Alcoholism, maybe (12.0).
7.1
The design of literature is not to split specifically me into a thousand pieces tenuously linked. This sounds crazy but I am speaking, right now, to you in quotations; I have lived in untold houses. I have kissed all of their surfaces.
The design of literature is not to sow false memories that might twist up through my chambers creeping for light. Lie. Light.
7.2
Some time, not so long ago, I dreamed that the city of London had found a way of keeping its pigeons within the city’s limits. There would be no more migration to the south (London’s pigeons, in real life, mostly do not migrate). In the dream I thought, What a charitable gesture. That London would keep its avian problem to itself. But the conveyer of this information corrected me: ‘They’re not protecting other cities from an avian problem. They’re keeping the birds from being snatched up by competing cities.’
These iconic pests were, in my dream, the strict property of London.
When, yesterday, this story passed into my consciousness, I tried to remember where it had come from. At first I thought it had been an anecdote told by my friend Nadia, who often recalls odd stories she has read in Russian newspapers. Such as: Americans don’t have sufficient power in their homes to boil water by means of electric kettle, so they use a stove. In some cases, a microwave. Learning of the latter, the Australians responded with jolly surprise.
8.0
What I am saying is that I understand the total collapse of structured memory.
I asked myself, what does it mean to anticipate the loss of one’s rational function (7.0, 7.1, 7.2). ‘Dementophobia’ is an internet-science kind of answer, ‘a fear of losing one’s mind’. Though the chaos I witness creeping in at the margins of my consciousness is not the symptom of a phobia. I don’t fear. I comprehend, rather, the unity of the tangles and plaques, cell death, I comprehend tripping into the lacuna with my hands tied behind my back.
8.1
Tawhid is the Islamic concept of God’s unity. It is one of the core concepts governing the faith.
If everything is (7.1, 8.2). Then a single human could never be King. For example.
The worst thing in the world is when an Anglophone drags another people’s language into their burgeoning awareness of the limits of ontology. But I could have converted on the spot when I first studied this concept, tawhid. It described everything I felt to be true, the molten lava of everything knowable, but which I had never had a name for. And what has that got to do with a materially located method of worship.
8.2
Sudden knowledge that I, the puniest least consequential human being, am the same as the love feeling of looking at the ocean. The same as warm milk in a cow’s udder. A perspex box full of pink plastic children’s toys. A new knife set won in a raffle. The sound of someone’s voice you have known since you were twelve. Garden pavers. A too-big starched prison uniform. A baby’s first possum encounter. A drunk boy at the train station. An oyster’s pearl. Saint Catherine of Bologna. Drones owned by the United States military. The idea of bowling. The stiff flake of skin in the middle of her bottom lip. The existence of fascism. A well-curated newsfeed. The delicate tops of carrots.
You.
9.0
Genesis exodus leviticus numbers deuteronomy kings one kings two corinthians one corinthians two ruth is how I remember it, wrongly. Although truly I thought I knew it by heart. My teacher, whose daughters were goths, insisted on my learning it. She played the cello, I think, which was charmingly the same shape as her body.
When I go back to witness the true order of the books, I find I am again reading the Song of Songs.
Your name is oil poured out.
King Solomon, such a terrible patriarch. And yet.
I wanted to marry God (15.0).
10.0
The drummer from Silverchair, Ben Gillies, and his wife, Jackie, once sat next to me on a flight to Melbourne from Newcastle (16.0). They were relocating. So this was just before Jackie became a famous monster on The Real Housewives of Melbourne.
Ben ordered a tiny bottle of shiraz and a plastic box of crackers and cheddar, which I found tremendously lavish. I didn’t have things like twelve dollars to waste at the time. Jackie asked me and I said. I’M A WRITER. Jackie said, ‘My husband, Ben Gillies, is a famous musician.’ Ben said, ‘Jackie here is a famous psychic.’
‘Cool,’ I said. ‘So, Jackie,’ I asked. ‘What do you think is in store for me?’
‘You’re going to be big,’ she said.
I smiled coyly.
‘You’re going to be a very important music journalist.’
11.0
The feeling is devotion. (5.2, 8.2)
12.0
Alcoholics will tell you that if the first time you drank you blacked out, you are one of them.
The first time I fell down the stairs I felt nothing. Someone’s older sister showered me, draped me in cool sheets so that I might live. One of my brothers told everyone I got my stomach pumped. But really the nurse just gave me charcoal to drink and said, ‘Sleep it off.’ Probably they had girls with real stomachs to be pumped. Everyone always overdoing it. He just needed a brush with danger to enhance his social status. That danger was me.
12.1
But I didn’t choose hunger, hunger chose me.
But I didn’t choose. Hunger, hunger chose me.
But I didn’t. Choose, hunger hunger chose.
13.0
There will be problems inherent in the realisation of the International Museum of Rape.
13.1
Horrid. Rape, a stony, brutal word. The threat of the word possesses us: the way that we permit our legs to walk, throat boxes to talk, the way that we might place our arms at our sides as though it were natural to stand, or to possess a human body.
13.2
Ubiquitous. Like unity (8.1). Do you know? All human beings descend from one woman. The name given to her by scientists is Mitochondrial Eve. All our matrilineal lines converge in an unbroken chain to her. And early Homo sapiens commonly reproduced under rape’s aegis. It is through the rape of our maternal ancestors that each of us exists.
One could say that rape precedes all other acts of violence. All other oppressions. Without it there are no human beings on earth on whom to inflict violence. No bodies to put to work no children to starve no workers to stab open the coal face to pour carbon into the shimmering sky. How could this fact be contained within a building, a mission statement, a human mind.
13.3
Fraught. Monumentalising this suffering seeks to, in some small way, honour lives, life. But the victims, the depth and breadth of cultural, legal and narrative modes for dealing with (or not) this violence, ought not be translated into a single tongue, the lingua franca of the museum. The museum, after all, has functioned to produce singular forms of cultural authority.
13.4, 13.5, 13.6
Who will pay for it. Where will it go. How can we live with this.
14.0
A mental-health website: ‘The fear of losing one’s mind is just a symptom of anxiety.’
Going Crazy = Anxiety?
Anxiety can make you feel like you’re about to lose your mind. It can be incredibly debilitating, and cause you to think that something terrible is happening to you. But it’s often just caused by anxiety.
I suppose this is useful advice. In that it promotes a calm, rational approach.
My boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend once spoke in Greek to him all night.
‘I don’t speak Greek,’ he said to her.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m speaking it.’
She was also thinking in Greek, she told him, in case he or anyone else thought they might try to read her thoughts.
My boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend was scared of losing her mind.
She left him for Cyprus without saying goodbye.
But probably it’s often just caused by anxiety.
&nb
sp; 15.0
At eleven I hungered for cloistered life (11.0). Longed for visions of the virgin. Thirsty candles. The smell
of brass. Young knees violet with carpet burn. A sister’s palm stroking my back. ‘My little cat,’ she’d say to me. While I tried to remember the Beatitudes.
Blessèd are the poor meek mourn hunger merciful clean peace persecution.
Willed for the ghost to find me, strike my spine, shake me until I became alive (8.2, 12.1, 16.0).
But she never came.
At thirteen I took my magic elsewhere.
15.1
At twenty-eight I visited my patron saint. Catherine sits upright on a golden throne deep in the mediaeval bowels of Bologna. Stiff habit; her leather hand grips a ruby-encrusted crucifix. Patron saint of artists and temptations. Died 1463. Mysteriously mummified. Scientists can’t explain it. At her burial site, so it goes, somebody smelled roses. The sweet odour of sanctity. ‘We’ve got to get her out of there!’ is what I imagine they said. ‘Get her on that throne. And would someone please install some cherubs?’
Saint Catherine’s face is like a rotten apple.
In the dark chamber before my patron saint, a woman sat on her knees. Weeping. Hushed magic spilling from her lips. I did not take a selfie.
16.0
I suppose my lover in Newcastle was like God. In that I wanted to marry him too. What a pity. I waited for his blood to raid me, thick and pulsing. Wanted to feel the shock of me. For a line to fall down round me as opposed to you, wife. Of. Flame. What a shame.
Unlike God, his hands were purple.
I didn’t know about unity (7.0, 7.1, 8.1, 8.2, 11.0, 15.0).
17.0
After all my complaining about weddings in my life (and there has been complaining) I think this year I will have one. A bureaucrat’s office in Denmark, nation of handicapped mermaids and express weddings. There is love with him, just like a row of teeth or an avian problem (7.2), and a visa too. But mainly there is life. Swampy, vivid life. And shaking it until the line is buzzing.
17.1
Quaker lovers crumble to their unblinking knees in silence. No priest. Stare it out.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam would go off just the two of them and declare their new status. Word of mouth love amid terrible violence.
I don’t like these things, which signify unity, to be mediated by the King.
18.0
The International Museum of Rape will be a solemn affair, like church, where I once mis-placed my reverence. Church, though, being its own museum of rape, will have to pay dearly.
18.1
The International Museum of Rape will be a large dome, an echo chamber, where the name of every woman in the entire world, and the name of each of her children and the children she could not would not have, will speak itself. It will be built of inexpensive material, collapsible, transportable to every carpark in the world. The sound will be tremendous. Every surface will be rippled with braille. Animals will be welcomed. And each space will be decorated by a furious arrangement of flora. Thousands of domes will pop up around the globe, maybe even one hundred thousand. And what will happen within these spheres is momentary chaos, is harmonious dignity.
Someone might call this a temple.
19.0
My friend Adam was a superior altar boy. Much better than giggling me. The nicest guy, perhaps, I’ve ever known. When we moved, he and my drama teacher were rumoured to be the only ones who missed me. He dated a glamorous girl with a rose tattoo on her breast who worked at the fruit shop. Like Carmen Miranda. Adam’s father had killed himself. A boy teased him about that and my older brother punched him. My brother was punched in the face in return and has the black tooth still.
Sometimes the Father would give Adam a cigarette, or maybe Adam stole them.
When I remember Adam I feel touched as though a warm gas is spreading over me between the cells of my skin.
His name, though, might have been Sam.
19.1
Saint Catherine wrote the treatise The Seven Spiritual Weapons, a wild title for a wild book which, if written today, might provoke a schizophrenia diagnosis. But saints are like that.
She writes:
Whoever wishes to go up, let him rest not
From thoughts, from speaking works and doing deeds
And always exerting himself in God
but with discretion, so that when our adversary, like a wicked traitor, assails us from ambush, we can defend ourselves.
By ‘from ambush’ I mean, when under the appearance of good he wishes to kill you, for there is as much danger in too much as in too little.
19.2
Catherine was one of those sisters who allegedly died a virgin. Which is to say, she was a sister.
Before I was born, Mum, another Catherine, worked at an old folks’ home. She nursed a lot of ancient sisters as they died of cervical cancer. ‘It’s the most painful death,’ she told me. ‘Excruciating.’ So I was happy to announce my first Gardasil shot, the vaccination against the sexually transmitted human papillomavirus, which is the cause of cervical cancer.
Mum was shocked. ‘Maybe there’s another way of getting cervical cancer,’ she said. ‘I mean, they were sisters.’
Maybe it’s evidence that I’m from the time I am from, but I had always assumed that nuns lived in the nunnery as punishment for their passions.
19.3
But, you can see, Saint Catherine of Bologna knows that what possesses her is uncontainable (5.2).
Satellite
The librarian gestures towards a desk and chair by the window, so I follow her hand and sit down, spread out my books next to a young guy, seventeen maybe, who is eating a meat pie. It’s a quarter past ten in the morning and he’s eating a meat pie with sauce from a brown paper bag, and he’s reading a magazine about sneakers, and for this sequence of facts alone I adore him, but also I would like it if the pie funk was not so intense. The window is partially obscured by a council design, something to remind passers-by that this is a diverse community in case they hadn’t noticed. I am sitting now with a stack of histories of this small part of the world that I know best, but don’t really know, not really. When I was sixteen they didn’t have the desk at the library window, just an armchair or sometimes no furniture at all, so I’d sit on the floor with my backpack next to me in the sun, and I’d read about communism and existentialism and surrealism and dada, and I wore a beret, I think, and I saved my Macca’s income to pay for a French tutor because we didn’t have French at my school, and I knew I didn’t have a real education because that was the index. More than a decade later I’m sitting here breathing in meat-pie steam but now I am reading about chain gangs and scarred trees and bodies buried deep beneath the tram tracks and I don’t know French and I am horrified. I am trying to remain horrified lest this horror slips away, I am horrified by what started here two hundred years ago so that in the early 2000s I could dream about Europe propelled by junk-food money and mass-produced cliché hats made from the hair of an introduced species that has ravaged this land.
Now that I know I am parochial—and still I am embarrassed by this fact, by all the things I did not become—now that I know that the only constant in my life of elective insecurity is my proximity to a tram line, an artery thumping out north from the city, I am also certain I don’t belong here, because I don’t, but there’s nowhere else to go but ashes and dust, or Scotland. And now that my parochial character is clear to me it’s too late: my roots have dug in deep like those of the serrated tussock, which is an introduced grass species that thrives everywhere by choking its competitors, that avoids detection by passing for a native species, and this laboured metaphor is trying to say something about colonial figures like me who’d really like to not make things worse than they are, but who by simply accepting the yellow blotted sun through the pane of glass, by accepting the home built atop spirits silent and angry, have roots that are caught in the seams of rotten foundation
s. I know this fantasy will be demolished someday and the stories trapped beneath it will finally go free, but by then there’ll be no one there to listen, and this sadness is worse than anything.
When we first moved here, my family thought the neighbours sophisticated and cosmopolitan because unlike us they had friends over at all hours, talking into the night, drinking sweet black coffee in the kitchen we could see into from our side window. Later we learned that this late-night banter, the visitors at all hours, was grief; their teenage son had been bashed to death barely a block away on Sussex Street by someone not even from our grim and frankly quite horrifying neighbourhood. My parents held us close but they couldn’t always know where we were and with whom, and there was a lot of making friends with loner kids who lived there too, and tagging of abandoned factories and smoking Dunhills and then there was also romantic stuff happening, like once I gave my boyfriend a wristie in the underpass at the velodrome and just recently, just the other day, I drove out to the secluded carpark where instead of studying he and I used to park and fuck in his car in the black night under one yellow street lamp, and I sat, just the other day, in the car and I thought, how am I alive, how was I not dragged from that car and hurt right here, where the air smells like dirty oil-fried chicken because of Cammaroto Poultry on Charles Street and like burnt plastic because of Tontine Fibres on Bakers Road, and I was so in love with him, heavy, and I’m happy I suppose to be alive, but these things stick to you, they stick to you like burrs do in your socks.
These car nights took place in an empty lot next to one of the countless ‘reserves’ in the area, just patches of grass, dead spaces empty of promise, maybe one shrub or a grubby old grey box gum and some vintage-spec graf. At Sanger Reserve it said FUCK OFF OR TROUBLE and at Hosken Reserve it said LIVE RIDE WRITE ten metres tall, which was gloriously romantic, though I think in this context ‘write’ meant graf, and at a reserve without a name it said WATCH OUT FOR THE SUSSEX STREET BOYS signed off by Macca and Bluey. A council ‘reserve’—nothing but light and grass—is a site reserved for something else, a site of potential, the potential to cancel out the damage of the garbage factories or the potential to make life more pleasant for the young taxi drivers who lived next door to us who shift-shared their beds because they were too many for their little unit. But to me the council reserves were unkept promises and unmet potential, and rubbing that in people’s faces makes them want to cause trouble and bury their crimes in the knee-high patches of introduced grass species. These reserves are reserved for a time in the future when the council might dig up the soil to build spaces for deck chairs for residents in the future who deserve them, only to find the bodies, all the bodies, waiting to tell the stories that no one wants to hear.
Blueberries Page 6
