I am writing to you from no-place. The dark hours between waking and sleep. This time visits me at the trough of morning, before the scrape of birds upon the roof, before the sunrise like explosion across the harbour. I write wishing I were with you, wishing that the audacity and passion of text could infect those moments I spend with you. It is August. Around me, around this place, the imbecilic wind haunts, accelerating between buildings delivering some apocryphal message for thirty days and nights of this month. The air slows and a thin gauze of cloud unfurls, its silver pallor covers the sky, darkening, diminishing star-speck. Looking out into the streets, into the city, into distance, I look for the angels that walk among us not knowing whether they journey through the City of the Dead or through the living. I look for them hoping to see the penumbra of figures peering through the windows of my neighbours’ house inspecting each for some signpost or a familiar to deliver to them directions or instructions. Nothing appears no dark wing beats at the window and no coal black eyes. At this hour, in this no-place, nothing exists. Perhaps this wind, in its fury, has left an absence. The welter of leaf meal and seeds, of litter and dust, seems to have vanished. For a moment I am the last of things. But I know that this cannot be - you are sleeping. Drawing breath deeply from your stomach, your fingers curling through fabric clutching like the clumsy hands of a child at something that seems always beyond grasp. Your breath quickening, rising and falling. And at intervals the planing of one foot across the other. A near-silent portamento and the slow comfort of touch. I am dwelling too long in the shape of your body. The slow erosions of movement that curl your hair these nights have left fine spidery talismans across sheet and pillow beside the scribble of yesterday’s makeup. Even here, far from where you sleep, hours before you will wake (when perhaps you will finish a glass of water left from the previous night, throw open a window and examine the advancing hours, then pad quietly through still dark hallways only now illuminated by weak shafts of light and begin washing - the first of your small ceremonies this morning) I know what it must be like to lie beside you. There is little else to do at this hour. The distance between this time, between this place and the next differs whether I sleep or sit here and write. This distance between us is equally unpredictable. Despite a childhood of promised blood-red sunrises mornings begin with a small dot of light that gapes through the rest of the sky washing everything with painful alacrity. There is none of the possibility of the earlier hours. Morning presents itself naked and cold. With the light a pentimento, shapes and lines previously hidden in the darkness, and a return to normalcy. I am preparing myself a pot of tea. The sounds are of the boiling water, the neighbours’ dogs anxious to free themselves of their nightly burden trying to break from their yards, the click of bird-claw on the tin sheeting above my head and the occasional menace of sharpening beaks, engines grinding passengers up the street and ferry blasts. Three short sounds indicate reverse and the need for correction before turning back into the harbour.
I recall her stance
I recall her stance, the way
she teased the blue smoke, like hair,
through long fingers. The
way I smiled though inside
I was as stale as a spent
match.
Everything that I own is not mine
There is the sense that everything here, everything around me, that I own, is not mine. I have no connection with these things any more. It is as if these are the relics of another life.
In some respects they are. It is because, as the song says, everything I have is yours. These things all once belonged to her. To her and I. Ours.
Of course, reading letters is difficult. Whoever they are from they were written to me. But also, not me. To a previous me. With emotions that are long spent. Loves long burned hollow.
And the other difficulty is realising the passion with which I lived. When everything, every fibre, every dollar, every breath was for her. Notes, gifts, I have them still even though I have largely forgotten when I loved her so completely.
It is not just that the love is lost. It isn’t just that we no longer love each other the same way but that I’m not that person anymore. I don’t greet each day with the same determination or passion, filled I expect with the knowledge that I am loved and am in love.
The market basket that now holds my laundry was once a Christmas gift for her, full of food and wine. And without her now these things have lost all meaning. The glasses, the coaster, the lamp. When did I let this all go?
I’m not sure that I can live just for myself. Not that I can’t go on, just that each day is half-lived. And I don’t know when it all fell apart. I imagine that if I can determine the break then I can remedy or avoid but really, now, all I can remember is the joy lost.
So I dream of running. Hitting the road, flying somewhere far away.
With movement I can distract myself from the loss. Though at some point I have to stop and face whatever has happened.
The problem, when a relationship like this dying, is that it isn’t just the end of two people; it is the end of the two people that they would become, the dreams and plans that they shared, that they began to prepare themselves to become. And the break destroys that, destroys those futures utterly. Even reconciliation meets with different dreams. More fragile, less fanciful. Not hopes of living in Tuscany or by some beach, but dreams of just making it work.
So now, I’m living in the vacuum of those broken dreams. And I made plans. I had tried so hard to map out what I would do after the split. I knew how I was to regain my footing. But that isn’t the same thing. And I’m living a half life in the emptiness of dead dreams.
And now I wonder whether running is enough, or whether running is necessary. Perhaps silence. Remaining hidden and mute.
Altermodern and the nomads
There is an interesting video of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the 4th Tate Triennial, explaining his conception of Altermodern. Bourriaud is also writing a book, The Radicant. From the publisher’s site:
To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.
“And if twenty-first-century culture was invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who insistently is emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation. This figure is accompanied by a domain of forms and by an ethical mode: translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate.”
I suppose the key difference is the Radicant sounds more inclusive while the Nomad is more deliberately making decisions about what should be discarded. Both concepts appeal since they seem to work against any kind of cultural studies approach that great ouroboros and cul-de-sac of academic thought.
Another book to add to the reading pile.
Robert Drewe & Charles Meere
I was a little fuzzy on the details but after seeing a painting last week I was reminded of a story.
Robert Drewe was scouring through the Art Gallery of NSW looking for an artwork that might suit a book cover. He happened upon ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ by Charles Meere. The AGNSW describes the work as “perennially popular” but until Drewe pulled it from storage it had been “lost”.
That’s the story. Whether it is true, I’m not sure.
Looking at the AGNSW details for the painting they list exhibitions that include the work. After an initial exhibit in 1952, it wasn’t seen again until 1982. The Bodysurfers, Drewe’s collection of stories was published in 1983 using the painting for the cover. The timeline seems to match, taking into account the time involved to create the cover, print the book, etc.
Like Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ the painting has become an iconic representation of beach culture but more than that it seems a very nationalistic piece. The child raising a shovel from his father’s shoulders looks almost like a parody of Soviet-era posters, and the father, as well as the man holding the towel in the centre, have a military posture.
Most striking, to me, is the light. It isn’t so much that there is a problem with the direction of the sun but that each person is made up of light and darkness. The painting has depth and perspective, a layering of groups. But there is also tension on each person with the way shadow seems to curve the figures.
