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Muzzle

We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.
—Werner Herzog

I read The Neverending Story when I was a teenager. I hardly remember the plot and I have only vague memories of the film (which I saw for the first time in 2009); it was the images in Michael Ende’s book that caught me—plains full of softly waving golden grass, crumbling buildings and a melting rainbow sky. There were pages and pages of this, of pure shifting shape and concept, colour, spectacle, adventure—imagination for the sake of imagination. And then, in juxtaposition, the plague of Nothing—darkness, a hollowness, sucking the colour and the joy out of the world. Sucking the world out of the world.

Artists know that the slip between reality and imagination is, in a sense, not really a slip at all. Writers know that stories exist in a way that makes the dichotomy of fact and fiction artificial. The popular fantasy genre takes as its premise that what occurs in the story exists in a world other than our own. Magical realism, on the other hand, more directly challenges our understanding of this world. ‘Normal notions about time, place, identity, matter and the like are challenged, suspended, lured away from certitude.’(1) Salman Rushdie talks about the writing of Midnight’s Children: ‘I wanted to make it as imaginatively true as I could,’ he says, ‘but imaginative truth is both honourable and suspect.’(2)  The child in Pan’s Labyrinth knows the magic is real, even if the adults have turned a blind eye. Novels like Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria and Gabriel García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude merge history and fact with the fantastic to the point where it is almost impossible to tell where the real leaves off and the ‘magic’ begins. And this is precisely the point: by treating the fantastic as an inextricable part of the actual, such stories force us to question ‘the political and metaphysical definitions of the real’ in which we anchor our lives.(3)

It’s the job of the fiction writer to slide between the real and the imaginary and to put these concepts into words. To create something physical (a text) from something that is not (an idea). To create new worlds from those that already exist. To challenge. This is dangerous. Imagination is dangerous. It’s dangerous in the same way that fear is dangerous. It reminds us of our mortality, of our fallibility, of the slipperiness of our experiences, our knowledge, and the simplicity of death. But the imagination is bridled only by itself. We may allow of our imaginations what we would never allow of our realities, and in the private space of our minds, whole other worlds may exist. Every now and then they test us. Stories and ideas push us, push our realities and our understanding of the things we can touch and taste and see. By imagining the impossible we wonder about the realm of the possible. And this is dangerous.

Censorship attempts to limit the imagination. Censorship limits what is shown to be thought in order to limit what it is possible to think. It is at direct odds with the project of the artist, the writer, the creator and the innovator, because it curtails the hypothetical, the imaginary, the possibility. The role of art in a society is not to replicate the actual but to reflect it; to reinterpret it, to represent it: to re-present it. Its purpose is not just aesthetic but social and political. Aesthetics are the medium through which it draws attention to itself. ‘Culture’ is not a fringe concern; it is a representation of how a society understands and defines itself. It is the core of our existence as sentient creatures. Censorship is power recognising danger in imagination and representation, but mainly the danger presented to itself.

I am becoming afraid of being an artist in this country. I am becoming afraid of saying what I think, especially in a time when the world is becoming less and less private, and the relative safety of anonymity is crushed. Even now I struggle with the idea that I am still free to think as I like, that my mind is not shackled by anything except that with which I shackle it myself. And the more afraid I am to speak, the more important it becomes. Soon the only private spaces will be the ones in our heads, if they are not already the only ones left. And perhaps one day even that will be taken from us, because the more restrictions governments and power brokers place on our representations of ourselves and our understanding of the world—of all aspects of it, not merely the loving, the sacred and the benevolent, but also the dark, the disturbing and the profane, which are as much a part of this world as the things we hold dear—the closer we come to a time when even to think in certain ways is to commit a crime.

There are places in the world where these words would be considered dangerous enough to censor. I almost censored them myself, except I think they are too important. The mere fact that I can say them means they should be said, because there are places in the world where speaking your mind or creating art is considered dissident enough for jail, capital punishment, death. That place might be here sooner than we think. The wheels are already turning. The artists are always first.

(1) & (3) From the Introduction to Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, David Young and Keith Hollaman (eds.), Longman Inc. : New York and London, 1984.
(2) Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. Granta and Penguin : London, 1991.

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Categories: Kicking up a fuss, Page, stage and screen.

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By Stef
— March 4, 2010 at 2:13 pm

A Study in the Art of Revolution III

It started when I was about fifteen. Behind my bedroom door and high up where I thought nobody would see it, I stood on a chair and painted right onto the wall. I painted green vines, creaking trees and flowers in bud, and down the sides of the door frame, shrieking birds circling high above tumbling blue-green waves.

My mother saw this first effort about three days later and said nothing. My father saw it a month later and flipped out. My mother told him to calm down. My room was tucked away in the topmost corner of the house. Nobody went past it. Nobody went into it unless they wanted to see me. ‘It can be painted over if necessary.’ My father didn’t say anything about it to me for a long time.

Throughout high school and while I was an undergraduate still living at home, those walls became the default way for me to react to the world. When I heard a song I loved, I would paint the lyrics in the colours swimming behind my eyes. When a line from a poem got stuck in my mind, I would write it over and over until I couldn’t see the words anymore. When I couldn’t sleep for anger, I would scribble near the head of my bed with the closest writing implement I could find. I made a list of initials of every person I’d kissed. I composed poetry. I ranted. I mused. I was indiscriminate about content; those walls wore my angst, they wore my joy, they wore my lust and hate and longing. They wore everything I couldn’t voice and many things I wished I’d said first. Those walls wore me.

Friends would come and sit in my bedroom and talk about which part of it they liked best. The pictures were their favourites. I painted a porthole on the wall next to my bed, through which you could see Planet Earth. I painted a tree split by lightning, shining golden where it was struck. I painted a night sky, tar-black, that faded to rainbow as it reached the carpet. While I was living in Poland, my great-aunt Patty was given my bedroom during her stay at Christmas. She told me in a letter the following week that she’d had a wonderful time lying in my bed at night examining my art, but that she possibly hadn’t got enough sleep.

When I moved out of home, my third brother, Peter, inherited my room. He was happy to leave it the way it was but the day after I’d left, my father came in with a tin of paint and before Peter or my mother or I could object, had covered all of the soul-scrawl with a pale yellow wash. All of it except for one tiny spot. On the white metal edging around the wardrobe door, about two feet from the ceiling, remains single blue painted raindrop.

I was back in Melbourne for Christmas a few weeks ago. On Christmas night, after all my friends had left, I went upstairs and found Peter lying on his bed with the lights on. We talked for a couple of minutes, but all I could think about was that one raindrop. So I picked up a pen. Underneath the noticeboard in curly drunken sister-scrawl it now says:

Fuck the system. Be a revolutionary. Write on walls.


'Order is existence, chaos is living.'

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Categories: Kicking up a fuss.

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By Stef
— January 25, 2010 at 8:30 am

Rainsong

These feelings come, like inspiration, through the cracks in the quiet of night-time, like spiders that bite when you’re asleep. When I see them trying to stick their spindly legs under the skirting board I stamp my feet and slap my knees and play music to help distract me, as if distraction is all it will take.

The sky has been crackling and sparking all evening. I am supposed to be writing but instead I am thinking about the new year, about sticky days with champagne and sweat and lessons on shattering crystal. About seawater in my jeans at five in the morning, numb fingers and an unexpected kiss. About swimming naked across a river to watch the lightning dance through the cloud-mountains for hours, a full moon high in the sky behind me, above the blue-black and grey silhouettes that make up the midnight world. We sat on a mudpan, a field so flat and wide and dry that the horizon looked an arm’s length away. The sky was alive, but the world was silent. Silence that wasn’t silence. Bush silence: the whir and chirp of the night insects and the semitone interval drop of a boobook. The rain is coming, they murmured. The earth is singing for it.

Music has colour, the same way words have mood. It’s like an extension of the sound, another dimension to the experience. A veil through which you can see the world. A veil just behind your eyes. Tonight’s song is the colour of light through rainwater, and I’m never sure if this is love or sadness, but it’s not so much an ache these days, more of a hum. Not quite disillusionment, but its sister, perhaps. And again, again, this mind of mine, despite all its stretching out, it always seems to circle back to solitude, back to the self, still fascinated by the experience of being alone, of thinking alone, of knowing alone—and this song that I can’t stop playing.

Thunder is the sound that trembling would make, in the hot dark, the sparse ground radiating from a sunken sun. Something is trembling now, and it’s coming towards this house, towards me, a rising crescendo. At 3am, the storm hits. The rain pounds, the sky heaves, and there is so much water. It pours down the window pane, rivers against the trunks of trees, and I am swamped by the sheer weight of the sound, each rivulet singing a memory, splashing against a melody, the ground drinking greedily. It fills my head, drenching my heart, like it may as well be pouring out of the walls around me, that rainsong, over and over and over, skin prickling even now as the music ripples around it, and it’s all I can do to throw my head back and be swept along because simple sounds have never changed the world quite like this. I am submerged in it. I am consumed by it.

And now it’s 4:29am. I’ve hit ‘play’ thirty-eight times tonight. I see bare legs, smooth knees, the dim light of my laptop on the bedsheets, slight black scuff marks from shoeless household wanderings, and I am bone dry but I am swamped.

It’s 4:29am and that’s the first glow of fresh dawn through the bamboo.

It’s 4:29am and the leaves outside are dripping, still.

It’s 4:29am and I am, I am, I am.

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Categories: Thoughts.

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By Stef
— January 18, 2010 at 8:13 pm

A Study in the Art of Revolution II

When I was five, Dean B—— bullied me for my freckles. It’s my first memory of primary school. I was self-conscious about the way my skin looked for years afterwards. The comments didn’t stop as I got older, either. I remember being 13 and walking out of Middle Brighton train station in summer in a short black dress. I passed a group of boys and one of them remarked, ‘Ew, white legs.’ I felt ugly and alienated. I refused to wear miniskirts for a long time.

In Year 7, a group of girls in my class passed around a petition with the instruction: ‘Sign this if you hate Stephanie.’ One of these girls I’d known since Prep. (She actually came up to me at a party in 2005, after years of my ignoring her, and said hello. I suffered through only three sentences of small talk before she said: ‘We were really mean to you at school. You were more intelligent and mature than us and we were intimidated by that. I’m sorry.’ I was so shocked and touched I forgave her on the spot.) This wasn’t an isolated incident, and it’s hard when you’re a kid, when all you want is for someone to like you, not to gravitate towards those stories that make you feel safe—that make you feel normal—and glossy magazines that purport to give you advice on what you can do to fix what’s wrong.

I credit the sheer volume of novels I read as a teenager featuring girls and women who had wit, talent, determination and resilience for getting me through high school, and my admiration and respect for those women in real life. Screw the insipid Bella Swan; Ellie Linton got shit done. Elizabeth Bennet spoke as she found. Anne Shirley may have got married and had ten children but she held up her chin, cut her hair short, stood up to bullies, came first in her classes and still found time for daydreaming and poetry. And I had a lot in common with them, despite my insecurities about the way I looked. I was the kind of girl who put her hand up in class. If I knew the answer, I had to say it. When I did the work, I had to be first to finish. I had to get everything right. In the absence of other triggers, I might have to put this down to genetics. Nobody told me to be a smartypants.

I credit Kaz Cooke’s Real Gorgeous with giving me the courage (if that’s the right word) to have flesh on my thighs and not waste money on toner or Tommy Girl—and the facts to back it up. (I read it cover to cover on Christmas Eve in 1998. I never bought a copy of Dolly magazine again.) But it took me a long time to call myself a feminist. It wasn’t until a second-year uni drama class that the issue was made plain for me. A feminist believed in social, sexual, economic and political equality for men and women. A feminist saw that the world was imbalanced thus, and that power resided mainly with men. The past tense is for the sake of readability—I found (and still find) these things self-evident, but giving myself the feminist label got me into an unexpected amount of trouble. Friends harangued me. My brothers scoffed. A family argument erupted in a restaurant one night when my uncle looked at me skepically, and said ‘Surely feminism isn’t needed now?’

(The stigma is slightly ironic because my family is bursting at the seams with tough, independent women. I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t have come up against resistance due to their sex. My grandmother ran a costuming business by herself after my grandfather had a stroke in the 60s. My mother wanted lots of children but refused to marry any man who would play push-and-pull mind games. My father’s sisters still command large salaries on their own terms. Every single one of them has a degree. Germaine Greer was taught German by my great-aunt, Sister Michael, who had ‘a face that looked like it was scrubbed hard with steel wool’. By the time I became a student at Star of the Sea, the nuns were no longer teaching and Sister Michael’s tenure as principal had been reduced to a plaque on a door in the old grey stone building, but their spirit had by no means left. Perhaps some people find it hard to see a feminist uprising in black habits—or, when I knew them, navy blue—but they obviously don’t know nuns. ‘Strong Star women,’ then-Principal Rosalie Jones used to say to us. No doubt.)

The problem is, while it might work in novels, real people expect strange things when sex is involved. Real people expect strange things when they want sex to be involved. And I’ve always had an appetite for fairy stories that compromised the good work of a lot of that literature. The law of romance says that logic and love are irreconcilable. On the contrary, I think love is extremely logical; it’s romance that muddies the water. And sometimes I feel like it’s the hardest thing in the world to reconcile staunch feminist politics with a desire to be loved. These stories of lust and death, betrayal and despair, obsession and infatuation, class and compromise—they’re compelling and ridiculous all at once. And I’ve never had such vitriol thrown at me as I have when I bring out the word ‘feminist’. Is a woman speaking her mind and standing up for herself so unpalatable even now? Is it some kind of challenge? Is the challenge to keep up or to shut her up?

What if she doesn’t shut up? What will change? Is that where the fear lies? Or is being close to a strong woman like the desire for attention—simultaneously craved and despised, fascinating and repellent? Sex is about power and power is about control, the desire for which stems from fear—at its most primal, fear of death. But we’ve also coupled sex with love, and I’m not the first of my feminist friends to wonder seriously if her politics will result in unintentional celibacy, especially alongside heterosexuality. I’m becoming increasingly aware of the strange social consensus that people like me end up alone. As though the only kind of love I could receive as a woman with these kinds of politics is from afar—someone to look up to or admire perhaps, but not someone to get close to. Or perhaps it’s more like staring at the circus freak, and there’s that odd bookish girl again with the ugly freckles and white legs. But there’s an assumption even in that term ‘ending up alone,’ that implies that a woman’s journey is necessarily about a reliance on others, as though one navigating the world under her own steam is wrong somehow. The aesthetic of the romance narrative makes women afraid to be feminists because it makes feminists look unloveable. It has rose petals on the surface and maggots at the core.

So here I am, split into three, each part curled around the other, tense, taut, tangled. The artist, craving magic, mystery and the beauty of drama; the philosopher, unravelling tapestries with painful and meticulous care, each thread weighed and measured and tested for strength; and between them both, the gawky little girl with her big imagination and pile of stories who just wants people to like her.

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Categories: Kicking up a fuss.

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By Stef
— January 12, 2010 at 9:25 pm

Obituary for the New Year

One very windy day when I was eleven, my mother came to pick my brothers and me up from primary school with a small plastic bag in her hand. When I asked her what she was holding, she said ‘Nothing,’ rather shortly, and put her hand behind her back. We got home that afternoon to find a tiny black-and-tan kelpie puppy hiding under the kitchen table, next to a small yellow puddle and my father’s shoes. When I picked her up to give her a pat, she peed on my school dress.

We had owned dogs before—blind, deaf and grumpy when I knew them, which wasn’t very well as they were already old and faded quickly—but it had been a couple of years since Jody had finally gone and the house had been pet-free. My mother wasn’t consulted about Mocha; Dad picked her up on impulse from one of our Tolmie neighbours. She was the runt of the litter—smaller than my school shoes at 6 weeks—but that didn’t matter in the city. My brothers complained for awhile that she was annoying, that we didn’t need her, or that she had chewed through their socks and was clearly uncontrollable. But I caught one of them saying a heartfelt goodnight to her late one Saturday. I considered paying him out at the time but thought better of it.

When I started high school, my mother would come upstairs every morning at 6:45am to wake me up. Mocha would bound in after her and lick me on the hand or the face or whichever part of me was closest to the edge of the bed—if she could make it through the mess on my bedroom floor. When I was living in Poland she’d still come upstairs while Mum woke up my brothers, and would run down to the end of the corridor where my bedroom was just to see (Mum used to say) if I had come back in the night and she hadn’t noticed. On her birthday and Christmas day we’d give her toast with Vegemite for breakfast. She loved it so much that on the few occasions when she escaped into the street and refused to come back, all we needed to do was flick the spring on the toaster and she’d be back at our feet within seconds.

She had been getting old for awhile but had only started to show it in the last few years. When I took her for a walk on Christmas Eve (two blocks, that’s all she could manage) I wondered how I would feel when she died. She was 14. We all knew it was inevitable, but it’s hard to know how you’ll react to something until it actually happens. I had been preparing myself for awhile—making sure I said goodbye to her properly every time I left the house in case it was the last time I saw her. I’ve been living out of home for years, but still the thought choked me up, and I realised then how much weight our pets carry in our lives, and how much just knowing she was still around was a source of comfort and support even from the other side of the country.

Mocha always knew damn well when we were going travelling, no matter how much we tried to pretend otherwise, and would race out the front door and jump into the front seat of the car at the first opportunity. She would sit in the car, sometimes for hours, while we packed. ‘You’re not going anywhere without me.’ On Tuesday morning, it was no different. I was headed to Moulamein, my father out bush with our cousins, and Mocha was already sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser with her tongue hanging out and a giant grin on her face. I didn’t get a chance to give her a goodbye pat—I was running late and too busy wondering if I’d forgotten to pack something myself. That was the last time I saw her, because six hours later, in a beautiful piece of bush called Limestone, my stupid, careless second-cousin drove off without looking and caught her under the front wheel. She was so badly hurt, they shot her. I didn’t find out until Friday afternoon when I turned my phone back on and found voicemail messages from my 23-year-old brother, drunk and distraught and mostly incomprehensible at half past midnight, pleading with me to call him, please, just call him.

You know your childhood is over when your childhood pets die. 2009 ended with a tempest. My childhood ended last Tuesday with a gunshot and a whimper. Part of me feels like we ought to qualify our sadness and anger with ‘It’s just a dog, but…’ but the truth is, it’s never ‘just a dog’. And if the lumps on her chest had turned to cancer and we’d been forced to take her to the vet to have her put down, I probably wouldn’t have felt so angry. We were prepared for something like that and it would have given the whole family some kind of closure, not to mention saving that beautiful, trusting animal such acute stress and trauma. But instead she was killed by someone else’s hard black skidding tyre and a bullet to the brain. It wasn’t the way it should have been—it never is. But she damn well didn’t deserve to have it end like that.

I miss her.

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Categories: People.

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By Stef
— January 4, 2010 at 11:27 am

Arioso

Sometimes in this sultry climate, when the words won’t come, in between the storm-shadow, the rumbling of thunder, the pouring rain outside and the drumming of water on the shower curtain, my concentration begins to slip. I know it when it starts, the way you know the scent of home. And then there’s that hot rush from below my belly, sliding into my blood, slipping through me like a drug, hurtling along my spine. And my heart pushes, urgent against its cage, and I suck at my teeth, my bottom lip, my tongue, and I think of a train ride home, my skin still singing from the song of his, and sticky fingers, a sticky mouth, birds’ nests in my hair—my mother used to call them that, and I’d see hundreds of shapes pouring out of the tangles and into the sky, like the geese shrieking against the burning sunset—and my arms tingling, legs shaking, hands trembling: here, now, you. I was surprised the whole carriage couldn’t taste my sweat.

Or of oranges plucked from a tree at 3am, spitting rain, tram tracks and electric lights, and another woman’s bed. (I never told him, but I found myself then.)

Or of those who didn’t want to talk about it but preferred instead to talk it out; who wanted to hear the words expelled from my mouth, staccato blasphemy: ‘Fuck, suck, cock, cunt. Does that make you feel good?’ (Face forward, kitten. I want you on your knees.)

And there again—bee-stings on my cheeks and things rough to touch, like skin on bark, a man’s chin inside my thigh—a dirty angel face, a beautiful beast. (When I draw, it’s trees: haunted, leaf-bare skeletons, curling branches. There’s more in my head, but that’s what comes out.)

And then there were those stories that made girls like me believe that love and sex made you feel the same way; that a declaration changed the world; that a couple of words were comparable to being pressed up against a wall with a tongue in your ear. Or limbs and fingers and hair, gasps and laughter, knotted together in damp sheets. Or binding someone’s arms because that’s what they asked for. Or coming home after a sleepless night with sore breasts and bruising between your legs, but still so desperately wanting, wanting, wanting, and not able to touch yourself for the pain.

Or was an orgasm the moment when the universe shifted? An escape from yourself; an embrace of yourself. A little bit of another person. A little death; a little life. Rebellion. (Touch me, and we’ll see.)

And every time I think I could make a choice to last a lifetime, I grow some more, learn some more, see the possibilities expand. And sometimes I think I might find enough comfort in a glass of red wine and a drunken stumble into a stranger’s arms—maybe a little taller, a little older, a little further away—because after all, it’s mostly chemistry, and everyone looks good in the dark. But even when it means nothing, it carries weight. Perhaps no more than the heat of your breath—just enough to maintain the push—but weight, nevertheless. Minute momentum.

So I won’t close myself off and I won’t hide, but neither am I leaving my heart wide open. One way or another I know what I’ll be left with, which is exactly the same as I’ve always had: the world in my head, an open window, and a cool breeze on swollen skin.

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Categories: Thoughts.

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By Stef
— December 17, 2009 at 9:00 am

Pinpricks

I never feel like I know a city until I can walk its streets at night, alone. And I can see the current snaking along the Brisbane River, a curl on the surface of the water—I can see it, from all the way up here. Vertigo doesn’t haunt me three beers down, and anyway, it’s the urge to jump and go flying that whispers seductively. I know that voice, its giddy music, and I grip the railing of the bridge to steady myself.

And I know you, city lights—flimsy, artificial things, clamouring that you have the answers, that all of the world’s secrets can be found in the crackle of electricity and the flick of a switch. I know what you’re really hiding from me. I’ve seen them, out in the bush, hurtling across the sky, dying thousand-year-old deaths in front of my just-born eyes. I’ve seen them glistening between the branches of the redgums and the stringybarks and the ghostgums in the mountains. I’ve seen them out in the middle of the floodplains, peeping awake as the sky bruises purple. And I’ve seen them in the shudder of a lover, in the taste of sweat and dirt and eucalyptus, and the way my fingers break the skin of a peach.

And I know my shadow is far more willowy and graceful than I will ever be, but still, it is part of me, and so I run along the Story Bridge with her leading the way, my little weightless piece of the dark, carved out by streetlights, skirt billowing, hair flying, flat-footed, shoeless. And I don’t care what they think of me. I’m not here for them. This is bigger than them. This is bigger than me.

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Categories: On the road.

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By Stef
— December 9, 2009 at 11:11 am

The Itch

1.

The bugs have been biting my legs since I got to Brisbane. I douse myself in insect repellent, swat them away, slap them, swear at them, beg them to stop, but still they bite. I wake up in the morning with little red welts peppering my legs.

2.

There is frangipani in the garden, a forest of bamboo and a possum that likes roast potato. Each night, it climbs down from the trees and sits next to the porch railing, playing chicken with Murphy the cat and waiting for scraps.

3.

Being social is an effort, even with people I know very well. Even with people I love. What I want has nothing to do with it; after awhile, of their own accord, my body and my brain begin to rebel.

4.

Out on the Moil River, near Peppimenarti, the mosquitoes are particularly nasty. They carry brain fever and disease, as well as a brutal itch. They breed in the swamp, sharing the mud, reeds and lilies with the barramundi that were hiding from our fishing lines and a huge saltwater crocodile. You can’t stay out there after sunset. At dusk, the mosquitoes swarm. At night, they eat you alive.

5.

There was a time when I couldn’t say no to lovers. No, I don’t want to share your bed tonight. I can’t sleep before 3am and I’d rather spend those blank hours writing. No, I don’t want to spend half my day trying to study while you pretend this is a functional space. I can’t concentrate on raw philosophy when all you really want to do is send your hand creeping up my leg. I require solitude. I require my own space. I require a door that closes and locks from the inside. Five hundred a year and a room of one’s own. And I want and I need and I crave to write.

6.

The difference is what gives.

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Categories: Writing.

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By Stef
— December 6, 2009 at 7:58 pm

Rapture and the rupture

It’s 13 degrees outside, 4th of March. It’s late, a weeknight. I’m driving mostly empty roads alone. The car is filled with murmuring grey music and the traffic light pauses seem longer than usual. Night spills in the open windows―a cold wind on wet, sore lips.

Someone is firetwirling in Royal Park. The sharp kerosene smell jerks me back―five years, six years, seven. A flash of flame―‘Do you remember when?’―and I do, I do―I remember nights on the beach, drinking straight vodka, and learning to cut my own hair. I remember wishing you would speak to me, what it felt like to want to be ‘that girl’, and when I started calling myself a woman instead. I remember believing only in uncertainty, because every time I felt surefooted, the ground moved again and unsettled it all. And I remember letters from South Africa, a friend imploring me to say a prayer and ask for God’s love, and the first time I wrote it down on paper: ‘That’s not how it works for me.’

At the intersection of Blyth Street and Sydney Road, there is a Baptist church. On the front of it, a sign in flickering, lowercase, neon purple announces that this is indeed Brunswick. It jars with me. When I think of churches, I think of reverence, silence, stillness, and a sort of reflective, ethereal joy. Gaudy plastic and fluorescent lighting sell a flimsy aesthetic that is perhaps supposed to speak to the urgency and superficiality of my generation, but still: it jars. Perhaps it’s my Catholic heritage that does it, growing up in a world of carved ceilings, glittering stained-glass and a focus on the solemnity of ceremony and theatre of the Gospel. Selling religion feels like an oxymoron. One of the things I always liked about it was the sense of something running deep, something that didn’t need to be sold. A church was a place where you considered the way you lived your life, contemplated your choices, meditated on your morality―whether you agreed with the priest or not. It was a place where you couldn’t help but be confronted by the possibility of your own mortality and fallibility. It was place that said to me, Take something seriously. Think.

University philosophy is not quite the same. It requires you to remove your emotions and your instincts from your analysis in order to systematically, logically deconstruct and reconstruct the world. There is a place for that, a very important one, but it isn’t and will never be everything. Sister Loretta, Sister Verna, Sister Barbara, Sister Anne―they taught me this. Even when wracked by crises of faith, they still got up early and took vegetables to their neighbours, taught music and maths, visited the sick and elderly, consumed literature and science and philosophy, and tried to accomodate as many disadvantaged families in their cottages as they could possibly manage. Long after I decided that the church was not where I fit―too rebellious, too changeable, too interested in the soft mouths of my friends―I still went back to stay with them, to help them, because it was so obvious to me that faith was not what made a person good or bad. Good people are good because they choose to do generous, loving, kind things. The titles they work under mean far, far less than the work itself.

My lack of faith in religion hasn’t eaten away at the reflective hush I feel when I walk into a church. It’s not religion that is evil. Belief in God isn’t what hurts people. Bureaucracy, power abuse, prejudice and closedmindedness are not the exclusive domain of the church. And the frustrated, fed up agnostic in me wants to shriek that in the last few years I have met more closedminded, pigheaded atheists in this country―closedminded and pigheaded about their atheism―than I ever have closedminded, pigheaded Catholics. The institution, the individuals, the doctrine, the interpretation of doctrine and its practical application are all separate issues, as is the social context in which they are cultivated. Calling a theist ‘stupid’ for their faith is arrogant and presumptuous. Fear of being wrong is emotionally toxic and intellectually crippling, whether your doctrine stems from Jesus or the scientific method. And I can’t help but feel that people who bang on about the evils of religion and quote from the bible of Richard Dawkins are just as guilty of intolerance, ignorance and spite as their accusations would have others be. It’s far harder to be receptive to and welcoming of possibility—of any kind—than it is to be blockheaded and insistent that your own tiny corner of the universe can tell you everything there is to know.

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Categories: Thoughts.

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By Stef
— November 22, 2009 at 10:57 pm

Strange birds

It was late afternoon. The houses, so sprawling and airy they could hardly be considered ‘indoors’, spread in a lazy curve around the oval. Football posts peeling scabbed white paint stood in the bleached grass at either end. As I walked across the oval to the schoolhouse, the sun stretched long fingers across the floodplains in the west, lighting up the escarpment to the east that marks the border of the lands owned by the Emu Point people.

The carcass of a wild pig lay discarded in the middle of the oval, flies buzzing and crawling over it. Two crows perched on the rump, pecking at wormy flesh through coarse black hair. They flapped a few feet into the air as I drew near. It didn’t occur to me to steer clear until a shadow passed over the grass in front of me, and I looked up to see a hawk circling just metres from my head. Above it, spiralling, turning and turning in the widening gyre, were five or six more—swooping in close to the carcass one after another, looking for a chance to dig in their talons and beaks. For an unsettling moment it felt like it was me they were circling, and the jolt it gave me left my hands tingling.

In the city, death is sanitised. White sheets and chemicals strip the blood and spit and shit from death and halt decay, because we prefer instead to see quietude, composure, rest—as though the reward for a hot, quick, electric life is inertia. And when the muck of it manages to splash through, it’s unexpected. In our shock we sensationalise it, dramatise it, and talk about tragedy and grief and respect to remove ourselves from the reality of rot and disintegration. But out in remote country, those white sheets don’t exist. Death is everywhere, raw. Blood and dirt mingle and open wounds fester. Temporality feels as close as skin.

The Europeans were afraid of the bush. They tried to stifle it, to conquer it. It was a quest, a duty: man against nature. Even now, we barricade ourselves in and push the world out—hiding from sunlight, from storms, from insects, from snakes, from people, from possibility, from ourselves. How could such a passionate need for control be anything other than an acute manifestation of the fear of death? I wonder sometimes if everything—if Western culture in its entirety—can be boiled down to this.

Sometimes in the city, in the deep hours of the night, I hear birds. They don’t sing at that hour; they cry. Sometimes I think they’re crying for us, for our fear of nothingness, of not knowing, of not meaning. Sometimes I think about crying with them: so afraid, not of death, but that the weight of possibility will bury me before I’m finished.

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Categories: On the road, Thoughts.

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By Stef
— November 17, 2009 at 5:38 pm