The World-Swimmers (Patrick West)

27 Jan

For days now you have been driving across unbroken grassland, which you know you’ll never be able to leave behind forever, no matter how fast you might go, or however deep into the night you persist in your journey. The northern coast of your country is far in the distance and darkness, yet nothing is clearer to you than the knowledge that the plain you once in a while spit into will surely not disappear when it gets to the water. You have faith it will move without interruption through the breakers, even picking up speed across the ocean, until there is no more ocean—and with all the more reality if it takes on a form you could not even begin to comprehend. After so much confusion—the wrack of entire cities on sickening flats of sand—this alone seems certain.

As you fly across the land, constantly accelerating over slicks of water, you are granted once or twice a momentary vision of a greenness of the least degree of intensity, which before it disappears resolves itself into a pale and flowing plain. You see no people on this plain, in the instant before it evaporates, but you can picture yourself there—a vision within a vision—in the easeful company of the men and women you have decided just now to call the world-swimmers. There have been no other cars in either direction for ages. You have nothing left to do but continue. Even the radio falls dead eventually, and in the morning of your last day in Australia, an ungodly silence fills your mind.

On a radio station phone-in program in the Midwest of America, just before dawn on a day never to dawn, a woman is unable to finish reading out the carefully prepared statement she wanted to make on a subject closely related to the death of her husband, a year ago to the very hour. Before the program host can finish telling her, transmitting on a twelve-second delay, that no one could blame her in the circumstances for being reduced to tears, she puts the telephone receiver down next to its cradle, and walks outside into the yard, her last words moving through the icy air of the state on a twelve-second delay.

In a country of the future, a century or more from now, the first of its inhabitants ever to cry is immediately accorded all the privileges of an emperor. She surveys her people through watery eyes. It is said that she has been elevated to tears. Millions of eyes blink all at once in China; for the briefest of moments, an empire is watched over by no one.

Now you are about to come to the end of the beginning of your journey. As its final hours pass by, you wonder even now—the sole occupant of your strangely empty car—how you could ever describe, to a friend or to a friend of a friend, the momentous things that you have already been witness to, along a stretch of road that has never been anything, you feel, but perfectly flat. Entirely new oceans well up in the most delicate furrows of grassland, their waves breaking in and out of being, as fragile as the high clouds of a coastal region.

Once, when you were many years younger than you now are, you sat in a classroom of sunlit air as your geography teacher described the strangeness a plain of grass uninterrupted by roads or cities would have, if it stretched all the way from the boundary of your suburban school—deep in the drowning depths of Australia—to the furthermost point on the earth’s surface. How might one species of grass give way, under the influence of new weathers, as the miles thundered by, to another, and then to another? But think of this, your teacher said, think of this for a moment: is it possible that by a million freaks and faults of nature a single blade of grass of the original variety flourishing between the roads that you, girls and boys, will this afternoon travel home by, could somehow make it all the way—passing through countless species of grass—to where the inhabitants of the most distant region of the world laze and sleep, even in the middle of sunlit days, on soft and nearly pure lawns of velvet?

You have always associated yourself, my driver, with that single blade of grass—a foreign flag of green, born out of your teacher’s late-afternoon imaginings. But you have nothing of any of this in mind now, as the edge of Australia, its vastness awakening to the moon, draws ever closer. Sullenly you are suffering from an almost overwhelming desire to piss, yet you dare not stop the car, and you cannot bring yourself to dirty your clothing. It must wait, you tell yourself, until you can clearly hear the sounds of the beach and the ocean.

In the middle year of a century in China in which the ban on all forms of swimming or water play has once more been lifted, a peasant kneels with bowed head in the middle of a paddy field, to know for the first time around his humped body its slush and splash. After a little while other men come and settle themselves alongside him, their backsides all turned to the sun, experiencing each in their own way the touch of water almost unflowing. The peasant who has set off this communal event is hardly thinking of it as a revolution, as he walks slowly back to his village, long after the dropping of darkness, while other men remain in the paddy field of shallow channels and low ridges, experiencing each in their own way the feel of rice seeds floating between their lips and through the gaps in their teeth. A year later exactly, in Peking, the ageing and weakening Emperor, having just partaken of a lavish meal made up of a single grain of rice plucked from every paddy field in China, suddenly becomes tired of lackeyism and wearisome power. Frightening away the many servants nervously tarrying over the various waters that flow through his palace grounds, he enters the single stream—barely a trickle over grass—that he alone knows will, without a doubt, take him into a river that runs to the ocean. For many days he floats along, the peasants fleeing up the banks at his imperial approach, until he reaches the ocean wherein he wishes finally to die.

As odd waters are swelling within you, the coast comes into view eventually, its sounds rise over the sounds of driving, and you are able to empty yourself of your sour waste at last. It disappears quickly into the earth, and from this you gather that, for every one of the hundreds of miles of your journey, the land has been gradually tapering towards the point where air and land and water must meet, and where the bottom of the land (for such there must be in a place like this) comes to an end. You tell yourself that you can remember even now a firm feel to the ground in the area where you began your trip—an enduring sensation of foundation entirely absent in this place, where even skipping lightly on the spot threatens your old confidence in the security of your footing. What matter lies below this inner-land or under-land, perhaps only inches away from where your car tyres have snugly settled, you do not even begin to think about, least of all when you have the urge to name the ordinary sand dunes you are on—as if you had just discovered them—the Shallows of the Land.

There is no hurry yet to go on. As the strained and pressured parts of your stationary car continue to cool and cool, and the remaining drops of petrol in its tank fly apart like quicksilver, you prepare a bed for yourself, and lie down to begin the most blissful sleep of your life, resting your head on a pillow of weeds. For two days and two nights, you dream of nothing but leaves of grass, circulating slowly through the caves and caverns of the most unknown depths of any of the world’s oceans. Intermittently, you urinate without waking, childishly emptying your body of ancient water. On the morning of the third day, you wake to discover that your car has disappeared, along with all of your clothes, and other belongings. Something once close to you is stealing away. With hands made green by the touching of weeds, you rub the sleep from your eyes. Your face is the colour of a sun almost colourless. Birds fly low and fast through the dry riverways of your veins—wings liquid on the upstroke, pure fire on the down. An ocean, barely tidal, laps at the shelly shore of your heart.

Leaving behind the sandy zone you christened the Shallows of the Land in the last moments before you fell blissfully asleep, finally satisfying your urge to name it, you make for the breakers, where somehow (without your having realised it) things in the long silences of forgotten nights have turned into what they were not. Suddenly you find yourself wading through shallower and shallower wavelets, rather than through water deeper and deeper, and the breakers themselves have become still, as if they were the foothills of the solid sea—holding back the tidal mass of the country—protecting the ocean’s hinterland from death by slow drowning. Depths swirl within you as you begin swimming, easily enough, through rolling waves of grassland. Fish notice, then forget you. The land is calming. You are surprised by its warmth as of blood.

In the final minutes of the eighteenth century, on a damp part of the border between Germany and France undisputed in the course of his lifetime, a young man realises that he has become an official of the State with not a single function left to perform. Immediately, by candlelight, he begins to set down the reasons why he will continue to live and to breathe. His writing becomes salty.

With the coast of Australia not yet out of sight above the turbulence in the turf that forms your wake, you don’t yet have the boldness to call the plain that you are swimming through the Grasslands of the Moon, much as it seems inadequate to think of it as no more than a special region of the ordinary liquid and solid planet upon which you have always lived. You hear a shout once from the shore—a matter of your car, perhaps—but only this and nothing else, and soon the silence enters into the paleness of the place, and overwhelms you. You swim automatically—the Australian crawl—almost as if you have forgotten that you are a man with a man’s nature. Crabs scurry through the dirt; your naked body barely responds to their touch. If you once dived beneath the earth, you would find the roots of the grass swirling and billowing in the currents of the soil. But you do nothing other than swim across the world’s surface, breathing regularly—with nothing left of Australia to bother you now.

The steady rhythm by which your muscles are being exercised goes on without interruption or alteration for many hours, until suddenly you enter into a channel of water that baffles every movement, resisting you rather than, as before, embracing and protecting (like an extra skin grown later in life) every hard and soft part of your body. The comforting swells of the land have given way to wavelets of surface rock, which hurt you in many places, and put sand and grit into your eyes. You think, this is water too thick to be natural. Then somehow you pass through it all, and, as if for you this were a second awakening of the day, you start to think, and to feel, and to act, like a man again.

You concern yourself over a sea shining with every known and unknown colour of the world, green excepted. You muse on an image of the water that collects beneath cathedrals and graveyards, lying still in the earth, it’s said, over centuries—a solace for water-ghosts. You spit a mouthful of dirt high into the air, as you change your stroke to the pull and the kick of the butterfly stroke. The pattern of the wake behind you changes—it’s wider, deeper too—and you can’t help but smile, and shout, and laugh. You are active and free, in a world that is becoming ever more active and free. Seagulls are crying overhead—their tears stinging the ocean into which they are slowly falling—but they are alive, after everything, and you are joyful for it. Every last part of you quickens into greater being, as the waters of your body sustain and nourish the flesh and the tissue of a new season. Young blade that has made it this far—rake, lad, new seed—your body beats the water like a hunter flushing game birds out of grassland.

There are people, the world-swimmers to be sure, not so far off in the distance. The nearest of them, you can see, are surfing on tumbling waves of soil, grass and stones, their tanned faces breaking into brilliant white smiles as they surface through the foaming dirt, their boards wedging into the earth, dripping with sand. For your part, you don’t stop stroking a path through the water, and your view of these fabulous athletes becomes better and better with every rotation of your untiring arms, and with each new pulse and push of your legs.

There is no shore to govern the way the waves form and fall, but there is something that causes them to crest and collapse in the same place every time. Behind this stretch of whiteness, the groups of waiting surfers undulate on what looks to you—as each new wave is born—like a line of hedgerow, or like a rise of thick and knotted grass. Your thoughts rip, then smoothly curl over on themselves (a breaking wave; a still lagoon) and you look closely at just one of the surfers with a changed but settled mind—you see now that he is wearing a wetsuit of ocean mud, with scalloped segments resembling the scales of a fish.

A moment passes away, dies. While still unnoticed, you plunge under, and begin swimming through the petrified remains of ancient city-races—the Melburnians, the Sydneysiders, and deepest of all (of course) the Darwinians—letting balls of water escape from your mouth, and from the pores of your skin, watching sometimes the surfers above you, their legs dangling into the roots of grassland. The sun’s illumination only reaches you like the light from a star on the edge of death and blackness; millions of coming Australian years have blindly passed you by already, down where you are. Somehow all the speed that your vehicle flung out into the plain during your car journey—land kissing water—finds its true counterpart here. You go very much deeper than you expected you would, but within a few minutes you come to the surface of the dry ocean, well behind the surfers, finding yourself among the main mass of the world-swimmers—although, by chance, a little away from the nearest of them. Thus, you remain the unobserved observer, the observer unobserved and secret; a subtle mystery even to yourself; a stain of skin on the green water.

You understand that one of the world-swimmers will have to see you before the night finally comes, and you picture yourself swimming towards them—sometime in the future—clumsily imitating their native stroke. The whole plain seems to be under the influence of a single current now. Beneath a darkening sky, while everything is moving, everything remains relatively as it is. Breasting tiny sets of streaming earth, now and again gently pissing into the grassy water and soil, you give yourself up to the inevitable drift of the land.

Time passes—slivers of grass through an hourglass.

Then the falling sun casts a greenness of the least degree of intensity over the pale and flowing plain, and you notice for the first time a woman looking in your direction, and squinting a little, as if adjusting her eyes to a sight never seen before. Without any hesitation, you start to move towards her, drinking from the sap of the grass that parts before you, thirsty for the world, no more to be a lonely swimmer on the enchanted ocean; the woman is smiling at you, she is smiling and calling to you among the weeds of the water, and you believe that you can see all the way into your future, to the time when you will be known to her and to her many companions as the Last of the Australians, and frequently called upon to talk about the absurd and quaint lives of the peoples of Adelaide and Brisbane and Perth, whenever comparisons are made between the failed societies of the past and the magnificent civilisation of the world-swimmers. And now you are almost into her arms, as stroke for stroke she begins to come towards you as you go on towards her, and her eyes are glowing like oceans of snow, like grasslands of the moon.

* * *

The World-Swimmer is available at selected bookstores and through the author $25.00 postage free: patrick.west@deakin.edu.au

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What it’s like to want to write when all they want is for you to sing (JL Shenstone)

21 Jan

There came a time in my life when I had to face the fact that I was never going to relate to most of the population.

They go to work, they study, they buy wide-screen televisions and touch phones, they go to IKEA on the weekend, they go to the gym, they read magazines and newspapers and they never find the time to read literature.

They’re comfortable being caught up and swept away in the commotion to catch a train at seven-thirty in the morning, to exit buildings for an hour at lunch, to get into their car and enter freeways, to pull into their driveway with the matching driveway next door, the same television shows on the same televisions screaming out the same advertisements, the same glass bathrooms, the same mobile phones, vacuum cleaners and breed of dog. I could picture them sitting on their latest Swedish design with the remote-control in their hand reclining into the ground, opening the next beer to dull the sound of their child calling his brother a faggot, while the wife stares blankly ahead wiping over the kitchen table for the hundredth time that day, and finally when the beer, or wine, or gin had done its job they could sigh into their pillow and dream about deadlines and debts.

I didn’t understand.

Working full-time was never an appealing option for me. I went to university for three years to study an Arts degree. Because I dropped my subjects on a whim and was less focused every year, I never actually finished. And for three years I was there I spent most of my time at the tavern with students who assumed the world was theirs and the rest of the time falling in love with every intelligent girl I met (the ones with bob-cuts, red lipstick and black boots, who read Gertrude Stein and Jeanette Winterson, who lived alone, who drank in the day, who bought records instead of CDs, who had black bed sheets with white cum stains and rooms that smelled of incense and adventure). I didn’t believe in the power of a degree like everyone else. Going to university is like practicing for a life that doesn’t exist. So I quit and decided to become a writer instead.

After that I only ever occasionally wrote. Though still claiming to be a writer, I spent my time sitting around drinking, smoking and reading. It didn’t take me long to settle into this lifestyle, so much so in fact that I didn’t want a moment of it, I wanted a lifetime of it.

When I started to call myself a writer, people didn’t react well. They seemed confused, almost hurt that I had no plan in life now except to sit back and write about what ever came to me. I figured they were uncomfortable with all the free time I had. They would come up with goals and plans for me, bringing me pamphlets on short courses in creative writing, adult education and book clubs. I had no interest in any of it, of course. I was aware of every hour I wasted in their eyes, when I could be doing something, anything but this. But I’d created this existence and I liked it. I wasn’t nervous about an empty day. I had the freedom to walk the streets with no obligation to be anywhere. While the students rushed off to learn, the businessmen in suits and ties rushed in and out of tall buildings, mothers rushed to the store, cleaners cleaned, couples loved, machines ran, children played, I walked alone, lost in it all.

There was never one moment I thought I wanted to be a writer, only hundreds of them. Like the time I picked up a book by George Orwell and by the third page my hands were shaking. Or when I was reading Henry Miller’s Black Spring and I had to put the book down because it was too good, too much; a page of it was enough to fill me up to the brim. I was only up to page fourteen but I was done, sold and forever enslaved to the book and to the man who wrote it.

…Such a day it may be when first you encounter Dostoevski. You remember the smell of the tablecloth on which the book rests; you look at the clock and it is only five minutes from eternity; you count the objects on the mantelpiece because the sound of numbers is a totally new sound in your mouth, because everything new and old, or touched and forgotten, is a fire and a mesmerism.

I seek the solace of authors, most of which are long dead. Sometimes I think they know me better than anyone else.

And maybe they do.

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unseen (Chloe Rose)

17 Jan

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VERITY LA: The next step

14 Jan

Dear Verity La subscribers, readers, visitors,

The Sydney Morning Herald recently acknowledged Verity La as an ‘increasingly influential’ literary journal, and indeed, Verity La has been evolving since its inception eighteen months ago. We’ve published 100 writers, interviewed scores of eminent writers, artists and thinkers, and achieved the attention of the National Library of Australia.

The next step is an upgrade of our site. Verity La is now a domain, which means less limitations and more creative freedom in how we bring you content.

Our aim is to keep what’s great about Verity La – a clean but eye-catching site that maximises readability – while making the right improvements so we stay fresh and vibrant. The next few weeks and months will see Verity La explore design possibilities, integrating video content, and personalising all elements of our presentation.

Verity La will continue to develop as a forum for writers dedicated to bravely pushing online literature forward, and we hope you’ll come along with us. As we improve and expand we are looking to include more creative input, so if you think you’d like to contribute to Verity La as a designer, writer, or indeed as an involved reader, we’d love to hear from you.

Regards,

Alec and Nigel
Co-editors
Verity La

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The poet said fuck on stage (Tiggy Johnson)

10 Jan

The poet said fuck on stage. It doesn’t sound like anything extraordinary and nor would it have been, but for the context and the fact that her mother sat in the front row. I admit I looked over to the poet’s mother when I heard the resounding, almost yelling of ‘fuck’ on stage, and she didn’t really react. Not that I’d met her before so it would be hard for me to know. Even as I realised the mother didn’t react, I was aware that perhaps she felt so self-conscious that she was using all her energy to indeed appear to not react.

Then the poet said masturbate.

It wasn’t said with the gusto she’d said fuck, nor the clarity, but rather a touch of speed and an almost-muffle, but it was there. I heard it, others heard it, and I imagine her mother heard it.

Again, her mother failed to respond.

I know it sounds odd that I’m surprised she didn’t react, or more that I’m surprised the poet said fuck and masturbate on stage when she knew her mum was there. Even I’m a little surprised I’m surprised.

On the same stage almost two years beforehand, my own mother sat near the front as I performed my first featured poetry set, and I said fuck too. More than once.

Fuck is a word my brothers and I got into trouble for saying when we were kids. Mum used to say shit all the time and I said it once when I was starting high school. Mum wasn’t impressed and before she dished out consequences I reminded her that she said shit all the time and asked how she could expect us not to. I didn’t get into trouble that day, nor any other time I said shit.

But Mum never said fuck and it seemed, even by my own argument, fuck was off limits.

When I was planning my poetry set I knew I was going to say fuck in front of her. Of course, as an adult, I had no disillusions of any consequences, although I didn’t want to make my mum feel uncomfortable, or myself, for that matter.

When I got to the bit where I had to say fuck I chose not to look in her direction. Same the next time I had to say fuck. I tried not to imagine her reeling a little, perhaps sitting up straight all of a sudden and wondering whether she worried that people were staring at her. Though I suspect, unlike the other poet’s mother, my own did reel a little, whether or not it was because I said fuck or whether it was the context in which I said it. Though I didn’t say masturbate in front of her, nor do I think I would. (Although I realise it’s to say this when that word does not feature in any of my own poems. To date.)

Even considering this and knowing I would again say fuck in front of my mother for the sake of poetry, it still surprises me that this poet did it.

Perhaps it’s some crazy double standard, or maybe it has something to do with me having a good understanding of my own relationship with my mother and knowing nothing about this poet’s with hers. Maybe it has something to do with the age gap between the poet and myself, which makes me almost old enough to be her mother. Though really, I suspect it has more to do with context.

By that I don’t mean that I said fuck in the middle of a humorous piece about being in labour while this poet said it in a more, let’s say, aggressive, piece that suggested she less than loves her life, or more specifically, one aspect of it. Although that does have something to do with it.

I don’t remember the context of her saying masturbate, other than, as I’ve already suggested, it seemed rushed, like she was aware her mother was listening and hoped she could somehow disguise it so her mother mightn’t notice. Maybe she didn’t feel comfortable saying it at all.

I do recall the context of the poet’s message though, the thing the poet, through the various poems she delivered as part of her featured set, was trying to say. She hates being a parent.

No two ways about it, considering the context of her overall performance, I have no doubt the poet hates, more than anything else on this earth, the responsibility that comes with caring for a dependent child.

At least she did when she wrote the poems.

A poem that involved no swearing was perhaps the most disturbing she delivered. It was the kind of poem that, as I listened, I wondered what would happen in the future, when her toddler grew up, could read, could ask questions like, ‘Why did you hate me so much, Mummy?’, ‘Why didn’t you want to play with me, Mummy?’ and ‘Did having me really ruin your life Mummy?’

Because this poet is angry. Angry about being a mum, angry about being responsible for a dependent child, angry about not getting enough time to herself to be herself, angry about her marriage breaking up, angry that her life isn’t what she hoped it would be. Angry that she was tricked into the responsibility of being a parent when she had a completely, albeit naive, expectation of what it might be like. Angry with society’s attitudes toward mothers.

I feel for her. I’ve been her. I feel the pain she’s suffering. I feel the pain her daughter may suffer in the future. I feel for her mother who sat and listened to her daughter’s pain, unable to do a damned thing but sit still and listen.

I understand where the poet is coming from, the things she feels right now, the desperate need to break out of it, at all costs. I’ve been there, although not so publicly. I felt ashamed of such thoughts, struggled to come to terms with them in the safety of my lounge room instead of belting them down a microphone in a dimly lit suburban pub. On one hand, I admire her for being brave enough to say some of the things I wasn’t, even though I’m all for getting the messages out there. I mean, half the reason she feels like this to start with is because talking about the things she’s expressing are taboo, but that’s a separate issue.

I think her poems are important. I agree the world needs to know what it can be like for new parents, how it can be difficult to adapt to new responsibilities, particularly when, as she pointed out in one of her poems, you become invisible to the rest of the world when you have a baby. But I’m not yet decided whether she’s brave, or whether she just needs some help. Even if she doesn’t need help, perhaps her poems will show others that many new mothers do. And that they often don’t know how to get it. I look forward to the poems she’ll write next.

I hope she’ll write some that offer the right balance to give these dark ones the strength the message in them deserves. The kind of poems that show the light side of parenting, that show she learned something valuable from this dark place she’s in.

While I could argue that other poets write about the happy times and this poet’s experience provides the balance, I can’t help but feel that without her providing a balance herself, the audience, instead of hearing her message, will just think of her as the poet that said fuck on stage. And masturbate.

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HARD NOTES OF WAR: a review of Valence by Susan Hawthorne (Lesley Lebkowicz)

5 Jan

War has always been a subject for poetry – for all forms of literature – in every culture, in every time. It’s been examined, glorified, abhorred. Rarely does a writer confess an addicted love of it despite its horrors, as Tony Loyd, a British war correspondent, does. It’s possible to think of his work, in its shocking authenticity, as defining one end of a continuum and Susan Hawthorne’s fierce and rich polemic as defining the other.

The subtitle of Hawthorne’s Valence is Considering War through Poetry and Theory. Her twofold method of verse and discursive prose makes for a visually pleasing experience. Each poem/argument/exploration is given its own page. The poem comes first – generally two but up to four six-line stanzas – sit over a paragraph of two of commentary. The difference between the poetry and the prose is emphasised by a difference in type-face and spacing. Given that poetry is a form we linger over, and that Hawthorne’s work here demands reflection, attention to presentation pays off.

Structurally, the verse element of Valence alludes to the complex form of the sestina in its six-line stanza and in its three-line concluding envoi – but that is all. The other characteristics of the form are not used. This makes for a pleasant acknowledgement of poetic tradition without any rigid adherence to it. Many poets these days are happy to play with elements of form as they work within the currents of free verse and this work sits nicely in that context.

Within the book-ends of two three-lined verses Hawthorne offers a dense mesh of imagery in the verse ranging across several instances of military violence. Words are ‘slaughtered in the throat’, ‘widowed ground has been filled with half-grown trees’, what ‘will it take to unpurse the future’? Images freed from the control of punctuation jam one against the other invoking the terrible chaos of war.

This is the main substance of this work – but not the complete matter: the series considers questions of hope, betrayal, the difficult possibility of putting right the wrongs of war. And more. War is so big a subject, its ramifications enormous; issues arise and spill across the pages. As a feminist scholar, Hawthorne is predictably opposed to war. Some of the prose commentary alludes to her own (as well as others’) scholarly work on the subject. She also refers to her own experience in these commentaries and this invites the reader into her material. The sequence is, for instance, initiated by reflections on her grandmother’s, mother’s and uncle’s war experience.

At its best, Hawthorne’s voice is clear, striking, impassioned. The sequence begins: ‘all day long the gods have been screaming’. Her opening lines are frequently declarations strong in the vernacular: ‘revolutions have a tendency to unwind’ or are charged with rhythm (here with a Shakespearean resonance): ‘undoing hatred is a pilgrimage of hurt’.

As it works its way through its variations on war the sequence moves inevitably towards despair. In the last lines: ‘you dream of light . . . /you sob . . . / because nothing will ‘stop the clot of war’. It’s a hard note to end on. Honest – and hard.

Valence: Considering War through Poetry and Theory
Susan Hawthorne. Spinifex Press, 2011, pp16

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The Pre-Dentist Not Wearing Red (Lara S. Williams)

2 Jan

She says she will soon be a dentist. She likes teeth and is fascinated with their decay. At the  Canada Bay Private benefit she attracts a crowd of followers who, one at a time, bend their heads back to the Darlinghurst terrace chandeliers and submit to her probing fingertips. In teeth she sees future meals and cocktails and heart break and the many lies it will take for their owner to reach death.

‘You eat a lot of curry.’

‘I wouldn’t say a lot,’ says a neurosurgeon from The Rocks. ‘I do like it. Mutton is awfully good for the jaw.’

‘Not so good for the molars. They look like Blitzkreig back there. And yours! You’ll need a crown within the year.’

‘On this front one?’ asks a PR agent from Balmaine. ‘I just had them checked. You sure?’

‘Oh, yes. I never miss a nerve rupture.’

They all laugh and she wipes an embroidered napkin around the announcement of her mouth. The hostess, always in black, is attracted by the attention.

‘You’re a regular magician over here,’ she says, one hand carefully placed on her mantelpiece, fingers curled underneath. ‘Making cavities appear, vanishing healthy gums.’

‘It’s a serious matter.’ The pre-dentist puts down her fat-bodied red and interlaces her fingers, palms to the floor. ‘This is the flesh that holds our mouths together. Teeth in gums, gums on bone, all that. When we damage our gums, some of these little wires pop loose.’ She nudges a cardiologist from Bondi. ‘Could you pull one of these fingers our for me, please?’ With her ring finger free and easy she continues, ‘and when we don’t properly attend to this damage,’ again she nudges and he obliges, ‘more are disconnected until eventually…’ she waggles her fingers in front of her throat and everyone laughs and someone refills her glass.

‘Quite amusing,’ says the hostess. ‘I could use you on the hospital board.’

‘Oh no,’ she replies. ‘I’m not yet qualified.’ Her left incisor is a shade darker than the teeth around it. She licks it, slowly, when she believes no one is watching.

‘Can you practise?’ asks the PR agent. ‘Without a license?’

‘Only during training.’ She leans forward until the bow on her dress slips through the skein of her wine. ‘Actually, I’m not technically suppose to consult outside the clinic.’

‘Does this count?’

‘Only if one of you say something.’

The hostess thins her lips and motions to a waiter carrying a tray of bruscetta. She takes two but the others, watching the pre-dentist turn them down, wave the tray away.

They ask about the challenges of reconstructive surgery within the current budget cuts but she brightly excuses herself and winds her way through the crowd, into the bathroom. Two women are hovering before the mirror, one applying blush to the other’s cheek. They have a look of midwifery about them. They part and smile and one puts a hand to her own lip.

‘You’re the dentist.’

‘Very nearly.’

‘Could you look at something for me?’

‘Only if you write me a cheque. I didn’t bring a donation.’

They leave, whispering, and she locks the door and sits on the rim of the bathtub. The taps are so highly polished she can see the warped image of herself bowing around their curves. Her red dress looks like the angry dome of a sunset. She wonders why she wore it again when she can so clearly see the outline of her bra through the fabric.

There is a knock, then a scrape of keys and the door opens to the hostess. She steps in sideways, closes and re-flips the lock. The pre-dentist looks at her through two cupped hands, unsurprised.

‘Just thought I’d see if you were all right.’ She puts her keys on the ceramic sink, wipes a smudge from the surface. ‘We had an unfortunate incident in here last year with a radiologist from Strathfield.’

‘I heard he was very depressed.’

‘Certainly depressed enough.’ She sits beside her and both women place a hand on each knee. ‘It happens like that. Sudden, in your host’s toilet.’ She turns and looks over into the bowl. ‘Hell of a place to choose. I wanted a larger one.’ She flushes it and tuts.

They are silent for a long while with nothing but the occasional hiss of the cistern. Eventually the hostess says, ‘you’re not really a dentist.’

‘I’m getting my qualifications.’

‘But you’re not. Are you.’

The pre-dentist closes her eyes and smiles so widely a flash of filling can be seen. ‘How could you have possibly figured it out?’

‘Your tooth. That pointy one.’

‘Incisor.’

‘No dentist would have a discoloured incisor.’

The pre-dentist stands and puts both hands out in supplication. ‘I did study dentistry. I mean, not at university. From books.’

‘Dentist for a father?’

She stops to think, then stretches out a ‘no.’

‘How interesting.’

The pre-dentist fiddles with the chain of keys. ‘If I leave now, can you not tell anyone? It so comforts people to be told by a professional that they have broken teeth.’

The hostess brushes a hand toward the door. ‘I won’t say a word.’ She watches her reach for the doorknob.

‘I was at the Baulkhan Hills children’s ward fundraiser last year,’ the pre-dentist says. ‘I thought you did a wonderful job.’

‘So did I. People fawn over these doctors and surgeons and chiefs of medicine but really it’s us, the wives behind, that make these things happen.’ She slips a hand through the air to brush a piece of lint from the pre-dentist’s upper arm. ‘We organise and chase up and worry about the money; how much money are we raising, how much do we need, how much will they let us get away with? Do you think doctors give a thought to all that?’ She slaps a hand to her thigh. ‘We do. Women outside the picture.’

‘It’s a very safe place to be.’

When the pre-dentist leaves she takes her umbrella from the deer antler rack, tells the elevator operator to grow his hair out and hails a taxi from the building’s entrance. She looks up at the seventh floor where the flashes of party reflect on the hats of street lamps. The silhouette of the hostess stands out against the lights. She has one hand raised in farewell and the pre-dentist does not return the gesture. She takes her dress off in the taxi with no intention of putting it back on.

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Guns N’Coffee (A.S. Patric)

25 Dec


I work in the middle of the damned city. I start when every other son-of-a-bitch is about to clock-in as well. It doesn’t matter where I go, I can’t get a coffee without waiting for fifteen minutes in a line. No one likes lines, right? I’m not saying I’m different, but lately, these coffee lines seem to be slowly moving us along like a hissing snake, swallowing all our minds in a milky swirl of white poison.

These days there’s less space in front and behind. The breath of those who haven’t eaten or brushed since the day before, spiced up with a cigarette or two just before coming into the crowded café and snuggling up just behind my shoulder, is the kind of stuff that is going to challenge the most equanimous. Me? I only know what equanimous means because it was word of the day on my screensaver yesterday.

If it’s not that, then there are those women with the angry industrial-strength perfume that burns like a corrosive through my nasal passages and leaves a chemical taste on my tongue. I used to think they had lost their sense of smell, but now I know it’s an attempt to get some space in these coffee lines.

None of this is going to explain why I brought a handgun along with me today. I’m just saying, there’s too many people in this damned city, and they’re all starting work around the time I need a coffee.

*

It’s a modest gun. I’m not a closet Dirty Harry wanting someone to make my day. I just want someone to make my coffee.

When I pull it out for the first time the woman in front of me just kind of blinks sleepily and goes back to daydreaming about her strong latte with two sugars.

“Hey,” I say to her. She’s ignoring me so I give her a wave of black steel near her right ear. “Hey,” I say again. “I’m not kidding.”

I fire the gun through the wide doors of the café and out into the street. The shot travels just above the heads of the masses of people pushing along the footpaths. The bullet shatters a pane of thick glass across the road in the fashion store. People get a bit cut up from the crashing glass and a man begins screaming like someone has cut off his toes. The pedestrians keep passing, barely pausing, crushing the glass beneath their shoes as they make their ways to work.

My wrist is limp from the kickback but I transfer the gun to my left hand as though it’s all the better to display the weapon. The double sugar latte woman steps aside. The rest of the folks in the line follow her example.

Bradley the Barrista knows how I like my coffee. His arms move with speed and precision, a perfection of machine engineering translated to human form. It’s as though I press his fast forward button and then the stop button when he finishes my ristretto strength long black with three grips and three sugars.

I pay him and tell him he can keep the change on a ten dollar bill. It’s only polite to show an appreciation for good service.

“How’s your day been Brad?” I ask after my first satisfying sip.

“It’s been pretty busy Mr. Bushnell. This is the first time I’ve had a moment of stillness for two hours.”

“Are you enjoying it Brad?” I ask.

“I am indeed, Mr. Bushnell,” he replies, and adds, “There’s something about a loaded gun that makes one appreciate a moment like this. Thanks for that, Mr. Bushnell.”

“Glad I could do that for you Brad. I’ll now have the pleasure of strolling to work rather than the unwelcome power slalom through those frustrated crowds outside. I’m going to have a lovely amble to work today, Brad.”

As soon as I move away from the counter the line resumes its shape, longer and angrier than ever. A rattler of a line extending outside the front doors, the furious tail shaking with the anger of twenty mobile phones, palm pilots and planners going off simultaneously. It’s a soothing sound when you have discovered the ways of the snake charmer as I have.

*

I come in the next morning with a smile in my stride and a spring in my face. I’m eager to display my Kimber 1911 Compact again. I want to get that snake dancing out of my way.

I don’t have a problem until I arrive at the head of the line and a high-powered exec smiles like his teeth are made out of diamonds and he eats crystal croissants with his coffee. He’s been held in the purgatory of the line for the last fifteen minutes and can’t swallow me moving past everyone with a royal wave of black steel. Maybe he didn’t see my warning yesterday but I can tell he is a natural born hero.

“You are not going to shoot me for a coffee. That’s ridiculous! It’s only a few dollars and a few moments. You can’t kill a human being with such little motivation.”

“What’s your game, Mr. Suit?” I ask him.

“I don’t want to play. I’m just going to get a coffee and go to work.”

“Well, Mr. Suit, I’m not going to go into a lengthy analysis of the situation here. But I will say this — it’s not about a few minutes or a few dollars. It’s about an accretion of time that mummifies my brain and turns my thoughts into sand. More than anything it’s about the brief, black, bitter taste of liberty in those cups. You’re standing in the way of my freedom Mr. Suit. I advise you to step a side and give me a moment with Bradley the Barista.”

“I don’t think so,” Mr. Suit tells me with his diamond grin.

“Mr Suit,” I say and step forward. I raise the gun to the height of his heart. “Reconsider, please,” I say and wiggle the Kimber 1911 Compact. I polished it last night and I know it has a lethal gleam to its black metal.

He looks at it like it’s a water pistol and turns around and asks Bradley for an affogato. It’s more of a desert than it is a coffee. An affogato! It also happens to be the most time consuming thing he could have asked Bradley to make him. I take it as a personal affront. Mr. Suit says he also wants two scoops of ice cream and not just one. I give him two bullets instead and I’m not sorry.

Mr. Suit dies in a very elegant creaseless crumple of the best Italian fabric and design. A macchiato stain of blood spreads across the immaculate collar of his white shirt and drips to the black marble of the café’s floor. Everyone lines up behind me. Bradley’s hands fly to the handles and dials of his Deco D Dosata Gaggia espresso machine.

*

The next morning I walk into the café and feel sure there will be no more need for gun waving and I won’t have to kill anyone to get a coffee. I had a difficult night getting to sleep. For hours I tried to rest my mind and body. Even when I managed to drift away I found myself waking in a fevered state, my sheets wet right through and my pillow soaked. In short, too much coffee. There’s got to be limits even to these dark pleasures I suppose.

The line is long and I can barely get through the doors of the café. I announce myself but no-one moves.

The double sugar latte woman stands before me again and I tell her, “Surely, my mettle has been tested. My resolve can’t still be in question.”

She turns around and a wash of her perfume breaks over me in a dizzying ocean of petals and pollen, bouquets of sweet smelling chemicals rushing down my throat. I take a step back but I stumble and grab a café chair to steady myself.

“You don’t look good,” she tells me.

“I didn’t sleep very well,” I explain. “Frankly, my experiences in the toilet haven’t been too pleasant either. I’m sweating a lot and my stomach feels uneasy. Queasy, I feel very queasy.”

“Coffee’s not for everyone. Perhaps you should drink tea instead. Take a few moments every morning perhaps — treat yourself to a pot of Orange Pekoe leaf. You’ll find it’s a lot more suitable to your nervous system. Our culture has so many problems and diseases that stem from stress and anxiety and there’s nothing that generates and promotes these things as does the addiction to the coffee bean.”

I’m starting to feel disorientated. People are pushing past me to get into the store and others are coming out with steaming take-away cups filled with the delicious beverage that will give me the boost I need to get through the next few hours of my life.

“Shut up, you scandalous hypocrite. You’re here for the same reason I am. You need the coffee bean as well.”

“I drink decaf.”

“Decaf?” I say. “Decaf!”

“Yes, Decaf. Decaf indeed.”

“Don’t talk to me about decaffeinated coffee. It’s like taking a shower in a raincoat.”

“I don’t think so,” she says.

“It’s like eating one of those burgers made out of lentils and cabbage.”

“No, it’s not,” she says, looking at me like I’m someone to be pitied.

“Should I remind you I’m carrying a weapon?” I reach below my arm and remove my Kimber 1911 Compact from a holster I bought for it yesterday afternoon. “You don’t require further demonstrations do you?” I pull it out and hold it before her.

“It’s not a good idea. There’s a room full of coffee drinkers here after all. Every single one of them desperate for that first hit, just like you. There’s no way you can keep a trump card like that in a room full of losing gamblers.”

“What?” I blink at her. “Just move!” I waved the gun with two sharp movements to the right.

She steps aside with a sorrowful expression. I see the line has changed. Everyone in it has removed a firearm from a pocket or handbag and they all have these guns pointed at me. Thirty barrels are trained on my head, chest and stomach. I blink but I can’t really take in the image of all these respectable city workers armed with such deadly weapons.

I look over to Bradley the Barista and ask him, “What’s going on here Brad? Didn’t I invent the game? It’s my ball isn’t it? I get to say how we play. Bradley — tell these people!”

The Barista wipes his hands with a tea towel and a regretful look passes across his face. He says, “I’m sorry Mr. Bushnell. No more coffee for you.”

“What?” I ask the question meekly but I feel my heart kick in my chest at never having another morning jolt from Bradley’s beans. “What?” It comes out as a roar this time. “You don’t get to decide on something like that. I’ve been coming here for years. I’ve been working in this damned city…”

*

My anger had begun to foam like milk in the bottom of a metal jug and I was spitting with my eyes closed when I said ‘damned city.’ My weapon might have been raised but it was more a gesticulation than an intent to harm anyone. Coffee drinkers are jumpy though and their fingers get twitchy.

*

‘Guns N’Coffee’ is the winner of the 2011 Booranga Short Story Prize. It is published in Issue 22 of fourW.

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Neal Stephenson’s Reamde reviewed by Robert Goodman

24 Dec

Neal Stephenson, one of the Godfathers of cyberpunk and deliverer of massive, engaging tomes full of historical and philosophical fun returns to the present day, real world (of sorts) with Reamde.

The first thing to say about this book is: don’t be put off by its size or its unpronounceable name. At over 1000 pages it is a daunting prospect and will make you think seriously about buying an e-reader (if you don’t already have one). And, given the novel’s focus on all things technological and interconnected, this may indeed be the most appropriate way to read it. But an e-reader doesn’t build up the muscles quite as much, and the novel makes just as good an argument for throwing technology away and experiencing reality. So you can still lug the real thing around and feel righteous.

Reamde, stripped right back, could best be characterised as a post-9/11 thriller. It has Russian mafia, internet millionaires, famous jihadists and their hangers-on, hackers, MI6, FBI and enough lovingly described exotic locations to fill a couple of James Bond movies.

The Reamde of the title is a computer virus which is used to extort money from the players of a Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game called T’Rain, a game that has been designed specifically to help part players from their money in the first place. But while this aspect of the plot allows some skewering of the on-line fantasy gaming fraternity, it is just the conceit from which the rest of the story spirals completely out of control. But the plot, is not Stephenson’s central concern.

Under the hood, Reamde continues Stephenson’s look at the how technology changes the way we live and interact. On the surface, coincidence brings a group of disparate characters together. But it never feels like coincidence, as the connections are all the result of the information age – an age in which everyone finds out about you through Facebook or your Wikipedia entry; an age in which a Chinese teenager, an America special services soldier and a Swiss banker can interact in a virtual gaming world; an age in which GPS always lets you (and other people) know exactly where you are.

At the same time, the novel also examines how its internet-savvy characters fare when their technological safety net is taken away. At one point, one of the main characters finds a kind of bizarre freedom in being kidnapped and forced to operate without a phone or internet connection for the first time in years. Another trio find deep wells of ingenuity while trying a “sail” a powerless fishing trawler.

Stephenson can be heavy on exposition, and there is plenty of it in Reamde’s 1000 pages – about things as diverse as how gold farming Chinese teenagers make money out of virtual games, about how the Russian mafia actually works, or how aircraft flight plans are developed and approved. But its delivery is mostly well integrated with the plot, pitch perfect and peppered with a beautifully sly, tongue-in-cheek observational style that often makes you smile while you absorb the information.

Just a couple of examples:

On the Russian Mafia: “Almost all of what they do is very boring… How they get most of their revenue in Russia was not crazy shit like drug deals or arms trafficking. It was overcharging on cotton from Uzbekistan…”

Or this: “Insurgents did not care for spectacular snow-covered mountains. Snow impeded movement and implied harsh cold, “Spectacular” meant “easy to see from a distance”, and insurgents did not like being seen… Many of the features that tourists liked, insurgents found positively undesirable – most of all, the presence of tourists.”

Stephenson highlights how the interconnectedness of the modern world helps us communicate but in a way in which meaning is often left behind. A Chinese hacker and a Hungarian systems administrator communicate well enough using terminology and concepts that they both learnt playing American video games:

“’Maybe we should go back and get their guns,’ Marlon suggested.

“‘That’s how it would work in a video game,’ Csongor said, which was his way of agreeing.”

But they still don’t really understand each other:

“Csongor remarked on the fact, which to him seemed odd, that in China places were unbelievably crowded and others were totally uninhabited but there was no in between. Marlon thought it curious that anyone should find this remarkable. If a place was going to be inhabited, then it should be used an intensively as possible, and if it was a wild place, all sane persons would avoid it.”

Readme is engaging fun, an often thought provoking read which at its heart, is an old-fashioned pageturner grounded by interesting and endearing characters. It has good guys, it has bad guys, it has cliffhangers, chivalry and heroism. And lots and lots of guns.

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Patrick West Interviewed by Laurie Steed

20 Dec

Laurie Steed: You are noted as saying it’s essential a short story “spend time in the foreign territories of the writer before it is midwifed onto the page”. How would you define such territories? What are the roles of time and memory when evaluating accessible life experience versus those moments you’ve yet to fully process?

Patrick West: As a writer I’m happy to receive inspiration and useful insights into creative method from just about anywhere. One book I would recommend to any artist is Creative Evolution by Henri Bergson (1911). Bergson makes a seemingly naïve observation… everything isn’t given all at once. In other words, there is time. But is there really time? Bergson’s point is that our conception of time is such that everything might as well be given all at once. Pre-determining time as a series of static moments, as we tend to do, we always fail to encounter time itself. What is time itself? The existence of time, the fact that everything isn’t given all at once, suggests for Bergson that “Time is invention or it is nothing at all.” The future is always a matter of invention and the past is dead as in “already invented”. On Bergson’s logic artists need to insert themselves into time itself as creation in this sense. To do otherwise is to treat creation as merely the re-creation of the already created, as if, to borrow one of Bergson’s own metaphors, all a painter is doing is returning a jigsaw puzzle to its original state. Great artists tap into the very becoming of time and use it as a resource for true creation. Time, for them, is moment-less not as in without time but as in pure becoming. The test then of originality in all art might be that it produces, out of this flow of becoming, an effect of time never before experienced.

I do not claim to have done anything like this myself! And besides I am only beginning my own adventure with Bergson’s thought as it relates to creative writing. However, I think that I can notice in my writing some indications of what, for Bergson, such an engagement with time itself might consist in—namely, an un-thinking of the usual (time-based) categorisations of our existence. Or an attempt to prise open reality across the grain along which it usually splits. With these ideas in mind I just came across this passage from my short story “Nhill”: “When we made up our minds to go it was in sadness. A single duck’s cry carried to our ears with almost no volume at all, the smallest increment imaginable before deafness begins.” I like the notion of being “in sadness” (rather than simply say “feeling sad”) because it opens a chink in sadness out of which may trickle an unfamiliar sense of time. It makes sadness itself into a form of becoming. Similarly, the last part about “the smallest increment imaginable before deafness begins” suggests an attempt, at least, to occupy the flow of becoming rather than bear down on it too heavily with timeless modes of writing.

To come back to your question, the “foreign territories of the writer” would by this measure be those places where time is able to go to work on memories by drawing on the resources of that most valuable of things for a writer: his or her own body. Our bodies are an ever-present source of creativity for us as writers. In the simple fact that we are living as we write, we may be put in touch with the becoming of time itself. And, I might add, it is probably in the only half-processed (or apparently so) moments of our experience that we encounter creativity of this order.

Laurie Steed: How does the body both individuate and collaborate in regards to creative practice? Is writing meditative fiction, in a sense, a solitary writer seeking connection with the reader through the memory of sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste, and how does the mind shape these senses into a finished story? Equally, how do preconceived notions of what constitutes narrative either help or hinder the transmission of our own “body” memories across to the reader?

Patrick West: There is an oft-quoted line in Spinoza’s Ethics (1677): “the body can do many things by the laws of its nature alone at which the mind is amazed.” What are the limits on the power of the body? Does the body lead the mind or is it led by it?

In your question you mentioned “sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste.” These, of course, are all capacities of the body, but in the special sense that they operate as aspects of the interface between the body, any body whatsoever, and the world. In fact, the world is absolutely necessary to the exercise of these capacities. If there were nothing to see we would all be blind…. If there were nothing to taste we could not taste.

In my view, the only creatively useful way to think of the body is in the multiplicity of its possible relations with the world. Even sexual difference is sculpted out of the relations of bodies to the world as a whole. The world, of course, is made up not just of things but also of other bodies: human, insect, animal… and after all don’t we call just about the largest things we can contemplate (suns, stars, moons, planets) heavenly bodies?

How does all this relate to creative writing? It seems to me it’s a question of how and to what extent the senses may be evoked in a piece of writing. Scriptwriting theory tells us that a rounded character is the bridging of the gap between apparent wants and unconscious needs. Perhaps this works in performance, but in writing, for mine, a rounded character is one with a zone of indiscernibility about them. When a reader starts to feel uncertain about where a character ends and where other characters and the world begin, that’s when that character comes to life. Characters then are bodies through and through, as even the mind is woven into the body at every level of existence.

One might even argue that the mind is subservient to the body. Spinoza asks us to consider the case of sleepwalkers and “those things [they] do at which they are surprised when they are awake.” As an aside, I like this idea that creative writing may be like sleepwalking… allowing the body to create art at which the waking mind will be amazed.

Janet Frame warns of the dangers of trying to rid oneself, as a writer, of the demands of the body. In a recent review of Frame’s short-story collection The Daylight and the Dust (2010) I wrote this of her short story “Solutions”:

–>In Solutions, a writer tells of another writer who, “bedevilled by the demands of his body . . . decided to rid himself of it completely”. Eventually, all that remains of him is his brain, which, mistaken for a prune, is tossed out by his landlady and eaten by three mice for breakfast, “spitting out the hard bits”. In his final state, as pure brain, the writer is left “blind, speechless, deaf”. “No one could have divined his thoughts; he himself could no longer communicate them.” Writers who ignore the contribution the body makes to their writing, Frame seems to be telling us in this collection, might as well be dead.

The absence of body is the absence of the senses (“blind, speechless, deaf”) and the absence of all writing. It is also, as it happens, death.

One reason I like the short-story form so much is because you can do things in it that would perhaps not be tolerated by publishers or readers in a novel. Thus, while I’m not sure how “preconceived notions of what constitutes narrative” could help in “the transmission of our own ‘body’ memories across to the reader” I don’t regard these preconceptions as particularly a hindrance to such transmission either. (Having said this though, I imagine that there are some bodies out there that do conform, somehow, to “preconceived notions of what constitutes narrative”, although for my part I wouldn’t want to be one of those bodies.)

But what of the mind? What is its role? I wonder if mind is what “individuates and collaborates” by seeking connections both within bodies (as in complex characters and complex writers) and across bodies (as in communities of friends, lovers, fellow writers)? For me, creative writing is all about making connections through the senses (in that double sense of using our senses to engage with the world and also allowing the world into ourselves through the portals of the senses… thus becoming in a way what it is that we see, or hear, or taste, or touch, or smell).

Although, like most writers I imagine, I write alone, and although, unlike many writers perhaps, my characters often appear to be “solitary selves”, I am not usually inclined to think of myself or of my characters as isolated or cut-off from the world. There is, if you like, an art to being solitary or alone yet not isolated or cut-off.

In “Nhill” the male protagonist, you could say, is solitary yet not isolated: the sensitivities that connect him to the world and the world to him suggest both other types of non-human connection and, just perhaps, future forms of (better?) human connection. Many of my stories, I suspect, are variations on this pattern.

Sometimes though it goes the other way. In “As of Shadows” the main character is so enmeshed in things—at a certain level—so weighed down by her abject historical situation, that her very lack of a solitary identity makes her isolated in quite a terrible way. She is unable to make connections with others or with the world that would enable her to feel richly alone.

In short, “Nhill” is about being a crowd though being alone, while “As of Shadows” is about being alone in a crowd… only “a counter of countries” in a world impossibly teeming with countries.

Laurie Steed: Which, in a way, leads on to my next question. What are the limitations of fiction in recreating experience, and do said limitations occur primarily at the point of transcription, or do they surface at every stage of literary engagement, from transcription through to reader reception, and perhaps even literary criticism?

Patrick West: Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “On Exactitude in Science” springs to mind. Borges describes an Empire of such overweening ambition that it creates a map with a one-to-one correspondence to the territory that it maps. The point of the story is that such a map is useless because it is a map no more. For it has become the unmapped territory itself.

The limitations of fiction in recreating experience are, like the limitations of any map less large than what it maps, quite possibly enabling limitations. Just as the map Borges describes could never be of practical use so any fiction that somehow managed to describe the totality of experience would be useless as a means for reconciling ourselves to experience.

As it happens, my desk is covered with a writing pad that is also a map of the world. The scale of the map is “1: 64 100 000 AT THE EQUATOR”, whatever that means.

But what is the scale of fiction’s relationship to the world? And do some genres operate on a larger scale than others? Is Naturalism, for example, a closer approximation to the world than say Magic Realism? Or do none of these questions make any sense?

Georges Perec wrote a curious little story, first published in 1979, entitled “The Winter Voyage”, about a writer whose work, also called The Winter Voyage, seems to contain quotations from a multitude of famous authors who wrote after him. Perec terms The Winter Voyage a “premonitory anthology.”

I am telling you about this story because the name of the author of this fantastical book is Hugo Vernier and a “vernier” or in full “vernier scale” is, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “a short movable scale used on various measuring and positioning instruments, by which fractional readings may be obtained from the divisions of an adjacent graduated scale.” The writings that come after The Winter Voyage might thus be interpreted as fractional readings of the “premonitory anthology.”

Something similar might apply when we talk about fiction and this thing we call experience. What if there is no experience beyond writing, no world beyond words? What if all writing is like a vernier and/or in relationship to a vernier? What if it’s all just a matter of scaling within language?

My short story “The Japanese stripper from the Inland Sea” concludes with an immodest attempt to somehow scale an understanding of experience (within writing, the setting is a bookshop) against the scale of the universe. It could be seen on one level as an attempt to travel to the very edge of fiction in order to ascertain if there is “‘something more’”.

–> On the morning of his departure from Japan, with some time to kill, Mr Simone browsed in the multilingual Narita Airport bookshop. Simultaneously with the first boarding call for his flight coming over the PA, he picked up The Oxford dictionary of philosophy and started flicking through its alphabetical entries. An ancient Greek name caught his eye. He began to read the one-paragraph entry about an inch from the bottom: ‘… is also famous for his proof of the universe’s infinitude’. (A gramophone needle stuck in the last groove of any record, thought Mr Simone, answers this question easily.) ‘The curious man should travel to the edge of the known universe and toss a dart into the darkness. Only two things can happen. It may disappear without trace. It may bounce back. Either way, the boundlessness of the universe is proved. There is always something more.’

Of course there is “‘always something more’”, but it is a “‘something more’” that hangs suspended in the sublime abyss between something and nothing. It is a something that could be nothing or anything!

Sometimes I think the fiction we write is like the dart described in this passage, indifferently bouncing back from or disappearing into the maw of experience, telling us very little about what it encounters. Sometimes I think that writing is a very crude instrument for describing or explaining the world or even, as Perec suggests, that it only ever recreates other writings in scaled-down or scaled-up versions, which are geometries that make little sense in the face of the “‘boundlessness of the universe’”.

Better writing, though, than a boundless map….

Laurie Steed: Indeed. And yet despite such constraints or limitations, the written word, at its best, continues to confound, engage, and evoke strong political, emotional, and intellectual responses from the reader. The Oulipo Movement of the 1960’s (which included Georges Perec, as well as Italo Calvino and Raymond Queneau, among other writers and mathematicians) seemed to see writing as both freedom and limitation, and indeed described potential literature as “the seeking of new structures and patterns to be used by writers in any way they enjoy”. Here, I’m selling their work criminally short: among other things, they played with palindromes, lipograms, and even chess formulas to create new and exciting narratives.

Your work, at least to this particular writer, seems to take the Oulipo spirit as one of its departure points, and if there’s one thing I noted about The World Swimmers, it’s a willingness to showcase rather than summarise, by which I mean you’re willing to see each story as its own point of departure. In West’s world, there is no necessary need for an overarching connectivity between narratives; your stories hint at both solitude, connectivity, and even the malleable nature of time, but all do this in such different ways that there’s a necessary divide between them.

If one, then, was to accurately sum up Patrick West, the writer, what would be the necessary themes, preoccupations, and motivations to be cited? More importantly, how do you see that particular trajectory informing your work that’s still to come?

Patrick West: At the Melbourne launch of The World Swimmers Paul Carter suggested that, though there is considerable geographic range across the stories of my collection, I am not really writing about places themselves so much as about the senses by which we encounter place. Or by which we encounter anything at all for that matter.

This was something I hadn’t really thought of myself until Paul pointed it out, but once he’d said it, it seemed suddenly obvious. I would add that it is not only senses as in the senses of sight, hearing, touch and so on that are in play here. I realize now, on the evidence of my own stories, that I am a writer interested potentially in all of the infinite number of ways by which humans have sensations of the world and of themselves.

To “re-sense” the world and/or yourself, as it were, one has to do what you suggest in your question: “showcase rather than summarise”. For when you “summarise” you take much more for granted than perhaps you should as a writer. Realism as a form tends to summarize in its very foundations. Effectively it says, here is a world that we share, now let’s create a story within that world. The story told may be truly fascinating but it will probably not suggest new ways of sensing the world. It won’t re-create it, make it over. The conventions of language Realism employs won’t allow that.

I like what you say about the Oulipo Movement and writerly experimentation. My writing is sometimes referred to as experimental too (I have a fondness for chiasmus that I couldn’t even begin to explain!). But I hope that what my experimental writing explores is not experimentation for its own sake (something that would be remote from the preoccupations of the everyday world) but experimentation as a way of discovering and perhaps even interrogating other possible ways of sensing.

Experiments of language (which in one very powerful sense at least is all that writers have to work with) may create opportunities for different ways of sensing ourselves and the world of which we are a part. And in these opportunities, to return to an earlier theme of our discussion, there will almost inevitably be new modes of time as an expression of new modes of becoming or being in the world. All of these themes—language experimentation, the sensing of the world, the sensing of oneself, time itself, notions of living—are contained in this paragraph from “The Japanese stripper from the Inland Sea”:

–> Mr Simone crossed the room and placed his palms down flat on the window sill. Distractedly, with just the tips of his fingers, he nudged what he thought of as only some value-less trinkets. Finally raising both hands, he took the smallest of these objects into his grasp, felt its lightness. Replacing it in its original position after several minutes, Mr Simone then turned away. He was never to know of this thing’s aliveness. There is a species of insect that hibernates trustingly in the open the length of the Japanese winter. Now, spring was just around the corner. The thing uncurled itself a fraction on the window sill. Pray mercy, the birds …

The “point of departure” for this story is Mr Simone’s lack of awareness of “this thing’s aliveness”. I hope and imagine that ideas of what it means to be alive—the spectrum from deepest death to fullest life—will continue to preoccupy me in my future writings. And that, perhaps, if I’m lucky, some odd notions of how to sense ourselves and the world differently will slide off the page and take up their place in the world and in our bodies. To make that happen, though, in my view, one needs to engage in concentrated experimentation. One needs to sweep away the “taken for granted” and, almost, to un-learn the lessons that we don’t even know we have learned. For these lessons obscure the new.

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