what is meant by 'self-reflection'

only when the wind stops and I feel
no forces at work upon my nerve endings -
when I forget my body's positioning
in space, the pressure on this limb
or that limb - when, like Plotinus,

I feel that my body is no longer mine
can I love it,
can I imagine and intellectualise
'body' at the same time - like
watching a woman as she sleeps
or thinking of a woman on the other side

of the world - but with our manifold
minds we need not go fishing
for New Age techniques or cubes
of sugary LSD - for we can put to bed
one voice or another at will -

we can put will to bed at any time
of the night or day - analyse
our behaviour as though it were
transposed onto film and that film
mailed to the farthest, darkest place on earth -

while unused the foibles of our character
are sleeping beauties
the skin of whom we caress, the pulse of
whom we coyly check, not impolitely,
to make sure they are still alive

because their stillness, like their silence,
is total.

Spider Story Draft (working title: The Time I had a Beer with Kiera's Dad)

I had to work at Art After Dark that night and so I didn’t think much about murdering the spider until later. I was a ‘ticket scanner’ at the National Gallery. When I had first gotten the job – the outgoing ticket scanner was a friend of mine whose glasses were especially thick and whose R.M Williams boots were at least third or fourth-hand, who painted large pictures of pool tables and sold them to regional hospitals and nursing homes – I had imagined a utopian combination of work and pleasure. But a month or so in, after watching a documentary about construction workers in a spectacular area of the Bolivian Andes I realised that, like theirs, my job was just a job and that I could just as well have been scanning tickets for illegal cockfights or dinner theatre shows. I also realised I didn’t like my coworkers very much because they didn’t see it like that, or pretended they didn’t.

On the other hand, I guess there was a certain valour in working a mundane job at a place everybody else considered an escape from the mundane. Most people worked jobs that weren’t supposed to be anything but a means of paying the bills, which were therefore diametrically opposed to whatever they did for fun. Everything was made ‘funner’ by comparison. For my part, I could easily have come to resent my passion for painting because I disliked the crappy job that that passion had afforded me. But I didn’t.  I didn’t because I had accepted that art was a pauper’s enterprise and I was more prepared to scan a million tickets to the Napoleon Exhibition than to start painting pictures of pool tables or men standing around on a golfing green, waiting for the last man to putt in. It was that artistic integrity that I felt had been queried by Kiera’s dad and his stupid Pirate of Penzance comment.

When I came home I was tired and a little bummed out. So that I could go straight to bed, I immediately brushed my teeth, washed my face, and pissed. I also sprayed the antibacterial spray onto the eyebrow ring I had gotten a few days earlier. Then I entered my bedroom and saw that Kiera had left a chocolate muffin on the little antique sideboard  next to my bed. She’d moved some books to one side and put the muffin on the other side. The muffin was huge and had orange rind on top and it was in my favourite bowl, an old Rice Bubbles one with pictures of Snap, Crackle and Pop in their American clothes, which my grandma had given me when I was little.

I ate the muffin with a heavy heart. Kiera and I had lived together for six months by then and the best way of measuring how comfortable she was with someone seemed to be through the kindness, devoid of ulterior motives, that coloured the stuff she said and did. That was how I knew she liked me, maybe even loved me. I had never known a better or more beautiful person, let alone imagined, in my wildest dreams, that I would be on the receiving end of their goodness. It was also how I knew that she could never be mine and why I almost wished she would suddenly become indifferent to me. I took the bowl upstairs and washed it; the microwave clock read 02:17. The apartment was quiet except for the fridge and for me. The first thing I noticed upon reentering my bedroom was the can of water-proofer on the windowsill, as if it hadn’t been there before. At the sight of it I froze. I turned to the mirror on my wardrobe and saw that I looked wrung out and terrified. I sat down on my bed feebly and started to think about what I had done.

spider story, moving, changing

My housemate Kiera was the daughter of a prominent politician in Melbourne. A federal member and a Liberal, Kiera’s dad was tall and very broad, an Irishman who still spoke with an accent and who was a devout catholic. When he wasn’t in Canberra or in his office on Orrong Road, Kiera’s dad was doing ambassadorial stuff for the biggest anti-abortion organisation in Australia. He wore suits with thin ties on the weekends – at least on the weekends I saw him – and his aftershave was too young for him, probably something with ‘ocean’ or ‘mist’ in its name.

I didn’t like Kiera’s dad very much at first. For starters, there was a lupine aspect to his face – the big toothy mouth and pale, beautiful eyes – that, in combination with the sheer mass of the man, made me uneasy. His hair was so thick and anchored to his forehead in such an immoveable, angular line that it almost looked woven, or like the pelt of a huge Irish Wolfhound. It was all black too, but not in a coloured kind of way. Is it possible for a fifty year-old man to be without a single grey hair? Even on the sides? It was weird and it scared me.

Secondly, Kiera’s dad’s eyes were the same as hers. I mean exactly the same. That unbelievable likeness niggled at me every time I looked at her sexiest feature and I resented her dad for it, despite the fact that they were his eyes first. Not that it mattered much either: I had never been – and would never be – able to stare into Kiera’s the way I wanted. 

But when you got right down to it, Kiera’s dad was difficult to like because he couldn’t stand me. When she had first moved into the apartment we share and was hauling her bed through the corridor, he, holding onto the other side, muttered something I heard distinctly and which is still kind of on reverb in my mind whenever I see him, even now that he and I have had a beer together.

-He’s a painter, dad, I heard Kiera say. A really good one.

-So he paints houses then?

-Dad, he’s an artist

-I’m just taking the mickey, Kiera, I knew he was an artist just by looking at him. If a young, middle class Melbournian man looks like he’s a Pirate of Penzance, then he’s probably an artist. And a vegetarian. Is he a vegetarian?

I couldn’t hear what Kiera said next – maybe she nodded. Because her dad said hmm and then something about which way the bed was going to face.

Even though it was amusing to hear an Irishman actually say taking the mickey, I became self-conscious and thought later that two people who were different ages and whose political and religious views sharply diverged, and who hated what the other wore and who thought what the other said was funny when it wasn’t supposed to be, that two people like that could never get along. So how did this beer eventuate then? And why would I bother writing about it? Well, the answer to the second question is that it now seems as if the beer was representative of the breakdown I had and am kind of still having. The breakdown that started last month when I set a spider on fire. The answer to the first is this story.

A Huntsman. It was bigger than average, the size you can make into a monster with an outstretched hand and not feel like a liar. It scuttled across my bed. I was reading A Discovery of Strangers and a John Serrie album, one of his collaborations with Gary Stroutos, was murmuring in the background. I liked to listen to Serrie while I read; his arrangements were sparse, seemed incommensurate with the speed at which I absorbed each page, and had the effect of both slowing down and supercharging time, as if I were surfing a wave as well as watching it from the beach, building miles and miles offshore. My white blinds were drawn, but backlit brightly enough to know it was still the afternoon. Now and then I could hear Kiera and her boyfriend Daniel making food, which usually made me hungry and lonely because Daniel was a chef and I was in love with Kiera but the window of opportunity had been steamed over by our living arrangements and the fact that she didn’t love me back. Something interesting is that our house was a double-storey but the kitchen was the only room upstairs.

 The sight of the spider almost gave me a heart attack. In that moment I was suddenly reminded of the time when I was a kid that I had gone for a swim and taken a bunched up towel off our table tennis table to dry myself and then felt something in my hair, felt the tickle of it coming down my front, saw it on my chest in the reflection of the backdoor, woke in the night at the slightest odd sensation for weeks afterwards. It was a memory I had forgotten and at the shock of it I sprang up. I eventually managed to track the spider to behind the bed-head, which I had covered in cutout pages of Hesse’s Siddhartha. The spider was sitting as motionless as if it had never moved in its life. Its legs were curled up, like a dead crab’s. Its body – or sac, or whatever you call it – looked like a bulb of nutmeg and the thought of putting it in a nutcracker made me grit my teeth. As calmly as possible I pulled the rest of the bed away from the bed-head, revealing a sliver of dusty floorboards, a pen and a couple of odd socks. Now the spider had nowhere to go.

One of the dusty socks was thick, an Explorer I think they call them, and I put it over my hand like a puppet of death. The dust made me want to cough but I held it down. My dad had always used a jam jar and a paper towel to trap spiders, or cockroaches for that matter, putting them out in the yard or, to make my sister and I laugh, over our neighbour’s fence, but I was panicked didn’t have any empty jars or paper towels. All I had – or thought I had – was a sock. For a split second though I took my eyes off the spider and looked around, maybe to see if anyone was watching. It was then that I noticed the cigarette lighter on my windowsill, sitting in the bonsai pot.  I used it to light candles for my incense burner. There was also a can of shoe waterproofer I had happened to be using that morning in preparation for the trip I was making to Mount Bogong.

*

When I doused it for the first time, the shocked spider darted halfway up the wall in a flash before staggering back to the floor, poisoned, already half-dead.

Never before had I done anything like what I’d just done, but by now, except for the nervous start I gave when it reacted to the water-proofer, a kind of trance had come over me. I was looking at the spider the way I looked at the last page of a book just prior to sleep. If the book was no longer a book but a lullaby, something which coaxed me into another mental imperative, then so was the spider hardly a spider. My weird urge to burn had smoked ethics and the naming of things and there was only one way to ease it. 

Certain that it had no more escape attempts left in it, I sprayed the spider a second time. While it was glistening wet I swooped the lighter in close and sparked. There was a crackle, and a very high-pitched, beetle-like squeal, and the smell of burning rubbish, all of which I took in with the focus of a scientist conducting an experiment. I was deathly quiet and could feel that my eyes were open wider than normal. I sprayed the spider some more and the flames turned greenish and almost sucked back up into the can, terrifying me. So I raised the can higher and pressed the trigger as softly as I could; the occasional droplet of combustant would fall and stoke the flaming spider on its pyre of smoking dust.

There was a lot of fire and smoke. There was a lot of waterproofer on my fingers. And even after the spider had devolved to a shapeless piece of charcoal I continued to dapple it with waterproofer, relight the flames if they went out, unthinking and so unmoved, transfixed and so not really watching. Then when there was nothing at all left to fuel the fire I swept the remnants into a dustpan and threw them out my window. I pushed my mattress back into place. I realised I was still wearing the sock on my hand and took it off, dazedly put it in the bin.

I opened my bedroom door and the smell of whatever it was that Kiera and Daniel were cooking rushed at me, attacked me. It smelt good. 

reading proust and borges

your family has a frailty
about it that endears
it to all the girls who've thrown
their heads under the celestial
doona cover when your mother sobs
or your brother's anger rears up
like a cornered Huntsman -

the comparisons your father makes
between he and a young Sylvester Stallone
puts smiles on faces that subcultures coat
with taciturn dust - waxy apple skin
legs stuck to your thigh by sweat
at the knee pit start to pulse to the rhythm
of your mother's songs about your overweight
cat, Bee-Gees songs with 'Petey Petey Petey'
in lieu of the regular lyrics -

perfect dysfunction would, at least, have made
Borges bow his stately head for periodic
infinity - for you though, you for whom the pinwheels
of chance spun hardest between May 1988
and February 1989, they are simply your family,
they are of you - and when a multitude of souls
embodies a single being it is nothing
if not deified - you are a God and I worship accordingly.


...


she is crying fitfully, a baby who has yet to learn 
how to cry and breathe conterminously
but old enough to suffer incurable anxiety - why can't 
those maladies be resolved in reverse order?


why can't babies, as from the tit, 
be weaned from their manic depression and social phobias,
and the fear that life is lived
always on the cusp of tragedy?
then Lyotard wouldn't ache to be a child again - 


to know how to celebrate is to have
mastered mourning, and in the faces and objects
and areas which monster us with their beauty
there also dwells the monstrous - 


but  look at her, Panda-eyed,
tears blotting each eyelash 
like the bulb of the root in each pore, weeping
over nothing when everywhere
there are causes for joy!


I watch her and, as never before,
think that we are designed to suffer,
that the Epicurean opposites are
chemical inducements, that our inscrutable
purpose is really none too clear -
only problem is, if suffering is inborn,
why aren't there more babies on Prosac?

...


the fervour some need to write
is closer to a frezy - but Fyodor
Dostoyevski is more buck wild than the girl
I like who blusters her notepad around
the room, as though to consecrate
the emotional eddies on the page,
whose scornful hisses ward
off my feeble attempts to speak to her -
I am dating a prettier,
less talented, female Underground Man.


...


everything I have ever wanted to express
already resides in two places:
the Library of Babel and a book
called In Search of Lost Time -

subsequently my will to express it
has been nullified, effaced by the urge
to read it in a totality that I
would probably never have realised  -

what effect does that have on my worth
as an artist?
well, the Library's books never were furnished
with authors, but if we hold to the logic it seems
that they too should be infinite in number
and variance -

therefore, not only have I written all
that I'll ever write already,
I also wrote In Search of Lost Time
and every other book there was, or will be.
so did you.

beginning of another story about spiders

It’s just that I already feel like I need to start making sense of the decisions I made, put them into a logical sequence instead of the impulses, pell mell and violent as orgasms, they were when I made them. Because in all my short life I’ve never felt regret like this. I’ve never tried to breathe but couldn’t, because of how sick I feel at the idea of sustaining my own life. I’ve never heard the voice of the storyteller in my head speaking in so many discordant accents, tones, volumes. I’m half-cracked and I know I am and it’s all because last month I set a spider on fire.

A Huntsman. It was bigger than average, the size you can make into a monster with an outstretched hand and not feel like a liar. It scuttled across my bed. I was reading A Discovery of Strangers at the time and a John Serrie album, one of his exquisite collaborations with Gary Stroudos, was murmuring in the background. I liked to listen to Serrie while I read; the sparseness of his arrangements seemed incommensurate with the speed at which I absorbed each page and had the subsequent effect of both slowing down and supercharging time, as if I were surfing a great wave as well as watching it from the beach, building miles and miles offshore. My white blinds were drawn, but backlit brightly enough to know it was still the afternoon. Now and then I could hear Kiera, my housemate, and her boyfriend Daniel making food, which usually made me hungry and lonely because Daniel was a chef and I was in love with Kiera but the window of opportunity had been steamed over by our living arrangements and the fact that she didn’t love me back. Something interesting is that our house was a double-storey but the kitchen was the only room upstairs.

 The sight of the spider almost gave me a heart attack. In that moment I was suddenly reminded of the time when I was a kid that I had gone for a swim and taken a bunched up towel off our table tennis table to dry myself and then felt something in my hair, felt the tickle of it coming down my front, saw it on my chest in the reflection of the backdoor, woke in the night at the slightest odd sensation for weeks afterwards. It was a memory I had forgotten and at the shock of it I sprang up. I managed eventually to track the spider to behind the bed-head, which I had covered in cutout pages of Hesse’s Siddhartha. The spider was sitting as motionless as if it had never moved in its life. Its legs were curled up, like those of a dead crab. Its body – or sac, or whatever you call it – looked like a bulb of nutmeg and the thought of putting it in a nutcracker made me grit my teeth. As calmly as possible I pulled the rest of the bed away from the bed-head, revealing a sliver of dusty floorboards, a pen and a couple of odd socks. Now the spider had nowhere to go.

One of the dusty socks was thick, an Explorer I think they call them, and I put it over my hand like a puppet of death. The dust made me want to cough but I held it down. My dad had always used a jam jar and a paper towel to trap spiders, or cockroaches for that matter, putting them out in the yard or, to make my sister and I laugh, over our neighbour’s fence, but I was panicked didn’t have any empty jars or paper towels. All I had – or thought I had – was a sock. For a split second though I took my eyes off the spider and looked around, maybe to see if anyone was watching. It was then that I noticed the cigarette lighter on my windowsill, sitting in the bonsai pot.  I used it to light candles for my incense burner. There was also a can of shoe waterproofer I had happened to be using that morning in preparation for the trip I was making to Mount Bogong.

loaded smells: mulch

garden mulch is a smell on

which I drank myself

into adulthood –

and when I’m old and the

only ellipsis left

is that of the great perhaps it

will blow towards me in

a squall of memory, the scent

of the saturday trips

to the warrandyte nursery,

the fig tarts we ate there,

the christmas trees we

had chopped down and loaded,

the mulch hillocks

I could have ran up and down forever –

whole decades will have vanished

by then – fettered as I am by this

nembutal imperative – fettered

but fearless – I can watch

the umbrella of a  water fountain crown

and land like the sound of babies

treading water, float tranquilly down to

the cavernous pits of my remembrance –

I can like it there. So when the dump truck

bucks a mulch mound into the centre

of royal park, I imbibe it as if I’m about

to be submerged, knowing

I’ve a few more gulps of that woody elixir

left before my long hair turns white.

Cameron's first release

I visit the leisure centre, three days after discharge, to discharge from my body

a drugged abiding stillness, a dormancy I can’t shake. Not even the roar of a stoked lawn mower, the hum of a fridge at nighttime shakes it. Not even freedom. Yes the typeset of my house keys the real back into me, but not my body’s proper

proclivities or the crowded fuselage of mental orbit, not the energy I need to be alive.

And here the little legion of selves scattered in the playpen do what no dumbbell can- the kids’ finger-paintings look like masterpieces to me, they’re the seminal artworks of a memory begun afresh; jar of buttons a treasure trove to a boy with long white hair, chided for nearly leveling a girl jumping up and down for joy

on a sheet of egg foam. And balloon bundles like massive genomes sit on shrunken seats the colour of polished bone, the colour of the ward’s walls.

Wireless modem flashing purple sends the women, drunk on lavender, into tickling paroxysms; they careen down backs and up hairless legs, and all

the flags of the world are blown out of their borders by crayon. I wake.

Long to be tickled. Those slight undulations on the grassy path from the train station, detectable only in the ache proprioception sent to my calves, the laughter I feel gestating now as the white-haired boy laughs: are they not the root of my impunity, why everyone is so alarmed? Even when I hurt myself I only watch as I am hurt. I am not an agent unto myself but an agent of the universe; my actions no less causal than gravity’s grounding me. I slake its sadistic thirsts.

That is and always has been my typeset.