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By George Berger.
I came straight up from nowhere, I’m not going straight back there.
* * *
And so we depart Beckenham Junction, but not Beckenham itself. Because Kent House is still part of Beckenham really.
The station – just seven miles from London Victoria, was named after Kent House Farm. Yes, there was a time when you could travel seven miles from the centre of London and come across farmland. One day they’ll say that about Sevenoaks. Maybe one day they’ll say that about Maidstone – the Japanese know how it works.
In the Petts Wood article, I mused on how my parents moved down from Merseyside for a better life. That was where we lived, but Kent House was where my dad worked for the main part, at Ravensbourne Registration Services. From the late 60s until a couple of strokes forced his retirement in the late 80s, whereupon he hi-tailed it back to the Wirral, got happier and never looked back.
RRS was something to do with shares, I never really understood what. It was also, as far as I could see, something to do with wearing suits, lots to do with feeling pressure and nothing to do with happiness.
Kent House, then, is immortally tied to the world of work in my eyes. To the concept of work, the protestant work ethic, the numerous morality tales and guilt trips laid on me as I tried to find my own way through early life from the ages of 5-25.
Of course, all this was seen through the prism of my dad’s experience only. Perhaps the other employees were happy as Larry. That’s how life works though, isn’t it? You only see what you want to see, and in a decidedly pre-internet world, that view could be quite narrow, almost the wrong end of a telescope.
From when you’re born up to roughly when you start school, your brain operates in theta state, forever downloading information without question, wherever it comes from. This becomes your subconscious programming – all downloaded without a virus checker – and it’s a bastard to shift if you want to change it later.
I mention this because, as in the Beckenham Junction piece, I was busy downloading pop-hippie song lyrics off the radio. Songs that suggested a better world but also often hinted that avoiding a lifetime of work was a great path to ‘feeling groovy’.
“Slow down, you move too fast…”
My dad left Merseyside before us, staying in a B&B for over 6 months while he earned enough for us to move down. Thus, the first thing Kent House did was steal my dad. He’d work 12 hour days, 7 till seven, in an attempt to improve his lot in life. OK, our lot in life. He was permanently stressed out.
This was held up before me as some kind of noble way of being. Train to Kent House every morning, home again in the evening, too tired to do anything except drain a bottle in a fumbling search for equilibrium.
Of course, a part of growing up is watching your parents morph from the omnipotent infallible beings you thought they were, into normal people doing their best to muddle through. You experience a similar loss of magic to that moment you realise Father Christmas doesn’t actually exist. My dad did his best, it took me a long time to realise that he had his own set of influences, experiences and circumstances to deal with. That he could feel doubt and pain and fear and all those things that never plague comic book superheroes.
“And you of tender years
Can’t know the fears
That your elders grew by
And so, please help
Them with your youth
They seek the truth
Before they can die”
– Teach Your Children, Crosby Stills Nash & Young
I sought my dad’s love and approval at every turn but our relationship was massively strained by my being a punk rocker and deciding not to get a job. The conflict of values would take decades to get over or more accurately just fade into the past. I was taught to seek his approval, but that approval was only ever measured in exam results, in conformity and in supposed ‘good’ behaviour. As puberty hit, I started failing these tests more and more.
At the time, I just thought he was being completely unreasonable, that he wouldn’t listen. That he put his values before any love for me. Nowadays, as I approach the 25th anniversary of his passing, I can see that I somehow tapped into his deepest fears and exposed them like bare nerve-endings. Like that moment when the dentist gets a filling wrong. That’s how I made him feel. Which isn’t a great realisation.
Whether he should have felt like that is almost beside the point. We were two strong characters and there could be no meeting point at the time. And Kent House was the HQ of these values, the temple where he devoutly practiced his beliefs five or six days a week, in exchange for the money to survive and feed his family. An impartial observer might almost start hating capitalism for the soul-crushing cruelty of all this.
And then, finally, I have a vision that changes everything. A vision of my father as a frightened little boy, one who had a far tougher upbringing than I did, for all my whinging. A scared little boy who doesn’t understand his harsh surroundings. A tear running down his five year old cheek. A barefoot boy who left school at 14 to get a job and look after his disabled mum, his father having passed away due to an accident on the docks. A boy forced to be a man way before his time.
But also a boy who could never know what he didn’t know, what he’d never been shown. Who became a man who did his ultimate best with the paltry toolkit he’d been provided with. Who did his best for me, and got little to no understanding in return at the time, or since. Until this vision. This vision that points out you can’t teach what you don’t know. You can’t give what you haven’t got. You can’t pour from an empty cup.
And the forgiveness pours out of me like healing light. And I relax – for the first time since I was born – about all this.
He was a victim in Kent House, but not of Kent House, as such. So the forgiveness spreads like heightened awareness, like some kind of benign goo from a kid’s cartoon. I would’ve got away with a cartoon vision of all this too, if it wasn’t for the pesky kids of awareness pulling my mask off.
It took me six months to write those last few paragraphs. You could say it took me 40 years to think them.
A bit of light relief, you say? Well, one of his workmates was a relative of Siouxsie Sioux. Tom Page, I think my mum said he was called.
My parents told me another workmate would have a bottle of Guinness with his breakfast. In my everlasting naivety, I just thought this was gorgeously eccentric, rather than any kind of tip of the iceberg stuff. An impartial observer… etc.
As a young child, I remember proudly telling someone my dad was “fourth in charge of a skyscraper”. Cringeworthy stuff, for sure. Perhaps 7 stories high, his office was a skyscraper to me. I think I just made up the ‘fourth in charge’ bit. I desperately wanted him to be important. These were the values I was growing up in the presence of; in acute, deliberate hostility to the relative benevolence of Simon & Garfunkel and the Mamas & Papas.
And then I heard Patti Smith singing ‘Free Money’:
“Every night before I rest my head
See those dollar bills go swirling ’round my bed
I know they’re stolen, but I don’t feel bad
I take that money, buy you things you never had.”
And everything changed, again. She’d already bought my heart with ‘Birdland’. Another guy in my class went further with it, all the way to prison for armed robbery. Almost an antique crime now of course. He became good pals with my mum later, before tragically succumbing to cancer.
I watched from the sidelines, but I always knew which side I was on. Not my dad’s, sadly. Not Patti Smith’s either, ultimately. Nice words Patti, but none that you ever lived. You just painted them on sounds (and I thank you dearly for that, but…) then you walked away, backstage – to your tour manager and your backstage rider and your paycheck. I don’t begrudge you that, but it wasn’t much use to me.
Or my dad. Especially my dad.
Only Arista was pretty. And so it goes. But where it’s going, everyone knows – let’s not kid ourselves.
Fast forward to 1993 and the IRA put a bomb on a train which exploded at Kent House. By this point, my dad was back on Merseyside and I was in Brighton so I have no memory of this at all. Due warnings had been given and there were no injuries. I do wonder why they chose Kent House – or maybe they didn’t? Maybe it was just where the train happened to be when it was evacuated. Either way, it’s one of the more notable things to have happened on this trainline.
So, yeah, Kent House. My dad the unconsciously willing victim, like Woodward in Wickerman style. Led by the limits of his perception into a world populated by others with (I’ve always thought) a knowingly different reality going on. And here I am, the result of it all, writing about Kent House from some far off viewpoint.
You see, a short while later, I heard the Clash advising me to Stay Free. And, for all their faults, something in their song – maybe the south London setting – rang more true than Patti (and it hurts to say that TBH). So I thought fuck it and I decided to stay free.
Which I did – all the way to Sydenham Hill.
But first…
Barely any distance at all up the line is Penge East, which is more of the same. There really isn’t enough distance for anything to have happened since the last station.
Only something has happened – as you pull into the platform, everything suddenly feels more urban.
Because somehow Penge East in the 80s is an island of a more cosmopolitan society, unlike the stations before it and unlike the next couple of stations after it. It’s like a peninsula – or a needle – jutting into the side of the surrounding areas and gives off an accordingly different vibe.
In the six months it’s taken to write this piece, I’ve been reading Tracey Thorn’s book, Another Planet. Purportedly a book about the suburbs, I read glowing reviews about it and figured it would be a nice companion to this train journey. Only it’s actually about a place outside London completely – beyond even the M25, and she seems to look back on it all with more affection than I do. So it’s weird and makes me ask questions about myself – am I still fired by anger as I write this? I’d very much like to think not, but Tracey’s writing makes me think of comfort blankets, even when she’s being critical.
Far closer to my feeling is the recently departed lyrical genius Mark Astronaut, venting – indeed spitting – his disdain out: “I might crack up soon, but they won’t bury me in the suburbs”. Mark was from Welwyn Garden City, north of London and not far from where Tracey grew up. It gives me a pathetic kind of pleasure to think that my suburbs are more urban than theirs.
At least the train is heading in the right direction. We’ve crossed an invisible line and we’re now in the territory where people can catch buses into the West End as well as trains. Indeed, they seem to have more options in every direction. Proper destinations on the front.
In some respects, Penge East in the 80s was like Green Park tube in London, which should really be renamed ‘change at Green Park’, because that’s what you always do there.
‘Change at Penge East’ would be to a bus for me, but not into the centre: first to Crystal Palace football ground when Liverpool would visit, back in the 70s and 80s when we used to win everything and every game was a survival test outside the ground.
Then in the other direction, some years later to Forest Hill where Bill, the Flowers in the Dustbin drummer, lived for a wild while. Every time I see Forest Hill mentioned anywhere, it seems to be the venue for wild happenings – from legendary swinging sixties parties to the punk/reggae 70s at Don Lett’s house.
Then, later still, back to Crystal Palace to see the Sex Pistols play what I gather (hope) was one of their most disappointing gigs. Change at Penge East, the place that never changes.
Have you ever missed a station because your mind was elsewhere? I’m afraid I’m about to do that.
There’s a big hill just beyond this station. A hill that at some point had to be tunneled through to get the train line towards London, Rather like most of the train lines in Switzerland I guess. But the sound in my head is not the sound of music; not at all. It’s a darker sound altogether.
Every time I’m on this train, as it pulls out of Penge East, it enters the tunnel and, a slave to cliché, I involuntarily enter my own darkness.
Because the next station is Sydenham Hill. A place where… where words start to fail me through the sheer terror of remembering… not that I could ever forget… not that I would ever forget…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
George Berger has resumed this 3:AM column after a 15 year hiatus. He’s written the official biographies of Crass and The Levellers, a book on mindfulness and various other books that can be found here. He’s also the singer in Flowers in the Dustbin. He’s recently finished his memoirs In Case Of Dementia, Break Glass.
By Emma Jones.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire, directed by Céline Sciamma, 2019
I wanted to use the tools of cinema so you would feel the patriarchy without actually having to embody it with an antagonist
– Céline Sciamma, 2019
Set in eighteenth-century France, Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) hints at the patriarchal society that dictates the conditions of the women who inhabit the film. It is the reason why the painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant), submits work for exhibition under her father’s name. It is the reason, too, why she has been called to a small island off the coast of Brittany. The Countess (Valeria Golino) has commissioned her to paint a portrait of her daughter, Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), due by arrangement to be married to a Milanese aristocrat. Mentioned but not seen is Héloïse’s sister who, rather than succumb to marriage, chose instead to jump off the rocky cliffs that surround the island. Héloïse is her replacement, the planned portrait her dowry.
If the patriarchy defines the rules of the society in which the narrative is set, however, then it sits on the periphery. The focus, instead, is on how desire builds and is felt, as Marianne and Héloïse become lovers. The relationships in the film that are defined by power, ownership and oppression, are the antithesis of the one formed between Marianne and Héloïse. As the latter begins to paint the former we see an affair born between equals. And, tellingly for a film that is about the relationship between artist and sitter, it is through the act of looking that this equality is engendered. Throughout, director and writer Céline Sciamma creates a visual language that is a purposeful act of transgression.
The relationship between Héloïse and Marianne, and to a different extent, between them and the young housekeeper Sophie (Luàna Bajrami), is something they create for themselves, that sits outside existing frames of reference. It’s an argument for an alternative mode of being, and it is built through a different mode of looking. That’s the process we are watching in Portrait of a Lady on Fire — a figuring out of new ways to look at one another and, by extension, at the world around us. It feels like Sciamma is trying to invent something too, a cinematic vision that breaks out of its own patriarchal confines. It is a queering of vision, and a rebellion against existing lesbian love stories in cinema that place performative eroticism over any meaningful connection.
This way of looking impacts each and every scene. Nothing in Sciamma’s film is wasted. Everything is slowed right down. With cinematographer Claire Mathon she creates a space in which intimacy can flourish. Not just between Marianne and Héloïse, but between character and audience too. In minute nine of the film, Marianne has only just arrived at the house, after travelling by boat to the island. She has not yet met Héloïse. Candlelit, she walks down the empty staircase in her stained painter’s smock, makes her way into the sparse kitchen and finds cheese and bread in the cupboards. There’s no dialogue and, like the rest of the film, there is no musical score either, only diegetic sound — sighs of wind in the corridors, the crackle of the fire in the kitchen.
There is nothing in this scene that anticipates some big reveal, but neither is it simply a bridge used to drive the narrative forward. Indeed, Sciamma’s practice as a screenwriter begins with two lists: a ‘desired’ list and a ‘needed’ list. Over time, after the desired elements have been mapped onto the needed scenes, she says ‘you can end up in a position where you have two scenes you want, without the bridge you need’. That’s how this scene feels. It sits outside of any conflict and yet still tells a story. It is a minute in time held up to the light for purposeful consideration. There is no need to wait for something to happen. It is already here, and it is quietly revelatory.
The story up until minute nine of the film focuses on the painter. It is a group of young women we see at the very start of the film, making their marks on paper. Marianne guides them. ‘First, my contours. The outline,’ she tells her class, ‘Not too fast. Take time to look at me’. It’s the first words we hear (or read, if, like me, you are watching the subtitles in English over the original French). As an audience, then, it is Marianne whom we have considered first. The artist/muse dichotomy falls apart. We watch as her students look at her, in a way that she has dictated. It is something we are reminded of as she in turn paints Héloïse, and when Héloïse reminds her that she isn’t the only one regarding, seeing, when she tells Marianne: ‘If you look at me, who do I look at?’.
Keep looking, Sciamma suggests, and we may find a gaze that is reciprocal, one that we recognise and one that we can hold, tenderly.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
3. Grant Maierhofer
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Emma Jones is a freelance art and non-fiction writer who is interested in the slippery form of the essay. Emma was previously Curatorial Assistant at Tate Modern, where she specialised in photography. Curatorial credits include solo displays on Graciela Iturbide (2019), Ernest Cole (2020) and Šejla Kamerić (2022). Recent writing credits include contributions to the book publication Photography: A Feminist History (2021), the magazine L’Essenzial Studio Journal V.4 (2022) and online at Lucy Writers Platform (2023). Contact her on twitter: @perceptivehow
By Andrew Flinn and Astrid von Rosen.
Sven Lindquist, Dig Where You Stand: How to Research Your Job, tr. Ann Henning Jocelyn (Repeater Books, 2023)
Finally the long-awaited English translation of Sven Lindqvist’s key activist research manual and manifesto Gräv där du står / Dig Where You Stand has arrived! When first published in Swedish in 1978 the book was a critical intervention into the conflict between the competing narratives of workers’ histories and more dominant and pervasive elite histories. Today the book makes for a powerful entry into the urgent and pressing task of critically addressing the increasingly complex, painfully precarious work conditions of human lives in global-local economies, as well as for all “barefoot researchers” working to research and write counter-histories which challenge other dominant and often exclusionary narratives.
Digging as Workers’ Inquiry
The central idea underpinning Dig Where You Stand is that doing history work is a necessary and significant contributory factor in achieving social, political and industrial change, and indeed in fashioning a new world. The book conveys the key idea that everyone — not just academics — can learn how to (and benefit from) critically and rigorously explore history, especially their own. It provides clear, comprehensive and engaging instructions on how everyone can systematically research the history of their workplace and industry, employ a multiplicity of sources (official records as well as more informal oral and personal sources) in a critical fashion and choose research methods relevant to the subject of the research. It instructs the reader how to formulate and pose urgent and critical research questions — questions about power and the lived legacies of the past in the present still relevant today — and provides the researcher with the tools to research and answer those questions. Without a proper question, you are ill-equipped to enter the archive and commence the act of research, warns Lindqvist, and you will get lost. Today, in our global precarious economy, and the resulting indeterminate archives, the warning is more relevant than ever.
Dig Where You Stand prompts workers to become researchers, to follow the money and the power it represents, confers and reproduces. It invites them to take on the role as experts on their job and industry and “dig” out its hidden histories to produce a new picture and understanding of that industry and their position within it as a vital step towards social and economic transformation.
Written in an engaging and clear language that everyone can understand, Dig Where You Stand challenges the arbitrary and harmful boundaries between the public and the academy, workers and experts, “amateur” and “professional” researchers. In so doing, Dig Where You Stand was aligning itself with a long-standing intellectual and political tradition. Lindqvist himself described the roots of workers “digging” being located in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (“Wo du stehst, grab tiefhinein!” / “Where you stand, dig in deeply”) and also in practices undertaken after the Russian and Chinese revolutions (Lindqvist 2014). Digging practice has also strong echoes of the “Workers’ Inquiry” advocated by Marx and the Workers’ Enquiry movement in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, not to mention the approach encouraged by inter-war Pan-Africanists like Arthur Schomburg for African Americans to dig up their past (McAllister 2022, Wright 2017, Schomburg 1925).
According to Lindqvist, experts (academics, industrial leaders and the likes) are not to be automatically feared and deferred to, because a worker is the expert on their job. Lindqvist concludes his preface, “That is why your own job is such a good starting point for your research. Dig where you stand!” These short and to-the-point sentences neatly capture what we argue is a key distinguishing feature in and for Dig Where You Stand, namely embodied and situated action. Making “your own job” the point of departure in becoming a researcher, Lindqvist firmly grounds and situates the practitioner (in his case, the cement worker) in real life, material space and the human body. When adding the imperative “dig where you stand!”, this research stance is charged with a call to take action, enter the explorative stage empowered as practitioner-scholar, and to do so without shame and fear.
In line with previous as well as current perspectives in feminist research, Lindqvist’s real-life case studies situate, embody and visualise rather than merely describe how workers (and other communities) can on their own or in collaboration with others create this “new picture” and use it as tool for change. His exposition of politically engaged and counter-history-making is still known and acts as an inspiration to many interested in radical history practices within social movement and activist environments today (see for instance the international History from Below network and the influence of Dig, “a mass history movement” (Ball and Box, 2015)).
Starting by looking out from one’s local setting to the world and ending with a vision of the future (set sometime in the 2020s) where activist scholars collaborate with academics to work for social change, the book’s thirty chapters of “materials and methods, which anyone can use to trace their own history and that of their workmates”, together create a montage of possible ways to explore a job and the workplace. History is set in motion in a multitude of dynamic and critically fruitful approaches engaging oral history, visual analysis, archival research, memory work, spatial explorations and critical reflection. The results of such research could be equally dynamic, with Lindqvist warning that “research is not mainly a defensive but an offensive weapon. It’s more suited for conquest than for defence.
By Christiana Spens.
The following is an extract from Christiana Spens‘s The Fear (Repeater Books, 2023)
The day before my father died, I went to see an exhibition of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe at the Grand Palais in Paris with my boyfriend. At that time, I had been living in Paris, subletting short-term from my old landlord, and we were in a long-distance relationship. I was also going back and forth to Scotland a lot, for my course, and also to see my dad. We’d spend time in museums and cafes, when my boyfriend was around, stretching out our free tickets and expensive espressos, to fill the frozen, bright days.
We went to the exhibition in the morning, which I was reviewing for a magazine. I knew my father was ill, but I didn’t know quite how bad things were. There had been so many scares before that I had begun to not really believe it could ever happen. I was waiting to find out whether I needed to book flights back, though, whether it could really be that bad, when we went.
We walked around, trying to be normal, but death loomed anyway; a stark crow in the otherwise green and pristine Luxembourg Gardens; window displays of eerie candles and flower arrangements. I tried to concentrate on work — I was trying to get as much finished as I could in case I had to leave Paris — but even my work was all about death, it turned out.
We took the Metro from Montmartre to the Grand Palais, an imposing building surrounded by decorative gardens and busy roads, and random police marching around. It was eerie and dark inside, like a mausoleum. Women in veils and latex, dying flowers and bowed heads. Fur and lipstick and Irish hair, props and faces lit to seem as blank as sculptures from Ancient Greece. A large white, minimal cross on the wall, next to all the other crucifixes and dying roses. A figure in a blank hood.
There were Polaroids that Mapplethorpe had taken in the 1970s and formal black-and-white portraits of the artist and his friends. He had created a system of iconography that embraced S&M and Catholicism at once, in this pursuit of true beauty. There were classical, sculptural nudes and arrangements of flowers. “I am looking for perfection in form”, he was quoted as having said, his words on the wall of the museum. “I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.”1 He lined up Saints and rent-boys, celebrities and Michelangelo. Striving for transcendence, perfection and immortality, he had developed an aesthetic, spiritual code in these figures, flowers and icons. He had re-appropriated religious iconography to show how art and sex were his own religion. He had written a letter to Patti Smith: “I stand naked when I draw. God holds my hand and we sing together” (1). There was Robert and a skull, Robert in drag. Robert with a cigarette. Robert living with/dying from AIDS.
But his photographs betrayed none of these struggles. Instead, they were an altar to his idols and ideals, beyond good and evil, beauty and ugliness, success and failure. He had used art to transcend, to go beyond struggle and fear, to assert his own ideals in spite of the doubt he must have felt or experienced from other people, and the fear of his own they betrayed. By transforming images of death, sex and himself so that he triumphed, transcendent and by turning what seemed pornographic into a form in the language of Michelangelo, he sought redemption not only from personal, spiritual dilemmas, but from life itself, and the fear of death that implied.
The nudes are so still, I wrote down, sitting on a bench in front of them, that they cannot be alive and, of course, frozen in time and a photograph, they are not. The flowers seem to be placed as carefully as funeral arrangements. The little altar, with images of Jesus’ crucifixion, together with the lines and lines of photographs of Mapplethorpe’s friends and idols, complete the reconstruction of a fantastical funeral. He has reconciled with doubt, pain and death; he has created his own meticulously executed send-off.
We walked out of the exhibition, out of the darkness. Outside, the pond shone turquoise and shallow, with statues and tourists in the distance, and a froth of fine algae at the bottom. I sat on a chair by the pond and smiled and smiled, and my boyfriend took a picture of me. We were both wearing black, and my skull scarf flickered against my skin in the breeze. I had not picked out these things intentionally.
After being in such dim light before, I was surprised by the brightness of the sun outside, the fresh green of the gardens and trees we walked through, after the soft tones of marble and spot-lit flesh and bone. We walked on to the Jardins du Luxembourg, where the pathways were covered in fine cream gravel. I heard a strange noise as we walked that I couldn’t quite place — a lone cry — and looked around to see what it was. I saw a single black crow, seeming oblivious to the people straying around, standing still on a spot of the lawn, continuing to make its odd, eerie cry, beak open, towards the sky. “Isn’t that creepy?” I said, and my boyfriend nodded and we kept walking. It had seemed so incongruous there, in the green and the sun, as tourists in neutral travel clothes wandered around nearby.
We had just come back from the Mapplethorpe exhibition when my mother phoned and told me how bad things were. “He’s not getting better”, she said. I had been so used to being told he was dying that it didn’t seem fully possible as a reality. But I booked flights to Scotland for the next day, anyway, in a daze. By the time we got home, he was gone.
***
There was a nervous atmosphere at home, with people sitting around, waiting for the funeral to happen. Death seemed unexpectedly public; everyone knew about it. He had been ill for such a long time, during which we had often been ignored or looked down on as a family, mainly because financial problems had followed illness so swiftly.
He had, to me, died very slowly and gradually, and detached from the outside world. The grief was therefore dispersed over the years, but no one had seemed very involved until this point, in which he had physically gone, which seemed in some ways quite arbitrary. I wasn’t sure how I felt about it entirely, but at times it felt good that I was finally allowed to be proud of him, to tell people what he was like, to be allowed the ritual of death. The illness had become a strange spectre, before — haunting us all with the imminence of death, the Fear — but now that tension faded, and in a strange way it brought him back to me, more fully, in essence. A spirit distilled, managed, sort of. As if grief can be bottled, memories saved, legacies controlled.
In the week or so before the funeral, so many flowers were delivered that they took up every surface: lilies, their scent pervading over every other, white roses of various shapes and arrangements. They covered everything: a large dinner table, side tables, sideboards, a dresser, two desks. They arrived in cellophane and paper, with sad notes from friends. So much white, but occasionally some purple, from a thistle, the dark green stalks and long, winding leaves. When all the vases were used up, I found other things, jugs and glasses, to put them in. We bought a couple more vases as well. I took most of the leaves off the stems, cut them down, arranged them between the vases.
As the days went on, I plucked out the dead ones as they wilted, rearranged the bouquets with those flowers missing, merging them together. Cutting stalks, refilling water, bundling all of the cellophane and ribbons into rubbish bins. There was so much clearing up, cutting things away. I thought of Mapplethorpe, the flowers he had photographed. I imagined the actual process that had gone into them. How many flowers had he bought, for a photograph of one? What did all the waste look like, scattered around his studio? What did he do with the leftover flowers, and the flowers he’d finished photographing, when he was done with them? Or did he just discard them, decadently, or busily, efficiently, entirely focused on the art at the end? Why had he not photographed more dead flowers, decaying things, why this stark purity?
I thought of those flowers again — his entwined white tulips and star-like orchids and sensual, begging lilies. The dark and light, the harmony and yet the desire, pushing through. I thought of them over and over, as they flickered in my mind, and somehow, it quietened my despair.
Robert Mapplethorpe took me by the hand, and perhaps my father did too — gave me lilies and roses, morbid confetti. I tried to capture the flowers before they died. I photographed each one, recording their gradual wilting, as they flopped and fell. After I had taken so many, I put the photographs away, hid them, and tried to live.
(1) Patti Smith, Just Kids, Ecco Press, 2010.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christiana Spens is an academic, writer and artist based in London. She holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews, and before that read Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of The Portrayal and Punishment of Terrorists in Western Media: Playing the Villain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and several other books. She writes regularly for publications such as Prospect, The Irish Times, Byline Times, Art Quarterly and Studio International on politics and culture, and is a founding member of Truth Tellers, based at Kings College London.
By Grant Maierhofer.
Synecdoche, New York, directed by Charlie Kaufman, 2008
I don’t know why but I’m still affected by the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman. I didn’t know him, and I don’t think I’ve even seen all of his work, but his presence is so affecting to me. He doesn’t look like an actor. He struggled with addiction. He got sober young and relapsed. It scares me.
In Charlie Kaufman’s film we probably have his best work, playing a director putting on productions that grow from Death of a Salesman to an impossibly large thing, but in the ninth minute of the film we just have him talking to his doctor. The doctor asks if he means right as in morally correct or as in accurate. Hoffman’s Caden Cotard says he doesn’t know, maybe accurate, and then we’re with these two for a moment, this awkward moment between someone who is hyper aware of themselves and his doctor, and although there’s always that temptation to simply state anything to keep an appointment moving along, that doesn’t happen, and suddenly both men are forced to sit and think, and it’s uncomfortable but warm.
And then we have Cotard watching his production of Death of a Salesman in dress rehearsal, and Willie Loman is delivering his speech to his son who walks off in the middle of the scene about football. He realizes his son has gone and goes to his car, the car crashes into the house and in the production a piece of architecture hits Michelle Williams’ character, so Cotard goes to check on her. It’s clear there’s a budding romance between them.
In the midst of this Cotard says it’s too late in the game to be having these problems. At around nine minutes into the film it feels fine to link that with the movie itself. Or it’s Cotard’s life, and it’s the place wherein he can express his frustration over the ongoing problems that are consuming him — his family, his health, his work, his identity — and his frustration is the same as Willie’s, then, the father trying to wax poetically about the importance of the big game, and these big moments, who lashes out by crashing his car, as Cotard lashes out at the crash itself and everything breaking down around him.
Two protagonists, then, a mumbling Everyman who is subjected to the average medical appointment wherein he gives up everything to find out what’s happening, only to be stopped with a quandary about the differences between moral rightness and simply being correct; and a theater director late in preparations for a play about the lateness of living and the world moving on whether or not we’d like it to, lashing out but then laughing and embracing the small comforts of a tryst with the starring actress.
It’s interesting because there are moments in this film I find physically painful to watch. There’s a moment when Hoffman’s character is putting together this massive production in a warehouse the size of the city and it becomes so introspective that I can hardly bear to look at it. I think I chose Synecdoche for a piece of criticism like this because I knew it wouldn’t mean I’d have to watch the entire film again, and I don’t know what that says about me or about the work, to be simultaneously drawn towards something and its creator but not to be so drawn towards it that I want to simply watch it over and over again and can even comfortably do so.
I watch Synecdoche every year or every couple of years or so. I get caught up in different elements, most recently Olive’s (Cotard’s daughter) tattoos—I liked the idea of trying to replicate them on myself as a way of forever connecting with the film. I don’t even know if it’s something I’d say I like in a typical application of that term. There are artworks that I like, and artworks that I even love, and then there are those perhaps I need, or have needed, and this film would fit in there, where its aesthetic rendering of certain preoccupations of the creator align perfectly with my own thinking.
We get the whiffs of the rest of the film here, in minute 9, the sense of frustration the outside world can often impose on people driven by aesthetics, and the awkward lives such people lead whenever they’re not in their various temples. The sense of bliss that’s double-edged when Cotard is in his temple and everything’s not entirely perfect, and the predilection people in these situations have for simply telling jokes or laughing, because to name anything else too exactly might hinder the experience of everyone involved. The presence of the director, too, in Cotard but also in Kaufman: imposings upon imposings upon imposings. In his review of Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist, Roger Ebert made the point that even fictional films are a sort of documentary about the actors performing in these films, which I think also nicely expresses the layerings of influence and performance in Synecdoche, New York.
In the realm of the practical, then, i.e., the doctor’s office, this artist is useless; he’s mumbling and unsure and evasive. The doctor, comparatively, is comfortable and incisive, commenting on Cotard’s observation and moving around it without much in the way of anxiety or reservation. In the theater, though, Cotard isn’t bashful, or unsure, and responds quickly to a potential injury with the same speed we’d hope a doctor might exercise in a similar situation. The film itself seems to also be about the growth of an aesthetic life to the extent it almost becomes unwieldy, where people viewing the warehouse much later in Synecdoche, New York couldn’t help but ask why, and wonder at the role this kind of production might play in living. What’s interesting is that this doesn’t happen. Everybody there is committed, even if they’re asking their director why, and he can’t offer much in response. Living beats Cotard down, as does the work, but here, there’s still a fire and a determination to see this production through, to make it unique and to make it expressive and powerful. The wavering in the doctor’s office gives way to certitude and drive.
Something I struggle with with film in particular is the desire to take it in in any order I’d like. I hear about readers who read the end of a book first, and I’ve read some things piecemeal and never entirely through, and the distinctions with film seem arbitrary enough or at least made so by television and our screens, where films are broken into pieces anyway. Oddly, too, it seems natural, so when I rewatch this ninth minute consciously I feel as though I’m engaging in a criticism most in line with my natural aesthetic position, the one where I’m no longer carving out large swathes of time to watch one film from beginning to end, or reading much work that seems to demand a kind of attention that now feels unnatural, for better or worse.
Most of us don’t like to visit the doctor, and I think it has to do with the forfeiture of authority. In this situation, the doctor has indicated that the eyes are part of the brain, and Hoffman’s character suggests that this just doesn’t seem right. It doesn’t seem entirely right, and it’s left there, with the moral question pursued and the usage question, rather than resolving it, and this leads to the dress rehearsal and the shift where Cotard is now the authority, and in his position of authority he behaves not unlike a doctor in an emergency. A flirtatious doctor, and a theater director who’s able to treat his work with an utmost seriousness, which again preoccupies me.
I don’t know why, but I find myself thinking most these days about the question of art and what it’s for. Emil Cioran wrote about there being something wonderful in the pursuit of doing something that’s entirely useless. To pursue something that is useless as opposed to doing any of the countless other things a person might do could have a kind of honor to it. And the world wants to tell us which things are useful and which things are useless. But the longer I live — and certainly this is a film to be lived with — the more I feel it’s inadequate to think of art as useless, unless we’re willing to go all the way. All the way in or all the way out, and this film feels like someone going all the way in to see what’s there.
It’s an art that’s so grand that it feels comfortable to look at it with pity, a space where an artist puts everything in front of you, and takes that gesture quite seriously, and your reaction to it — like any reaction to any vulnerability — inevitably communicates the most about where you’re at, and that’s okay, too.
I’ve just watched the ninth minute one more time, from a few seconds before to a few seconds after, and I think there’s something to watching or taking in certain works of art in this manner. For some people, Synecdoche, New York is too much to bear in its entirety all at once. I don’t know why I’m that sort of person, but I think it’s true. Looking at this, though, and thinking about the whole of it, and what I like and dislike and love and hate about it, I’m certain it’s a work of art. I used to say that Paris, Texas was my favorite film. Probably, in part, because I thought this made me sound cooler than I am, and partly because, when I first watched it, about forty minutes in, the sentence “this is my favorite film” came into my mind. It’s odd because I don’t sit around excited to watch that film, and I doubt I’ve even seen it more than ten times, but it’s similar to Synecdoche, New York in that I know it affects me deeply, and there’s something in it that resonates so much with me that I actually find it hard to watch. I have no doubt that Wenders’ film would lend itself quite well to this sort of viewing experience. Piecemeal, split up, with the pressure lessened. I don’t know what any of this means.
Previous essays in the Minute 9 series curated by Nicholas Rombes:
1. Nicholas Rombes
2. Alex Zamalin
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Grant Maierhofer is the author of Ebb, most recently, and a forthcoming book from Inside the Castle whose title is too long to include here.
By Tom La Farge.
Now by the swelling of things
and the empty din of phrases
students have reached this point,
that when they come into court,
they think they have been carried
into another world.
– Petronius, Satyricon, 1
Fellini starts exactly here, at the swelling of things that transfers us to another world, the empire of rhetoric, populated by the grotesque, ornate, far-fetched, hysterical figures by which rhetoric is said to denature true language, purus sermo; but Fellini’s figures are human.
They lend themselves to the powerful man, to amplify his discourse, himself, his position, his central importance as declamator, yet turn aside to eat, to kiss, to stare into the camera that meets their steady eye at their eye-level.
Red sky lowers, rubor of inflamed language, above a furrowed waste where a poet, lying imagining dying, ‘bequeathes’ to Encolpio, student of literature, everything absent from this scene: the seasons, the earth, rivers, sea, sky.
Strapped down in a covered cart, an unsatisfiable woman, who speaks in moans and pantings, in eye-widenings and flicks of the tongue, is wheeled for a cure to the cave of a hermaphrodite: inert,
bloodless, semidivine, unarousable, a magnet for this film’s most monstrously lopped or twisted or
swollen figures.
Contours everywhere bloat, warp, explode, and the paradigm of shape is the meats carried out from Trimalchio’s ovens, swollen or burst in a spiky splay of blackened limbs: rhetoric’s distention,
disruption of the envelope.
Rhetoric encloses every setting by dropping a ceiling, or else the enreddened sky, and wrapping walls around, some built, some natural like rockfaces, but all overpainted or inscribed or mottled like tissue, to encyst a swelling performance.
In Vernacchio’s theater a plump, masked comedian frisks and farts, while an axe crops a peasant’s hand; later Caesar is mocked, but the performance hasn’t begun until Encolpio, student of literature, interrupts the play to demand his catamite, Gitone, until Vernacchio raises his mask to implore the camera.
Lica the pirate with the staring glass eye, so much larger and whiter than its fellow, humiliates his prisoner Encolpio by forcing him first to wrestle in the lamplit hold, and next, on deck, to stand up as bridegroom beside Lica, the happy, saffron-veiled bride, in nuptials that Lica’s crew joyfully celebrates till joined by a boarding party of legionaires, fresh come from assassinating Caesar (who stabbed himself first, to be sure, but no blood flowed till the soldiers plied their spears); they strike off Lica’s head, which, sinking, stares pleadingly at the camera through undulant thicknesses of ocean.
The camera tilts up to view the new Caesar passing in triumph, preceded and followed by bunched spears, eagles in demonic spread, bristling crests, and the turreted shapelessness of elephants, blocking a flat, bright sky that mutes their features (but Caesar’s haunted eyes engage the camera) but limns their figures, stark and spiky as Trimalchio’s meats.
Standing before a classically proportioned villa, a handsome paterfamilias, his wife demurely to one side, frees grateful slaves and dispatches his children to safety, promising one disquietingly beautiful daughter, whose eyes suggest precocious knowledge of cameras, to join her the very next day, but this scene, which for a while looks like an image of the normal to set against the monstrosities, a vision of chaste language, is set in a courtyard entirely enclosed by pure façade, a rockface, and a stand of weird white hedge: another theater, therefore, to the center of which the noble Roman moves, and he slits his wrists, his wife too somehow dying, and later someone arranges the bodies on a pyre as fine as Dido’s.
The theaters of rhetoric are linked by the narrative labyrinth through which Encolpio must travel and meet monsters, factitious ordeals, the monsters merely monstrous figures in the discourse; so that ‘Minotauro,’ for instance, who nearly kills him to the rhythmic heckling of spectators lining the bluffs surrounding the sandy waste containing the maze where Encolpio and ‘Minotauro’ strike, dodge, and blindly stalk. ‘Minotauro’ turns out to have a soft spot for students of literature and swears friendship, cheerfully unmasking, just an actor in the festival of Mirth, which demands the ridiculing of a stranger, accomplished then in stylized mockery, with the result that Encolpio is unmanned and cannot service the waiting Arianna, to his deep humiliation.
The birching of his buttocks by women who insouciantly chant cryptic syllables, some formula of remasculation, while he lies rigid on a quilt of pubic triangles on a raked bed of sand, an elephant in the background, while more women gaze out of windows and Ascilto, his lover, swings overhead, jeering, on a circus trapeze swollen to the dimensions of a small stage where yet more women voluptuously loll, fails in the restoration of Encolpio’s virility, not to be regained till he couples with the meaty Enotea, an event he celebrates by running rejoicing through a meadow by a river under an open sky, the first natural setting in the film. But when Ascilto sinks and dies, Encolpio kneels in a final elegiac burst, inducing a sudden shot of desert; and the sky goes red.
But then he sets sail for Africa with freed slaves, while old men sit on the shore, stolidly staring into the camera as they chew a dead man’s flesh to gain his legacy. The student of literature travels, so he tells us, to undiscovered cities, shedding his narrative in a final figure of ekphrasis, wall-paintings on the fragments of the labyrinth, between which the open sky appears, figuring freedom, the receding emptiness that lends no screen to rhetoric’s feverish projections.
Sound like Fellini to you?
Balls! Tumor rerum is Fellini’s matter, ‘sky’ his climactic figure: O altitudo!, a commonplace invoking a ‘height’ of meaning beyond the power of syntax to express, acknowledging the limits of the rhetor’s power, the infinite margin to his page, but slily, by that very gesture, inscribing it.
Rhetoric is disingenuous, a teachable trick, its craft the invention of figures, but in an exhausted world, if the world is ever anything but exhausted, when language has crystallized in figures, if language ever is ‘liquid,’ figures need to be invented, the further-fetched the better, because maybe they can fetch us back.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tom La Farge (1947-2020) was a novelist, educator, and publisher who lived in Brooklyn, New York. He was the author of more than a dozen books, including The Crimson Bears (Sun & Moon Press), Zuntig (Green Integer), and The Enchantments Trilogy (Spuyten Duyvil). He was also was the editor of Proteotypes, a small press based in Brooklyn. An award now bears his name.
By Stephen Orr.
Before I start writing I hear the story of four boys who have died in the United States, fallen through river ice, cardiac arrest; and a neuroscientist facing his own mortality, two or three days before the cancer he understands so well (at the genetic, the cellular level) carries him off on the Great Adventure. The fear of losing loved ones, daily, hanging over our heads, the realisation time has nothing to do with you – you’re part of it, in it, but it continues despite any understanding, intuitions resisting words, categories, floating just beyond our grasp – sits waiting, and why should you be any different to the fourteen people who have lived in place of you before this moment? Once understood, and accepted, everything follows. A cloud seeded with everyone who’s ever lived, falling through time’s long ruin, gathered in some mystical, mythical place full of weeping grass and bluebells. If that’s how we want to imagine it, and why not? The idea that there’s no thought you’ve had that hasn’t been had; no frustration, no contempt, no desire, no shame that had to be hidden in the deepest, safest part of your brainbox. No poem that hasn’t been written, combination of notes making songs sung on cold, windy Burren days thousands of years ago; no insights into others’ behaviour, no overlooked solutions. You, simply, have been thrown into an unwinnable football match, probably because of a lack of players, destined to chase a small, soggy ball.
I think of the piece I thought of writing, describing ‘the town that was’: Tallangatta. ‘Old’ Tallangatta grew up around the junction of the Mitta Mitta River and Tallangatta Creek in north-east Victoria in the mid-nineteenth century. A 1903 handbook explains: ‘The township [population 600] is prettily situated in the midst of a fine pastoral and mining district. Lighted with kerosene … a library containing 1,150 volumes.’ Post-war population growth and the need for more irrigation water led to the necessity of increasing the capacity of the nearby Hume Weir. Low-lying Tallangatta would have to be moved 8 kilometres west to a grazing run called Balgo. The relocation commenced in 1954 and was completed on 29 June 1956. The cost of moving a town: £2.5 million (around $143 million in today’s money). On the day I visit, old Tallangatta sits under gigalitres of water, thirty, forty metres down, the main street all sludge, the Soldiers’ Memorial Hall and Free Library, Pink Bros. General Merchants, the billy buttons and club rush, all drowned in the name of 1950s progress. The coffee palace and cordial factory; the lusty, Methodist church and pig sale yard. And what of this place I can’t see but stand at the end of Martha’s Lane imagining? The water lapping at my feet, inviting me to wade in, explore, some Tourism Victoria Experience sold to city folk, and here I am, disappointed. Think of yesterday, of this town, the four boys, the flooded graveyard, the long-abandoned six o’clock swill at the Victoria Hotel, Jock Cavanagh explaining how, as a boy, he and his mates crawled under the jacked-up weatherboard houses looking for pennies and pounds and marbles. Spent his summer fishing for redfin in Tallangatta Creek, and now there’s no creek, no town, nothing but the Hume Weir and a body of water the size of seven Sydney Harbours, a safe, dependable supply of water that came at the cost of a small, Australian town.
‘Old’ Tallangatta is an Australian Brigadoon, only emerging in drought years. In the form of a few houses left behind at the time of the government relocation because they’d been built on high ground (the ‘Toorak’ of Tallangatta). The butter factory with its rusted roof, its yard overgrown with rivermint and pigface, old machinery and an abandoned car, the memory of milk, churn, butter, bread, Jock at the dinner table and Pappa says dear Lord, thank you for what you’ve given us, but soon their house, minus its outdoor dunny and rows of carrots and tomatoes and its tool-shed full of rusted hammers and nails and the spot where Bob emptied the dripping from the roast and the bough-hung swings, floating beside Aunty Noreen’s bleached bones, windows in the school house where kids stared out at clouds (their Pythagorean ghosts marvelling at carp and cod), all jacked up and de-stumped, loaded onto the back of a truck and taken to the ‘new town’ a few miles away, placed on a numbered site ready to start again.
Post-World War I, the need for reliable irrigation water, the use of the Returned to build the Hume Weir, an engineering feat that, to this day, impresses. Water to the horizon, speed boats and catamarans playing in the silver-tipped waves, then heavy, prolonged rains, the weir gates opening, the bloated Murray flooding. But even then it was obvious the weir could hold more, promise greater wealth, alluvial plains and beets and lettuces and fat angus and shorthorns to feed the Commonwealth. And already, by the 1930s, a discussion about increasing the weir’s capacity. Although everyone agreed, the biggest problem was the town of Tallangatta, built in the bottom of a low-lying valley, the annual floods, the winter fogs that lasted until one in the afternoon, this unremarkable town that had started off as a series of cattle runs in the 1830s, an 1854 foundation-stone, the Indigenous name Tallangatta (‘place of many trees’) borrowed from the local Pallanganmiddang and Dhudhuroa people. And from the outset, there were concerns. The usual drought and fires, but mostly the annual floods, so bad the council built a shed to store boats so people could get up and down the main street after heavy rains. The horses were used to getting around girth-deep in the mud. This, everyone agreed, was what came from building in the bottom of a valley.
I stop beside the highway, look across the flooded valley, read the sign saying this is where Tallangatta used to be. A feat of imagination, although an old bridge still exists, taking the ghosts from nowhere to somewhere – wedding, funerals and wakes for Clarry and Eunice, Bown’s main street Draper, chiffon curtains and a doily for Edna’s phonograph. Once – down deep in this submarine city, this wattle-and-daub Atlantis, a thousand miles from the closest coast – you could visit T.J. Brazill, baker, for a cob loaf, sound the fire alarm if you saw or smelt smoke. Now, just double-glazed visions of the past and the memories we grant it, the names we choose to remember, a glossy, brochure-perfect landscape with bald hills (cleared for firewood, willows for stock in drought years) and sheoaks on the high ground, river reds with their feet in the liminal zone, drinking the murky water in wet years, storing it for the dry, yam daisy and native lilies and an old pre-flood oak surviving beside one of the few houses left in ‘Toorak’: the wealthy of the Australian regions always built their homes near the hospital on the high ground, anticipating the vagaries of climate, and history.
A road crew in a truck pull up and park in the lookout, search their phones for messages, sit in the cab and eat sandwiches. Meanwhile, the ghosts are busy – the wind working at a chocolate wrapper caught in the wire fence (although the Kit Kat isn’t going anywhere); a warm day, the frustrations and desires of the old townfolk almost audible through the needles of a nearby pine. As I read the usual interpretive panels, fading, just like the memory of whatever happened below these waters seventy years ago. Friday night, the men from H. H. Goodwin filling the pub for six o’ clock swill, their kids waiting outside, lemon squash and bikes made from bits and pieces of older bikes, and older bikes, this churn of life, of love, of routine like it always had been, and would be, amen.
Four boys dead, but only two fell through the ice, and the others went to save them. Like, in numbers, things would be better, everyone could be saved, this aspic, this silver nitrate moment that always had and would be, leaning on the everlasting arms that were flung open in 1956, billions of litres pouring into the valley, as the boys reached for the surface, the sun, the voices above them. And in the years since, shopfronts full of photos of the old town, the old people hoping their kids and grandkids and kids-to-come will want to remember. But the old prints are fading in the summer sun, and our capacity, as a species, for moving on, is enormous. Still, the living and the dead have an understanding, and anyone who can hear the old people calling can hear what they’re calling.
After the town was moved – lines on a map, lots drawn, sewers laid, gardens planted, concrete footpaths – there was a sense of unease in ‘new’ Tallangatta: that, for all its newness, its water tanks and reliable electricity, this place didn’t add up to what they’d left. Still, these were tough, reliable people, used to hard times, wars, nothing phased them, except perhaps a loss of history and belonging. Something about roots, lifting a house on the back of a truck and taking it elsewhere, temporary nomads demolishing red-brick pubs and shops and replacing them with neat, asbestos-trimmed laundromats and shire halls. No more fishing or swimming in the river; no more selling mushrooms to the Myrtle Café (‘Three Course Meal a Specialty’). With the end of the old town came the stripping away, the loss of old connections, of shops with a house out back, smoked sausages and pickled onions in clay pots, the day Mary Fraser locked the visiting magistrate in his hotel room; the Oddfellows used for art displays, reading circles, crocheted rugs as a way of dealing with the loss of sons in the Great War.
I couldn’t have come at a worse time: the tail-end of a wet winter dragging its arse into October, November, December. The Hume was up, no signs of old Tallangatta. So I stopped my car short of the submerged town, walked to the water’s edge, and listened. Nothing except a striped skink on a rock, fat exhausts from motorbikes on the highway – steamy days, the walk to town (no one could afford a car), sleep-outs full of stray uncles who spent their days listening to the races. But the new place would be just as good, better. It’d all be done properly – everything surveyed, paid for, and if you didn’t get your first choice, then your second, your third. Of course, the usual claims of favouritism, committees stacked with local businessmen, who got the best shop on the main street? A hundred houses lifted, 37 new homes, birches and elms planted in civic parks to replace swamp paperbarks and tea-tree that’d lined the river for millennia. Dunnarts and bandicoots replaced with Jack Russels and cats, Aboriginal songlines with Leave it to Beaver (fine-tuned in the after-school haze, blue gum skies full of smoke from stubble burns), bent-wing bats with budgerigars, sugar gliders with rats and rabbits and fallow deer introduced by well-meaning Acclimatisation Societies. Change the only certainty. Television ads for labour-saving devices promised a more civilised existence. A machine to dry your clothes. A Holden. A petrol station to ensure you were never stranded.
One day I’ll go back to old Tallangatta. I’ll wait for a long drought. For the waters to recede and the streets to emerge. I’ll walk the main strip; I’ll stop in front of the Victoria Hotel and listen to the voices in the front bar, kids calling for dad to come home, mum wants you, she’s pretty pissed off. Jock will be there, eight years old, and the Grade six kid his mother gave two shillings a week to dinky him to school. A bank, the manager with poppy oil in his hair, who’ll know the name of everyone’s kids. The cinema that started with Fred Astaire and finished with James Dean, the popcorn, the worn carpet along the aisles. I’ll listen to the conversations about the new maths teacher and Harry’s bulging disk and the rumours the government wants to move us all, but they’ll carry me out in a box before that. On a cold morning, the boys running down to the creek, and in they go, and this gyre, this churn, this cycle continuing until the next rains, more water and we’ll wait another thirty years to remember who we were, and are. But we’ll hear the voices calling; listen, and make out what they say, and realise they know our names.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Orr is an Australian writer of novels, short stories and various types of non-fiction. His writing keeps returning to the relationship between people and landscape, and how one makes the other. His latest book is a collection of experimental short stories called The Boy in Time (Wakefield Press). @datsunland.
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