I powered off down the road: a beautiful day, sublime countryside. And as I turned my head to look out the driver’s-side window, there it was: a smell, faint but distinct. Rat on my cardigan.
•
This pleasant hillock. Who wouldn’t choose to sit down here?
After Georgia and I have finished our sweaty work, I roll the mower back in under the house. Most times I have a smile of satisfaction on my grimy face. The job is done. The little house made nice. Thank you, I say into the dry air under the house, to the people who brought the shells. And when I look beyond the mower to the cockles which dot away into the darker reaches, it seems weirdly right that the fibro scraps are also there. It’s fucked up and apt at the same time. The all of it is evidence that can’t be dodged.
That is what I learnt from my visit to Janet. And from Georgia, who was admired for her clear-eyed personal honesty, and the honesty of her writing, and whose forthrightness I’m always reminded of in the forthright act of mowing.
It is wrong to dodge the truth. And ultimately futile.
My home is set on an asbestos-contaminated midden.
That frankness is the only thing I have to offer back to the shell-gatherers.
What does that phrase, ‘asbestos-contaminated midden’, mean to me? To me it represents all the complications of our settlement history, all the messes that can never be undone or neatly separated out. The asbestos, the rat: they are symbols of the old, careless white fouling of the nest and white despoil, which has ongoing ramifications for us all. It cannot be pretended away. It happened.
The shells, well, it might seem strange to say, but they make me happy. They are a sign of life. They link me to humanity across time. Through them I make contact. From these very cockles and whelks—the ones right here—mothers and fathers and children once picked the meat and slurped it down.
With the mower parked, I go around to the front yard to admire my work. There’s no footpath, so the grassed nature strip (ironic term!) rises up to merge into the low hill on which the house is set. It looks especially good in the late afternoon, when the lawn’s undulations are given dimension by a mix of shadow and sun.
Though it might be a culturally misguided gesture on my part (built on a notional folly convenient to myself), I mow for all of us: for Georgia, and my family, and for the first people and their families. A well-maintained lawn has long been a sign in suburbia of a household’s overall order and good health, and so it pleases me to tend these grounds. The grassy knoll must be kept inviting.
In openness we are better off.
Self-portraits
I’m running a test. On the gear I’ve hired. I pull the curtains together and shut the door to make the afternoon room as dark as possible. I’ve got a video camera set up on a tripod at the foot of the queen-sized bed I sleep in in the house up the coast. An infrared light is clamped to the top of the wardrobe door, which I’ve wedged ajar with a chair. Power boards and cables run over the floor. I open the viewfinder of the Sony camera. Information appears, but the picture behind it is grainy. I look for a button on the camera that the guy in the hire place showed me. There it is, marked NIGHTSHOT. The word instantly appears on the screen and the picture of the bed is suddenly crisp monochrome with an overall green cast. I grab a nearby shirt and wave it in front of the infrared light while straining to also keep sight of the viewfinder. It’s the only way I can think of to check the light’s working properly, and where it’s pointing. The human eye can’t see infrared. That’s how come you can sleep with it on. The shadow of the flopping shirt crosses the pillows, so everything seems okay. Later, lying in bed that night, I will see a science fiction cluster of red dots in the glass of the small lamp aiming blankly at me. Twenty red dots, to be precise. (The next morning I get up and count them.) No glow emanates from them. Twenty dull red dots aiming blankly at me.
Everything’s set.
A last glance at the viewfinder. How odd. In that confined area of sunken green, I intend to put myself.
•
When I began writing personal essays it was never my intention to blurt out a lot of autobiographical details, but once I’d written a few I realised that, cumulatively, some kind of portrait would inevitably emerge. That got me interested in the idea of investigating painted self-portraits and commentary about them. It also made me wonder what I might find if I looked more deliberately at myself. In fact, when I realised that many of my essays were about looking, it seemed only fair to look more directly at myself. That’s when I came up with the idea of filming myself asleep and doing a day of selfies.
I would film myself over consecutive nights while I slept (the first night in wide shot, the second in close-up), and throughout the intervening day take a photo of myself every fifteen minutes. This would be done up the coast at the holiday house. It would give me a cache of material about myself, awake and asleep, over a particular period in time. With it I might examine myself: perhaps to construct a self-portrait; perhaps to more closely investigate myself as an artist-writer.
What would I see if I could see something of the usually unseeable me, the outside me, the me that was otherwise not knowable to myself? I’d never been much interested in the appearance of my walking-around body, being too busily engaged looking and thinking outwards from behind its eyes. But now I had a good reason to boomerang that gaze and an objective framework in which to do it. I didn’t want to make any advance guesses as to what I’d find, nor did I want my behaviour in front of the camera to be self-conscious and taint the outcome. Hence so many selfies. By turning them into a chore I’d bore myself into being unself-conscious—although, to be honest, it’s probably an understatement to say I have no natural inclination towards posing. The selfies would provide a full record of me in the course of a day and perhaps I’d accidentally catch hold of a hitherto-veiled aspect of my person. Secretly I didn’t expect to get much from them, but it was hard to be as neutral over the sleep component of the experiment. That idea, when I first thought of it, immediately seemed recklessly thrilling. Sleep is such a fascinating realm, and the thought of being able to visit ourselves while we are disappeared in it is at once compelling and unsettling. Notionally, I intended to cross a boundary and go where, in nature, I did not belong. Just to question the state, which we customarily take for granted, seemed somehow subversive. Is it not strange that come nightfall we obediently take ourselves off, en masse, to lie down like grubs? To the nightly hiatus we surrender, in our dormitories vulnerable and soft, at the mercy of any who would open a window, pick a lock, light a match.
To regenerate, we have no choice but to plug into sleep, and yet, while rationality rests from leadership, who are we? In the dwelling place of dreams and sexuality, who are we and how do we behave?
•
Weeks before any filming took place I did my usual thing and went on a research binge. I got hold of a pile of art books and then I went to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. From room to room I roamed, armed with an incomplete list of the self-portraits currently hanging, but I wondered if they would be easy to identify anyway. My art books tell me the ‘look’ of self-portraits is commonly one of mastery, containment, self-possession. It may even tend to the imperious—the artist presenting themselves as creator and controller of mini-worlds. Because artists often paint themselves from a mirror, a strange feedback loop can occur which does not happen in other portraits. The eyes of the artist bore into the surface of the mirror: the looker endlessly looking at the looker. But another thing happens too: the viewer, in standing in front of the artist’s portrait, replaces the mirror, setting up the possibility of a conceptual swap, whereby the viewer may ‘become’ or ‘enter’ the artist. In looking, both the artist and the viewer might glimpse some truth about the artistic personality with its gift for ‘insight’, or something important about art itself.
As it turned out, at the gallery it was pretty easy to pick a self-portrait. While there were some detached works where the a
rtists seemed only to be asking, What form do I take as an object and how does the light fall on me?, the majority had an unmistakable intensity about them. An air of isolation clung to these sitters. Self-possession did indeed seem common. This was sometimes depicted as determination, and occasionally as full-blown defiance. There was wariness and weariness. There was melancholy. Most subjects looked prepared to give whatever their vocation asked of them, even while expecting it would never be enough or serve to much good.
Two portraits in the gallery stood out. One by Sidney Nolan and the other by Margaret Preston. In both, as in a multitude of self-portraits, the subjects hold palette and brushes, an identifying cliché you’d think artists would want to avoid, but important of course as the mediating tools they use to communicate with the world. It’s the way they are held that’s interesting—almost always between the artist’s body and the viewer, and acting as a kind of demarcation or barrier between the artist and the world. Sometimes the palettes and brushes obviously look like shields and weapons, but weapons deployed for self-defence rather than attack.
In the Nolan picture (Self Portrait, 1943), the artist is daubed with war paint. Gallery notes say that at the time of painting he was a soldier in the army, and a year later he went AWOL, but to me that’s only incidentally relevant. There’s far more going on. Nolan’s china blue eyes are hurt and questioning. Dominating the foreground are brushes spiking out of a palette. Like the look in Nolan’s eyes, the brushes actually work in two directions—going into and out of the painting. They resemble arrows stuck in a target but fired with the aim of piercing the artist; and, at the same time, they look to be tools of resistance parried outwards in defence.
In her self-portrait of 1930, Margaret Preston is apparently serene. She wears a black dress and stands in front of a pink brick wall. Her equipment is rendered in subdued tones and naturalistically. There is nothing aggressive about them: as objects they make no comment. Nevertheless, the way Preston holds them squarely in front of herself keeps her at a slight remove from the viewer. Her black dress is very plain and strong. In fact, she looks as if she is ministering, as if she has just come from a funeral to a home where a wake will be held. Instead of the priest’s ritual equipment of Bible and chrism, she has brought palette and brushes. They are the necessary accoutrements of her office, but as a professional she knows not to expect them to deliver truths which are a comfort to others. Preston’s clear-eyed gaze passes the viewer’s left shoulder to fix on something beyond. She will be calm and pleasant at the wake but hold herself apart from the emotions of others. She understands, as they don’t, that art, like death, cannot be swayed from its overall impersonal course. Its terms must be accepted and ‘got through’.
•
CLICK.
At 6.36 am I wake and immediately reach for my phone to take the first of what will be 113 selfies. (If you’re thinking the maths doesn’t work, you’re right—sometimes I took extras by mistake.)
I get up and stop the video. I remove the camera from the tripod and hook it up to my laptop to download the entire night’s worth of vision. The download takes a geological age. Which is nerve-racking. It’s been a bother sorting out the technical side of this experiment given the low light conditions, the time span, battery life and file size, so when the transfer is finally complete it’s a massive relief.
While it’s tempting to break out the popcorn and settle in for an extended viewing session, I don’t. I’ve got another night to go before I have to take back the gear, and I want to save up my viewing impressions. I restrict myself to a quick check: there I am in my nightie climbing into bed; jump to the end of the vision; there I am at dawn climbing out.
I’m wearing a nightie because I always do. I gave up caring if it was daggy in my late twenties when I realised I hated sleeping naked: I get too cold. I suppose if I was naked it might add something to the experiment, because there I would be, basic and animal; literally exposed if I kicked off the covers. But it’s not the usual me and it might change my behaviour, and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.
Intermittently the timer goes off on the phone. Another selfie. Snap.
With the successful capture of the night’s vision, I suddenly feel good. Really good. Too good to stay inside. It worked! I’m the sort of happy that, on an unseasonably hot, windless autumn day, needs to go walking for three hours. TIMER-SELFIE-CLICK. I throw a few things into a backpack, including a selfie-stick, and head off up to the ridge and the national park, determined to go all the way to Tallow Beach. There won’t be too many more days left like this before winter comes and I can’t let this one be lost.
•
High up on the ridge the orange dirt of the fire trail ribbons out in front of me and behind. Low scrubby trees and coastal heath give way to views on my left of the ocean and to views on my right of the estuary; sometimes both at once. This is the summit of my place. The estuary, cradled between steep bushy hills, is in many ways my cradle, the childhood arena of family holidays, loved for its wharves and its fish and its tides. It’s where I learnt to look as a kid. In adult life, also on holidays, I have come to know the beach, the coarse grain of the sand, salmon riding in the walls of waves, salt misting the headland come late afternoon. Up here on the ridge I straddle the two parts of myself: the one enclosed and kept close; the other that wants no constraint and will not conform.
This would be a good spot to scatter the cremated gravel of my bones.
The timer goes off on the phone. So far I’ve pretty much been randomly adjusting the length of the selfie stick when I snap pictures so I’ll appear sometimes closer and sometimes further away. I don’t care how I look, or about the background, or even how the photos turn out technically. I haven’t posed once, but this time I intend to, because I’ve just stepped up onto a rock and seen my destination below. I’ve never set foot on Tallow Beach before—so strange that in all these years I’ve never made the effort to go the extra way there.
Only then does it occur to me that I’m breaking the terms of my experiment in quite a major way: I’m about to do something out of the ordinary, something I’ve never done before. But actually it’s entirely fitting as another expression of my inquiry into the unknown—and proof that I don’t like being told what to do, even by me.
I take a picture of myself pointing down to the beach, in the end not striking a valiant attitude, but one that shows me to be cheesed off. I’ve noticed specks moving around down on the sand and I’m saying: There! I’m going all the way down there and still there will be PEOPLE! Urrgh!
The outrage in the pose is mock but the impulse behind it is genuine. I’m disappointed. I presumed I’d have the whole place to myself and now the outing is slightly spoilt. The unknown isn’t so unknown if it’s known by other people. I’ll have to skulk around avoiding the PEOPLE, and in doing so miss out on seeing that end of the beach. Gone will be the wholesale feeling of wildness I hoped to have when there alone.
As I turn to leave my ridge-top eyrie, I catch a glimpse of the phone’s screen. The camera app is still open but the selfie mode has automatically reverted to the normal setting. For a half-second I see my shadow, thrown forward on the platform of sandstone on which I’ve been standing.
Though it’s not on my schedule, I stop and take the shot, because I recognise that looming, over-tall shadow, cut off at the shins. It’s the main character out of my failed colonial baroque novel. He also walks alone in nature. Because he wishes, and because he has no choice.
In one way I’m not that surprised to see him here. This is exactly the kind of place he’d like to be in.
•
The road down is steep and undulating, and strewn with small stones which roll like ball bearings under my shoes. I have to take short steps and go slow. But I don’t care. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to get there. This outing can be whatever it is for as long as it wants; there’s nothing and no one I have to check in for. And that restores my relaxed and e
xpansive mood after the unwelcome intrusion of PEOPLE.
When the road levels at the bottom I take a track through the tea-tree down to the beach. After the trees, but before the beach proper, the path opens onto a flat area of tufty grasses and low-to-the-ground, wind-wizened bushes. Exquisite, obdurate things, variously hard-prickled. If you could bear to grab a handful and close your fist on them, through the pain you’d feel the full glory of their stubbornness. TIMER-SELFIE-CLICK. Great exhalations of salty breath come off the surf, which powers in.
The PEOPLE are at the northern end of the beach—jumping around. I turn south. Make for the point, there to sit on a rock and eat my apple lunch.
CLICK. One cheek bulging with apple.
•
There are obvious reasons why artists may choose to paint a self-portrait. To use themselves as a model when no other is available. To advertise their skills. To record their own likeness for posterity—perhaps as a way of achieving a kind of immortality, or at least to thwart mortality. To present a ‘true’ self, the inward self, the creating self, a desired self, a reviled self, an alter ego (think Grayson Perry). The traditional use of a mirror no doubt encourages thinking about doubles and replicas. Doppelgängers.
Doppelgänger: from the German words ‘double’ and ‘walker’ or ‘goer’.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica says: ‘double goer’; in German folklore, ‘a wraith or apparition of a living person, as distinguished from a ghost’.
•
The apple tastes good. As I munch I see a little goat path which goes up and around the rocks behind me. It might lead all the way to Box Head, where the estuary opens to the sea. A marked national parks’ trail on the ridge top is the official way there, but this absconder’s route, clinging to the hillside, appeals. It’s impossible to resist the lure to at least see around the first point, where surely there’ll be no more PEOPLE.
CLICK.
The path leads first to Little Beach, a sandy nip between the curved embrace of rocks. I take a scenery photo while I’m there, despite reckoning the beauty marred by the graffiti somebody has painted on a big rock in the middle of the beach. Later, when I look properly at the photo, my dismay at that incursion is replaced with a smile. The lime green symbol on the rock is no scribble. Its position is strategic (the ocean spreads out behind it), and it is well and carefully executed. It’s a single, wide-open eye, with long eyelashes. A third eye. Only via the photo was its mad and entirely coincidental relevance to my project made apparent. The hippie universe was looking back at me to throw in its own comment.
Night Fishing Page 15
