Category: words

status makes me mad

Posted on by thevoiceinmyhands in words

I’m pretty mad right now. In fact, my blood is boiling. It’s a niche madness, though, that may skim off the skin of most people as irrelevant.Venn

All self-conscious irony aside, I am an artist. I live to aid and abet the creativity of others and to make work that sharpens perception.

There is no question about this.

The other day I was asked whether I’m a feminist or not. What? Of course I’m a feminist. If being a feminist means that you don’t question the fact that men and women are equal, then I’m a feminist. None of this nth-Wave rubbish. It’s a fact, that sits alongside the fact that I have legs and that the paint on my house is peeling.

Similarly, there’s no question about my being an artist. It’s nothing to boast about. I wake up with it and I take it to bed. It makes me self-conscious when I say it out loud, and slightly ashamed as I see ‘bum’ flash in the eyes of the person I’m talking to. But I don’t care. Yes, I make no money. Yes, the things I make can’t be put on a coffee table or improve our roads. But they do other things instead.

I imagine that this is a pretty common feeling. There is nothing lofty about my identity, nothing unique.

Which brings me to the anger: today I witnessed a status-rip, a chasm of misunderstanding so deep that I don’t know whether it can be overcome. I overheard a conversation between two extremely talented theatre practitioners who have 30+ years of experience under their collective belt. They were having a conversation about the indie theatre ‘scene’, speaking about various events that have taken place in the last year and the benefit they hold for young theatre makers.

Neither of them had been to any of these events.

By coincidence, I had been at most of these events.

And I listened to them correct each other about what had happened at each of them.

And neither of them got it remotely right.

Those who sit in the lofty clouds of recognition identify as artists in the same way as those in the dirt. We all want to change people, tell stories, develop a sense of community, etc. But we’ve lost any sort of connection between these two positions. Those in the clouds have stopped looking down.

what do you say to death?

Posted on by thevoiceinmyhands in words

collingwood

Fifteen days ago my uncle died.

He was in a car accident and his chest collapsed. For reasons still unknown, they could not operate as his blood would not clot and he was dead within 24 hours.

All I could feel was a sense of total absence.

The man that I had only really started getting to know halfway through last year no longer existed.

He was a real outback kind of guy.

Hard in a no-bullshit, rock-climber, mine-manager kind of way.

He’d been bitten by snakes so many times he was immune to anti-venom.

He was a diehard Collingwood fan.

He didn’t eat vegetables.

He was a serious smoker.

He was a gentle giant who in his retirement lived on Mount Tambourine with his partner, my aunty.

He worked on their massive back yard, building a rock-climbing wall in his shed, a big birdcage for their zebra finches, and a pen for their chooks.

He drove my sister and I the hour-and-a-half trip to the Gold Coast airport after our stay with them.

He called my aunty ‘Poss’.

When I heard that he’d died all I could think about was my aunty. He was her everything. They’d never had kids and had lived all over Australia, following John’s mining placements. And he was gone. A whole had been ripped into halves.

I only have a shadowy understanding of grief. My grandfather, my idol, died in 2006, and I still think about him everyday. But it was with John that I began to sense the shock of sudden death, of having your ribcage yanked out and being told that it no longer belongs to you.

The thing that I am ashamed of and which fills me with wonder is how quickly the world reasserts itself. The shock knocks out your focus, holding you in the merciless grip of remembered images, remembered words. But almost instantly your focus starts to shift back: objects refill with colour and weight, something makes you laugh, you have a conversation with someone who doesn’t know what’s happened and who you decide shouldn’t be dragged down with the details.

I’ve realised that language has not been designed to cope with death. The sheer nature of it is a ‘filling-up’; you fill up space with words, often to avoid the yawning, threatening, exhilirating emptiness of silence.

Is this why we flounder with the bereaved? What language could approximate their loss, could capture the absence of their other half?

Perhaps this is where our bodies really do come into their own. Language fails in the face of death. But you still want, desperately, to help the one left behind, to help them start stitching up the one half left. And so you hold them. A hand on the shoulder, back, knee. A hug. An encouraging, useless smile. Open arms.

What else can you do?

Funnily enough, I think one man has managed to capture grief with words, which my aunty put on the funeral service sheet:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H.Auden

saturday night

Posted on by thevoiceinmyhands in words

If I ever have to define an adventure for somebody I’m going to explain what happened last Saturday night.
We were meant to be seeing a play. Decided not to. Had drinks instead on William St in an empty pub save for the tennis blaring on the platinum TV screens and a couple waiting for Godot (one of these men found Federer incredibly frustrating and worked it out by swearing at his bowl of nuts). This pub was remarkable only for the number of sneaky hidden steps (like the constant surprise of silent letters) that filled it. I think there must have been quite a few hidden cameras for the staff to pass the time watching everybody, drunk or sober, trip up.
Dinner. Bill and Toni’s on Stanley Street. White paper tablecloth. A constant supply of orange cordial. A schnitzel on a plate (just a schnitzel, save for the over-steamed carrot sticks trying to kamakaze off the side). ‘Salad’: chopped up iceberg lettuce. An unashamed/beautiful bowl of tomato sauce.
Move to the footpath outside with beers.
Move across the street to The Hazy Rose. Perhaps one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been in, but without the hipster-intimidation of most. On special, fresh summer fruit juiced in front of you with your favourite liquor. Cue frothy pineapple and rum. Cue The Clash’s London Calling. Cue Chuck Berry’s ‘You Never Can Tell’ and Pulp-Fiction-dancing. Cue overwhelming joy.
Midnight strikes. Bar closes. Head towards Town Hall to catch the bus home.
Wait a second. There are people in Hyde Park having fun. Let’s go look. 1.5 minutes later and we’ve joined the Sydney Festival Up Late crowd. Try to follow another girl who we think has found a way to sneak into the Spiegeltent. End up in the disabled toilet with said girl. Partake in the confusing sparkling/regular water tap system. Watch a group of girls dancing in a circle. The one guy in their party walks away and they immediately disband. Watch the beauty of people dancing by themselves. Watch the tables and tables of carefully made mess – hair, clothes, mannerisms. Smile at the Festival staff, all who are incredibly friendly and dressed in bracers.
Leave again for bus. Walk past woman (with a partly shaved head and dreadlocks on the rest, swept up in a bun. It was like a tsunami of hair) and man smoking weed just outside Festival barrier, staring at the trees.
Abandon bus – plan to aim for Circular Quay, for water. Walk through Pitt St Mall, drinking beer. A French man approaches, asks for a swig so he can wash down the pill he’s just swallowed. Start talking to him and his friend, both who seem to be caricatures of attractive Parisian males. Start walking with them towards a hard-dub-deep-bass-something club around the corner. Stand for a bit as they finish their cigarattes.
The one I talk to – Mr Pill – has an exquisitely trimmed beard and a cap that seems a very real extension of his face. He talks to me about the danger of growing up in the outer suburbs of Paris. About how his cousin is a drug dealer who’s learnt the magic rule – don’t take your own product and you’ll make a whole bunch of money. Also, when dope-heads come at you, you’ll have a clear head and know whether it’s a good idea to knife them or not. This man I was talking to is never bothered by anybody – I think the cousin’s knifing skills might stretch beyond dope fiends.
Walk down into the belly of a building. Music ripples towards us like a heat wave. We find out it’s $25 each to get in and quickly pivot back up the stairs, abandoning our French men to the darkness.
Start off towards the harbour again. Pass a pair of abondoned trousers – someone decided they could do without – and a surprising number of abandoned girls with heels bigger than their skirts.
Walk past The Ivy. Everyone standing outside, security and patrons alike, looks hard and mean. Neon dresses. Hair-gel that could cut like a knife. Tightened muscles under tight shirts.
Make it to the Quay. Sit on a bench and look at the watery Harbour Bridge and its solid cousin, the dancer and the drugdealer. There are a surprising amount of people that walk around at 2am.
Go to some pub to pee. This one also has a tricky front step. Play a game at the bar – pretend we’re strangers and we’re trying to pick each other up except each line we use has to be more outrageous than the last. First person to laugh loses.
Go and wait for our bus.
Invest in some McDonald’s chips. Only two people are working and they’re handwriting orders. Suddenly a mile-long queue is behind us and there’s one guy at a table with a mountain of burgers, laughing at all the hungry people.
Go and wait for our bus, again.
Get on.
Go home.
It’s 4am when we find our pillows.

Lesson: aim to catch the last bus.

sun

Posted on by thevoiceinmyhands in words

Several events have run into each other, vein-like, in the past handful of days. There is no way to sieve them into a comprehensible pattern.

1. My uncle was in a car accident last Tuesday night and his chest collapsed. He’d been bitten by a tiger-snake but was immune to the anti-venom (having been bitten so many times. He was one of those men who truly make sense in the Australian outback.) He died on Wednesday afternoon. I cannot yet understand such sudden absence. It’s like someone did the trick of whisking the tablecloth away but they took any sense of stability instead.

2. I found out I can fly. Or, rather, I found out I can fly down a single flight of stairs. On Friday night, in Kings Cross Hotel, my shoe got caught on a stair-lip. It serves me right as I had just been smiling at a highly inebriated man trying to walk past me up the staircase. Rather deftly, I managed to break my fall not with my hands or arms but with the right side of my face. My Dad, who used to be a doctor, has been making jokes about me not being a paraplegic right now (which worries me, as he is always serious about potential catastrophes, in a hyperbolic sort of way, which makes me think that I may well have come off much worse than I did). Luckily, X-rays show that my skull is intact. The skin covering it is just a bit purple/yellow right now.

3. A very dear friend from school came over on the weekend and we started brainstorming for a collaborative project. We’ve always wanted to work together and whilst throwing ideas around I felt like I was being swept up within the vortex of something that’s going to continue spinning for far longer than I can either anticipate or predict.

These three moments stand out to me like braille. I don’t know what they mean beside each other. I’m sure nothing. But I’m also sure that I’ll be unable, inevitably, to accept the rule of random events, of arbitrariness, and my mind will make these moments porous, will make their individual significance, or lack thereof, leak into each other.

in the hands of the mother

Posted on by thevoiceinmyhands in words

What if emotional trauma was transferred intergenerationally by physical scarring?

Imagine: a parent is traumatised in some way, be it through war, domestic violence, racial persecution, etc. This trauma, rather than having an intergenerational trickle effect (where the fear/anger/isolation of the parent is transferred in some diluted form to the child) it would only manifest as scar tissue on the body of the child with no emotional residue (which I imagine would feel, if rubbed between your fingers, like resin. In my mind, fear is sticky.)

This recalls, in some sense, that article I wrote about a while ago, which explored the phenomenon of descendants of Auschwitz survivors having the survivors’ tattoos inked on their own skin. Although this is voluntary on the part of the descendant as a testament to the survival of their relative, it echoes this idea of a physical manifestation of past experience. Imagine if this was a way that we could read a person’s history.

We could literally read it on their body. Like in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, where the main character’s back is covered with a cherry blossom tree (which you come to realise is the latticework of scar s left from when she was a slave), we could read struggle, and past struggle, on skin. I could take your hand, or left shoulder, or elbow-bend and run my fingers over the lines of thick dense tissue and ask you what’s happened to your family.

This sketch is by Kathe Kollwitz and is called Kopf eines Kindes in den Händen der Mutter or Head of a child in the hands of the mother. It was this that set my braining running on this question. Imagine if we could suspend the pain of survival and replace it with scar tissue. But wouldn’t we want to feel the pain of the struggle that it took for our parents and our grandparents to survive? Otherwise we’d risk slipping back into the ease of invincibility. But surely our scars would also pay testament. Maybe the concerted rejection of apathy is enough.

Kathe Kollwitz, Kopf eines Kindes in den Händen der Mutter