03/06

“Borderline personality disorder”.
“Attention Deficit Disorder” (there was no hyperactive back then).
“Bipolar depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder”.
And night after night Wendy sobbing herself to sleep: “I knew I should never have had kids, I knew the family bloodline should have ended with me!”
Clinical evaluations pockmarked by tears piled high on both bedside tables. What consolatory words could he, engulfed by such misery and fatigue, have given her? Understanding as he did that a woman could bear or admit no greater suffering, whilst at the same time being scarcely able to keep his eyes open? Instead he would hold her tight and read the Wife of Bath’s tales – they always made her laugh – or a poem:
Pretty, Pretty Robin!
Under leaves so green
a happy Blossom
Hears you sobbing, sobbing,
Pretty, Pretty Robin,
Near my Bosom.

After the last girl left home, burning – like the others – with hatred for her parents, it took less than a week for Bryan and Wendy to understand that their love too was gone. Intact for as long as was needed, it could not survive the onset of retrospect, of reflection, of unfettered self-judgment, just as a human being fares no better in a dramatic loss of pressure than they do in a dramatic heightening of it. Their love had served its purpose – sending the three vulnerable beings it had engendered safely into adulthood. Bryan had laboured through that PHD chiefly to provide for his partner and baby daughters.

Everything he had was because of her. All the same though, when Wendy left not a single tear was shed by either of them. “Maybe in six months, or a year,” she had said, “we’ll be able to look at each other again the way we used to”. Now alone, Bryan was forty-six years old but tired as the dead, with only the sense of tragedy and absolute relief – and his photographs – for company.

31/05

On Bryan Gable’s dusty mantelshelf, a photo frame with three hinged compartments stood, fanned open like an altar triptych, blocking all but the Concordia logo on his dog-eared PHD in English Literature from view. One box for each of his baby daughters, all grown up now but immortalised there, fuzzy-headed and crying in the same bassinet Wendy and he had used to rear them all. It was blue and covered in car bumper stickers, literally covered by the time Sarah, the youngest, was born. Those crazy bumper stickers; how many disapproving looks in shopping centres had been cast on their account! As Bryan remembered it, the first one had been put there as a sort of joke to offset the monumental gravity of parenthood – after all, they were only kids themselves then. He supposed the rest had been jokes too. Where was that bassinet now?

The phone rang; he let it go. Sometimes the prospect of answering made Bryan too anxious to move. Only embers remained of the fire he had stoked alone, and sat by alone, most of the previous night. His lips were chapped. His long hair, needing continually to be brushed to either side of his thin, stubbled face, smelt of wood smoke.  Through the archway next to the hearth it was plain to see how empty, almost melancholically empty, the kitchen was; nothing but a few old cans of five bean mix and a box of All-Bran down to its dusty dregs still sat on shelves that had once struggled to cope with such abundance. A kitchen without food was like a bedroom without bedding. But Bryan wasn’t hungry. The malaise in his stomach made the very idea of eating revolting. Matter of fact, he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten or drank for any other reason than to extend life another day. While the 11 o’clock news bleated in the background, Bryan looked at his girls. His little jewels, all their jumpsuits the exact same soft pink. Plaintively he imagined, and for a time nearly convinced himself, that it was a triplicate of the one picture. How alike they started out, how different they became. He hadn’t looked at those photos – or his degree – in ages.

Lately Bryan had been almost madly preoccupied with how manufactured everything around him was. Particularly since his resignation from the university it seemed that everything, from tiny rivets to colossal skyscrapers shining like supernovas in the sun, stair railings to the stitches on his bed sheets, footpaths and asphalt and disability ramps, burger wrappers and coffee cups and what-all else, whatever you cared to mention from these so-called urban environments, all of it was third or fourth or fifth hand, passed from the farm or the mine through who knew how many processes, across who knew how many oceans, only to be installed after dark and thought of by people the next day as something that had simply sprouted of its own accord from the ground. Walking through the synthetic streets nowadays was like an affront to one’s blood and bones. So conscious had Bryan become of this artificiality that he had purged his house of almost all electrical appliances, all whitegoods besides the refrigerator, all plastic rubbish bins, even clothes and Manchester containing the word polyester on their labels. In short, only materials which still bore some resemblance to the way the Earth had made them were acceptable for Bryan to have around him. 

A Way In (2009)

We understand that people like to live in buildings before they have been erected, in order to set up for something like a Big Bang, one made of all the emotions.
Bang!
Let’s say optimism or pessimism, depending on the nature of the explosion.
Then there are the people who get theirs by peering into the building of another. We might call them voyeurs.
And finally, finally we come to a murky place, where a murky undergrowth of people, for whom peering into buildings is not sufficient, live. Computer gamers allergic to sunlight, fifty year old internet teenagers… liars… the regretful…misfits…; it is some social fabric down there. For their intents and purposes, you see, they have done it. They have found a way in.

This is a story about a way.

One late January in the early afternoon rain, an old black station wagon pulled into the empty driveway at 239 Grant Street, Morton, plumes of smoke blown out the rear exhaust pipe. Stephen Entosic stepped out and squinted his toes over the edge of his thongs. The old neighbourhood, in his clothes and on his skin, felt cold. American Presidents. All the streets in the area had leeched their names; Abraham Street ran parallel to Grant; Rover and Woodrow Courts nestled side by side between them, George Parade connecting the greater Banyule district with bigger roads that led to Realside Tennis Club and into town. Three hundred thousand people slept in Banyule, a municipality heaving, over-lived– classrooms full up, nursing homes so crowded death wasn’t quick enough for the waiting lists, and here, by rights, was a house that deserved an ultimatum: be lived in, or be bulldozed. Wasting space was more than an inconvenience. It was a ‘fuck you’ to everyone who had precious little.

Why, Stephen always wondered, was his street called Grant and not Ulysses? This question threw itself back at him many times in his life; during the dizzy spells he suffered after training because of his low blood pressure, or while the slit wrists of his little sister lay in the bathroom sink, or in bed before sunset with a pen in his hand, it would come and pull at him, pull at him. Ulysses. The point of the reference would be blunted. Not many world leaders had taken their name from Homer. A thick yellow bush that grew around the letterbox was closing fast on the sidewalk, nobody had clipped it down. Front lawn of dead grass, weeds profusely alive, redbrick façade turned grayish, like a steak done blue by the elements. There were always cockroaches in the newspaper unless it had been clipped down.

Black hair in the stain glass panels of the door, refracted back as a kaleidoscope - long and straight, tucked in behind his ears, headbanded. There was a ring of baldness about the spot a Jewish skull cap went, but if you weren’t seven feet talk it was only visible from behind. The hazel of his eyes seemed locked in argument with skin that was pale, as if the sun had never touched it, and a four day growth of rusty hair – scattered black strands just below his eyelids, sunken – took attention from the scar dug into his right temple by the fork on the back of a hammer head. Inside, a collection of cardboard boxes sullied an otherwise vacated living room. Earwigs scurried up the dusty walls. Bedrooms were empty. Inside those walls, unattended but for insects, sour smelling, like an ancient image so decayed that even memories seemed dead and awaiting burial. You took the ashes of memories with you – encased them in concrete, tossed them into the ocean. Walking down the corridor to the bathroom Stephen found himself steeped in all of it, soaked through, an inconvenience – it has to be said – he never predicted. Still a bathroom; sink, shower, bath, toilet, vanity intact.

The old pipes groaned and flexed, and the water seemed, at first, to be the rusted copper itself escaping. Once it cleared Stephen took a few handfuls and doused his arms and face. Then he turned on the shower and then he turned on the bath. His arms were drying but the ritual was compromised, Milana must have taken the mirror with her. Fuck, fuck. A skylight made of spider webs, an arm purging water by magic, and here was Stephen Entosic without a mirror. He left the bathroom alive – sinkholes plugged, liquid and pipes seeping out like something alive, and took the note out of his jeans pocket. Her handwriting was terrible. Years ago, when he first began to decipher it, she would slide little notes under his door in bright crayon, driven across the page like sandpaper, asking that he read her to sleep with one of his stories or poems.

Stephen: I have taken everything of mine already. Everything that might be of value to you I have put in the attic. The other boxes are unknown items, some of which may also be yours. We will discuss the house and the rest of the inheritance next week. You may remember that I will not be at his funeral, nor will I have any part in organizing it. If he is to have one, I feel that it is your duty to take care of it yourself.
M.

A board of Masonite still stood on its side at the fifth stair. Steffi had cried for days when they first put it there, but she had taken to shitting and pissing in the corner by the spare bed around then and no disinfectant could wipe the ‘Steffi’s’ off that carpet. Twisted ankles, an arduous half year spent forgetting patterns, remembering new ones; one, two, three four, step over. Muscle memory. You could’ve walked blindfolded in the dark before that board, and after – even years after – there was this unshakeable feeling that each time you went in things might be different, that you would be hurt unless you kept it together, remained on your guard; after that board, it paid to be afraid of the dark. The attic was black and bedless. Carpet was all pulled up and the floorboards, nails jutting out where the joins had been, smelled like Steffi.
Even in the company of a downcast camping lantern the attic was dark; wood varnished the colour of red wine, walls the same black Masonite as the fifth stair prison bar. Six cardboard boxes stood in pairs at the center of the room like dead trees, and there, over by the little boxy window, was Stephen’s baby mobile. Suddenly he felt an insipid lack of energy or will, and was dizzy with vertigo. Attic; black and bedless. From where he stood it was clear that the balls were still affixed. 


They were still bright, too bright for this place. Perhaps that had been the old man’s error. Perhaps his fatalism should have gone a step further and only affixed worn out old balls that had been played with by champions. Something was moving through the house downstairs. Vertigo eased and he went towards it, picked it up; it felt warm in his hands, or rather his hands were warmed by its touch. A connection still existed -this icon of his earliest years, one that he had desired in secret, hated in the open. House, mobile, the bathroom sink and cockroach bush pulsing with cockroaches, wispy walls resurrected by earwigs and Stephen’s footsteps strafing ashes across the quiet ground beneath him; something still connected the lines that were erasing themselves, thwarted by the arrival of this man who was a boy here once, whose longing to remember was redrafting them again. The water level was rising. Stephen was fairly certain he heard the pipes sighing with relief. Inside one of the boxes he found both of his diaries. While one looked like a regular school organizer, the other was a tremendously thick notepad bound with string, encased with the cover of a Jean Paul Sartre novel, in the French, which he couldn’t read. A moth flew out frenetically when Stephen opened the second diary, wings harassing his cheeks like butterfly kisses. There was a poem, about a ballet dancer, on the open page;

she’s dancing, oh yeah!
As I sleepwalk she’s a jewel
in this black and white nightmare.

He laughed hysterically for five minutes and the house was in rapture, before his tear ducts opened and crying came out of him, and the house was in mourning again. Duck, duck, duck, goose; walking slowly, slowly walking, around the three sets of boxes, he picked up the mobile. His wrists were sore. He had taken a lot of pills today. There was a story here, but first it had to be thought up, redrafted, imagined. Water had reached every crack and crevasse. Earwigs clung to their walls somewhat harder than they had done before Stephen came in. At last he lay on his back and fell asleep, cradling the books and a baby mobile made of tennis balls in his arms. In his dreams it would swallow the whole house, and the house would expand until it was breached like the walls of a hollow dam, and Stephen would survive, even if he drowned up there in the attic, because by the time the water reached him a story would be carved out, and unlike a life which could vanish into the ether a story would always dwell somewhere waiting to be found, then lost, then found again. 

dusk with the sea and the dying

blot of red sun, dusk
and the palm tree tips
golden, and the clouds

that darkened the day give
over to cold
aquiline clarity

sandy tire marks in-
-tersect in the carpark, spin
circles around Lily and me,

Lily with the ailing heart and
sliver of surfboard
tucked under her sunburnt arm

radiant heat - asphalt -
sticks salt to my shins and calves
from the hill-crest an ocean
calm as glass, silent menace

lurking in its vast shadowed parts;
sparkles on languid peaks the last
captive vestiges of our Great Star






collapsed on a bench
I say 'sparkle'
ensconce her in my arms
view heart-stopping
(I cry, Lily laughs)

Picking Season

perched on laughter’s threshold

keeled abdomen a drawn bow-
-string poised, taut, sore;
pulleys of my cocked bow boast
a million pounds of strike force                                              about to ride inward

on a twitching saddle of poison’s mirth;

change: cat’s-back-recoil

                                                hyper-sensory nerves

                                                quell dumb hunger
                                                slake psychedelic thirsts
behind kitsch-curtained weatherboards;
pin-prick tics on bare soles
and under spindly hair

                                                                                         – tactile inaccuracies –
blare of whispers,                                                      whirr of frothing blades
legion of heads protrude
cancerous from grid-like windows, vanish;
                                                 mirthful tennis balls, ballpoint faced, chemical-stayed
Olympic humour of the empty stare;

and as a spade turns over earth
                                   the earth upturns itself
oh atmospheric spade; where

                                           even the air casts a shadow
                                           even the air is a feat of geometry
soil walls churn
tile fissures gape in gapless nooks                           like unseen moons in space;
                       pretty girls’ faces glow orange, grow
                                                                                                                 ghastly excrescences

behind eyelids unable to close
                                                           gruff men die of groundless grief
                                                  among pockets of people no-one knows;

the walls dance
the body’s lips don’t pucker for Sarah
the body traverses its ages         past, present, future       as a pinwheel spins
in a Spring breeze
ring-pulls catapult beer               into the foggy ether;  a Sarah skeleton on my knee            

four sets of teeth on a garden fence, seven enjoined halves of Che Guevara
undrinkable rocks run liker rivers          weird wordless covenants
marijuana butter                                                                   slugs, slug-slicks in Winter
moustaches

                                    what havoc wrought
by transcendent unconsciousness

If Guevara pulls a gun I’m going                 to hail the nearest ambulance                      

Tapestry

feathers in a picture frame
and in her braided hair
wan woven cloudlets
chill of a sidewise glance
shivers in sunlit air

tapestry under her arm
Bohemian briefcase
slowing her uphill stride
the moon’s crater-irises
red veil of heavy traffic
vilified road-ragers
blanketing all sight

sandals like a Roman God
evading pavement cracks
moon-beamed mountain range
Tiger-lily lookalike
with feathered hair on horseback
riding through snow
woven purple night

bus-stop steals her silhouette
mass of selfsame dark
frame at her side refracts a glint
in my eyes new colours spark
no more clouds or mountains
horse lost in the dazzling daub

feathers and irises of her own
remind me what is real
choking on exhaust smoke
eyes ice-cream punnet blue
fingernails like pearls

but give me the tapestry again
there I am more at home
another sidewise glance
from her on the snowy plane
bus gone, and I alone

Anders, Father? Some overwrought conclusions

A cynical reading of parenthood as the easiest and most universally attainable great goal of life would be that the biological imperative to procreate, an instinct as primal as the search for food and water, has been feebly disguised as something sublime in order to take the edge off our systematic shortcomings. Parenthood - or the potentiality of it - mitigates the sorry effects of squandered ambitions and endless regret, offering us this consolation: we needn't try so hard at other - probably fruitless - endeavours because the greatest endeavour of all, the one most indelibly tied to the Good Life, is a mere act of copulation away from being ours. No matter how far our lives diverge from the way we once imagined them heading, we can always have children and therefore have happiness. What religion is for the Nietzschean, therefore, parenthood is for the dogmatically childless.

(reprisal of that unspoken conclusion: Anders doesn't want to be happy).

The obverse argument might go something like this: parenthood is the easiest and most universally attainable great goal of life, but  it is also much more. Most importantly, it is a reminder that the multitude of other goals -  goals which usually, but not always, involve money, fame, prestige, legacy, reverence...in short, material recognition of the contribution we have made in the world - are nothing but trivialities extolled by our sick Age,  worth all but nothing when compared with the genuine Happiness afforded one by raising a family.

Clearly these two positions represent polar extremes, and the majority of opinions will lie somewhere in the middle. But what about mine? Didn't I come under the 'dogmatically childless' category? Avoiding overpopulation, you say. Perpetual bachelor, you say. Immature, depressive, lacking, you say.

Not quite. As it happens, my reasons are far more abject, far more morbid than those common suppositions.
I do not want to be happy: I am happy. Much as the world dismays me, my love for life is nevertheless immutable. However, my relationship with all animate beings around me might be classified as hyper-sensitive:   I am unable to comprehend bad things happening to others in any capacity, and much less the idea of myself as the engineer or perpetrator of those bad things. Thus, while wholly pacifist, I must maintain a degree of social and political disengagement in order to protect my hyper-sensitivities from being over-inflamed. But bad things happen. Like it, lump it, be thoroughly horrified by the thought: bad things happen.

Wait a minute: what does all of this have to do with my stance on children? Clever cookies may have already figured that out. Nothing I have yet said would indicate that I do not like children, or that I consider having them some kind of a weak-minded cop-out. In fact, my sentiments comport much better with the argument couched in the second paragraph. I can imagine no greater joy than conceiving, raising and sending off into the world a human being I am proud of, of whom I can say honestly: there goes a person who knows how to love themselves and others and their environment, whose priorities are not in the order of the present day, but in the order of tomorrow and forever. What is more, I know of at least one woman who has appeared before me in  contemplation and in dream as a perfect mother for my - never to exist - children.

But I am afraid to say that my hyper-sensitivity to life is a formidable barrier to parenthood, perhaps an insurmountable one. How could my conscience carry upon its back an injured child, a dead child, a child who fell prey to one of those legions of bad things in the world that I knew were out there? How impossible life would become! If an assaulted animal causes me to weep tears of unbearable sorrow, how could I even countenance the thought of engendering a child who was bound to suffer, and even more assuredly bound to die? No matter what accompanying happiness, that I had consigned my own flesh and blood to suffer and die? Ultimately, what sort of child deserves such a melodramatic wretch for a father? It simply wouldn't be fair. I  therefore cannot envision having children for the good of the child, not for me.

I said in the first post of this blog that I wasn't especially good with Death. Until our relationship improves, the  possibility of my conceiving new Life seems equally fragile.

Or, if I should seem now and then to trifle along the road- or should sometimes put on a fool's cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along, -don't fly off,- but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;- and as we jog on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short do any thing.- only keep your temper.
-Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy