Status of My Life Address [27/04/2009]

I have become a bit houseproud recently. Not that this has had a huge discernable impact on my living environment, but I notice an increased enthusiasm for the purchase of things that have no practical use-value - for example vases and bonsais. I have bought three vases in the last three months, but I have no local florist. Possible, dendritic origins of this desire: firstly, there is some sense that this place I am living is not my place, or at least not a place that the adult me feels ownership over; secondly, I have acceded to the simple, visceral object-pleasure one gets from weighing an excellent soup spoon in the palm of one’s hand, quite apart from any economic or intellectual ideas about the worth of such an object; thirdly, I am mainlining the financial stimulus message being pumped from the halls of power presently; fourthly, I am artificially flattering myself for having some kind of ‘taste’ to make up for not being able to go out an exercise such taste in the public sphere (I’m housebound with the thesis at the moment); fifthly, the lived temporariness of being here is being beat back by a woman holding a vase in each fist and shaking them at the ceiling. Either way, I’ve now made a long-term commitment to a miniature fig-tree named Thumble.    

[3]. I am currently sitting at the desk my study, flanked on all sides by highlighter-streaked articles and notes. I often can’t understand my own notes, but take pleasure in the delayed surreality of their interpretation. One reads ‘the anxiety of clearings’ (exclamation point), another ‘Sappho, the brackets (boom>?)’ and another ‘Ophthalmia Ranges - seeing and naming, and not-seeing and naming’. On the wall there are some dymaxion maps, landscape photographs and print-outs. One print-out is Kafka; an excerpt from a letter to his friend Milena Jesenka. Another print-out is a quote from Amy Hempel’s short-story In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried. Another is a poem by Sean O’Brien. There is also a brown envelope with half a rabbit on it and a relevant timeline of dates and word-counts.

I am wearing a green t-shirt, black running pants and white socks as I have just come from the gym. No jewellery. Two days ago I dyed my hair recession blonde i.e. an accidental carroty flax. Since last writing this address I have acquired a tattoo on the top of my left foot. The image is a series of calligraphic lines that form a bird, although I have also been told that it looks a bit like a character in the Arabic alphabet, a boat on the ocean (a local government logo?) or a flame burning sideways. I slightly ashamed to say that the image comes from a collection on Shutterbox. The ambiguity of the design was part of its appeal, and the choice of a bird had familial connotations that it isn’t worth digressing into here. It did hurt, but I never expected that it wouldn’t. My sister has the same tattoo and whenever I feel the breath of trouble on my neck, I look down at my shoes and feel a bit stronger.

[4.]      I have changed my diet since last year by cutting out all meat other than fish and reducing how much dairy I have, particularly yoghurt which I used to eat for breakfast every day. The reasons for doing this were equal parts ecological, ethical and health-related. I weigh 58 kilograms, no more or less than last year. There are still times that I feel the presence of my body as a impairing influence - an experience I’m certain everyone shares regardless of whether they are male or female. Times when the thoughts flare ‘they’d take me seriously if I was really tall, like formidably, intimidatingly tall (with a Modigliani neck)’, and ‘how should I be standing so that no one looks at my nearly-thirty knees?’.  It’s true, age and confidence do not diminish the background noise of self-criticism cultivated in a private girls’ school. Somehow I thought there would come a day when my body was somehow, less conspicuous to me. At the same time, when I’m running or stretching or dancing or meditating, I completely love this scaffold. I’m as healthy as I’ve ever been if you put aside the tide-lines of stress. The last thing I ate was tom yum soup. This afternoon my dad is making me an ugly/delicious walnut cake and in the evening my mum will cook my favourite meal of salmon and cold, spiced pumpkin salad. 

            As for my mental health, studying the end of the world through flood hasn’t always been conducive to stability in the last year. But like my physical health, I decided to make salubrious brain chemistry a priority in a year when external pressures are so high. Whereas I thought this would involve a cloying process of self-involved (rd. selfish) deconstruction, I’ve discovered the merit found in a certain degree of detachment - not remoteness or erasure, but a better response system for dealing with what is internally over-hyped. I am the haruspex of my own strange habits. As was pointed out to me by a good friend recently there’s no control specimen of yourself against which to compare yourself, so you might as well embrace the curious, contradictory paths your mind takes.        

[5.]      I have quit all other work obligations other than my thesis this year, with the intention of just doing one thing well. The work is coming along, but it’s still far from being finished. Or perhaps not that far - I think I have lost the ability to see within the territory populate-able by the subject matter the territory that I will ultimately claim. All of the work needs to be finished by December so I am bunkered down with it now. I have an excellent supervisor and unlike many other final year PhD students I do not now hate the topic area of my thesis. If anything, I find it daily more and more interesting. In other thesis-related achievements, I gave my first lecture to an undergraduate class of eco-philosophy students this year. I am giving a conference paper on the ‘Mare Incognitum (Unknown Sea) in Australian Cartographic Imagination’ in Perth in June, and another paper on the ‘Photography of the Catastrophic Seascape; Some Implications for the New Ecological Uncanny’ in Cardiff in July. With luck and diligence in one week I will be done with a complete draft of the exegesis, and will return to the creative dissertation.

[6.]      In terms of a personal ethos, I imagine that I am now more environmentally minded than I used to be (a foreseeable corollary of my studies). My current academic/writerly crush is on Rebecca Solnit, an American landscape writer. I am starting to think about what long term ambitions I have outside of defining a set of intellectual preoccupations and the tonic-note motivation of simply being a better writer than yesterday. I have some abstract ideas about setting up an Australian version of the Centre for Land Use Interpretation; a sort of cross-institutional think tank outside of the academy, but that is a distant ambition at the moment. There are few universities with a strong eco-philosophy school in Australia; certainly nothing like some of the Canadian universities (Trent for example), or the University of Vermont in the United States. The University of Newcastle shows signs of being ahead of the rest back home. I am hoping that the Cardiff conference will be instrumental in helping me define these intentions more concretely. I would like to write more creative non-fiction in this field though, and am currently working on preliminary research for a short (but getting longer) cultural history of the burning tree in Australia. Some of the ideas that are expounded in my exegesis may well be applicable outside of the waterscape sphere, the possibilities of which are exciting.

[7.]      I am not religious, and much to my grandmother’s chagrin I did not go to church this Easter (sometimes I tell her I’m a forest Christian, which only perplexes her further). I have however, been reading a lot of apocalyptic literature for my study this year and have had cause to dig into religious texts for relevant references (the book of Job particularly “who shut in the sea with doors, who can tilt the waterskins of heaven?”). The world ending in deluge is a distinctly biblical exemplum, with parallels in most of the world’s major religions (for example, in the Islamic tradition Noah’s boat rests on Mount Judi during the great flood (Suras 11 & 71 of the Qur’an), the Hindu Puranic story of Manu, the Deucalion in Greek mythology, the Prose Edda and Ragnarök in Norse mythology and Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, in the Murray-Darling Basin on the Eastern Seaboard of Australia the Indigenous dreaming traditions tell of a great frog that drank all the water and then flooded the land when it laughed etc.). Thomas Burnett, writing in The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1684) considered it significant that the ocean is absent from the Garden of Eden, omitted from the Judeo-Christian concept of paradise. As a morally punitive element the ocean only appears in the Biblical tradition after Noah’s flood and although it retracts, the sea remains in the basins of the earth as a persistent reminder of the wickedness of mankind; godless, unpredictable and the subject of divine augury. The ocean is the void into which human beings and human things are plunged in order to be cleansed. The antediluvian world washed. My main interest however, is in the spatial vocabulary of apocalypse. It is the landscape beneath the landscape that rises in the apocalypse; the shaking off of built contours to reveal a literal and figurative underworld. Cities razed by fire. Floods raised by divine will. The environment takes on a kind of morally punitive agency that is distinctly theocratic. The very word apocalypse comes from the ecclesiastical Latin, in turn from the Greek apokalupsis; from apokaluptein to ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’. The apocalypse does not come down from above, or arrive diachronically from the future. The apocalypse is located beneath the land, where it shares synchronicities with ‘underworld’. For apocalypse to materialise, we move through the catastrophe either in the form of a catastrophic event or as the culmination of incremental change. So the underworld ascends and civilisation sinks into a Boschian Garden of Earthly Delights like a city into a swamp. Importantly for my purposes there is also that other constant in the palimpsest of the land, for underneath everything, imaginatively bonding with the apocalypse there is water. McCarthy in The Road: Perhaps in the world’s destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence. But if this interests you, you’ll have to wait until I’ve finished writing it.      

[8.]      Love. I started to write point eight as a reflection on fear and a kind of future-tense nostalgia for things which optimism promulgates, but evidence tempers; and then I realised that actually, in summary this has been a beautiful, beautiful year for love. Love in the smallest gestures; the intimate weight of a sleeping friend’s head on my shoulder in a plane, weekly swimming-dates, the return of another friend to Perth who had us all crying and laughing ridiculously into our books, the overseas contingent of departed friends who still call me on days when I’ve locked my keys in the car, nights spent sitting on basketball courts with the fabric of our clothes closely touching, not quite looking at one another. And other kinds of love too of course. I’ve dated some completely amazing men this year; talented, gorgeous, desirous, intelligent, kind men. I’ve feel so privileged to have shared time and closeness with these people. Kindness now, is a virtue I value above many others. Kindness, honesty and assertiveness. At the moment the status of love in my life might best be summarised by the saccharine pop-cultural caption, ‘you don’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you get what you need’. I’m single. I hope one day I’ll be the person whose voice you most want to hear when the phone rings in a distant room. And that being someone’s most hoped for voice is only the beginning of it. 

[9.]      Financially, I have finally managed to pay off my credit card, consolidate my superannuation into an ethical investment fund and hopefully saved enough money for a short holiday after I finish my thesis. With no extra work I am now living off my university stipend - which is making most luxuries unaffordable but doesn’t seem to be stemming my purchase of vases and my irresponsible book-buying habits. At one point I thought I might be able to claim for all books bought through my tax, so I’ve kept all the damning receipts in a drawer. 2009 might well be classed the year of the impulsively purchased photographic monograph. I haven’t yet received the stimulus package grant of $900.00 that is being made available this year to all Australians within specific tax brackets. I’m not sure if this might mean I’m ineligible, having earned less than the lower threshold allows for (my stipend is tax-free). I check my account for the arrival of this soft-footed money often. I own no real estate property, but I do have a rundown little car, a lovely laptop computer and some comfortably dented furniture.

I have no notable drug-use or addictions to report, other than a once-daily coffee fix and a propensity for watering the garden for too long.

[10.]    I am currently reading The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, which has just been nominated for the Miles Franklin and Alice Flaherty’s The Midnight Disease. One of my favourite presents this year has been a copy of Leviathan or The Whale by Philip Hoare which arrived wrapped in a map. The last work I published was poetry in Stop Drop & Roll and I have a piece about David Berman appearing in the upcoming Cutwater journal. I also have some work appearing alongside the photography of Gene Eaton in the Boom project. The last live reading I did was at Cottonmouth in April. The last movie I saw was Synecdoche New York. The last music I purchased was the new Bill Callahan record Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle. The last track played on my computer is ‘Commes des enfants’ by Coeur de Pirate. The last meal I cooked was an ordinary napolitana pasta made in a hungry rush. The last text message in my phone reads ‘Happy Birthday dear! Hope you had a great day x o alli’ and it is from Allison Browning. The last email I got was from a friend in Houston and is part of a cycle of emails reviewing the weekend that I keep up with my international friends through. My last three Google searches are ‘how many astronauts are in space now’, ‘Tanner Lectures, Scarry’ and ‘Terry Faulke, wilderness’. The last man I kissed is younger than me.

[11.]     Since writing this address last year I have visited Holland (Utrecht and Amsterdam) and the United Kingdom. Later this year I will do that trip again, with a side journey to Wales for the ‘Art, Literature and Culture in an Age of Global Risk’ Conference. Within Australia I have been up North to work as a Writer-in-Residence for five weeks in Broome, and over to Melbourne. I would still very much like to live and work in another international city, although I suspect my next move will be over East in 2010.

[12.]     I am a member of International PEN, the Concrete Organisation, a book-club called ‘Words for Everything’ and I sit on the board of an independent press. I am an RTR Fm subscriber and a public library user. This morning I have an invitation in my email inbox to join a fortnightly dessert-eating club. Up until February I was a member of the Cottonmouth Organising Committee. I have no health insurance or union memberships, both of which ought to change once I finish my thesis. 

[13.]     Today I will stay relatively close to home after the morning’s excursion to the gym. (Now that I am writing completing this statement the day after my birthday I can project the rest of the day with some accuracy). In the morning a friend who currently lives in Boston will call me to wish me a happy birthday and ask if I will be her bridesmaid when she gets marries her astronaut fiancé next year. Actually, he’s not an astronaut, he’s a physicist with a research interest in bone weakness, or is he a petrochemical engineer? Possibly he is all or none of these things. At any length, I will be honoured by this request and I will say yes, so long as she doesn’t make me wear apricot tulle. I have never been a bridesmaid before, but it makes me boundlessly happy to be in this bride’s corner.

I will go out mid-afternoon and have coffee with a friend who has just started her career as a lawyer. She loves her job and it shines under her skin, but perhaps we both recognise that she is being absorbed into a world I will only ever have partial knowledge of and feel intimidated by.

I will come home and help my mother assemble the salad. The smell of Fabulon starch will be in the house with the music of the ABC News, both things which strongly remind me of my childhood. In the evening I will pace the front verge talking animatedly into my phone about the hypothetical of what to do with a half full bag of rice belonging to someone who has died. Is it more respectful to eat the rice or to throw it out? What does this mean with respect to my insistence on decanting rice into containers? Am I providing less or more emotional ballast for anyone who would have to sort out my posthumous pantry? I hang up the phone and remind myself to let only one thing matter at a time. Then I go back inside and eat a piece of the birthday cake that my dad proudly proclaims to be a ‘10/10 in adherence to the recipe’ (he’s secretly snuck in some grated apple though, when my mum wasn’t looking). Later, to bed, I dream I am lying with a glass paperweight balanced on my forehead and that I am trying to imitate being asleep and dreaming but that really I’m awake. A meditative dream of sorts, the cool heaviness of the weight between my eyes. I sleep perfectly still so as not to let it slip. And dream myself to be waiting for morning to come, to be 27 and a day. 

Status of My Life Address 26.

Status of My Life Address 25.