Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

It is worth going to see ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’, if only for George Smiley’s (Gary Oldman) glasses frames (featured throughout the film) and the moment, toward the end of the movie, when he eats a mint. After the film finished, I walked immediately to a convenience store, bought a roll of mints (the round kind with the foil wrapping), rushed home, turned the lights off and stood there in the dark in my socks until I’d consumed the whole packet (Smiley is more restrained). The entire time I watched the film I couldn’t help wondering what Smiley’s hard, translucent, two-tone, brown plastic frames would feel like on my teeth. For some reason (enter psychoanalysts) I always wish to touch or bite or hold objects of this, glossy plastic kind, in my teeth—perhaps only because they (my teeth) are familiar with the toothbrush handle?

The glasses can’t take all the credit though, Tomas Alfredson (‘Let The Right One In’) is a master at conveying aesthetic affects. The movie is so accomplished concerning the subtly of its feel: slightly claustrophobic, smoke filled rooms, with retro communications devices. It’s all woollen sweaters, cloudy skies, mist and greenery, so dank and stuffy, so cups of tea and English. Throughout the whole movie there is this fine mist of droplets that clings to the fuzzy outlines of the omnipresent tweed. As one friend remarked to me: ‘shades of grey have never looked so good’.

The movie, unlike so many productions, doesn’t parade the fact that it is a period piece. Often filmmakers get obsessed with the novelties of a certain time and end up making the idea of people ever wearing such clothes, sitting in such furniture, using such technology, behaving in such a way, seem utterly ridiculous. In such instances it’s as though the movie becomes the theme for its own garish party. The trick, as ‘Tinker, Tailor’ recommends, is almost to make the viewer forget the fact that the movie is set in another time, while still capturing the aesthetic specificity of that time—perhaps more difficult to do in with something set in ancient Rome, but it can be done. Alfredson, and whoever was responsible for costume, props and set design, clearly has the gift of a curious (careful and interested) eye.

Alfredson also displays a keen and deft awareness of what a cinematic experience is. Obvious though this may seem, watching a film is a very different experience of movement, causality, space, time, matter, light and so on, to what we experience when we exit the cinema. As a filmmaker you can ignore this peculiarity and attempt to represent on screen that world into which the audience returns at the film’s end. Or, you can attempt to do something within the film that intensifies the specifics of the cinematic experience. This need not be laboured over, nor significantly alter the plot-based, representational aspects of the film, such as maintaining dramatic activity, or establishing character psychology. Attention to the relationship between light, surfaces and screens, might be one way of making a plot-based film more intensely cinematic. These distinctions—between cinema as a representational medium, on the one hand, and as an event with its own specific internal reality, on the other—tend to be confused when we experience them. However, it’s worth pointing out their difference theoretically because so many films attend to one aspect at the expense of the other. The shots in ‘Tinker, Tailor’ through the frosted window of the contraption that moves files between floors is an example of this attention to things within the film that refer to the specifics of the medium. It suggests a perceptual event that takes place on or through a surface that is partially transparent and partially opaque, and it invokes the presence of a mechanical box that stores and enables the transportation of data, i.e. a camera.

Additionally, Alfredson often gives us the sense that we are on some kind of set: things in the background are being dismantled and ferried around, odd bits of machinery and ornaments removed from what we might imagine as their usual context. He is continually finding ways to invoke the obscure though essential aspects of the cinematic experience—the fact that we are watching a motion picture, and although the impeccably complete screen may convince us otherwise, the movie we are watching is composed of imperceptible, affect inducing, moving parts.

The non-human components of ‘Tinker, Tailor’—Smiley’s glasses and the roll of mints, among many others—though they do not talk, are characters that contribute significantly to what makes the film memorable. I recall also a scene from ‘Let The Right One In’, when the protagonist (the young boy) is playing with a Rubiks Cube in the snow at night. Ostensibly, the focus of the scene is the conversation that takes place between the boy and his young vampire friend. However, the seemingly mundane presence of the cube, its contrasting colours against the snow, twisted with mindless intent within the boy’s hands, is what remains important in my memory of the film. And what a perfectly suggestive object through which to reference cinema: a moving surface composed of pixelated colours. It is as though the boy sits there with a condensed version of the medium in his hands.

When I came out of ‘Tinker, Tailor’ it was a vaguely hallucinatory experience, the residual affect of the film still persisted in everyday events such as cars driving past, the light of street lamps and the sound of the breeze. This happens to varying degrees after I leave any film, but here it was at once vague, lasting and emphatic.

Go and see the film, watch it closely, then buy some mints, walk around at night, make a cup of tea, enjoy the drab summer, spy on your friends…

The Homoerotic Commentary of Jim Courier

I am already missing the homoerotic commentary of Jim Courier. I think his best moment came in the final, when he said something like: “Rafa’s really stuffing his balls in Novak’s honeyhole”. But throughout the tournament I enjoyed Courier’s verging on rapturous descriptions of buttocks, quadriceps and the male physique generally. Previously I found his commentary excruciating: ‘who the f__k does this yank d__k think he is ruining my summer with his tedious banter!’ I’ve since moved on. He’s actually a great reader of the game, I find him endearing and despite the superficial assertiveness, in the end somehow timid, yielding, almost obsequious when Lleyton and Pat are on the team. Except he never seems willing to concede any ground to Todd Woodbridge, and neither would I.

I imagine him hanging around the places where the players eat and socialise, irritating the hell out of them with his questions. I imagine people like Andy Murray doing a U-turn when they see Jim lurking in the distance, waiting to probe him with questions about his most recent girl or the colour of his stool.

If I was going to make a movie about Jim the obvious choice to play him would be Philip Seymour Hoffman. He’d have to lose a few kegs for the early years when Jim was hamming it up on the court, but that’d only be the first five minutes of the film. The rest would be a kind of David Brent inspired doco giving us an insight into the lonely life of a commentator, and, of course, featuring his relationship with that ageless and most peculiar creature, Bruce McAvaney. I recall one year when they cut to the commentary box, ‘the bunker’ or whatever they call it, during the game, and I’m sure Jim had his hand on Bruce’s knee.

Guaranteed I’ll completely forget all about Jim within a week or so, and then next January I’ll flick from the cricket to the tennis, and as soon as I hear those dulcet tones, ‘He’s got to pick himself up off of the floor and start tattooing some balls with his slice’, then, and only then, will it be summer.

Novak’s Travelling Homeground Advantage

I have been very impressed with Novak Djokovic’s performance in the Australian Open, and not due only to his skill levels. What strikes me as more peculiar, and more interesting, regarding the performance of ‘The Djoker’, is his ability to make the contest his contest. It is not whether his opponent is able to beat him, but whether or not Novak can play to the best of his ability. Hence the various mysterious physical ailments and his dramatic expressions of them: now it’s his breathing, now it’s his right leg, now it’s his left leg. He managed throughout to give the sense that his best tennis remained in reserve, that even when he was managing to win easily against his opponent, the more significant battle was taking place between Novak and himself, or, more exactly, Novak and that elusive thing that people refer to as ‘the zone’ or ‘form’. To a certain degree all champions do this, however, in the case of Novak this year it was patently so. In the matches leading up to the final, from the Hewitt game onwards, even if his opponent was playing exceptional tennis, Novak took control of the game mentally by making it seem almost as though he was losing on purpose. Now, anyone can make it seem as though they are losing on purpose when they are losing—it’s called throwing the towel in—Novak can make it seem as though he is losing even when his winning, and when he’s losing, it’s always a matter of us, and perhaps his opponent too, wondering: how long will this last? Perhaps this is the way spectators necessarily respond to players whose reservoir of quality is so great they may play well within themselves and still defeat any challenger. But imagine the psychological damage that must be done when a player is beating you and still giving off the sense that he’s losing an internal battle. I suppose none of Novak’s antics would be of any use were he not as skillful as he is, however, in the event of an elite contest such subtle differences determine the terms on which the game is played. I’d compare the effect to that empirically troublesome phenomenon we call a homeground advantage. It’s as though Novak, by making the game emotionally and mentally his, is able to create a homeground advantage wherever he goes.

Vermicious Knids

Here is a paper I presented at the Poetry & The Contemporary Symposium in July 2011. It features my nascent ideas regarding what writing might be were we to consider it a kind of creature or thing? I look to the prose fiction of W. G. Sebald for examples and to the literary criticism of Steven Meyer for guidance. The conference program, in which my paper is misleadingly titled ‘Poetry as Writing As Vector’, can be found here.

Melancholia

There were certain generic aspects to the film which pleased me, most significantly that there was a gathering of depressed rich people at a beautiful house, removed from society. I will find it hard not to indulge any film that exhibits a shred of intelligence and deals with this subject matter, so it is called. That the whole movie takes place at that house, with that garden, beneath that sky was lastingly important.

I thought the two leads were exceptional, the character of Justine especially, Dunst and whoever cast her deserve plenty of credit, her pallid, strangely insidious, permanently smiling, permanently spoilt face, and the name that was hers in the film, persist in my memory.

I also enjoyed the jumps between the bedrooms and the dining room in the first half of the film. Formally, and I think therefore more effectively, it invoked an architectural/ social experience that is familiar to me from dreams. There is something perfectly giddy about moving back and forth between a private space where one is on show (and in this sense a public space or experience), and private space where a relationship is at stake (especially an impossible relationship, somehow suggestive of prayer): the contrast between the chatter and clatter of the dining room, and the muffled or ruffled atmosphere of the smaller rooms with one or two people in them, attempting and failing to connect with each other. There is something suggestive about the way enunciation works differently in these two contexts. Von Trier seems very much attuned to the question of who or what it is we are speaking to: what on earth is the point of all this? Who is it for? Who cares?  He captures a sense of non-correspondence between the emotions that inform questions of such gravity, whether to a god, nothing, or another person, and a reality that is cruelly or comically incongruent with regards to their being answered.

I like the aerial shots of Justine and Clare riding horses, I liked the spiralling bird, I liked the onion soup at night and how quickly the wedding felt like a world away once we moved into the second part of the film. Yet they were still at the same house and they were the same people! Justine is going to get married, she is moving into another reality (a sham reality) to which everyone has gathered to stand witness. The world is going to end: how is such an event witnessed? Into which reality do we move here? As I think more about it, the setting alongside of these two generic traits is very clever. Two scales of doom (loss of future or false future), we experience them as different but in some sense confused. Justine is the medium (the witch-angel?) between the two.

Von Trier is very happy to work with stereotyped notions of men being failed (even when logically or scientifically successful they fail morally) rationalists and women being irrational and in some sense possessed of, or connected to, a greater knowledge, and often victimised because of this. This does not irritate me, nor do I think it particularly revealing.

Ploughman’s Lunch

Today I had a ploughman’s lunch at the Armchair Collective Cafe in Mona Vale. The idea of a ploughman’s lunch struck me as a novel convention. Let me offer some details as to this particular, very well realised example: there were pickled onions, cut in half, crunchy and tangy, little bombs of vinegar; there were caper berries, which, once I bit into them and admired the slippery seeds, reminded me of last nights okra curry; ham calved off the bone, also slippery, but good slippery, not dry, and free from the gelatinous clumps that one sometimes finds clinging to fresh ham; toasted bread that seemed unadorned with butter or oil, but when I bit into it it felt oily in my mouth; two battered baby zucchinis, flowers attached and filled with some type of runny cheese, no doubt a contemporary addition to the ploughman’s; in the middle of the plate were two massive chunks of cheddar cheese that had messy edges like the smaller cubes of ice Sharon Stone’s character breaks off from the larger block in Basic Instinct (that I just googled as Primal Fear before I realised it was the wrong title—Basic Instinct was made in 1992, Primal Fear 1996); what else…crisps from another persons plate; ah, a salad of shredded green apple, red cabbage and walnuts (Waldorf Salad); and a small bowl of Dijon mustard in the middle. I tended to tear up the bread, paint it with mustard, add layers of ham, and then, as soon as that was in my mouth, stuff in pieces of cheddar and pickled onion. The caper berries were the most extraneous part of the dish. I mopped up the cheese from the zucchini flowers with the bread, and I wrapped up some of the leftover cheddar in a napkin and put it in my pocket. Cheddar for later.

Apparently the ploughman’s lunch can also include things such as pate, hard boiled eggs, carrot and celery. It is a cold lunch and would go very well with a beer. I imagine you could include all manner of hard cheeses, pickled things, salad and cold meats.

Summer, 1996

The idea was to release the tension in your skull, in your whole being. The magician had met a man with a shaved head in his dream. He told the magician that he needed to make an opening in his head in order to relieve himself of the tension that would occasionally build up within him. Any incision would do. This all took place in a nondescript suburban street, many yellow-brick houses, letterboxes out the front, boring, well-kept lawns, much like a cartoon. As the magician went to leave, the man with the shaved head asked him to rub ointment over his back, which was covered with an exploded constellation of moles. The man writhed on the ground in readiness. The magician couldn’t believe this was expected of him, but filled his hand with the ointment and began to kneel.

That afternoon he wrote a series of responses to a hypothetical problem involving having to apologise for something he didn’t feel worthy of an apology. Certain people, wrote the magician, will always aggravate a tendency within us, which manifests as a feeling of being subject to. But the magician was well aware of his own implication in this set of affairs. He needed tactics, he needed myths, he needed drugs and new clothes.

Once someone asked the magician whether it was possible for him to love, like a real person? The magician declared that that was in fact his job, and ever since the day he learnt to part his hair and consider his reflection, he knew that love was the key feeling to which he acceded. The person looked at the magician with surprise, and wrongly considered him to lack a heart.

The magician’s sensitivity was indeed different, he was far less perceptive of certain things, but to think him lacking in genuine feeling was to claim too much for the notion. He had built amazing worlds, where atmospheres of utter generosity flourished, where courageous undertakings were the norm, and where humour and forgiveness informed the experience of the inhabitants to such a degree that an outsider struggled to appreciate the speed at which they nourished each other’s cravings. But the magician’s own life was different, if only slightly so. He had his list of weakness imprinted in the lines of his face. He could not help but devote himself to multitudes of seemingly irreconcilable desires as though their outcomes would unfold in exclusive futures. He had friends, he had food, he had a room to return to when it was dark.

He thought about the advice of the man with the shaved head. He touched his face in the mirror, as though to mark it. He noticed the dim regions his fingers left, and he noticed the diagram of his skull as it chewed over these possibilities. He looked stern. He looked full of intent. He could see things in the mirror behind him, scenes playing out in a 2D strip; fires burning against an indigo sky, a person sitting in the corner of a room with a pen, they were shrinking and their dark eyes held clues to the magician’s future. He thought about a certain place on the street where he saw the sun fall, he thought about his birthday. I sense there is some animosity between us, the magician said to his reflection, in a deeper than usual voice. In the background, through the window and into the next house, the magician saw fingers with warped knuckles tapping a table. He heard a voice say, we have to do it, I’m sorry, and he immediately thought back to this time last year.

The magician looked out over the river. A mist had gathered above it in the morning and he remembered being in the same place, only instead of the mist there was single balloon, and his partner swimming in the river. He went to join his partner in the water, who had temporarily disappeared. The magician swam out to were she last was, the water was shallow enough to stand. He stopped swimming and stood, he touched the surface of the water around him with his hands. His partner burst from the water before him, her face slightly enlarged and flatter, and then she disappeared again, leaving almost no trace of the prior disturbance. The magician watched the water. This time she emerged more slowly, he noticed her dark red swimming costume, and that she had the same serious look as her brother when he wore a tie. She strode through the water towards him, and then continued on, straight past, heading for the bank, which the magician noticed was studded with hunched, shivering bodies that looked as though they were hiding. It surprised him that he didn’t care. He played in the water for a while, half stunned, half thinking back to the other times he had swam there. Paradise, he thought, and knew his happier days had passed him by.

‘ode ode’ & Mr. Squiggle

Below is a paper I gave on Michael Farrell’s book of poetry ‘ode ode’ at the ASAL Conference in Canberra in 2009. The full conference program, in which this paper is titled “Are You Serious?: Paradigms for Thinking, Michael Farrell’s Poetry,’ is available here. The paper is available as a Word document here.

I’d like to begin with two quotations, to do with reading and writing poetry, which have always made me feel safe; safe because poetry is such an expanse, always working to redefine itself in the act of its making, both anything and everything. Beginning to think about it is productive of anxiety: explain poetry? Especially for someone with an epistemological horizon that is, more less, adolescent. Both quotes can be found in Paul Celan’s Selected Works, edited and introduced by Pierre Joris. The first, Joris cites at the end of his introduction:

On April 6, 1970, Paul Celan wrote in a letter to his friend Ilana Shmueli: “When I read my poems, they grant me, momentarily, the possibility to exist, to stand” (35)

This first quotation interests me, and is relevant to for my discussion of Michael Farrells’ poetry, because it supports an intuition that poetry is most fundamentally what people do to exist. That’s a good definition to begin with. I include quotes to bare witness to my intuitions that they help form.

The second quotation comes at the end of the book, after the selected poems, in a section entitled ‘Documents’. Included in the documents are some of Celan’s letters to his wife, to his son, and to his friends, this specific quote is in a letter to a friend, a fellow poet, Rene Char. It reads:

You see, I have always tried to understand you, to respond to you, to take your work like one takes a hand; and it was, of course, my hand that took yours, there where it was certain not to miss the encounter. To that in your work which did not—or not yet—open up to my comprehension, I responded with respect and by waiting: one can never pretend to comprehend completely—: that would be to disrespect in the face of the Unknown that inhabits—or comes to inhabit—the poet; that would be to forget that poetry is something one breaths; that poetry breaths you in. (184)

In this quotation Celan emphasises the words: understand, respond, my and yours—words worthy of emphasis; an interest in poetry means trying to understand, and respond to, the things that other people need to do to exist. And that sometimes, as in the case of the rude, abstract, little nuggets you get in books like ode ode, what’s needed is some waiting time for the poems to come to you.

I glow with pride at these findings, and with them in mind begin my own encounter with the poetry of Michael Farrell. To make things easy for myself I have not set an agenda, nor did not have an agenda to begin with, no argument before the poetry—for better or worse. And I have restricted myself to identifying the poet with his book ode ode, published in 2002 by Salt Publishing. Taking this book as my object—this book, which is full of poems—I’d like to substantiate my encounter with it, hoping that what I’ll end up with is yarn of connections, presented in a variety of mediated realities. Here might be an opportune time to make good of some of my hesitations as to whether or not I’m the right person for this task, for submitting a paper on poetry at a literature conference in 2009. I’m a sceptical and easily distracted reader, which means that my reading habits are on the one hand, biased toward texts that a caught up in documenting themselves, and on the other, terribly erratic, because I tend to either obsess over something or move on from it quite quickly. Subsequently, I find a good deal of poetry either fraudulent or unreadable. This explains the appeal of Celan’s quotations, they work to substantiate the event of poetry by documenting its appearance in another mediated reality, traceable back to his poetry. Both quotes are letters from the poet about poetry, but not poetry. They connect the Celan poems to a wider field, which makes them appear less fraudulent, more durable, continuous but variable, and for this reason, distraction is less of a possibility—especially if distraction is associated with its Latin origins, meaning ‘to draw apart’, the opposite of what I’m desperately trying to do by making connections. To read poems I need to connect them to things and events represented as existing in other mediums, this has defined the method of my paper. The aim of this paper is to document the evidence of my travels with ode ode as my partner—hopefully objectives as broad and inclusive as the potted definition of poetry I mentioned earlier.

Myopically, the first place I sought a connection was with the author, who lives and breaths in this room. Anyone can make this connection, and today, in the age of almost immediate communications, email is the perfect tool to make contact and to receive documentation. So, I sent Michael an email on April the 28^th 2009:

Hi Michael,

Can you send me, or bring when you come to Sydney, any information, including the most banal, concerning the publication and reception of ode ode. It might be helpful if I tell you why: Part of my paper is going to consider books from a design perspective, as objects that happen to contain poems by poets. Obviously this doesn’t mean I only want details relating to the books design, as it appears (front cover), but also stuff that might give me a sense of the process leading to its composition and construction (publication). I don’t mean what goes into making each poem, but what ever might provide an index of the book’s coming together. The story about the cover image is a good example, as are the alternative cover images. Your discretion and helpfulness here will no doubt be a formative part of my paper, I want as many players as possible involved in the process.

Michael responded with a about 16 attachments, one which was a letter he’d sent to Norman Hetherington, the mind behind the children’s T.V. show Mr Squiggle, which I’d discussed with him in an earlier phone conversation. Originally, Michael wanted the front cover of ode ode to feature one of Mr. Squiggle’s drawings. Mr. Squiggle was Australia’s longest running children’s T.V. show, first airing in 1960, with the final episode in 1999. For those of you who don’t remember, Mr. Squiggle and his cast of friends were marionette puppets, for the better part engaged in the task of turning scattered lines and shapes, sent in by viewers, into more substantial representations of figures, objects and landscapes: elephants holding umbrella’s and the like.  I remember Mr. Squiggle as being an enjoyable, sometimes a scary show, mainly because of Blackboard’s gruff tone, and the fact that you couldn’t predict when he was going to insist on hurrying things up. The thing from the letter I’d like to pull in here, is Michael’s attempt to make his poetry writing practice intelligible to someone working in another medium; or working in a number of other mediums, at the same time: television, puppetry and drawing. The quotation is as follows:

The reason I think such a drawing would be perfect, apart from the purely visual (I would like something simple), is that Mr Squiggle takes a couple of lines by someone else and turns them into a picture; I do the same with many of my poems.

Continuing on the theme of children’s T.V. shows, in another attachment, entitled descriptions, Michael mentions that if ode ode did have a dedication it would have been to Countdown or Sesame Street. So what is it about children’s T.V. shows that makes them good partners for the poems in ode ode? I’ll leave my wilder speculations until later, but for the moment I’d like to consider the ontological status of the beings that populate these texts. What are some of their defining factors? Concerning Mr. Squiggle and Sesame Street, the figures responsible for creating the drama are apparently puppets, shells teased into existence through invisible connections with human agents. People and puppets make representations out of each other, and television is a medium that makes this double representation viewable to a wide audience. Puppets respond to the movement of the people operating them, but onscreen a puppet seems as though it is competitive with the humans involved in the representing, because both are being represented in the same medium, television. This parasitic competitiveness is often scary because it can seem as though real representations of humans, are as real as real representations of puppets. This diminishing reality or this reality multiplication, is appealing to children because they fit in somewhere between adults and puppets, as real representations of what adults once were, with aspirations to be more real, as in adult real. In kid’s T.V shows it would seem everybody has a share in the reality of a representation, which makes its representational quality intelligible through a series of different though connected ontological states: puppet, child and adult. Not to mention, in the case of Blackboard, with whom Farrell expresses a particular affinity in his letter to Herthington, a puppet that represents the other nested realities of pictures, which are introduced as requests that children have sent in, in the form of scattered lines and shapes. Blackboard wears these unfinished realities of referenced viewers, which Mr. Squiggle the puppet then completes. Drawing in this context is a witnessed process, completed by another represented representation, defacing the palimpsest identity of an irritable, surprisingly talkative Blackboard. It wouldn’t make any sense for a viewer of Mr. Squiggle to emphasise the gap between representation and reality; yes you can arrive at a reality and a representation, but you can’t have one without the other, and the two, which is more than two, confirm each other through consistent, though variable, worked together surfaces. Which is perhaps what makes Sesame Street and Mr. Squiggle so inviting for children; not bothered by the endless masks of representation hiding the reality which adults obsess over, they are in tune with and able to indulge their own character, momentarily transfixed, continuously part of a show.

The one other thing I’d like to say about television shows, and on screen entertainment generally, and maybe here I’m thinking especially about this child-like state of transfixion, is that, while they demand our attention, the apparently real entities communicating with us on screen, do not care about our existence. They don’t respond to our persuasions. I like the word transfixion to describe this experience of engagement with an apparently non-contactable entity. The word’s etymology results in some interesting provisions: transfix coming from the Latin root meaning to ‘pass through’ from the verb transfigere, from trans ‘across’ and figere ‘fix, or fasten’. The transfixed character I’m working to define here is fastened to their seat because of what is passing through them, and their existence is defined by attempting to reach what is passing through them, they are pieced by the attempt to reach Mr. Squiggle. But Mr. Squiggle doesn’t correspond. The nucleus of this fragile little bobbin I’m concocting is in its living temptations to converse with another dimension, which it then demonstrates as being inseparable from its own making, whilst not corresponding with it. To be transfixed is to be childishly part of the seemingly distant reality that confronts us as not only a representation of experience, but experience as representative of a variety of interconnected, cross-medial experiences, all working for greater definition, all coming close to.

Before I provide an example to bear witness to the contribution Farrell’s poetry makes to such a ‘fragile little bobbin’, and that bobbin’s envelope of experience, let me make it clear that in their apparent non-responsiveness, television characters, puppets like Elmo and Blackboard, as well as the people who share the sets with them, are not categorically exclusive from someone we might encounter in a less mediated reality—the reality of walking down a street, the reality of a bedroom. Using non-correspondence and transfixion to define a set of experiences is an attempt to rejig the tied old divide between being and not-being, and make it more useful for an understanding of how humans and non-humans collectively relate. For example, if someone ignores you, they may partake in the unresponsiveness demonstrated by an onscreen character, by a bird at your window, a dog sitting under a clothesline or a decomposing chunk of hay. This is a most painful reality when someone with whom we are transfixed declines to express an awareness of our inquiry. Human rejection is an extreme example, because expectations are high, approximations intimate, the body hypersensitive. A less extreme example, not to be confused but in this context productive of a relatable difference, is the distinct and playful language between a human and a pet. People who claim to know nothing of poetry, sprout daily experimental operations on language as they give meaning to the supposed distance between their world and the world of a dog or a cat. Transfixed, our attempts to communicate do not correspond, but nonetheless they build toward something. The difference between our persuasions and their targets does not amount to nothing. On the contrary, they provide us with the indexes of our activity, our attempts and temptations to arrive at something more than us that’s part of us. Documents that establish a departing reality, caught in the act.

At this stage of my paper, I decided it was time to step outside and take a look at some of the peculiarities of my activity. I haven’t discussed Michael’s poetry directly at all—where are the close readings? Why isn’t my analysis presenting the poetry? Excuses proliferated, the most articulate being my inability to take a poem at face value; the tendency when reading books on poetry to skip over, or the suppression of a temptation to skip over, the chucks where the poetry itself was being unpacked, quoted, screened meticulously, line by line. This is necessary activity, surely? Confronting the poem directly and picking apart its language appear to be a bit of a blind spot for me. What I want to do is pull in as many examples as possible to stretch between myself and the obscurity of the poem: Celan would say the poem’s darkness. I want to preserve the poem’s darkness in other forms, realities, situations, as they arrive, as they come in from the side while I think about, and travel with, the poems. I want to take short cuts to other things. I’m interested in poetry because of how well equipped it is at giving things and activity new dimension, it enables thoughts to pass through it: poetry, and Michael’s poetry is here an exemplar, is a character of distraction and fixation; no medium is more porous, more tightly woven, more spiky with unfinished ideas.  Poetry invites and provides for the momentum of other ideas, always beginning to end, the middle segment.

So, to apply this method, or to make apparent the insistence of its application, my reading of the two Farrell poems you have before you, and other poems in ode ode, took me on an unlikely journey, which began with a jug of chai and a wooden table at a café in Glebe. I was taking notes on each page, jotting down quotes, which then became speculative propositions as I attempted to find partners to continue the new reality of my reading experience. My notes read:

The poems are conjuring acts, prayer-like demands or persuasions, insisting on the presence of  alternate dimensions, and for this reason I associate them with bitching; in the sense that bitching takes place in the absence of a character to which it gives exaggerated, often comical, sometimes nasty, form. Michael’s poetry projects the hyper-internalised accretions of distorted personalities, discovered by switching channels.

I remember thinking about the media forms suited to bitching, gossip mags, and the ritual of mild attack mouthed off at the becoming celebrities of reality T. V. Then at lunch, someone bought up a recent, and atrocious film, Valkarie, and inevitably the discussion led to speculation about the ‘real’ features of Tom Cruise, who represented the movie. ‘How tall is he?’, ‘You can’t tell those things on screen.’, ‘I get my info from the trash mags.’ ‘Lucky we’ve got the trash mags to debunk the myths of Hollywood film.’ Which I though was a great way to put it, or maybe: trash magazines give form to the becoming real of celebrates, often characters in movies, who occupy as strange dimension between on screen role, and named character in an extended hyper-reality, used to prove their existence, not as real, physical individuals, but as really removed celebrities. Behind these speculations Michael’s poetry threw up its lines about outsideness, about the magnificence of ugliness, about how you’ve got to hate to make a movie, about how silence can be hard to watch, and how we might catch ourselves asking ghosts questions, the appeal of quotation, the many forms of emptiness that are ours to connect with, so much wasted/ ability a thought we read in each others minds mentally slapping into/ fictions our falls and little fetishes…

Veronica’s Sister

This is your world, said his friend, as he watched the slanting rain. The problems you speak of are hot coals not for your touching, you must continue to proceed, but do so as though blind to what is remote from you. The magician had heard this before. He wanted to obey the advice of his friend, but the well attended to objects of his thinking were too delightful and too well established to counter with any sage advice. His only hope was a lengthy journey to find the very substance that was the characteristic of both his thinking and his suffering. He imagined a fountain made of blackened rocks that appeared at once old and new, crumbling and perfectly preserved, from which bubbled a deep, green fluid. The magician bent at the fountain and splashed his weary face, and in so doing he realised the relief he sought was in the action of his doing, in the clash of his pliable expressions and this featureless, cool, though apparently impotent liquid. He looked across at his friend, who now stood by the window, a shadow ornamented by the bright, grey light. He wondered how long, or how many times before he had been part of this scene, and he chided himself for reducing it, each time, to one simple factor.

The magician left several projects unattended to and started a new one. He had a few pale, cylindrical lumps that glittered as he rotated them. He had dark blue fabric, almost too hot to touch, and he had one of those small creatures that were expert in tattooing. He called Veronica and she floated into his room from a distance, beginning as a tiny dot, then as she drew near he could distinguish her outline, the folds of which danced in the air like some plants do in the water. The magician and Veronica set about their work, and each time they pierced one of the lumps, it let out a yelp that was mimicked, ridiculously, by the creature, who seemed to need this type of humour to do its best work. Its hands moved so quickly and smoke was either drawn in from the air by its body, or its body was emitting smoke. A number of times the magician was forced to clip it over the head softly as it began to tattoo the floor, and even, on one occasion, his leg.

Two days later the magician and Veronica found themselves embedded within each other’s bodies and tattooed with imperceptibly detailed drawings. The creature had taken advantage of them while they were resting, and now it was only Veronica’s sister who would be able to separate their bodies. That being said, the magician hardly minded. He could feel Veronica’s every breath, and was only slightly pained when he attempted to scratch his nose. Veronica, on the other hand, wailed as though the world had come to an end. Both her arms had been sewn into the magician’s body and she struggled and kicked to tear herself from him. She partially succeeded and the magician mocked excitement but secretly withdrew into himself further, appearing mute and useless to Veronica.

By the time Veronica’s sister came the magician had gained mastery over his imaginings. He was able to focus on any scene he chose and adjust details, from heated landscapes, populated with desirable, erratically running bodies, to cool gardens where each individual blade of grass was weighed down by a droplet of dew that depicted the entire world. He could make things grow at his chosen pace, he could find what he wanted to find. The places and bodies he imagined were not his own, yet he trusted them with that extreme and sensuous trust that one only gains access to after a long and arduous journey. Veronica, though, had faded. For a while her body carried the ripples of resignation, but she could imagine no future like this, not even for an instant, and in her hopelessness she drifted into a sleep from which, despite the magician’s trying, she never woke. The magician spoke with her sister who he could tell had been eating chocolate. He asked her in, she stood at the door and looked around his room, at the various tunnels and windows, at the strange furniture and the mess of tattoos left by the creature. Without saying anything she entered, as though it was her reading of the tattoos that drew her forward. She knelt, inspecting one particular patch, transfixed.

Later that evening, the magician sat with Veronica’s sister on a stone slab that seemed to stretch off into eternity. He spoke only to her stomach, as he could not confront, in the light of day, the beauty of her face. The magician asked Veronica’s sister whether he should wait, he listened to her response, and watched the patterns in her dress, tiny, curled up crustaceans, against blackness.

People Standing Behind You

The magician stood at the sink washing the foodstuffs off dirty plates. He had to make a decision he was not ready to make. The nearby ocean infected the room with a sense of possibility and vastness. He imagined his feet in baths full of shells and crustaceans. He remembered the floor of the lift titling and his conversation with a friend in the darkness. Temporarily all he saw was a fraying rope, pulled taught. His decision was composed of such elements and in his dream they were collected differently, as though the skin of his friends were the skin of other people, people he knew from long ago who wore different clothes and had moles in different places on their bodies. He carried his wand and sounded the implications of his thinking by addressing a nearby bed of sand. He graded fresh hatchings in the sand and waited for the plants to grow and to call out to him with their dancing. Why, thought the magician, can’t I just pick people up and place them in different locations, like the wiser and better trained beings that populate this planet? He imagined great arms grabbing random bodies by the shoulders and moving their frozen forms to situations more suitable for the running of the cosmos.

Some of the people who previously appeared powerful now appeared weaker, and in this context they endeared themselves to the magician, who continued to assist in the washing of plates and the removal of certain kinds of sea creatures from a larger batch. He tried to encapsulate the sense that his friend was a very good cook by describing his feelings about her without reference to her cooking. He could only imagine another friend in a gauze tutu, which was frustrating. He attempted to hand her things even though she wasn’t always present. She had short, dark hair and a mole on her cheek, which was different to how she appeared most of the time. One minute she seemed healthy and the next sick, but she was stuck in the same clothes permanently. Her hands were cool on the magician’s shoulders and he noticed this in her voice.

The magician followed his ideas back into his dreams. Two things attached to each other scuttled off through the bushes. His decision, he still had to make it. He watched the red neck of a bird protrude from its layers of black feathers. He had absolutely no reaction to the observation of a certain friend. His certainty developed, seemingly consistent in one direction, only to halt before a gorge and decay as it spread out around the edges. I make up nothing but lies, he thought to himself, and I oscillate between extreme seriousness and utter self-ridicule, I must wait for eternity in the presence of these birds, for only then, it seems, will I appreciate the punishment that is the answer.

Yesterday’s vows lay on a crumpled bit of paper and the magician wandered with a large group of friends through a building that displayed valued products. Everyone vied for his attention, so he escaped in his summer car to a newsagency in the country where he bought the paper and a chocolate while his single, most prized acquaintance at that time waited in the car. It was dark inside the car, as he looked from the newsagency, and he could see his friend fiddling with the knobs on the radio, shifting the shadows and helping the static evolve into something of near perfect clearness. But then the static returned, and this time, as his friend toyed with the settings, it didn’t vanish so much as hold its shape and include the magician’s feelings. Paying the man at the counter, he thought, I must be close to making my decision?

Back in the room near the sea the magician inspected his friend’s skin, really it was only an arm, as his friend refused to stand anywhere but behind him. He could still imagine what they looked like accurately. The room seemed to fill with the sea and the paintings on the wall depicted this. Nets hung in various places and the couches were dusted in a fine, white sand. The magician was shown the centre of his body by his friend, who invited him to lift part of it outwards. Who would have thought, considered the magician, that an opening would equate with more heaviness? His friend scratched his skin. He wondered what it was inside him when he didn’t want anyone else to be there, and he wondered about the power of this friend to be there more or less the entire time.

There were more shells in the bath, and they clacked dully together in the water. The magician plunged his arm in to fish out the bright orange shells he knew to be hidden towards the bottom. His friend knelt behind him, naked inside their clothes and able to invite alien feelings into existence with gestures such as nodding and winking. The magician realised that after this meeting there was a fair chance that his specific feelings for this friend would evaporate, but in the moment he couldn’t understand the actuality of this idea. He watched his friend’s hand join his amid the hardened forms stacked messily in the water of the bathtub, and their searching seemed part of the disturbance they created.