Recently, I find myself being honked at more and more as I cross the road. I don’t know if I’m taking more risks or whether I’m just not judging my timing as well as I used to. Perhaps I’m giving off vibes that drivers are just none too pleased with.
Too, in the past couple of weeks, when I hold bottles of water at certain angles, I have found them making a sudden metallic thud. When I inspect the bottles, I confirm they contain only liquid, no solids whatsoever. This has happened with multiple bottles of different makes and materials.
I saw all the pretty faces
all at once; they
did not see me, my rhythm
that goes like this . . / - - \ . .
(when you speak that aloud,
make a sound like a dream is
accelerating and then not).
I’m of the mind that we only arrive at what we’re looking for by way of failure. Not in the sense of you have to fail to succeed, by trial and error, but that the failure is the revelation, the failure is the endpoint - it is the moment where the thing becomes what it was always going to be. When the French tried to produce cheese like Swiss or Basque, and it went rotten, the cheese went bad, that’s what produced the epiphany that is Camembert and Époisses, birthed through uncontrolled mould bloom.
There is a line of reasoning that suggests the lived experience of our everyday reality is but the remainder created by the failure of the impossible fullness that we imagine sits behind reality. It is what we feel we are trying to reach, but cannot be accessed, and as a result it creates a gap. It is this gap that gives form to our world.
This is not a bike, it’s a non-thing
and likewise in the lifeworld
my daughter and I do not sing
with the gaps in our heads, these
are not bodies on an e-bike
streaming to the nightharboured seas
The only successful poem is the one that exists during the period of daydreamed intention before it is put into concrete form. Once it is written into being, it loses whatever possibility it had, even the very good poems. Some, at best, regain a glimmer of their potential when they are quoted, as an incomplete fragment - just a few lines - in, say, the introduction of a book or a piece about the life of the poet. It is the failure of these poems to contain their intention that, when removed from the context of their fullness, gestures towards their unattainable ideal.
As for me, I am still dripping wet from the morning shimmer of the Tasman Sea after taking a swim, healing from a sleepless night when the sound of a screaming cat, which I have not been able to identify, split the air and sent me into a bout of insomnia. It is a balmy day, and I am drying fast beneath a palm tree in the courtyard of a kiosk that just served me four warm doughnuts and a can of carbonated guarana.
Text message: You remember Daisy, the opera singer. We visited her while she was house-sitting one night. The place on the hill, she took us up onto the roof. Do you remember, we bought cigars for Mark’s birthday on the coast. We listened to Orbital on cassette all the way down. I liked her but never told her. She probably knew. Anyway, let’s catch up soon.
This essay is in reaction to not being able to write four poems I planned based on four recent journeys on my e-bike. Bach said that when playing an instrument, all one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and it plays itself. This essay is in reaction to not being able to hit the right keys at the right time because the keys are gone.
and this is not a city but its
metaphorical remains, all those dark
window panes - glass was to be
the material of the future in stark
disavowal of deception, only truth
as the lifeworld of office living
was observed from the outside,
cooking in the kitchen, forgiving
in the bedroom with the TV on -
but now the glass is in our hands
for now, we won’t need our hands
soon, another non-thing gone.
My daughter and I are not bodies
but information streaming
towards the lighthouse at Nobbys.
Text message: I just want to make all the people I fall in love with laugh forever.
Text message: Are trees memories?
My teenage daughter is currently into ‘object shows’, internet animation series that feature things as characters - from the show she is explaining as we ride across the city tonight, her favourite characters currently include the number nine, two, four, the algebra symbol x, a needle, a golfball, a flower and a teardrop. She also tells me about characters from other shows, including an exclamation mark, a paintbrush, a marshmallow, and a notepad.
It is said that we live in an age of non-things. Byung-Chul Han, quoting media theorist Vilém Flusser from the 1980s - “Non-things are currently entering our environment from all directions, and they are pushing away the things. These non-things are called information”. Our bodies have become abstracted. We don’t move through the physical world; we hyperlink through cyberspace. Could there be a more nineties way of describing the internet?
This year was the 30th anniversary of the movie Hackers. “We have just gotten a wake-up call from the Nintendo Generation”, says Cereal Killer, hacker alias in the movie for Emmanuel Goldstein, the namesake not only of the figure of resistance in George Orwell’s 1984, but also the pen name of one of the editors of 2600, the hacker quarterly magazine. 2600, of course, being the hertz frequency at which the toy whistle in Cap’n Crunch cereal produced that, when played into a payphone, indicated to the AT&T phone network that the trunk line was available to make a long-distance call, for free.
Yesterday, my six-year-old son and I stopped in at my mother’s house to say hi, and I found a box of my old video games there, including my first first - the Atari 2600, so named for its hardware component, the CX-2600 (Atari video game cartridges have similar naming conventions - Combat was CX-2601, Space Invaders was CX-2632, Adventure was CX-2613). Why 2600? An homage to the toy whistle frequency that established the myth of the hacker as the magician cowboy of our age?
Text message: Yesterday my neighbour called out to me through his kitchen window as I was returning home from a walk. He knows I can’t hear him through the window. I said what did you say. He said something again that I couldn’t hear. I half-laughed and said say it again, I can’t hear you man. Then silence, then he appeared on his concrete landing that looks into our yard. He said, mum died yesterday. Like Camus. Hier, maman est morte.
He said his mother liked me, and then he said you know, I’d say she loved you.
From what I can remember, she only really noticed me when I left the bins out too long.
I gave him my condolences. He said it’s these man. These cigarettes, a lifetime of these. This is what killed her. He said this as he was holding one from a pack, about to light up.
One of the shows my daughter watches includes a character who is a toy whistle. It was one of the contestants in a game show episode, along with Mario and Luigi hats and a kite. As we glide through the night city on my e-bike, we cross footpaths, roadways, and parklands, up hills and down ramps, without the textures or gradients altering our momentum even slightly. It is as if we are part of a shared lucid dream, flying across the city in some abstraction of physicality not dissimilar to how we scroll across websites and algorithmic video feeds.
Are the objects in the shows my daughter and her generation watch in opposition to the non-objects, the non-things, that dominate our waking subjectivity? In reaction to watching the world through a screen, through digital art made inside a screen, is this some yearning for object fetishism to assume form? They sell merchandise of the characters from these shows - one of the objects in the show is a school bag, and you can buy a school bag that is the school bag. You can buy a golf ball that is the golf ball. For Christmas, she is getting the algebra symbol x.
Text message: Can you get milk?
On a community-run Object Show fandom wiki page, documenting all manner of related object show media, the title for the page is a spectrum of colour that passes through the LGBTQ+ rainbow, Trans Pride colours, Progress Pride, and some associated non-binary, genderqueer and aromantic shades. It is also notable that these shows appear, at least in my daughter’s telling and my own reading into the online communities that flourish in this world, to particularly appeal to neurodivergent folk.
Is there a relationship between the abstraction of the body in the Information Age, of transitioning the physical world into an online cyberpastoralism, and the prevalence of neurodivergent representation, queer culture (I think particularly of the Tumblr days, when gender linguistics became mainstream), all these fluid ways of representing the self - neurospicy, pangenderflux, otherkin and fursonas - beyond the need for a body?
There has been much said over the past ten years about the level of anxiety and self-loathing that screenagers have experienced by way of the selfie camera and comparing themselves to the selfies of others, but I don’t see this in my daughter’s online life (not to say it isn’t there; it just isn’t as prominently displayed). She and others who partake in the online communities aforementioned - the neurodivergent, the genderqueer, plus the Discord servers of Object Show enthusiasts, Sonic the Hedgehog web comics, horror indie game development and horror podcasts (horror, the mode that a generation of post-9/11 iPad kids who were exposed to too much of the unpleasantness of the world too quickly through Elsagate on Youtube Kids, much like Rotten dot com before, have transmuted their trauma into existential digital violence) - seem more invested in the creation and swapping of visual art illustrated in Ibis Paint than photographic representation of the body: one more way to distance the body from the physical, from the always-returning gap.
On Discord, as on Tumblr,
users divide and multiply
what information age
bodies cannot elucidate,
secret sensory perceptions
like when you squint into
corners of light, geodesic
tessellations impossible
to put into words,
(this is critical: the impossibility
of putting something into words
establishes the perfect conditions
for turning the world into words)
this is where my daughter lives
in a lifeworld of body abstraction,
of non-bodied enterprise (the
selfie is dead, who wants to look
at the faces of the non-bodied)
Every generation virtualises the self. In the 1960s, my father walked through the city at age ten with his mates, stopping in at the Beaches Hotel on Watt Street to be served a complimentary glass of lemon squash by the Bearded Lady and others in the travelling Freak Show who served behind the bar during the wet season, en route to one of the half dozen cinemas showing cowboy movies every Sunday afternoon - they’d show one at 2pm and one at 3pm, one ticket would get you two films - by which he projected himself onto the screen, he was the cowboy, the gunslinger on the opposite side of the world (in fact, the cowboys were closer than we might imagine: US soldiers were still training on the sand, in the parks down by Horeshoe Beach, the Navy Base, during this post-war period, where my father and the same mates who were earlier served by Lionel the Lion-Faced Man would pick up bullet casings from rounds fired during twilight drills) in the same sort of silverscreen daydream that would eventually flatten light in the home, the bedroom and its 56k modem.
Text message: We stopped on the way back from Byron at my grandparents farm. We were low on fuel, we put the windows down and crawled along the backroads. There were fires everywhere. I am responsible for the farm now, the animals.
The dream of 90s internet felt like a democratic revolution was coming to life - ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ penned by lyricist of the Grateful Dead (and, cattle rancher, who the Paris Review accurately described as a Space Cowboy) starts like this: ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.’
No borders, no boundaries, no bodies. Now, thirty years on, I ride this e-bike with my daughter on the back, and we are not bodies either: we are information streaming, frictionless across the city (external landscapes always mirror our internal geography; they’re our talisman). My identity is composed of the paperbacks that comprised my teenage years, objects you can’t find on shelves anymore around here because the last bookshop in the city has just gone up for sale, they’re just text files now, where I spend ten hours a day of my waking life; my daughter’s lifeworld lives in the echo of my teenage 90s cyberspace, within its deep and sudden strata, where it is always midnight somewhere, schools and families asleep, dead to the world; and my son - well, who knows.
My favourite Australian authors are the poet Les Murray and the sentence writer Gerald Murnane. Les Murray had an autistic son who went to one of the schools I work with, and catalogued his own neurodivergence in such poems as ‘Portrait Of The Autist As A New World Driver’ (“A car is also a high speed hermitage, questioning who would put in a telephone, that merciless foot-in-the-door of realities”). On Gerald Murnane, the term autistic has been used frequently in description of his presence and writing, although he himself has never registered it as part of his identity (only that, in response to Ramona Koval putting to him that ‘there are people now who write about such feelings of being a little bit separate from the world and making lists and making lots of categories and would say that that’s a slightly autistic way to be in the world’ Murane responded ‘I may be that way’.
Text message: I found the Les Murray quote you asked about. This is it, straight copy paste. I used to refer to them as the humans, you know - ‘what are the humans thinking about’ - seeing myself as a bit of a stranger to the human race and trying to work it out. That’s the line I think you were looking for. I found it on a blog. My question is, doesn’t everyone feel this way? Is there any other way to be? That’s me all over.
Is this not what the dawn of the Romantic Age was, of people too sensitive for this world putting onto paper, into concrete form, a simulation of the observed world to establish an artistic gap between what was too severely felt and the daydream fantasy of being able to share that sensation with others? The cruel cliche of the last half-century of the autistic lifeworld was that it was characterised by a lack of empathy. We now know that it is not a lack of empathy, but potentially of too much empathy, of feeling the world too much, of its sensory and emotional abundance, that leads to a filtering of information; of compressing it onto the page, into the screen, into the gap between the self and the world.
To be happy is to forgive oneself
for existing, for a while.
Nature will not tolerate miracles
that drag on into tomorrow.
Love is all that you don’t give away.
I’m sitting in a restaurant gathering these last couple of lines from a notepad, and I’m watching a couple, a young woman and a man, eat Thai food with the father of the young man. The woman is so gregarious with the father, sharing anecdotes and laughing. When the young man speaks up, the young man she is dating, she looks quiet, distanced. The young man is uncertain and tries to sustain focus on his drink. The young woman hopes the young man becomes a man of confidence and substance and gentle revelation. Look at the father, he has survived, he enjoys lunch and dessert. Only later, when the young woman walks to the bathroom, do I see she’s pregnant.
My daughter and I stop the e-bike when we hear music coming from up above. We turn towards the honeycomb of rock strata and see three young folk wearing masks - possibly wizard masks, or Bin Laden - dancing to the Macarena. Only, they don’t know the Macarena dance moves. They know that the Macarena is a cultural artefact from the past, a meme from the centrifuge of the modern day, the 90s, but they haven’t studied the choreography - they’re just feeling it, putting their hands palms up to the ceiling of the world, data drunk, waiting for us to film them and make their simulacrum complete. We do so, and post it Reddit a few minutes later.
I am recovering, this morning, by way of a series of swims - first at the Bogey Hole, which the local tourist board describe as Australia’s oldest purpose-built ocean pool, although I wonder how this catalogues with our First Nations people (in a lineage of slave labor that necklace the pyramids and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Bogey Hole was handcut out of the coastal shelf in 1819 by convicts tasked with delivering colonial Major James Morisset with a personal oceanic wash tub); and then, to the Newcastle baths, where there is such a glorious display of young revelery, the school year effectively over, the water filled with backflipping bodies, the air with careening footballs, that I am brought to consider how all of these people here today (sunbathing, sitting on the steps nursing babies, a ring of folks from a disability service playing a game of frisbee near the steps, elderly swimmers with bodies they’ve been carrying around for eighty years today floating and treading water with their flowery caps on, teenagers in the early throes of semi-aquatic mating rituals, forty-year-old authors struggling to keep their balding heads out of direct sunlight) feel, to me, on the edge of the nation, like everybody here is outside of history. All the politricks and ideologies on the mainland, the technologies, the grammar - somehow it’s just for those people on the television, on the internet, back there in the glass encampments of the city, not here in the sunlit water. We are escapees of history, outside of time, outside of theory, but utterly and completely in and of our bodies. There is little more physical than this. This is the antithesis of tactile abstraction. We here, in the water, are wrapped in touch.
Last night, my wife and I dined with friends. I don’t remember much of the conversation - I think one of my friends described being tested for sleep apnea, and we all made fun of him. What I do remember, on the periphery, is a stream of cocktails that kept coming in from the side of my vision - sometimes from the east, sometimes the west - and landing either in front of me or in front of my wife. At some point in the night, I stopped throwing quips into the conversation and just stared, docile-like, at my wife’s face, lovingly but also with a sense of vacant time-stretched wonder:
that crest of cartilage, that
transition of teak fringe
into a glaze of gelatine blue eyebulb,
lip phase, the skull that sits
like a memento mori on her shoulders
above the hewn ridge of her collarbone,
where models pour pools of milk
to then drink up through a straw.
My staring reminds me of a phrase Byung-Chul Han uses in his essay ‘The crisis of narration’ - he talks about how modern readers have lost the capacity for “the long, slow, lingering gaze”. For Han, as for Walter Benjamin before him, the information age has delivered a diffuse media landscape of so many million-petalled attractions that draw us in, often from positions that carry no resonance for our daily lives except that they offer spectacle -
I must interrupt myself here to note that a man with a little dog has just caught my eye twice, intentionally, by staring down at the little pile of books I have beside me here - ‘The crisis of narration’ and, another essay by Byung-Chul Han, ‘Non-things’, as well as a hardcover of early Australian poetry I picked up the other day, ‘The Wide Brown Land’ - and he asked me what I’m doing, that it looks like I’m writing: I said I am, and he asked me if I’ve ever written a book of my own. I said yes, a couple, and he asked what I write about - and, for the life of me, I couldn’t form a cogent answer. At first I said Newcastle, and he said well you can’t help that, look at where we live, and I agreed; then, I said I guess I write about a slowing of time, perhaps, and he said well, there’s no use in rushing about, and I agreed; then, he said farewell and he and his little dog walked away.
- where was I, back to the spectacle: so, for Han as for Benjamin, we no longer place importance in narratives told around the campfire. Narratives, as opposed to stories: a narrative contains wisdom that relates to your life, because it comes from your history, your lineage, part of your family and community, something to learn from, deeply, and take with you (that’s the long, slow, lingering gaze, both into the fire of the wisdom-pregnant narrative but also into the amplitude of yourself).
A story, in contrast, is a news report about a fire in another country, a social media reel about whatever - it isn’t a narrative that stretches beyond the momentary specatacle, even if the fire is part of climate change and connected to a narrative arc about the industrial age and the ozone layer all the way back to indigenous patterns of nomadicism and environmental care, is it actually feeding into the wisdom of how you internalise the meaning of your existence and those you temporarily love?
One thing that interests me in this line of thought is whether our future is unwaveringly one of perpetual, increasing fragmentation. It feels like a line can be drawn between population growth, globalisation, the philosophic handshake of East and West, and the move across the past two centuries towards multiplicity.
no facts, only interpretations (Nietzsche);
whatever satisfies the soul is truth (Whitman);
we’re just animals, like all the other animals (Darwin);
if no god, then is everything permitted? (Dostoyevsky);
reality is bent through the prism of our unconscious drives (Freud);
we live in a rainbow of chaos (Cezanne);
truth is mathematically incomplete (Gödel);
language disguises thought (Wittgenstein);
I am made and remade continually (Woolf);
in a world that has really been turned on its head, truth is a moment of falsehood (Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, 1967).
After dinner, my wife and I take a group selfie with our friends (or, a ‘wefie’ as one of our Singaporean friends terms it), and then we head out into the heat and dark of night on the back of my e-bike. She hangs onto me, arms around my chest, as we cruise up Bolton Street and Watt, around the sweep of King Edward Park towards where I returned this morning to swim off last night (which I’m talking about in the present tense) - the Bogey Hole. Feeling physically inclined, we bathed as a light wind whipped a swell across the fringe of the pool. Again, I dwelt in that long, slow, lingering gaze as my wife and I stood on the rocks and let the moonlight drip us dry before getting dressed and mounting my bike.
This is a morning of interruptions. Someone I knew from a previous job, a stint at a radio station, has just come up to me and announced ‘A butcher’s breakfast’. I say I’ve never heard that phrase before, only a ‘tradie’s breakfast’ because they’re up so early. Same thing, he says, butcher’s are up early with bakers and tradies and all the rest.
He tells me that he used to work as a butcher’s assistant some thirty years ago. While in this role he got the signature of one of his heroes, a local daredevil stunt man. Some years later, after a stretch of profound neurological pain, the stunt man took his own life.
After, this chap telling the story told me how he was sitting with friends having a drink and they were talking about whether any of them would have the courage to end things if life got bad enough. They all told him, this chap telling the story, that, of all of them, he definitely didn’t have the balls to do it. He didn’t have the guts. Well - he’d show them.
On the back of some extensive drinking, this chap decides to get in his car and drives very fast, way too fast. He points where he drove, down a long stretch of road by the beach. As his car was about to leave the road and soar off an embankment into a tree, he suitably panicked and climbed into the back seat. Then, everything turned white and he heard a voice say - ‘Take care of your children’.
The next thing he knows, he’s covered in blood and an older man is hovering over his face. The older man pushes a bottle into this chap’s mouth and says, drink.
Later, at the police station where he’s being booked, this chap tells me how he flirts with the police officer there, the woman doing his paperwork. He also tells me that this flirtation was brought up in court later, which he felt was unnecessary.
In finishing the story, this chap tells me again about how he still hears those words - take care of your children - sometimes, when he leasts expects it to pop ito his head. He says that, all told, he probably has three kids out there in the world, or likely four if the spies are doing their job. I get the sense that the care he has provided those children in the intervening years is likely questionable.
What Han is channelling with Benjamin is nothing new - any student of modernism and post-modernism can recite how the trajectory of the 1900s was one from tometic certainty into an infinite remixing of culture and meaning that destabilises any opportunity to feel the ground beneath our feet. But the thing that I keep returning to, personally, is whether this is a one-way path without a chance to undo, like when you realise how a magic trick is done and can’t later regain a sense of illusion.
Does the unfurling of our self-consciousness, over centuries, mean we are forever stepping further and further into fragmentation, that we are constantly breaking the stable certainties of meaning and narrative of our lives into smaller and smaller pieces that cannot be reformed any more than we can enjoy the magic trick after we learn about the mechanics of its trickery, or after someone explains a joke?
And, critically, are we developing technologies that manifest this ongoing fragmentation of self - the small printing press that distributes poetry chapbooks and zines, the means of artistic production localised in the bedrooms of a generation of laptronica creatives, the server farms
that stretch across the horizon
into cyberpastoralist evening glow
as they vibrate however many trillion
blogs and video diaries (and how long
will they be kept for? When will the photos
and videos and music in the clouds
we rent from expire? Will
the Internet Archive hold it all?
Gardens full of suitcases
buried beneath the topsoil, full of geobyte hard drives
{a geobyte is equal to 1024 brontobytes,
and a brontobyte is equal to 1024 yottabytes -
the Internet is estimated to be around
one yottabyte big.
For scale, one yottabyte is equal
to around a trillion terabytes. For further scale,
DNA, if suspended in water
via nucleotide data encoding,
holds around 215 petabytes of data per gram.
One petabyte is approximately equivalent
to one thousand terabytes. So, for extra credit,
how many teaspoons of water would you need
to hold a garden full of geobyte hard drives,
if the garden is, say, three by seven metres wide
and a half metre deep?}
containing copies of all downloadable copies of everything ever - are these technologies developing in response to these new infinities of perspective, or are they manifest in our own awakening, inseparable from the terraforming of our internal landscapes: as the self becomes more self-aware, fragmentation ceases to be a symptom. It rather becomes the structure of all possible experiences, and all that we imagine and create. Aristotle wrestled with this, too - was everything one, or was everything infinitely divisible? What is at the centre of reality, something stable or fluid? Or, something else, something unimaginable even today - a gap.
We are told that so much of our internal and external lives are unimaginable - there is too much data, too much complexity, how can you even know yourself when your own mind is inpenetrable, all those half-misunderstood theories of childhood development and the subsequent production of the impossible and contradictory adult world, all those politicians and billionaires who live in another dimension, the depletion of bookstores, no more poetry books available on the shelves of Newcastle Public Libraries, and even if they were, poetry is inaccesssible: no longer the plainspoken news broadcast of The Charge of the Light Brigade, no longer the memorable if ironically misunderstood Road Less Travelled, today poetry is only discussed in the inner circles of the internal sanctum of university courtyards, and the only way to be admitted is to admit you know nothing, the highest form of Socratic wisdom - but, maybe we can understand. It might not really be as complicated as all that. Perhaps we can understand ourselves just fine; maybe it’s easier than we think. Or not.
When we ride away from the Bogey Hole, I tell me wife I picked up a copy of a book called The Bogey Hole by Barbara Coombs the other week, at the same bookstore I got The Wide Brown Land from. It tracks a family narrative from 1818 to 1972. I tell her the Bogey Hole is central to the plot, like when you’re playing squash and told to always return to the centre of the court, that’s what the Bogey Hole does in the narrative. My wife says, what. She can’t hear me. The wind is too strong - shirtless, I glide over Strzelecki point and head over the rise towards Bar Beach as my wife wraps her arms around my chest.
I feel the wind, I feel her skin on my skin, fine hairs on coarse, gradient curves on vertical densities, and I am aware that everything from the day before, of the abstraction of self, has dissolved into unbridled bodiness - hang on, sweetheart, and feel the chambers of my heart fill up with the fine spun whirring of angel whispers billowing into lifeblood and meaning - say yes to simple dichotomies, to being a man in the holocene, to knowing the self, to having a body, and don’t tell me that I’m only feeling this way because of the internal disruption to my stabilising chemical balance. I don’t know what any of those words mean right now.
I know you were expecting
a confetti of shareware ghosts
with all the numbers pressed
into footfalls of cardiac swoon
but all I have is a silent delay.