Archive for the ‘fiction’ Category
the what that I try to say…
A phrase in a novel – falling in love is like being haunted. It brings to mind youthful feelings, traces of which are occasionally felt in – late maturity?
It may not have been love, I was ever skeptical, but in youth you might encounter someone, without ever really meeting her, a friend of a friend of a friend, you see her, and then not, and you’re not thinking of her, you don’t think, and then, unexpectedly, she’s there, in a room you’ve entered, a room full of people, and your skin goes electric, so palpable you feel other people must notice, you want to escape the embarrassment.
Of course, of course, you have been haunted. Wonder and hope haunts. You need something, but how awful to impose that on others, especially on her. And so you’re caught in an orbit, a satellite, it feels fatal to get too close, or to drift away, into empty hopelessness. Can you simply remain like this? Is it bearable? Is it bearable not to?
Haunting, haunted. You imagine speaking but dare not. You imagine trying to speak but the words refuse to become sound. You imagine a disdainful look that you’ve never seen on her face. You wonder at all the barriers you insist on creating. You count all your failures. You detect a pattern that you feel is slowly reducing you to… what? Nothing substantial. A thing so insubstantial that nobody, let alone her, will even feel any need to avoid. How could such intensity produce such nullity?
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Hell is other people? Heaven too? Thoughts are encased in bone and flesh. We think others are a mystery, as if we understand our own hopes and fears and anger and anguish. We think, why did we think that? Idle, hurtful thoughts, impossible to trace. Or we don’t want to get lost in that maze.
We’re drawn to what hurts us, for example, where there is pain there is life. But what is the equation? What are the respective quantities? Should we experiment with experience or stay safe or find a balance but what balance? To each her own?
Screens are safe, mostly safe, their unexpectedness rarely pains, threatens, upends our lives, which is why they never provide us with enough. Spontaneous interaction is the essential that we often strive to avoid. Why do I say we? Can I even speak for myself honestly?
Love is a terribly abused, essential word. It makes for us a pain which threatens our lives while we wonder about its reality. To not believe in it is killing, to believe too much kills with hope. But what matter, we must die.
Old people on the streets sit on mats. I mostly look at the women. She sat on a dusty blanket with a bowl, a big Buddha staring through the passing crowd. A small dog skipped by on a lead, my dog, pulling toward her, and her face lit like a lamp, warming and shaming me, indelibly.
Growing old, things still happen. Hope springs familiar, but so different, but not so different. No movement to action, or little, mostly just thought, internal, invisible to all but the self. When action occurs, however slight, it shocks and shames and excites, too much. No more, no return. But then…
I stand at the whiteboard waiting for my students to drift in. I wear a fixed, almost grim smile. A thin, wiry Arabic student enters and sidles between desks. His near-shaved head makes me think of skinheads of long ago. A contrast. He looks at me and stops, smiles.’Handsome’, he says. I smile back, thin. My skin prickles.
I walk streets and stop at bars, or not. I pass a pub, familiar, near my home. Near the door I stop to let others pass, leaving. A tall, scowling man, who seems surrounded by acolytes, is saying ‘he sits there every night, with his one bacardi, clogging up the place’. I feel a surge of violence, burning. I blink and blink. Moments or hours afterwards I wonder at myself. Is this a male thing?
I indulge myself with memories. As a child, but not so young, I sat beside a girl in class. I noticed with pride that I was the only boy who did so. I wanted to be unnoticeably exceptional. That year, the only year, we had inkwells and pens with nibs. It was hard for me, my left hand, my writing hand, trailed behind the nib and smudged the page. The girl, whose name I remember, looked at my work and smiled, a sad beautiful smile. And then, but perhaps not then, perhaps a day later, or a week, she rose, in the silent class, and approached the teacher’s desk, and I knew why, and the teacher, a young woman with huge intimidating spectacles and without a smile, came to me in all this silence and told me that I could write with a pencil from now on. And when she was gone, I looked at the girl, my friend, but she would not look at me.
And memories bring more memories, as if on a string lit by the first. She came in late, and held a handkerchief balled in her hand. Her face was wet and discoloured, pink, almost purple, a number of subtle shades, and she was trembling. Everything disappeared around this sight.
There is only one more memory, it was so long long ago. We were walking home together, like friends, chatting, and I was carrying her books. Yes, truly, I was carrying her books. I think I had come to realise that she was beautiful. And she told me, with a touch of sadness, the very slightest touch, that she and her family were moving to Melbourne soon.
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Familiar silence encloses me, though the inner noise baffles and bores. Impotence is tedious, yet it grows and grows. Or perhaps it was always this way, memories are so unreliable. How we love to manipulate, while never quite believing in its effects. And hate to be manipulated, yet always somehow hoping.
References
Han Kang, Greek Lessons, 2011
on indigenous, aboriginal, or first nations people and the literary art
I recently read Praiseworthy, by Alexis Wright, for a book group I belong to. At our meeting to discuss the book, a rather awkward incident occurred. One of the members, who had issues with the book, which I have to say I didn’t really understand (the issues I mean, not the book), asked, presumably in exasperation, ‘Do you think I’m being racist?’ I believe he was asking the group as a whole, but, since I’d been speaking in praise of it (it was Praiseworthy after all), I spoke up and said, sotto voce, ‘Well, yeah, a bit’, or something similar. This was unfortunate, and I owe him an apology. Anyway, he stormed off to his room (he and his partner were the hosts for the evening), and the group struggled on without him for a while, and soon dispersed.
I don’t know if I remember this rightly, episodic memory being so fraught and entangled with ego and angst and such. Anyway, what I think was bothering me wasn’t so much racism – or not at all racism – but what I perceived as a lack of recognition of a work that played with the combination of oral and written storytelling in a writer who, like all indigenous writers coming from an oral tradition, is interested in displaying the best of both worlds, with an understandable bias towards her own culture. I also found, in the writing, a certain irreverence, if that’s the right word, for the adopted language, which I’ve found in Aboriginal people I’ve spoken to or listened to. An irreverence often laced wth humour.
It should be remembered, as I think it’s really important, that all indigenous/aboriginal/first nations people who have had their culture upended, their best land appropriated, their age-old lifestyles destroyed, are forced, in order to recover anything out of what they’ve lost, to learn and effectively use the language of the colonisers. Because it’s never going to happen the other way round. And Alexis Wright’s whole career illustrates this unfortunate but completely unsurprising fact. Wright’s white father died when she was five, and she was subsequently brought up, by her mother and grandmother, as a Waanyi woman in the highlands south of the Gulf of Carpentaria. Her use of the English language, to which she was obviously exposed from an early age, is dazzlingly rich, fertile, and unconstrained in a way that I’ve encountered myself in my all too rare conversations with aboriginal people.
Now I’m going to throw caution to the wind and, just because I’ve been on a Darwin binge lately (Charles, that is, not Garamilla), I’m going to quote from The voyage of the Beagle –
At sunset, a party of a score of the black aborigines passed by, each carrying, in their accustomed manner, a bundle of spears and other weapons. By giving a leading young man a shilling, they were easily detained, and threw their spears for my amusement. They were all partly clothed, and several could speak a little English: their countenances were good-humoured and pleasant, and they appeared far from being such utterly degraded beings as they have usually been represented. In their own arts they are admirable. A cap being fixed at thirty yards distance, they transfixed it with a spear, delivered by the throwing-stick with the rapidity of an arrow from the bow of a practised archer. In tracking animals or men they show most wonderful sagacity, and I heard of several of their remarks which manifested considerable acuteness. They will not, however, cultivate the ground, or build houses and remain stationary, or even take trouble of tending a flock of sheep when given to them.
Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, p 291
So, to Darwin, Australia’s ‘savages’ were kinda noble. His later description of Australia’s ‘freedmen’, those brought to the country from England due to crimes large and small, was much more cloth-eared, classist and offensive. In any case it’s unlikely that Darwin bothered to learn any of the local aboriginal lingo. But then again…
The point here is that, as Darwin’s description tells us, the first humans to make a living on this land became very adept at surviving and thriving here, and as to ‘cultivating the ground’, they had little need to, quite apart from the dubious advantages to be gained by the ‘agricultural turn’, especially as the soil wasn’t the best for growing crops, as the first fleeters discovered. These first humans too might have struggled at first – that’s something we’re unlikely to ever know – but they clearly adapted over time to what was available for hunting and fishing, as well as developing skills to replenish the natural foods they found, as the writings of Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe have shown.
But then the Brits arrived, and they had to deal with foreign diseases, foreign weaponry, culture shock and ‘Terra Nullius’ land-grabbing on a massive scale, though plenty of those early Brits were impressed at the health and vitality of these ‘savages’. All of this makes background for Alexis Wright’s literary work, which presents us with the haze of Carpentaria under the remote overlordship of the Australian Government, and how particular individuals and families try to deal with it.
The first thing that struck me, though, about the book, was the writing style, which I might describe as ‘colourfully rambling’, with particular individuals standing out for their more or less fantastical obsessions. It marries the oral and the literary in such a breezily nonchalant way that all the craziness, the various dreams and schemes, become convincing. And it’s all about how to deal with that oppressive foreign overlordship – every response from suicide, to get rich quick schemes (white folk stuff) to complete identity with the overlord, to retreat into private obsessions. In one memorable passage, for me at least, Aboriginal Sovereignty, the aptly named most tragic figure in the novel, is picked up while apparently trying to commit suicide in the open sea, by a boat full of refugees (Sovereignty had been marked as a paedophile by the White Powers for breaking a certain law):
One of these laws said that you cannot have sex with a minor. He had raped an underage girl. Why did that girl want to get married to her promised one? She said it was the law, their law, the old true law. She said that other people had married same way, and all their families knew that too. She said stop being a pack of hypocrites, she insisted on being married, and went right out there, and claimed her man. There was no trouble about her doing that. Everyone knew. Said it was right. Those two loved each other since they were children. They said that they would spend the rest of their entire lives with each other…
The ‘people smuggler’ in charge of the boat is given a voice – a rare thing. In fact, our former Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, described what he and so many others have termed people smugglers as ‘the scum of the Earth’, as though they were a species, like those poor maligned cane toads. So the passage dealing with Aboriginal Sovereignty’s thoughts as he floats in the open sea thinking of ‘her, only her, in his soul’, and of eternity and spirits of time, is broken by this cargo shifter, weather and time-hardened, hunger-hardened, his home washed away by a changing climate, his being shifted from shrinking land to drifting sea, and now through circumstances too wind-blown and divagating to bear in mind, he is responsible for live cargo, so that he needs not to panic, he needs to be calm for others, as time and this boat have taught him, though he too might be drifting between a formless hope and despair.
So Aboriginal Sovereignty is rescued by this boat, this eagle-eyed scummy watcher of the sea and its flotsam, and with Wright’s language spinning its webs we are, or I’m not, sure if he’s dead or alive, and then some coastal military arrive in helicopters followed by customs patrol boats, and all is panic and noise and interpreters and the unconscious man lying on the deck is mentioned, and death is surely unconsciousness and yet… The uncertainties are perhaps deliberate or maybe I’m just being obtuse, but it seems Aboriginal Sovereignty’s ultimate demise results from the sudden brutal occupation of the boat by these officials, but of course it all began with the police and charges of paedophilia and the assimilation soothing the dying pillow wisdom touted by the Adelaide Review back in the eighties and still practised without the name.
In any case we see where Wright’s sympathies lie throughout Praiseworthy – with people who must make the most, if they can, out of displacement and dispossession, a praiseworthy task, often misunderstood, often obstructed, and sometimes, often, something to marvel at.
References
Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy,
Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle
Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu, 2018
Bill Gammage, The biggest estate on Earth, 2011
Claudine at school – a bonoboesque novel?
This is the Penguin edition I’m reading
I’ve been aiming for reading 40 books a year – maybe just because nobody seems to read books anymore. I go to cafes here in the pleasantly middling city of Adelaide, with me book, and notice a few tables with people sitting alone, reading, or maybe just looking, but not at books, at their phones. I don’t know how bookshops survive these days and I can only assume they won’t survive for much longer. Someone close to me buys me books on special occasions – my birthday, Christmas – but she orders them online – delivered from some massive warehouse, I imagine. The next step will no doubt be to eliminate the paper book – a terrible waste of trees, ink and the like, when we have ipads and their successors. And then of course reading itself will be eliminated, the whole tome being plugged into our frontal cortex, complex metaphors, hyperbole, onomatopoeia and all.
Anyway, it’s December and I’m a bit behind on my 40 books – I’ve gotta read 6 books this month! So, one book I’ve chosen is something decidedly racey – a novel (I almost exclusively read non-fiction these days) by the French author Colette, published in 1900 under the name of Willy, her first husband. It was Colette’s first novel, and it’s a doozy – sexy, witty, and enormously self-assured. My paperback copy has been languishing on my bookshelves… well, having just blitzed through the first 60 pages, I happened to glance at the inside front cover, where I found my name written, and the date of purchase, July 1982 – that’s 42 years ago (!), and well before I began my French degree in 1986. I’m thinking now of getting a collection of her works in the original – I couldn’t think of a more stimulating way of brushing up on la belle langue.
So though I’m trying to rush through Claudine à l’école, it’s really worth lingering on, like anything delicious. So far, it’s a world of women – schoolgirls of around fifteen, and their school-teachers, some of them not much older, and the forbidding senior mistress who turns out be rather drawn to her juniors. And of course there are a few male masters to drool over, in a mocking, superior sort of way. I recall reading about how Willy urged Colette to make the content a bit more steamy, and I like to think she was happy to comply. Anyway, time to read a bit more….
So I’m hoping the term bonoboesque will catch on, but it’s unlikely, both for its intrinsic clunkiness (and yet there is beauty…) and for the fact, more to the point, that I’m the world’s worst promoter of anything. Whateva, I’ve never read anything as bonoboesque as this novel. If bonobos could speak…
So, I’m wondering, does Colette continue in this vein? She was a prolific writer, beginning with four Claudine novels, all of which were immensely popular and provided a good income – for Willy. After disentangling herself from him she struggled to survive as a part-time actor and music hall performer, before turning to journalism in the 1910s. During this time she caused admirable scandals with onstage and offstage love affairs with various men and women. And, of course, she wrote. I’ve been hunting desperately through my unkempt bookshelves for Ripening Seed, (Le Blé en herbe), which I’m sure I’ve got somewhere in one of those old paperbacks, priced in shillings and pence… Anyway, she wrote a couple of dozen novels at least, of which La Vagabonde, Chéri, Sido and Gigi are among the best-known, if not the best – but what would I know?
Any way, reading about all the squabbles and squeezes of the school-girl Claudine, her frenemies, rivals, whipping-girls and other assorted victims, I fantasise about bonobos having language. After all, they’re a boisterous lot – without the occasional deadliness of their chimp neighbours, for sure, but I suspect not quite always as lovey-dovey as they’re portrayed. And yet, for the most part, it’s a world of inclusiveness and happy endings, and without the shock value of female-on-female pleasure that Colette brought to her fin de siècle readership. Bonobos are a million years ahead of that curve.
So while it may be that Claudine at school was deliberately aimed at scandalising and titillating, while bonobos only do what comes naturally, it’s far more honest and natural in its sensuality than just about any other work of its time, surely. And still has lessons, in that regard, for us today – though Claudine does have something of a cruel streak at times, which bonobos… I don’t know, are the primatologists missing something – or am I?
So, when I’ve look such things up lately, I’ve encountered an ‘AI Overview’ at the head of my enquiry. Ominous, but oh well, let’s go with it.
AI OverviewBonobos are generally less violent than chimpanzees, but they can still be aggressive:
Less violent than chimpanzeesBonobos are less likely to commit murder, infanticide, and cannibalism than chimpanzees.
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More frequent but less intense squabbling
Bonobos are more likely to push, chase, and bite other males than chimpanzees, but these interactions are less intense.
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Male bonobos are more aggressive than female bonobos
Male bonobos are about three times more likely to be aggressive than chimpanzees.
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Female bonobos prefer aggressive males
Female bonobos may prefer to mate with aggressive males.
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Bonobos may fight when groups come togetherTwo groups of bonobos may engage in serious fighting when they come together.
All of which is a bit confusing – male bonobos are three times more aggressive than chimps, except in the case of murder, infanticide and cannibalism. That’s a bit unclear, to say the least. Bonobos, I’ve always heard, don’t engage in those acts at all. And so how does an AI measure aggression, to work out that male bonobos are three times more aggressive than chimps? And female bonobos may prefer to mate with aggressive chimps – but then again, they may not? Still, I suspect there might be some truth here – there may be a bit more squabbling than is generally admitted. Which doesn’t much alter my view of bonobos as role models – it just makes them more human.
In any case, having read about half of Colette’s first novel, I find that, unsurprisingly, Claudine is something like a bonobo in a chimp world, humanly speaking. The big bosses are male – the school inspectors and the like – and the female schoolmistresses kowtow to them, while lording it over the schoolgirls, excepting the much petted school pets. There’s a lot of petty nastiness going on, much of it perpetrated by Claudine herself, but she maintains her popularity for all that. In the end it seems a lot more complicated than the descriptions I’ve read of bonobo society. Then again, so is bonobo society, I’m sure.
References
Colette, Claudine at school, 1900
Bonobo cruelty – AI overview, Google