by Luke Carman
All this would have come to no more than a wishful pornography but for an email that came my way a few months ago. The email was nondescript, full of formalities. It asked me, on behalf of the University of Wollongong, to come and be an artist in residence for their writing program. This was not surprising. After all, my collection, A Dozen Doorbells on the House of Time, had won the Premier’s Award for New Writing. Since that win the invitations had come thick and fast and I, overwhelmed, stayed in my room and deleted them so as to convince myself that they had never occurred. The nondescript email from Wollongong University would have been no different, but the name at the bottom gave me occasion to halt the cursor above the little digital garbage can. It was signed, sincerely, by Dani – now, apparently, a senior lecturer in English. I closed the trap of my laptop and shivered so hard that the knots in my spine cracked. I rose from my bedridden slump with a thrill of dread and ecstasy.
‘We can offer accommodation, at the campus lodge, should you require it.’ A strange sentence that stood out as somehow enigmatic amidst the propriety of the rest of the email. Or was I reading wrongly, confused by my own suppressions and dreams? Even now, I am not sure if there is something meaningful about that sentence, but nevertheless, it thrilled me to find it in my inbox. Immediately, my mind filled with fantasies of seeing Dani again – this time, both of us adults, accomplished, seasoned and wise.
As it turned out, I was the only man, woman or child at the lodge during my stay on the oddly isolated island of Wollongong University. A security guard in dark blue uniform towered over me at the entrance to the campus and made me repeat my name three times before going upstairs into the huge concrete expanse of the administrative office to find the keys for my accommodation. When she returned she sternly handed me a card and pointed to a number underlined on it. ‘That’s the number to call if you need any help,’ she said, almost threateningly. She was vague, too, on directions, and I circled the campus three or four times trying to turn down the right road towards the lodge.
The keys fed me into room number 6. The keyring included a large metallic disc, perhaps to prevent it being treated carelessly, engraved with a dog’s head that also resembled a dove. On entering the apartment I threw down my bags and stripped off all my clothes, and ran naked and flapping up to the bathroom mirror as if to catch it by surprise; but what would you know! It surprised me! With the weak light of the late afternoon behind me, I was alarmed by the glow of my own muscularity, thought it for a moment a stranger, and in a panic, hurled a flurry of punches at the reflected figure who, after the initial shock subsided, became, in my mind’s eye, a critic named Stephen Triste who had treated me badly. I hated him and his stupid sentiments. Often we would fight in my head. Always I won. In Triste’s Twitter picture he looks solid of jaw and thoughtful – hand curled around his chin to demonstrate the weight of his mind at work. I wasn’t sure how the fighting would go when this image was the extent of my acquaintance with him. Later, at some sad affair at the Writers’ Centre in Rozelle, I saw that his profile picture was one of those magic moments in his life when he had looked good. In motion, as he descended a long staircase in that old colonial relic, his jaw was a wispy thing and his shaved head balanced like the bulb of an unburnt match propped atop a fleshless framework of pencil-thin elbows, knees and neck. After that vision of him – plodding down the old staircase with two complimentary cupcakes in his hand and a lanyard around his neck, like a puppet in a noose – he fought poorly in my fantasies, his wild swings bouncing off my head, and I would go so far as to say that the fantasies weren’t fun any more. Triste wrote in his review of A Dozen Doorbells that I risked rehearsing the basest of masculine clichés. What a thing to write! Only a man as thin and frail as he was could write such drivel!
When night came upon the lodge, I lay on the made bed, having written my lecture for Dani’s students, and I rolled into a dream of chasing Triste through the science quad at my old high school, with the September sun blinking at me through the crow-crowded ghost gums. In the dream I was long-haired again, a young man, soft with baby fat, and I grinned as we ran through the breezeway past the toilet blocks, and Triste, a miniature version of himself, had Sophocles or something stoic tucked tightly to his chest. He was beginning to wheeze with asthma and terror, and he hoped, I knew, that the mysterious dignity of ancient times would bleed from the book into his cowardly heart, or at least transport some dimension of his essence into the long gone past, which, since it is only written down in books, seems so much less shameful than the living nightmare of a boys school in Liverpool with spikes and barbed wire wrung around its head like a crown of steely thorns. There was no intent in my heart to catch him, only to herd him out onto the sports field until we both collapsed into the buffalo grass with the pure blue above us – me laughing tears of happiness, him crying into the grubby earth and beating his bird-boned fists into its hardness. That’s all, to lay there for a while, history rewritten.
When I awoke from that dream, I didn’t know whether it was still the first night at the lodge, or the second day. The curtains were drawn and the clock was unplugged. My phone was dead and I couldn’t find the charger. The lecture notes lay on the table beside the bed. They were, I realised with dawning terror, an indulgent litany of jokes in bad taste. I promised myself I wouldn’t swear during the lecture on this occasion, since it always shamed both myself and the students, and of course Dani, too, would frown on it, but I knew somehow that I would do it anyway.
What a strange thing! I dressed and gathered my notes and went down the stairs with my feet echoing off the stucco. It made me turn back a few times to see that no one was following behind, and I felt, stupidly, great pity for the maid who must go up to my room on those stairs soon, only to see that the lone guest did not wish to be disturbed.
On my way out I hesitated at the double doors of the lodge’s conference room. It was on the ground floor, right by the entrance, and it was locked, but my room key worked it open. It would shame me greatly to tell you why I opened the doors, but I might as well be honest – I secretly hoped to see Dani waiting for me inside. She was not, of course. Inside there was a long table with little speakers in its centre; ten chairs, all out of fashion by several decades but well maintained or underused, some scratches along their wooden surfaces the only sign of life; and an old stereo behind glass in the corner. The lake outside the room, which I’d spent some time staring into on first arrival, was still too dark to make out, but its watery presence seemed to press up against the lodgings in the darkness as if it might make a move into the dreams of guests – dreams in which the whole squat brick building would perhaps slump sideways towards the lake and sink cartoon-like beneath the mud.
I sat at the head of the table, finding by the wall something to plug my phone into, and felt like a chieftain’s body at a conference of ghosts before I noticed a tattered dart board displayed on the hip-high cupboards. I plucked out one of the darts and sat back down at the head of the table to toss it across the wide empty room – the green fins whirled and the dart’s needle sunk uncannily into the bullseye. What a shot! It truly was one in a million from where I was sitting, and I leapt up and punched the air in triumph before I could restrain myself. I stole a glance at the glass doors as if expecting God to be standing there shaking his head at this loss of control, but it was too dark outside to see anything for certain. Somebody, not the Lord obviously, might have been watching me from the gloom: a stray senior lecturer maybe, wandering the campus and spying through the curtains of the lodge like a poet in search of desire. Nevertheless, it didn’t matter – no one was around. I sat back at the table, feeling oddly uncomfortable about the way my legs were angled. Who had sat here before? I wondered, bouncing a little on the burgundy cushion as though there might be something in its propulsion that my arse might divine in way of an answer. What a strange thing to do, I decided, and besides: was that the best question I could come up with? I had to ask myself: is that the sort o
f query Maurice Blanchot would ponder were he caught alone at night in a Parisian tavern? His name made its way into the mix of my thoughts because one of his books was in the lodge, slumped to the side of the library shelf, apparently recently read. Taking the book’s displacement as a hint of its quality, I had read the first pages – something about a stranger who wanders into the city and is held indefinitely in detention for his own happiness and the sake of the people. The story was ruined by the local atmosphere of the country, where such questions came too shamefully close to the bone. Instead of enjoying the spare prose, I made creative writing critiques in the margins: ‘more detail needed – we don’t get much description of the protagonist’s physicality, and there is little to no specificity regarding the setting – without these things it is hard to connect with the story’. It gave me great pleasure to correct a famous Frenchman.
Eventually, my phone charged and the sun rose and, just as I started to doze in my chair, it seemed suddenly to be time to go and give the lecture. I wandered along a duck-dotted path that wound its way into the campus amidst the lively chatter of students swarming the university in the cool morning air, their hands in pockets and chins tucked into scarves. I followed the directions Dani had sent me to a large lecture room. A fat man with thinning hair on his round head was standing behind the lectern, in front of a huge wall onto which a computer desktop image of an Appalachian mountain was projected. He greeted me with a meaty handshake. His name was Damien, and he informed me, with his eyes squeezed in a fierce welcome, that he’d read and loved A Dozen Doorbells.
‘Where’s Dani?’ I asked.
Damien frowned and his jowls dropped down from his jaw. ‘Oh! Professor Herrick is on a residency in Paris! I apologise if that wasn’t clear – but to be honest, I was the one who asked her to invite you. I think A Dozen Doorbells on the House of Time is a masterpiece – a total inversion of the Australian voice! It is not, as it happens, completely unlike some of my own work! I’m very pleased to have you here… Anyway, I’ll tell you all my thoughts afterwards; here come the students – they’ve all read your book too you know!’
Damien eased into his front-row seat and winked at me, smiling openly while the room filled with young people and their mumbled morning chatter. The persistent interjection of the lecture-room door opening and slamming shut gave the students’ muttered exchanges a savage punctuation. The talk was titled Writing the Sub-City, and I intended to show them an extract from Antigone Kefala’s Sydney Journals in order to demonstrate to Dani that I had moved away from Henry Miller. I needed her to know that I was no longer obsessed with erections made of lead and the ghosts that are lost on university campuses.
The students shrugged through the hour and shifted in their seats. To make matters worse, I had left my copy of Kefala’s Journals back in the lodge, and I said so to them aloud, like this: ‘I’d like to draw your attention to…something I’ve left back at the apartment!’ I thought it would make at least some of them snicker to say it that way, but I heard nothing except my finger smacking the microphone stand when I turned back to the slideshow on the lectern computer.
In her journals, I explained to the furrowed brows on the bright white faces, Kefala says that when she first came out of Europe she and her friends suffered from the lack of historical weight in the air and water, along the streets of the city, and in the cemeteries with their milky white accoutrements through which strong winds were always blowing and the pool-blue sky seemed so garish and indifferent to elemental human life. Growing older, I told them, as Kefala grows too, I begin to see how archaic a vision she was sketching. Then again, I admitted, in this new century, that I barely recognise, with its inverted myths of slouch-hatted soldiers, their ghostly images projected onto the Harbour Bridge at night, or slung in laser-light upon the sepulchral curves of the Opera House – with the Light Horsemen eternally staked into the earth between the crossed legs of the colossal motorways paved over the arse of the western suburbs – it would be hard to argue with the high tone Kefala takes, and all her perceptions of emptiness. Beside Damien, whose jowl flexed and shook its way through the talk, more attentive to my voice than its owner I thought, who held his hand up to tap at the bum of his chin on occasion, his tight eyes darting over everything in the room, there was an empty seat. If Dani were not in Paris, I supposed as I read from my notes, she would be sitting in that seat. If she were here her long curls, I realised, would be the only golden element in the botched hermeneutics of the lecture room.
‘If you lose the flow of your story, your setting, your characters, for even a moment – it’s all gone and you’ve fucked it!’ I said. They shifted, listless in their seats, with a thousand pantomimes of indifference all upon me at once. Death was in their youthful gaze.
Later, back in the conference room with my board of the dead, I tossed a second dart. Unbelievable! I said with wide eyes. Another bullseye! This time it was the one with the blue fin, like a swordfish. It was stuck into the red centre of the board perfectly alongside the earlier miracle – the two darts suddenly appearing like lovers. No celebration this time: just a disembodied smile. In the dark windows of the room I saw the expression’s glow reflected back at me. It was only a faint reflection on the surface of the glass, and now only a memory, but what a lonely smile it was.
DREAMS IN THE DAYLIGHT COUNTRY
1.
To try and read strange writing, signifies that you will escape enemies only by making no new speculation after this dream.
GUSTAV US HINDMAN MILLER
This is how one becomes, through dreams, the perfect autodidact. The dream itself might not be much chop, but then, my fiction is so short that I can dine out on even the briefest, vaguest visions for an entire book. It might not be a particularly interesting dream either – but then, the audience for Australian short fiction is so slim that getting to know the desires of readers is, for me at any rate, something of a waste of time. Besides, what kind of writer concerns themselves with what the reader wants? Not a very interesting one. For interesting writers, the relationship between reader and writer is pure ‘sub and dom’. The writer commands, the reader obeys. William S. Burroughs once said that teaching ‘writing’ was like ‘trying to teach someone how to dream’. I suspect he had it right in a sense: if you cannot dream – in one form or another – then don’t bother writing at all. Perhaps those with pretensions of teaching fiction to the young and the restless should be more concerned with the ethereal realms than they seem to be at present. Politics and imagination are overlapping magisteria – each realm need not be addressed in the absence of the other – but it appears to me that the literature most in production in this troubled country is a little too beholden to its own seriousness, and far too down to earth. The rabid effacement that commercialisation demands of the humanities in our higher education institutions is one destructive factor – a ‘community arts’ culture that seeks to trade on the commodification of every aspect of the ‘writer’s life’ and reduces literature to an economy of gossip is another. But there is plenty of blame to go around.
In the introduction to Cultural Amnesia – a collection of essays derided for its self-indulgence and its many egomaniacal liberties – Clive James, that shamefully unabashed Australian polymath, writes:
We could, if we wished, do without remembering, and gain all the advantages of travelling light; but a deep instinct, not very different from love, reminds us that efficiency would be bought at the cost of emptiness. Finally the reason we go on thinking is because of a feeling. We have to keep that feeling pure if we can, and, if we ever lose it, try to get it back.
These words are with me almost every day. There is an air of dreamlessness – a thick, thoughtless sleep – in the atmosphere, as if our collective meetings with the unconscious have become narrowed to a cinematic aperture cliché. They have been usurped from us by benign, unfeeling hands. I don’t know what is worth remembering, but I know the electric feeling that is too often missing
from the world when it is written on the page. The pure light comes in from here and there, like a secret whispered between friends. It is there in the feverish marginalia and the liquid monomania of Kate Middleton’s Ephemeral Waters, in the plangent logorrhoea of PiO’s Fitzroy, in the ectoplasmic cine-poetry meditations of Miro Bilbrough’s Being Venice, in Holly Isemonger’s necro-sexual political prose psalms, in the distended alt-text ouroboria of Oliver Mol’s Lion Attack, and in every line of the tectonic linguistic ecologies that make up Alexis Wright’s mesmerising novels. Through the dreamers in our midst, the histories and memories of the twenty-first century rise over the dim horizon like the smoke of spectral djinn, looming entities without organs and boundaries – new and ever queerer visions for tomorrow’s children to follow, and forget.
2.
To dream that you are writing, foretells that you will make a mistake which will almost prove your undoing.
GUSTAV US HINDMAN MILLER
Dr Maria Angel was the woman who taught me everything the neophyte writer need know about their subject – and she did it almost entirely through the prism of dreaming.
