"The evening I offer you the easy aspirin of death
Boots on the golden age of landscape
You don't understand when I've
Smelled the smell of ... I don't know
Now from opposite sides of the drawing
The nut of his birthday
..."

John Ashbery, from "Night"

twitching meditation

electric light lids snibbed at tipping point, lashes buzzing, dark inner of the cheeks ok there goes shin, chin going shape of a sad domino tipping I'm in my face, the lit up dark white oxygen pad hits back of the case shape of a grin ace face I'm in my face

not sure what I saw today. I had moods. a curse of two or three years was lifted! I was empty of knowledge and deserved expulsion. I was ready, with a future. I found what was in front of me and began to suck, hard. the teat was dry. the teat overflowed, the flavour was closed, unavailable to me. floods touched the feet of loved ones. the population grew. the weather grew and grew. I was in that. 

I've been immersed, stressed, in the land of lateness - but also deep in work, working from somewhere between 12 and 3 to 11 and 1 each day/night. Eyes sore, arms aching, but that job is done now and today I surfaced, back to the beautiful world, and N, and people to lunch with. It's good. Now I'm so thirsty to read, my poor bare plot won't soak up the sun. 

Crocodile Climate Refugee Escapes to Equator in Dream

I dreamed that N and I had moved into a lovely bungalow on the water - there was a railed jetty/walkway out the back that connected us to our neighbours. It had been my parents' place, or at least their neighbourhood, but because of their financial trouble they had moved on. A colleague, who was about to lose his job, lived along the jetty.

We'd had a housewarming party the night before; my parents had invited all their friends and requested angpao/red packets for money gifts. Perhaps I was even pregnant. It was the day after the party and I went to our back door to look for the kitten that used to live here with the previous family. She was there but had been scared away by a strange, rangy husky lurking at the door. It looked like a predator and I tried to shoo it off but when it lay down on the dog bed I knew it was one of the family animals too. I hoped it hadn't eaten the kitten.

I went inside to open the angpao and sooner or later the kitten came to the front door. I was delighted - that we lived in this nice place, that the kitten was going to stay with us. I lay on the floor on cushions, opening the red packets and cuddling with the cat. Several people had given us a hundred dollars and I was feeling a little uncomfortable about that - I knew it wasn't a rich area and wondered if they'd felt pressured by my parents.

I opened one from Maureen and was puzzling over it. There was a hundred dollars, a couple of gift certificates and the details of her bank account. It seemed like I was supposed to take more money out but maybe she wanted to put the money back in? She wasn't rich, had her own family. Just then she came up the walk from the beach to visit. I leaped up to hug her in gratitude but she was not responsive. We started talking about my colleague, A, who she'd just been to see.

He wasn't doing too well, she said. "He had another 'bubble' a couple of weeks ago and now he's not coping with the work situation". By 'bubble' she meant aneurism - he'd had a few in the past. I shrugged a little. I decided not to care about him a while ago because of the way he was about his job, and because he probably was going to get fired.

We talked about the weather, how fish stock were dying and there was a 'ling' tide. "What's that?" I asked, but N laughed and pointed out the window - "There it is". I wasn't sure what he meant - it was high tide, and perhaps 'ling' tide meant that there would be no more low tide.

Maureen's family were out there on the jetty. Just as I looked out a huge crocodile leaped out of the water and snapped. It was frightening but beautiful too, emerald green. "Did you see that? Did you see it?!" Maureen's daughter or partner and kids were out there on the jetty and I saw they were in a state of chaos. The mother had recoiled in fear at the crocodile, but at the same time one of the children hadn't seen and was still playing, was mid-bounce. Somehow he got over the wrong side of the barrier and fell in the water. There was a thrashing - he was being eaten. The family were screaming - another of the children reached her arm over to somehow try to reach him but the crocodile was out of the water again. And neatly tucked her arm into her own mouth before devouring her, head first, too. There was blood.

I thought of the solutions - there was no gun, no help would get here in time. "Get inside", I started screaming. "Get inside, get inside, get inside."

I know I shouldn't go on facebook when I'm sad and drunk.

tonight I wound up looking at pictures of the old house - I felt like it would help to stop me being homesick. and since the privacy settings were adjusted once again I've been able to look at the old bitch's photos, though I can't see her wall and I'm barred from leaving her messages.

I saw they've rebuilt the bridge over the front pond.  they've got lambs in the front paddock, and their grandchildren come over to feed the lambs with bottles. it's their pond, their paddock, their place now. they can raise hyenas there if they want to, suckle them from the old bitch's teat.

but then I saw the one of the grandchildren having a picnic with a china teaset. It was my china teaset, my grandmother's. was locked in the garage for us to retrieve, but once the bank signed over the title early we had no chance. we borrowed money from the last people we could to go up there. last loan forever. and they already had the cops at the gate. the title was signed, the assignee had been informed, and any possessions left on the property were a matter for the courts.

the next photo had the kids in it too, and, to my confusion, something tagged Lily: a pig, I figured out, after staring for a while. The kids were draped over it, cuddling it, all in their togs, because the pig was reclined in my daughters paddling pool.

And there was the Bishop, too, to round things off. Beaming jauntily behind them, with a hand on each of the granddaughter's heads. Bishop Brian Axle of Shining Hill Church. And Lily the pig. In my daughter's paddling pool.

I forgot how nice it is to write critically and actually find, on a second or third or fourth go round, a way of saying the sentence that means something you believe and even something that interests you or is graceful. It's still horrible, though, all the way up to that point and especially if you have to stop before that point. saying ignorant things, wrong things, obvious naive things, mean things. no more mean things.

N describes me writing a paper as much like someone trying to shit lego bricks. big ones, not little ones. at least they feel big on the way out. much like that. there must be an easier way. 

:D

"I am also worried about the amount of gynergy this issue is taking to deal with, when the patriarchal backlash continues to strengthen and grow behind the scenes. Sometimes I feel as though the issue of transsexualism is operating as a feint, a frontal attack meant to exhaust us while the actual bulk of the patriarchal forces mass at our flanks and behind us. The patriarchy seems to operate like a headless but very effective war machine, extending its reach and protecting its perogatives. "

Nah, transsexualism is totally the issue. For sure!

I got a lot done yesterday but have dragged around today and can't see that I'll get this paper finished tomorrow. fuck fuck fuck. I wonder if I will ever get hold of how to do this properly. it's bitter doing it this way, embarrassing, and embarrassing to think it might just be beyond my capabilities. it seems that always I'm either overreaching and outside what I honestly know, or I'm stating the tedious obvious. 

out in the trees after rain - all the mosses and lichens swell up and GLOW - bright orange and green and white, soft pink, soft grey...a tree is a home, holding dozens of other lives, each with its own peculiar texture and shape...

restless since morning, hard to focus... except for a few moments in the shade to watch a brown-throated sunbird on the red button ginger, attending to each stem. the stems are tight, shiningly budded, ready to erupt into flower. the bird with his iridescent yellow breast takes his time, like he's a curious doctor in a quiet ward on a quiet day.

all day there was a strong wind keeping things cool... in the morning I went to the open air cafe to write, got caught up instead with the hard wind and sun, the feeling from another land that one must take things inside before the storm comes. but it was just wind, no clouds, the raintrees waving to their reflections in the glass-topped tables, bright blue sky behind them...

I took my own teabag to the cafe and asked for hot water. tall young japanese guy at the counter, new. helpless supplicant to the words - 'hot water only. hot water' - like a toddler, trying it out, half-smiling but absorbed in the feel. I knew he had never said that exact phrase before.

then at the library, the old lean librarian, combover, fastidious but so much calmer than when he started two years ago, when every anomaly was a source of panic. he looks for a way to tell me in English that I can take a reserve book out for more than two hours now, can 'go back', 'can now till tomorrow, even go back one till tomorrow.' this is clear, it's okay...

I sit here and there with my paper all day and all night and it seems impossible to move blocks of words around like that. that their true legitimate orders are beyond me, and I can only gesture in a kind of wrongness towards what seems so conceptually simple, in some other language unknown but felt. 

He is always lurking around asking questions, and the questions often leave us puzzled and annoyed. None of the other recruits ask these questions in the same way. The new nurses are usually humbled by ignorance for no more than a week, blushing at the front desk, 'oh, sorry to bother you, but one more stupid question' - and then soon enough they make a show, do something without asking, find some other pathway, make a wrong decision with feisty pride and stick to it.

He comes back to the desk, or calls again and again, apologising, panicking. He needs to borrow the spare equipment because his has not been recharged correctly, he cannot see how he can make a shift because he has not yet been paid, the bank won't process his pay because of a problem with his account.

I was pretty sure from the beginning that he was carrying a parasite. Because it's unheard of here I didn't say anything - well, only joked with the others, knowing they'd never take it seriously, and hardly able to believe it myself. 'He acts like he's a bug carrier!'

'Ha, yes, imagine that. God, a nurse with bugs, here - they'd kill us all!'

Problem is, on Thursday he came to the desk before his shift and I was the only one there. His hands were shaking while he checked out the spare equipment, again, and he was sweating. There was a delay while the machine processed the check-out, and he swept his hair off his forehead in a frustrated, panicked gesture. And there were the bite marks, a neat and vicious row across his hairline. I was right.

I admit that my first instinct was to go to Shirlene and tell her, maybe just to say that I was right, or maybe to somehow off-load the sick, excited feeling I had at seeing those marks for the first time in such a long time.

But after I told her I wished I hadn't. She hadn't really wanted to know. I was lucky that her first and best instinct was to do nothing. Almost nothing. She went to her door and slammed it before telling me to shut the fuck up. 'We don't know,' she hissed, 'anything about this. I do not know anything, and you do not know anything. And because we do not know anything, nothing will be done, or said, by either of us, to anyone, including Brian.' And then she kicked me out. And now I am scheduled on weekend shifts for the rest of the month.

That was yesterday. This morning as I was trying to get to sleep I couldn't stop thinking about the bite marks, and wondering why I was excited. That wasn't good. Brian is a person. I used to care about people who suffered in this way. Perhaps the excitement was really a manifestation of fear. I wanted to say a prayer for him, for the person who was at the mercy of parasites in this place. Maybe I needed to begin with praying for myself, too, to assuage the fear. 'Lord I ask protection to keep evil from my door.' I said it over and over, trying to think of a next line, but got no further before I fell asleep.

I dreamed last night that N came to me and told me he had forgiven me. the feeling of relief and partnership was utter, and we held each other, like a completion of our marriage. Immediately I found myself in bed with C, who was saying 'I knew we should be together, we were married, you are the only woman I ever married'. I was agreeing with him, feeling that yes, this was the right place to be, and trying to say the same thing but vaguely remembering that it wasn't quite right after all. Then I remembered I had married four men, that I was not available, and so on. I don't remember all of what happened next but I had to put things right; and then there was a room at the end of the dream, and a small strawberry-haired girl of about four years old inside it. 

one of the new people has the most strange and lovely eyes - tawny brown with  - I swear - a completely natural sheen of blue, that catches the light sometimes.

talking about angsana trees, malaysian vs indian minah birds, flowers that open up their scent after dark.

-

I rode there the hard way, up the road in truck-and-bus traffic, before freaking out and stopping at a bus stop to reconsider. I discovered on the way home that on the far side there's a footpath all the way.

But I got there, and the cemetery was its peaceful self. A huge eagle was circling, many birds and insects singing in the late afternoon sun. Hot, as always, but on a bicycle you catch a beautiful wind. Lemony light, the sky all innocent. Parrots, and the bird that sounds like a creaking hinge, and the bird that sounds like a grief-struck farmer whistling a long-lost dog. The graves fall out in tight, higgledy-piggledy rows over many acres, concrete and tiled. There are few walking paths between them and very few live people to walk them. I see a couple of distant clusters of umbrellas over families who crouch and groom. One family wander out of the jungle carrying stems of jackfruit, back to a black car where a middle-aged woman waits, looking hot and tearful in her black dress.

I ride past the "Lawn Cemetery Section", with grassed plots for deaths from 2008 onwards. The plots are either extremely dishevelled or supremely trim, tiered in earth with miniature hedges squared around the plaques. A couple of guys cruise the aisles wielding whipper-snippers. Each of the well-tended graves sports a little advertisement for a grooming company - 'Ah Hock' or some other name and the phone numbers, in Chinese and English, all on a spiked tag like those that tell the prices of cakes in the supermarket.

I stopped to take a photo of the "Exhumed Remains Section", and the beautifully realist sculpted face on a nearby headstone. I hear a quiet voice approaching behind me - 'Excuse me miss, excuse me miss...'. Three men are shuffling along the road, two Indians in their thirties or forties, and one older Chinese guy, the one who is calling to me. They all look a little bit beaten. He has an imploring smile. "Even the dead cannot rest here!" he says, then asks where I'm from.

We walk and talk for a while, about the 30 year exhumation rule, how this is one of the last cemeteries. How there are so few places here to be peaceful like this - in the city it never stops. I comment that the taxi drivers don't like to come out here. 'No, it's too quiet,' he says. 'They don't want to get caught.' I say I've heard they are scared of ghosts out here and he laughs a little, says that taxi drivers come in good, bad and ugly, like everyone else.

He and his friends have come from a half-way house at the back of the cemetery. He's a gambler, a taxi driver. His friends are alcoholics. His life was fine, he says, he was going along fine and happy with life before the casino open. But now - it's bad for taxi drivers because they have too much time. His daughter made him come here - either that or split up the family. He's been in the half-way for three months now. He's not ready to leave because he feels a calling. The bible study, discipline, prayer. He's a Catholic, but the house volunteers are Methodists. They garden, and every afternoon at 4.30 they go for a walk.

He has longish, soft white hair and a small, soft face, at once lively and tired, acquiescent. He tells me about the Parsi cemetery and the Jewish cemetery along the road and we walk there. He's curious about the text outside the gate and is hoping I can read Yiddish, or that I have a friend who does, maybe... The sign says in English that the text is to be read if you have not entered a cemetery in a month. As we look at it together, unable to read further than the first instruction, I see a long grey feather fall from a tree.

Now I learn from the internet that the prayer is 'the blessing of asher yatzar eschem badin': http://www.jewish-funeral-guide.com/tradition/blessing-jewish-cemetery.htm

"...who fashioned you in justice, nourished and sustained you in justice, and caused you to die in justice."

That text seems first flat and meaningless, and then like a wormhole into a different dimensionality. A world where everything is complete, all events the completion of a perfect balance.

He said they'd told him this morning in bible study that one of the angels was missing, and perhaps I was his angel. I wonder if he saw the feather too. We said goodbye and I rode out past the stall selling flowers, and half a dozen white cattle egrets, picking their way through an open plot.

I notice that there are half a dozen or so empty blog posts open on my desktop. I have this feeling that there's something I want to say, I guess. I know I should go out and take in the last of the weekend light with a walk. what would I see? I could go down to the cemetery, maybe see a bird or a large butterfly, people selling incense. better if I took a bike....

stuck in a rut this weekend. so much to read, so much to do and I'm just drifting in space.

yesterday I repotted one of the new plants, I think it's a lipstick plant, which I realised was root-bound. growing back in on itself, all the roots one pale and rigid body in the shape of the pot. I tried to tease out the clump a little bit before repotting but it was very firm. The foliage is still healthy but I'd noticed a couple of new leaves had just shrivelled, and it was starting to send out runners. actually I've just looked it up and it seems they like to be root bound, this is what makes them flower. but I didn't want it all turning to runners. this seems to be the inclination with potplants here, and it starts to make the garden room feel slightly creepy, like we might be housing triffids. one of the money plants sent a shoot down and along the floor, around the feet of the dryer and out, as though it was going to catch N by the ankle and pull him in. anyway, I pinched the runners off the lipstick and repotted. I suppose it will just devote itself to foliage now for a while before feeling snug enough to bloom again.

Another sweet, sweet night at the bar with the R & B band. I took N back there and the line-up was almost entirely different - the drummer replaced by the drummer's 17 yr old son, and the keyboards and vocals taken over by a couple of people who did guest spots last week, and a whole new roster of impromptu guests, held together by the spine of the band, a bassist and singer who, we learned tonight, used to play with the Jackson 5. Tonight a female singer fronted the band - someone who had sung once last week and blown me away. She's a wonderful improvisor - both sharp and comfortable, running around like there are ladders from any place she finds herself to any place she wants to be.

After a series of brilliant spots by people who are obviously comfortable fronting their own bands, a guy who is usually a sax player came on to sing 'ain't no sunshine'. It rocked for a while and then started to languish as he lost lyrical and melodic possibilities, got into this rut that just seemed to deepen and deepen while the band flagged and frayed. And then the woman who was fronting most of the night picked up a second mike and came in, echoing and harmonising and echoing in close tight layers until the bass and keyboard and drums fell into layers of the same thing, and together they built and built and built this exhilarating chamber of sound, the first singer was free, bouncing around the cage, liberated by what he was already doing, how it had been heard.

Today the sky is basically grey, shadows of blue breaking through thinness in the cloud cover, just here and there. The trees are basically still, their branches not stirred at all but their leaves thinking with the wind. Malaysian minahs cross the sky in groups of three or four; just in the last few months they seem to have taken over from the Indian minahs in their visibility. Beyond the tree cover, about a kilometre away from my window, are the black glass panels of the art building and its grass-covered roof. Somewhere a jackhammer is disturbing the morning, but far off enough to be part of it. I can see and hear buses and cars on occasion through the trees, and a plane is rumbling too.

Those glass panels are silky and reflective, made to look like the surface of water over a black pool. Sky is grey inside them, and trees are black smears, fragmented into squares.

Since the fires in Tasmania I've been thinking on and off about a photo I saw. A grandmother and five children sheltering in the water under a jetty, much like the jetty we swam off at Clareville. The fire is behind them, consuming all sight of land, and the sky and water are orange. They're sealed in, immersed up to their shoulders and necks. The grandmother is holding the two smallest children. The oldest girl holds the third young one while the middle boy clings to the jetty. In another shot you see the dog standing above them on the jetty - a white lab or golden retriever. It seems the grandfather, also in the water, was taking photos and sending them to the children's mother, his daughter, while they waited out the fire. But they didn't know if they were going to get to wait out the fire. They were there for three hours and it seems it would have taken so little for embers to fall on the jetty and set it alight.  The grandmother's face can't be seen as the children cuddle into her. The children look dazed, hair damp and faces dirty, reflecting the orange light. They have freckles, solid bones and sandy hair. You could pass them on the street anywhere in the world and know immediately they were Australians or New Zealanders. They look so familiar, like the children of my friends, or part of my family.

calendula

I feel very much like T at this juncture, trying desperately to write down all the action in the play as it happened, and failing, miserably.

I just had the most wonderful night, accidentally - a friend offered me a free ticket to a classical music thing, which was really lovely in itself, and as I was leaving I happened upon a bar where an r & b band was making nice work of Roberta Flack's 'Feel like Making Love' - I ducked in and got a beer, and then when it was followed by Cyndi Lauper's 'Time after Time' and then back to Roberta for 'Where is the Love', I decided to stick around. Seems like I stumbled on the motherlode of Singapore r & b and blues - the core band were brilliant, with two Singaporeans and two African Americans, and they had a bunch of friends there doing equally wonderful guest spots - through various shades of Chicago and Mississippi blues, and plenty of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, etc - so many of them my favourite picks. There were only 25 people in the bar, half of them musicians - I'm pretty sure most of the musicians could have stood up to play in almost any blues band in the world.

I kept my table and simultaneously wrote and rocked out as they played, dismantled the chase poem in a fun way... want to go back next week.

reading stories from someone who left here, holding welcomes for people arriving.

dazed look
conversation doesn't hold
the wrought iron ceiling's starry
kids thirsty

let's get used to moving on
to higher ground and
learning the language
because we want to

new words for rain
I have money
can we settle here

gemein

I read this thing in the NYT today, and the comments...  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/make-me-worry-youre-not-o-k/
So many angry, disdainful comments. I know I'm on the 'dumb' side, but this teaching method aside, I don't mind confessionalism or therapeutic writing or tragic memoirs. Sometimes I like them. I like to applaud when people who struggle tell their story. I don't see the decline of culture. Culture as fortification will keep doing its thing, endorsing itself.

" Where will it end? Not in the rebirth of great literature, in the incarnation of a James Joyce or a W. B. Yeats. How will it end? With these people in charge of "creative writing"? -- Badly, and for a long time, until the geniuses emerge again. Until then, we have this . . ."

Oh, where will it end! Joyce and Yeats aren't going to stop being Joyce and Yeats because someone taught confessional memoir writing. Only difference is dummies who were never going to be Joyce or Yeats got to write about their lives, other dummies got to read them, some money changed hands, maybe somewhere in there someone felt something was shared. Maybe something important, and sharing made someone feel more human. Or it was a cynical trade, exploitation and lies about life, although it seems a bit too convenient to paint it ALL that way... I know some of it is that, but -

"The confessional memoir is a symptom of an affluent culture expiating its guilt and frustration. Laying bare flaws and scars is to claim suffering as a badge of honor, as dues paid, something soft people need to do to claim legitimacy."

Yeah soft people... fuck soft people and their 'claim' to so-called legitimacy...

*

I suppose this is the view of someone seeing 'an affluent culture' as a total object, with a single sequential operation: have affluence, become soft, lay bare/claim suffering, claim honour, pay dues, legitimise whole, buy further affluence with legitimation....

And it means the commenter's identification with the sufferer and the affluent is total, because in her formulation those roles are indivisible from each other and from the rest of the culture. All contempt is self-contempt, I read somewhere.

Went to pick up a coffee table at a nearby apartment tonight - a retiring Chinese couple are moving out, to where I don't know, wish I'd asked. I knew from my first visit yesterday that the wife was tricky - she was vague when I asked about a chest of drawers, told me to come over rather than confirming or denying that it was still for sale. And her pitch worked - after four flights of stairs in the heat, I went for the table.

Tonight she was in fine form. There were papers and knick-knacks everywhere, two timid young Indian couples were following her from room to room, browsing the piles of stuff. Strauss was pumping from the stereo and every time any of us tried to settle a deal she waltzed on to show something else, crying out with wonder at the things she had to sell - Look here! Very good bargain! Veeeeery good quality!

The table, she said, was a precious wood from New Zealand, and she was amazed to learn we were also from New Zealand. It had been $50, she said, showing her photocopied flyer for proof - now was only $30, but if we polished it up we could sell it for $100 - no, not $100, $400, $1000!

And then she tried, quite unsuccessfully, to interest any of us in the large painted Chinese vases, or the beer cooler with built-in radio.

The table has some dings in it and a weird diagonal streak in the grain. It's solid, heavy and medium-toned - too dark and dense for rimu, and too rough-grained for kauri. It's too long to be a very good fit for our living room, but I really like it. Knowing nothing about woods, but pretending to, I speculate that it is cedar or Canadian redwood. N speculates coconut or daffodil stem. We agree that it may be from the interior of a baobab.