What about the way a rapidly-moving river can feel perfectly still? What about the water weeds lying flat on the riverbed, waving as the current takes a breath? What about the way the mist comes down, breaking into a thousand droplets in a space no wider than your palm? What about the way it throws the light back at you, the way it jumps out at you in the dark?

What about standing in a cavern as drops run off the leaves a hundred metres up, gathering speed as they hurtle towards your open mouth, cold splashes as they slap against your teeth? What about a storm just passed and wet roads filled with kamikaze toads, cracking and popping under the tyres? What about that bird with the long legs pecking at the bitumen, or the owl feasting on someone else’s roadkill? What about accelerating through the puddles and spraying the windscreen with mud?

What about your mother? What about your friends? What about your job? What about your car? What about the mortgage? What about your taxes? What about the way your shoes don’t keep the rain out? The way the sweat runs down your nose. The way breathing northern city air feels like taking a mouthful of damp wool. What about the cut on your finger? The stain spreading on the hem of your T-shirt. What about the steam in your eyes?

What about those dreams I have of a heaving ocean? Of depths that breed darkness and echoes—sonic ghosts. What about sky that looks like sea? What about clouds that splinter like coral or ripple like sand, or race past in puffs like schools of fish? What about floating face up two and a half hours from land, imagining a world upside down?

What about today?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Somewhere along the road, we came to an almost vertical rock-face. One side of it was smooth, the other jagged, and the men stood around trying to decide how they were going to get the convoy of Landcruisers up it. Dad’s car—with me and Kathleen in it—was the guinea pig. They tried the smooth slope first but the tyres couldn’t get a decent grip, so they backed us down ever-so-carefully and tried the jagged side instead. The engine strained and Kathleen and I—almost horizontal—held on tightly to the seats. Halfway up the rock-face, the car paused for a minute or so as Dad got a firmer grip on the gears and the wheel, and Kathleen and I thought, “Oh, we’ve stopped.” Never mind that were almost lying down in a car whose wheels were clinging precariously to a few chunks of stone, we proceeded to open our colouring books.

I started with a story because it’s late and I’m trying to keep the motor running. I’m in a bad mood and people insist on walking into the firing line, claiming “I can handle it, I can handle it.” No, you can’t. You say you can because maybe you want to, but you can’t. So I’m going to shut you out because I’m tired of small talk and I’m tired of anxiety and I’m tired of feeling like I need to explain myself. I’m not doing it to be nice, I’m not doing it for some bullshit attempt to sound like I’m tough—I’m saving myself the guilt-trip later. You may as well get a glimpse of what you’re missing all at once because it saves me having to go through it again.

All week, friends and family (bless them) have been talking about me, to me, saying things like, “Look at what you can do! Look at what you are doing!” And I look and what I see is that I’m running on borrowed time. I know I should be grateful—I am more than grateful—but I don’t know how to fight for things when the odds aren’t severely against me: when people aren’t saying, “Yeah right, as if you could.” And the more people tell me I can, realise I can, the more third chances they give me, the more contrary I feel. No, don’t let me hand this in at the last minute. No, don’t tell me my excuse is “fair enough”. I don’t want special consideration; I want a challenge that electrifies me. It’s the arrogant discontent of the excessively privileged. If it’s too easy, I switch myself off again and float out into space, ignoring the stars colliding on the far side of something, wondering where the anchor is or what it anchors me to. And I wonder even now if I will spew this out and care what you think, or if I will spew this out and leave it idling, half-finished, going nowhere, and bury myself in the waste of my day and the excess food, and the way that lately my eyelids get heavy the minute I feel like I need to write, and the fact that I write to avoid work, that I work to avoid writing, that I try to write when I should be sleeping and that when I fall asleep the words start coming. Sometimes I feel like I’m made of conflict and the tension is all that keeps me upright. But I can’t move either forward or back. Perhaps every artist’s life is a constant struggle with the impulse to create—medicating the world away with one anaesthetic excuse after another, as the pressure builds up on the inside until finally the smooth veneer is ruptured—and the voices outside murmur, she’s successful, she’s smart, she’s got it all together—and then the dam wall cracks and gives way, words pouring forth, thundering through the valleys, washing away fences, uprooting trees. And perhaps that’s what this is, the inevitable build-up. But I don’t want to validate inertia, and I don’t understand why I manage to get away with it all the time.

Then there’s the fact that art doesn’t come from quiet comfort; it comes from quiet comfort being torn away. It comes from tension and conflict and uncertainty and discordancy. It comes from euphoric joy and unheralded despair. Its creators are selfish and biting and incredibly messy, and the process of construction is contrary and draining and physically debilitating.

Or maybe I’m just talking about myself.

How’s the writing going? I hate that fucking question. How do you measure a good day? Quality? Quantity? A spark of inspiration? All three? In that case, most days are bad days. I could write 3,000 words and not use any of them. I could write 40 and it could be the best sentence of my novel.

How’s the writing going? Here’s the truth: it’s stagnating, because I’m stalled at the bottom of the rock wall. I’m too proud to turn around and go home, too stubborn not to eventually succeed, and it’s not like I can’t do it, or think it’s worth devoting my life to—because I can and I do—but I’m the one that’s driving, I’m the one that has to decide which slope to take, I’m the one with the keys and the means and my foot on the clutch, and instead I’m colouring in my fucking colouring book.

Pathetic.

• is not a photographer.
• steals from the world in abstract.
• breaks rules.
• drives faster than she should.
• wonders about noumena.

2.

• built herself out of cardboard and dye.
• sees sound, hears colour, finds pathways in air.
• talks about herself in third person.
• can give you an explanation for anything.
• is probably a narcissist.

3.

• should run more, sleep less.
• should write more, talk less.
• should read more, drink less.
• feels better in the dark.

4.

• is buried in paper and sugar and cloth and ink.
• wonders how she burnt her fingers.
• is not going to tempt the wrath from high atop the thing. Not now, not here, not like this.

And I hate:

• waiting.
• nausea.
• slowing down.

The duality of potency and act fall by the same stroke. The act is everything. Potential is not real, there is only manifestation.

“How complicated we make the world,” she thinks, with a sigh.

It’s time to write.

On July 1 in South Australia, new laws come into force which will allow the attorney-general to declare any group of people a criminal gang and prohibit them from associating with each other. If they communicate more than six times within a year, they face 5 years imprisonment. I presented this information to my housemate today, who said, “So? Since when do ordinary people get affected by stuff like this?”

Her nonchalance surprised me. She’d previously become quite heated about other issues in the media – the Bill Henson thing, for instance. I followed up by explaining that the police would also be able to ban the wearing of an insignia in public if they thought it compromised public safety – not beyond reasonable doubt, but on the ‘balance of probability.’

“Yeah, but this is all for bikie gangs who make drugs and stuff,” she said. “Nothing to do with the rest of the population.”

In 1972, ASIO put tabs on Helen Garner. Not for the influence of her writing – Monkey Grip, her first novel, wasn’t published until 1978 – but because she put her name on a phone list for a feminist group. I can’t help but wonder what the implications might have been for the feminist movement if the SA laws had been enacted then.

2. Vertigo.

When I was in Year 11, the first English assignment for first semester was ‘personal’ non-fiction. When asked what she expected from us, Mrs G suggested we write about our family, our friends, our social lives, our plans for the future – that sort of ‘personal’. We had a couple of weeks to complete the essay, but I waited until the last minute to do it. The redundancy of it repelled me. The way I saw it, Mrs G was just trying to get an idea of what she might expect from us without having to go through the rigmarole of actually talking to us. When I finally put words on the page, it was a minor act of rebellion. “I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I wrote. “I could tell you about my family and my friends and what I do on the weekends, but that won’t tell you anything about how I see the world or what I think it means.”

I tried to explain that it wasn’t that these things didn’t have a significance in my life; they just didn’t fit in the category of what I considered ‘personal’, and regardless of what my teacher might have wanted, making those things the focus would be skirting the point. If my teacher had wanted a truly personal piece, I thought, she would ask me to write about the ripples I get up my spine when I hear a major-minor chord cadence, or the colour of C#, or why I read in the dark, or how and when I had my first orgasm, or what I think about on the train, or why I can stomach fingernails down a blackboard but the sound of hot water being poured makes me want to scream. But these subjects aren’t the expected focus of a Year 11 assessment task, nor are you supposed to conclude a VCE English essay with a triumphant “So there.”

There’s this feeling I get when I’ve decided to break the rules a little. I’ve come to identify it as the intersection between frustration, fear, conviction and euphoria. The fear usually manifests itself after the fact: I had strong pangs of doubt after I submitted the aforementioned assignment. The wave of rebellion I rode the previous night in front of my computer seemed tacky in retrospect. I felt like I’d exposed too much of myself and that my arguments were ill-considered.

A couple of days later, as I was waiting for the final bell to ring, Mrs G pulled me aside with a pressed forehead and handed me my essay. There were no comments on it, no marks – no teacher scribble of any kind. “I read this last night,” she said. “I don’t know what to say.”

My belly did a backflip.

“I was blown away. There’s nothing I would change in it. It’s wonderful.”

3. The political is personal.

The first writing prize I won came from a story that quite bluntly attacked the pro-life campaign, organised religion, traditional concepts of femininity and, depending on your interpretation, bordered on sympathising with infanticide. The fiction component of my Honours thesis nearly lost me a couple of friends, but won me a scholarship. The ‘personal’ essay wasn’t the first time I’d issued an open challenge to the reader, but it was the first time I can remember where the provoked reaction was solely one of praise. Since then, it seems that the times I’ve walked that line have been the times I’ve produced my best work.

But there is a danger to it. While I think that every piece of art should be considered in isolation from the artist, it is also true that every time I write, I write a piece of myself. My most successful work is also the work I have felt the closest to. As someone who intends to make a living out of the creative arts, I need to walk on edge of what is socially acceptable: to challenge what people think, to push the boundaries, to dive head-first into those grey areas and reflect them back in vivid colour. Those grey areas are parts of me, just as much as they are parts of everyone else. One of hardest things for me to confront lately is that at some point, I might push it too far. At some point it may be my turn to stand up and get thrown around by the storm.

I wonder what people will think of me then.