Little Houses, Big Forests

Siouxzi Connor

Little Houses, Big Forests
(desire is no light thing)

Huge gratefulness to:

The city of Berlin for the opportunity, the knowledge and ultimately for making
impossibilities possible. Particular thanks to the Berlin Institute for Cultural
Inquiry, especially Claudia Peppel for her continuing care.
Tariq Goddard – for everything here, of course.
My family, no matter how far and long I wandered.

For the ones with unwavering belief. Thank you for cracking the light open in me.

An Introduction

just tumult everywhere endlessly

Confused? Lost? […] If you don’t know where you are, can you know who you are? Just tumult everywhere endlessly, tumult modulating into another tumult all over and without end. The change is so constant so pervasive so relentless, that identity, place, scale – all measure lessen, weaken, eventually disappear.

– RONI HORN, SAYING WATER¹

IF IT IS IN the nature of things to be lost², then we are not exempt from this: it is also in our nature as humans to be lost at some points in our lives, to go beyond what we know.

This is a feeling that has, over the past few years, come to bruise me; to the extent that the bruise has become not only painful, but fascinating. I can’t look away.

With the electronic tracking devices we willingly slip into our pockets each day, and with the connotations of non-productive failure attached to being lost, it has become more painful than ever for us as human beings to give in to abandon and let ourselves be lost in any sense, even within literary or artistic practice. This is what makes it harder.

Writing or creating art of any form is often a matter of knowing that you need to find something the nature of which is totally unknown to you. So in order to find something unknown to you, you need to risk the pain of sauntering somewhere unknown to you. Like the labyrinthine fantasy land of Tlön³, whose unknown power swamps the “real world” around it, this is an admission of the need to wander away from the desired object of knowledge in order to, serpentinely, better understand it. Experience in life that is borne from lostness is invaluable in that it originates from a wellspring of honest unknowingness.

We have been trained to see “undisciplined” forms of experience or knowledge (like fantasy), or those who get lost in the world (like the original saunterers⁴), as challengers to productivity.⁵ But it is precisely these subjugated ways of knowing or being that are the most likely to present us with unexpected knowingnesses. If sauntering or wandering aimlessly is considered to be unprofitable erring⁶, then a book dedicated to being lost on purpose through a weaving of thoughts and narratives and part-narratives and glimpses is very much a book of wandering to unprofitable “error”. Losing oneself in its non-structure with the only stated aim of allowing oneself the counterpleasure⁷ of feeling lost, could be seen as a transgressive practice of gaining a “non-productive” and altogether unprofitable experience.

Reading is always a kind of quiet resolution to truly let go, not only of geographic bounds, but of identity – a voluptuous, urgent need to shake off all context and surrender to a text. As Benjamin said, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to surrender to uncertainty.⁸

Wandering through the wastelands of a book – no map, no money, just taking one page after the next into the distance – the reader can begin to feel the layers of lostness deepening from one state to another, until all around her becomes rooted in the elsewhere, in the “benign indifference of the universe”.⁹

The sauntering of the reader takes her from wherever in place and time she was, along chaotic letters carved into muddy syllables, down natural tunnels of alliteration, into flowing rhythms fluttering within her that only she knows with her own pace, her own breath. Pages stutter as she slips into brambles too thick with metaphor.

Cussed out of a highway bar filled with over-used similes, chased down an abandoned railway line by barking clichés, the reader might sense that it’s only the deranged and the other wanderers who take kindly to the literary lost. You are an exile, you have the air of the uncanny when you truly let go into a text. But “who would we be if we could not forget ourselves at least some of the time?”¹⁰ as Susan Sontag asks. Still not allowing herself to read any page numbers, the reader chooses one at random and hurries through the heavy fog of indulgent over-writing towards a multi-lane highway stream of consciousness.

In the darkness of a high-rise sprawl of ideas – more lost than ever – the reader realises the world around her has become larger than her knowledge of it before. She “allowed” herself a loss of control until she was completely beyond it. As she wandered, expectation fell away as new experiences rushed onwards through her, but she was still marked by the panicky movements of one not accustomed to the pleasure of it. In the end, she ceased to be lost not by closing the book but by actively turning the act of reading into something else.

In this way, we can find a way to both rub the bruises of any past lost years we might have experienced deeper into our skins to truly feel them, rather than resisting the pain that caused them in the first place. The vulnerability of this becomes a way of resisting familiar thought patterns and climbing out of emotional ruts. We become skinless. We welcome unknown inhabitants to well up inside us.

Getting lost in a book or in life exposes the painful risks of embracing error, chance and failure¹¹, or shows us, in the words of Samuel Beckett, how to fail better.

The art of being lost is not one of ignorance but of letting go.¹² When we are truly lost and everything we know is gone, that’s when we can find fullness in our loss. That’s when we can acknowledge the pain of losing what we do know and surrender to this pain with grace.

A quiet comes over the riverbank as the sun sinks.

Another day subsumed by night, leaving the emptiness

of what could have been done with the day hanging

before the onset of darkness.

Her hair is fire-warm between her legs

and I stroke her there with my tongue,

glistening and satiated from our feast.

The fire and each other keep us warm.

She pays no attention

to the quiet etiquette of the trees:

her wails echo far into their midst

as my tastings of her grow wild and rough.

My river-wet fingers plunge her deep.

She floods my mouth.

Nights silent with the expectation of a predator;

nights thick, caught in the back of the throat;

nights of chasing the sense of being chased

through the undergrowth,

vines becoming entrails,

spilling bloody with this chase,

further tempting the darkness creatures.

Heaving breaths from dew-wet lungs.

But night after night,

as dawn quickly became impassioned

by day and blushed, morning broke the darkness every time

and revealed aloneness.

The light brought warmth and searing beauty

but it also brought inevitability.

By day, the inevitable loneliness was clear.

By night, any number of stalking creatures could be near,

watching and wanting.

THE NIGHT BROUGHT THE PROMISE OF BEING WANTED.

THE DAY BROUGHT THE CLARITY THAT NOTHING HAD TAKEN A CHANCE;

NOTHING HAD TRIED, YET AGAIN, TO GET CLOSER.

DARKNESS BECAME A TRUSTED FRIEND.

* An alternate version of this essay, titled ‘“Lost Knowledge. Just tumult everywhere endlessly’”, first appeared in Runway: Australian Experimental Art Journal in November 2014.

1.   Roni Horn, Saying Water, recorded at the two-day art festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, May 2012, http://vimeo.com/67051609

2.   “It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise… The word ‘“lost’” comes from the old Norse ‘“los’” meaning the disbanding of an army… I worry now that people never disband their armies, never go beyond what they know.” Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking Press, 2005), 3.

3.   As dreamt up by Jorge Luis Borges and cited by W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, translated from the German by Michael Hulse (The Harvill Press, London, 1998), 70.

4.   The original saunterers were the idle people who roved about the European countryside in the Middle Ages under the pretence of going à la Sainte Terre (to the Holy Land). They knew the secret of successful sauntering because they felt equally at home everywhere. As observed by Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Ticknor and Fields, Boston, 1854).

5.   James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1999).

6.   “To saunter is to wander or travel about aimlessly and unprofitably… Such wandering is erring – in which one not only roams, roves and rambles but also strays, deviates, errs.” Mark C Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (University of Chicago Press, 1984).

7.   As Karmen MacKendrick points out in Counterpleasures (State University of New York Press, 1999), those who take pleasure in non-productivity have the power to disrupt our society of productive and consuming subjects.

8.   As cited by Fran Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms (Polity Books, London, 2006), 119.

9.   Albert Camus, L’Étranger (Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1942).

10.   Susan Sontag, as cited by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions (Cambridge University Press 2013), 219.

11.   As inspired by Judith Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2011).

12.   Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Viking Press 2005), 6.

Leda in Glass

Desire is no light thing.

–ANNE CARSON

I’M LOCKING EYES WITH a drag queen in a dressing room; a white Grace Jones. My eyes, now spilling with tears, are flitting from overflowing ashtray to frost-coated railing on an inner-city rooftop, sharing an apple with someone shy as the sun comes up. Now my eyes are irritated by the floor, glittering with beeswax reflected by the chandelier, trailing instead to the wall, hung with a portrait of myself dressed as a monarch.

Someone has blacked out portions of someone else’s tales to recreate new ones to fit their own desperate needs. Clipped versions of things that, as much as I try to deny it, feel vaguely like they’ve happened to me. Reading by omission. Living by omission. The usual.

I’m in a bookstore, flicking through a tiny volume of cut-up short stories. Blacking out a few of the words myself, shutting one eye and then the other, everything begins to ring true.

The bookstore phone rings, ominously, and the dark-haired pretty girl working here answers it.

Yes, she says suspiciously, holding the receiver with her chewed fingertips as if the phone had never rung before.

Then: yes, someone here does fit that description.

There’s silence as I feel her eyes on me, scanning me up and down like a pulp-fiction page. This is how it starts again, I realise. I turn shakily in her direction, careful to separate my face from hers with the book I’m reading.

And, yes, that person is reading your book, she continues, her voice lowering from bright curiosity to the darkness of doom. I turn away now, sweating, my back to her, but I can still hear her voice. In the book, I’m flipping through a cut-up story about someone who out-dresses the birthday boy by showing up to his party wearing a white fox-fur stole around his neck. I can feel the white fur tickling my throat. It’s time to run.

Tell the person to turn to page 32?

The girl hangs the phone up slowly and the click of it resonates in my guts. I should run but instead I am already reading page 32. I look at the page for as long as I can as my eyes brim with tears. The inevitable is happening and most of me has no idea what that is. An image swims from my tears into focus – a hotel-room door with a brass number 32, remember the mixtape I made you? Scrawled on a page torn out of an old book and slipped under it, accompanied by a glossy photograph advertising a high-class escort who would come presently to the hotel room if only I would call her. There is a familiar drone resonating from the far end of the long, carpeted hallway.

I’m sitting on the edge of the brown velvet coverlet, phone in hand, dialling her number numbly. I already know it by heart.

Yes, answers the secretary, she will be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Promptly at 3.32am, X arrives.

She is dressed in a bathrobe, just as I remembered her, and I’m in the bath: my skin smoothening, sweating and reddening moment by moment. The heat of the water on my skin means she can’t tell that I’m blushing.

X lets the bathrobe drop and steps naked into the bath, just her style. Her dark hair darkens the water; blackness seeping from it like smoke until we are surrounded by dark, scalding liquid. Static hisses and X hums along. She knows this tune.

Wasn’t this on the mixtape I made for you, Leda? She murmurs and pulls me hard beneath the black water.

Under the water, we’re in a car, river reeds waving farewell to us through the windows. She’s in the driver’s seat. Her hair’s blackness has completely seeped away into the river, revealing long, shining red hair. We wrench off our seatbelts before we drown down here. We are half-sick of shadows.

The car jolts forwards and her red hair thrashes through the river like flames that thought water was their lover. Those flames were dead wrong. We’re catapulted through the windscreen, glass shattering around us into icicles which then melt onto a red dust road. The car reverses off behind us into the distance, cicadas screaming in the heat as the car’s rumbles disappear.

Beside our heaving bodies is a mound of earth, rising like a pregnant belly from the dirt road. I dig at this belly with my fingers, hungrily, caking us both ochre with the debris. Hope, sweet, cruel, delusive hope. I uncover a big old book and X immediately claws her fingertips down the gold plating on the edges of the pages. I’ve never seen her fingertips so eager. She reads from it first as we walk down the road, and then it’s my turn.

…You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns…

…I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheardof songs…

…and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others… and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures…

…Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive…

…and back and forth like this between us until sundown. We are echoes of each other.

As the sun disappears, the red dust beneath us gives way to the cobblestones of Kazimerz, the old Jewish district of Krakow, and we walk the twisted streets reading from the book until we get to the last page and get thirsty simultaneously. She clutches my hand and speaks words in my direction.

…My library is an archive of longings.

We enter a bar on scalded bare feet called Alchemy, filled with, unsurprisingly, well-used alchemists’ equipment. Mercury, the fluid connection between the high and the low, is prominent. A young man leans over our table in a loose-fitting shirt, revealing muscles, hair, everything, and says:

So you want to try a Polish beer and you want to try the key?

My companion nods and I nod too, not knowing which one I’m agreeing to. I never know what I’m agreeing to until it’s too late. I notice a frail, cloaked man in the doorway with a watchful cat draped on his shoulders. They’re both staring at me deeply and won’t look away. The man’s wrist is tattooed with a key.

Either kill me or take me as I am, because I’ll be damned if I ever change, whispers the cat in the man’s ear.

The waiter moves to them in the doorway and peels the tattoo from the man’s skin, leaving him with a bloody scar. The cat licks at the scar absently as the pair slowly leave. The waiter hands the key to me, and a large Polish beer for X. She drinks it down while I hold the bloodied brass key in my palm. It’s still warm.

I excuse myself, needing the bathroom, but on my way there I find myself distracted by a large wooden wardrobe in the corner of the next room. Look at this tangle of thorns. I turn my little key in its lock and open it, stale air confronting me. I enter and feel a sub-bass permeating like a passing subway train. I can’t hold on any longer and am forced to lower my underwear and piss in here, in the dark. My urine glows an unearthly pink as it hits the wooden floor beneath me, transforming to an appealing powdered state. I enjoy its texture in my toes for a while; sun-drenched holiday sand. Something then, something like curiosity or the want never to dip toes, but to dive, no matter the depth, takes over. To know unheard-of songs and swim luminous currents. To be skinless. It forces me to bend down and touch my tongue to this texture. Closing my eyes, licking urgently, the powder takes on a delicious fleshiness. I take all of it in: running my tongue through all of its folds and curves and slippery twists and turns. All of me surges as if with a new form of blood through a new form of body. Not quite liquid, definitely not solid, perhaps a form of light and magnetic current at once: one that sparkles.

Mmmmmmm, says my mouth, fiercely as it dares, vibrating through this fleshiness at my lips, feeling it tremble in return, feeling it moisten in return, gushing back a handwritten letter direct to my tongue. LE-TT-ER, LE-D-A, three quick sounds on the tongue, drawn out from the roof of the mouth to the front of the mouth and out to the lips. I read this handwritten letter now, eyes open once more, and every word of it is scrawled in forest-green ink over every surface of the delight that is the body of X.

You should fucking work on your fucking fucked-up personality. We can’t work together anymore, X is saying, so smooth and gentle, down the shiny formica phone she holds with her shoulder to her ear. Out of the corner of her scarlet-painted mouth is a cigarette. I raise myself on my elbows from the brown velvet coverlet (my elbows are still muddy from the river, while my face is still smeared with the pink glowing powder), and light the cigarette for her. She takes a drag, endlessly languid, and pushes herself up from the bed to stand and it leaves me panting. All she wears are the green-inked words on her skin. My darling Leda, the words begin, at her chest, then fade into bawdy limericks. She picks up a platinum wig from the carpet and pulls it over her red hair. She is an instant bombshell. She flickers with illumination reflected from a disco ball, spiralling her serpentinely as she spirals serpentinely on the carpet. She’s slipped into glass platform slippers that glide on the mirrored surface now beneath her and above her. The mirrors offer all kinds of lugubrious, optical illusions of her body. Someone from the audience throws red rose petals all over her and she smiles with closed eyes. I watch from the wings, the sea of faces out there upturned in enthral.

Backstage I blindfold myself with a strip of black silk I found in my pocket. I can’t watch her any longer. I can’t watch anything any longer. The silk across my skin reminds me how it is to be between her thighs and I feel hot tears of longing seeping into the fabric. Captured by the silk like this, I can’t escape my own saltiness. My own need to go astray.

There’s a swan in the dressing-room bathtub. He lets me ride him, blindfolded, all the way down the drain, along the sewerage system, then upstream on the canal to the nearest bakery. There, we share an earlymorning croissant; he hungover and taking more than his share. Me, blind and getting croissant crumbs all over everything.

* First published by The Offing Magazine, a sister publication of the LA Review of Books

The fire trickled back from the bed now and from the two bodies, slicked with sweat, raging upon it.

One burning thigh pressed between the other’s two:

their hair was the forest’s entrails, their paleness the forest’s moonlit pools.

The muscles in their writhing backs were the ripples of the forest’s ancient volcanoes.

Their hands, dripping with fresh blood, travelled each other; beasts pursuing their hunters.

Their writhings then began slowing, along with the flames around them.

Their skins showed no trace of damage from the fire, just sweat from its heat.

The dust of the closed room left no smear on them.

They were invulnerable to everything but each other.

In the mirror, they could be seen drinking each other’s sweat

like river fish hungry for the taste of the ocean.

Then, finally, they were still, satisfied. A last wisp of smoke trailed from their window:

a reassuring wave to the forest that all was in place once more in the little wooden house.

The forest responded with a gust that slammed the hinged window of that room shut again.

When we saw the little wooden house buried deep in the trees, our hearts leapt to our mouths.

We could not speak.

We were silenced by it;

not choked, but so warmed in our mouths, so caressed and comforted in our mouths.

What would it sound like

if sweat, caused by all this warm,

pulsing feeling in our mouths,

came pouring forth from our lips? Would that suffice? Would the little house feel that this was sufficient?

And what would happen if, through all this excitement,

one of us would bite down a little too hard on her heart in her mouth?

Momentarily halt its pulsing,

hurt its feelings through this piercing of its materiality?

The first plunge sof darkness, herein the forest,

were liked rowning.

As each day made it self scarce,

and the moon made its eternal decisions

whether or not to show its face that night,

the darkness would raise up, crest for a moment,

then come crashing down and pull all beneath its rip.

THERE STOOD A LITTLE WOODEN HOUSE

– ITS ANGLES, ITS SQUARENESSES,

ITS CONTAINMENT ALL NEATLY INTACT.

THE LAST REMAINING HOUSE OF THREE.

THE FIRST VIEW OF IT STRAINED THE EYES

AFTER SO MANY WAVERING TREES AND SHADOWS

DANCING ACROSS DIRT AND HEAVENLY BODIES.

THERE WAS A GLOW FROM IT AND AGAIN, LIKE AN OASIS,

THE EYES DID NOT TRUST IT.

THE MIND DID NOT TRUST ITS SCENTS,

THREATENING TO CHURN BOTH IT AND THE GUTS

WITH SO MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF HUNGER,

SO MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEMORIES.

ALL THESE TYPES OF LONGINGS THROWN UPON WITH DAMP EARTH, CALMING THEIR FIRES.

THE HUNGER FOR MEATY FOOD, FOR SWEET FOOD,

FOR THE PULSE OF ANOTHER’S BLOOD NEARBY,

FOR THE DRUMMING OF ANOTHER’S MIND NEARBY,

FOR THE SCENT OF ANOTHER’S SEX NEARBY.

THE HUNGER FOR THOSE ELECTRICAL SURGES OF ANOTHER.

THE GLOW FROM THE LITTLE HOUSE WAS A SAFE PASSAGE,

A CHAIN TO ALWAYS COMING BACK TO THE SAME PLACE OF A NIGHT. THE GLOW WAS A DISTRACTION FROM THE PAIN, FOR A TIME.

BUT, NO, THE HEAD SHOOK WITH CONFUSION,

PAIN SHOULD ALWAYS BE STROKED, ALWAYS BE SATIATED TO CLIMAX. PAIN SHOULD BE CLUNG TO AND NURTURED

AND MADE AT HOME UNTIL IT IS LOVED.

THE PAIN, BEING IGNORED FOR A TIME WHILE THE GLOW DAZZLED, THEN RETURNED TENFOLD, AND THREATENED TO COLLAPSE THE BODY.

UNDER THE WILL OF PAIN, THEN, IT WAS TIME

TO BACK AWAY FROM THE GLOW ONCE MORE, AND TO RETREAT, WHIMPERING, BACK PAST THE COLLAPSED HOUSES,

INTO THE WAITING ARMS OF DARKNESS.

Acknowledgements

“You can always count on a murderer (…). Look at this tangle of thorns.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs --- Hélène Cixous, Laugh of the Medusa

“And one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity (…) was free for the strangest adventures.” – Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“Only in the books written in earlier times (…) what it might be like to be alive.” – W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz

“My library is an archive of longings.” – Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980

The Lady Bitch

Susan Sontag, resurrected

I’ve always identified with the Lady Bitch Who Destroys Herself… Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn… This woman is above all else a lady. She is tall, dark, proud. She is nervous, restless, frustrated, bored. She has a cruel tongue and she uses men badly.¹

BY THE TIME HER ground-breaking essay “Notes on Camp” was released in 1964, only a decade or so into her career, Susan Sontag had shot to international fame as the world’s first “rock-star” intellectual: straddling academia, literature, film and photography with all the swagger and poise of a modern-day Joan Jett. Photographed for magazines all over the world, captured in BBC interviews, in a film for Andy Warhol and on her own book covers, Sontag was depicted as a smoking, cat-like, long-legged, dark, mysterious creature, surrounded by books, with a barely containable sexual voraciousness – a persona more at home on record covers than academic texts.

In her book On Photography, Sontag had been largely critical about photography’s ability to freeze just one intellectual gaze upon a subject (famously attacking Diane Arbus’ oeuvre which captured a singular view of the downtrodden as “freaks”). So it is all the more interesting, then, that Sontag’s persona as the intimidating pin-up girl of the intellectual world was fuelled precisely by her involvement in photography as a subject – allowing herself to be framed in a very specific way and becoming one of the most photographed women of her time.

This involvement with photography of course continued until the end of her life, through her influence on young photographers, not only intellectually but in the way she allowed photography to be the wave that largely steered the course of her life, work and love. Her relationship with Annie Leibovitz in her later life finally allowed us a glimpse into Sontag’s persona that stripped away the glam: Leibovitz’s spontaneous and very intimate portraits of Sontag at home, and even naked in bed, showed a vulnerability to Sontag that the world had never before seen. Ironically, it took one of the most acclaimed celebrity photographers to capture Sontag with honesty.

In 2014, ten years after Sontag’s death, filmmaker Nancy Kates dared to push this honesty even further, with Regarding Susan Sontag, a documentary that both bows down to Sontag’s towering intellect – in awe of her as an unparalleled role model, particularly in a time where men dominated the intellectual game – but just as significantly, portrays Sontag as a very complicated, very flawed person: ‘“I think it is actually really important that we see public figures as something besides heroic—that we see them as real people’”, Kates explained in an interview with the Tribeca Film Festival, admitting that during periods of her research she even started to hate her subject, whom she had so idolised in her youth. Screening in international film festivals and on HBO to much acclaim, Regarding Susan Sontag closely followed the publication of Sontag’s early diaries (aptly titled Reborn), released a few years ago with the permission of her son and editor David Rieff.

This revelation of the “in-betweenness” of Sontag, her inner/outer contradiction and her struggles with identifying her sexuality (in other words, her humanness), seems now to have posthumously won her a whole new generation of young fans. In early 2015, a major interdisciplinary conference was held in Sontag’s honour at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. The venue was packed to over-capacity with eager young intellectuals, engaged in discussions of her work and her star power as if she were still publishing furiously today. Clearly, the shine of Susan Sontag is not about to fade into obscurity: and this time around, the full spectrum of Sontag is being celebrated.

Even as her academic and artistic career as a novelist and filmmaker was reaching its peak, Reborn now reveals that her uncertainties, her disillusionment with leftist politics and her focus on what she saw as humanity’s inability to both find and hold onto love were also peaking. Her diaries reveal that all of these insecurities seem to have stemmed from a deeply personal root cause: her continuing failed attempts to understand her lovers’ behaviour. It is these continued attempts which might help explain Sontag’s choice to move from critic to working as a filmmaker and novelist in her own right. ‘“What draws me very much to writing’”, Sontag wrote in her diaries, ‘“is its way of paying attention to the world’”. A writer, Sontag believed, was ‘“an instrument for tuning into as much reality as you can’”.

There was a particular significance in Sontag’s choice to set her first novel (The Benefactor, 1963) and her first films in Europe rather than the States. On the political level, this was a Europe that was still grappling deeply with the trauma of World War II – it was a time before postcolonialism and postmodernism had taken hold of public consciousness. Europe was the place where she could push herself to the front lines of what was defining her era, beginning with the aftermath of fascism. Sontag identified Europe as dense, fastidious, serious, with far more artistic experimentation than what was happening in the States at the time. On a personal level, Europe represented freedom to Sontag: she had first left the States for Oxford in her twenties, and at the same time left her family and her old persona behind. Europe was her sexual awakening, her intellectual awakening. Even after she had returned to the States, she claimed that she would forever after need to live in a big enough city that would allow her the freedom to jump on the night flight to Paris on a whim. Growing up in suburban California, Sontag always yearned to be European – wanting to claim it as her intellectual and cultural identity. By the mid-60s, she found herself in a position of being neither/nor: a kind of American and European fusion, within both her work and life.

Her fiction films, Duet for Cannibals and Brother Karl, were both shot in Sweden and rode the New Wave of modernist cinema that was coming out of Europe from auteurs such as Bergman and Godard. The films were characterised by silence, a sensitivity to trauma, psychic suffering and the clichéd binary oppositions of stock female characters: the lady bitch vs the passive hysterical victim. Interestingly, when Sontag’s diaries are read in tandem with the timing of her filmmaking, the recurring inabilities of her characters to communicate with each other and understand each other (whether through voluntary muteness or their refusal to artistically speak to their audiences in the roles Sontag cast for them as theatre directors, dancers, etc.) mirror her struggles with this in her own relationships. The Antonionian sense of melancholy and loss threading through her films is made all the more acute with Sontag’s personal struggles in mind – quite the opposite to the steely persona that she had been pushing out to the world.

A similar melancholy is felt in her later film, also paying homage to Europe: Preparation for a Trip to Venice. The film’s meandering structure, following a glacial woman in headphones through Venice, is an archaeology of longing – the camera caresses doomed monuments as the water rises, as if they were symbolic of doomed love. An internal voiceover traces omens of this civilisation’s death: cracks, rising water, statues crumbling to dust, shadows of all the people in history that once also traced these streets, these canals.

It seems these films and novels of Sontag’s acted as a kind of healing process for her – and a chance to escape her labours over academic language for a while, with all its gendered, sociological and psychological power games. Sontag could instead communicate through sound, through editing choices, through her choices of framing and through her literary fantasies. Perhaps through her creative work, Sontag finally allowed herself the right to speak emotively – without the confrontation of having to be direct or “real-life” about it.

Identifying as more of a novelist and filmmaker than as a critic or academic, perhaps it was within the worlds she created with her novels and films that she was able to find that sense of foregoing the intellect a little in favour of more emotional resonance – an attempt, whether successful or not, to surrender to her emotional self.

Sentence maven, she enmeshes me still: in (Sontag’s) prose’s hands I’m a prisoner of desire, yearning for a literary art that knows no distinction between captive and captor. Such art can be sadomasochistic in its charm, its coldness, its vulnerability.²

It is precisely in these moments of loosening her own intellectual chains that seem to have gotten Sontag’s fans their most hot and sweaty. Susan Taubes, intellectual contemporary and fellow writer, became one such groupie, referring to Sontag affectionately as ma soesie, her double. She and Sontag shared the same hunger for purity, the same refusal of the body and the same unfitness to live, as Taubes observed after they began developing a close friendship. But later, after learning of Taubes’ suicide, Sontag drained any affection for Taubes or any admission of their similarities from her diary from then on, believing Taubes had chosen the role of the passive victim – further fuelling Sontag’s determination to be the binary opposite, ‘“lady bitch”, pursuing intellectual success and fame ferociously.

We know well the vulnerability of the body but we aren’t willing to admit the vulnerability of ourselves, least of all the soul, where we can never be exposed.³

Taubes would never know just how close to the bone her words would become for Sontag. Both women’s diaries indicate an unspoken love between the two of them, which may have also fuelled Sontag’s frustrations at their breakdown in communication which was never resolved. Neither woman, it seems, was ever prepared to succumb to the vulnerability necessary to reveal romantic feelings.

‘“To love’”, Sontag wrote in her diaries, ‘“[is] knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin’”. These diaries, along with Regarding Susan Sontag, allow us to reach the heart of Sontag: most profoundly through accessing her private views on love. This level of exposure to Sontag’s personal life risks cringe for those who would rather keep the mythic intellectual up on her pedestal – which is perhaps why Sontag herself kept most of her relationships so under-wraps. But for those who are interested in the real Sontag, the one who was driven to attempt to understand her own and her lovers’ behaviour through her novels and films, ripping down the pin-up is a deeply satisfying act – one that a whole new generation of Sontag fans now have the great pleasure of doing. For, as Sontag herself asked, ‘“who would we be if we could not forget ourselves at least some of the time?’”⁴

It is almost dusk when we push off from the bank,

all traces of him trailing behind us

downstream as we move east.

East, away from the sun suffocated by night.

East, away from the echoing nothing of desert.

East, by river, to the edge of the land.

If we let our bodies be carried downstream,

east, by the river, we will make it to the ocean.

A fire threatened within that smell,

burning as if with the potential that

anything in its reach could catch alight.

The sound of their voices; the smell of their fire.

We, all of us creatures,

can feel when the new season is coming

and it means the same thing in our bones

to all of us.

Winter means the same thing to all of us,

Spring means the same thing,

Summer means the same thing,

Autumn means the same thing.

This thought comforts me, infinitely.

Living in such closeness to her body for so long,

my body has become aware of the fullness of the life of her body,

with its own psychology just as rich as her mind’s.

I have seen her body’s evolution,

as I have experienced my own,

and, just like her mind,

her body too has a history I can trace.

The letting go,

the attempted foregoing of the self

– bodily first and then everything else – almost make all the other losses

we have gone through worthwhile.

It means the same thing in our bones.

1.   Susan Sontag, Reborn: Early Diaries 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (Macmillan, 2009).

2.   Wayne Koestenbaum, ‘“Susan Sontag, Cosmophage’”, from My 1980s & Other Essays, (FSG Originals, 2013).

3.   Susan Taubes, An Intellectual Biography of the Writer and Philosopher Susan Taubes (1928–1969), ed. Christina Pareigis (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, München, 2014).

4.   Susan Sontag, as cited by Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor, Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions (Cambridge University Press 2013), 219.

Against the Interpretation of Susan

Tuesday November 6

SUSAN RELEASED HER GRIP on the handle of her red leather suitcase. After a long hesitation, she let go of her breath too.

As the last of the warm air from her body pushed through the heat of her childhood bedroom, Susan was wracked with wheezing coughs – the severity of which she hadn’t felt in a year. As she was doubled over and heaving, a few stray flies tried to pass into her mouth, also bruised and disorientated by the heat. Little wilted blossoms. The cicadas screamed into the blue outside.

Her coughing could only mean one thing: after a year of being away, her lungs had become unaccustomed to the cotton dust in the air here. She had become a Non-Local. An Outsider.

At this thought, she fist-pumped the air triumphantly, knocking the lightbulb above her head that she had painted purple at age sixteen. The swinging light caught her reflection in the dressing-table mirror and she leaned in to inspect it. Back and forth, the arcs of light from the swooping bulb traversed her features. There was a perceptible difference there in her face – and the difference was something more than the eyeliner she had smeared on, badly, and the bun she had forced her hair up into, in the hope of freshening herself up; making it a little less obvious to her parents that she hadn’t slept last night. And it wasn’t just the swinging film-noir light, with the power to make even Susan look exotic. There really was suddenly something there in her face to look at, to take in.

In her nineteen years spent here dipping sheep and sorting cotton (in between sticking her nose in parentally-unapproved books), Susan had never felt even remotely desired. But after what happened to her on the train journey last night, and realising now that she would never be at home in this flyblown town again, Susan felt a new rush between her legs. This something about her face was proof that she was becoming some kind of mystery, she was thinking, some kind of mystery, even to herself. She swung her gaze to the red suitcase by the door.

The vision of it, standing at the ready by the doorway, stormed her stomach with butterflies. Suitcase in hand, hair flying in the wind, boots kicking up red dust… its presence conjured an idealised, windswept vision of the new Susan. This Susan could, suitcase in hand, disappear into the dunes beyond the town. Leave no trace. The thought momentarily brought back that rush between her legs.She unclasped the brass buckles on the suitcase and let the case fall open to the carpet. A gust of air from her room in the city, far far away, another life, another universe, spilled out with her ill-tempered clothes. Second-hand trousers, belts and shirts stained from their previous owners hung in packs on the floor like her stoned city friends. A dank beer stain on her favourite jeans laughed pungently in her face, reminding her of the bars she wouldn’t be going to, of the parties she wouldn’t be having, for the next three months while she helped out here for bushfire season.

Overwhelmed by the mangled mess around her stockinged feet, she dived her hand in to retrieve her notebook, then impulsively scooped the hump of clothes back inside the case. She closed the clasp once more with a decisive click; not yet ready to unpack. Let there be just a little longer that I can hold onto the feeling of the city, and of last night.

Her palm had left a sweat patch on the suitcase handle.

Wednesday November 7

SUSAN WOKE BEFORE DAWN, as if jet-lagged. As if her hometown were in a different time zone to the city. Not having showered for two days, her hair and skin gave off an acrid odour that both repulsed and thrilled her, and she smiled at remembering that she was most probably already falling in love.

Through half-closed eyes, the colours of the room, drenched in the predawn glow, reflected across the dunes, took on sepia tones that deepened as the sun approached. All was soft around the edges as if Susan had smeared her skin across the lens of her memory. But this was no sebum-coated memory, this was here and now – and Susan was slowly realising there was indeed something covering everything. Every curve and angle of her room was smothered in a thick layer of something.

All at once, her body ached into the reality of her surroundings. She rubbed at her eyes then immediately recoiled from the pain. Her fingertips against her eyelids were like scourers scrubbing at a fry pan.

She peered at her hands in the meagre light and realised that they, and everything else in this room, were coated in orange sand. The sky’s sepia tones suddenly seemed ominous and Armageddon-like. Susan shook the last remaining fuzzies of sleep from her head and remembered. When a wind storm rages out in the desert dunes at night, anyone who sleeps with their windows open wakes with a dusting of sand over everything. Susan had gone to bed so early last night – collapsed under the sheets like a newly castrated sheep – that she had missed any storm warnings or rhyming couplets her mother often sang on summer nights to remind them of the dangers of the dunes. Her poor mother must have taken her literally when she commanded her not to enter her room without knocking. She had slept, sprawled, window open, through the whole storm, and probably her mother’s knocking on the bedroom door too, without so much as stirring.

Red sky at night, sand devil’s delight…

Susan sat up and watched the tiny grains fall down her pungent body, from her face, from her hair. She had the sensation of being a tall, angry mountain, setting off an avalanche.

Not ready to deal with anything of this magnitude at this time of the morning, she simply jumped out the window and climbed down onto the back verandah, her gritty notebook in one hand. She would make the most of a quiet hour to herself before the others woke.

Outside, the flies had already started their drone. The cicadas were waking in chirps and shrieks. Cockatoos began their dawn chorus – their screeches like those of a pack of zombies on the hunt. Susan slumped against the hot back wall of the house and opened her little book.

A proper writer’s diary, she intoned to herself over the noise of the day beginning. A place where I build, part by part, the identity of myself as a writer.

Being nineteen, Susan hadn’t come up with this lofty concept for her notebook all on her own. Last semester’s critical -thinking class had exposed her to the essays of the writer who had now become dearest to her heart. This “Susan”, with whom she shared her first name, had become her private mentor from beyond the grave. Whom she had decided to address in her own “writer’s notebook”, as if this writer was hanging onto her every word and feeding back to her with insight, calmly and clearly. Susan pictured her beloved writer like her very own phone-sex operator (or her best rendition of one at least, based on itinerant internet ads she’d seen), working luxuriously from her bath, stretched back with a formica telephone receiver to her ear. Sure, plenty of academics, critics and other writers had had access to her other public line, the one that the writer would pick up when she really had to (and sit rigidly in an office chair, dressed in a suit, responding curtly). But it was the private line, which the writer would answer when she was naked in the bath, her hair piled in waves and her smile lithe and knowing, that only Susan had access to. This notion was made all the stronger when Susan read that the writer was, in fact, dead. So these insights I get from her, Susan thought to herself when she found out, these are her thoughts transmitted directly to me from beyond the grave… as if I were her young protégé.

It was this notion that led Susan to believe she had found her calling as both a writer and human being. It ignited this transformation of hers, beginning with her physicalisation of the writer. It all happened within a matter of weeks, before the first semester was even out. She kept her hair long and unwashed, she started wearing only second-hand loose slacks and men’s shirts in greys and blacks or denim. Sometimes she would allow herself a knee-length skirt. She found herself the biggest, most dramatic black-rimmed glasses and only took them off to shower or sleep. She started eating tuna sandwiches for breakfast, smoking and drinking only black coffee. She spent a good chunk of her scholarship money on seeing up to three films at the cinema per day. Ah, if only for the movie ticket prices of New York City in the 60s, she lamented one day when her movie habits meant she couldn’t afford a can of tuna. Within three weeks of her transformation, she started affecting a middle-class Manhattan accent, writing letters to a nonexistent infant son and husband, and considering a conversion to Judaism. Converting my sexuality, though, she told herself last week, will have to wait until next semester. There’s only so much the parents will laugh off in one visit.

I will cram my notebook, Susan wrote loftily on the next fresh page after today’s date, with statements on the will: the will to write, the will to love, the will to renounce love, the will to go on living. It is here I will be heroic to myself.

Susan allowed herself a pause to watch the dawn sky take on a colour and richness that, unexpectedly, gave her heart a little tremor. The high wind had now blown almost all of the dust from the atmosphere. It had been so long since she had seen the sun paint the sky in this way. This huge sky that let the red dunes caress its undersides red at daybreak and at dusk. And all day in between shone the infinite wild blue of her childhood.

I am a perceiving, suffering, struggling human being, Susan whispered earnestly to herself. Her eyes reflected the thrill of white meets blue above as if she were gazing out to a foamy sea.

Susan flicked over to the next page, ready to write this thought down, when she realised there was already something written on this page. And it wasn’t her handwriting. It was two lines, badly smudged, that looked like they had been scrawled using her eyeliner pencil. Her thick glasses left inside on the dresser, she squinted at the scrawl fiercely.

Her first thought was that “Susan”, the dead writer, had begun to make her presence felt physically.

Find me at the Royal Tiboorinka Hotel.

But no – this was something even more tangible than her Susan. This was undoubtedly Bridget – her Bridget from the train.

So Bridget hadn’t just run off after all. She had left Susan a key to her whereabouts. Her stomach surged like a new wave of wind through the dunes.

There’s no time to waste, Susan whispered to herself. “Susan” would want me to go to her right away.

Monday November 5

THE TRAIN WAS PULLING her away from her city life, back out west to the desert of her past. Her heart felt like a piece of blackened chewing gum wrenched from the steel track onto the unrelenting wheel of the train. She distracted herself with the passing trees, watching them let their leaves loose on the wind like those effortless, shiny women in hair commercials. Then, as the city began fading from view, she pulled her new book from her suitcase and settled into the sticky train seat to read.

It was a book of diaries from her favourite writer, which the writer had begun penning when she was around the same age as Susan was now. The blueprint to my future identity, she had convinced herself when she pulled it by the spine from the shelf at the bookstore. It had been jutting out at her like the trigger to open a secret passageway. And after she had begun immersing herself in the writer undressing between the pages, there was no turning back.

Susan let her fingers trail across the pages before she let her eyes get acquainted with the part she was up to. She was touching before looking, as if she wore a blindfold. Then she brought the pages to her face and took in their odour. The immediate smell of ink, then the deeper scent of the paper itself. Then lilting above this was the trace of smoke and cloves. She was hit by these scents, by these textures of the pages on her fingertips, and, beyond this, the fact that these pages didn’t care how she looked, even this close-up. The impact made itself known between her legs; she felt herself growing wet. Trembling, she opened her eyes to the words before her face and let her sight inhale them. Let them inhale her. Her eyes flickered through pages like running fingers through long strands of someone else’s hair.

The words were stiflingly, burningly personal – the writer stripping bare to the world. Something had been turned on inside her, and her veins coursed with a steaming liquid that no longer felt like her own blood. And then the feeling spread out to her surface, it overflowed, it stung her skin. And then it burned. The book was burning her from the inside out.

She felt as if her own thoughts were spilling onto the page; but the thoughts fell with grace into elegant sentences far more masterful than she could ever imagine mustering. It was as if the words were a verbal painting, direct from her mind’s eye, and her experiences were the mirror image of this writer’s experiences. The two were gazing back at each other, from either side of the pages, eyes blinking simultaneously. Susan the writer and Susan the reader.

This is it, Susan reassured herself feverishly, wiping her nose on her shirt sleeve (her allergies were playing up today, breathing in all this conditioned air), this is who I am becoming. She sighed heavily as if she had just climaxed.

Her continued path to self-revolution was stifled, however, by the person who had just sidled into the seat across the aisle.

She had just got on the train at Katoomba and had ploughed down the aisle in riding boots, narrating loudly as she filmed herself walking through the train with an old-fashioned black suitcase in one hand (like Susan’s but black) and an outdated video camera in the other – the type of which Susan had never laid eyes on before. Her voice and her boots rattled the train as if a stampede of sheep was hurtling through it.

The fingers gripping the camera were long and bony, black grease seeped into her badly bitten fingernails. Bitten just like Susan’s. As she plonked herself down in the seat across the aisle from Susan, Susan’” eyes began watering from the stranger’” smell of clove cigarettes, lingering in her black men’” jeans, scratched up leather jacket and stringy, collar-length black hair.

I’m just recording this moment, and you happen to be in it, the stranger had said to her, unnaturally loudly, presumably so the camera’” microphone would pick up her voice over the rattle of the train. She wasn’t making eye contact with Susan, just focusing the camera in her direction. She started humming something, as she kept filming. Susan’s oldest brother used to play tunes like this on his guitar on spring mornings to get him in the mood for docking lambs. Bruce Springsteen, she guessed.

Susan kept her eyes stuck firmly in her book, fuming at this imposition.

I was actually trying to read.

The stranger kept filming her.

Oh, I won’t be any bother. Just pretend I’m not here. She knocked her steelcapped boots against the footrests as she cackled at the ridiculousness of this.

Susan was now compelled to look up, furious, from her book. She inhaled, ready to lay the newly assertive Susan’s wrath on her.

Slowly, Susan put her book down. Slowly, the stranger put the camera down.

Their gazes met. Silence.

The burning gaze of the stranger tracked Susan, from the shuffling boots, all the way up the length of the laddered black tights, to the crumpled pencil skirt and the tucked in, too-big denim shirt. Her eyes hovered for a few moments at the level of Susan’s breasts, unassumingly hiding beneath the looseness of her shirt, then passed up further to her watering, bespectacled eyes. Susan coughed wetly.

With a sharp intake of breath, the stranger suddenly started filming her again, hiding herself once more behind her lens.

Susan sunk her eyes bashfully down to her own boots, which were sliding into a nervous little triangle of pigeon-toe. The stranger stayed hidden behind the camera, revealing only her quick-smiling cracked mouth beneath the viewfinder. She cleared her throat and spoke directly to Susan, quieter now.

What’re you reading? she asked. Her accent shot pictures of sun-drenched meadows and shivering pines and a rushing brook fed on by fat bears to Susan’s mind. A voice born in some epic landscape in the United States.

What’re you filming? Susan asked, mimicking the stranger’” tone inadvertently.

Venturing from the river under the nurturing coat of night,

following the intensifying scent of smoke.

After seemingly endless tracts of forest,

finally ruins of two small wooden houses sprung up into sight.

Dark wooden shells they were,

burnt out and caved in under the weight of many snows, many storms. The forest had taken its own back with new firs and ferns dwelling inside. Their harrowed shells conjured memories of earlier times

when all was, presumably, full of life and thriving.

Perhaps many bodies lived here, singing and working,

gathering and scribbling down all they knew so nothing was lost.

Warm bread, children laughing and skipping through the washing lines, long hair being brushed. The head, the body was flooded by images, sounds, smells of these times here. But this was impossible.

How could the body bring back such memories?

Non-existent memories from a time before remembering.

Shaking the head free of these impossibilities,

moving further in towards where the voices had come from

and where the smoke was coming from, now all was still.

Creeping closer, intricate fingers of pine trees

brushing past and framing this destruction,

the flames could be seen licking as high as the pointed roof.

Closer, the flames slipped down

so that their reach was only as high as the crude guttering.

Closer still, the flames only tickled above the windows,

and now, perceptibly retreated back within the windows

and left the white lace curtains intact,

allowing them to make their play with the breeze again.

The flames on the verandah were now extinguishing,

and all of its contents being left intact:

a wooden travelling case by the door,

a pair of trusted boots by the mat,

a Winter coat that had seen much snow,

flung on the wooden rocking chair, just so.

All the old belongings.

The heart raced with familiarity as the flames subsided.

All the familiar grooves and notches of the belongings still glowed true. Once more, they promised warmth

and the chance to set the wandering down a-time…

anchors to be dropped into the deep plushness of armchairs.

Before the eyes, the flames were sweeping back like a receding tide,

leaving all in its wake renewed, if a little shaken.

THE RIVER SUSTAINS US WITH PURPOSE, DIRECTION, RHYTHM, HYDRATION.

IT IS A MOTIONING RIBBON THAT WE HOLD ONTO WITH OUR EYES AND HEARTS AND SWIMMING ARMS.

IT SURROUNDS OUR BODIES, COOL, MAKING IT EASY TO FORGET THAT THE HEAT OF THE DESERT BEYOND IT IS TOO MUCH.

WE HAVE SIMPLY SLIPPED INSIDE THIS RIVER, LET OUR BODIES BE CARRIED BY IT.

Each night, the mountain that watches over us surges up tidally towards the moon and suspends itself. A peaking wave that never crashes.

Just what I see. Me and my camera are travelling right the way across this wide brown land of yours.

Susan could see that the stranger was focusing her shot right on her face now, capturing a long, lingering close-up of her. Susan distracted herself from any shyness, any sense of how un-photogenic she always felt, by letting her mind wander through what she pictured to be the stranger’s forest-fringed fields back home.

Pass it over, the stranger murmured, pulling focus on Susan’s eyes.

Susan extended her book across the aisle, trembling, to the stranger’s free hand. She could feel the stranger’” eyes moving from the viewfinder to look down on the book from her lanky height. Her eyes passed across it as if she were undressing it.

It was only a matter of hours, before they had even reached Dubbo, when the stranger was then undressing Susan, and cramming the two of them in a hot mess of buttons ripped off, jeans and pencil skirt crumpled in the puddles on the floor, and their sweating bodies – one with the quick hands and lips of a seasoned hunter, and the other a wide-eyed, wannabe runaway, stepping beyond her picket fence – slammed up against the vibrating train toilet wall.

Later, crowded up on the stranger’s bunk in the sleeper carriage, the stars wheeling past the tiny window so fast, so exhilaratingly, that Susan could’”e sworn they were fireworks, the stranger finally gave Susan her name.

Ever since I was nine and the kids at school learnt the word “frigid” and then figured out that it rhymed with Bridget, I’ve been trying to prove them all wrong.

Bridget laughed loud and passed Susan a hip flask of gin. She kept her eyes on her as Susan took a long, defiant swig.

Oh? Really? Susan gulped, trying not to cough from the fire the gin had started in her throat.

Bridget wrapped her hand around Susan’s, still clutching the flask, and took her own gulp of the gin now, long and slow, keeping her eyes locked to Susan’s all the while. No one had ever looked at Susan like this before, or at least not for this long. Bridget swallowed audibly and smacked her lips like a cowboy having his first beer after a good day’s lassooing.

Bridget let the flask of gin hang in Susan’s trembling hand and picked up the video camera. With a little bleep from the camera, she ejected the tape.

Have you ever held an actual videotape? Or were you born in the wrong decade?

She pressed the still-warm tape into Susan’s hand like the last remaining artefact from a dying tribe.

Their eyes met again and Susan wondered whether Bridget could hear her heart pounding above the relentless chaos of the train.

Bridget smiled as if answering Susan’s wondering. It was the first warm and genuine smile from her, and it burnt itself excruciatingly into Susan’” memory.

Well, now you have. Two firsts for you tonight, little Susie. In one night, you held your first videotape and your first woman.

Wednesday November 7

Her feet softened by city life, Susan had tears streaking her dust-coated face from all the bindies and burrs piercing her skin by the time she rounded the final bend. A century ago she might have been mistaken, by looks and by smell, for a street urchin. Today she appeared as a particularly badly-dressed, barely-of-age, town drunk.

Stopping at the town’s main intersection, bewildered locals passing her by in their utes, she found herself confronted by the presence of the once glorious Royal Tiboorinka Hotel.

It was the archetypal Australian outback hotel: standing to attention on a wide street corner, two levels of gaping verandahs – first-floor pub, secondfloor lodging rooms – with a painted blackboard boasting “Best burger’s this side of Bourke. Last beer’s for Three Hundred k’”s”.

Yes, the Old Girl had once been the radiant, stately pride of the oncethriving cotton and sheep town. But the paint which had once coloured it in cream, olive green and rich burgundy had cracked and fallen off like sunburned skin. And since countless droughts, followed by plague proportions of frogs when the droughts broke, the occasional desert sandstorm and then, of course, the beer-fuelled street shoot-outs over its lifetime, its stained-glass windows had been boarded up with plywood. Susan had been just down the road at the fish-and-chip shop during one of the shootouts in her Year 6 Easter school holidays. She’d been on a lot of roo and boar hunts as a kid, but somehow the bangs and screams of the street shooting were louder, more ear-shattering, when she knew it was human against human.

The sun was well and truly coming up now. Peeking a burning orange over the corrugated iron rooftop of the hotel. Susan would have to hurry if she didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

She leapt the back Beer Garden gate, a border collie following suit with a splash of drool, and crept in through the open kitchen door. She knew from the all-nighters she’d gotten away with here as a creeping teenager (in that year or two before she became bookish so she could escape to a university in Sydney), that there was a long-standing agreement with the drunks who couldn’t manage to stumble home of a night, that they could get into the hotel through the kitchen door and crash for a few hours on the downstairs

couch until the pub opened up again at 10am. Then they’d be roused awake, and down one more for the road before they were kicked out home.

How’s it goin’ this mornin’, Purple? the pub owner would roar into one of the drunk’”sears as he opened up for the day.

No use complainin’, would come the haunted reply as the drunk hauled himself from his puddle of various bodily fluids and paid off his tab.

Susan snuck through the quiet kitchen, fish and chips and hamburger grease still lingering from the night before, and into the hotel hallway. The border collie left her to make a beeline for one of the kitchen’s bins, overflowing with steaming, coagulated leftovers. Sure enough, the snoring of a drunk or two could be heard from the foyer couches. The carpet was sticky underfoot and what was left of the velvet curtains reeked of cigarette smoke and petrol fumes. Dead flies squished between Susan’” toes as she crept along. Soon, she reached the grand staircase. Most of its wooden bannister supports had been wrenched out, possibly for use as clubs during brawls, so the bannister itself swung and creaked a little as the hotel expanded in the blooming heat of the day.

Susan padded up the stairs, running the ragged fingertips of her hand not carrying the notebook along the aged patterned wallpaper, peeling off in sheaths like the paperbarks in the heat outside. A hanging lamp above her flickered then buzzed with a horde of mosquitoes trapped in its shade.

According to the plan Susan had envisaged on the way, once she had made it inside, she would find a way onto the verandah, then creep along it, peering in every hotel-room window she passed until she found Bridget’s. Then she would creep into bed with her and surprise her when she woke up and then – well, after that she didn’” have a plan.

All the hotel-room windows were closed of course. These people would have been up late enough to get the dust-storm warnings. But since the hotel hadn’t bothered to repair many of its curtains, most of the rooms were conveniently bared to any prying eyes that happened to be standing where she was.

Through the scrap of decaying lace on the first window, Susan spied an Indigenous man lying radiantly naked on a single bed. His forehead was beaded with sweat and the sheets were tangled around the cracked soles of his feet. A book lay sprawled open on the bedside table. Susan squinted through the lace at it – the title looked to her like Camus’ The Plague. In the second room, an English-looking couple in their seventies were lying in matching blue cotton pyjamas, the man wearing an eye mask and the woman wearing ear-plugs. The man was snoring like a lawnmower on a Sunday morning. The woman had rings on every finger, her flesh bulging around them in the heat. Susan had the sudden urge to squeeze all of the rings off, one by sweaty one, and set those bulging fingers free. The next room was just being used as storage for odds and ends. Susan’’”s eyes travelled across a broken coffee percolator and rusted bain-marie in the gloom. She drew breath when she realised the far corner of the room was stuffed full of copies of soft-porn magazines, circa 1970. She rubbed at the dirty glass and peered in closer. There must have been five-hundred magazines in there, stacked high to the ceiling. Susan imagined the collection had started out as just two, but before long they had coupled madly in the dank heat of the room, until they spawned more and more – swarming the room, multiplying themselves in a loose orgy of sticky pages filled with leg-spreads in denim cut-offs and erect nipples pressed against sheer nylon nighties.

In the next room, the “suite” on the east corner with French doors, a leather jacket was slung over the back of a chair with a false carelessness: as if it had been thrown several times, just to get the lie of it right. Susan moved closer to see the rest of the room, peering around the edge of the French doors through the soiled lace. A couple lay on the bed, legs entwined, long hair covering their faces in sweaty strands. The sheets were a hopeless mess beneath them. After a moment, Susan could see that these two were awake. One was undulating against the other, one muscled thigh grinding between her thighs. The woman turned over to spoon his body against hers while he continued grinding, his hand now between her legs. She had a blue and yellow butterfly tattooed on her hip and the word “Infinity” tattooed down her ribs. Her hair glowed almost white with bleach. As the undulations of their bodies escalated to a frenzy, the woman’s body let out a long, guttural sigh like a deflating blow-up doll. Then the man turned over on his back with satisfied laughter and pushed the strands of hair from his face.

At that moment, Susan realised that the man laughing was not a man at all. It was Bridget. Her Bridget from the train. Muscle-bound, sun-drenched, Bridget. Bridget lit a cigarette with one hand, then cupped one of her own small, tanned breasts with the other, and played idly with her nipple.

As if her stomach were suddenly pierced through with a hot, silent bullet, Susan fell hard against the hotel wall. Her knees buckled and her body slid limp to the splintered floorboards. She fell amongst the cobwebs and shattered glass, breathing hard, feeling all the blood drain from her and swamp in a warm pool around her. All over again, she was a broken toy that everyone was bored of playing with. That even she was bored of playing with. All those musky thoughts of her new Outsiderism wore from her skin like a perfume that never suited her anyway. A fluttering tightness spread across her chest. The pain of her invisibility returning churned in her guts.

After what seemed like the longest time, the town around her waking up for the day, going about their normalities, Susan snuck one last look to Bridget inside on the bed. She watched as Bridget lay her messy head back against the headboard like no time had passed for her at all, letting her cigarette droop slightly from her wet lips. She smiled slowly like the wide desert horizon. Smoke haloed her face.

Wednesday November 7

IT WAS JUST on high noon by the time Bridget and her camera found Susan on the riverbank.

Susan’s discarded sundress and underwear were crumpled behind her in the red dirt, and Susan herself was washed-up and mud-drenched by the water. Susan’s hair was flung in dirt-ridden strands along her pale freckled skin. Her bare back was still wet from the murky water, swiftly drying in the heat, already sunburning. She was curled foetus-like in the mud, naked: her chin, arms and knees tucked protectively into her chest.

Bridget watched Susan’s form from behind her camera’” lens and she felt, for a time, like David Attenborough, stalking a specimen that could at any moment do one of three things: expire there beached on the mud (if she hadn’” already); wake up and come at her, hungry from hibernation; or wake up and run forever from sight, leaving little proof that her strange fragile species had ever existed. Bridget took her time, waiting, watchful behind the paperbarks with her camera, as Susan finally drew breath, then, even more slowly, released it. Relieved that she was at least breathing, Bridget watched as Susan erupted uncontrollably into sobbing, there on the riverbank.

When the sobbing finally left her body, Susan sat up abruptly to finish her last notebook entry.

There is something between us that defies all interpretation, like any work of art that defies its interpreters.

I –

Susan sat up and clutched her diary to her chest. After a moment, she threw the pen disgustedly up into the blue sky, squinting in the sun. She reached out a hand twisted with river reeds to shade her bloodshot eyes and watch the arc of the pen back down to the red dust.

Susan drew her scratched-up knees to her chest, inadvertently exposing her nakedness to the world. She took a long drag of the cigarette she’d taken from one of the barflies, then ashed the last of it into her book with a shrug.

She melted down into the riverbank and her thoughts trailed off into nothingness. She was relieved to see that the blood on her shins from hauling herself out of one of the hotel’s windows had dried.

Then with a deep breath, she moved from the riverbank, mud all over her naked skin. She strode to the water’s edge and roughly hurled her notebook into the murky water. A quiet smile spread itself across her lips.

Susan’s guts swayed as if she were standing at the edge of a windy cliff face. Then, without another hesitation, she slipped herself into the thick water, with the reeds and eels and her favourite book floating face down.

There was a Bruce Springsteen song on Susan’s lips. One of her brothers had been singing it last night after dinner. The same one that Bridget had been singing on the train. Susan sang as she swam, her eyes closed serenely. All her fumbling awkwardness dissolved, for this moment, in the river around her. Her book slipped away with the current, down the weir and far from view.

Still hidden in the scrappy paperbarks, Bridget filmed Susan swimming gloriously for a few moments. Then she packed her camera away and picked up her suitcase, gripping hard on the painted wooden handle. She took a step towards the road. Heat shimmered from it, shining in silken, ungraspable waves from a distance she couldn’t comprehend.

Then, she let go of her breath, put the suitcase down and released her grip on the wooden handle. She turned back towards Susan swimming in the river.

Sweat glistened on the handle from her palm.

The Art of Non-Productivity

(according to W.G. Sebald)

In that moment I was both utterly liberated and deeply despondent, more so than any other time… I had not a single thought in my head. With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew even greater and the silence more profound.i

What is it about periods of non-productivity that scare us so much? Perhaps it is the same thing that sometimes scares us about silence: there is suddenly nothing to distract us from ourselves, to distance us from the workings of our own minds.

W.G.Sebald, the German-born writer who achieved rapid worldwide acclaim while remaining a self-confessed literary exile before his sudden death by car accident in 2001, penned the above lament during his now famous English coastal pilgrimage in 1992. What was initially an escape strategy from the eerie calm that followed his completion of a large body of work, Sebald’s on-foot journey along the Suffolk coast resulted in providing the meandering structure for what is now considered one of his most important literary works, The Rings of Saturn. Essentially, what began as Sebald’s attempt to run away from the impending emptiness of his nonproductivity ended up as his major literary achievement.

Sebald is best known for his historical literary prose, intermingled with photography and haunted intellectually by the Holocaust and World War II. Journeys of one kind or another are at the heart of all Sebald’s narratives: the lives of his narrators or protagonists are always in some way displaced. Part-documentarian, part-memoirist, part-poet, he single-handedly created a literary genre all his own. In a sense, the longing evident in much of his writing for a metaphysical island where an elusive childhood sense of home still exists, manifested itself into a literary island populated only by Sebald, melancholy, and his books.

Rather than leaving his readers with a sense of disconnection or isolation from the workings of his mind, however, Sebald’s legacy left us with the sense of a man whose writings stemming out of lostness – such as The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz and Vertigo – are imbued with the affective wanderings of a mind just as confused, pained and empty as any of ours. In this way, we can find a human connection with Sebald – he becomes a beacon to guide us through our shared fog. Even the knowledge that Sebald’” death came through a freak accident, leaving his papers literally scattered and his affairs in disarray, seems poetically apt to his legacy of lostness.

In her essay ‘“Loosed in Translation’”, novelist and writer Ali Smith focuses on ‘“what gets lost, what gets found, what gets loosed, freed, liberated in the work of Sebald’”.ii Through melancholy, through silence, through wandering, what of ourselves is lost, loosed, freed through our own work and, most tellingly, through our own times of non-productivity? How do we enable ourselves to become at ease enough to wander in our times of non-productivity without a map, blissfully open, into unfamiliar terrain?

So that the fear is, that if you allow yourself to become a writer the catastrophe will be like an avalanche, whereas if you keep walking, you might be ok.iii

Over time, we have de-centralised foot-travel from our existence. Making a significant journey on foot has become something of an adventure sport, left to the professional mountain climbers and retiree hikers. Sebald, on the contrary, used his on-foot journeys as a way to confront, non-linearly, the presence of this silence and emptiness within him. This manifested, of course, in his writing: his serpentine process of constructing the self through entering the Other as he walked (whether that Other manifested as a darting hare he encountered along the path or a deserted, crumbling hotel). Reaching further, he used these identity fragments to piece together his thought patterns on historical events as disparate as colonialism in the Congo, or the overfishing of herring. In The Rings of Saturn, each essay begins in the stillness of his physical encounters – dilapidated manor houses, beaches bereft of human life – and ends in a kind of historical inferno of thought. This structure is repeated throughout, with the same dialectic tension as within a circle, until he reveals the self and history not as fixed but as movements; often cyclical. In this way, Sebald uses the power of repetitive language to pre-suppose the eternal return of difference, unfolding the illusion of a cohesive subject. Both Sebald’s cities and the wild places he wrote about are where continual self-renewal and never-ending self-destruction are one and the same, in constant cycle. ‘“Cities carry the past and they obliterate it’”iv, as Gillian Beer writes. The distant place you are walking towards might be entirely altered or even missing by the time you get there, just as you yourself might be.

Obsessed by repetition, it follows that Sebald’s work would be concerned with memory, melancholy and mourning – both in a personal and a historical sense. According to Freud, once a traumatic event happens, the natural process is mourning: a set period of time where one attempts to sever the traumatic association from the person or place. Melancholy, on the other hand, has no end point and, also according to Freud, is the pathological result of being unable to mourn. Sebald sees melancholy not as a sickness but as a natural result of being unable to reintegrate into society after a trauma or displacement. For him it goes beyond the individual to a place of post-memory, which pervades one’” life as a real memory even if one didn’t directly experience the trauma, such as the trauma felt by the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. This is a feeling of an inexplicable sense of loss: why am I feeling so attached to a memory of something I didn’t directly experience? This is the type of melancholy which seeped into all of Sebald’s work and wanderings… like the sound of the sea in a shell pervading the senses until it becomes an overbearing, oppressive state of mind.

Sebald saw his state of mind as represented by the endlessly winding paths he walked. He wrote that he dreamt that their patterns were a crosssection of his brain. Walking in this way, thinking of his brain in this way, he allowed himself to become a kind of animal – deferring his moment of self-representation by getting himself lost allowed him to be better able to represent himself, to undergo a metamorphosis. In this way, the moving identity of the self unfolded and all that is left now are the cocoons of the text to represent him, with the constant possibility of change.

As J.M. Coetzee notes, Sebald’s first long prose work, Vertigo (1990), emphasises the apocalyptic dimension of this mental crisis:

In the final section of the book the ‘I’”narrator takes a trip to his birthplace, the town of W. There, as he pores over a clutter of objects in a dusty attic, a flood of memories is released, followed by intimations that retribution is about to be visited on the town. Fearing madness, he flees. The homeward trip through southern Germany is eerie. The landscape has an alien air; people at the train station look like refugees from doomed cities; before his eyes someone reads a book that, as his later bibliographical researches prove, does not exist.v

Filling his prose with cities of the dead and post-apocalyptic landscapes, Sebald was endlessly fascinated by those institutions which record our dying civilisation in some way: the artist’s studio, the graveyard, the library, the museum, the pawnshop, the second-hand shop (where Sebald was in the habit of picking up old photos), the country house, the attic. He paid visits to them in periods of non-productivity, collecting and hoarding, as if through these habits, along with freezing moments in time with his photographs, he could somehow stop the flow of history towards our ultimate destruction. Or, at the very least, arrest the nature of his own self-destructiveness.

In his novel Austerlitz, Sebald writes:

I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, between which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead.vi

This conceit of time to another reality seems threatening because it at first appears to be a form of self-destructiveness, allowing gaps in the self’s “reality” to open up. These gaps let in that strange tickle of being haunted by what cannot be seen, only felt. Letting these gaps open up is a way of letting go of the illusion of the apparent wholeness of the self – not a selfdestructiveness at all, but rather a greater self-awareness. It relates back to this fear of the apparent emptiness of non-productivity, the place where this self-awareness must be confronted because there is no longer any noise, any distractions. What Sebald speaks of specifically in Austerlitz is to do with the letting go of time – or at least the linearity of time – to another potency (or in Roland Barthes’”words an “emanation of a past reality”vii) not bound by the laws of minutes and hours and days. In the words of Freud, this is a way of connecting waking fantasy with cultural production – as he puts it, working towards appeasing our inner “unquiet ghosts”viii in order to get closer to the reality of the self.

The “ghost state” of non-productivity, once we appease it, can become a meditative state: not one of simply allowing the mind to become dull and all mental processes to grind to a halt, but a state of more subtle awareness where the mind can be washed clean and sharpened anew with greater self-knowledge. Without these downtimes, these times not bound by the ticking clock, there’s a risk of exhaustion and eventual burn-out, leading to the precious creative powers becoming weakened and the self remaining a mystery.

As Susan Sontag notes on Sebald’s own temporary collapse:

The whole of The Rings of Saturn is the account of this walking trip undertaken to dispel emptiness. For whereas the traditional tour brought one close to nature, here it measures degrees of devastation, and the opening of the book tells us that the narrator was so overcome by ‘the traces of destruction’ he encountered that, a year to the day after beginning his tour, he was taken to a hospital in Norwich ‘in a state of almost total immobility.’ix

As if trapped deep within the minotaur’s labyrinth, sometimes the more we discover as we create art, as we write, or as we wander, the more, proportionately, our ignorance can feel as if it’” increasing. Similarly, Sebald’” writings do not always fill holes in our knowledge, they create more gaps, more questions. Rather than collapsing under the weight of this, we can redeem it by embracing the very nature of the gaps and the cracks to allow new or dormant knowledge to bubble up to the surface, like bewildered frogs after a long drought. By doing so, we acknowledge our ever-moving, unfixed, incomplete self. Allowing ourselves this knowledge in periods of non-productivity, we allow ourselves to see that it is always within our own capacity to revive, rather than flag, the creative powers – preparing us or even paving the way (such as in the case of Sebald’” The Rings of Saturn) for when next we are thrown into an intense period of productivity, with a sense of self ready to embrace whatever is to come.

It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last.x

i.   W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (New Directions Books, 1995).

ii.  Ali Smith, ‘“Loosed in Translation’”, in After Sebald: Essays and Illuminations (Vintage Press, 2014).

iii.  From the film Patience (After Sebald), directed by Grant Gee, 2012.

iv.  Gillian Beer, ‘“Sebald in the City’”, in After Sebald: Essays and Illuminations.

v.   J.M. Coetzee, ‘“Inner Workings’” in After Sebald: Essays and Illuminations.

vi.  W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2001).Clive‘’: Essays and Illuminations.

vii.   Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (Vintage Press, 2000).

viii.  Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism (Knopf, 1939).

ix.   Susan Sontag, ‘“A Mind in Mourning’”, Times Literary Supplement 5056 (25 February 2000): 3–4.

x.   W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Penguin Books, 2001).

LRS

LUCA DABBLED IN PLAYGROUND witchcraft.

From behind clustered fir trees, spells rasped from her narrow white throat, scratched in parallel lines with bitten fingernails. The other kids called their wishes to her and their curses, from down below. Their voices sailed up on opposing breezes from the sea and the mountains, sounding disowned. Luca remained within, up on her hill, pretending to be blind. In between spells she carved her initials, the same as her father’s, into the giving skin of her most precious fir tree. LRS. She thought the word forever aloud. A raven-wail. Forever was how long her father would be away at sea. Then she gulped down a self-made potion and danced up on her hill until the sun went down and the other kids went home.

*

Flash forwards. The darkroom and the studio are her places to dabble now.

Light burns in eyes on skin beneath fingers scanned with the lightest touch and lifting the second tiny letter from underneath her nail. Last week it was L. Today it was R. Next week it would be S.

What does it all mean? Luca whispers from her chemical baths at night, knowing full well. Too past. Not past enough.

By daylight, in the studio, light flares are memories behind her eyes; every click a climax, every shot an opening, a wound heaved open and made fresh with her blood. Blood on her hands that hold, shaking, the camera. Blood that drips warm down onto her photographic subject. The subject that claims she loves Luca.

Today she straddles this subject, what’s-her-name, and blood drips down on her from above. She is both painting and photographing her subject at once in the same rich hue of her insides. Pushing her subject closer and closer to the polished concrete ground until her bare back is chilled by its hardness and Luca is warmed by her subject’” pliability. Her subject releases tension and pain in bursts and gasps and bucks – a breaking horse. Sweat on the flank, breath heaving from the ribs. Legs trembling from the strain. Whites of the eyes in the afterglow of flash, of whir, of the preciousness of real film still passing through the camera. A chemical overcoming of light.

Goosebumps spread from polished concrete to skin stretched hard over polished bones. Bones in such close contact with skin as to cause bruising all over. Luca can’t help but capture her subject’s bruises in lips pressed to them. Then shots of them stolen in available light to make the most of the discolourations. The greens and browns blooming across the white skin. The growing toxicity of a drowned body. The sea seeps in and stains it from the inside out. The salty tangles, the muddy bed, the vast spills of oil, the deepest recesses filled with creatures existing phosphorescently, spreading within the falling body and manifesting in bruises on the surface of skin.

Luca captures her subject on film as a body of water beginning in its crevices, with underwater reeds entwined in its long, oil-slicked hair, with ancient crusts of shells crawling from its toenails and tentacles of unnamed beasts now its fingers. Its scent is the breaking of ice-sheets with snow-teeth. Its saliva is the very foam of sea; its tongue, now in her mouth, the rippling tide behind the foamy waves. So long has Luca not tasted this ocean in her mouth, so long has she not gulped it down. It offers its mouths to her, salty, and heaving with the lilt and toss of tides. The concrete beneath devolves to sand washed by timelessness. The sand sucks softly down, a gulp inwards with the wave, an inhalation of two bodies within itself. Two missing liquid parts of itself beckon inside.

Once alone, the darkroom beckons, and Luca is bent to the task of swimming gloved hands in cold chemical baths. Her subject dances down there onto paper, underwater; face/body swims into two-dimensional being. Amorphous foetuses from a past without abjection. Teeth grows skin grows nails grow tongues grow eyeballs wet grows hair grows spiralled fingers grow blood, all there before her onto standard format matte, within the burning chemical bath. The cool bath that threatens to burn her through.

Luca hangs the photos up, one by one, her mutated births, on pegs her mother used to use on electrical wires serving as clotheslines that crisscrossed the family’s two-room apartment.

***

She was light enough, once, to hang from that clothesline with straining little hands, reaching the wire by climbing snowy boots on the kitchen table scarred with cigarette burns. Later she was tall enough to reach the wire just with the overturned washing basket, but heavy enough for the wire to dip so low as to feel it pulling hooks through the wall’s plaster and smokestained wallpaper. Once, a hook pulled through and the wallpaper tore a layer like the skin on Luca’s knee tore when the jagged-teeth boy from the grade above pushed her off her stolen bike. Beneath this layer of wall-skin, another could be seen. A corner of her father’s faded idea of the next best thing to a tropical island escape. The corner of an entire wall of tropical bliss – a mural – later hidden behind this layer of thick brownness; a sensible paper her mother used to pretend his escapism didn’”t exist. Luca pressed the corner back down with the lightest touch, making sure she could come back at any time and lift the corner once more for a peek underneath at tropical paradise.

Outside, the November snow had tread its way down from the mountain and scattered its white and grey scents across primary-coloured pitched roofs and stubbled berried hedges. Her boots for the snow were already too small but there was no way she would be handing them on to either of her sisters, or either of her brothers, no way. Her parents had bought them new last year, one of the advantages of being the oldest, and she wasn’t about to hand them down after one season, just to be dragged to the charity store to get a dirty old pair from some stranger’s feet. The smell of that place was like all the grandmothers in the world had died in there at once.

For too many years now, she was old enough to hang her own washing on that line. In the dark mornings she would force the wooden pegs open one by one and decorate the living room with the cotton pieces of her underwear and pretend they were colourful party lanterns hanging over the heads of sun-kissed party-people, dancing on soft warm sand. Her brothers and sisters slept soundly beneath her decorations, not yet tall enough to hang up their own washing. She would hear the fog horns of the big hulking ships down in the bay and want the wind from the horizon on her cheeks. That physical sensation of air from other lands on her skin. Her father got to ride the ships every day. Eyes on the horizon, deep in piles of leaping fish, letting himself be taken out to sea.

One day he would let himself be taken somewhere that he would be less needed. The one who needed him most, his daughter with the faraway eyes, had suddenly turned sixteen. He promised Luca the night before every journey that would take him away for more than a day, that he would get the boys to sound the foghorn an even three times before the ship pulled away from shore, just so she would know.

But how will I know where you’re going? she would whisper to him under the covers by torchlight before he crept into his own bed across the hall. And her brothers and sisters in the room would kick and moan and grind their teeth in their dreams.

How can any of us know where we’re going?

***

Luca plucks one of the still-wet photos from the line. When her eyes adjust to the image, the old peg falls to the floor – slips out of her suddenly trembling fingers. In the red light, she can see the detail of goosebumps along her subject’s curving back. And in the corner of the image, on the polished concrete, she can see the edge of her father’s wet-weather boot. The one with the non-stick tread on the bottom. Same shoe size as she. Her father who was only sixteen when she was born. Was her age now when he left. His hands were cut-up all the time from scaling fish. Sometimes the scales caught beneath his fingernails gave the impression of a second set of nails growing there, translucent and delicate; marinely. She pulls her second image from the bath and her father’” double-nailed hands appear, resting on the bare shoulders of her subject, raised and shivered by a sea breeze that was never there.

***

The mist in December. The back of his head. The back of the truck. Too early to be thinking. The back of his head, no face. Hands tucked in angry-warm pockets. Door slamming. Someone else’s motor running, someone who’” never visited, this sound of the motor was unfamiliar. A grunt and whir of gravel coated in ice. The road wet reflecting the street lights. Not seeing who was beside him in the truck, who was driving him away. Red taillights. Fade out.

Later, as night fell and dinner got cold, three blasts of the fog horn rang across the bay. His attempted goodbye. Luca left the dinner table immediately with tears escaping down her cheeks. She unravelled the map of the world she kept under her bed (wall space was at a premium). She drew an L at the mouth of their bay. She drew an R halfway round the world, somewhere in the deserts of Morocco. She drew the S, their third shared initial, in the middle of Madagascar. The polar opposite of where he was needed. The polar opposite of where his daughter was. She wrapped up the map again, making no effort to follow the creases of where it had always been creased. The back of his head and not knowing who was driving him away made her hot. None of his last words were goodbye. Red taillights.

By the scale of her map, a year later when she had grown into his boots, she had moved a few millimetres away from their house. She found a place in town where she could get by on her own, selling warm bread to people on their way to work in the mornings who said that she was the most beautiful baker they had ever seen.

***

He was thirty-two when he demoted himself, in her mind, to just a back of a head and disappearing taillights. Now she is thirty-two. She draws the third image of her subject from the darkroom bath. Perhaps she should stop referring to her as just the “subject” in her photos. Perhaps she should try to use her name. What did the subject even look like, in “real life” without the camera lens in between them? She couldn’t even form a picture in her mind. Her father could be seen in the developing image again. Putting his hands on her subject’” shoulders. His boots now creeping closer to her subject’” naked back. The sea water from his hair now dripping down onto her subject’” bare chest. His morning breath is fogging up the lens and blurring the subject altogether.

In the last image that Luca hangs on the line, the nascent curve of the subject’s belly is taken over by a curl of steam from the colossal pipes of the ship he left on. The three sounds of the horn, even and clear, ring out through the darkroom as if the sun had just gone down in there for the evening. Another day’” haul. The photo’” subject – her lips, her obsessions and words of love for Luca – are becoming lost in the fog. She is drifting down from the high hull of the ship into the blur. The subject is asleep, she has been pushed out of Luca’” bed by hands ripped with fish scales. And she is still sleeping on her way down to break the surface of an ice-ridden sea northwards she has never visited. The ship will push out, far away south from the harbour’” nestle, and out to the open sea. The subject will break the ice and then the sea and not awaken until she is so far beneath the waves that it will be too late. Her words of love for Luca have lost their meaning on ears that hear only the sounds of obscurity and distance and loss. Her words are distorted by depth and suffer the bends as they fall heavier. They will never surface.

Up there, on the ship which has expelled the subject, is Luca. Up on deck, her camera tied tightly around her throat, she is rasping spells, rasping forever. She captures the wind’s savagery, letting her subject drift away. Her ship will follow her father’” and head south, safe and warm, to places where she isn’” needed, to be amongst people who will never need her. At least not like the subject needs her. They will smile in her photographs. They will dance against the background of tropical paradise as if it is nothing but a wall mural.

The subject, what’s-her-name, before she was blinded by lack, found a letter underneath her fingernail and she extracted it gingerly in the dark water.

It was the letter L. The first in a series of three letters she will find beneath her fingernails in her long underwater travels. She runs her hands through reeds down here; like the rippling of Luca’s hair. The reeds make her bleed into the water and she wonders why Luca never said goodbye.

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Copyright © Siouxzi Connor 2016

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