She's the kind of person who thinks of insomnia as something that would be useful to have. She talks too quickly, and never chews her food properly. She's economical with her laughter, rationing it out so that she has enough for very serious emergencies, when she has a tendency to giggle with hysteria.
He has napkins for eyes. He has different napkins for different occasions. For day-to-day use, he wears plain napkins from cafes and mid-range restaurants. He draws his eyes on roughly with a biro. He wore a fancy emroidered napkin to his Year 12 Formal, and his eyes were drawn with a calligraphy pen his Dad gave him for his birthday. When he's slumming around the house, or feeling really hungover, he wears McDonald's napkins, but they tear quite easily, and it's very difficult to draw eyes on them, even with a biro.
They met on a rainy day. It seemed to her that he was crying. She averted her eyes, because crying made her nervous. The pitter-patter of the rain followed her all the way to her office, where she was distracted from work by the thought of his napkins. She wondered what it would be like to draw eyes onto his napkins for him. As the grey day wore on she imagined drawing happy eyes, bright and sparkling.
They met on a rainy day. It looked as if he was crying, because the rain made his eyes run. He tried to smile at her as she passed, but she averted her eyes. That made him want to take his napkins off and draw on sad eyes. Instead, he went home and watched the television. But nothing could keep his attention. Instead, he thought about her averted eyes, like little shiny mirrors.
The next day, he went to the supermarket. Wandering up and down the aisles he passed the dog food and the tampons and finally found what he was looking for - the al foil. Although he only needed one sheet he bought a whole roll because that's the way they sell them. Outside the supermarket he drew on the happiest eyes he could think of, and put them on.
[...]
Thursday 27 March 2008
Monday 17 March 2008
Peach Presents: The Rise and Fall of Herman the Cat*
My cat Herman wasn’t always so bad. Before Allie died, he would leap with a friendly jingle from behind a rose bush at the birds but they would flap lazily away. In winter, when my knees shake because it’s so cold, he would always slink into my room and leap unexpectedly into his lap. Then he’d curl up there and purr every so often and my knees would be still.
Herman discovered Allie’s corpse on a routine prowl of the living room. He didn’t notice the goldfish floating belly-up in her bowl until he was almost pressed up to the glass – something he liked to do regularly, peering into the water and pawing playfully at Allie.
The news of the death filtered through the house quickly and it was barely ten minutes later that we were all assembled in the backyard, around a little hole I dug in the shade of the apple tree. Mum held Allie in her hands, cradling her into the grave. My little brother Wilder placed a tiny Bombers scarf alongside the body (she had always seemed more energetic when the football was on TV, and would stare intensely through her bowl whenever Essendon were playing). Then we all grabbed a handful of dirt and sprinkled it over her until there was nothing left except a slight mound of dirt surrounded by patchy green brown grass.
A couple of days later, Herman had a dream. He was wandering by a lake, chasing butterflies, swatting at them with his paw. The sun was mirrored in the lake, and the rays from both sky-sun and water-sun bathed everything in a toasty gold. Then, without a sound, silky black animals of every kind stole into his dream and began to attack him. Claws, beaks, hooves and hands tore, bit, scratched and slashed him until he was on his side, dying, looking at the butterflies fluttering past just out of his reach …
Herman woke slowly, unable to shake an unnameable dread. It was mid-afternoon. Wilder and I played Cowboys and Indians in the backyard and Herman watched us, thoughts racing through his head. Mum brought out his food but he barely even looked at it, choosing instead to pace up and down the railing of the veranda. When we’re tired of playing I ran back inside to watch TV but Wilder stayed outside. He went over to Herman, who dropped off the railing and stretched out on his back. Wilder tickled, and Herman purred contentedly.
For a while, Herman forgot all about his dream. Little shoots began to push through the mound of dirt under the apple tree. Birds were chased to no avail, while Wilder and I played Cops and Robbers in the yard. Then the ants came.
We first noticed them in the kitchen. Wilder had managed to slather as much honey on the bench as on his toast, and sure enough, just as Mum had always foretold, the ants appeared. There was only a handful at first. Brave little scout ants that trekked across the sink and through the drying rack and over the blender. By mid-afternoon they had been replaced by an army of worker ants, who arrived so thick that the bench swarmed black and multi-legged.
The next day I found a little trail of ants leading from my window, down my wall and across the floor to my desk. They carried back crumbs of mud cake twice as big as themselves.
Herman didn’t take well to this invasion. He sulked on the veranda, and when he did venture inside he cast mistrustful eyes at the little trails of ants that seemed to seep out of little cracks in our walls. Eventually Wilder and I tried to coax him out of his gloom by buying him a ball of yarn, but after a brief smile and a half-hearted swipe he sank back into moody contemplation. I had to go play soccer, so I left him to Wilder, who had his crayons and was drawing Herman some funny pictures.
When I got home Wilder was sitting poker faced at the foot of the stairs. As I shook the mud off my boots he said in as serious a voice as he could muster, ‘Allie was murdered.’
All the dots connected, he told me. Herman notices things we’d never notice – firstly, goldfish don’t just drop off like that. They usually take days to die properly. Secondly, the ants were seen trooping in and out of the shed, where the weedkiller is kept. The way Allie died so suddenly is consistent with poisoning, he assured me. It wouldn’t have been too hard – remember when that bird flew inside and couldn’t find it’s way back out? We spent the whole day helping Mum, chasing the bird with broomsticks trying to show it the way out, and you remember thinking, it didn’t seem to want to get out? That was the day before Allie died. We were all distracted by the bird – but Herman wasn’t. Do you think that the first ants came only after Allie died? There weren’t many, that’s why Herman didn’t say anything, but there were enough to carry out the job. Just a few drops of weedkiller would have done it.
I was sceptical to say the least. All circumstantial evidence, I said, echoing the guy on TV. Coincidences, accidents. What about a motive?
Herman wandered inside and gazed sadly at me. Wilder too looked at me pityingly.
‘What about Herman’s dream?’ said Wilder.
I thought it best to leave them to their theories – just the fancies of grief, I told myself. They spent most of those days out on the veranda, Wilder with his crayons and A3 poster paper, making connections, tracing outlines of action.
Meanwhile, Mum and I thought of ways to get them to move on. We took Wilder on some retail therapy but he spent the whole day following us through Chadstone looking at the displays for hair transplants and home entertainment hubs. We bought Herman some Discovery Channel documentaries about lions and leopards and tigers. Finally, we decided to get a new goldfish.
The people at the pet store were very understanding. Things like this happen all the time, they assured us, it’s tragic, just tragic. You just have to move on. We nodded mutely and walked out of the store with a goldfish that looked almost exactly like Allie, a new tank and matching rocks and seaweed décor.
Wilder and Herman didn’t react well. They barely even greeted the new goldfish before retiring to their maps and diagrams. During the next few days they looked at me and Mum suspiciously and became silent whenever we were in the backyard. There was a growing expectation in the air that something was about to happen.
Before it did, Wilder came to me once last time. I was in my room, my knees shaking, trying to read a book about the Cold War.
Before he could say anything, I said, ‘Maybe we should have fed her better. Maybe we should have cleaned her bowl more often. Maybe there’s no big conspiracy. Maybe it just happened.’
Wilder shook his head. ‘Then how do you explain the fact that the ants invaded only once Allie was out of the way? The magpies had a motive – she was always such a passionate Bombers supporter.’
‘But they could all be coincidences. You’re piecing together a puzzle that isn’t there.’
‘And Herman’s dream? They’re behind this, the other animals. That’s what the dream meant. They’re jealous of our pets. Things don’t just happen for no reason. Goldfish don’t just die. And you know what this all means?’
I looked at him blankly.
‘Herman’s next.’
The next day, Wilder came out to the veranda with a can of deodorant and some matches. He searched the ground for a while, his little face scrunched tight in concentration. He soon found what he was looking for – an ant hole. Wilder traced all the little paths the ants were making to the house, and laid down a carpet of deodorant over their busy freeways. He lit a match and then watched as the fire spread from the heart, through the arteries to the suburbs, where industrious scout ants sensed danger coming from home but stayed on their designated tracks, calmly waiting for the eschaton. The fire consumed them quicker than Wilder and Herman had thought – it was surprisingly quick and clean. No writhing bodies, no ants running about on fire. Just the burnt out corpses of an entire colony. They wondered how things looked inside the tunnels. Did the fire penetrate? Was the queen dead?
Wilder returned with Panadol, placing the small white capsules among the birdseed Mum leaves out next to the birdbath. He left out Pringles laced with detergent for the possums.
That night, after the moon set, Wilder and Herman woke up under the cover of darkness and Wilder cleaned at Herman’s directions. The exploded birds, the dead possum, the charred ants. Herman showed his pleasure at a job well done by rubbing against Wilder’s leg and purring.
Eventually, Herman ruled the world from his vantage point on our veranda.
Often, just to wile away the hours, he would call on his most beloved courtier. Using the entire backyard, Wilder regaled the emperor with news of his empire – little newspaper armadas sailing across the pond; princesses kidnapped and held in the cubby house; the surviving ants drafted into service, now patrolling the swing. Wilder came to Herman with visions of his empire: shopping centres, office buildings, freeways and universities – all pastel colours and crudely drawn squares, triangles, circles and oblongs. Herman began to map out his vast territory, up there in his mind’s eye, a terrible, awe-inspiring kingdom.
Herman became quite particular, as is the case with most absolute rulers. He only ate out of his bowl – a shocking purple, with glitter-dusted letters spelling ‘H.E.R.M.A.N.’ accompanied by jaunty yellow stars. Dictators often have terrible taste. But maybe this is a little unfair. Herman was very discerning in his television watching. The West Wing of course, and Arrested Development. But also Big Brother and National Nine News. He wanted to understand his people.
Sometimes though, he wondered how well he knew them.
Wilder returned to Herman with visions that grew more and more vivid. He forewent pastel for watercolours. He moved on to pentagons, octagons, decahedrons even.
And all the while, the dream sat like a tumour in the back of Herman’s mind. Although the magpies now patrolled the skies for him, and the possums were his personal bodyguards, he couldn’t shake off that unnameable dread he had woken up with so long ago. He sent flies and bees to check on the still unnamed goldfish, and demanded status reports from Wilder everyday. Every detail was scrutinised with obsession. Why didn’t she eat one day? Why did she spend most of another day flying through the arch-like rock? Why was she so interested in Neighbours?
The tumour began to affect Herman’s eyesight. He started to squint from the veranda but still couldn’t make out the edges of the yard. The fence blurred into the grass. Wilder began explaining his shopping centres with the aid of brochures, illustrated with drawings that looked like photos. Herman saw the universities on a little television Wilder brought out to the veranda one day. It seemed to him that he was finally seeing his people clearly for the first time – they were cheery, culturally diverse, and talked with their hands while walking through impressive looking archways. He watched his creation and saw that it was good.
Herman started getting excruciating migraines around then. From inside, we would hear a keen screeching and if you looked closely you could see long thin scratch marks on the veranda decking. And always, the same dream …
Herman began to dislike his view from the veranda. The blurred edges of his vision started to hem him in. Even as his empire expanded (Wilder would point to distant lands on multicoloured maps – strange places where cats were eaten, others where cats were gods), his world grew smaller. He ordered Wilder to knock down the Hills Hoist and cut the tire swing. Even those animals that served Herman were to be exterminated. If he could not even trust his own eyes, how could he trust those ants, those birds? Those that had so much reason to hate him.
He retreated to the living room and held court beneath the dining table. The curtains were drawn, the doors shut. Wilder covered the table with doonas that hung over the edge and created a sanctuary. From in there Herman surfed the net and kept in touch with his empire. He would click the mouse and press enter, ctrl+alt+del. In a couple of hours the nameless goldfish was floating belly up in her tank, the rocks and seaweed décor gone.
One night Herman came into my room just as I was about to fall asleep. He prowled among the piles of books spread about across my floor. He seemed agitated. He told me it was about time he gave up this empire lark.
I switched on the light and I realised that the walls of my bedroom were now covered from wall to ceiling with maps, fabulously multi-coloured maps unlike any I had ever seen before. The maps encompassed the whole world – and yet I could easily pick out our house. I could move up our street, turn right and move past the shops right up to the gates of our school, and then through into the corridors, past my scowling principal and into my classroom where Liz and Max and Emma are playing Celebrity Heads … you could lose yourself in these maps.
Herman looked at me sadly. All too easily, old sport, he seemed to say, with a wistful little wink. He pre-emptied my question by assuring me that it wasn’t the power that had attracted him. It had all just been something to believe in. After all, you know what they say…it’s all fun and games until a goldfish dies.
He jumped from my desk onto my bed, curled up at my feet and settled into a dreamless sleep. Outside, Wilder roamed beneath the silent moon, among the burnt out remains of shopping centres, where the blackened fliers for weight loss and mobile phones fluttered out of broken shop windows, among the dying, and the dead.
*Originally published in Voiceworks Magazine
Herman discovered Allie’s corpse on a routine prowl of the living room. He didn’t notice the goldfish floating belly-up in her bowl until he was almost pressed up to the glass – something he liked to do regularly, peering into the water and pawing playfully at Allie.
The news of the death filtered through the house quickly and it was barely ten minutes later that we were all assembled in the backyard, around a little hole I dug in the shade of the apple tree. Mum held Allie in her hands, cradling her into the grave. My little brother Wilder placed a tiny Bombers scarf alongside the body (she had always seemed more energetic when the football was on TV, and would stare intensely through her bowl whenever Essendon were playing). Then we all grabbed a handful of dirt and sprinkled it over her until there was nothing left except a slight mound of dirt surrounded by patchy green brown grass.
A couple of days later, Herman had a dream. He was wandering by a lake, chasing butterflies, swatting at them with his paw. The sun was mirrored in the lake, and the rays from both sky-sun and water-sun bathed everything in a toasty gold. Then, without a sound, silky black animals of every kind stole into his dream and began to attack him. Claws, beaks, hooves and hands tore, bit, scratched and slashed him until he was on his side, dying, looking at the butterflies fluttering past just out of his reach …
Herman woke slowly, unable to shake an unnameable dread. It was mid-afternoon. Wilder and I played Cowboys and Indians in the backyard and Herman watched us, thoughts racing through his head. Mum brought out his food but he barely even looked at it, choosing instead to pace up and down the railing of the veranda. When we’re tired of playing I ran back inside to watch TV but Wilder stayed outside. He went over to Herman, who dropped off the railing and stretched out on his back. Wilder tickled, and Herman purred contentedly.
For a while, Herman forgot all about his dream. Little shoots began to push through the mound of dirt under the apple tree. Birds were chased to no avail, while Wilder and I played Cops and Robbers in the yard. Then the ants came.
We first noticed them in the kitchen. Wilder had managed to slather as much honey on the bench as on his toast, and sure enough, just as Mum had always foretold, the ants appeared. There was only a handful at first. Brave little scout ants that trekked across the sink and through the drying rack and over the blender. By mid-afternoon they had been replaced by an army of worker ants, who arrived so thick that the bench swarmed black and multi-legged.
The next day I found a little trail of ants leading from my window, down my wall and across the floor to my desk. They carried back crumbs of mud cake twice as big as themselves.
Herman didn’t take well to this invasion. He sulked on the veranda, and when he did venture inside he cast mistrustful eyes at the little trails of ants that seemed to seep out of little cracks in our walls. Eventually Wilder and I tried to coax him out of his gloom by buying him a ball of yarn, but after a brief smile and a half-hearted swipe he sank back into moody contemplation. I had to go play soccer, so I left him to Wilder, who had his crayons and was drawing Herman some funny pictures.
When I got home Wilder was sitting poker faced at the foot of the stairs. As I shook the mud off my boots he said in as serious a voice as he could muster, ‘Allie was murdered.’
All the dots connected, he told me. Herman notices things we’d never notice – firstly, goldfish don’t just drop off like that. They usually take days to die properly. Secondly, the ants were seen trooping in and out of the shed, where the weedkiller is kept. The way Allie died so suddenly is consistent with poisoning, he assured me. It wouldn’t have been too hard – remember when that bird flew inside and couldn’t find it’s way back out? We spent the whole day helping Mum, chasing the bird with broomsticks trying to show it the way out, and you remember thinking, it didn’t seem to want to get out? That was the day before Allie died. We were all distracted by the bird – but Herman wasn’t. Do you think that the first ants came only after Allie died? There weren’t many, that’s why Herman didn’t say anything, but there were enough to carry out the job. Just a few drops of weedkiller would have done it.
I was sceptical to say the least. All circumstantial evidence, I said, echoing the guy on TV. Coincidences, accidents. What about a motive?
Herman wandered inside and gazed sadly at me. Wilder too looked at me pityingly.
‘What about Herman’s dream?’ said Wilder.
I thought it best to leave them to their theories – just the fancies of grief, I told myself. They spent most of those days out on the veranda, Wilder with his crayons and A3 poster paper, making connections, tracing outlines of action.
Meanwhile, Mum and I thought of ways to get them to move on. We took Wilder on some retail therapy but he spent the whole day following us through Chadstone looking at the displays for hair transplants and home entertainment hubs. We bought Herman some Discovery Channel documentaries about lions and leopards and tigers. Finally, we decided to get a new goldfish.
The people at the pet store were very understanding. Things like this happen all the time, they assured us, it’s tragic, just tragic. You just have to move on. We nodded mutely and walked out of the store with a goldfish that looked almost exactly like Allie, a new tank and matching rocks and seaweed décor.
Wilder and Herman didn’t react well. They barely even greeted the new goldfish before retiring to their maps and diagrams. During the next few days they looked at me and Mum suspiciously and became silent whenever we were in the backyard. There was a growing expectation in the air that something was about to happen.
Before it did, Wilder came to me once last time. I was in my room, my knees shaking, trying to read a book about the Cold War.
Before he could say anything, I said, ‘Maybe we should have fed her better. Maybe we should have cleaned her bowl more often. Maybe there’s no big conspiracy. Maybe it just happened.’
Wilder shook his head. ‘Then how do you explain the fact that the ants invaded only once Allie was out of the way? The magpies had a motive – she was always such a passionate Bombers supporter.’
‘But they could all be coincidences. You’re piecing together a puzzle that isn’t there.’
‘And Herman’s dream? They’re behind this, the other animals. That’s what the dream meant. They’re jealous of our pets. Things don’t just happen for no reason. Goldfish don’t just die. And you know what this all means?’
I looked at him blankly.
‘Herman’s next.’
The next day, Wilder came out to the veranda with a can of deodorant and some matches. He searched the ground for a while, his little face scrunched tight in concentration. He soon found what he was looking for – an ant hole. Wilder traced all the little paths the ants were making to the house, and laid down a carpet of deodorant over their busy freeways. He lit a match and then watched as the fire spread from the heart, through the arteries to the suburbs, where industrious scout ants sensed danger coming from home but stayed on their designated tracks, calmly waiting for the eschaton. The fire consumed them quicker than Wilder and Herman had thought – it was surprisingly quick and clean. No writhing bodies, no ants running about on fire. Just the burnt out corpses of an entire colony. They wondered how things looked inside the tunnels. Did the fire penetrate? Was the queen dead?
Wilder returned with Panadol, placing the small white capsules among the birdseed Mum leaves out next to the birdbath. He left out Pringles laced with detergent for the possums.
That night, after the moon set, Wilder and Herman woke up under the cover of darkness and Wilder cleaned at Herman’s directions. The exploded birds, the dead possum, the charred ants. Herman showed his pleasure at a job well done by rubbing against Wilder’s leg and purring.
Eventually, Herman ruled the world from his vantage point on our veranda.
Often, just to wile away the hours, he would call on his most beloved courtier. Using the entire backyard, Wilder regaled the emperor with news of his empire – little newspaper armadas sailing across the pond; princesses kidnapped and held in the cubby house; the surviving ants drafted into service, now patrolling the swing. Wilder came to Herman with visions of his empire: shopping centres, office buildings, freeways and universities – all pastel colours and crudely drawn squares, triangles, circles and oblongs. Herman began to map out his vast territory, up there in his mind’s eye, a terrible, awe-inspiring kingdom.
Herman became quite particular, as is the case with most absolute rulers. He only ate out of his bowl – a shocking purple, with glitter-dusted letters spelling ‘H.E.R.M.A.N.’ accompanied by jaunty yellow stars. Dictators often have terrible taste. But maybe this is a little unfair. Herman was very discerning in his television watching. The West Wing of course, and Arrested Development. But also Big Brother and National Nine News. He wanted to understand his people.
Sometimes though, he wondered how well he knew them.
Wilder returned to Herman with visions that grew more and more vivid. He forewent pastel for watercolours. He moved on to pentagons, octagons, decahedrons even.
And all the while, the dream sat like a tumour in the back of Herman’s mind. Although the magpies now patrolled the skies for him, and the possums were his personal bodyguards, he couldn’t shake off that unnameable dread he had woken up with so long ago. He sent flies and bees to check on the still unnamed goldfish, and demanded status reports from Wilder everyday. Every detail was scrutinised with obsession. Why didn’t she eat one day? Why did she spend most of another day flying through the arch-like rock? Why was she so interested in Neighbours?
The tumour began to affect Herman’s eyesight. He started to squint from the veranda but still couldn’t make out the edges of the yard. The fence blurred into the grass. Wilder began explaining his shopping centres with the aid of brochures, illustrated with drawings that looked like photos. Herman saw the universities on a little television Wilder brought out to the veranda one day. It seemed to him that he was finally seeing his people clearly for the first time – they were cheery, culturally diverse, and talked with their hands while walking through impressive looking archways. He watched his creation and saw that it was good.
Herman started getting excruciating migraines around then. From inside, we would hear a keen screeching and if you looked closely you could see long thin scratch marks on the veranda decking. And always, the same dream …
Herman began to dislike his view from the veranda. The blurred edges of his vision started to hem him in. Even as his empire expanded (Wilder would point to distant lands on multicoloured maps – strange places where cats were eaten, others where cats were gods), his world grew smaller. He ordered Wilder to knock down the Hills Hoist and cut the tire swing. Even those animals that served Herman were to be exterminated. If he could not even trust his own eyes, how could he trust those ants, those birds? Those that had so much reason to hate him.
He retreated to the living room and held court beneath the dining table. The curtains were drawn, the doors shut. Wilder covered the table with doonas that hung over the edge and created a sanctuary. From in there Herman surfed the net and kept in touch with his empire. He would click the mouse and press enter, ctrl+alt+del. In a couple of hours the nameless goldfish was floating belly up in her tank, the rocks and seaweed décor gone.
One night Herman came into my room just as I was about to fall asleep. He prowled among the piles of books spread about across my floor. He seemed agitated. He told me it was about time he gave up this empire lark.
I switched on the light and I realised that the walls of my bedroom were now covered from wall to ceiling with maps, fabulously multi-coloured maps unlike any I had ever seen before. The maps encompassed the whole world – and yet I could easily pick out our house. I could move up our street, turn right and move past the shops right up to the gates of our school, and then through into the corridors, past my scowling principal and into my classroom where Liz and Max and Emma are playing Celebrity Heads … you could lose yourself in these maps.
Herman looked at me sadly. All too easily, old sport, he seemed to say, with a wistful little wink. He pre-emptied my question by assuring me that it wasn’t the power that had attracted him. It had all just been something to believe in. After all, you know what they say…it’s all fun and games until a goldfish dies.
He jumped from my desk onto my bed, curled up at my feet and settled into a dreamless sleep. Outside, Wilder roamed beneath the silent moon, among the burnt out remains of shopping centres, where the blackened fliers for weight loss and mobile phones fluttered out of broken shop windows, among the dying, and the dead.
*Originally published in Voiceworks Magazine
Saturday 15 March 2008
Finally, the Peaches are Taking Acid!
in and out of consciousness. following conversations down hallways. a single bloody-mindedness of purpoise...
radiant
the most fucked up ive ever been whatever that means. blues reds. insanity. music and babbling
its a madhouse back there. entirely insane
the most amazing thing is i write this completely non-personally – or in bursts of personality – of realization of who i am and the long long [indecipherable]
periods of – nothingness
between the spasming of reasoning of my mind.
and wait i remember – where i am i what i am doing, in a tent, unable to string a sentence thought together – and how long! how long has this debauchedness carry on – and how much can i remember the mad spirit of what propelled me – lost it.
[indecipherable] over – losing so much. unable to think – in coherent – inability to write is a symptom of – shortness of breath. strangulation – ecstasy. waves of EVERYTHING.
[scribble]
collapse. tilt. it sways making it difficult to write.
---
me what actually is this entity.
completely locked win the confines of
ludicrous.
CLICHÉ?
maybe – important to me, right now yes and that is all that matters how i feel right now. how i choose to see myself.
LOVE
radiant
the most fucked up ive ever been whatever that means. blues reds. insanity. music and babbling
its a madhouse back there. entirely insane
the most amazing thing is i write this completely non-personally – or in bursts of personality – of realization of who i am and the long long [indecipherable]
periods of – nothingness
between the spasming of reasoning of my mind.
and wait i remember – where i am i what i am doing, in a tent, unable to string a sentence thought together – and how long! how long has this debauchedness carry on – and how much can i remember the mad spirit of what propelled me – lost it.
[indecipherable] over – losing so much. unable to think – in coherent – inability to write is a symptom of – shortness of breath. strangulation – ecstasy. waves of EVERYTHING.
[scribble]
collapse. tilt. it sways making it difficult to write.
---
me what actually is this entity.
completely locked win the confines of
ludicrous.
CLICHÉ?
maybe – important to me, right now yes and that is all that matters how i feel right now. how i choose to see myself.
LOVE
Friday 14 March 2008
The Body Peach
Our bodies are not our own. Our bodies are strange creatures over whom we pretend to have dominion - but in reality it is we who are shackled to them.
Memory is a ghost that haunts your attic, your bedroom. Memory is hollow, speechless, useless and compelling. Memory does not speak our language, it just mimics our syntax.
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo is a ghost story, but it is not particuarly interested in the supernatural. The novel follows Lauren Hartke, a body artist living in a rented house on the deserted New England coastline. One day her husband goes for a drive - all the way to New York and the apartment of an ex-wife where he swallows a shotgun and pulls the trigger.
Unlike DeLillo's other work such as White Noise, this novel doesn't satirise pop culture or modern politics. Normally his scope is quite vast - he writes "American" novels that capture the paranoid zeitgeist of the age of information overload. But here, his spare pointed prose is directed much more personally.
We fall in and out of Lauren's consciousness as she tries to deal with her grief...
Memory is a ghost that haunts your attic, your bedroom. Memory is hollow, speechless, useless and compelling. Memory does not speak our language, it just mimics our syntax.
The Body Artist by Don DeLillo is a ghost story, but it is not particuarly interested in the supernatural. The novel follows Lauren Hartke, a body artist living in a rented house on the deserted New England coastline. One day her husband goes for a drive - all the way to New York and the apartment of an ex-wife where he swallows a shotgun and pulls the trigger.
Unlike DeLillo's other work such as White Noise, this novel doesn't satirise pop culture or modern politics. Normally his scope is quite vast - he writes "American" novels that capture the paranoid zeitgeist of the age of information overload. But here, his spare pointed prose is directed much more personally.
We fall in and out of Lauren's consciousness as she tries to deal with her grief...
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