wellington

just the latest of w places names i guess. wagga now fills me with a vague sense of unease. i’ve spent more years of my life there than anywhere else. it now feels like things have not worked for me there. a palpable sense every time i sight the welcome sign. my kids live there. my ex lives there. my mum & sister. & it continues to fester & grow in a weird way. the majority of your highschool year are still there. you feel watched if you have any reason to walk the main street. the traffic burgeons. things change in a similar way always & you don’t understand any of this.

willandra is going to live on for that one image. even tonight someone mentions it. ‘he’s the guy who took that shot’. i try to explain that there are more, unedited shots still sitting on the memory card but it was almost literally like those words trailed off into the exhaust/noise of a passing truck, lost on the wind. & i tire of repeating myself. what does it matter. the image has the kind of fame only 150 likes on facebook can garner & now it simply has to become symbolic of the time. looking back east, away from the sun, & the way that peculiarly red light brought out the leaves on the wildflowers. it’s the best i can do by way of explanation. i’ll maybe be back there one day but will i be losing myself in the colours or just my own memory again? no point pondering the future i suppose. all moot.

having never been here before wellington is now to be associated with missed opportunities. on the way i chased down a site-specific project that never happened. my theory is there will never be an explanation for it’s non-appearance either. i think that would be preferable. then, i miss the last project, arriving to a darkened street & just the instagram memories. my little ones have had fun just going places anyway, jumping into strange towns & roaming, & they’re now utterly exhausted.

(‘where are you?’ – i wanted to respond with something vitriolic but i didn’t. (nobody is driving through my region to look at projects (if they were though they’d find things planned & mapped a little better) so maybe i should just stay put too. maybe everything i’ve done is taking things too far. i’ve never really appreciated the limits of interaction, always pushing it a little more. i mean even the stupid rhino thing embarrassed me today.))

the girls are heavy breathing cocoons in the bed opposite while i type. our hotel is an old homestead perched on a hill & it could be anywhere. if you like, imagine me writing by candlelight.

i’m not doing well at engineering casual social situations, right. there’s always some moment that makes it seem laboured & difficult. even if it’s just a text going unanswered. or slamming a car door without looking back. or any other of the moments, times. i can’t imagine not trying though. i guess i’m only in my 30s so i haven’t lived that long, but it sure feels long, & i know there just aren’t many of those… times of giving over one’s self. it feels right, even if never straightforward. so yeah. i keep on being stupid. people will eventually give you their binary answers, even if they don’t want to. even if they feel silence is best. i’ve learnt this from the terrible past.

i’ll turn this off now, awake at 6.30am, see what my phone has new, decide more decisions. it’s always new.

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willandra

a time lapse of the day’s end & this

it parallels your own pathetic fallacies.

the suffuse orange hues symbolic

of all turning points in your life,

the crimson-to-blue banding of the eastern sky:

it just means ‘you’ / your significant romances.

.

make of this what you will. & you will –

it’s what you do – ever creating order

from the stimuli. that much at least, true.

at home now she doesn’t think of you,

this. controlling her emotions she’s patterning

all-of-the-things. you are unhelpful & complex.

.

take the narrow road back

to the homestead & stop dwelling

on your own dramas. as if on cue,

the deep dusk disappears, gets lost,

gives over to black. take something

from this night, these words.

if it’s the deletion of all memory

it just makes sense.

packing / from empathy to steak sandwiches / 2000-2007

edit

usually i come up with the thought bubbles while driving. i do a lot of that nowadays – sometimes it’s a productive time behind the wheel, other times not so much. but i forgot to include one of the elements i had floating around in the posting of earlier today & it’s been bothering me.

i drove wagga – leeton – darlington point – whitton – a few hours all up. my daughter slept & this future writing was occupying me the whole time. i’m a sporadic writer. when i’m disciplined, i run every night, i make notes, & make poetry from the process the next morning. i’ve not been very disciplined recently. sure there’s a bit of flux i can blame, i guess. this sort of journalistic writing tho generally happens when something happens. & today it was 2 separate people (within the space of around 12 hours) telling me that they’d been reading my blog. i was kind of taken aback. i don’t deal with that stuff well. i’m never quite sure how to respond. i’m socially awkward as a real physical person. but you know me right.

anyway, this sense of being ‘read’ was the impetus. in a sense when something takes me like that then i think blogging the thoughts is the only real way to get rid of them. i suppose it’s cathartic. it’s like how christina stead’s characters would sometimes ‘worry a notion’, which usually involved a single piece of dialogue lasting pages. the talking cure. i’ve only got you to talk to but.

the element i forgot to include in the earlier posting was my emotional investment in instagram. i’m not sure how it was going to fit in, but it seemed to be a related idea, and i know it would have fit. i would have made it. i would have worried it into place.

i’m struck by the notion that i possibly feel the impact of an image a little too much. it’s a palpable thing. when i thumb through my feed & come across something i like, it’s a bodily sensation of liking. i see your perfectly balanced beach shot (with the elements in a pleasing compositional symmetry, the subject caught in a perfect athletic poise, & the focus so crisp & real you can feel the cold of the waves) & however momentary it is i feel like i want to reach out & hug the photographer. the heart isn’t enough.

that’s not completely normal is it. & i know i don’t really have the visual language to describe what’s going on (i mean Jason once had to tell me the correct term for ‘rack focus’, after i’d been talking about this thing i loved for at least 10 minutes..) but i do know what moves me. & i want to communicate that to you. this medium is such an indirect form but then maybe that’s the best way. all forms of communicative media defined by the degree of mediation.

not nothing

you read the internets to escape the solipsism. it makes sense in that way. all of your theories of yourself, who you are what you mean in the world, only exist inside your own head. it’s the same for all your theories of what the past meant, what will happen in the future and the plans/structures you overlay in order to keep things going. are you seeking to complicate or simplify? it doesn’t matter. only this makes sense: you’re in there, & you need to be comfortable. but you know, it can also feel isolating at times. the thoughts you think are the only things in the world. the idea of ‘getting outside of your own head’ (even though it’s impossible, really) has some validity & worth.

so you read things & you get a sense that there are actual other people in the world, & that they are not dissimilar to you. the specificity of their stories & words, this gives you a sense of generality (paradoxically, i know). these other actual people also have real lives they live out while suffering the menace of their own thoughts. other people have reassuringly specific ambitions, routines, sadnesses & loves. it changes nothing but it maybe helps you cope. we are all human beings doing things in the world. it is, at least, not nothing.

but when you go beyond this you run into problems. i’m talking about not just reading the internets, but seeking more. specifically seeking contact. in response to the material, the arrangements of words, the mood & tone: ‘are you ok?’

it’s become increasingly meaningless & the only response i’ll give you is ‘yes’. who cares if it’s true or not. i’m not going to go into it with you. i suspect everyone is both ok & not ok all the time. i try to convince myself the ‘ok’ outweighs the ‘not ok’, maybe in a 70-30 ratio. but who knows. anyhoo – ‘yes’ is all you’ll get even on a second or third insistence. ‘yes’. ‘yes’. ‘yes’. that’s all. i hope to put a stop now to the recent spate.

i’m not the author figure who will elaborate. it’s not quite correct to say i care little for your good intentions. but it’s also not quite incorrect. things can co-exist.

really, i only care for the very specific internet emails, subjectless & with the content limited to ‘hi :)’ – these are the gestures i keep stupidly anticipating. over-thinking it (of course) yields the idea that those particular missives span distance in a non-confrontational manner. it’s why i would always feel the corresponding physical smile on my lips. it was involuntary. such an email is like seeing someone special just a small distance away: she smiles ever-so-briefly, and waves.

you don’t need to know anything more.

i’ve written this at the end of so many of my students’ creative writing assignments: this ending feels artificially conclusive. perhaps something more open, more suggestive, would be more satisfying?

i write that so much i think it’s become my own peculiar cliché. but i can’t help it. i want students to think like i do. nothing ever really begins or ends. your task as a writer is to just complicate, or simplify. whatever you choose.

i guess it’s only september but this track will almost certainly form part of my top 10:

eleven

months &

just forget

about her

words

after

i scratched this straight into the browser:

i’m a fistful of wildflowers, proferred, that

& nothing more / or i’m the under-butler,

secretary of worries, gainsaying

the impact of sentences /

zadie asked me how big the sky is

.

the limits of me reached

.

artist statement

three chunks of text that have stuck with me over the last 24 hours:

the artist furiously plays drums in the middle of an abandoned boeing 747, in the middle of the desert. simultaneous embrace & letting go? or is it a convenient overlay? do we engage in the repetitive activity we feel like doing, as a way of occupying ourselves (in the face of memories), embracing & letting go? i don’t know.

i really like the idea of activity devoid of direct intellectualisation. this feels like a worthy goal. but how do you do that? in this video piece the artist kneels as close as possible to a massive waterfall. i’d like to have faith in sensation, on occasion.

i was almost immediately concerned by the sentence before the contract signature. how can you see that a desire is likely to result in happiness? it seems like a negating clause, one that might keep the artist from actually having to take this seriously. my desires have to stare down unlikelihood & complication. i think that’s what’s makes it worth it: having faith in sensation, embracing / letting go, risking certainty.

again, still. i don’t know.

next week

 

 

i keep wrecking things with words