat, he walked under a streetlight at the same moment that it turned on; or rather, it turned on as he walked under it.

In Good Company

2009-01-03T11:17:00.010+11:00

A pile of receipts populates my desk, remnants of a holiday that was once here but fled abruptly to ravage another part of space-time. There are also letters from educational and financial institutions, contained in envelopes resealed to appear unread. The floor is littered with clothes both worn and unworn, pieces of used tissue paper dried with mucous, and a lone shoe whose partner seems to have scampered off, sneakily, to another part of the room. Birds are chirping in the distance, their melodic ode to summertime an annoying feedback noise to my exhausted, agitated ears. And amidst all this is the whirring of a faraway washing machine, whose activities dissuade me from cleaning my face for fear of being burnt by tap water of an unstable temperature.

The fury of the night before is still bubbling within me, its causes still vivid in my memory. I have become a grumpy old troll crouching under a bridge, chasing away those who cannot appease me, though only within a certain radius; that is, always near the sanctuary, the subterfuge, of that bridge. Has my amicable self degraded into this overly critical scrutiniser, this overactive set of criteria transformed, embodied, in human form?

Company. It is preposterous to suggest that all human beings are fundamentally social, for many a wise person has survived with the most minimal of human contact. Occasionally it becomes unbearable for me to interact with other people, especially those who fail to conform to my notion of what constitutes personhood. Collisions between these people and myself create supernovas of domestic proportion, the repercussions of which extending beyond the immediate ten minutes to a couple of days, weeks, months afterward. And so I remain enclosed in my room, wallowing in a cesspool of non-existent memories, imagined worlds and meticulously memorised – but far from unwavering – ‘facts’.

Perhaps it is no wonder that, instead of frolicking in the company of others, lavishing the sun's warm embrace, I am on my bed, my back in anguish from the two or so hours of excess sleep, hesitant to exit the room lest I cross someone’s path on the staircase and become forced to engage in a feigned act of courtesy. ‘Good morning,’ I would be expected to say. Bah.

It is the first few of days of a new year and here I am immersed, almost submerged, in my thoughts once again. I welcome change – it is not something I disdain – but it seems change is expelled instinctively by my psyche, a reflexive mental heaving, an experiential aversion that is substituted, rather, for the refuge of familiarity. I have not made any friends recently (in fact, I believe I have lost some due to a lack of ‘effort’ on my behalf); instead I have become intimate with characters I had not met, except in my imagination. I had shared a table with Roquentin, laughed at the weakness of Raskolnikov, admired the insouciance of Aureliano, exchanged text messages with Harry Haller.

‘Why would you write that if only ten people in the whole world can understand it?’ a Facebook contact once inquired. At the time I responded with a polite explanation of my desire to write merely for my own pleasure, of the need to ventilate the overheating ducts of my creativity. I knew what I had said was a deception, though I was ignorant exactly why. Later on, I thought maybe I had written those unnecessarily abstruse words to draw in those who could understand them, activate a literary magnet of sorts by which I could become acquainted with similarly minded individuals. I understand now that those words functioned to dissuade idiotic conversation with those incapable of comprehending my cryptic prattle.

My stomach rumbles.

Discovery

2008-12-25T01:19:00.002+11:00

Apprehension.

In the Dark of Night

2008-12-22T11:10:00.009+11:00

I can hear the blades spin repetitively in the darkness of this summer night. Barely awake, almost in a stupor, I squint to discern the familiar shapes that compose my bedroom. Outside, a strong wind blows, treating sheets of unwanted paper and empty biscuit boxes to a free trip to the other side of the street. Its howling is magnificent, fearsome, but only to a five-year-old child.

My legs feel the cotton-polyester blankets caressing my legs seductively, like a prostitute does to arouse a customer. The heat leaves my skin with a stickiness that it isn't real, with an imagined discomfort, the type that is borne of irritation at insomnia. I shift my weight to my left side, then curl up into a ball, then realise that my initial position was more comfortable.

What? There's a word fluttering around in my head like a moth that nimbly evades every attempt to smother it with a slipper. It's something like 'pretext' but meaning something more. Maybe it's 'pretense', but that's not it. Although my instincts tell me it starts with an 'a' and ends with '-ion' I discard the notion, for instinct never did prove useful in matters of the intellect.

Something makes my head itch, something akin to the light pricking of a rusty needle. My hands make that long journey to my crown, to locate the source of the itch, to purge it, to return my body into a state of sufficient comfort, or rather, lethargy. Soon the itch is replaced by a redness in my scalp, a pain that dissipates within four or so minutes.

The word fits in to the phrase 'under the __' or 'in the __'. 'Impression'? No.

In the half-light of 3:42am the ceiling looks black, as does the closet and the door. Actually everything is draped in the sombre colouring. Through the gaps in my blinds a light seeps through: feeble, weak, almost string-like though stiffened with starch. The wind continues outside, and despite the barrier provided by the window and brick walls the blinds sway gently, making the beam of light approach, then withdraw, then approach again.

I begin to accost the heat for hindering my sleep when my perceptions become indistinct. I no longer hear the bellowing of the night-time breeze, nor the whirring of the fan, nor do I see the playful two-step dance of the lightbeam, nor do I feel the discomfort of the blanket's officious insulation. There are spirals doing ballet in my field of vision, though not in reality but projected out of my own consciousness. Two are blue, three are green, the rest are a peculiar shade of pink-purple.

I feel the word approaching; it is traversing the stormy landscape of my mind, fighting past numerous distractions to make itself known to me. It takes a momentary respite, standing at the edge of a precipice, staring below at the x kilometres of nothingness, fearing for its survival. It is at the tip of my tongue, materialising – 'ar-', 'art-', 'asp-' – but I fail to capture it.

The word is coming, extracting itself from the million or so words that accompany it in the overcrowded storehouse labelled 'Vocabulary', when I am overpowered by exhaustion and my eyes close into oblivion.

A Christmas Ghost

2008-12-06T00:10:00.010+11:00

This post comes as a result of my unwavering devotion to procrastination – the pitch for my next fashion column is due in two days and I have only just begun my research – as well as a flood of cataclysmic events that have ravaged the last couple of days. These events include (but are not limited to):

A pain that has developed in my lower back (the cause of which still eludes me),
My regular mid-morning rousings (at around 4 or 5 am) in which I stay awake for about 1.5 hours – effectively ruining my sleep cycle, and
The protracted length of time my semester two University essays are taking to return to me (I have conjectured possible explanations, such as Australia Post strikes, disappearances in-transit due to incorrect labelling/postage, neighbours conspiring to withhold my mail from me, etc.)
The recent suicide of one of my uncles (by hanging, no less. Ironically, the Márquez novel I'm reading at the moment is fraught with suicides – though of the romantic, cutesy, why-don't-you-love-me sort).

Of course event (4) overshadows (1) to (3) without competition. The revelation was a peculiar one wherein my sister, the first to have been informed, was in total disbelief at the news. "This isn't a nice joke," she replied to the cousin whom she spoke to. But eventually denial was replaced with that typical human urge to rationalise bizarre occurrences. My parents joined my sister in conjuring potential explanations for my uncle's suicide; I remained indifferent to their clamour. Apparently to kill oneself is an immediate manifestation of one's cowardice, of an inability to make decisions and a lack of awareness of consequences. I decided to interrupt with a (to them, 'anti-Christian' or 'amoral'; to me, 'existentialist') defence of my uncle's action – that perhaps he had thought it through, that perhaps he needed a (permanent) respite from the burdens of life, that he needed to be given credit as an intelligent human being to have made this choice out of his own capacities. Rather than engaging me with a philosophical response, I was merely met with that pathetic excuse for an argument, that appeal to emotion that would override all else: 'But what about his children?'

It's been an hour since the discovery of his death and I have already grown weary of it. On the other hand, my father, sister and brother-in-law have rushed to my uncle's home where a horde of relatives, family friends and bystanders (as well as police and ambulance officers) awaited them. It was never a question whether my family would be 'represented' in that group present at the scene; yet one of those already there neglected this, calling us on the phone to remind us to 'send someone over, you should go visit.'

This episode reveals to me a facet of human life that seems so pervasive, so frequent, that it must be true. (Yes, I am appealing to induction here; but oblige me.) Before today, I had almost forgotten my uncle's existence. And apart from the occasional mention at the dinner table about whether he and his family would be likely to attend my sister's youngest child's Christening and other such logistical matters, he was already a ghost to my family, a mere name to add to a list, under the heading 'relative'. I had often wondered what it would be like if I were to take my own life – whether my overtly selfish act would be justified, whether those I would leave behind would even remember my existence past the conventional three months (or however long it takes these days) of mourning.

As a hermit I've severed most connections with my acquaintances; my family and a small number of friends are the exclusive recipients of (sporadic) updates on the goings-on in my life. With only my aspirations and the affection of a select few (most of whom I relate to solely out of necessity or reciprocal sentimentality) to ground me, would my death – whether premature or natural – leave me, too, as a mere apparition in the minds of those I had encountered?

Hypertext, Secondary Orality and Narcissism

2008-11-04T15:09:00.008+11:00

I have been gorging myself in university assessments for the last couple of weeks. It has come to the end of semester, and this brings along with it the simultaneous imposition of task deadlines. Days ago, I began researching (well, that is quite inaccurate for I'd been immersing myself in brainstorming and random Google searches for months over the topic; researching intensely, then) for my Philosophy, Media and Culture essay.

My topic is a modified version of one of the topics on offer, and I decided to delve into the effects of hypertext and new media on self-perception. This fascination originated from having taken Reading, Writing and Criticism in the first semester, which questioned the nature of linear narratives and the Modernist aesthetic of texts. What it welcomed was a more poststructuralist conception of narrative, one in which hypertexts abounded and meaning was more of a game than something discoverable in any text. For this essay, I had taken these ideas on board, suggesting that perhaps these link up with Walter Ong's proposition that the contemporary 'electronic age' heralds in a 'secondary orality' that is reminiscent of the cultures that predated print.

Although Ong never discusses these issues himself (he wrote during the late sixties to eighties, and is now retired), many have seized his notion of secondary orality, celebrating its promise of a more inclusive, democratic medium of communication. And theoretically speaking there is reason to be optimistic – hypertext decentralises meaning, dethrones the author, advocates Bakhtinian dialogism (even to the point of multiple collaborations), does not impose particular conventions and sequences, and allows for the existence of 'online communities'. With these in mind, it is understandable that many perceive hypertext as a godsend for a world wrought with the literate aspirations for abstraction, reductionism, hierarchies, inequality and all other evils that one can attribute to the permanence of writing. Their main point is that literacy fosters individualism, while orality (and its subsequent reappearance in contemporary society) encourages community, a sense of that 'self' and 'other', 'knower' and 'known' are mere inventions that do not exist outside of literate analysis.

Hypertext (and CMCs), however, are quite the opposite in practice. Many internet (ab)users are more inclined to engage in these media because of their ability to cater to self-interest. Indeed, if one looks to the plethora of web communities and forums it is evident that members indulge in forms of self-legitimation, seeking out people with similar views and attacking those whose ideas are disparate. Flaming (personal attacks, rather than rational debate) are frequent, emphasising the individual users' 'rightness' more than anything else. And although hypertext may offer more 'power' to readers, as they have influence on the reading of the text through selecting hyperlinks, these links are limited to the choices made available by the 'authors', leaving power still in favour of the text-producer.

Perhaps I am merely entrenched in my literate predispositions; I admit that I am a lovechild of Modernist prosaics and the philosophical approach to language that sprung from the rise of alphabetic literacy. Yet there seems to be something irrational – my literate bias surfaces once more – about seeing something subsequent to another as cycling back to an antecedent. The sequence of developments is orality, literacy and now; and to call our present day 'secondary orality', that is, a resurrection of 'suppressed' propensities of centuries past, seems unfounded.

Yes, Ong and the Ongeans admit that secondary orality 'can never be like primary orality' because it has been infiltrated by literacy. But such a view seems plagued with contempt for literacy – it's as though literacy were some disease, some repulsive sore on the history of human language that has 'infiltrated', 'tainted' the immaculateness of orality. Must these theorists romanticise the past so much that they neglect the merits of their present? (Their arguments, their research, the whole of humanity's ability to understand itself beyond its immediate, pragmatic context are all made possible by literacy's abstractions, but this seems to be conveniently neglected as they glamorise contemporary society's return to its 'roots'.)

Of course I am aware that these sentiments may be misplaced. My research is not extensive, and I have no authority by which to validate all my claims. (As is the point of reading the work of those in the field: to add credibility to any claims one makes.) But hypertext does allow, as in this blog, a person to immerse in his own ruminations and make them public for catharsis, validation, or whatever other reason that can be evoked. Yes, I am not reluctant to call myself a Narcissist, a term used by Eric McLuhan used to characterise modern-day technophiles, in my use of hypertext. For it seems hypertext, rather than offering a break from literacy's championing of the individual, merely offers something of an extension of its abstractive prowess. Only now the abstractions are much further from 'reality', their signifieds existing mostly (only?) in the virtual realm/s, something those tribes of the oral world (and their reincarnations in the modern day) are sure to face with incessant head scratching.

The Sea of Blue

2008-10-02T21:32:00.003+10:00

I was surprised to hear that I’d been summoned.

All around me people were in a frenzy, the clamour they made resonating through the building’s well-lit hallways.

“There’s another Caesar around!”

“Can we get someone to replace him?”

I was thrust into an unknown drama; one in which lives were props and people, these people, were actors. My clothes immediately made me an alien amongst their placid, tidy blue, but it was not long before I was supplied the appropriate costume to be subsumed into my role.

“You can change in there,” one told me, pointing to a large wooden door with a pictograph of a man affixed on it.

I emerged from the room clad in a periwinkle suit akin to the others, though slightly crisper and cleaner. Its odour reminded me of flowers; evidently, it was brand new (or was made to appear so). The halls had been deserted, and although on the surface I had assimilated into their world, it was at this point that I felt the most lost.

In the distance I detected another one of them scurrying with some paper in hand, the whiteness of the sheets complementing the pastel blue that coated her body. Without my knowledge my legs began moving, transporting me towards the person, but she waved her arms and shook her head.

“Just wait there,” she yelled to me.

I was uncomfortable with being made to loiter in an empty hallway. I had been summoned, after all, and to be neglected like this seemed to me just a bit uncourteous. But I was obedient enough to comply. I sought out any form of stimulation and began to dally around the halls. My shoes and the floor engaged in some dry humping, producing squeaks that were so loud I had to raise my foot higher than normal per step. The walls were filled with pictures and photographs; on my right was an ode to cats and dogs, on my left a sculpture of a budgerigar. Besides me nothing was stirring; in fact, it seemed as though all the people I had seen beforehand had forsaken the building. Had I been left here to linger like a phantom?

Out of desperation I made friends with a chair that I seemed to have overlooked when I first arrived. It accommodated my exhausted body well, almost massaging my lumbar with its firm, yet comfortable, cushions. On it, I waited for something, anything, to happen.

I then heard some noises from behind me. As I turned my head, my vision was bombarded by a sea of blue. There was a whole procession of them, all heading in the same direction, filling the air with their chatter.

“The time has come for us to begin,” one said to me, her face forming a slight grin each time she paused between words.

I nodded and followed the group.

We weaved our way through the sterile hallways, past countless empty rooms and dark, silent cupboards. Each room was illuminated with a white light that was almost blinding, and the smell of clean was overpowering. Finally, we entered a room that seemed larger than the rest.

This chamber had an air of seriousness about it; inside more of the blue-people were waiting, some of them surrounding a bed in which lay a person who seemed vaguely familiar. Those I walked with hurried to get into position and surrounded the infirm, their eyes wide-eyed in anticipation over the ceremony that was to begin. I was excluded from the circle they had formed, of course.

From where I stood all I could hear was the noise of metallic apparatuses colliding with flesh and with each other. I contorted my neck into hitherto unknown positions, attempting to catch a glimpse of the events, but the sea of blue obscured my vision. The sheer gravity of the situation would have been unbearable were it not for the giggling that soon emanated from my unrestrainable mouth. Was this why I was summoned? For this farce of a ritual of which I could not even partake?

A child’s cries then filled the room. They had wrapped him in cloth, cleaning the white slime that attached itself to his skin. His breathing was irregular, his minuscule fingers writhing in alternation. The people in blue then handed the infant to the woman in the bed, whom they congratulated with twinkling eyes and excessive smiles.

“You can leave now,” bid one of them, gesturing me to follow her out of the room. I looked back at the woman who had just ushered in a new being into existence, and smiled. It was she, I was sure, that summoned me. As I left, she kept her eyes fixed on mine, while her ruptured womb was carefully sealed by an old man in faded blue.

Chérie

2008-09-29T23:47:00.001+10:00

Come, let’s sit by the fire. The winter wind permeates through those glass windows and I’d hate for you to develop a chill. Here, by me. Isn’t this cosy? I’m glad that we have until forever to spend moments like this.

Are you cold? Allow me to fetch you a blanket, I’ve got plenty. There, is that more comfortable? There’s nothing I want more than to please you. Let me put on some Edith, I know how much we both adore her music. You’re just sitting there, motionless; I’m sorry, I hope you don’t find me too intense right now. It’s just that I really become a changed man when I’m with you.

Do you remember that day you walked home from the shops carrying three bags full of groceries and a sack of flour? That was the first time I ever laid eyes on you. Have I told you that? Well, I was conversing with someone who lived a couple of blocks from your house when I saw you stroll past. I discerned that you were having difficulty carrying your things, but something in the way you moved your legs, your gait, made you seem so elegant. Your flaxen hair was being swept by the wind, some of it obscuring your eyes, but you managed to avoid getting distracted. Underneath your petticoat your hips swayed with each step. As you turned right from the street in which I’d first noticed you, I knew that one day you would be more to me than just a stranger.

Oh, the tea’s ready. No need to trouble yourself about it, I’ll get it. There, I’ll serve it while it’s still hot; it is, after all, the best tea available in my cupboards. I know you can’t appreciate this tea, but I’m offering it nonetheless. Now, allow me to stir in a teaspoon of sugar – it’ll complement the chamomile nicely. I’ll just leave the teacup right there, away from the edge of the table.

Avec mes souvenirs, j’ai allume le feu… Edith’s splendid, isn’t she? Speaking of memories, would you like to see these photographs I took of you? They’re just by the shelf. Wait, here they are. Here’s one of you by the stove, cooking. You’re almost like a housewife in an ad from the fifties. Haha, and another of you having a cigarette on your front porch. I took them while you weren’t looking. Oh, you were always so beautiful.

Like during that ball at the town hall. You were unaccompanied, apparently you’d decided against having a chaperon. Your parents had just died in some tragic accident – rumours spread that they’d veered off a cliff while another driver rampaged past. But you didn’t speak about that. Nor did you indicate any sort of grief. Instead, you remained as bewitching as ever, akin to an Olympian goddess, radiating all there was to behold that night. I didn’t wish to speak to you at that occasion, the time wasn’t yet right; but you found your way to me. Weaving your way through the crowds of people with all the grace of an ice skater, you were soon engrossed in conversation with me. You were so convivial, so congenial, it was almost like no tragedy had befallen you. I could not but oblige. Your eyes twinkled as we spoke, you giggled constantly. Hours after the party ended, you and I were still celebrating, albeit festivities of our own. And I congratulated myself over my masterful influence on the turn of events.

Your hair is still as beautiful as when we first met. I love the way each strand performs a waltz with my fingers as they fall. It’s almost like I’m playing with silt, but more beautiful. Oh, but your face is a so dry and rough; as though all the moisture from it had been drawn away. And your skin is frigid like ice. We must revive that youthful glow with which you entranced me, but how? I know, I care too much about you. That’s what you said you liked most about me. But don’t worry, I’ll always be here to take care of you. We’ll always be together.

Time passed, and you decided that with your parents gone, I was to be the only person you’d ever need. We soon lived together, sharing every precious moment, each dream and nightmare. I was ecstatic that everything had fallen into place.

Oh, your blanket’s slipping off. Lucky I was quick to catch it. There, I’ll tuck it in underneath your shoulders; that way it won’t fall out again. One must always be cautious when dealing with problematic things, like this blanket, and administer a decisive solution. Oh, let me get you another blanket; the fire’s raging yet your skin feels colder and colder.

If only your affections towards me never diminished. I had given you everything, caring for you like a mother does to her new-born, but my attentions for you went unnoticed. You said you needed something else, some space, you said I was choking you; I didn’t understand how love could ever be asphyxiating. You even had the nerve to try and leave me. But what would I be without you, or you without me? We had become one being, and if you’d left everything would be ruined. I had to fix it. All you needed was some forceful convincing, something you couldn’t refuse, some irrevocable alternative that would ensure you’d always be with me.

How I wish you wouldn’t just sit there, stiff like a plastic mannequin and staring into space with those blank, unfeeling eyes. We never talk like we used to anymore. You’ve changed, and not for the better. Maybe I can fix that, too.

Don’t look so glum, cherie. Amidst this snowstorm, nothing will be going in or out of the house.

Atonement

2008-09-11T23:11:00.000+10:00

Marcel observed the paraphernalia that littered the room – wooden crates, shredded paper, Petri dishes, Ziploc bags. It had been two weeks since he weaved through the city’s labyrinthine alleyways to arrive at the ‘meeting place’. In the darkness flickered an incandescent bulb, its light waning and waxing in rhythm with Marcel’s heartbeat.

A ring of smoke flew into Marcel’s eyes, making it tear up in irritation.

“So why you just sittin’ there?” inquired another man, putting out his cigarette.

“Ah, sorry,” replied Marcel, a slight tremor perceptible in his voice.

“So, what you call me here for anyhow?”

Marcel could sense the agitation in his companion’s tone. He foresaw that the conversation would inevitably lead to disastrous consequences.

“I … er, just had something to talk to you about.”

“So what is it?”

Marcel had been armed with the answer to that question for weeks, having rehearsed his response daily in front of a mirror. But Marcel had yet to learn the faint difference between contrived and actual situations. As quickly as he mustered it, his eloquence fled him.

“You see, ah, I … I jes’, I don’t wanna do this anymore.”

“Do what?”

“This! Working for you! I don’t wanna sell your drugs no more. I need to give myself a break—sorry for shoutin’.”

The man sitting on the chair opposite Marcel chuckled, his face contorting into a sardonic grin. Marcel had seen that look many times before, particularly when business deals failed to materialise. He could not help avert his gaze.

“You’re an idiot. What is this, did you grow a conscience or somethin’? You got nothin’ without me. You be dead by next week.”

Marcel grew pale. He knew that the conversation would not end in his favour, but a blatant death threat seemed too brusque. The silence that followed made the situation worse, forcing Marcel to hypothesise the manner in which he would be ‘disposed of’. Would it be by sniper, knife, collision? He preferred anything to such uncertainty, even to have himself killed at that very moment.

Marcel could not bear to look at the man who would be responsible for his demise. He wondered how anyone could be so heartless, so unforgiving. He would never again be able to lavish the simple joys of fast food, or the cheap entertainment of free-to-air television. The promise of a suburban lifestyle, a wife and children, the three-bedroom house, became fainter, fading into pitch black. Why would fate decide to turn on him upon his decision to atone for his grievances?

“I’m not gonna kill you, dumb-arse,” said the man, who then guffawed as though he had shared a hilarious joke.

The turn of events was so relieving that Marcel sighed heavily, his breath like air from an overfilled balloon. And although something loitered in Marcel’s thoughts, something that still made him feel uneasy, he thought it unwise not to join in his companion’s laughter.

“Hunger’s gonna get ya before I do. Here, have some beer.”

It was not in Marcel’s nature to refuse such a generous invitation. He consoled himself that perhaps this gesture was a sign of absolution, the beginning of a new leaf for him.

After some time the bottle he grasped in his left hand was empty. Marcel, inebriated, felt even more confident that he and his companion were on good terms once more.
“I better go. Thanks again for understandin’.”

“Sure. Can’t let the last nine years be for nothin’, right?”

“Yeah.”

Marcel exited the room. Knowing it was the last time he would ever see that place again, he returned for one final glimpse. The cracks in the walls were still there, as with the splatters of some substance that appeared brown in the light. He bid a silent farewell to the claustrophobic darkness and criminal stench, to the late nights and police chases, to the clandestine meetings, to his past.

He crossed the doorway, a feeling of resignation overcoming him. His mind began to wander towards the future he would make for himself. He could already see his son running to him, having just tossed a football in the air. Marcel would keep his eyes fixed on this ball, tracing its trajectory and allowing his body to veer unconsciously towards the expected landing site. With hands in position, he would wait for gravity to act upon the ball, which coyly decides to fall a couple of inches away. A slight miscalculation.

Marcel plunged to the ground, his cerebral cortex saturated with the arsenic.
“Motherfucka.”

Stepping over Marcel’s convulsing body, the criminal emerged from the urban catacombs and approached an overcrowded tram. Once aboard, some fellow passengers greeted him with a smile.

Booktopia

2008-09-08T19:29:00.007+10:00

Last August, UNESCO honoured Melbourne as a ‘City of Literature’. And why not: Melbourne boasts the largest number of bookshops in the country, and publication – book, newspaper, magazine – sales here are higher than in any other state.

As a minion of a significantly under-funded, albeit highly praised, literary magazine I could not contain my excitement over the accolade. I distinctly recall the momentous discovery: I was sitting at a Swinburne Library computer doing nothing but reading The Age. Behind me, four people were ogling my computer like vultures, ready to swoop in case I vacated my seat. The full-page article pictured the State Government’s plans for a ‘Centre for Books and Ideas’, and gave a lengthy enumeration of the reasons that made Melbourne deserve the title.

Which is why a recent experience has led to this demi-rant.

Weeks into the semester I learned that a textbook required for one of my subjects had not yet arrived at the Swinburne bookshop; apparently the delivery was delayed ‘slightly’. I attempted to locate another shop that stocked the book, but my search was in vain. The book, according to a major book supplier, was out of print in Australia. Six to eight weeks was their estimate for it to arrive if they arranged an international order.

But I didn’t see the value in ordering it from another bookshop, considering the copies requested by Swinburne were (allegedly) already on their way. So I waited.

In the weeks to follow I made regular visits to the Union Building, hoping to have someone greet me with a smile, desired textbook in hand. Sadly, I was instead met with apologies uttered by poker-faced bookshop attendants (the poker faces surely masking their irritation over my weekly nagging).

I contacted another major book retailer, which suggested a possible explanation for the delay. Routledge, the book’s publisher, sent orders out via ‘freight liner’, which, to the oblivious (like me, before I Googled it) translates to ‘transport by boat’. That meant that the books, ordered five weeks prior, were at sea somewhere.

I’ve lost count of the number of weeks that passed since I revisited the Swinburne bookshop, wide-eyed and enthused about the learning that would occupy the next three months. And with the textbooks still enigmatically charting the open waters – or wherever they are – I find myself simultaneously amused and annoyed by the ironic situation. The world now recognises Melbourne as a haven for books and booklovers (though only secondary to Edinburgh, the original ‘City of Literature’), yet a decent transaction between publisher and bookshop, not to mention freight liners and delivery trucks, could not be arranged.

Could those books have made a detour to Edinburgh?

Flabbergasted

2008-08-11T14:56:00.000+10:00

The teacher tossed a red schoolchair on the ground. It made a metallic sound as it fell, kind of like the noise of a hundred fat arcade coins raining into a popcorn machine. As all of this happened I sat watching, my left eyebrow raised slightly higher than my right. I didn’t blink for eleven seconds.

Holidayitis

2008-07-22T01:42:00.010+10:00

What follows is a list of the activities that had occupied me at various times during the last six weeks or so:

Completed the first draft of my second fashion column for Voiceworks magazine.
Bought and finished Pokemon Sapphire.
Had a garage sale (along with my sister and brother-in-law). Made a satisfactory amount of money.
Did some end-of-financial-year shopping. Momentous buys include a $30 leather jacket, $40 cardigan and $20 jeans.
Cooked some stir-fry (without the aid of a cookbook). Twice.
Gave myself a haircut. My two-year-old niece, too. And my sister.
Completed my tax return.
Visited the National Gallery of Victoria twice: first for Black in Fashion (as material for my column), then for The War Prints of Otto Dix.
Changed my university subjects for the second semester (for the umpteenth time in a row).
Half-completed a Jean Cocteau novel.
Three-quarters-completed a rendition of an ad featuring Audrey Hepburn using vectors on Photoshop.
Downloaded and watched every single episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender that I hadn’t yet seen, all the way up to the spectacular finale.

Of course don’t be fooled. It may seem as though my life is filled with activity, but the flurry of industriousness is punctuated with periods of indolent nothingness. And items 2 and 12 especially are ‘accomplishments’ that I am not particularly proud of. What’s worse is that there are other things I’d done that I have chosen to exclude from this list – out of embarrassment or some similar sentiment. But you get the picture.

I always dreaded holidays, particularly because of the threat of stagnation that they posed to usually-active minds like my own. I must admit, though, that I am grateful for the opportunity these breaks give to relax, sleep in and not be ruled by schedules. But while I laze around my bed staring at the ceiling, the fears of my mind slowly dissolving into space or shrinking to the size of a pea continue to plague my, err, mind. (This is especially worrying in light of an article I had recently read about human brains physically shrinking due to disuse. Holy crap.)

Nietzsche contended that to be fulfilling, human life must not be stagnant; rather it must constantly create. Yet I question whether the activities with which I had been so engrossed could actually be considered ‘fruitful’ at all. Sure, there’d be those who would argue that because these things satisfied me at the time, they were fruitful/fulfilling/whatever. I remain unconvinced. Certainly there must be another reason?

Being idle and reclusive thrilled me in ways that I can’t fully elucidate. Around Melbourne were several events that I could have enjoyed – design expos, movie screenings, boutique sales – but none were able to entice me to venture out into the bitter cold. And apart from a single friend, I caught up with absolutely no one this winter. (I seem to have taken my hermitage a bit too seriously!) Instead, I remained at home, with my rare non-domestic expeditions taken on my own.

What puzzles me is why I enjoy this. There seemed to be nothing ‘creative’ about what I had been doing, and I don’t seem to be accomplishing anything.

---

Me: Doctor, I think I might be afflicted with a case of Holidayitis.

Dr Faust: Is that so, child? What symptoms have you experienced?

Me: Well, er, I’ve been really anti-social. I’ve become infatuated with a faux-anime character, one that can manipulate flames. I haven’t written a story, finished reading a novel, or drawn anything for about two months now. Oh, and I stay up till about three in the morning watching sit-com reruns.

Dr Faust: (shakes head) Maybe you should go see Dr Wilde.

Those Shoes!

2008-05-15T14:40:00.005+10:00

With my mind blank, I sat on that derelict bus. My head was still spinning from another bout of early morning distress – the same one that had afflicted me since my childhood. “How can people be so active at this time of day?” I quietly pondered. The bus made a quick turn, my body mechanically jolted to the left by centrifugal force. To my dismay, although my pre-midday routines were as regular as a train’s chuga-chuga, they have not managed to obviate this chronic discomfort.

“Bah!” was all I could profess (albeit only mentally). While I maintained my sombre disposition – I would not have been surprised if my fellow passengers offered me their condolences! – my thoughts began to indulge themselves in an exuberant samba. My temples pounded. The music my delusions danced to persisted with a steady, syncopated beat (syncopated in relation to my heartbeat, that is) and it was reminiscent of someone using a double kick pedal on a bass drum. Each time I blinked the unfolding of my eyelids became harder, as though the aqueous humour that lubricated the gap separating lid from ball was transformed by some crazed witch doctor into super-maxi extra-hold glue.

I was about to unleash a deafening howl of agony when I found myself soothed by a vision of almost ethereal beauty. An elderly man boarded the bus, clad in what I conjectured to be a recycled women’s jumper that did not at all flatter his rotund physique. His trousers were also of an inappropriate sort to his figure, and don’t even get me started on his half-balding, luminescent head. No, I was tantalised by none of these repulsive travesties. Rather, I was enamoured with his footwear: a pair of pigeon-grey, suede cap-toes with black laces threaded on a 45-degree angle to each shoe’s longitudinal axis. “Such a divine sight!” I almost declaimed.

For the remainder of the trip I was entranced by the beauty of those shoes. On spasmodic intervals I caught myself repeatedly glaring at them (and it did not help that where I sat, it was impossible to observe them without leaning forward and revealing my almost fetishistic voyeurism).

I concocted a multitude of ingenious means by which those shoes could fall into my possession. I could possibly persuade him to sell it to me there and then for $30. Or perhaps he would soon tire of such high maintenance footwear – they were suede after all – and relinquish them to an op-shop (where I would coincidentally be at the right moment). Maybe I could just mug him (because I obviously have the capacity to do so).

In any case I could already imagine those shoes slipping onto my feet. Strangers would find themselves inexplicably delighted at the sight of me overtaking them in the street. If a Vogue correspondent were at the scene he/she/it would compose a four-page feature article (plus centrefold) detailing how my superlative taste rivals the shoe-hording activities of Mrs Marcos, and how the shoes developed a godlike appeal because they were worn by me.

When the bus arrived at the depot it was not unexpected that my adoration continued. In D-Grade Detective Movie fashion, I trailed closely behind said man, my eyes fixed on the soldier-esque march of his feet. At some point, when I felt as though the person attached to the idol I was worshipping began to feel uneasy, I advanced to avoid giving the impression that I was some sort of creep. (A judgment like that would definitely have intensified my already appalling early-morning sentiments.)

I then realised: my head was clear! All the discomfort I had experienced prior had sublimated into my intense (and almost abnormal) fixation with those shoes. I found it comical that my ailment was purged by something almost as pathetic as this. And it was only 10:53am.

Explode

2008-04-29T20:26:00.004+10:00

Good heavens, how wonderful to bump into you! It had been an eternity since I saw you last. Three, four years ago, I believe. Back then you still had hair, and your teeth weren’t as crooked, or yellow. Back then the lines under your eyes indicated the restless activity of youth, whereas this time they seemed reminiscent of an aged mother who reared one child too many. What had you done with yourself, man?

Nevertheless I was glad you recalled who I was, and what I meant to you. All those fleeting moments we shared, those misadventures, those fond memories that I could never seem to eradicate flooded my brain en masse, leaving me to drown in them. Your absence from my life proved cathartic, but on seeing you again I lost the ability to restrain my outrage – the very thought of you vexed me. “How dare you,” my whisper rising to a crescendo, “how dare you show your face to me without a hint of dismay at what you had ruined!” Of course I was too craven to even approximate a discernible enunciation of those words.

While I was lost in thought you decided it was time you carried on. Some previous engagement that you urgently had to go to (as though I didn’t matter enough). I implored you to remain with me for we hadn’t seen each other for such a long time. But you refused with that piercingly scornful look that you always cast on me when you thought my actions stupid. You then turned away to head to your next destination.

I could not permit you to go, however. My head was already inundated with scenarios, and apologies, and plans, and emotions, and it was as though I was ready to engulf you in one swoop like an anthropophagous amoeboid-person. Yet you continued walking.

I decided it was time to take drastic action. I could not let you depart on such ill terms and forsake me in this sea of distress, drowning, gasping for breath. Out of my left pocket appeared a gun which, as though enchanted, compelled the fingers of my hand to grasp it tightly. It all happened rapidly, mechanically, then BANG! Without apprehension the bullet exited the barrel and penetrated your skull, most of its pieces shattering into minute fragments alongside a splatter of blood. I didn’t think a cranium could explode, but yours did. Bizarre.

Then you called my name again. Awaking from my reverie I realised I was still on that bridge over that river near that train station. There was no gun and no shattered skull; only you, me, and that power you have over me that I hate. “Change of plans,” you said with a sly nod. And down those crowded streets I followed you into a dismal café, where I wallowed in my cowardice while enjoying a soy latte.

--
(Originally published in Vibewire in May 2008. Republished here due to their faulty servers. Copyright remains my own.)

Flattened Colours Misuse Over Take

2008-04-17T17:28:00.000+10:00

My eyes procure a feast of undefinable luxury
while the computer whizzes and my ears are
saturated with deafening sound that cannot
seem to silence itself with its own
overwhelming prejudices of inconceivable
genius although within that I cannot really
comprehend the joys of not allowing myself
control as my art takes its own form despite
my input which I believe can master itself into
fruition but does not necessarily require me to
act upon it and as a creator without wilful input
I may just stand back and allow my work to
realise itself by coming into form without my
help but only through the movement of my
fingers across this series of letters embossed
onto plastic squares that look like pieces of
child’s play flattened into discs with little
stickers whose colours have faded due to
overuse and misuse and I still sit here
dumbfounded over the lack of sense this
artwork may take but I allow it to continue
without my concern and it really pains me that
it has become so abstracted and uncontrolled
that I somehow feel like it may not have any
sense and I continue to try and taper it by
revising some words that spontaneously come
to me and yet they come out of their own
accord as though springing from some innate
fountain of creativity that existed before my
conscious mind and will continue to do so
despite me like a dream that continues to play
out vivid scenes while one is in a stupor of
exhaustion and like that exhaustion perhaps
this is the only means by which I can ever truly
call myself creative because everything seems
to have been created before in one form or
another and as an artist I cannot but fall into
the trap of queuing in the line of revisions
without attribution and soon this work will
create something more wonderful than
anything I have previously created because
unlike them in this one I only pressed
backspace once every forty words.

Just Do It: A Cut-Up

2008-04-17T11:33:00.000+10:00

Change for more mirrors. Or anything else that possesses the rebellion against self, a rebellion against accepted norms. It has run for too long, exhausted the supply already? It is through alcohol-induced intoxication that we meddle in other people’s affairs. Just get shit. At least I can admit I’m faulty.

Pretence is appalling. Just do it!

Each is but a person forced upon an intellectual rebellion; a rebellion against being. I, for one, have successfully mastered the spectacle. Reflect! How else am I supposed to exercise my self-love? Probably superlatively appalling. Just do it!

There is nothing but fragmented phantasmagorias in this need for more mirrors. Those irreconcilable foes they are perceived to be. I, for one, have power over humanity.

Damn,

The Next Inadvertent Criminal: A Cut-Up

2008-04-16T23:35:00.001+10:00

An idler such as me comes from having missed a right. Everything becomes right. But in that awakes the next where "Life" provides acute settings for what is lacking in belief and conscious ways out of that stupor. Through an inability to comprehend, I justify my planned nature via the most debasing life-competition. That heated moment of spontaneous decision I experienced was the last. Everyone's watching.

With a clear head one awakes and is not blameworthy for any of what was before. "Life" provides acute social ladders and hierarchies that have become valid to awaken the next inadvertent criminal. And the most comprised of traditionalist ideas, with notions of clarity, conquers as he enters the world affecting the outcomes of this world.

Persecution is no thought of other choices: Nothing is wrong, then.
The mind is clouded in the feeling of chance events. There is only so much that bestows incredibly unbearable moments. I wonder whether one’s hold on one’s credos is actually beneficial, that one must ensure that Schizophrenia prevails one's psyche. I can control what is previously planned, but if not will it beget other choices available to satisfy my hungry psyche?

Examining all possible options leaves no room. Yet those peculiar aftershocks…

I am the Story

2008-03-02T17:31:00.003+11:00

I have written countless stories before, countless accounts of deluded anti-heroes grappling with the perils of normalcy, or of so-called normal people thrust into exaggeratedly bizarre situations. As well, it had never been difficult for me to conjure narratives that delved into the recesses of the human psyche, introspective peregrinations towards self-discovery or even self-abasement. At this point, however, I am faced with the onerous undertaking of writing a testimony of my own life – a piece of truth that hardly coincides with the fabrications I have grown accustomed to. Strangely, more than anything it is this acknowledgment of my existence that I cannot seem to confront

I need to write a biographical story. A tale about life. For weeks now I had been deliberating the theme I would use to develop my contest entry. On train trips to university, while eating dinner with friends, whenever I found myself slightly unoccupied I would engage in introspection, furtively perusing through my stocks of conversations and experiences in an attempt to unearth a worthwhile topic.

Initially I contemplated recounting incidents in other people’s lives, including:

the ‘black sheep’ treatment received by my father in his childhood,
the lavish bourgeois upbringing experienced by my mother,
my sister’s rebellious late-teenage escapades,
my great uncle’s high-society forays in the seventies.

Each of these would impart emotive evocations of the past, something I thought would be ideal for a short story competition such as the one I would be entering. But as I scrupulously examined these plots in my head, I realised that I was uncertain of various details in each story; details that would only be accessible to the person who endured them. If I was not wholly familiar with these chronicles, how was I to convey them to others who knew even less than I did about them?

Thus, I decided that it would be in my best interests to relay an occurrence from my own life instead. Again, I had to situate myself in my mental library, internalising each file, each document that was to be located there in the hopes that one would prove valuable to my endeavour. Hours of sporadic recollection had passed, and my cerebral expedition remained fruitless. Had my life been so uneventful, so mediocre that I could not even retrieve a memory worth narrating?

I was overcome with feelings of inferiority as my mind subjected me to neurotic predictions of what my competitors would produce. I could imagine coming-of-age stories, or tales of survival amidst persecution and illness, accounts of family conflicts and resolutions, romantic liaisons and whimsical childhood memoirs… In the presence of such conventionally moving plots, how was I, the raconteur with no personal story to tell, to fare? Though disillusioned by my tentative failure, I convinced myself that I only needed time to allow the colourful anecdotes or significant life-lessons to reappear. Maybe a short respite would facilitate the gruelling hunt that was to come.

With salient memories cunningly avoiding detection, I resorted to the vacuous spectacle of television, conjecturing that its programs might somehow provide cues to assist my reminiscence. After scanning the list of available programs, I opted for a classic movie I had watched in my late childhood; a love story set in the backdrop of an infamous early-twentieth century sinking ship. Unfortunately, I had missed more than three quarters of the movie, with only the old woman’s final recapitulations of the ship’s final hours remaining. What was ironic, though I did not notice it beforehand, was that this character was performing what I aspired to accomplish – she was in the midst of relaying vivid episodes from her past. Irritated, I turned the television off, obviating myself its inconsiderate derision. How dare Hollywood characters possess more history than me!

Internally I was exploding with frustration, and I made attempts to ensure that my external composure masked this uncouth sentiment. My sister, whose presence I had been oblivious to until that point, then enunciated her concern for my condition. She discerned that something was slightly awry in my behaviour (evidently my external masking had been faulty), and I obliged by verbalising my apparent inability to convey my own past. In response, she reassured me that my life had, in fact, not been so bland, with my plethora of awards and achievements verifying this. Though I physically remained in her company, my mind had already begun a retrospective voyage to revisit these ‘achievements’ of which she spoke.

I was aware that many considered me intellectually precocious and, to this day, both teachers and colleagues remark on my distinctive abilities. However as I evaluated my marks, my awards, my ostensible accomplishments, I was swept with an overarching dissatisfaction with what I had been examining. Although to others my successes were laudable and were worth coveting, I could not but suppose that these weren’t the types of things people reflected on when making biographical stories. What I needed was action, hardship, fear, survival, danger, romance…even Joyce’s autobiographical Portrait divulged his plaintive encounters as a juvenile misfit! My life, though saturated with ‘triumph’ remained insipidly plain in that it had not been exposed to the chaotic elements that moulded other people’s lives.

It was considerably peculiar that someone, whose literary creations were rife with schizophrenics, murderers and stalkers, had not undergone any of the situations his works explored. Although I doubt authors normally have first-hand experience of what they write, it seems sensible to deduce that there is at least some acquaintance with them – hence the adage, “Write what you know.” Armed with this hypothesis I scoured my catalogue of finished and unfinished works, attempting to obtain some sort of reference to any relevant encounter in my life. Alas, this attempt, like the others, proved futile. Unless I had murdered a priest to take his place, or mistaken my psychological institutionalisation for penal incarceration, these, too, bore no resemblance to any events in my past. My incredibly mundane history did not even approximate these narratives (though it is fascinating to consider where these plots originated).

I was on the verge of surrendering, conceding that maybe autobiographical writing just was not a genre I could conquer. If only I had decided to compose a record of someone else’s experiences instead! That choice will have prevented the inexorably laborious conundrum I had found myself in. Unfortunately, it was too late to commence doing research for an other-person biography. Dissuaded, I headed sulkily towards my piano, hoping that some Chopin would spark some creative fuse in my vast collection of episodic memory. I tried to concentrate on playing one of his renowned nocturnes, but my mind continued to preoccupy itself with possible themes to use for as a contest entry. Consequently, after every eight bars or so my fingers, as though contorted into knots, would inadvertently fall on the wrong keys, generating dissonances so unpleasant that I soon had to stop. Not only was I unable to compose a substantial recollection of a personal experience, I could not even divert my attentions towards a different artistic pursuit!

Then, amidst the musical discord something occurred to me: these allegedly useless ramblings I had been recording were, in fact, biographical. Despite not being climactic or consequential they did relay a significant aspect of my life; that is, they accompanied me through the creative process in which I was so frequently immersed. Similar to music, it is sometimes on an imprudent error that a valuable work can be begun. This narrative, as with my previous works, had been composed from what seemed to be senselessly ordinary and vexing dilemmas. What did, however, make this work more remarkable was the homage it paid to my person: I was the disconnected story-conjurer no more; I had become the story itself.

The Op-Shop Pandemic

2008-02-28T13:52:00.001+11:00

Another piece published in Vibewire, this time a non-fiction piece on op-shops.

Unchanged

2008-02-11T22:21:00.003+11:00

A poem of mine has been published on Vibewire.

Drowning

2008-02-08T22:24:00.002+11:00

When I was younger I once visited an aunt whose husband had, at that time, recently passed away. He was afflicted with some sort of illness (of what particular type I cannot recall) and was usually incapable of leaving their bedroom. My aunt burdened herself to take charge of him, wishing to keep him company throughout the whole of his gruelling ordeal.

Her efforts, she recounted, culminated one night when, on his deathbed, she clutched his hand as he oscillated between life and whatever it was that lay beyond it. His chest would cease to rise, and she would begin weeping; but soon after he would cough, inhale some sizeable amount of air, and would mumble almost indecipherable messages of comfort to her. “Not yet,” he would jokingly say. To divert her attention from the sombreness of what lay ahead, my aunt entered into conversation with him, discussing the sensations and sentiments (if any) that he experienced. “What’s it like?” she asked, doubtless trying to obscure the anxiety in her voice which nevertheless remained apparent. “Like drowning,” he replied. Before long signs of respiratory activity halted again, but unlike the previous times, he did not return.

Almost a decade had passed since I had this discussion with my aunt, but her husband’s description of death lingers in my memory like a splinter driven too deeply in one’s skin. If death was to be likened to drowning, then what was I to make of life? Had we living creatures merely been plunged into a vast sea – the sea of existence, of being – with the pressing need to continuously struggle to keep ourselves afloat? Life, then, ultimately becomes signified by the constant paddling and kicking, the cycle of submergence and resurfacing, of being marooned at sea.

It sounded reasonable to me to associate life with struggle; most of the academics, authors and artists I had encountered seemed to advocate the same position. This view, however, was deeply macabre and seemed to imply that all living creatures were just waiting to die: carcasses that incessantly tried to resist that which is their predestined, inevitable end. If life were truly the struggle to keep afloat and death the inexorable consequence of arresting that struggle, did this then entail that death was an intentional ‘letting go’ and ‘allowing oneself to drown’?

Coincidentally, I once made an observation that seemed to complement the ‘drowning’ metaphor. Upon entering the world, human beings are born with clenched fists; a gesture of wanting that could arguably denote the commitment to keeping afloat in the sea of existence. From infancy through to adulthood, one continually demands what one perceives as the best and fittest, petulantly rebelling on the off-chance that one was deprived of these. Upon nearing the end of one’s life, however, one begins to feel less compelled to act selfishly, and the gravitations towards egocentric fulfilment (‘keeping afloat’) become less formidable. At death, countering the image of the newborn, the deceased’s hands lose their vigour and, as though consensual, unfold to liberate all the corpse’s burdens, all its desires, all its guilt, love, anger, shame – all its willingness to live.

Together, these allegories imparted an interpretation of life and death – that of struggle and its subsequent respite – that proved less bleak than what I had initially conjured. With death suggesting not just emancipation but also growth from irrational juvenility, from that untoward desire to preserve life at all costs, I was reassured that death, was not to be feared. On the contrary, one must anticipate one’s impending departure and descend the waters with the sincerest valour and enthusiasm.

Wooden-soled Boots and a Mustard-Yellow, Sausage-Shaped Train

2007-09-27T23:57:00.005+10:00

I awoke with the deafening cacophony of silence saturating the vicinity of my bed. After trying to perceive any sort of form in the darkness, and failing, I made no motion to return to my slumber. Through the window only a fragment of the moon could be seen, but it was there. Round. White. With its peculiar shading that rather reminded me of the shape of the American continent. Unlike other nights that have been interrupted by mid-sleep rousing, I felt a sudden urge to traverse the empty night-time streets.

I could see the clouds moving quite rapidly and I was certain an insidious cold wind was present in the air. I put on a thick khaki jacket (one that I had found the night prior) and quietly exited the house through the front door. The rest of the dwelling's inhabitants remained asleep and it was not in my interest to disrupt their slumber.

It was probably not wise to have worn my favourite black boots, with their wooden soles making a racket every step I made on the wet asphalt. Clack, clack, clack replaced the silence that previously dominated the scenery. I headed towards the park at the end of the street – the one with swings and a slide – hoping that it would satisfy the craving for some late night recreation.

I arrived to that familiar spot, with its cork flooring stifling my footsteps. I was certain that I had not gone astray; indeed this was where I intended to head. Albeit to my surprise it was not the park that I found myself in, but a train station.

There were people on both of the two platforms, more on the one opposite me, and none of them exhibited behaviours that would signal the peculiarity of the present situation. Indeed, I seemed to be the only one that felt out of place. I began a debate with myself, deliberating this strange occurrence but did so in vain; and I realised it would be best to instead strike a conversation with a random and discuss this startling matter. Turning to the gentleman standing somehow close to me, a flood of questions surged through my mind and it became difficult to select the most appropriate one to convey to my now fellow interlocutor. Out of my control, what I ended up asking was when the next train would come.

"In...now, here it comes."

And lo and behold, there it was in front of me: a mustard-yellow sausage-like contraption, lustrous and sparkling clean, with green-lined windows, and red lighting within it. While I looked askance at this train-thing, I was at once overwhelmed by the stampede of occupants disembarking their carriages. Left and right I was tugged and shoved, and once the number of people exiting the train subsided, I was reciprocally subjected to the force of those trying to enter it. I was powerless to oppose their collective magnitude, and the next thing I knew I was sitting on what seemed like a bean bag, comfortably, on a train filled with no more than four people.

"Where did everybody go?" I asked no one in particular.

"Where they're supposed to be," was the vague reply.

"Where are we going?" said I.

"Where we were not before," my conversant responded.

At that point I had concluded that this dialogue would do nothing but exacerbate my confusion. It had clarified nothing, and only intensified the eeriness of the situation. I decided to continue my interrogation,

"Where are you sitting? I can't seem to locate where you are."

"Where you cannot look."

Like I had done once before, I scanned my immediate surroundings. Again, I concluded I was in a train with no more than four people, none of which had been in the middle of speaking with me. But where was this enigmatic fellow? Surely he would not be hiding under my (or anyone else's) seat, waiting to pounce on me had I decided to search for him.

After about ten more minutes I decided against pursuing his location. It seemed unnecessary. Pointless. What benefit would I get upon finding where he sat?

With a piercing screech the train halted. The doors opened; for the last time I double-checked to find anyone on the carriage that I had missed, but failed, and I got off. Now, if the tete-a-tete on the train was not mysterious enough, it seemed to me that the train stopped at the same station where it embarked. Unlike the previous one, however, no one (apart from myself) exited or entered the train. I was alone on the platform; in fact the station was empty. Only the light flickering from the purple eggplant-shaped light bulb above me could be seen.

I returned to my examination of the situation, reconvening my internal debate with myself. I had conceded that it will be impossible to deduce the more complex ontology of the event – the park turning into a train station, the station itself, the train – so I proceeded to pondering only the more immediate concerns. Like why I ended up in the same station from which I departed. I perused through the features of the station and confirmed that this and the station I left from were definitely identical.

"It's the same station!" I exclaimed, half-agitated.

"It is," retorted the voice that remained consistent with the preceding conversations.

"But you said the train was going 'where we were not before'!"

"It did."

In frustration I began stomping around, generating such a din (thanks to my wooden-soled boots and the acoustics of such an echo-y building) that a man (who apparently had been there all along) in a navy blue dinner coat reprimanded me. I apologised immediately, explaining the cause of my furore. Initially I thought he would be of no use to me, as my comment incited a condescending burst of laughter. Afterwards, however, he explained that it was impossible for a train to depart from, head towards and immediately arrive at the same station.

At that point I no longer suffered to pay attention to him. The topic of conversation had digressed into his personal life and was replete with complaints about working odd shifts and being a neglectful father. This was all irrelevant, of course, to my little adventure, which still kept me ill at ease and unaware of any explanation.

A train then appeared on the platform opposite me. What I had witnessed beforehand repeated itself, with a flood of passengers both entering and exiting a sausage-shaped, mustard-yellow-coloured train (green-lined windows and red lighting, too).

"I'm on a different platform!" I exclaimed. The brainwave had fallen on me so suddenly that my outburst caused almost all of the people on the opposite platform to turn their heads and leer at me. I was definitely not where I was before.

My ears were then deafened by a ringing sound that was inexplicably familiar. I could not pinpoint its origin but it could not be denied that the sound did exist. None of the people around me seemed to perceive it, however; or if they did, they merely ignored it.

The only explanation I could surmise was that it was merely I that was subjected to its tumult. And in fact, the ringing kept triggering a feeling of clarity or awakening. My mind, my 'spirit', was jolted with life and creation, as though I had become empowered.

I had been dreaming! All of these events could be explained with the simple justification that it was a play conjured by my subconscious as I lay in my dark room asleep. The ringing continued, and all I had to determine now was the mechanism by which I could awaken – the transition from this 'world' to waking life was not explicitly bridged by an alarm clock.

Once again the station was empty. The train had obviously departed while I was in the midst of contemplation, as with all its previous passengers. Even the burdensome man who inconsiderately imposed a narration of his life story had disappeared. All that remained were the ringing (which seemed to have grown louder) and my burgeoning desire to finally rouse from sleep to terminate this awkward dream.

But how am I to do that?

--
(This story was originally published on Vibewire.net in January 2008. However, as their servers are down I have decided to re-publish it on my blog with the original completion date.)

The Precocious Child Prince

2007-06-05T13:41:00.003+10:00

So after years of receiving praise for works of an excellent nature and conjuring jealousy from other people, the child who possessed abilities far advanced for his age begins to feel inferior in the world of the bourgeoisie and proletariat. Traits once perceived to be laudable and praiseworthy no longer merit commendation. Where once the child was complacent, now he is perturbed and lacking in belief and conscious of a state of inadequacy.

His upbringing comprised of traditionalist ideas, with notions of etiquette and politeness being endowed the most concern. At school he learnt about the great thinkers and his abilities of hypothesis were trained towards superlativity. He began to think big; pining for worlds far greater than what was before him, of times and people who shared his aristocratic calibre, and an intelligentsia who were able to aptly satisfy his hungry psyche.

But as he slowly becomes a man doubt infiltrates his mind. With most of those around him expediently discarding their principles and desires to 'survive' in this life-competition dangerous to the point of self-abnegation, the child begins to wonder whether his hold on his credos is mere folly. Is there any place in this world of pay cycles, social ladders and hierarchies for a dreamer – an idler – such as him?

He lay on his bed filled with questions and remained awake until the next day crept itself into being. He pondered on all that he has achieved, all the battles he has undergone, and ostensibly won, and what they all meant. Looking ahead he fears what the future might bring; of what real battles he may have to conquer as he enters the world of those who work for their honour.

Will his precocious intellect continue to provide his sole means of deterrence, his subterfuge, from all the troubles of existence? Or will he have to learn to face this new world without it, degrading himself into the very archetypes he was trained to despise in his childhood?

Red Lights

2007-05-31T08:47:00.001+10:00

Red lights begin to flash:
the first, and then the second,
then the first again
in alternating sequence.
In flocks people beckon
the message: "It is coming!"
Standing in awe they are
beguiled as they are faced with
nothing. But the lights
just keep on flashing.

Subject rejection

2007-05-02T18:25:00.000+10:00

My inquiry regarding extra subjects was gravely rejected today – and not even by some figure of prominent influence but by a mere receptionist.

“It’s our duty of care,” she commented, “to ensure that you don’t exert yourself too much. Don’t even try, you just won’t get it.”

Upon hearing this I shot her a quizzical glance; a look juxtaposing amazement and impertinence painted on my face. In retort I mumbled, “Uh, okay,” while exiting the office abated with defeat.

Albeit the whole incident endowed me with a burgeoning sensation of amusement. The peremptory fashion in which she spoke to me may be analogous to the servility expected of her by her superiors.

A severe case of power-tripping, I quietly thought to myself. Inferiority must be a despicable state of being.

Aftershocks

2007-04-25T01:25:00.002+10:00

It is only in sobriety that one achieves clarity as to what one has done in an intoxicated stupor. Through an inability to comprehend, the mind is clouded by many spurious justifications and ostensible ways out that everything is perceived to be right. Everything becomes right. But in that heated moment of spontaneous decision one is not blameworthy for any misdecisions made. As a sufferer of the regret-in-retrospect syndrome one's actions have become valid because they were appropriate and accurate and meaningful and superlative at the time.

Schizophrenia prevails one's psyche; everyone's watching. Everyone's always watching. And on that token one must ensure that what is seen is a manifestation of the perfection beheld in one's persona. To emanate confidence is one thing; to prove it is another. But is it a consequence of this attempt at verification that words are said – things are done – that beget a sense of irresponsibility? Of thoughtless haste?

There is only so much that one can control in this world; much less so when alcoholically-induced. However can anything really cause compunction in that state? And if they possess that ability, must they?

With a clear head one awakes the next morning to find that the events of the previous night may or may not retain their level of dignity. But is this even relevant to the fact that they had already been actualised? Their realisations manifest a sort of inescapable veneration by which the acts can be considered worthwhile.

Nothing is wrong, then.

Yet those peculiar aftershocks continue to perpetrate the inadvertent criminal.

And probably the most debasing insight obtained from all of this is how one actually does not even feel a pang of regret. At all. On the contrary, one develops a complacency which can be attributed to the satisfaction gained from what was done.

Persecution is by no means necessary in the face of such demeanour.

A Disseminated Self

2007-04-08T02:53:00.002+10:00

I am told that I often manifest pretence through my charades of self-importance. And that I possess very strong views about intellectualism and my subjective elite (which obviously revolves around individuals possessing a similar calibre to mine). And that I can be rather captious towards other people with whom I find fault. But no matter. There is no reason to be taken aback by these implicit prejudices - don't get me wrong, I am incredibly narcissistic and critical - but this rarely hinders me from being a fully functional [and sufficiently social] human being.

This aside, I am a person of many facets, each of which concerns a different area of the human condition. I can contrive to generalise about certain aspects of it (which I have in one of my blog entries), but this endeavour to me seems rather irrelevant to the matter which this section hopes to attain. The 'me' that I describe cannot withstand the flux prevalent around it. It seems unlikely that all of its traits can be ascribed into one piece of writing – not to mention the possibility for contradictions and obsoleteness. When I think of who I am – that is, of the person I currently purport to be in this instant – I am forced to grapple an uncertainty laden with confusion and incompetence. Not only am I made to feel that I am unable to do so, but that the said task is impossible.

I live by moments, days, eternities; whatever immediacy that I find myself in, and it is only through these temporal intermittencies that my existence becomes evident. The person that has hitherto travelled with me on this journey has probably died: the me from a couple of weeks ago was buried next to the corpse that passed a week prior as well. It is this ongoing process of self-continuation amidst the change that makes me myself. Obviously certain elements remain the same – these would almost entirely be comprised of my skills and capabilities: philosophy, articulation, piano, intelligence, argumentation – yet it is the more malleable elements that constitute this 'me' that remain significant in other people's perceptions of who I am.

So maybe this matter of identity is solely based on an other-person perspective. As I continue to be exposed to the transience of my personality – eradicating any notion of permanence on my part – it may be valid to suggest that 'I' exist solely in the spectator's point of view. To me there is no such thing as 'me'; I only interact with that entity which lives and dies with the moments that flutter by steadily. I am only responsible for creating and maintaining that which portrays itself to be my character. And thus maybe this whole essay has been in vain once more… it becomes futile for me to describe my person when there is a lack of knowledge on my part as to what it precisely is; in fact, I haven't even had the chance to experience this 'me' that my fellow humans have ostensibly gotten to know so well.

But, I can't see a predicament in my situation. It is no grave malady that I cannot ascertain who I am per se, nor believe that it is possible to do so. In fact, it becomes of great use to those I interact with as they become free to formulate their own ideas of the fellow with whom they perform their interlocution. I may frequently disagree on certain views people have of me, but then who am I to oppose? It's not like I possess anything concrete with which to undermine their stances, anyway.

Thus, the task is disseminated unto you, my audience. I perpetuate a supercilious, solitary life, solely in fragments; hence the 'I' that I 'am' only too exists in these instants. It is only you who have the ability to deem my personality existent beyond these, for I am far from adept at performing this task myself.

Misanthropy

2007-01-27T23:24:00.000+11:00

A life comprised of fragments of chaotic miasma: moments of distress opposed by alleged 'joy'; ostentatious company that actually lacks substance; meaningless recognition that is presented with false worth; boredom to the point of indolence… It is these that surround my day-to-day existence. The impermanence of the reality I face, that purports to be existent, causes me alarm. The constant anxiety of what is to come – of what is – befuddles my psyche. Yet ironically it is for this reason that I grapple to combat the desire to wither away into nothingness.

However, as a consequence of having to endure such a lack of anything concrete, I have developed a sense of mistrust amidst any form of company I find myself in. I am often furtive, preferring to act as an observer and distancing myself from involvement with fellow 'humans'. Probably the only consideration I bestow is the prospect of conversation at opportune moments with perspicacious interlocutors. With this, hopefully, my misanthropy makes itself evident.

Nevertheless, I am cajoled on occasion to act in a more 'pleasant' manner. Albeit pleasantness, in my opinion, ceases once it persists beyond politeness. And even then, the level of politeness I manage to convey is only gauged apt for the audience to whom I present my pretence.

Now I must digress, though still implicating my soliloquy about myself, and express my distaste for certain types of people and particular institutions. Their odious acts include self-righteous, indignant obstinacy filled with obtuseness and condescension towards ME. As such, I am driven to become defiant of anything that demeans my self-worth – such as interacting with people I perceive inferior.

As well, I frequently comport in what most perceive as 'rebellious'. I, however, see this 'expedience' as a mere rejection of what is conventionally acceptable. I deny society the right to command me and demand of me certain attributes. Society, as with everything else, is impermanent and chaotic. Why should I cede myself to its so-called authority?

It is in this manner that I manifest one of the most prominent elements of my personality. I pride myself in my frankness and my inability to conform, and this is generally complemented by my taciturn nature. I am quite selective, and as such have a propensity to discard various situations – and people – due to dislike.

In any case, this act of self-selection and incessant introspecting has its benefits. As I subjectively judge what I deem is fitting – and in the process annihilate what is haphazardly thrown upon me, I create a small but momentous ration of something concrete amidst the unremitting turmoil. In doing so, I endow myself satisfaction…satisfaction that I have myself fashioned. That, to me, is truly commendable, and inspires me to persist.