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What I don’t remember writing.
It’s happening again. The same thing. Stripped of your crutches, the monster emerges again. Before. Before. Before. It’s all you can think about. The lack of composure. The lost dignity. The agitation that drives your mind, forces your legs to move ceaselessly, sucks the tears out of your eyes and drags them down your face. You swore you’d never be back here again. Out of control like a train off its tracks. Capable of anything. Of screaming. Wailing. Cutting. Moaning. Stabbing. Running with no return. Trapped. Tearful. Terrified. Lost in the midst of a self that is not yours.
Your real self, the one which you had regained, has suddenly vanished. The personhood that you built slowly, painstakingly, through the sheer effort of getting out of bed in the morning. Through the ceaseless act of putting on self, daily and with constraint, like she revealed to you one day that it would always be. But under duress you succeeded to reclaim the life that was lost. You spent weeks in the arms of another, of others. Months immersed in the world that had become sharp and clear and distinct once more. You bathed in a haze of books and chatter and thought and laughter. You had won, turning your face to the sunlight that had chosen to bless you and follow your movements. To cast only shadows of the monsters that had once ravaged you. Ravaged you. And yet now, only months later, this self has fallen.
Once again, the ending was simultaneously prolonged and brief, similar to the fate of a Jenga tower. You noticed some dark spaces amidst the fullness of the days. A shadow shot right through your centre, and your breath became halted. The tower swayed. And all at once the monster emerged again. Yes. One moment you stood at the precipice, the next you tipped. The monster opened its jaws. You tumbled through the dark. And when you landed, you were once again left with nothing.
It’s the same in other ways too. A different place, yet the same people. They could be from anywhere, they could be anyone. Yet they are familiar. The same. They are the ones that pull you in, that you hope to find comfort with. A small relief to console and be consoled, to take the sufferings of others and discard your own. A temporary measure. But in the end only another form of destruction. For they are not yours, nor are you theirs. They are caricatures, people who will fade into shadows as soon as you leave this place. You will be nothing to them. They, nothing to you but a wasted memory tainted by the glasses assigned to your eyes at the time. But for now they become you, their mannerisms, their voices, their personalities melt into your own. Your struggles become theirs, and theirs yours. You can hardly be sure where you end and they begin. Confined, slapped together in the underbelly of society, you can do nothing if not mingle with its great unwashed.
You knew this last time; the danger enclosed in their shy smiles or comforting arms. The danger of affection – of giving away a part of yourself to others who would only ask for more. You watch the procession helplessly; tender morsels of yourself given timidly until you are swallowed whole. And yet you cannot blame them. There is hardly one whole body between you. Your offerings, however small, help to construct the whole that you all dream of owning. And so you sit, bodily present, mind lost to another world. You hear the words spoken over you.
Sanity in question.
Situation perilous.
Destination unknown.
And yet a shred of yourself remains. Ribbon thin, frayed, hidden in the mess of wires and sockets. It runs like a spinal cord amidst veins and arteries dyed with artificial colours and flavours. It is swayed, bent, but never broken. It is the voice that speaks with clarity amongst the others, those that try to convince you that you are broken. They; the liars, the cheats. This voice is quieter. It does not shout. It speaks truth. It tells a story that has been lost, that exists only in fables of the aural tradition; voices that have been drowned by the west, by its perilous quest to play God. Because between the red pill and the blue there was once another. It was neutral – its value lost to the world of medicine, its décor demure and as such underrated. It didn’t hand out free mugs and staplers with its presentation, nor holidays to the orient for its champions. That pill was once known as normality – under duress of course, for all who seek struggle to find. Normality. It is found in the thread of the real, the pill that will center and make true an illegitimate existence. But in this place, they shun normality. For here all are already lost to a darker fate. Instead we are served a regulated, shared meal from which we can all partake. Normality has vanished. Here they replace it with a cheaper brand. Uniqueness. Doesn’t have the quite the same flavour to it. But the starving will eat anything.
But what of the others? The ones who exist beyond the borders of the shadowlands, those who live beside but apart from me, who I know I will find again, be it in months or years. Their charmed lives have become my benchmark. They, the only reminders of my ribbon thin existence beyond the deep. My friends, my family, the fleshed embodiments of life, the products of the normality pill that sits beyond the locked door. Yes, the ones who live above the surface, who walk the sunny streets with familiarity, with a lazy for granted-ness I can now only dream of. They live unabashed, unconcerned, tossed by waves in a teacup, never knowing of the storm that lies beyond. They are the frying pan to my fire, the molehill to my mountain. They exist in my perpetual Narnia – far beyond the confines of the wardrobe. It is a place I dream of, where the lion lives and the witch is vanquished, never to return.
I know, topic might be getting old. But I have some questions to put to you all.
Talking about spirituality and spiritual experiences, Sarah, one of my uni friends, that she didn’t disbelieve ’spiritual experience’, but the systems of belief to which those experiences are ascribed. For example, to have some kind of ‘encounter’ in prayer is one thing, but to then assume that that spiritual experience correlates specifically to one kind of belief system, which belongs to a certain group of people in a certain part of the world at a certain time within a certain political system, might be completely unnecessary. Is it possible that just because there’s ‘something’ out there, it isn’t necessary to ascribe that something to, for example, a white, patriarchal, monotheistic, culturally specific religion (Christianity). Especially when so much about that religion is oppressive or in direct opposition to some of your other beliefs. I have been thinking about this since Sarah put it to me.
Why ought I ascribe my spiritual experiences to a certain organized form of religion? I mean, spirituality and faith and religion are all completely different things. And you can have one without the other.
I get very put off by the claims that Christian ideology ‘founded the western world and our legal system’, as though that is something to be proud of. Capitalism is so oppressive, just that it’s an indirect kind of oppression with no ONE person to blame. So saying things like that put me off A) because of their underlying political ideologies, and B) because in seeming SO pro-western, statements like this emphasise Christianity’s NON-universality.
For example, how is Christianity relevant to native peoples on the other side of the world in BC times? Or even now? People with their own history, culture, dreaming, etc etc that have gone on for millions of years? How can we claim Jesus, one dude who lived in Israel over 2,000 years ago (but more importantly, millions of years INTO human existence) overrides that?
Judaism and then Christianity belongs to only one cultural history and that is largely a western history and culture, except where the West have imposed those views on other people groups. Eg. Christianity is not the ‘native’ history and culture of most Eastern countries. It is not even that native religion of the U.S, or Australia. It accounts for only a percentage of the population. And yet it’s supposed to be true for everyone? I find this really difficult to get past.
In fact, I’m not at all sure people can get around it and not stand accused of working within an exclusive framework that doesn’t account for cultural others.
Any thoughts?
In the summer of 2008-2009 my family travelled around the South island of New Zealand. It was my first trip overseas, and despite NZ being considered our closest neighboring country in terms of distance and culture, I was enthralled by everything I discovered that was ‘different’ there. There were little things, like different shaped coins, no Mcflurry’s at McDonalds and no fines if you were caught without a bus ticket. There were medium sized things, like the fabulous wood and metal jungle gym playgrounds in every town, the kind that disappeared in favour of unexciting plastic ones a good ten years ago in Melbourne. But the most obviously different thing was the natural environment.
The South Island is Lord of the Rings country; majestic, ancient and unyielding. What I considered as mountains in Australia dwarfed in comparison with the steep, snow-topped alps that cropped up like giant guardians of the land that our car wound and dipped through. The terrain was so present, so demanding of attention that it seemed to become everything. It was as though vision had surpassed all my other senses, which stood to the side to augment the experience of drinking, and almost drowning in, the beauty of the landscape. Ridiculous as it may sound, sometime in the second week I found myself staring down at my dinner plate, and instead of seeing peas, pumpkin and mashed potato, I saw a birdseye view of snow capped mountains, earthy rocks and green forest. That was when I felt I understood the phrase imprinted on the mind. My external environment had found its way into my inner world. The mountains and rivers and cliff-faces seemed as much inside of me as outside.
On the way home from Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne, I was startled at how flat and ordinary my environment had suddenly become. Deprived of the commanding beauty of the South Island, my insides felt instantly parched. A strange melancholy crept over me that first night back. I felt as though something that I had grasped hold of was fading quickly from sight. The sense of openness that had bloomed inside of me while overseas disappeared like water down a drain. New Zealand became photos I printed at Kmart, a few funny and a few semi-disastrous anecdotes, archived safely in the back of my mind as a place I’d like to go again someday.
Tonight I was driving across the valley from Yarra Glen to Coldstream when I glanced to my right across the vineyards and caught my breath at the technicoloured display in the sky. The purples, pinks and oranges of dusk lit up the bluish-grey clouds, and the modest Yarra Valley mountains rose to meet them. I glanced several times from the view to the road and back, trying to assimilate the radiance of the sky with the dullness of the world below. It reminded me of the way I’d felt when first struck by the beauty of New Zealand, and I started musing over the idea of vision.
I’ve been watching True Blood lately and in episode 5 of season one (yes, I’m aware I’m behind), Lafayette offers Jason the chance to “see the world with new eyes” by taking a drop of Vampire Blood. He says “V will open up your mind to everything you’ve been missing around you… let it take you deep. Follow it. Soak it in. See the world with new eyes.”
Vampire Blood might not be on the market around the Yarra Valley, but lately I’ve been talking with people about the idea of looking at the world through different sets of ‘glasses’. In my cynical, ‘disbelief’ glasses, life is meaningless, and the pain I’ve been experiencing lately makes no sense, has no greater purpose. Yet I had a couple of days a few weeks ago when I put on my ‘belief” glasses, or my ‘greater purpose or meaning’ glasses. I can only say that I really did see the world through a new lens. My life; memories, feelings, thoughts and experiences, which had been scattered like bits of a torn-up map, seemed to piece themselves at least precariously together. In those few days, everything that had been floating disjointedly in my mind converged into some kind of coherent whole. I couldn’t see that ‘whole’ in it’s entirety, but it was there, surely and inescapably, reflecting back at me like the mountains on the island. I felt a sense of oneness and of sureness. I saw a partial explanation rather than no explanation at all. Instead of feeling like a helpless bunch of atoms trapped in the time-space continuum, I felt the loose threads of my tapestry moving on towards some kind of completion.
The people I shared that experience with advised me to ‘follow it’. And while I attempted to, my ‘trip’ seemed to gradually taper off. I’m not sure at what point I ditched my ‘belief’ glasses, perhaps it was in a moment when I doubted the accuracy of my vision, or when I caught sight of the other people wearing the same glasses and decided that they didn’t suit me after all. But everything I’d seen so vividly and fully became only a few days later a memory, a postcard from another place and time. So today I started thinking: how do we trust the accuracy of our vision? How does a trip over seas, or a few days with a different set of glasses lose its veracity so soon?
I don’t have any answers, but something that came back to me was these verses from two songs by The Mountain Goats:
“Love love is gonna lead you by the hand
Into a white and soundless place
Now we see this
As in a mirror dimly
Then we shall see each other
Face to face”
- The Mountain Goats, Love Love Love.
“When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are”
The Mountain Goats, Against Pollution.
Both the songs rip off parts of the Bible, and I have to say those are the parts that I like. Before my ‘belief’ glasses fell off, I was sure I could see at least “in a mirror dimly” rather than not at all. I could see some kind of greater meaning and purpose in my life. Then I started to wonder if I just wanted to see something, grasp at some larger meaning that probably wasn’t there at all.
Yet isn’t my experience of seeing with my ‘belief’ glasses the same as my experience in New Zealand? Just because NZ has been reduced to 3x5inch matte photographs now doesn’t mean the experience of actually being there doesn’t exist in a greater reality. So maybe it’s the same with belief, with seeing the existence of a bigger picture beyond our current experience. You may have to fly there, or put on your glasses to see it, but perhaps it is waiting for you, if you’re willing to follow it.
New Zealand
'in a mirror dimly'
“I must get back my soul from you. I am killing my flesh without it.” (Sylvia Plath)
She is certain it has vanished – her soul. Perhaps it was never there, perhaps it was only ever a sketch or a blueprint. She waited, expecting it to grow into reality. It was stagnant, waiting for revelation, for truth. But when truth came with all its words and theories and prophecies it held no weight. Truth was nothing, it turned out. Truth did not exist. The revelation has thrown her to a place beyond a cornerstone. She can longer even call herself by her own name, no longer identify as a subject. The utterance dies on her tongue. She. No, not even that will not do. All presuppositions have been erased. Nothing remains.
I see the world in a million pieces; broken, out of control, falling away. They are emotions, thoughts, ideas, objects, people, places, history, space, time. They have burst out of their frames – they come, persistently, terrifyingly, a whirlpool, a swamp. They are racing, blurring. I grasp at reality. The kitchen, the table, the chair where I sit. Chair? A noun. But I think of writers and words and civilizations and wars and somebody telling me about the history of catapults. Catapulted. A verb? My mind, a filing cabinet turned on it’s head. My body, a vessel which fills me with terror and betrays me at every turn. Lungs, there only to taunt me with the prospect of suffocation. Heart only beating to warn me of it’s inevitable ceasing. I am a consciousness trapped in a feeble capsule, a moving object required to negotiate space. But how? With hands no longer my own, with words out of a mouth I no longer know?
The words smear the page and the more that come the worse it gets. She fires them out like spears. She thinks, hopes, that surely this is all working towards something. That at the end she will look up and the tapestry will be complete, that she will turn the drawing the right way up and it will suddenly make sense. She will see that this is just another piece of the puzzle, these words all part of a process, the journey, and so on.
But suddenly I am stuck. I cannot move, and the words won’t come anymore and everything is stuck, stuck. Wheels in the mud. Spinning. Getting deeper now, throwing up spit, showering me with it.
And besides, that’s what they tell me. They all do. They say “Oh, you’ll realise it when you look back. You might even laugh, because it wasn’t really as bad as all that. It’s just that you were stuck in the swamp of emotion. But it was a necessary part of your narrative. Soon, there’ll be a turning point.”
But aren’t we all turning? Always turning, looking back, and now forward.
And it might be months, years, until she leaves the cave. Until she opens her eyes to a world at once freeing and terrifying. To a life not mapped or signposted with places or people or phases, but open, vast and empty as the sky. Even then, there will be nothing to cling to, nothing but vaporous memories, the faded identity she once carried on her back, then replaced for another, just before the fall.
They tell her that later, much later, she’ll see. That this was really just a speck, a tiny speck, and that soon she won’t remember what it even felt like. It will be an old ghost, a dead dog, and she will be free of it all. Once in a while, they say, you’ll feel the old fear, stirring faintly, but removed, as if you were watching it from afar. Then you’ll see the world for what it is. Your heart and breath and mind will unite once more. Your body will feel like your own. The filing cabinets will be put back in order, perhaps even more tidily than before. You will step away from the shadows, and then you’ll feel the breeze again.
I wrote this blog paper for my uni subject: The Digital Mediascape, and figured I may as well post it here for fun!
Digital Media in the Museum Space: The Melbourne Museum Titanic Exhibition
In this blog paper I wish to draw attention to the museum and the ways in which digital media is impacting the sense of the authentic or the original which is thought to be the essence of museum culture(1). In their discussions on the museum space, both Allison Griffith, George Macdonald and Stephen Alsford explore the ways in which museums are utilising digital media in conjunction with authentic artefacts in attempt to get closer to the ‘real’, or to recreate the past in a more dynamic way. In their view, “diverse media are required to capture and communicate the many facets of culture.”(2) From this angle, digital media is seen as enhancing our experience of cultural artefacts by reconstructing historical and spatial context. It helps create an interactive experience in which we can be ‘immersed’ in a simulation of time or place and thus get closer to the ‘real’, or to authentic experience. IMAX can be seen as the epitome of this notion in that it “enables visitors to “enter” (immerse) themselves both physically and psychically in the experience.”(3) In this paper I am interested in questioning the validity of this idea. Does the heightened sensory experience simulation offers enhance historical and cultural understanding?
In her article “The Morphology of Space in Virtual Heritage”, Bernadette Flynn discusses the way that history is increasingly being mediated through simulacra(4). In this sense, as soon as we place anything behind glass in a museum, it’s presence as an artefact signifies an absence. While we have an authentic artefact before us in a brightly-lit case, we have lost context; its surroundings, the temporal and spatial environment it belongs to(5). The artefact thus becomes simply a sign, pointing to a lost referent. As Flynn says, “in this era of digital technology and connectivity, access to heritage is increasingly mediated through the consumption of signs, electronic images, and simulacra.”(6) This idea can be seen as similar ideas to Baudrillard’s idea of simulation. Baudrillard’s theory states that “simulation corresponds to a short circuit of reality and to its duplication through signs.”(7)
The upcoming Titanic exhibition at the Melbourne Museum is a good example of the ways digital culture is currently interacting in the conventional museum setting. The exhibition comprises of a number of ways of ‘accessing’ the past:
The first, most traditional and arguably authentic element of the exhibit comprises the actual artefacts from the Titanic. These act as signs that refer to the historical event.
Original artifacts in the exhibit.
Secondly, the exhibit contains images of the actual Titanic ruins. These are simulations in that they are digital copies that point to the original.
Film footage / photo’s from dive to shipwreck.
The third stage of the exhibit comprises reconstructions of the Titanic cabins. Here we are getting to Baudrillard’s idea of simulacra, as the reconstructions can be seen as “substituting the signs of the real for the real”(8) . As Flynn asserts, in our culture a 3D scale model is seen as “the hallmark of authenticity.”(9)
Reconstruction of a Titanic cabin that is part of the exhibition.
Interacting with these more conventional museum elements is the IMAX 3D film Ghosts of the Abyss. Made in 2003, the film follows director James Cameron and a crew of scientists and filmmakers as they undertake an exploration of the remains of the sunken Titanic. The film employs digital technology, both in the sense of filming the ruins, but also combines this documentary footage with digital images of ‘ghosts’ of the titanic on the night of its sinking.
In this way, the IMAX film can be seen to enter what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal world of simulation, where “a network of artificial signs become inextricably mixed up with the real elements.”(10) This literally applies toGhosts of the Abyss, as the film mixes artificial digital imagery of the ‘ghosts’ with ‘real footage’ of the ship. We are in a world where the real is almost indistinguishable from the simulation. There is a blurring of boundaries and a layering of fiction upon fact as we layer media upon media. In this sense, in the hyperreal are no longer able to make a distinction between the real and the imaginary. To take this analogy further, the fact that James Cameron directed the fictional Hollywood blockbuster Titanic (1997) further entangles us in the labyrinth of simulacra. Our relationship to the historical event has been remediated through both the archiving and cataloguing of artefacts that refer to the event, and the fictionalising of that event into a movie. I would argue that this has largely altered the perception of the historical Titanic in our collective cultural memory. The later 3D film by the same director creates more of a linkage between the real and the simulation, evoking both a nostalgia for the actual and the fictional.
Returning to the role of Ghosts of the Abyss in the museum space, I think this interaction between the film at IMAX and the museum exhibit is a good example of the various stages of simulation – from original to reproduction. We have the historical event being mediated through objects in the exhibition space and remediated in the IMAX. In this sense the real is enhanced or improved upon through 3D technology so we enter this space of the hyperreal. When questioning whether this experience gets us closer to the past, I am interested in the idea that the presence of the simulation and the screen only reinforces the absence of the real – only increases our awareness of the screen as a substitute for the original. With IMAX as an increasingly prominent feature of museum culture, is it possible that the closer we try and get to recreating the real experience with digital and virtual tools, the further we get from it?
This situation is addressed somewhat in Flynn’s discussion. While she notes that our access to the aura and enchantment of the original object may be lost in our new simulated way of seeing, she adds that we gain “the experience of navigation, immersion or vertigo as another form of “losing oneself”(11) . This leads us to question whether the idea of the original versus simulation is truly significant in terms of authenticity. While the reconstructed Titanic cabins or the IMAX 3D erase what Walter Benjamin saw was the enchantment of the original(12), does it instead immerse us in a different type of enchantment that is equally stimulating to our imagination? Macdonald and Alsford suggest that digital culture serves to make the difference between the original and the copy incoherent; “the whole question of original vs. replica, reality vs. simulation, has yet to be thoroughly examined, particularly in the context of a society where the digitization of information offers to make the difference meaningless in some circumstances.” This could be seen as the same idea that Baudrillard suggests when he says that “the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible because the real is no longer possible.”(13)
When evaluating the effect of digital media on our museum culture, I think it is important to keep these ideas in mind. Whilst Baudrillard suggests that simulacra signifies the impossibility of rediscovering the real, I believe this could equally apply to museums as they stood one or two hundred years ago. While original museums may not have had simulations and 3D technology to immerse us in ‘the idea’ of history, they still positioned us to view culture and history in a certain, specific way. As Alsford and Macdonald point out, museum’s have always had an active role in cultural and historical representation, mediating our experience of the past; “even selecting which artifacts [sic] to display, as a representative sample of a subject, is an act of interpretation.”(14) The increasing inclusion of digital technology in the museum can as such be seen not as a radical diversion to original modes of representation, but the natural development of that representation as technology opens up more expansive and immersive ways to access the past. Further, as Griffiths suggests, the idea of immersion harks back to periods before archival museums, thus situating IMAX in a chain of “longstanding…illusionistic exhibits such as dioramas and period rooms.”(15) Thus, the history of museum culture and simulation can be seen as not so divorced from one another after all.
End Notes:
1) Griffiths, Alison. (2008) ” From Daguerreotype to Imax Screen: Multimedia and Imax at the Smithsonian Institution ” Shivers down your spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View, Columbia University Press, New York, p231
2) MacDonald, George F. & Alsford, Stephen (1995) “Museums and Theme Parks: Worlds in Collision?” Museum Management and Curatorship. 14:2, p137. .
3) Griffiths, 2008, p218.
4) Flynn, Bernadette. (2007) ” The Morphology of Virtual Space ” in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse eds. Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine, MIT Press: Cambridge, mass, p349.
5) Flynn, 2007, p350.
6) Flynn, 2007, p349.
7) Baudrillard, Jean. (1994) “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, p27.
8) Baudrillard, 1994, p2.
9) Flynn, 2007, p349
10) Baudrillard, 1994, p20.
11) Flynn 2007, p362.
12) Flynn, 2007, p349.
13) Baudrillard, 1994, p19.
14) Macdonald & Alsford, 1995, p143.
15) Griffiths, 2008, p207.
Bibliography:
Baudrillard, Jean. (1994) “The Precession of Simulacra”, in Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, p1-41.
Flynn, Bernadette. (2007) ” The Morphology of Virtual Space ” in Theorizing Digital Cultural Heritage: A Critical Discourse eds. Fiona Cameron and Sarah Kenderdine, MIT Press: Cambridge, mass: 349-369.
Griffiths, Alison. (2008) ” From Daguerreotype to Imax Screen: Multimedia and Imax at the Smithsonian Institution ” Shivers down your spine: Cinema, Museums and the Immersive View, Columbia University Press, New York: 195-231.
MacDonald, George F. & Alsford, Stephen (1995) “Museums and Theme Parks: Worlds in Collision?” Museum Management and Curatorship. 14:2: 129-147.
Web Sources:
http://www.titanicmelbourne.com/ Accessed: 19/04/2010
http://titanicmelbourne.com/gallery_exhibition.html Accessed: 19/04/2010
http://museumvictoria.com.au/titanic Accessed: 19/04/2010
http://screenrant.com/wp-content/uploads/imax.jpg Accessed: 28/04/2010
http://www.traileraddict.com/trailer/ghosts-abyss/trailer Accessed: 19/04/2010
Filmography:
Ghosts of the Abyss, 2003, James Cameron
Titanic, 1997, James Cameron
Spring has brought with it the call to life that has slumbered deep inside us since the end of march. Everyone in Melbourne has felt it in the last week; something slowly unfurling inside of them, stretching, drawing the curtains, taking its first tentaive steps towars the front door. The light skies and new greenery have called for tea parties, kite-flying, morning jaunts to the market and fast-driving with the windows down. Maybe this has something to do with the life drive; that calling to health and and equilibrium that balances out the destructive forces within all of us. Because new things make us all feel a little more sane. New leaves and new sun brought shoppers out in force yesterday, in search of things to make themselves feel a little newer too. I wasn’t immune—I bought new clothes last week for the first time in months. My overwhelmingly black wardrobe, which I had mentally penned as “classic and elegant” suddenly took on the characteristics of “dowdy and morbid” in the light that blasted through my bedroom window. I came home with new blue jeans, a red checkered shirt and a white t-shirt with an old film print on it. I got my eyebrows waxed for the first time in months too. Undeniably, the had weather awoken some innate urge within me to rejuvenate. And suprisingly, instead of the usual retail therapy guilts that go with any significant spending, I felt nothing but lighthearted as I emptied my bank account down to the remaining $4.49 that I’ll have to make do with until payday. Not that I need the Bible to justify my spendings, but if the lilies of the field get colourful new dresses for spring, why shouldn’t I?
I’ve always been a little skeptical of the idea that the weather acts as a mirror of ones interior state, but in the last week it seems foolish to deny it. Breathing in the spring air seems to have cleared away the cobwebs of stress and depression better than Zoloft ever could. Not that I don’t love a good gloomy day, in fact I rather enjoy reveling in the melancholy for a day or two. But after five months of it, warm yellow light and a fresh breeze proved to be exactly what was missing. It makes me wonder whether people that live in warmer climates really are significantly more mentally healthy and happy than the ones in the arctic.
But spring isn’t only a call to embrace the new; for me it seems fundamentally linked to a turn back towards the past. Towards other times, other things that happened under the same sun and the same weather a year or ten years before. Of course this can happen at anytime of the year, but spring seems to be the time to call up old friends, listen to old music, visit places you haven’t been to in months or years. During spring two years ago I got my drivers lisence. I met the season soaring along the bumpy back roads between Coldstream and Chirnside Park to work and back, past farms and bushland with the windows down so that within a week my dashboard was littered with hay-fever inducing grass seeds. I listened to Imogen Heap and Liz Phair incessantly, and even though it was a brand new era of my life, I remember feeling that it was as though the last eighteen years of my life had compacted together to deliver me into that one moment. Spring weather constantly calls me back to childhood, to the cyclical nature of life, and thus at the same time as it celebrates newness, the strongest feeling that I get from spring is one of wholeness. Wholeness is one of those words I hate, like purity and stability. But the “wholeness” feeling I get from Spring hasn’t anything to do with that, it’s a wholeness that seems to come from seeing life (past, present, future) as one; an intangible yet real thing working together to construct and order life.
Maybe I’m analysing Spring far too much. Maybe my all too visceral body is respondly purely and simply to its seasonal body clock, caveman style. Perhaps Spring only triggers a bout of nostalgia, serving to remind me of my provincial origins and the fact that deep down I’ll never escape a primal love of pop music. Either way, crawling out of the cave sure feels good.
Ava Gardner collage I had some fun making for Bron’s 17th Birthday. Bless photoshop.
So. Here’s an excerpt from a blog I wrote a month ago but decided not to post:
“Only two more semester now. Approximately 30 more hours of sitting, self-loathing, in tute’s full of wankers telling me exactly how not to write like a cliche, until everyone is writing in the same unique way.
When will the end come? Months of finding myself in Readings or Borders, compelled every time to march straight to the new journals and anthologies, opening them to the contents page in order to scan it for names that I recognise. Yes, I know that name. Had a tute with him last semester. She was at that seminar last month. That guy won that competition recently.
Then it’s over to the classics stand, eyes scrutinizing the spines with their famous names. Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Flaubert, Forster. Time to inject myself with some more 20th century fiction. Stuff myself with it till I’m suffocating with words, sentences, clauses, possessive nouns, cliches and idioms.
I write less and less. I sit down once a week at the most, with laptop or pen and paper. It makes no difference; the weight of the entire literary world bears down on my shoulders, heavier and heavier each time. Instinctively, the pen freezes. The words are wrong. They are all wrong. I haven’t used enough of the five senses. My adjectives are overdone, the sentiments that should be there haven’t come out right. I am not clear, not precise. I didn’t put the reader there. They were not with me. They were not there. That metaphor was over used, that entire sentence over worked. Fuck. I say it silently under my breath several times. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”
So. Self-indulgent, yes. But my little *creative writing crisis* reached it’s frenzied summit about a month ago, when I realised that I had actually started to hate the one thing that I’ve always loved. Nothing about it was fun anymore. It was all academic. All about failure, criticism, insecurity, bogus academia, prestige (or lack of it), some ridiculous idea of what it means to be “a writer”.
Worst of all I couldn’t tell whether it was outside forces (Melbourne Uni, Creative Writing tutorials etc) that were doing this to me, or whether in fact I was doing it to myself. Putting myself in this world, this literary, academic world has truly taken all the joy out of writing for me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Melbourne Uni. Subjects like Sex and Gender have fundamentally changed the way I see the world. Today I walked home contemplating the ideas that I had this time four or five years ago, thinking about the person I was then, and I found that I couldn’t recognize myself. I pitied that person, that person trapped in a confining belief system that was destroying them. By some kind of grace I’ve been allowed to go to Uni and do a degree that has literally opened me up from the inside out. Why let anything destroy that?
I know that I can write. I can write fiction when I want to, but I can also write damn good essays. I can think critically and put those thoughts down on paper with clarity. Feeling unworthy because I throw a few too many adjectives in now and then is ludicrous.
When I was fourteen or fifteen my brother and I spent our school holidays making up stories together. One he started he called the “Island Series” was about a community of families that lived on this little imaginary farming island. We drew maps and pictures of all the characters and the way that they all related to each-other (cousins, best friends, lovers, etc). Then we’d each pick a character and start writing from their perspective. We’d make up plots and each take on the parts of different characters. We planned for these things to be novels, and I think they often got to about ten or fifteen thousand words or so before we got tired of them and started something else.
Writing those stories was one of my absolute favorite things to do on winter school holidays. Getting lost in an imaginary world which I could create and explore through writing had to be about the greatest way I could think to spend my time. From primary school til late high school writing these long, novel-esque narratives about familys and relationships and adventures was all I did.
At uni that all went away. Instead of writing more, I wrote less. Each semester I’ve painstakingly churned out 3,000 words for assessment, something I wouldn’t have thought twice about as a kid. Sure, perhaps the quality was considerably better. After all, I had to think about language and sentence structure and originality in a way I never had before. At first, although it was hugely challenging, it was invigorating. I learned about different styles of writing, different avenues I could take. But somewhere in the last three years the love of creating things with language fell by the wayside, got lost in the angst of making sure I was writing the “right” way.
One of my saviors in the last few weeks was reading Mr Paul’s self-published book “Trippa”. Sure, it wasn’t perfect. It didn’t always get the grammar right. But it was fun. Clever, honest, page-turning. It reminded me of how much fun writing is. It was enough to make me realise that there’s a fundamental joy in writing that I want back. Like, if I could somehow shed this infected skin of academia and all the insecurities that have slowly grown all over it, if I could get back to that pure, raw excitement and love of writing I had when Chris and I wrote the Island stories, then something great could happen. I could do this, for real. Take the stuff I’ve learned and mix it in with the fun. Leave all the other stuff behind.
I’ve decided that I won’t be doing honours next year. And in all likelihood it won’t be in creative writing if I ever do. For now, all that pressure has to go. I’m not going to worry about publishing, about any of that shit. But over the semester break I’m going to spend some rainy days drawing up character profiles and dreaming up fantastical plots. And maybe then the words will start coming back.
Ok. I have a feeling this is going to be a very long post.
Have been debating whether or not to lower this blog to the level of a journal in which I thrash out my inner moral and existential conflicts/ ruminations for the internet world to see. Apart from a few posts such as ‘and she shall be called woman’ and ‘white fear’ I’ve steered clear of this for several reasons.
1. I know that people (friends, family, acquaintances) read this blog from time to time, and I would never want to hurt or offend them by disrespecting their beliefs. But I think that there is a difference between objecting to something, contesting a point of view, and being disrespectful to a person, and I think most people know this. So, I’m going to put that worry aside….
The next two reasons, I acknowledge, are inherently narcissistic ones:
2. These kind of questions are for me the most important questions in my life – discussing them for everyone to see is kind of like bearing my soul. This is what I am pre-occupied with most of the time. This is the ‘inner me’. Also I feel completely inadequate trying to talk about ‘big grown up things’ like philosophy and religion. Sure I’m fascinated by them, but it’s not like I have anything new to say…
3. Writing is my ‘thing’. Or what I consider to be my ‘thing’. It is difficult not to let my entire self-worth depend on whether both I myself and other people perceive me to be a good writer. I know this is going to sound incredibly melodramatic, but writing becomes almost a terrifying prospect for me sometimes. If I fail at writing, I fail full stop. I feel as though I have worthwhile things to express in words – on paper. My greatest fear is that I won’t be able to ‘get them out’. It becomes almost an exhausting prospect, then, because when trying to express myself, I’m using the very medium in which my entire self-worth seems inextricably embedded in – written words. Consequently, I’m hyper-conscious when writing that whatever comes out on the page when I’m putting 100% into it, is (at least as I perceive it) the sum of myself. That knowledge, and the knowledge that someone else, someone reading my writing, could be doing it better, could be more articulate, more eloquent… well it’s almost paralyzing.
I guess the connection between 2 and 3 is obvious. Using the medium my self-worth is ingrained in to try and convey the things most dear and important to me – things I’m still figuring out, things I don’t know enough of yet to even form an opinion on – seems like the hardest thing in the world. Why? Because my pride and self-esteem are both at stake. I’m putting the extent of my skills and knowledge out there while knowing that they are insufficient.
The biggest temptation for me is to procrastinate, or even refrain from writing until I ‘know more’. In my head, there is some kind of obscure level of understanding or general knowledge I need to reach before I can legitimately attempt to write about ‘the big stuff’. But I was talking a couple of months back about this with Alice and she said something like ‘when will anyone ever be done learning?’ So I think I need to relinquish my pride on this one.
I just finished reading The Catcher in the Rye today (which was on my JANUARY summer reading list). Even though it’s soppy I’m putting in a quote that comforted me when I read it.
“You’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and sickened by human behaviour…. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer , someone will learn something from you.”
This kind of prompted me to reconsider my reservations about expressing my thoughts. Sure, I’m not a theologian or a scientist or a philosopher or even a phD student. If any one of the above took me to task I’m pretty sure they’d annihilate me. But that’s not the point, is it? I have no delusions that my writing is pure poetry or that any of my ideas are original or that I comprehend the obscure thoughts of philosophical genuis’ . But I want to learn, to improve, to understand, so there’s no reason for me to be ‘ashamed’ of where I’m at now. And if people read this and think “god, that person’s stupid, they have no idea what the fuck they’re on about” well, they’re probably right! But I’m choosing not to care (or at least to try to not care 
) Because I don’t think I’m going to find the answers I’m looking for if I avoid questioning and formulating and expressing my thoughts. I think actually that for me, that’s exactly the way in which I might find a way to make sense of things. (That and alot of reading, of course…)
not limited to but including:
Björk. Whose name has become synonymous with ‘Iceland+ singer’….Or the obvious choice when playing the name game and presented with those clues.
I cannot listen to cocoon without getting shivers .
And she wears pretty face paint during performances…
[and lots of other crazy stuff]
Emiliana Torrini.
First heard her magical voice while driving through a windy forest in NZ, sun filtering through the leaves of the trees and all such associated cliches…. lovely.
Then nearly threw up when she was being played in Sportsgirl the other day. But I guess I wouldn’t have known that unless I myself had been in Sportsgirl. So, can’t complain. But when my favourite singers are played in shopping centres it just seems to break the spell 
Oh yes, she also does an awesome cover of White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane. You should totally download it (I don’t know how else to get it) …
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir.
The world’s first openly lesbian prime minister. OH YES!!!
Now, I admit that I know very little about her politics and could be getting prematurely excited. But as far as I’m concerned this is a “fucking awesome until proven not so” situation. Down with patriarchy and all that.
Feel free to add to the list of reasons why we should all visit iceland!
Nostalgia:- Noun. A wistful desire to return in thought or in fact to a former time in one’s life, to one’s home or homeland, or to one’s family and friends; a sentimental yearning for the happiness of a former place or time.
Clearly, previous posts have made evident my obsession with certain periods in history. While watching the movies, wearing the clothes and generally attempting to emulate life sixty years ago, I started to wonder if something wasn’t a little off. For one thing, if I really wanted to live like it was the 1940′s, I would have to go without alot of the modern conveniences I take completely for granted.
But what is the reason for us to continually look at the past and see it as somehow better and more ‘real’ than our reality now? ‘The good old days’ seem to timelessly stand for some kind of authentic and more ideal world, connoting ideas of wholesomeness, good clean fun, hard work and family values: things that are continually lost with the ‘next generation’. It doesn’t seem to matter who you talk to or how old they are, it’s always the same: ‘kids these days, they don’t get enough fresh air,’ they will say. There is already a movement of nostalgia for ‘kids of the 90s’ reclaiming the icons of their childhood; Power Rangers, Mr. Squiggle, Captain Planet, Tazo’s, Yo-yo’s, the list goes on.
But when we look back with such fondness, are we yearning for something that never existed? Is it possible that nostalgia lies? I say, yes. You only have to go to Sovereign Hill too see nostalgia in full swing. Period dress, horse and cart’s, panning for gold, quaint old shops – what could be more authentic? Well…. alot of things. What Sovereign Hill is missing is exactly what all nostalgia seems to fail to recognize. Where are the cultural problems of the time? Where are the ideologies that governed that society; the racism, the sexism, the class struggle? Where is the excrement in the streets, the poverty, the hardship? Nostalgia has buried those in the depths of human history and resurrected instead ‘the good old days’, something that was never real.
So what? You might say. Why does it matter? The Praise of Folly says “the reality of things… depends solely on opinion. Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be assured of any truth.” There is nothing stopping us from re-creating the past as if the ideal were real. But there is a danger, I think, in living purely in the ‘truth’ of nostalgia. In its extreme, nostalgia forgets the mistakes of history and runs the risk of having us learn them over again.
But a mild dose won’t do you any harm 
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