It is the wound that produces pride

A calamity a day keeps tedium at bay

 

Friday 12 February 2010

1

What I most feared has come to pass. Not just the roller-door across the way, which creaks and groans as it opens and shuts, but the air venting. It is the worst noise, unrelenting, insistent, persistent.

It purrs but noisily.

When the building proposal was put forward I objected: 3 e-mails to the council (none of which was ever acknowledged), a fax, a posted letter (neither of these acknowledged either), and finally a hand-delivered letter. Out of desperation given the history of avoidance. That too was never acknowledged though I did discover something: the use of disabled people on reception. Like the use of amputees, war veterans, to man lifts in government buildings.

What strange policy is this? They are of course the first to go under automation.

No, the disabled will not inherit the earth.

My objections were exactly to what has come to pass. The area across from me – my front view, the view from my front window – is of a service area. It’s where waste is emitted: garbage, stale air. It’s all crowded into this one spot.

That is what the building offers me: its arse. I might have preferred its mouth but that’s somewhere else.

Until now the street where I live was serviced by back lanes or alleys. This new arrangement means that the street itself has become a service alley. Yes, my letter of objection was correct: the whole character of the street has changed. That we are now a service alley has been imposed upon us and against our will.

Otherwise this is a nice street, even handsome. It’s now a street with a running sore ...

I’ve been living here the best part of 24 years – and that’s what I have pushed directly under my nose: a farting belching arsehole. The mouth is elsewhere, no doubt silent and inviting; we have the arse.

Congratulations to the architects. Congratulations to the developers. Congratulations to the planning authorities. Congratulations to all involved.

2

People watching, it’s a favourite sport. Sit on a bus or in a train carriage and pretend you’re in a spacecraft.

You are.

Watch the passing astral parade.

After an appalling telephone call from a mate who thought I’d be fascinated by every move she’d made over the past 24 hours, I’m sitting on the bus: the bus to Balmoral Beach. It has a number, I don’t know it. I’m sitting next to a woman who thinks that by laughing she can get her own way. Or is it simply a way of getting attention?

She laughs. Ha ha ha ha ha. Then in the middle of her hee-hawing and gurgling she assails the man sitting in front of us. (He’s sitting in one of the 3 seats that run along the side of the bus, facing the corridor. It’s where you can put your pram or your baby stroller if you’re travelling with one.)

Ha ha ha, she goes, gurgle gurgle. Would you mind gurgle gurgle ha ha ha checking he he my suitcase ha ha ha? I don’t he he want it toppling ha ha over.

He does as she asks.

It wasn’t about to topple, he says.

Oh it could ha ha be he he terrible gurgle gurgle gurgle if titter titter it fell, ya ya ya, on anybody titter titter tut tut.

The silence comes as a relief.

But not for long: Ha ha I’m ha ha getting he he off gurgle gurgle at the next he he stop.

Me, too, I reply, which stops her dead in her tracks.

3

DB rings. I’m nastier than you, she says, I’m tougher. I agree with that. We’re both stoic but she’d win in a stoush.

It means she’s hated.

I don’t like conflict. It seems unnecessary. I’m probably wrong. It’s not good to be rolled.

Having a website is weird. There you are created as something you aren’t. You can be your own fiction or someone else’s. So far I like the look of my website even though it’s a total stranger, the bloke in it. I’m talking about me. ‘Who’s that?’, I could easily ask when I see an image of myself. It’s an unexpected thing. It’s more my father than me. It’s not something I look at every day. In any case, it’s the web-master’s creation. I don’t object to that, not at all, but I have the feeling, the quite strong felling, that anything I add will detract from it. I like the purity of its look. My past can only wreck it; the colour of here, its brightness, its too-vividness. These can only deflect and detract.

In any case it’s hard to return to the past. I’m only interested in the present, the future.

This is where DB comes in again: ‘It’s all imploding’, she says. She means a gathering entropy. None of us has a clue what is to happen or where the next thing will come from. The politicians are busy designing domestic economies for abandoned houses...

4

I hate to complain. Part of the general condition of oppression is being required to complain. That’s when they’ve got you, when you are forced to complain.

5

Should a blog have a name? Probably not. DB suggests  JOHN’S EXCELLENT IDEAS. Bad idea. For one thing I don’t like John as a name. In any case, it’s not up to me to decide whether things are excellent or not. And there are as yet no ideas.

For the moment it will remain BLOG.

The arsehole across the way continues its noisome farting. It’s almost as if, if it’s continuous, no one will notice. But no, it is not polite; it’s not polite in the slightest.

A fart is a fart.

Whoever designed this building, whoever commissioned this building, whoever occupies this building, these are the sort of people happy to fart in other people’s faces.

The noise makes my house useless for sound recording. Any such plans are now rendered null and void.

6

I turn on the radio. How strange, it’s a Polish station. At least I take it to be Polish.

SBS. Yes, let’s give thanks to SBS.

7

Yes, he says, do you understand it?

Yes, I say, every word

We’re going out, he says

OK, I say, go out.

8

Any moment now I’ll head off to the internet café. It’s partly about going out, working in public. Write everything, says K, write anything. Escape the censor.

Easier said than done, yet I accept his injunction, absolutely.

9

I’ll propose to S that we perform behind a curtain (a sheet will do). No one has an absolute right to observe.

We can, if we wish, redirect their gaze. We can set up a dummy scene. Observe this, we can say.

But then the issue arises: which is the dummy? The hidden is always the real thing. The apparent is too obvious, too accessible. We seek the behind, the beyond. But what if the obvious is the real? Will they see it, that something is screened, hidden, and that something is rendered obvious? In my terms, the obvious is just that: something is hidden, something is fully on view. Meaning resides between the obvious and the hidden.

The fact is that what is hidden is the source of the sound: the sound of the counter-bass, the vocalisation of the read text. The visible is silent. That is the fate of the visual arts and what in fact we are trying to overcome.

I wish to speak beyond the audience. The audience is a non-event.

Let us give the audience that freedom, to be a non-event. Let the audience be spared its status of audience.

When the audience is spared the burden of audience, of being audience, what then?

Saturday 13 2 2010

10

My health is poor. Happily I’m able to see my GP, at short notice: irritated bowel, what he calls ‘trigger thumb’ (left), my eyesight still very ordinary

Out on the street. Papa Smith, he says. It’s a newie. I’m used to ZZ Top. I‘m used to the old Ho Ho. I’m Santa himself. But this is new. Papa Smith!

The streets are full of deros. I’m friendly, I’m responsive. I step over a trickle of piss that runs down the cracks in the dark paving. I hold up my hand. Hi, I say. They feel my goodwill. At least they’re not offended.

I buy Imodium from the chemist. The GP has to ring some central authorising agency. He gets my Medicare number wrong. The chemist whom I know sells me a generic. It’s cheaper ($28.00 for 96 tablets).

A Georgian guy has crashed on the luge track at the Winter Olympics. Today they open in Vancouver. He crashed. At over 90 mph, they say, into a pole.

What was the pole doing there?

Should I say that I wept when I heard the news? Yes, I wept. It still upsets me^[1].

JD rings. I tell her the sequel to the shark attack. No, it wasn’t a great white pointer, despite the testimony of the professional shark spotter; it was a lowly wobbegong. (The wobbegong lost a tooth; the spotter all credibility.)^[2]

I have no idea why I am writing all this. I have to assume there is a point somewhere.

11

You shouldn’t write a blog, says DB, you’ll just attract all the nutters.

Does that trouble me? Not enough, it seems.

JD thinks it’s OK. Maybe I should just think of it as a running message to friends.

Of course we don’t need to know all our friends. In fact, the ones we don’t know may be better than the ones we do.

If my existing friends are insulted, too bad, I say to myself, not necessarily self-convinced. You have nothing to be insulted by. Friendship is not possession or a régime of exclusive rights.

It’s odd, in any case, how the demand for exclusivity can swiftly convert into abandonment. That’s part of the possessiveness, I guess, the feeling of entitlement: ‘I can take up when I wish and abandon when I wish’.

This is the contemporary culture of please oneself.

A young guy sits on a milk crate. He looks at me as I pass. I won’t call it desire but it might be.

I like these frank looks.

I enter the bottle shop. The lemonade isn’t cheap: $3.50. I choose the Schweppes. I exit with the bottle in a black plastic bag and the young guy looks at me again. Near him an older guy, in a wheelchair. I continue to play Mr Affable. He mumbles his madness at me. I’m breezy. He offers me something like a blessing. Thank you, I say, see you around.

Sunday 14 February 2010

12

Woebegone days. I tell her to say something; she refuses. I tell her to write something; again she refuses. I should have said ‘You’re good at refusing’ but I didn’t. I’m too accustomed to her will to retaliate. I might have slapped her but I didn’t. My brother got her in a headlock once. It was the best thing he ever did. It might have helped him. I’ll never forget the look of glee on his face.

13

What will I call them, Bib and Bub^[3] or Mr and Mrs Blah? How oddly they lived, how bizarrely! And if he was the Rhino of the piece (the comparison is accurate), what will I we call her? Hippo? No, too lugubrious. Zebra? No, too spritely. A Weasel? No, too slinky. A Minx? No, too sexy.

A Cow? No, too leaden.

A Lost Soul? That will have to do. For the moment anyway. Yes, an interim assessment. A Busybody and a Lost Soul. Peter Pan in an antique body. Wendy having mated with the Crocodile. Yes, a bell or an alarm clock would have been a good idea. We could have heard her coming.

Alarum bells, enter stage left.

14

Sunday is a favourite day for eating. For eating out, that is. Petrol is jammed packed, out the front at least. Inside there is room. I order lemonade with ice and the pork sandwich. These are more or less habitual.

It’s a trial run, in fact, to see if I can eat. (Yes, I live in hope but the Imodium is in the bag, and the Salzopyrin capsules.)

KG has rung already. He’ll be at the gallery between 10.30 and 11. Khaled is coming along for the ride. No doubt someone will ask me what I think of his piece in the Campbelltown show (Edge of Elsewhere). I don’t want to say hackneyed but it is. It’s too noisy, it’s too insistent. If God (Allah) is a nightmare it is this. The dervishes spin too swiftly, there seems to be a lack of awareness of how the ‘whirling ones’ are thought of in ‘general culture’ (as the demented, the fanatical). I find myself as interested in the back of the monitors as in what is screening on the front. I think the location at the front entrance is unnecessarily provocative. In any case I’m not interested in being bashed around the head by anything religious. Were it a Christian portal or a Jewish portal (I wish to place these expressions in inverted commas) it would be just as bad. The Christian would not be permitted, but it would lack any exotic dimension. The Jewish, the Buddhist, the Hindu, the Zen, the Taoist would be – exotic, that is. Not to omit the Islamic. In any case, the positioning of any religious intervention into the Australian landscape requires careful consideration. It is not unproblematic, it is not casually to be tolerated. There is already too much tolerance of things that are profoundly intolerable. As if anything will do. Religious practices are colonial practices also. To come here, to enter this ‘new land’, one might be expected to relinquish everything. Relinquish, yes, not abandon. This would properly be a movement towards possibility. Not that it will happen. Yet it is outrageous to treat the ‘here’ as some sort of empty vessel, a void. If the arrivistes are not to relinquish their prejudices and their practices, one might at least expect them to reflect on them, to scrutinise them. They are not casual baggage, they are not baggage without consequences. In any case, are we to tolerate the transferral of the Jewish-Israeli-Palestinian question here? There should be more discretion. We are not a universal dumping ground.

Yes, and I know that my remarks will be easily misinterpreted.

Nowhere is to be a dumping ground. Please, a little more restraint.

15

I’ve never managed to read a Henry Handel Richardson novel right through. I began with The Fortunes of Richard Mahony when I was very young. Too young. It was heavy going. Mine shafts, dust, failure, these are my memories of it. In any case I’ve never felt gold fever – the lure of gold or of quick riches.

Gold is banal. In any case, I expect that my early response would be the response I would have now. Some things don’t change. Some judgments remain.

I read well into Maurice Guest, which I admire and which I have recommended to others. I acknowledge its essential accuracy. I can see its antecedents (Eliot, James)^[4]. I am well aware of its deeply Australian  resonances and inflexions. But I gave up on it. Bleak is bleak, failure is failure – and nothing more to be said.

How odd then that I have turned to Ackland’s biography. It’s a dismal, dismal read.

16

Somewhere in the midst of the late afternoon, amid the entanglements of Ackland’s gruesome text (how dispiriting it is!), the final gasps of the Australian innings in the latest 50 over match against the West Indies, suddenly, suddenly, the Chinese New Year explodes, erupts: drums, fireworks, fireworks, drums.

Yes, and it’s the ridiculous Valentine’s Day at the Art Gallery (AGNSW), G & G (Gilbert and George) signing specially issued commemorative cards.

It wasn’t my scene; I left.

17

C. rings. I’ve lost my bicycle, she says. It was stolen from in front of the house. They saw you are the Art Gallery, she continues. She mentions various mutual acquaintances. I took a Valentine Day’s card, she says, to be signed. I made it myself. They signed it, they were very affable. (That’s Gilbert and George.)

If I’d known you were there I might have stayed, I offer.

I wonder. As they say, anything’s possible.

18

Outside we talk, Khaled and me. He’s heavy, lugubrious. He’s serious. That’s good. I like that seriousness. His shoulders droop.

He asks me my response to his piece. See, it was bound to happen.

He took my critique well. Yes, he says, the struggle against the exotic. It’s endless. It’s always there.

He agrees with other things, too: the colonising tendencies of (the big) religions. They assert merely by their presence.

I find it boring to write this report. It creates nothing, or rather, I’m unable to create anything out of it. Yet what we might say, what we may be forced to say is that within his heaviness is a true radical, a real revolutionary:

It’s the 99 names of God (Allah). The art observer, the visitor, makes the hundredth. This is blasphemy. To say this is heretical. I wish to bring things down, I wish to destroy. I’m not interested in preservation. The revolution, their revolution is endless (he means the twirling figures). No, it’s not Konya I draw on. It’s Syria. There the tempo shifts, fast, slow, fast … They told me it’s been done before, the twirling dancing, there’s no novelty to it. Old hat, they said.

His lip curls. I interrupt him. Do you mean to blaspheme?, I ask. It seems to me that you are playing the godly as well as the ungodly. Your complaint is at ungodliness … Your position is, at the very least, ambivalent. The work is devotional. It is hard to escape that. It’s like a complaint, a sort of cry, even a protest. And if you’re seeking to ‘bring down’, it seems to me you are also wishing to assert something. And if the walls of Jericho are tumbling down, it seems to me you are trying to erect something. This strange temple of monitors! Another Babel? It’s a presencing of something, surely! Something that’s present, in you!

The revolution must be continuous, he reiterates. The voice is big and still. It can’t be deterred or deflected.

So that, as I suggest to him, in passing through the swirling figures …

Yes, he says.

 

I’m not sure what he’s saying yes to. Let us note that it is his insistence that the visitor pass through this ‘portal’, this gateway (as he would frame it) to eternal revolution. The fact is, most people can pass through ‘the continuing revolution’ without ever becoming aware that that is what they are passing through. It is, we agree, a confrontation. It confronts. But why not a simple running of the gauntlet (sound, image, enclosure)? We survive it (of course we survive it) but what is at stake? What do we wager if anything?^[5]

KS did a radio interview, he said. He volunteered this. I didn’t mention religion, he said, not once. This left me incredulous. How did you do it?, I asked. Indeed, how can it be? It seems hardly possible.

The rain splatters down in insistent but scattered drops. We talk through it. He smokes, cigarette after cigarette. As he finishes each cigarette he keeps the filter. There they are, lined up on the palm of his hand: one two three.

It is a record of sorts of our conversation. A tiny artwork that I might have asked to keep.

19

Back to Ackland: If it is a matter of wounds and wounding, why doesn’t he investigate the wound itself? Instead he punishes: ‘She’s disagreeable, everyone says so.’ This involves a very smug and uncritical take on the social.

Moreover, why doesn’t he investigate the relationship between the fact of the wound and the need to write? After all, Richardson is a greater literary figure than he is. He is no literary figure at all, little more than a bystander. The fact is he needs to arrive at the measure of the woman. He doesn’t, he doesn’t get near.^[6]

Monday 15 2 10

20

Unprecedented queues at the ticket outlets, Kings Cross Station. An unprecedented rush of people at Martin Place Station. What is going on?

21

The young woman in front of me crosses herself. Why? If it weren’t for the religious meaning we could interpret it as an act of self-annulment, if not abnegation.

Maybe in annulment there is absolution.

22

I go to the Hand Clinic. Yes, back to Sydney Hospital. In hand I have a letter of referral from my GP. I ask for an appointment. Ha, she laughs, that will be September. Except that I know she isn’t joking, is this a joke? That’s over 6 months from now!

She leafs through her records. ! September, she announces. It’s a sadist’s grin.^[7]

What day is that?, I ask somewhat ironically. I know there is no point challenging this. It’s what she’s prepared for.

Oh, a Wednesday, 9.30 am, comes the breezy reply.

I don’t get an appointment card, just a squiggle or two on the back of the envelope housing the referral.

23

For a change of scene I plan to go to the Swans Club for lunch. But it’s closed. A long length of tape seals off the Club and the Bourbon and Beefsteak Bar. A power outage, it seems. There are two men wearing yellow safety vests sitting on milk crates alongside some large electrical apparatus, maybe an emergency generator. A conversation at a nearby table (yes, back at Petrol!) sheds light on it, just as I complete writing my account in my notebook: ‘The storm Friday night, about 8.30.’ How come I didn’t hear it?

24

Petrol is, I decide, unnecessarily stern. What is it? What gives it this strange cast? The relentless rectilinearity of it all, the square spaces created underfoot by the large tiles on the terrace, the long black-lacquered tables, the square umbrellas, the square railings that encase everything? Yes, everything is at right angles.

25

Sometimes I write just for the sake of writing.

And yes, it is true, the pink lemonade (there is none of the ordinary stuff) is lightly strawberry-flavoured. I’m sure to come out in hives, like a little kid.

26

A great piece of graffiti in Orwell Street:

ARREST ME!

APPARENTLY I’M

OUTTA CONTROL!!!

Except that apparently is spelt aparently and outta is spelt outa. I tidy it up for aesthetic reasons. It doesn’t quite compete with the MT DRUITT JUST DO IT piece that I regret not commandeering from the building site opposite.

Tuesday 16 2 2010

27

It’s official. Djon’s Tarpeian Way engravings are more or less set to appear. There was an announcement last Friday; and at the rally protesting The Intervention on Saturday there was another announcement. (The rally was held in Redfern and involved a walk/march from LaPa.)^[8]

Yes, the efforts to own the project have already begun (as well as the effort to repudiate it). On Sunday, at AGNSW, I’m subject to a grilling by LH over its ‘viability’. I dismiss any notion that the project will be disrupted ‘by Aboriginal interests’. Not that there won’t be efforts to ‘discommode’ or stifle. That’s to be expected and I say as much to Lisa. I say this because it is true but also to ward off any suggestion that DJM won’t be able to handle the politics. Of course he can handle the politics.

Now what I think of the project personally, that is another matter. DJM knows I have reservations. I am no lover of monuments. To be fair to him I need to set my position out.

28

A waking thought (or image). It comes in the form of a text: ‘She had no nose.’ The words appear in my head. Yes, mysterious. She had, it appears, a prosthesis made of some metal or other. Worked gold, that will do. I thought about this but not too much. Nonetheless the image persisted. How odd then that TW turned up with a plaster on her nose. It wasn’t exactly unflattering.

29

We take down the Macquarie University show. I listen to them roll up the big newspaper piece. It makes an admirable sound. As a large rolled form it inspires me to consider a large installed piece, what, for the moment, I’ll call The Horizontal Lorrgon. A large hanging object, a big log wrapped in strips of cloth or rags.

Why this, I have no idea – though I recognise the allusion to the burial bundles of western Cape York Peninsula. And how this relates to the ‘elementary structure of architecture’, the cross-member sustained by two forked sticks of equal length. (The wrapped body substitutes for the cross-member; this in a sense makes the wrapped corpse part of a shelter or shade (agu wiba) …)

Later in the day DJM reads me his Karla Dickens’ essay. How odd! Her work, too, is about ‘rags’ – not so much a rags-to-riches story but a visual account of retrieval, a salvation of sorts, a retrieval in the face of abandonment or discarding.^[9]

Wednesday 17 2 2010

30

The day’s programme is already settled. Breafast with JD at Petrol; lunch with CO; a walk to Taylor Square and Oxford Street, to see Haz’s latest work (in a bar under – mysteriously – the sign of a big ?). I hope to lure her to another eatery, just for a change of scene. Maybe Parmalat? Is it still in existence?

Shall we take in Gallery 9 and maybe the NAS? Is Ivan Docherty still operating? Shall we go to AGNSW to look at the Wakelin that caught my eye the other day? After meeting up with DJM last night I’m re-enthused to write about art. He’s asked me to write about his Memory and Mnemonics show later in the year. It’s ambitious – ambitious and engaging. I had real pleasure in listening to him talk about it.

As for my project that remains unidentified. As if in hiding …

31

Thursday, it’s official, my official day of rest. Any day that is to be one’s sacred day, the holy day, must be of your own choosing. Otherwise it is merely an institution, like any other. An institution is an imposition.

Thursday 18 2 2010

 

32

King Clodhopper takes the lead

Poor bugger, so desperately in need

Yesterday, a disaster! Off-key, off-centre, wayward, stupid; a feeling of being defiled. What happened? I don’t answer. A day in a sense carefully planned , even considered, turned topsy-turvy, made null and void. Everything corrupted, as if there were some satanic – satanic but not devilish – spirit in the wind. To be caught unawares thus!  A day so abominable it is impossible to write about.

Impossible to write about and impossible to think.

Nous n’y pensons rien!

It’s when the agendas of others become hidden. That’s when we are made to suffer. There was a certain rattishness in the air. Faces are avid but empty. Cheekbones seem unnecessarily and unnaturally accentuated. SJ turns up on the wrong day and proceeds to quiz me ferociously on things I don’t want to talk about: my ‘philosophical position’. If there is such a thing there is no need for it to be made thing – or object! It emerges as it emerges. Am I ‘I’? What the fuck does that mean? Address me as ‘You-Know-Who’ or any other label, Kinsky, Klaus, Schilsky, Krafft, Schipper. Address me as any old thing. ‘What does Erago think?’, for example. ‘Does Sylvia endorse this sentiment?’^[10] 

Ha!

And I? I can easily address myself in the third person: ‘He’. I can report myself: ‘No, he doesn’t think that, he thinks quite differently.’

I is the third – or the second – person I address as …

33

Ill and suicidal. He won’t claim to be suicidal but he is. Death is too much on his mind. 4 of his friends committed suicide: one gassed himself, one hanged himself in his mother’s house (the matter of the mother’s house seemed a significant detail), one OD’d, and one threw himself out the window. One of these young men wanted his friends – including S – to enter into a suicide pact with him. Yes, 4 in all. Maybe they refused, maybe they let it pass or drift, but it never happened. Yet he did – he did suicide. (I suspect it was the one who hanged himself – ‘a manly death’, as I saw it described in a recent obituary.) In any case I may be missing a method. The boy who OD’d may have thrown himself out the window. He was, S said, a heroin addict who found himself unable to score.)

People ordinarily don’t have to find reasons to live; yet the suicide needs a reason. Life and death are not symmetrical in that respect.

34

I’m back on my favourite bus, the 263. It carries the highest proportion of geriatrics in town. Nearly 50% carry canes. Maybe I should start to practice. But a cane would just be another thing for me to lose. At Wynyard I have to transfer to the L90, to get to Railway Square. From there I must walk to Dalgety’s, the café/sandwich bar where I have lunch with P.

On the L90 there’s a lively young guy who can’t stop still 2 seconds. He’s ugly but irrepressible. His wife is a beautiful black woman. He sings snatches of songs, anything that comes to mind or that he hears on the driver’s radio. He pays sudden attention to this or that passenger, entirely unwanted. ‘Is that a Buddha?’ He throws himself upon an elderly couple. ‘Uh, a coin?’, peering at close range at the man’s gold ring. The man’s wife handles him capably.

Now surely he’s on something. They’re like an exaggerated version of the social, of sociality itself. His wife is nearly as bold and as brazen as he is. There’s nothing backward in her demeanour. She yawns extravagantly. It’s defiant. ‘Can we have a cuddle when we get home?', he asks. It’s not plaintive. She strokes his leg. They have a new baby. It’s screened in a pram. Behind a blanket.

‘We’re getting off at Central’, he announces to all and sundry. We all get off at Central. That’s the way it is.

They’re bad news, that pair, they’re danger.

35

-------- to Town Hall. The driver is a tough but friendly woman. A Chinese guy turns and says in a voice full of outrage: ‘Don’t talk too loud’. He’s addressing some guy further down the back. The offender is soon to get off: ‘I’ll speak to you on Face book’, his final words to his companion. As he leaves us. P and I have just been talking about this over lunch, what Face book is for: ‘For people too busy to keep up with their mates’, he says. I don’t buy this exactly.

36

On the back of a t-shirt:

I’M

ME

37

The absurdity of driving in peak hour. Friday afternoon. Tell me, why are we heading into the city at this time? It’s madness, an unnecessary folly. We get to the udon bar just as parking becomes available: 6.30pm.

There are lots of tall guys lately, says D. He’s exhausted from working, trying to get his art show ready. He’s got 25 days left, I estimate. We sit at a counter table outside. At least it’s cool. D tries to balance the table. It’s rickety. It becomes a theme of the evening, getting the table we are sitting at stable.

The Asayi biru is $8.00.

38

Bar Me? Bar One? Anyway, we’re there. For Harry’s gig. I was reluctant to come but I’m glad I’m here. While we wait for the live performances there’s a singer with a good voice on the PA: ‘I’m walking through the desert’ set to a galloping beat. Singer-songwriter nights, says D. I know what he means. The singer sings, ‘We’re going nowhere’.

 

39

‘This is my version of a happy song’ (HL)

The guitar sounds sweetly. ‘A battle between head and heart’. One of the usual clichés.

We will forgive him.

Heartfelt certainly. A sincerity of hesitancy.

There’s a proper musical talent here. How do we know? It’s a willingness to insert oneself, a confidence that even if things go off the rails it’s not beyond recovery.

‘They all came and left’, he sings. That, don’t we know it, is the fate of the live performer. That, my friend, is the fate of the solitary performer.

More conviction in the voice

‘I think you give more to your pets’, he laments, ‘we’re hanging by a thread.’

The aim of the singer is to have a hit. ‘If I was ever to have a one hit wonder’, he tells us, ‘this would be it’.

‘A day of blessings’, he sings, ‘no one to buy flowers for’.

40

Hooked up to the machine, he can play, he can sing. Without the machine he stutters. Performance ‘normalises’ him.

He’s an adept, a considerable talent.

‘This is a song about being a prick’. He introduces the next song. About being a prick I don’t believe him.

His name is Dan Shepherd.

41

He has a mate, a more extroverted figure. That’s probably why they’ve hooked up.

The mate is hopeless.

Sad, it’s sad. But he’s just no good. ‘Night owl with white eyes’, he sings.

He tries to involve the audience. It doesn’t work.

Rule 1: Don’t try to draw the audience in. The audience has a good sense of what is going on. It knows. It has its own wisdom.

We leave.

Harry and his pals are sitting outside. They’ve already absented themselves.

42

Why bother? I wonder. Especially when my new system crashes!

We live in an age of groan and moan. The new confessional. ‘I’m glad to be sad’, says the singer. It’s the age of SOS, the text message, the endless relaying of position and the relentless assertion of presence. We know that all these symptoms mean the opposite. I don’t want to talk about alienation but we might be able to talk about new forms of being alone. Being alone takes on a new meaning. We rely on our ‘electric contacts’. Our messages whirl about us like electrons seeking completion or something.

So we put out, like straggly plants in a garden bed that no one attends to.

I’m not complaining about this. Myself I’m not an adept of the iPhone, despite its slick screen. The iPhone is a lovely thing. My eyes are not up to it. Next thing we’ll be able to feel what we look at.

DW is hard at work on his art show. He builds a temple. He builds it in his backyard, there near the sward of green lawn, the suburban something or other. Soon it will be in the gallery. He planned to build a portable cabin, something like a caravan, but now it’s a different form of caravanserai. A temple, yes, a spacecraft conjured up out of the divine, an inter-ballistic missile, a love machine, a thing to entrap and to enclose, a place of allurement and repose. ‘Come hither’, it says. The wood should smell sweetly (he will ensure this for he loves incense and wreathing columns of trailed smoke). The whole thing insulated and ‘robed’. (He plans draped canvas walls.) He can reline within like some imagined eastern potentate, cushions, little images of the Buddha, Ganesh and whatever else comes to hand.

He’s not a child of the State. The State will refuse him. He is not a good citizen. He refuses to be satisfied with the thin gruel of everyday. He wants more. He is not a sad cow in the back paddock chewing on inadequate pasture.

The State, if it were serious about its citizenry, would attempt to cater to all needs.^[11] Instead it’s content to allow its citizens to be ‘models of productivity’ which means that they produce nothing – or worse! The worse is real ugliness. The conception of being that the State offers is so feeble that life itself is put to one side. So the singers lament. As if it is truly all about them.

They confess to ridiculous crimes.

Saturday 20 February 2010

43

Harris Farm gets going across the way. Speeches, specials, special offers to Dear Neighbour. I think we all got a $40.00 voucher^[12].

Tiger Woods occupies the sports programmes – and everything else – as if that is the important issue of the day …

Sunday 21 February 2010

44

The three boys who fall off the cliff at Cape Cartwright, what are we to make of it? A pact of sorts? Even if they don’t know they are so bound, the fact is they were.

Monday 22 February 2010

45

There are matters to be resolved. Tactical things. If one’s desire is to write in the present, in real time, there are matters of privacy to consider. This is difficult when one has a commitment to reporting things as they are. Real people, real acknowledgments. If discretion means silence then something has to be done about it. There’s not much of a case to be made for remaining silent. On the other hand, yes, people have some rights to what we might call privacy. Privacy of course is going out the window. The level of government record-taking is now so comprehensive, the level of general surveillance so pervasive, the dissolution of privacy so casually set in motion when people insist on speaking on their mobiles in public, that one wonders what privacy is any more. There is a difference, however between being part of a social and therefore privy to the knowledges that arise through those social engagements and being ready, as it were, to ‘broadcast them. The Internet is a form of broadcasting. What then should we broadcast?

There is no point in broadcasting just for the case of broadcasting. And certainly no desire to do casual harm. There is a purpose even if it is yet to declare itself. We cannot predict the meaning of things in advance. To curtail is merely to curtail. In silencing ourselves we silence.

46

In this connexion, this afternoon I have to speak to Susan – Susan Norrie (we were supposed to meet up on Saturday but I missed the appointment). The issue? The matter of authorship. The precise issue is Koongarra, the proposed uranium mine near Nowalandja. Now, can a ‘whitefella’ serve as the point of relay of an Aboriginal voice? The Aboriginal ethic is, as I know it, to speak in one’s own name. There is no representation beyond self-representation. If you can’t represent yourself you can represent nothing. However, there can be extensive social support involved in this self-representing.

This takes us into difficult terrain, for self-representing, when it is merely self-representing, may be highly contested. It is where there is agreement – consent – on the part of the social, that the self does not merely represent the self but is made to embody certain principles, personas, ‘timeless properties’ that are in a profound sense extra-personal. That is, that lie beyond mere self-interest. Mere self-interest when it is mere self-interest will attract contestation. (This may take the form of withdrawal or contempt.)  The aim is to tie self-interest to the general interest. Miners of course try to tie their interest to the general interest, to make them one and the same. But of course this is merely self-interest masquerading as the general interest. All sorts of interests have equal claims; at least equal claims. But it is doubtful, in our form of society, that any interest can claim to be a general interest. Well, it can claim, it can claim all it like. The nation is always put forward as constituting the general interest: the uncontested good. Other scoundrels claim to speak in terms of the local or ‘the community’, constantly! What cheek! These claims are of course entirely spurious …

47

Pick a word, any word. Veronica. Yes, Veronica is the word of the day. A rather lovely word, wouldn’t you say? What it conjures up is far from lovely, however: boils, carbuncles, blood and pus.

How oddly our history erupts, how ‘indirectly’ it unveils itself.

I scrutinise the connexion, carefully, conscientiously. I can find none.

How oddly ‘morality’ intervenes. Morality is no morality if it blocks self-understanding.

48

Garrett will almost certainly go …

Tuesday 23 February 2010

 

49

How odd it is! Today I’m back in Campbelltown. The plan is for me to stay at Wedderburn tonight. We are supposed to have dinner with some Sri Lankan human rights activist. He takes photos.

I’m not much into ‘activism’. It’s a good example of what I call false concreteness. In any case human rights isn’t much of a framework for looking at things. It’s already falls massively short of life. In fact, it is rather anti-life.

You won’t get rid of cruelty by banning cruelty.

Not that I endorse cruelty.

The Edge of Elsewhere show is still on. I’m totally blown away by the fact that K’s installation seems to be two or three times the size I remember it as. It is somehow massively expanded.

I’m baffled by this. Talk about a gap between the image and the actual! There can be no better example of the double life of the artwork! Here it is as image. Here it is as the image I have of it. Please reconcile!

It’s still too noisy, too noisy, too noisy. I notice variations in the twirling I hadn’t noticed before. For example, some of the dancers twirl with their arms folded over their chest, others twirl with their arms in the air. There are variations in the images, too. For example, behind one there is a flare of a burning something, maybe an oil well. I remember the scenes from Kuwait …

50

Maybe something has happened to my sight. DJM is intent on reading his Karla Dickens essay to us. (I’m with JD who has driven me out. It’s fortunate for I fall ill and she is able to drive me back home. Most fortunate!)

Djon’s reading is almost unbearable. It’s deeply, deeply moving. He has achieved such a wealth of insight, such a play of echoes and suggestions. And through it all the history of his own history! I feel a deep grief, deep in my guts. (It is this that will drive me back to Sydney.)

As for my eyesight, it really doesn’t seem any better. But something has happened. There is an ‘appetite’ to it. Like someone who has just recovered their taste for food. But mine is for seeing things.

51

You can’t use people’s names, she says. This is JD speaking. But the more I hear this the more I am inclined to go the other way. Privacy is dead. People are yielding it up themselves. In any case, if they act well there is no reason for me to act ‘badly’.

At present there are a lot of games in the air.

Thursday 25 February 2010

52

Across the way the fish shop has opened. The fish are spectacular, things of real beauty. Splendid red emperor, sleek handsome salmon. Yes, beautiful things. I want to buy buy buy. And eat eat eat. The thought that they might go to waste is too shocking.

53

To be a real foodie, testing things, tasting things carefully. The tahini is disappointing, at best 3/5. The tiny sultanas are great: 8/10. The bigger green grapes are awful – and three times the price of their baby cousins. I try the lavosh. It’s lavosh. The guava and grape juice is so-so: 3.5 at best. No, a 3, a definite 3 (6/10). Mark the tahini down further. It’s barely more than a 2. Not horrible but definitely not good. Not bland, bitter.

6 March 2010

54

Introducing the notion of the circle.  I don’t know that it has much anthropological purchase. I mean, from a sociological point of view. As an element of social structure or organisation. The Bloomsbury Group might be such a thing. We might be such a thing. We might think of like-minded people. It is not as dry as a network – a notion now debased through its association with networking.  It is not so much about calculation and advantage as possessed of a moral sphere, an ethos – if not an ethic – of caring. (The ethic of caring must stand beyond the circle but constitute something of its ethos.) The circle must maintain a modicum of interaction, no matter how piecemeal. It need not come together as a group or as an entity. It need not show its hand too conspicuously. We each belong to our own circle and circles overlap. Networks may involve circles but the circle is not to be reduced to the network. The circle has a moral force. There is a loose armature of political views and orientations, modes of acting, aesthetic interests and a body of ideas that, if not shared, are known. Communicability is at its heart. This by no means is complete – but it allows the possibility of occasional ‘fullness’. It does not proselytize or seek converts; there is mutuality based on actual knowledge and orientations. It is productive and socially engaged to the extent that production (productivity) is always an insertion into the social. It allows possibility.

If these thoughts are rudimentary they are rudimentary. If I reflect on my own circle there are people who are in and out. Those who are out are already over committed to other circles. Circles involve multiple routes to the same ‘players’. This creates density – but this density equates to knowing. Sometimes I like to joke – my circle serves as a spy network. I am informed of things. This keeps the network  (yes, I’ll use this term here) intact. People speak of family networks or circles. The circles I think of are extra-familial. There are loyalties. Familial loyalties are primary even when the familial has been abandoned. Like the family the circle – I prefer the French term «cercle» - is forgiving. I prefer the French term because it puts the term in brackets. It makes it slightly remote and therefore available to scrutiny.

The circle is a primary site of belonging. In a church congregation the minister – the religious leader – mediates between the congregation and the ‘Almighty’. This destroys the issue of who the real leader is. The minister is merely a hotline.

55

A week ago I saw Mireille’s video piece [Mireille Astarte]. According to the accompanying blurb it’s about body counts in Lebanon, civilian deaths. I didn’t feel that at the time and I don’t now. The whole piece is rather static. This to my mind is an inadequate taking up of the true potentiality of video which, if it allows or demands anything, demands movement. Let there be life! Mireille’s piece is static; it is full of hurdles (fallen logs that fall across the image, from side to side, stretched threads of barbed wire that barricade); there is a sense of things coming to a standstill. I don’t find the barricading convincing. It doesn’t exclude – it is unconvincing from that point of view; what it does is announce exclusion. The exclusion is here, but it may not be as great as it appears; the impediments merely illusory. She films herself in a body bag. This refers to the bombing in Lebanon. But if there is death there then there is death here. How are they related? To be born here do you first have to die here? This is a hackneyed idea. It doesn’t take us very far. I’d be more interested in witnessing the process of rebirth.

56

Today I again miss the train to Campbelltown at Wolli Creek. If you are on the Illawarra Line, Wolli Creek is the most convenient point of transfer to the East Hills line. However, timetable scheduling makes this difficult. A simple adjustment by someone exercising a bit of imagination and sense…

There is a young man begging on this train for food. A rather sweet-looking young man. He makes the sign of feeding himself, the fingers of the hand bunched together with the thumb touched to the fingers lightly curled, and the hand thus bunched repeatedly thrust at the mouth. It’s disturbing to witness. Earlier on the platform there was a Buddhist priest wrapped in his saffron robe: a Caucasian in his late 20s-early 30s. He’s a beggar of sorts also. A rather aggressive individual, pushy even. And fidgety. He’s off to see his brother is Campbelltown. Because he wants the train to arrive earlier he wills it to appear. ‘There must be an earlier train, there must be an earlier train …’ He cannot accept the fact that what is on the electric noticeboard is how it is. There are no other trains. He belongs to a forest monastery in or near Perth. Here he stops at the Wiseman’s Ferry monastery. It’s actually beyond St. Albans. I know all this because he’s quizzed in my presence by an Asian guy called Mungo. In any case I know of the St. Albans set-up.

I’m going to Campbelltown but I’d rather be at home working. I’m making good progress on my Brombergiana suite. I’m writing a sort of commentary. It’s necessary, a site of reflection.

Revesby, I don’t know it at all. There’s a huge Worker’s Club with the insignia, a raised white hand, a St. Andrew’s cross consisting of hammer and some other object I’m unable to identify, all enclosed in a cogged wheel. It’s quite ugly.

The Buddhist priest, the beggar boy, the Asian ‘Inquisitor’, these all fall into the category of encounter. It doesn’t have to be a one-on-one. I avoid the priest after initially assisting him, telling him what train he needed to catch (the Macarthur train). He takes it upon himself to sit right next to me. He’s unsavoury. To such a degree that when I flee I leave my sunglasses behind. The begging boy has a story – but you’d need to take him on. The Asian guy is more wholesome. But in reality I’m preoccupied with my own priorities – and I’m sick of observing, the responsibilities it engages. You can’t observe without responsibility. You can’t observe without being prepared to take on responsibility. To preserve yourself you need to shun. This is an unfortunate truth.

57

It is a pity summer is coming to an end. Bare flesh will disappear. Not that’s there’s too much on display. Shoulders appear to be the thing.

57

Djon reads his Karla Dickens’ piece, Die Frau ohne Schatten, to the Friends at the Campbelltown Arts Centre: the assembled gallery guides and volunteers. His German needs some work. Never matter. He’s under instruction to keep his snide remarks to himself. Yes, being under instruction. I don’t need to sit through this reading for I have heard it all before. But I do. Why? Because I have nothing better to do but also because I want to witness his performance – as performance. To reflect on it.

There are things and issues raised. Things with previous lives. The use of strips of cloth taken from old clothes salvaged from the Salvos. Why? Is it enough to borrow them – or is there a requirement to revitalise? It’s the word he uses. Revitalise. Cf. the use of bolts of fabric as gifts in N-E Arnhem Land. Attention to detail. An industrious practice.

Further on the revitalisation theme: Singing and dancing things into being. Recourse to a soul or spirit or divine being that is able to locate itself outside the hazards and atrocities of history. The song quickens. ‘What is a shadow, if not ambiguous?’ He poses that question. Statement or question? From my own perspective, the shadow is the image form – a thing cast. But the image can take other forms.

The traces of history, of colonial history. Terrible, he says. But in fact it wasn’t all rape, murder, massacre, mayhem. The fact is, it’s the acts of goodwill, caring, mutual caring, mutual regard that are truly terrible – for it is they, them and the spirit of them, that is disregarded, shunned, overrun. Overrun for example in judicial action. Native Title is murder, too – acts of sanctimony, superiority, patronage and patronising. High-handed, ignorant, interfering, unaware of its consequences …

Are the dead truly other? This is a further question. If this is the case what is the source of this otherness? From what does it derive? What gives it its force?

It is really a very good essay. It is not only good, it’s modulated. There’s an evenness to it, especially as read, it has gravitas. It’s concerned, it’s full of concern. It has generality. Its reach is considerable.

‘The simple joys of a human life’. With that he concludes.

59

Question time. ‘My Irishness’, that’s one thing. ‘With contemporary artists is it a free-for-all? Does anything and everything go?’, that’s another thing. ‘Are there issues of appropriation?’ ‘Can women dance?’ ‘Is the didgeridoo used everywhere?’ ‘Is Aboriginal singing ‘throaty’?’ All the side issues that people seize on. ‘What do people think of the mother-daughter ‘thing’?’ That’s how Djon responds, in a rather forlorn effort to direct matters back to his interests. He is after all seeking a response to his argument. Maybe it’s by way of retaliation but no, the significant thing is the argument. ‘Which is the shadow of which’, he challenges, ‘the mother of the daughter, or the daughter of the mother?’ ‘The image is a positive image’, comes the return comment. But soon they’re somewhere else: ‘Wasn’t the Cootamundra Girls Home run by a church group?’ Which leads to a reflection on the church and brainwashing. ‘Not everyone allows themselves to be brainwashed’, says a woman with a heavy Central European accent. ‘We’re all brainwashed is different ways’, says another.

60

‘Tony Bilson is of Aboriginal descent. He confessed one Bloomsday …’ So says Djon. He’s talking about the restauranteur. Djon started with Bloomsday, now he’s back to it. It’s as good a day for confessionals as any other day, I suppose. Irish and Aboriginal, the theme of the day. The studious creation of central marginal identities, that’s how I’ll describe it. If you’re going to be on the outside you might as well do it properly.

61

This morning I look at the image Djon has directed us to, Karla’s Black virgin piece. (It’s in the most recent Parliament of New South Wales Aboriginal Art Prize catalogue (2009) at page 21.) I’m reminded of the big female figure at Nowalanydya (Nourlangie Rock). It’s sometimes called Injdjuwandjuwa, but only since Steven Harris.  There are arms and legs everywhere, especially arms. Hands reach north and south, presumably the mother-daughter couple. It’s a composite mythology, with clear Buddhist elements. The snakes (blue) on either side are fat, decorated in purnu design (the burnt decorative style of Central Australia). There are floral ‘rosettes’ reminiscent of the hibiscus design on the NT flag. It is multi-layered. The words Black Virgin are inscribed on the body of the main figure. I find this inscription slightly odd, as if she has to wear an announcing sign. A sign of announcement.

62

Bull’s Eye in Bulli? I’m not sure what I was expecting. I didn’t find the images particularly sexualised. Nor were they chaste. Someone said ‘anodyne’, another said ‘caught at their most innocuous’. I have no problem with the notion of male beauty – but I’m not sure that this is what the show is all about. What is it, then? What aesthetics inform it, whose aesthetics? What are the boys’ own self-judgments? There are fortunate expressions in Maurice’s essay, ‘… that time when our mind-body clock is wound tight towards new beginnings.’ I’m not sure about new beginnings; my own sense is of trajectories already ordained. The images are what I’ll call larval, pupate, unformed. It’s what I call the uncooked damper look.

Djon talks about puppy fat

We had doubts about the hang. The figures are displayed in linear fashion, around the room in pairs and at the same height (rather high) and side-by-side. This is the mode of mug shots, no determinate setting other than that – individuated, isolated and only surreptitiously compared. My own view is that the images would have been better grouped, all together on one wall. The sense of gang, or even age cohort, is not made present.

On the Verge? Hints of virginity? Yes, virginal – virginal but not entirely brides. Now, were they dressed in bridal veils and carrying bridesmaids’ posies …

I had expected that the images might have been imbued with a sense of caring, responsibility, maybe even regret. I sense none of this. The notion that ‘white boys’ – mostly blue- or green-eyed – should entrust themselves to a ‘black’ photographer, that is interesting. I wonder myself what Gary’s symbology might be, his symbolic framings, what constitutes them. I’m not sure of the Eyes Wide Open of Maurice’s catalogue essay. Some of the boys appear knowing. But others seem trapped in a sort of inconscient. The oldest boy is more knowing. Guarded, says the gallerist. He was brought in to build up the numbers, that’s what she says. He’s also expectant. It is this expectancy that draws us back to the issue of beauty, the idea of pleasing, of being pleased. This is a hesitant operation; a site of hesitancy. It is this in general that lacks^[13].

Monday 8 March 2010

63

Carmen Jones, we watch it on the tv monitor. Anything that is watched has to be dealt with, laid to rest. The DVD is defective. The sound track is continuous, undisturbed, but the visuals are not. Full of stops and starts, bad synch. Apart from one scene – the one in which Carmen ‘quits’ her man (Belafonte), a scene set in a shabby hotel/boarding house in Chicago, right next to the El train – it’s a lively, well cast and fast moving production. Some of the scenes might have been shortened but there was a tendency, I think, to stick too closely to the operatic score. Yes, it might have been trimmed. The ensemble work – the quintet – is first rate. Sharp, precise, full of panache and good voices. Pearl Bailey’s singing is a wonder – though one wonders why she does not adopt the ‘alternate’ line in the conclusion of her ‘aria’ (“Beat out that rhythm on a drum’’).  Don José becomes Joe (a weak character), Escamillo becomes Husky Miller. This is all vaguely absurd. There’s also an element of ‘primordialism’ with the folksy ‘black grammar’. This tends to be more pronounced in the singing than in the spoken lines. Odd! The dutiful wife-to-be gives an excellent and affecting performance, acting and singing. Meekness and perseverance. What a strange powerful face! Dorothy Dandridge is excellent – though the character is not entirely motivated. The oddest thing is Belafonte’s singing. What happened there? It’s close to counter-tenor. When he’s allowed to slide into the full baritone range his voice strengthens.

Verdict: Lots of good things. A special highly commended to the card scene.

64

Sławek has been back on the telephone, pushing away on and at our ‘project’. (He dislikes this term, he tells me.) He doesn’t seem altogether aware that I have other commitments. Some of these are quite demanding. I want him to read my Polish texts (Brombergiana) and the Commentaries. (I more or less finished these today. They’re quite long, 20 000 words plus for the texts, a further 15 000+ for the Commentaries.) Whether he does so or not is another matter. I do not underestimate the difficulties but I need him to read them because he is implicated. We need to work on the Polish poetry texts. I want him to use his voice. We have to build in Aboriginal components, singing especially. I have no interest in fetishizing the audience. The performance can be audience-free as far as I’m concerned. We can perform anywhere. Not in the ‘classic’ venues. There are things I want done in Martin Place, I have some set pieces I need realised, some video pieces.

Sławek is keen for me to produce texts spontaneously. In principle that is OK. It’s a force play. It could happen. We need to conduct some trials. I want him to use his voice. We need to accentuate the difficulties of communication, not to underplay or erase them. Language is a tricky matter. Foreign languages are foreign. We need to explore the nature of foreignness.

In time we appear to understand everything. We get a sense of what is going on. How is this?

Sławek is just back from Timur. ‘That was foreign’, he said It’s the Tetun. He clarifies: ‘The Portuguese not so much, but the Tetun, that’s another matter entirely.’ Yes, Tetun is a different story. It belongs to a different bloc altogether.

Portuguese neo-colonialism proceeds apace.

The beauty of the people, that impressed him. ‘Especially the women’, he says, predictably. ‘I can’t talk about the men’, he says, ‘they were alright’.

I can find men and women beautiful. Beauty comes in many guises.

Tuesday 9 March 2010

65

Today’s vessel is the Albatros. Yes, spelt like that. It’s hard to believe a name like that. It’s hard to believe a name like that is possible, in the aftermath of Coleridge’s poem. That’s what I mean. In its wake, so as to say.

The boat itself is rather pretty. From Nassau.

On the bus she’s waxing lyrical about Prince Harry. ‘Oh, he loves it here!’ She’s full of praise for the mother, she’s full of praise for the father, she’s full of praise for the boys. ‘So beautifully brought up, a credit to their parents, a credit to themselves.’ She allows herself to continue: ‘They speak beautifully’. Harry and William, they can do no wrong.

66

DJ is in tears on the phone when I leave home. The issue, the pressures being applied somewhere for the NSW Parliament Awards for Aboriginal Artists to be sponsored by some mining company or other. DJ is scandalised. He thinks of his uncles dead from asbestos – from the Baryugil mine. He tells me things I can’t repeat here. Things are too close to home.

Be that as it may, there are clear principles in play – well, maybe sidelined. For a start how can a prize emanating from Parliament be subject to private (or commercial) sponsorship? What would we say to  Conzinc Rio Tinto or the BHP State Parliament? Who gets naming rights – and how?

We should be cautious about suggesting shenanigans. But where there are politicians there are shenanigans; and where there is big business. To cut through it all I’d advise him to go straight to the Minister, whoever is in charge of this programme – ‘for clarification’. Maybe Meredith Burgmann who was involved at the inauguration of the prize. It’s a potential scandal but perhaps it isn’t. I mean, it should be but we live in such times! That’s the shocking thing, the death of shocking.

We have not heard this end of this issue, I suspect.

67

While I’m at it I should voice my anger at the operation of the Aboriginal land councils – or native title claimants. Land should never be surrendered. It undercuts the whole dispossession argument, the whole argument of a ‘sacred trust’, special spiritual significance, the indissoluble bond between people and land. If land is to be alienated it should be an interim and not an irrevocable step. Leasing would be an appropriate measure or mechanism.

68

Says Djon, ‘There’s nobody in the blackfella world I can talk to about this’. There’s Roy, of course, and one or two others. But I accept his point. I know it’s true. Everything is about short-term advantage. The drive is assimilationist. There are people who want to deal. The costs are not calculated. I can hear the Stumbo Walsh argument now: ‘The old people want something before they die.’ Such a fatuous argument.

Are there no issues around which people may be politically mobilised, are there no motivating issues – or is it just deal deal deal?

Wednesday 10 March 2010

69

No, despite being declared dead, the baby elephant was born!

70

DW makes a good suggestion about my BROMBERGIANA, for it to appear in limited artist’s proofs. One of the keys is to think of what paper it is to be printed on; another is what sort of boxes might contain it. An art installation, with voice, that is what he is thinking of.

71

A strange evening shot through with hints of madness.

Saturday 13 March 2010

72

Dreams. Driving up and down the road, not going anywhere fast. An old English woman, rather pleasant. She lived in Mumbai. ‘What did you think of it?’, I asked her. She loved it. But what a strange contraption she wore on her head. Like a box. You might try thinking of it as a theatre for it was draped in fabric. I’m not up to describing the sorts of braiding work involved or other technical aspects of the sewing. But in saying that I am reminded of the ‘difficulties’ of Karla’s work. Another association was with a dog kennel, the box into which my own dog Whisky used to slip. Also there is something theatrical about it. A boxed head, what does one say of that?

In the earlier part of the dream, the vehicle was my old Peugeot. People admired it but in reality it gave me a lot of trouble.

73

A critical practice, what is that? It’s an effort to maintain awareness.

Tuesday 17 August 2010

74

Today’s first mango in the shops – from the NT

75

He never regained consciousness. He was an engineer who fell off his own carport. His coffin was draped with the Aboriginal flag and the drone of the didgeridoo was heard. What shall we say of this? My suspicion of good works remains. My suspicion of nationalism in any guise remains undiluted.

76

Out of my sun, says Diogenes, out of my sun

77

This morning I challenge Djon on climate change. The climate changes all the time. He invokes the Moscow fires. What, I say, have you forgotten, you know,  Napoleon, all that jazz? The fires burnt to the gates of Moscow, I assert brazenly. Climate changes all the time. We probably understand the oscilaltions very badly. The cliamte is a temporal thing; it is not 'frozen'. The climate does not consist of events, but it responds to them - and it triggers them. Cook up a disaster and you ca always find a niche for yourself. We witness the commodification of catastrophe. There are millions and millions of people living where they probably shouldn't. I hate the scaremongering but I hate the polluters more. Tokyo in summer, the Ginza. 30 years ago it was intolerable.

It's true, many cities become uninhabitable in summer. The city is, in many parts of the world, a winter refuge. It's where people hang out in the 'off-season'. It is in that sense already geared to leisure - entertainment, interior pursuits.

Now, if you believe any of the above, go and have your head read!

78

The pursuit of 'good works' is not sublimation, it is merely displacement.

79

At Armani, the removal of the pretty boy posed prettily in his underdaks, what does this mean? A deletion of the 'indecorous'? Too close to the 'sacred zone', what our boys sacrificed themselves for? The wowser is always on the side of the righteous, have you noticed? But apart from the sexiness of the boy - a latterday David - what is 'indecorous' about it? The replacement image is as sexy as a tin of Campbell's soup. But no, we miss the literary reference. Anna Karenina. What, is there a suicide just around the corner?

80

Our midnight affair. No, it's after midnight!

81

I don't like the word soul but soul mates will do. We can poosit parallel histories. We can talk about this in other ways, as sharing similar fates. That makes us fated - but to say that what is that to say? We share similar fates (histories and not just histories but the 'structuring' they ordain or rely on), we are 'fated' (our histories bring us together) - but the moment we move forward, is that merely enactment? Are we fated in that sense?

82

In the street a middle-aged couple. Late middle-age. They're handsome, they hold hands. They're thoroughly modern. They're Indian.

83

On the train I don't hear Edgehill, I hear Vegetable. King's Cross, Vegetable, Bondi Junction.

84

Two boys sit sweetly side-by-side. What they offer to each other, it's a sort of sweetness, almost sexless. They're tiny, sweet, accustomed to each other. Tiny hands, sweet, tiny faces - and on one of them, a huge silver bracelet!

This is a delicate intimacy.

Wednesday 18 August 2010

85

As usual the Greens are on message, the Greens are on song: electoral pamphlets simply ja,med under our front door. So much for medium-as-message-style thinking. And such awareness of the urban environment! As the waitress says at Petrol: ‘Green is the most toxic of all colours’. She refers to the arsenic, I guess. No, I don’t want to lick their pamphlets and hope to die.

86

He’s got on a red top, she’s got a red top. Couples, they’re an odd phenomenon. She’s got a red top, he’s got a red top.

87

Today’s prize headline: FIRE ALARM FACTORY BURNS TO GROUND. The front page isn’t bad either: POLL HAS ABBOTT REELING, with a photo of Abbott fishing with rod and reel at Narooma – apparently fishing for votes. Yes, a baited hook aimed at the fishing fishing lobby.

88

No, we cannot really talk about a crisis of democracy, even a political crisis. This is an improper way to talk. We can talk about mass disaffection from the two major parties, we can talk about a failure to couple party membership with electoral clout, we may even be able to talk about a failure of the political parties to evolve in order to mobilise the population. There are a number of observations we might make - but without at the same time falling into the error that we are really talking about politics or about ‘democracy’. Democracy is dead and buried – except as a buzzword. There is no deep commitment to it. If we were really to have government of the people by the people it wouldn’t look anything like this. That is a self-evident proposition. We are dealing with political minorities seeking some sort of authorisation from the populace at large. But in themselves they are minorities - and very small minorities. Tiny fractions of the society, tiny fractions of the body politic, if indeed we are to conceive of such a beast.

There is a political order in place except it is not an order, it’s a rabble. It has no real legitimacy though one of the properties of the system-in-place is to have compulsory voting which has the effect of appearing to legitimate existing arrangements. If the aim was ‘democracy’ it would not have dwindled into this. The intention was never democracy, it was rule – by this mob or that. Happily our military does not ‘participate’ in arrangements. I can only surmise that the military is as disaffected as the rest of the population. It is significantly rule by disaffection. It isn’t that people don’t care, they don’t know how to care. The population is not governed, it is bribed. There is always a bait on the hook. No, let me correct that, the bait is only applied at significant moments. It’s an interim measure, aimed at gaining access to power or in retaining it.  If the population isn’t bought it is fobbed off. The rotten borough continues as a political life form.

89

Today I conducted a little survey with two friends, both of them are well-informed about matters political. They have an express interest in politics and are players to a considerable degree. My questions are these:

How many troops do we have in Afghanistan?

How many troops do we have in Iraq?

What is the membership of the Liberal Party nationally?

What is the membership of the Labor Party nationally?

What is the membership of The Greens and the Democrats?

90

I was startled at how hesitant they were. My second respondent freely admitted that she did not know. And I should, she said candidly. The former was diffident in the extreme. As to Afghanistan he thought a deployment of 200, maybe 500. For Iraq, hardly any, he said, maybe 20? As for membership of the Liberal Party he guessed: Maybe 2000? For the Labor Party, another guess: About 5000? As for the Greens he was certain. They have the largest membership, he says, about 7000. As for the Democrats he comes up with a figure but it’s uncertain: 500 or something?, he offers tentatively.

My second respondent, as I have already indicated, is happy to admit her ignorance but is quick to get on line in order to find out what the real figures are. But not before answering my questions: In Afghanistan she nominates a deployment of 10 000 troops. Is this information in the public domain?, she asks. She suspects not. I suspect not also. Iraq?, I ask. I have no idea, she freely admits. Less than in Afghanistan, she suggests, and gives a figure of 7 000, then a smaller figure: 5 000. She gives a context to her answers by suggesting that there cannot be too many as there are only 30 000 in the Australian military establishment all up. I wonder if this is right. She also suggests that one needs to distinguish between actual troops and other military personnel. Point taken.

Now for the political parties. The Liberal Party does not allow membership figures onto the public records, she says, it’s a matter of policy – and presumably strategy. In reality, she admits, she has no idea. As for Labor she heads straight for the jugular. In South Australia, Country Labor has 150 members, she declares boldly, it’s on the parliamentary record. The Democrats have less than that state-wide. What that translates into nationally we have no idea, but the figure for the State is less than 100, she surmises. Then she plonks for a figure, admittedly querulous: 120, Australia-wide? I’m staggered at this. As for the Greens, she does not take the line of my first respondent. Not many, she says, Green is small. How they can legitimate themselves I have no idea.

Both my respondents have direct connexions into the army. One has a son there, another a brother with a long history of engagement in the military, including military intelligence.

Saturday 21 August 2011

91

Yesterday I did my little survey with C.

Q: Troops in Afghanistan? A: 300?

Q: Troops in Iraq? A: Any left? None!

Q: ALP membership? A: 5 000

Q: Liberals? A: 306!

Q: Greens? A: 15 000

Q: Democrats? A: Zero!

92

Election Day, Election Day, happy, happy election day. Here it dawns bright and sunny. At Mittagong where my friends have headed, it brinks on snow. Don’t buy more books, I tell my mate, who is an avid book purchaser. His More Than My Skin show never received a proper catalogue, he says. I suppose that was up to him finally but why not – why not a proper catalogue with all the images and all the photographers treated comprehensively? Yes, why not? You don’t have a blackfella curator every day of the week. What White Australians don’t seem to grasp, even in the art scene, is that it is things Aboriginal that are mainstream, not White Australia. White Australia doesn’t count except as a zone of exclusion. Exclusive zones encourage one thing: exclusion. White Australia might figure in European consciousness, or American, as an experiment in whiteness. America can’t afford that as America can no longer present itself as an experiment in whiteness. Europe can conduct it's own experiments. It doesn't need to rely on us.

93

Darlinghurst Road, election day morning

Before it was sunny and there was someone sitting there, a young man wearing nothing against the cold and drinking from a bottle in a brown paper bag. But he was in the sun. Now he’s gone and the bench is bar and the sun too ahs gone.

A moment before I saw this young man I saw another man in his early or mid-thirties looking up at me pleadingly from an alcove in front of one of the shops or offices. You look cold, I said to him. He tried to say something but he didn’t succeed.

94

Late last night I get a call from a friend pleading with me to say it isn’t true. Tell me, she says, tell me that NSW won’t let Abbot be PM. This morning she rings again. I can’t reassure her. There is every chance, I say, if Victoria wants the PM-ship so badly … Which is one argument I am more than happy to run. I predict a Labor slaughter in NSW and Queensland, a slaughter they’ve brought down entirely on their own heads. This is what happens when you give up on principle entirely. There has been one ambition only: to stay in power. It’s a bad strategy. Self-defeating.  My caller runs an interesting analysis of the Senate. Her political antennae have always been acute. She gives her version of the quota system. It’s true, the Senate is poorly understood in Australia – and its role as a States house. Even among professional commentators.

95

I have another caller who is seriously concerned with how to vote. She doesn’t want to add to Abbot’s vote, however indirectly. That’s the last thing she wants. She doesn’t want Family First in the Senate. She is appalled, as I am, at the thuggery of the Labor Party. It’s what I used to call in an earlier time Land Council politics – ‘young things’, lawyers mostly, playing silly buggers and too smart by half while at the same time ‘yielding’ to the word of the ‘masters’: the ‘old buggers’. They’re young turks without clothing. They have no interest in the social, just their own insertion in position of power. My friend calls them arrogant; I call them ‘bored’. They have too much free time and too little purchase on the issues. The Libs, she says, when you go to the party room, it’s full of geriatrics, people doddering about, but they do listen. They’re listeners. I might have said that the dodderers, that’s us. And do we listen? I suppose we do. We certainly attend.

The Greens? I think of them as little demagogues, a cult – a cult of ‘proper thinkers’ in bicycle helmets. I don’t know what it is about bicycle helmets that makes you worthy. I’d prefer a party of walkers myself, strollers – and the occasional formula 1 racing driver! No, not cultish like the cult of  the flâneur, and spare me the hikers. Especially the hikers! Now where might I stroll, I think to myself. The idea of ‘strolling’ round the lake in Canberra, participating in the planned ‘picturesque’, evokes nothing but horror. I used to run from Acton to Kingston every afternoon. I don’t recall that as ever being ‘pleasant’, more a chore.

My own take on the Greens? I’ll almost certainly vote for them in the Senate yet … P. called Bob Brown Hitler on the telephone. At first I disagreed with him but then I could see his point. I always call Brown the Sunday School Superintendent. The Baptist, but not John the … I don’t think he’d ever turn Salomé on – but was she a siren, a vixen, a beauty? We’ll never know.

The Greens are post-capital. I suppose we should spell it with a capital C: Capital. Both major parties are capitalists; they are slaves to capitalism. The Greens see a beyond, or sense a beyond. It’s rather soft-edge, and they’ve never really come to grips with the city. And the slogan of sustainability doesn’t take us very far. Sustainable what? There’s no future in this notion of sustainability. It’s not a notion that triggers or incites the imagination. It’s management, it’s not ideas. Yes, the Greens suit the whole great management class. They foster nothing, they administer everything. The task is to nurture the conditions for a new political order. This present political order is null and void. It is not an easy task.

96

The polling booth. I tried to take a decent shot. There wasn’t a decent shot to be taken. Everything seemed half-hearted. Yes, there’s Turnbull, his poster, and then someone else, probably Labor but you couldn’t really tell. The Greens are prominent with flags and Green placards ‘on message’. There’s a sense of confidence there. It’s more than the fluttering of the flags.

I always vote here, in Darlinghurst at the polling booth near St John’s (a Blacket church and a favourite, as it happens). I’m not real happy about this link with the ecclesiastical – and there is Christian propaganda everywhere. I vote above the line - for Labor in the House of Reps and the Greens in the Senate. I’m sure I’m not alone.

97

 

I know my photos are no good so I try out the other side, on the Darlo Road side. There’s Anne Ferran, noted photographer, of course, but there to hand out pamphlets for GetUp: ‘a people’s movement, not a political party’, says the flyer. They’re in orange, which I like. They have a checklist of issues. The Greens come out massively on top, ticks all round. I can only suspect that this is Greens material in disguise. The summary of positions is more sympathetic to Turnbull than to Lewis, the Labor man. It is in a sense a local vote. Lewis is in favour of same sex marriages. It is not Labor Party policy.

An oddity of the GetUp summary is that there is no reference at all to the presence of our armed forces overseas. Not a single reference. Meanwhile today 2 troops die in Afghanistan. That of course has nothing to do with the legality – or probity – of our military presence anywhere. There can be no better way to encourage terrorism than to create an occupation. How stupid! Foreigh affairs in general is given a big miss. It's as if we only have an interior - that wicked people (boat people and others) are trying to penetrate.

I’ve asked various friends to take photos of their polling booths.  I hope they’re more successful in getting a decent pic than my efforts in Darlo. My best image – not very good – is of Julia alongside a Greens banner talking about INDIGENOUS RIGHTS. It is interesting that Labor is centralising its campaign around Julia but there is not an image of Abbot to be seen. Not surprising when the local Lib candidate is Turnbull. Why would Turnbull centralise Abbot? I should have been bolder and got a good shot of the GetUp team. It’s odd how curiously curtailed we are on such occasions. After all, it’s a public occasion and the people handing out the how-to-vote and other electoral material are fair game.

98

Whenever the serious gets too ‘imposing’ and things look hopeless, the conceit is never far away. My latest proposal? That people can nominate the electorate they want to have their vote counted in. That would be a good stimulus package, says Penny who has just turned up at the door. Yes, how interesting it would be for electorates to be vying for voters – or conversely, trying to deter them. What a swirl, what a swill of people! Like Thanksgiving in the States. Where would I vote? I have no idea. What would be an adequate inducement? On the Native Title front I’d give TOs 10 votes each or maybe a hundred or maybe a thousand if they voted in the electorate that contained their homelands. This is a practical measure. No mealy-mouthed ‘reconciliation’ that reduces everyone to nothing at all, no special recognition, nothing. Nothing nothing nothing, no sense of proper responsibilities or of creating the conditions in which they could exercise proper responsibilities both socially and to the environment.

And what to do with the scoundrels? I can hear the question now. Of clourse there are scoundrels, real scallywags. My answer to this is that if they sold their land (as happens) they’d lose their native title standing and therefore their special voting power. Also, if they didn’t act well, people would abandon that electorate for another – and they would lose their special status very rapidly! Power without a forum is no power at all.

99

My present proposal is to prepare a portfolio of appealing polling booths. What is the most appealing polling booth in the country? What makes a polling booth appealing? It would make a good Weekend Magazine article.

100

Steve?

There’s a voice beside me, suddenly. I’m shopping, I’m scanning the shelves.

I look blankly.

Steve, she says again.

No, I say.

Steve, you’re Steve.

No I’m not, I say, I’m not Steve.

You’re Steve, tell me you’re Steve. You lived under the Bridge.

I assume it’s The Bridge she’s talking about but it could be any bridge.

Her insistence astounds me.

No, I say firmly, I’m not Steve. She doesn’t even apologize. I nearly say it to her: Apologize!

101

Killed by an improvised explosive device. What is one to say of such English? Who makes up such expressions?

102

Wikipedia provides some informationon party memberships: Greens, close to 10 000 members nationally; Labor, about 50 000 and described as 'fluctuating', and the Libs, well, no information is available. Someone suggested 20 000.

Sunday 22 August

103

The nation is reeling, the nation is reeling and not a fishing line in sight! Such a wringing of hands, such a me-oh-my-oh-me! As if any of it is unexpected! Ha!, no, the nation is not dumb, the nation is as it is. You can’t say it’s dumb, it merely is. Let's get that right for a start.

A hung parliament? It’s almost as if there’s a national consciousness, a weird organic something that calculates precisely its desired outcome. We’ll wait and see how precisely.

Will ‘difficulty’ create a more sophisticated political culture or merely more ‘calculated’? Hard to say. It’s a question I’m not certain how to approach.

Monday 23 August

104

The moaning continues. The moaning continues to moan. Moan, moan. There are certain wishful thinkers who now think that the hope of the land lies with the independents from the country. Ha! Two minutes earlier they wouldn't ahve given them the time of day.

What do I want? Let us start with tonight. What do I want to eat tonight? I want to eat something but I want it cooked, elsewhere. Maybe pork chops with mash and peas and … I don’t feel like eating by myself.

What would I like to have learnt at school? Something like Principles of Mathematics, Principles of General Linguistics. I could see both of these making good courses. I would not teach literature. Literature is not to be taught, nor art. Musical theory might be OK if it were not so western-oriented.

105

Some people say silly things. The Mayor of Liverpool comes out with this extraordinary piece of claptrap. ‘This is not an attack on us, this is an attack on the whole community’. Rubbish. She’s talking about the fire that destroyed the Council Chambers. Who knows what the arsonist was thinking? They’re pretty sure it was arson – but the motives were, well, who is to say? Some people might just like big fires. Anyway, there is plenty of resentment directed at councils – and probably justifiably.

106

There are those who have no wish to be identifiable, however ‘indirectly’. I will re-write but the fact that people cannot or are unwilling to appear in their own name disturbs me. It is their right, of course. That simply cannot be contested. On the other hand, we need to be breaking down such barriers. For the self, in my view, not the other. I’m not sure what the status of the private is to be. I’m not sure privacy really offers any final protection, or that it should. We need to break through the ‘private’ conception of the self. I beleive this strongly.