Does my brain look big in this?

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Yves Netzhammer’s The Subjectivisation of Repetition is on display at Mona now. It is a prelude to our exhibition The Red Queen, which opens on June 18.

By Luke Hortle

It’s the interiority of it. The quietness. Like being underwater. But I think that’s its intention (one of them, at least). With The Subjectivisation of Repetition, Yves Netzhammer cuts together this mesh of vignettes, these lyrical short scenes that shrug off conventional ways of meaning to instead offer an internal panorama of a human mind. Whether this mind is intensely personal or inclusively collective, I’m not sure. But I’m not sure this matters entirely, either. It works both ways, answering and unfolding itself to one consciousness at the same time that it holds quietly and firmly to its de-individuation. The first time I saw the work, I tried to organise my thinking about it by overlaying it with an explanatory narrative. It didn’t work. It was an imposition, but perhaps a forgivable one (an elaborate, gestalt-inflected knee-jerk). There’s no endpoint here. I see that now. There never was.

The Subjectivisation of Repetition, 2007 to 2013 Yves Netzhammer (Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970)

The Subjectivisation of Repetition, 2007 to 2013
Yves Netzhammer (Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970)
Photo Credit: MONA/Rémi Chauvin

Suddenly the title jars. It’s another imposition, warping the structure by which I understand this artwork and imbuing it with grandeur and deflection. It’s self-aggrandising and knowing, and it seems to promise a final answer that is at complete odds with the guts of the work: this quietly precise consideration of human interiority. I wonder if the title, with its implicit refusal to make its meaning clear, seeks to align the work with the art world and art criticism more broadly, with their (perhaps not so) unspoken dictate of insular exclusivity and all that frustrating pomp and vagueness. I don’t want to encounter this artwork so publicly. I don’t want that context. No back-story, please. I want to meet it in a darkened room. I want to forget my own contours. I want to overlay my own interiority, my own panopticon of thought, with the installation’s precise and elegant shadows. I want to do this unashamedly and without the self-importance that the title seeks to impose.

It’s necessarily subjective, of course it is; how could it not be? It’s curious to think about how all this stuff, this torrent of information that slams silently into us with every second, becomes part of our own idiosyncratic ‘thought imagery’ (Netzhammer’s own term). As bio-cultural structures of information and patterns and biases and quirks, humans devour their surroundings and cannibalise their memories. We’re helpless against this insatiable and subcutaneous greed. Information gluttons. Endless recapitulation. It’s ugly, but it’s a leveling move, and I’m more aware of myself within this violent playing field of information exchange.

Netzhammer’s work repeatedly interrogates this process of encounter and exchange, of how humans, animals and environments come into contact and the associated fall-out of these interactions. Gaze upon the walls with their enveloping black and white miscellany. But within this, how does one thing encounter another? What’s involved? How does a mind decide what to do, what to discard, what to imbibe? How is the violence undertaken? A faceless automaton slices open the thigh of its shadow-self and fills the bloodless cavity with teeth. Human figures crouch outside a rustic building, and then suddenly collapse. Static fingers snap fresh from apples. Innards are just more surface, just another artificial crimson plane. A mosquito sucks at a disembodied vein; perhaps it’s a root system, reaching out to burrow itself into that black mass. Someone holds a whale’s eye in their arms. It’s horrifying and unaccountably sad. What I’m trying to say is this: I’m unconsciously feasting on everything around me, digesting it in my skull and I’m unaware. It makes me feel less evolved than I think I should be. Like I’m only partly in residence of my body. I’m pissed off that I’m not conscious of this process. Why can’t I be privy to the whole interiority of my brain and mind, the whole psychological kit and caboodle? The frustration is exhausting, and I feel cheated. I was given access to pages of installation blueprints for Netzhammer’s piece, along with a huge email conversation between various curators, exhibition designers and the artist. One line from Elizabeth: ‘the whole thing gives me a headache.’ For a fortnight, I was trapped in this mesh of lancing computer-etched lines and badly punctuated emails. It was my first encounter with the artwork and I felt ripped off. The point is, it was supposed to be a clarification of the work. It wasn’t. Noise. Excess fat. Communication breakdown. (I need to listen to more Led Zeppelin.) Mutual consciousness can be synonymous with white noise, and then everyone’s screwed. Shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. Fetch me the paracetamol, stat.

What I’m struggling with is the gradual piecing together of this work. It refuses to submit, to yield itself, to unfold completely, to remain splayed in the air and ripe for scrutiny. I don’t know where it begins. I can’t work out what to privilege. Those walls have bloomed silhouettes. Black cords ribbon from the plaster in perfect, looping lines. Teacups sink into the floorboards. The precision of it, of all of it, is shocking. It’s changed again. Expanded. I’m surrounded. (I was going to write this: ‘It’s impossible to watch. It becomes untenable to maintain that distance between yourself and the work. Impossible to watch because the verb itself becomes inadequate; this installation is something to be entered.’ But apart from that hideous act of trite italicisation—ugh, typographical gag—it sounded far too, um, penetrative. Which is just wrong; although for something so overtly sexless, the installation is refreshingly seductive. Don’t bother with dinner; Netzie, I’m yours.) I wonder if I’ve become the focal point, the empty centre. I’m worried about this, about the possibility of my subsumption. It’s problematic. Potentially. Things (ie. me and what I hold to constitute myself) can be swept under the carpet. Effacement is one bitch of a broom, and I resent that; I resent the idea that I might need to be emptied out, disembowelled, at the feet of a great work of art. I won’t lie; I shan’t. I’ve been coaxed into bed and I don’t know which way to turn. The uneasiness of it. I’ll insist, resolutely, that I’m still here. Meshed thoughts. My limbs. Brain, belly, cock and soles. It’s hypnotic.

I don’t bother with the title. I don’t nit-pick at the bastardisation of language. I walk into the gallery and stand beneath that concrete pentagon. It’s an aquarium of thought. The visibility is average, or the clarity of the content, visually at least, appears shifty to begin with. The Shurer’s hypnotic; I try to decide whether or not to resent this. I used to know this space, this artificial cheap wooden forest on an oil-aged wooden floor, with its crap technicolour sun spinning gracefully in the gloom. I’ve spent hours in this dark structure, now unfamiliar and haunted by blueprints. I don’t know where to stand; the periphery flickers relentlessly. It makes me want to overtly interrogate what’s swimming about in the tank of my skull and what that stuff (the conscious stuff, not the meat and fluid) could look like, what it might manifest itself as, thrust exterior to bodily confines. There it is, lanced to the walls, over-determined already by its own projection. It fails, instantly, at the moment of its success. I’m perennially shocked to realise that other people have their own internal realities and that they might be the same as my own. I’m embarrassed, and yes, I have a headache.

First world problems

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By Elizabeth Pearce1

I was halfway through Middlemarch when I got (‘fell’) pregnant. I’m not suggesting there’s a connection. I have only just been able to pick the book up again, and when I say ‘pick the book up’ that is not a metaphor (or metonymy) for reading it; I literally have been unable to look at it or touch the cover due to the powerful association I have built between it, and the all-day, all pervasive morning sickness that promptly followed my ‘falling’ and that, frustratingly, led to no actual vomiting, meaning that it wasn’t even classed as bad in the scale of things. ‘The scale of things’. That means the scale of my wonderful, privileged life, the one in which I can get pregnant when I want to, distinguishing me from lots of other women and couples who have to go through all sorts to get to that point; and distinguishing me, further, from the rest of the world for which getting pregnant and having morning sickness are not significant problems at all, in the scale of things.

I have been wondering a lot lately (ever since I realised I was not going to dedicate my life to saving the world or even, as I had planned when I was younger, to easing the suffering of sick or exploited animals) about the quality of suffering. Is the suffering I rate in my own ‘scale’—that of drug addiction, divorce, loneliness, cancer, failure to express oneself or to fulfill ambition—made of the same stuff, boast the same blood and tendon, as that suffering, unimaginable to me, of war, famine, genocide, or the suppression of human rights? I know that it differs in magnitude: we should be more horrified by, say, the exploitation of children in sweatshops than by the physical degradation and social isolation of old age. Or should we? Is suffering just suffering, regardless of whether its source lies with barbarity (in the first instance), or inevitability (in the second)? Do the scales shift, giving us an ever-relative experience of pain? But the reason that I frame the question, I confess with some shame, is that I want to be able to justify (or not) my ongoing decision to do nothing at all to put a stop to that second-order variety of human atrocity. For instance: two of my friends dedicate a lot of their spare time and energy (and who has much of that?) to raising money to educate children in Benin, and traveling to that country when they can. I could do something like that, but I don’t.

I believe I was sincere in my plans, at a younger age, to ‘do something’, and I don’t think my decision now not to fulfill those plans has anything to do with loss of innocence (even now I rail against the you’ll-grow-out-of-it dismissals we perpetuate on the idealistic young). Hmm. Perhaps my inaction does have something to do with the fact that I recognise, having lived a little longer, that ‘goodness’ is infinitely contingent: there are no essentially decent acts (due to immeasurably complex consequences), but only decent intentions – which are, in turn, shadowed by any number of murkier motivations. (Brian Boyd writes in his book On the Origin of Stories about the fact that, in evolutionary terms, the best way for a socially competitive organism like a human to conceal its intentions from others is to not know them itself. The truth as I see it is that we never really know why we do things and we shouldn’t waste our time trying to find out. Instead we should focus on trying to control the impulses we know from imagination or experience lead to the suffering of ourselves or those around us). Being privy to the childhoods of others (my husband’s boys) has taught me a great deal about the contingency of good and bad: each boy is very different to the other. It is easy for me to see, from my privileged adult vantage point, that they are often, in conflict, both right at once; they do wrong to each other just by (rightly) being themselves. I wish I could explain that to them in words they’d understand. It would truly, I believe, set them up to better know the world and so to make the best of it.

What do you do with the suffering in the world? is a question asked by many (everyone, perhaps); among them, Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch. Like Dorothea (at least as her character stands in the first half of the book. What I am doing now—writing about a book only half-read—is an atrocity in my book, but I hope, given the circumstances, you’ll forgive me this once?)… Like Dorothea, I am prone to over-empathy, that scourge her admirer Will Ladislaw (do they get together?) calls ‘the fanaticism of sympathy’. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say with Dorothea that ‘it spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it’; but I have been prone to the recurring, tormenting thought: Why should I be happy when that other person can’t be?

It is something of a cliché perhaps to recall that Mother Theresa said, when asked what we should do to promote world peace, ‘Go home and love your family’. (She also said in her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize lecture that ‘the greatest destroyer of peace today’ is—abortion. Actually she said it twice. I don’t even find the sentiment that offensive because it is just too weird. I was asked recently if my impending-mother status impacts how I feel about the issue. Yes it does. I have always supported free choice but my own experience has intensified my feelings of indignation—yes, outrage—at the audacity of any group or individual to have any say at all over the completion or otherwise of a pregnancy. It is an intensely personal business, a figment of my body, a biological quirk—at least, up until a certain point in time.2 On my way to work I walk past an abortion clinic, outside which Christian protestors gather each morning; one elderly man wears a sandwich board-style contraption sporting life-size models of fetuses that I could, if I wanted to, pop out and hold. I used to find these religious folk amusing, and even say good morning to them—who am I to discriminate against them on the grounds of their beliefs? They think they’re doing right in the world. But the thought, now, of the things those women must feel as they enter that building, each with their inherently worthy reasons for terminating their pregnancy—I don’t believe any person would make that choice for casual reasons—has put an end to my congenial tolerance of the protestors. I feel seriously pissed off with them instead. And by the way, if you want to you can buy from the internet a number of Mother Theresa abortion-quotation bumper stickers). But what I wanted to say, with or without Mother T, is that the advent of family, mature love, and the understanding that everyone—even people with seemingly everything—suffers, has perhaps been the biggest reason for the non-emergence of the world-saving zeal I looked forward to in youth. I offer this neither as excuse nor justification, merely the truth. Instead of posing navel-gazing questions like, ‘Can I justify my existence?’ I intend to do as much as I can to extend sympathy to the people in my life, friends and strangers, who are inevitably suffering their own silent, first-world scale pain. It is either enough or it isn’t (and of course it isn’t, how could it be?). I will think, as well, of the people around me whose strength, happiness and decency have rubbed off on me when I have been weak, miserable and ignoble. As Will Ladislaw would have it:

The best piety is to enjoy—when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight—in art or in anything else. Would you turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and moralizing over misery?3

And I’m going to finish Middlemarch.

1 I got hitched.

2 If this is neither a scientifically, nor morally, nor philosophically coherent estimation of the beginning point of human life, that is because we humans are incoherent entities. And I’m not saying that ‘the beginning point of human life’ is automatically equivalent to the point at which abortion should be illegal.

3 Middlemarch quotes are taken from page 219 ‘in case you care’ – to paraphrase my co-blogger Luke Hortle.

My Friends

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By David Walsh

I just made a Facebook friend.

For the most part there is nothing particularly interesting about that. In my case it is unusual, though. In fact, it is unique.

I didn’t create my own Facebook account. A close (but often annoying) friend spoofed me, and she knew enough about me to get my password right (meaning I could guess it).

I wasn’t the only one who could guess it. Another friend (that proves I have at least two, but not on Facebook) logged on in my name, and randomly befriended a bunch of people before I snatched the iPad out of his hand. He was taunting me. He wouldn’t have bothered without some potential for me to discover his misdemeanour.

I never checked my Facebook account, but I didn’t delete it (I assume that’s possible). I found it came in handy. The smart bastards that built this insidious system hold out access to some parts of Facebook when you are not logged in. And I wanted to know Mona stuff.

A couple of years ago I went to a wedding dinner. My newly nuptialized mates told me what time the dinner was because I didn’t commune electronically. Everybody else was told on Facebook. They all turned up an hour late because the time specified on Facebook was wrong. I sat with the bride and groom for an hour, a self-oiling third wheel. It was rather pleasant. But also rather edifying. I discovered that everyone I knew was on Facebook.

Occasionally, very occasionally, it crossed my mind that trying hard not to be like everybody else doesn’t really work. It seems okay to be a rugged individualist, but communication, honest communication, isn’t just an extension of your own consciousness. It also extends someone else’s. You and they, that’s the definition of need. No one benefits from being themselves alone.

An ex-girlfriend had a new partner. Some time ago she thought he might be a danger to himself. But, actually, I knew him better than her. He was part of my family. And he wasn’t a danger to anyone. In fact, he was kind of lovely. So I ignored her.

Just now, wondering if I failed him, wondering if I’d failed his family, wondering if I’d failed our mutual-ex, I checked my friend requests.

There were 263 of them. Many, perhaps most, were people by the name of David Walsh, and they were recommended by David Walsh. Do people think that coincidental characters, in a coincidental order make one compatible? Does coincidence define character?

But there were people in that list that I like, and love, that I’ve hardly communicated with for years. And some that I’ve spent some time with recently, and maybe they don’t know my Facebook habits (which might be the habits of a lifetime) and they think I’ve spurned them. Maybe not taking the time to care, maybe not being suckered into a medium or process that everyone is a part of, maybe that’s what spurning is. Maybe, sometimes, you have to sell out to the shysters, to keep your integrity, to maintain your shit.

One of those 263 requests was, as I expected, from Aled Garlick. He was the brother of a man who is my brother’s son, but is nearly my son, because it isn’t just biology that makes one a son. But Aled was not my nephew, because my brother died too soon to be his father. He is the son of two people that have other sons, and a daughter, but he will not be less missed because he is not all they have. And he will not be less missed because they have lost before, and because they didn’t understand then, and cannot understand now.

He is, too late, my first Facebook friend.

Aled Garlick (1988-2013)

Graffiti wall at Mona’s Moonah office
Aled Garlick, 2012

Stupid

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By David Walsh

The museum urn collection is stupidly growing, and its growing is stupefying me. I’m exhausted and sad and sick of being serious. Exploration and explanation will come later, if at all. I’m posting something frivolous.

It may come as some surprise to you that it is possible to read even if all words have their vowels replaced by a marker, in essence meaning that all vowels are represented by a single vowel. With practice it is feasible to read a text even if the vowels are removed altogether.

The reason English has written vowels is that ancient Greek had written vowels. And the reason early Greek had written vowels is that they didn’t have as many spoken consonants. This became significant when the Greeks co-opted the Phoenician script. Phoenicians didn’t write vowels, but they had more letters than the Greeks has consonants. The Greeks put the excess letters to good use as representatives of vowel sounds.

S f y cn rd ths y mght hv md a gd Phncn. -nd -f y-- c-n’t r--d th-s - c-n c-ll y-- -n -d--t w-th -mp-n-ty.

If all that is so, and it is, why do newspapers print expletives with a ‘*’, instead of a vowel? Is there anyone that can read, who is otherwise insufficiently well informed so as to be unable to perform a much-simplified version of the transformation that all literate Phoenicians performed as a matter of course?

Do those f*cking c*nts think we are f*cking morons, or what?

Springs eternal

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By David Walsh

I’ve been telling tales of death recently. At the risk of reinforcing what I believe to be an unfortunate stereotyping of my interests, here’s another. Just now I rang Jacqui, friend, singer, yoga instructor and, on the end of the phone, sadness personified. This, despite an attempt to conceal her suffering: as always she wants all to feel only good. With prompting she told me her friend had died.

Jacqui had asked for treatment advice for her sick friend. She told me that they had collected some cash to send this friend to an ‘alternate cancer therapist’, Ian Gawler, a long-term survivor of cancer and advocate of ‘mind-body’ medicine. I don’t know if I have accumulated sufficient audience attention, as yet, to not need to mention that I see no merit in such treatments. Survivors survive, and they maintain a dignified silence, or offer advice and therapies, depending on their state of mind before their status as a survivor was assured. Most don’t survive (actually that isn’t literally true, half of those diagnosed with cancer do survive). And some, but very few, haven’t survived at all, but have fabricated their disease and recovery. Noticing that cancer sufferers have little to lose, they peddle false hope for real money. This asymmetry – little downside but considerable upside – is verdant territory for a scammer to graze.

Despite all that, and now all this, I didn’t know how to respond. I muddled through by suggesting that the therapy was unlikely to work, but that they give her the money anyway; maybe send her on a holiday. But I accepted, and accept, that hope, even hopeless, desperate hope, springs eternal.

And that makes me mindful of a perversion of reason I used to subscribe to. I used to think granting the wishes of dying kids was a poor way to spend donated dollars. ‘Look after those who will continue living,’ I mentally admonished them. Now I stand astonished at my insensitivity, and my incapacity to reason my way around such simple moral obstacles. Each day alive is a day to be celebrated, if it holds any possibility of giving the liver of that day some pleasure. The cousin of my nephew went to a Clipper’s game in LA not long before he died, as a guest of Make A Wish foundation. The thrill of a lifetime and, for him at least, set to remain so. Surely a good thing remains a good thing when those who experienced and enjoyed it have died? Even if all memory has been erased? After all I, for one, do believe that the tree made a sound when it fell in the forest, even though no one heard.

My outrageous resistance to organisations like Make A Wish wasn’t just the result of immature reasoning (and at all moments in a life the receding opinions of earlier moments will seem immature). I had many opportunities to form different opinions. Years ago I read a great but obscure book of the human condition, Towards Asmara, within which was all the moral guidance I needed. During the most memorable moment of this most memorable novel, children are slowly starving as the Ethiopian Civil War, and famine, rages around them. The narrator has a conversation with the protagonist concerning the kids learning French and English as they slowly dwindle; as their bodies are distorted by kwashiorkor or marasmus, their minds remain vessels to be filled. They live each little bit of each little day for itself, having no other option. They learn to say ‘hello’. And ‘goodbye’.

Why that wasn’t sufficient to set me straight, I don’t know. And it wasn’t my only opportunity. Much earlier, I had read Fritz Leiber’s romantic science fiction tale, A pail of air, which memorably begins, ‘Pa had sent me out to get an extra pail of air.’ Earth, having been extracted from its orbit by a passing star, is now beyond the orbit of Pluto. A family lingers on, apparently the only people on Earth. They thaw oxygen to breathe. ‘Pa’ contends that

no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some rich cloth or fur, or the petals of flowers… or the fire’s glow. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as the first.

Our biological compulsion isn’t simply to propagate our race, it is more cunning than that. It is to build in the pleasure of living, and the pleasure of seeking to propagate. Most sexual liaisons have no possibility of producing offspring. But they do produce pleasure, and sometimes bind relationships more strongly. Maybe that’s why Leiber persecuted a whole family within his elegantly contrived allegory.

The other day Phillip Adams (and I harvest some pleasure at dropping such a name, but it stemmed from an interview, not a friendship) asked me if I fear death. I answered then, and mentioned to Jacqui just now, that I fear dying, as my biological nature compels me to, but that I contrive, through my evolution-given capacity to reason my way through my world, to see it as an undesirable side effect of the astonishing good fortune of having been born in the first place. The uncountable generations of successful matings since nature’s invention of sex over a billion years ago; the freakish chance of the one of my father’s sperm meeting the one of my mother’s eggs that were each able, through forthcoming fusion, to contain me therein; and the events since, that prevented my dying while allowing this moment and this thought.

To characterise all this more immediately and personally: an incompetent doctor, despite having been informed of my mother’s allergy, used penicillin to treat a minor infection. My mothers illness, and my parent’s anger at his blunder was soon tempered by their becoming aware of an impossible pregnancy, mum having been cured on an infection that had been surreptitiously preventing conception. My sister followed nine months later; I, third in line, emerged reasonably healthy seven years layer, but showing some of the characteristics (fortunately) that are associated with parturition beyond the age of forty. That the probability of my being alive will one day become zero doesn’t in any way change the fact that now that probability is one. Why should my boundless joy be tempered by comprehension of the most basic mathematics?

At Mona we have recently been working on exhibitions that reflect the involvement of evolution in art. That art is universal, and predates most of our cultural constructs, suggests that it is not only built into us, but also good for us (some theorists even assert that our capacity for cognition evolved to expand our capacity for creativity). One speculation is that storytelling, the creation of narrative fiction, allows us to learn to construct possible futures and react to them; to plan. I certainly had all the tools, through these stories and others, to produce a more reasoned ethical self. That I didn’t is a condemnation only of my use of these tools, not the tools themselves. But, here and now, the evolution of the propensity to tell stories, and to gain from them, compels me to observe that all that I believe may be overturned by future learning. If I think that everything I thought twenty years ago was flawed, why not extrapolate that in twenty years I will probably believe that most of what I think now is crap? I’m not suggesting that our lives are narrative and thus contain no reality, just that opinions ebb and flow. Only as a group do we make progress, and acquire knowledge. But if I advocate self-doubt, and I do, why write down something that I may come to believe was errant? I guess the answer to that is that I need feedback for my opinions to be fully constructed. To my surprise, Mona blog gives me that. When Elizabeth suggested it, I resisted. But I’ve learned. So now, when she asked me to write something, I groped about for inspiration, and as always it came from the way recent events have improved my accordance with verity. Jacqui’s friend kept a blog, which I only just now became aware of, within which there are many personal verities, and some things I read as larger truths. From an entry three months ago she reifies my notion of people living while they live, and continuing to attend to the things that make them feel human, and embody humanity; thus, just three months ago she would still ‘pout and wonder whether any true great love stories will ever involve a 30-something year-old girl with a diagnosis of stage 4 cancer and another soul who can see past that and love her right back anyway.’

The author of the book I mentioned before, Towards Asmara, is Thomas Kenneally, who also penned Schindler’s ark, on which the Steven Spielberg masterpiece Schindler’s list was based. My friend Martin Haywood, who has been the subject of a couple of blog entries from me, and whose probability of being alive recently fell by one, said of Schindler’s list: ‘I don’t want to watch such movies. I just want to know they are being made.’ Martin probably meant that we need to see our faults writ large. As a result of his demise, and his prior pattern of living with dignity, he has accidentally become the magnetic north of my moral compass, and so when his long-forgotten words renew my acquaintance, I allow them to direct my thoughts. We don’t just benefit from narratives that plot a possible future, we also gain from those that expose a moribund past. Selection will favour those who have a genetic propensity to learn from their mistakes. And also, as Kenneally and Leiber amply illustrate, from others’ mistakes. Our consciousness is extended by others, even (and often especially) dead others. And here I refer to the quote from Jacqui’s friend’s blog in the previous paragraph.

But evolution operates over a continuum of characteristics that contribute to a greater or lesser degree to our survival. Each of them individually, and together, participates in a strange sort of inverse statistical lottery, wherein luck giveth and luck taketh away. Yesterday Jacqui’s friend’s number came up. My numbers, and yours, haven’t. But we’re still enjoying the thrill of buying tickets.

They didn’t send Jacqui’s friend on a holiday. She had the alternate therapy which, for whatever reason, didn’t heal her. But it did empower her. Just three weeks ago she wrote:

Let me tell you that where I am at now is like having my feet on two very different paths. And it’s hard, but it’s real. One foot is on the reality path – the one with the CT scans, the doctors, the stupid tumours going bonkers, the daily morphine and pain meds… the other foot is on the spiritual, hopeful, optimistic, positive, determined healing path.

She died. But she did get a wish granted.

A few days ago I read in the Age about a terminally ill woman who had met her biological father, an anonymous sperm donor, whom she had been seeking for fifteen years. Despite her considerable effort that anonymity had been preserved until her cancer diagnosis had induced government intervention. She met her father and, as the article recounted, ‘There was an instant connection – how could there not be?’

That article appeared on March 17.  Then, on March 27, Jacqui was sad, because her friend, Narelle Grech, who had just met her father, died the day before. Her father, who one month ago didn’t know he had a daughter is, presumably, distraught. And all the better for it.

Is that subtext, or are you just happy to see me?

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By Luke Hortle

Throat-clearing.
Last night I went to hear Ellen Dissanayake’s lecture, ‘The Deep Structure of the Arts’, which was about the role of art in human evolution. I went because I thought I should, cringing slightly because the whole thing sounded too damnably Mona-ish, and left feeling awkward—not because of the lecture or Dissanayake’s ideas (which were methodical and measured, although I craved a more emphatic statement of her argument), but because of the awkward atmosphere of the question time that followed. Awkward, because the long-winded monologues were not questions, and setting them loose in the lecture hall shifted the mood. The air between people thickened. It felt compromising to be situated within a group of other humans. A caveat: I’m not sure if this awkwardness was objectively so, or more a self-absorbed by-product of my own thought-stream, which is decidedly awkward and neurotic anyway, regardless of any objective social scenario. Performing the opposite of that state of mind is probably a necessity of contemporary social interaction, unless you’re a ‘creative’ and can get away with a whole lot of really irritating shit while other people make excuses for your unconventional and fucking vexing disposition. (Also, I didn’t take a pen and paper.)

The guts of it.
Dissanayake argued in the lecture that art, or ‘artification’ as the behaviour of making art, has a deep structure, and one that is comparable to the deep structure of language advocated for by some linguists and psychologists. She claims that this behaviour is essential and intrinsic to being human. That it’s innate and natural. That it’s universal. She argues that this behaviour has evolutionary benefits. Apparently, behaviours such as singing and dancing with other people produce a hormone called oxytocin, which is also elicited during sex. One of the benefits of oxytocin is that it counteracts cortisol, a stress hormone. I’d like a clarification though. Do you only get the oxytocin hit if you’re having sex with another person, or can you replenish your hormonal stores by treating yourself (singular) to a nice night in?

***
Interlude: A masturbatory call to arms

No one ever talks interestingly about masturbation. Faux Mo flashback: I’m in a darkened cinema and it’s black-bruised-red like the insides of a vital organ. A woman is dancing naked in front of hundreds of pissed people, alternately with a black sack over her head or wearing a gorilla mask. I’m trying to work out what to think of it, when a young balding guy, not unattractive, stands next to me, grinning, and asks, ‘Do you reckon she’s going to flick the bean?’ Oh Christ. If this is indicative of masturbation discourse (and I suspect it might be) then I’m putting a call out for people to lift their game. Pun entirely intended.

***

I can’t comment on the scientific validity of Dissanayake’s claims; I don’t know enough (read: not much at all) about evolutionary biology and I’m not remotely interested in making those kinds of comments about her work. It’s boring (that kind of discussion; not her research, necessarily). My main problem with the lecture was her use of the word ‘human’. It became an oblique invocation of the term, which was disappointingly predictable. Using ‘human’ in such a way is commonplace, but that shouldn’t equate to an excuse. ‘Human’ has a subtext. An uncontainable one. Bare it. Refusal to do so turns use of the word into an act of effacement. It becomes another form of exclusory language, and one that relates only, within the parameters of Dissanayake’s argument, to those types of humans that enjoy regular heterosexual sex and the possibility, and propensity, for procreation. Speaking of the human, and using the term in a critically savvy manner, has to be provisional. I suspect I’m against its use as a commonplace and absolute term because it kills my identity politics boner. Yours too. Oh, the critical impotence. Humanness, particularly in the context of evolution, is anything but a constant or endpoint or intellectual dead-end. If we’re speaking of evolution (and we don’t have to be, not really, not if you don’t want to, but we are), then using ‘human’ as a static term sets up a disconnect with the premise and ideological underpinning of the subject matter. Being human is a state of modulation, of unfinished-ness, regardless of how aware we are of this process. Being human isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a matter of common sense. In other words (and with some quite unrelated, juvenile, yet suspiciously apt imagery), it’s an intellectually stimulating cock and it’s happy to see you.

It boils down to this: given the broad and fascinating cultural implications of Dissanayake’s research into the origins of art as a human behaviour, with art seen as a shaping force of humanness, linguistic and experiential invocations of the ‘human’ demand to be given the commensurate critical attention they deserve.

Death illiterate.
As an English graduate, I’m supposed to be interested in how being human is culturally produced, rather than how it is inherently and essentially substantiated. I get trapped between thinking about myself as a culturally and linguistically realised entity, and the biological reality of my humanness. Because if I’m biologically and genetically human, if I am irrefutably so, then why am I even talking about this? Why are discussions of humanness, life and species booming in politics, the arts and that ever so sexy world of critical theory? Are we just a narcissistic species?

It’s particularly pertinent now, in this contemporary moment, to think about this. Contemporary anxieties, and the various discourses they infiltrate, are underpinned by an almost unspoken fear of extinction. (I could be inflammatory and drop the ‘C’ bomb—climate change—but I won’t.) Perhaps it’s the reality of living out our humanness, the reality of being a species—to be perennially haunted by various other states, those innumerable modes of not-life. The bottom line: we face the fact of our own death, and perhaps our broader concerns with extinction work to absolve personal responsibility for having to deal with the relatively imminent occurrence of our own dying. An implicit choosing of collective anxiety over the personal realities of being a fleshy composite with an expiry date.

I don’t know how to think about my own death. The pure facts of its reality are subsumed, immediately, by the romance of the language I use to talk about it. The word itself, ‘death’, is shockingly seductive. And biologically, I’m at a loss. The biological facts of my bodily aliveness refuse to cross the threshold of my conscious awareness. I can’t ruminate on them. They might enable my consciousness, but they never become usable and recognisable terms within that swarming and personalised mindfuck. Biological subtext, rather than readable narrative. Ungraspable, even in their physical immediacy. It’s terrifying.

Synaesthesia

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By Anica Boulanger-Mashberg

There are so many ways a thing can make you shiver. A cello in a crowd. A chorus in a stairwell. A story about a child who didn’t stand up for another child. The fury of chilli and the honest, expected loyalty of a potato. A single note. The memory, a moment later, of that same note.

Morning. In the sun.

Conversations about heels.

Elizabeth wears them because Kirsha told her she should. And then because she discovered she loved them.

Angela doesn’t. She feels like a politician.

I always fall over. Lizzy thinks that’s a myth. Maybe it is.

Inside. The Void.

The first thing that I love:

A cello.

Pulls my guts out through my lungs and, coated in tears, drags them up my throat in a gasp and there’s everything I once thought I’d have and then thought I’d never need and now here it all is.

I want to drink the cello forever and already I’m sick of my own linguistic synaesthesing. But I do want to drink the cello.

At the beginning of this thing, and longing for the saturated, sleepy exhaustion of midnight.

And then a man in a black t-shirt, new for the day, towards me against the salmon-tide:

‘And so it goes’.

Later.

I find a room full of the throbbing, hypnotic reassurances of Philip Glass. Rhythmic certainties interrupted by uncertain pauses, and a mobile phone announcing some urgent communiqué from the world outside. The electronically generated xylophonic trill weaves itself easily into the milky notes of Glass’s intent, and I enjoy the absurdity of it.

Between Glass dances, the organist frantically shakes his wrists and fingers out, and the plants grow quietly in their wall-pockets at the other end of the room.

Later.

Five synaesthetes walk into a bar.

I’m not sure what comes next. But I think the joke is possibly arcane and probably offensive, and I decide not to pursue its invention.

Later still.

I think of a flautist I once knew, who had given up a professional career because her synaesthesia made performance (and especially rehearsal) too unbearable for her.

I wonder if this performance – in front of the busy Nolan snake, and splashed with cycling coloured light – is unpleasant for a synaesthete?

The subjectivity of humanity begins to preoccupy and mildly terrify me. I start scribbling incomprehensibly into my medium brown notebook. I write pages and pages and pages during the Mussorgsky, and it is so boring even I can’t bear to read it over afterwards.

Late evening. The Organ Room.

Kate Miller-Heidke is a glistening-polished jelly dessert with familiar and never-before-tasted tropical fruit. More saccharine at first than you think you wanted but then you discover you’re in love and, in all the sugar, what you taste is the whole world: the rind and the tang, the moon and the seas, the loss and the first times, poisons and wild animals.

She has a voice that doesn’t make sense coming from her small body. She sings about the past and about herself and about nothing sometimes, and she tells stories like she wants us to rise up and respond, or laugh at her, or be shocked, or maybe buy her a drink. She fills the already crowded room. She is bigger than herself. She becomes a way into the world.

Home
I’ve started to forget what I know about things. Or what I’ve heard. Started to think I’m making them up. Is there a story, for example, about David discussing the logo design, and saying ‘fuck it, let’s use fluoro pink: no-one uses fluoro pink’, and that’s how it came about? No? Well. It sounds plausible though, doesn’t it.


(De)Gustation

Saline

I saw a ghost and an angel while the chorus were painting the stairwell in Bowman and green and in blue light and in open vowels and in blood pooling softly across my chest.

He was magnificent and ordinary and dressed in white and in need of a haircut and the shape of a man and with eyes filled in sorrow and the everyday. He stood at the top of the stairwell and we made no contact and I stood near the bottom and by the Sanctus he was gone. I didn’t see him leave but I know he walked, down those back stairs, slipping quietly or with an excuse me, and the knowledge of him comforts me in no way you can imagine.

She was a sketch and a shadow and almost invisible amongst the resonance of the chorus. That chorus, haunting through the museum: cobwebs and sheets adrift in a hot, airless house. She slipped amongst them and was a shiver across their shoulders as they sang for us, sang for themselves, never once sang for her, sang for their childhoods and their immortality and their impossibilities.

And you didn’t see either of them.

Sour

I create restore points in time. I click something, somewhere, and I imagine that one day I’ll look back to this moment and I’ll try to re-feel all of it – someone I love sitting beside me, the air slightly cooler than my skin, the relentlessly gorgeous same-and-changing Glass patterns, the contented memory of kimchi, chilli, wasabi.

I wonder how long it would take me, in this space, to lose everything and become a throbbing, visceral echo of myself. Not long, I think. And what stops me? What holds me here? What holds you? What holds the ones you love? Is it the same thing that binds us all?

If this is the rabbit hole, I am already here. I’ve forgotten what I was following.

And the longer I’m here, the more uncomfortably mundane it all becomes. I see through the cracks and around the corners.

You can only eat so much, you know. It says a lot about a person, how they eat at a dessert buffet.

I met Alexandria at a dessert buffet. We were both standing beside the mousse, agonising. It said a lot about her, to me. And I suppose it said a lot about me. To her. I’ve never asked her, actually. I should. Should have.

See, if you know you love – and I mean love — the chocolate gateau, why would you go back, when you’re almost full and the party’s almost over, to try the passionfruit gelato? Just on the off chance that you’ll love it. Love it more than the chocolate gateau. Which you can never have again, by the way, because you’re full and the party was catered by a retiring pastry chef.

After a while, I start to wonder whether it matters at all.

The Messiaen is beautiful. So what if he saw golden Fmaj chords when he wrote it, and I don’t see them now?

Sugar
I’m holding your breath.

Bitterness

What if each time someone said your name, my mouth was filled with the idea of strawberries? What then? Or what if it wasn’t strawberries? What if it was the bitter disappointment of a lettuce leaf left too long before picking? A small, dark leaf perfectly formed, but carrying only ugly in its flavour? A tightening, lingering, wild-chicory of a bite. What if that metallic taste of regret was what accompanied you? Could I still love you?

Every touch of you is somehow unbelievable. Every brush of your tannin-tainted tongue is something I once longed for and now has no meaning. Where do such hauntings come from? Who turned us into this? I think there was a moment when I could have stopped it. This brakeless tumble towards loss. I remember. It was a winter morning but the sun was cruel against the tight cotton of my jeans. Your children were asleep – both of them, what a wonder. We sat together in their treehouse with a teapot full of sand, and we talked about politics and linguistics and the weather patterns of the antipodes. Something. I remember you opening the toy teapot and sliding one finger through the sand – I didn’t even know the children had a sandpit. I had only visited you in your house twice before, and both times in the unmooned darkness. This day, there was quiet in the air and the sound of the sand against your dry knuckles was remarkable. I listened as you warped that finger in and out, down through that multitude of crushed and infinitesimal fragments of things that once were, between the specks of abstraction.

And, you see, I knew then that I could love you more than you loved me. I don’t know why, but that’s when it was. That moment, your finger in a teapot full of sand, your children asleep, your words meaningless, your pulse at your throat contorting your profile, your treehouse around us and above us and below us, and the astringent taste of something familiar in my mouth – that moment. It was when I made the decision that swept me to where I am now. That moment was when I kissed you and you touched the side of my cheek with your finger sugared in sand, and the breath of you filled me up and emptied you. That moment. That was when I could have chosen no and I chose yes.

But this wasn’t supposed to be a story about love. They’re never supposed to be stories about love. What would I know?

Something else

‘What colour is silence?’ a woman asks the synaesthete.

A long pause.

‘I’ve never seen true silence,’ he finally says.

Later
The museum has absorbed all the synaesthetes and the nonaesthetes and the syn-curious into its skin like rain into an anonymous, quiet earth.