[1]. Today I am 27 years old on the 27th day of the month. 27; the number of current amendments to the US Constitution, the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet, the age at which Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison and Alain-Fournier died. There are 27 bones in the human hand and 27 member states in the European Union. I was born when my father was 27 years old which makes this the only remaining year when his age will be exactly double mine (unless he lives to be 108). When Dad was 27 the Falklands War was just beginning, he was working as an electrician installing emergency lights into the stairwells of skyscrapers in London, and he listened to Dire Straits on Capital FM. At age 27 today’s news covered the outbreak of Swine Influenza in Mexico, the United States and New Zealand, I am still studying for my PhD and I listen to the music that I’ve most recently downloaded.
I have been feeling a bit apprehensive about this birthday. All birthday celebrations have something of the apotropaic about them, a mealy cake offered to the hungry world as bargain for the birthday-ee’s continued safety and luck, but this 27th seems particularly charged. A distinct geometric motif speaks to the feeling - that this is a hinge year. A corner is coming up fast and I’ve no idea if the momentum means to push me nose-first into a hard plane, or turn me out into some new landscape. The edginess of things.
[2]. I am living in
Perth, in the house on a steep hill that belongs to my parents. The incline
makes it difficult to get out of a car. Postmen weave up the centre of the road
throwing handfuls of mail in the vicinity of the houses because if they stop,
their bikes roll backwards and topple. The plants I grow slip two inches down
the hill every year, peeling back fresh garden-bed at the top of the block in
Spring. I had intended to move out on returning from Holland last year, but
with my PhD thesis due in December and no sensible share-house room becoming
available I have negotiated a compassionate rate of board to stay here until
the end of the year. I have partially converted the upstairs bedroom that used
to belong to LG into a kind of study space and I am sleeping in the basement.
During the day I work with an eye cast to the garden and the blind collie we
keep, who walks into walls and fights ghost-cats. I talk to her through the
open window and she flicks her brow the way dogs do, searching for the hand
that matches the voice. Her sense of audible distance is impaired now too.
In some ways this the ideal work
environment - insulated and isolated. In other ways, it is a lonely place. The
dog doesn’t like to be inside anymore and usually there are no other people
walking along the suburban street during the day. Routines establish, decay and
re-establish. A month ago a dry windstorm came down the coast during a
green-waste collection, when all the heavy litter was laid on the verges. I was
trying to hose the front lawn (useless, backwards water-flowers) when a child’s
playhouse, what used to be called a Wendy House, came hurtling down the street as
if it were on coasters. It crashed into a electricity pole near the bottom of
the hill in a spectacular chrysanthemum of splinters. But no one else was there
to see it with me, except the unseeing dog. All night the stumbling of air
currents, the wind with its feet stuck in its trousers. These are the sorts of
days I like here. Today is a bright still day, the sky a colour only nature has
language for. Clouds come in like rays in the evening. Last year the weather
was colder.
A room of The Important Things for 2008 is here
The Important Things from 2007
The Important Things from 2006
I've been doing a bit of painting over the last few weeks, trying to create something to accompany a piece of written work titled 'The Water Library' appearing in the splendid anthology 'First Page', an upcoming release from the publishing wing of Love Is My Velocity. I wanted to make it seem as if water was welling up through the pages of the book in breaks between the text, whilst at the same time the viewer got further and further away so that in the end it appeared that you were looking at an abstract river-delta from a plane or satellite. Of course, I'd completely forgotten just how long it takes and how meticulous you have to be when hand painting, so I only managed to do three works plus the title page. I really enjoyed working with a visual medium though, and am now thinking of making some collages or taking some photographs in the future. Such a therapeutic few weeks; Iron and Wine on the stereo, ultramarine and phthalo green under my nails and in my hair, the feeling of achievement having completed it. It might not look like much, but I'm happy with it.
In this one you can't really see, but the white parts are cut-out using a scalpel.
First Page will be launched on August 2 at The Bakery. I'll post more about the book and its amazing contributors then.
a. Today I am 26 years old; the atomic number of iron, the age at which you can no longer be drafted into the United States armed forces, the number of the letters in the alphabet if you don't count capitals separately. Sometimes when I reflect on this age I feel quite young and green. Other times, when I reflect that it has been a decade since I turned sixteen, I feel quite old. I wish I'd written a S.o.M.L.A when I was sixteen so that I could remember what my dreams and aspirations were then.
b. I am currently living in the basement of my parent's house, having moved from my home near the park about a month ago. The reasons for the move were threefold - the priority reason being financial (so that I can save enough money to go and visit my sister in Holland later in the year), secondarily concerning my studies (the downhill run of my postgrad thesis) and thirdly to re-centre after twelve intense months. Here I live with the geckos and the centipedes underground. Last night I found a beetle the size of my thumb between the sheets. I like all the small life here, the crawling and the clicking things. A legless lizard lives in the shower and a jumping spiders inhabit the drawers. Where ever I work now it seems that the outside world wants to get in to see me. Within the first week of moving here my father broke the big window that looks in on the study upstairs and so I worked for a week amongst the finely shattered glass and the weather. At my old house last winter the air-conditioner just fell out of wall as I was typing, leaving a gapping hole. Sometimes I think I should just take my laptop and sit in the dirt.
It is quiet here. It is not a suburb made for walking. All the verges run down to the road. The phrase 'speed traps', a locution from my primary-school years, comes to mind as I wander around the contorting streets. There are many new houses being built. They start with the basements, deep pits in the ground set with cages of electrical wiring and thin water pipes. The roots of the houses going back into the earth. Later come house-skeletons with coils of insulated cable hanging from the rafters - all the loose vein-work. I miss living with MMM, DL & SB by the park for so many reasons, but I can see the advantages of being sequestered off in this (bricked) basement. I am trying not to be a child here, I am trying to better my relationship with my parents in adulthood. I do not think I am doing a good job in that respect. I often wonder how it would be if we could not live in the same city, if I didn't hear a passing 'how you doing there doll?' once a week. One advantage to having returned home after such a long period living elsewhere is that all the foibles of your family you assumed were solely meant to aggravate you have actually been going on in your absence uninterrupted - so you can accept them as nothing to do with you. My parents are renovating the front of the house at the moment. In the middle of the day I open the garage door and discover workmen sprawled asleep like road crash victims on the concrete.
c. I am currently sitting on the sofa in the front room. It is a ship of a sofa; wide and deep. Outside the clouds are hairy and threatening rain. This morning I ate breakfast at Aubergines in Fremantle and then drove up to the brainsick house in Beard Street, and quickly past it twice. I wanted to take some photos but I'd forgotten my camera. My neck is stiff and seems to creak if I move my head too sharply. Probably this is from laptop over-use. There is old French jazz playing in the distance, which I am enjoying. I am wearing black tights, a dress with orange leaves on it, a thick scarf and the bird earrings that twin a pair L has in Holland. My toenails are painted plum and my hair is newly dyed a chestnut/auburn. I still have all my limbs, all my digits and the ganglion in my left wrist.
From Cottonmouth last night
The bomb-maker has her hot heart,
shining like a new tomato,
in the cage of his fingertips,
and he is binding it into a trap of wires.
Cruelly casual about the crust of sawdust
it slips, and it skids and
he, [gasp] catches it in his shirt.
Her delicate aorta a mortar
to be handled glass-ishly.
It is small, plum-sized her heart.
Watching her lover red-handed
she considers that it would pump an ocean
if left to its own devices.
The unshelled crab of her heart
would nosedive from the work-bench,
crawl over the linoleum
and seek a Pacific of love.
Her heart swells, when she sees him
leaving the bathroom in the morning
carrying the spine of a bell pepper
that he has eaten in the shower.
But in the twists of the fastenings
it just seems so stunted, such an undernourished organ.
There he says as he slots it back between her ribs
I have reinforced your heart against all known shockwaves,
you are built against many types of modern violence.
At quiet night, inside her body's muscle clicking blood nicking
chorus, she notices that the alloyed heart softly ticks,
like a old record left turning after the song is finished.
The bomb-maker has her teeth,
unusual mineral sharps
out in a line on the mattress
and he is setting in tiny detonators.
He looses a molar, forgets their order
sucks absently on an canine
as if it were a boiled sweet.
Her kiss will list to one side of his face,
the incisors have their claws down.
But she thinks, my teeth will sing,
bleaching the sheets in the sun.
She thinks, they will ring like tuning forks
when I tap them together.
my mouth will be full of song and sparks
my palette will split bright syllables
and my children will be born
with egg-teeth. Like snakes.
Her mouth sizzles with the unstable
electricity of just-woken bones
in the morning.
And when they are lip pressed in that dim hour
she is avoiding the dark dreams that have
fallen into the back of his throat overnight.
Here he says screwing the teeth back into her gums
Each of these is new polished, sequin obscene smile
your laughter will be radioactive, leaving no one un magnetised.
Drinking green tea one morning she burns the
fleshy node between her two front teeth
and discovers diamond-shrapnel hidden there.
The Bombmaker puts helium
in her food, fills her with the noble elements
makes her back crooked with welding
and combs dynamite dust through her hair
in the evenings.
With each small repair she is aware
that he is making her minutely more perfect.
Her fingernails are grenade pins.
Her footsoles are landmines.
All the batteries in the town drain down.
They count bus-stops, they
swim between the sea-mines.
Small nuclear clouds clutter the air
like the pastel ghosts of jellyfish.
And here's what the bombmakers' lover knows:
that clinical strikes and spasm wars,
and sensory deprevation are just other words for us,
And that in love we are all a cluster bomb.
They light a fuse. They blow the lights out.
Here accumulate the drifts of seeds and dust carried by the desiccating wind. The gutters are heavy with felty weeds and plants as sharp as shattered glass. This week I read that in Shegeg Karo, Darfur, they are eating the burrs. Subsisting for weeks by consuming a sparse barbed-wire salad that they scrape up from the ground there. The children suck on prickles for hours; mock-lollies that crosshatch their tongues with lacerations. How plush then, this accidental hanging garden on the concrete rooftop in Perth. What opulent nature - almost obscene, the turfless grasp of plants. Wild peas seem to be growing in the window seals, everlastings clinging to the brickwork. There is grass, plush around the chimneys and spreading out a green, fraying rug. A lawn grown deep on airborne chicken fats in the effluvium. Commercially sized tins, Long-Life Deep Frying Oil, are stored in stacks. I consider for a moment whether that means the oil is long-life or if, once battered and fried, the label applies to the underlying product. A crispy giblet in the shape of John Lennon’s head under a bell-jar on the mantelpiece. Bullet-proof for years. Batter artefact. Crackling token. Shall I kick these tins to see if they are full?
There is a dry electrical storm gathering the skeins of cloud. The sky is bronze foam. My fillings buzz inside my mouth. Tapping my teeth together causes car alarms to go off. At home my bedroom has only a skylight and no windows so when the first vein of lightning quivered through the sky, the transparent part of my ceiling flashed white and turned everything into a photographic negative. For a moment I thought there was a hole in the roof. Or a huge aluminium bird flapping about up there. The second time I could see through my hands and the walls. 2 am, after a night spent getting narrower and narrower in thoughts, sleepless under the wash of the pedestal fan. So with the weather performing a nice act of anthropomorphic fallacy, it seemed only right to go out walking in the tiniest hours of the morning. OH PATHOS! howled the sky. A Shakespearian night, “blow you cataracts and hurricanoes!. THIS WAY IS UP! Screamed the clouds. SINGE YOUR HEADS! Was I actually still asleep? What dramaturgy is this?
The important things from 2007 are here. 2008 remains an unknown, but promising quantity.
