technically this isn't a class exercise: it's homework. And rushed homework at that, what with a flight to catch in a couple of days an all.
but two pieces: on a year in which all seemed uncertainty, change and anxiety. and a year in which it dragged - "terrible stasis and nothingness" was the brief, I think, which may be pushing it for the average Australian student. I mean, there's always sport. or is that the terrible stasis?
The first seems easier; for the second I might need to fudge and go for terrible stasis and nothingness in a particular aspect of my life.
The first, in fact, writes itself, or the year does: April 1986 to April 1987. in which I could list, in quick succession, a car crash in which I nearly died and someone else did die, the impending prosecution of my partner as being responsible for said death, a realisation that I had been doing bugger-all with my then 21-year-old life and that it could be cut off just like that girl's had been, my failed attempt to get into a uni course, my pigheaded decision to enrol in a different course and then nag the faculty to let me switch (it's called chancing your arm, I think - a jousting term?), my success in that, the subsequent need to move to Melbourne, thus endangering my relationship in Ballarat, and, around the same time, the sudden death for no particularly good reason but frail human physicality of one of my best friends.
But that's a list. To do it properly, I'll tell one story. It's about the dreams.
In 1986, they knew about post-traumatic stress disorder. It had been diagnosed in soldiers, police, victims of crime. And technically, as my boyfriend Bill had committed a crime in driving drunk the night we crashed into a ditch, I was a victim of crime.
You wouldn't know it though, the way the investigating officer spoke to me. He assumed I was lying from the start; that even though Sharon had broken her neck when she hit the swinging rear panel of the van on her way out, even though I could have died too, that I would lie because Bill was my boyfriend. I resented that assumption, but it didn't make any difference. I wanted to say: It's true. There was another car. They ran us off the road. But from the cop to the prosecutor in court, I was the "de facto", a woman whose word clearly meant nothing.
All I'd suffered, in a physical sense, was a few pieces of glass in my foot and the acquisition of a new aversion to the smell of petrol, the petrol that had seeped out into the damp ditch after we rolled - how many times? maybe only once or twice, but end over end like an hourglass spinning.
I didn't even have a hangover the next day, unlike poor Bill, who, yes, had had a few beers, but had also struck his head hard on the smashed-in roof of the white Holden panel van. Who slurred his words and staggered on the roadside even though minutes before he'd been 100 per cent in control of his acid wit and a car he'd driven thousands of ks. If he hadn't had those beers, who knows? Maybe it would have been all right. I never argued with the letter of the law, but I minded very much that no one, just Bill and Elise and I, the three people in the front seat of that van, will ever believe there was another car, a set of headlights straddling the white line, coming for us down a badly cambered slippery bend in a country road.
And no one wanted to know about the dreams. Now I know they were linked to the tears, the moments when I'd be walking down a street in Ballarat and stop dead, staring into space; to the short tempers in our house, to my urgent need, love Bill though I might, to get away, to start something new, to do, to be.
You don't have to be Freud to understand my dream: I would be on a carousel, or a carnival ride. Not having a good time, or a bad one, just on it. Then, without asking my permission, the world would go spinning, upside down and back to front, a washing machine, a whirlwind. I was tossed like Dorothy in the storm, thrown about, falling, rising, but never quite crashing. I'd wake up frightened, my body still remembering the wild motion of the dream.
Violence, for the most part, happens quickly. And there's nothing so violent as a car smashing up at 100 ks an hour. The person, the body, doesn't have time to watch it happen, just to note: this is how I die.
And coming out on the other side, life still being, the person has to ask: what is this thing?
Dreams insist: they repeat themselves like soap operas. And for me, the car has always been my life: I'm at the wheel, I'm in control, I've lost my car, my car has crashed, I've forgotten how to drive, my car car fly. Again, you get it. But for a real crash, for a white van with a pale green stripe down the side bouncing bonnet to bumper down a grassy slope under a brilliant April moon, some other device had to be found.
I got the message. I knew I had to take the wheel again; in the survivor's cliche, to make something of my life. And hence university, a move away, a move confirmed as right by the sudden death of Merilyn, who was only just turned 30. The world gave me a warning.
The next one came when I was 38.
...tbc
Thursday, March 13, 2008
The man in black
4/3 "life writing" exercise, in which a "model" comes into the room, looks at us and then sits down so we can look at him and write...
(pretty much verbatim and only slightly edited)
He goes by his middle name, because one day at school when he was six, a big kid asked his name and laughed when he said it.
But no one laughs at him any more. His Maori genes kicked in when he was 12, and he grew big and solid. He also learned the trick of engaging a room when he entered, sweeping the faces with electric eyes, swiftly hooded, finding friends and warning off potential enemies.
The effect of someone you don't fuck with was heightened when he turned 30: he swept one broad-fingered hand across his thinning hair and said in broader vowels: "This has to go."
Since then he's been bareheaded; on the hooks inside the front door of his cottage in Collingwood are a row of fishermans' caps, straw fedoras and woollen beanies, a wardrobe for the constantly ringing changes of Melbourne's weather.
Sometimes, when he walks home late at night, the oyoung men going to and from Collingwood's backstreet gay bars cruise him - always from a distance - and migrant women from the Commission flats veer out of his path and he wants to say to both: "I'm not that person".
Today he's life modelling. he's removed his jewellery, which is silver and patterned with Pacific Islander designs. He's deliberately dressed to give away as little as possible: black T-shirt, black short-sleeved collared shirt, unbottoned, covering his one small tattoo. There's a pen hidden in his top pocket.
As he waits for the exercise to be over, trapped under glass by the gaze of 11 students telling lies about his life, he spreads his right hand on his knee and drums a rolling rhythm, thinking about the book in his bag and remembering the incredulity with which he met the request to do this thing.
He's hungry too: there's an apple in his bag, but he doesn't think he should eat it now. In a minute, someone's going to ask his middle name and he'll laugh a laugh of relief, tinged with a realisation that that big kid can't get at him any more, and he'll say:
(pretty much verbatim and only slightly edited)
He goes by his middle name, because one day at school when he was six, a big kid asked his name and laughed when he said it.
But no one laughs at him any more. His Maori genes kicked in when he was 12, and he grew big and solid. He also learned the trick of engaging a room when he entered, sweeping the faces with electric eyes, swiftly hooded, finding friends and warning off potential enemies.
The effect of someone you don't fuck with was heightened when he turned 30: he swept one broad-fingered hand across his thinning hair and said in broader vowels: "This has to go."
Since then he's been bareheaded; on the hooks inside the front door of his cottage in Collingwood are a row of fishermans' caps, straw fedoras and woollen beanies, a wardrobe for the constantly ringing changes of Melbourne's weather.
Sometimes, when he walks home late at night, the oyoung men going to and from Collingwood's backstreet gay bars cruise him - always from a distance - and migrant women from the Commission flats veer out of his path and he wants to say to both: "I'm not that person".
Today he's life modelling. he's removed his jewellery, which is silver and patterned with Pacific Islander designs. He's deliberately dressed to give away as little as possible: black T-shirt, black short-sleeved collared shirt, unbottoned, covering his one small tattoo. There's a pen hidden in his top pocket.
As he waits for the exercise to be over, trapped under glass by the gaze of 11 students telling lies about his life, he spreads his right hand on his knee and drums a rolling rhythm, thinking about the book in his bag and remembering the incredulity with which he met the request to do this thing.
He's hungry too: there's an apple in his bag, but he doesn't think he should eat it now. In a minute, someone's going to ask his middle name and he'll laugh a laugh of relief, tinged with a realisation that that big kid can't get at him any more, and he'll say:
Reading Autobiography, pp1-26 notes
Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson, Reading Autobiography, course reader.
I guess they're starting as they mean to go on - right in the thick of the subjectivity/representation wars. I wonder what the average consumer (and I use the word advisedly) of biography and autobiography would think of phrases like "writes her subjectivity."
The questioning of the self that is writing is obviously a very important one, but it can make your head spin, trying to figure out if you are reading what the person thinks they said, or whether you should be "reading" the subtext around how they construct their "self."
p 11: a claim that historians remove references to themselves. I know this is an academic convention, but do they do it as much as they used to? And should they? Despite the potential confusion of all this self-referentiality, I do like prejudices to be out in the open.
p19: a reference to collective remembering and augmentation of memory. This could be useful for something else I'm working on, AKA the Melways piece. (admin note: quite hard to keep the journal to just this subject's work; may have to cut and paste and chop later).
p26: How existing discourses can shape the telling of a personal story. It must be hard to resist this; the easy way is to say "I'm this sort of person" - mainly because it's easier for readers to then shortcut to your "story". Thinking about the way musicians always say they hate being classified as playing X kind of music.
An unrelated reading note: have a list somewhere of what I call personal manifestos: Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter, the letter written by the woman who shot Andy Warhol, the letter written by that French murderer we studied in philosophy class, the Unbomber's manifesto. I'm sure there are a few more. From the Latin, I suppose: manifest, to show, with the first person personal ending "O".
And the beginnings of a reading list: The chapter on historical situation of biography, and Rosenberg's East of Time. Quite pleased I now have to read it, I ordered and bought it a year ago and it's been buried under all the books acquired since. Every time I think of him, I think of something he said on the Book Show: that when all is utter darkness, the smallest chink of light can appear very very bright (or words to that effect).
I guess they're starting as they mean to go on - right in the thick of the subjectivity/representation wars. I wonder what the average consumer (and I use the word advisedly) of biography and autobiography would think of phrases like "writes her subjectivity."
The questioning of the self that is writing is obviously a very important one, but it can make your head spin, trying to figure out if you are reading what the person thinks they said, or whether you should be "reading" the subtext around how they construct their "self."
p 11: a claim that historians remove references to themselves. I know this is an academic convention, but do they do it as much as they used to? And should they? Despite the potential confusion of all this self-referentiality, I do like prejudices to be out in the open.
p19: a reference to collective remembering and augmentation of memory. This could be useful for something else I'm working on, AKA the Melways piece. (admin note: quite hard to keep the journal to just this subject's work; may have to cut and paste and chop later).
p26: How existing discourses can shape the telling of a personal story. It must be hard to resist this; the easy way is to say "I'm this sort of person" - mainly because it's easier for readers to then shortcut to your "story". Thinking about the way musicians always say they hate being classified as playing X kind of music.
An unrelated reading note: have a list somewhere of what I call personal manifestos: Ned Kelly's Jerilderie Letter, the letter written by the woman who shot Andy Warhol, the letter written by that French murderer we studied in philosophy class, the Unbomber's manifesto. I'm sure there are a few more. From the Latin, I suppose: manifest, to show, with the first person personal ending "O".
And the beginnings of a reading list: The chapter on historical situation of biography, and Rosenberg's East of Time. Quite pleased I now have to read it, I ordered and bought it a year ago and it's been buried under all the books acquired since. Every time I think of him, I think of something he said on the Book Show: that when all is utter darkness, the smallest chink of light can appear very very bright (or words to that effect).
not quite in real time
There has to be a kind of irony in using a blog - the new millenia's life writing mode of choice - as my journal for a University of Melbourne subject on life writing.
But I'm all out of natty hardcover journals, my handwriting is shocking (and I have to hand this in at the end of semester) and I'll be travelling a bit during semester, so using a blog and then printing it out seems to make sense.
So that's a sufficient, if not necessary, first post. To follow: transcriptions from reading so far and a couple of booklists. I think the journal is for class exercises and readings, but I'll also be putting in my thinking on my essay and my creative piece. So that's five categories: Exercises, readings, class notes, essay, creative piece - what, that's only five? - you've forgotten the most important, and the category this falls into: administrivia. The which, one hopes, I will exclude from my final journal submission.
But I'm all out of natty hardcover journals, my handwriting is shocking (and I have to hand this in at the end of semester) and I'll be travelling a bit during semester, so using a blog and then printing it out seems to make sense.
So that's a sufficient, if not necessary, first post. To follow: transcriptions from reading so far and a couple of booklists. I think the journal is for class exercises and readings, but I'll also be putting in my thinking on my essay and my creative piece. So that's five categories: Exercises, readings, class notes, essay, creative piece - what, that's only five? - you've forgotten the most important, and the category this falls into: administrivia. The which, one hopes, I will exclude from my final journal submission.
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