Waiting for Santa

A row of coloured lanterns glowed,

a stripe above a tree. I considered turning

them off for the night but the light

was all that Christmas Eve should be and besides,

I was waiting for Santa.

In the absence of a chimney, a landing strip

could only be a good thing.

I hadn't left cookies, or milk or beer, but I wanted to honour the night,

the sleepless child-me of Christmas Eves past,

so I turned my back on the gold-wrapped packages

and let them bask

all the night.

In the morning the light

fanning through the slats of my blinds, my eyes, was

hot, eleven o'clock

ish

yet checking my watch it was scarcely seven.

I thought of the light

of the night before, and the shells

of wrapping and discovered gifts that would litter

the floor tonight, and realised

that Christmas had already gone.

When summer comes,

and heat bleeds into reluctant night, we'll go down the road and buy $4 wine. Slip dips into shoulder bags, paying for the bread and an apple or two. Slink into alleys with papers and crates, make toast with the flame of a lighter and count the slipshod stars through the glare of the city at night. We'll talk and drink and scrawl on the walls as the world gets warm and liquid blue. If we have to move we'll find some unlocked door, square spirals of piss-smelling stairs and a ledge at the edge of the seventh storey. Watch drunks stumble from strip-clubs and neon panties flash. And when we're quite, quite broke, we'll head down the beach and smoke dune-grass by the sea.

Misanthropy is the new black,

Valerie dearest. Kindly bid adieu to your meek and mild Penelope. She is gone forever. I am proud to announce that I have embraced my inner black.

What happened, you ask? You will recall, darling, that I work for the most exclusive milliner in town; also, that a certain horsey event of national importance occurred a few weeks ago. Need I say more? Suffice it to say, I have often suspected the horses of running not in deference to the whips of their riders, but as a mad attempt to escape the tipsy hoards of watchers tottering around the racecourse. A good quarter of whom, you may be sure, passed through the doors of our little boutique in the preceding months. I have been out of sorts ever since.

Matters came to a head – if you will pardon the pun – last Wednesday. I was attempting to enter a building at precisely the same moment that a young man – of, it must be said, rather a surly disposition – was attempting to exit it. We did a little door-dance – you know the one, Valerie, where you both dive out of each other’s way but in the same direction, and then you both duck back the other way, and then you try to do the opposite of what you think they’re about to do but then they’ve gone and done the same to you, and the only way out of the whole damned debacle short of adhering yourself to the wall is to stand still, but then they stand still, and you’re back where you began – well, we did that for a little while, and I said a very demure little sorry, and do you know what he said to me? He said “outta my way, bitch!” – fancy, bitch! – and I am now, officially, utterly through with the everyday charities of being nice to people.

By misanthropy, of course, I mean misanthropy-that-doesn’t-bury-its-head-in-the-sand-pretending-to-be-something-far-prettier. Because you know what I think, darling? There’s a little bit of misanthrope in all of us. I mean, don’t we all just love to hate someone, but in the sneakiest little ways? Like customers, for instance. Or rather more nebulous entities like “the bureaucrats”, “the youth of today”, “politicians”, “the tax department”. All those petty little scapegoats for everything and anything that goes wrong. Or the things people say about celebrities, the poor creatures. Or even: “don’t you just loathe the hatinator!?” which somehow confers upon us the right to mock anyone we ever see wearing one (and let me tell you, darling, they were all the rage last Cup). It’s despicable.

Do you know what Aristotle thought of misanthropes, darling? He said that because they were such solitary creatures, they couldn’t be men (or women). Therefore, they must be either beast or god (dess). Those of the Renaissance defined misanthropy as a “beast-like state”. It’s quite peculiar, isn’t it, because most of the beasts I’ve met, like each other. Just take a look at our collective nouns: a herd of cattle, a pod of whales, a swarm of insects, a bed of oysters, an unkindness of ravens, an implausibility of gnus. A crowd of people!

But let’s not niggle, darling. Let us suppose that Aristotle and the Renaissants were referring to the true solitaries: the tiger, the lion, the werewolf howling at the moon. What tickles your fancy the most, dear: a fish, or the silhouette of a coyote against a skyful of stars? A hungry cat, or a panther prowling the prairies for prey? A cow being a cow surrounded by other cows, or a lion being lionish on its own?

See? We revere the solitaries. They send chills down your spine, to be sure, but they’re delicious chills. So I am embracing the hatred, darling. I have immense respect for those who openly loathe their fellow human beings, and what’s more, you’re never left wondering if you’ve done something wrong, or if they’re about to pull out a weapon and massacre the entire street, because you just know that the only thing you’ve done to upset them is exist, and seeing as they aren’t troubling to hide it they’re hardly about to surprise you with a little machete, now are they?

So, I say, it’s time we let our inner misanthrope out! Wear it proud! Flaunt it, even! Of course, I don’t think we should go overboard, darling. I’m hardly advocating a mass-recall of the repressed Freudian unconscious. I’m just asking for a little more honesty in the world. A little less patience with preposterous people. A few more timely hangings-up and shutting-of-doors. A little more me and a little less them.

And next time I meet that great ape in a doorway, he’ll be getting a hatinator down the gullet.

Love Penelope.

One night

It was a Tuesday, maybe. So late I was lucky to be on a tram. There were maybe three other people, all spread out, like some force of magnetic repulsion was keeping us as far apart as possible. Which was fine with me. I'd been writing essays all day. I'd be writing essays all night. Probably the most words I'd spoken all day were to order a coffee.

The tram stopped at King St. Some oldish guy got on the door closest to me. Stood there. Weaved. I felt him looking at me before he took the seat across the aisle. I concentrated on my window. Listened to my music.

Pretty soon he was asking me what tram he was on. I told him. Did it stop at Southern Cross? Yeah, coupla stops down. Listened to my music. He needed to be on the 96, did it connect? Yeah, if he just crossed this street, and that one ... Our voices echoed. We were the only people talking. Talking through music. What tram are we on? What number? Then his tram crossed right in front of us. If you ran, I said, you could catch it. Nah too drunk he said. At least I'm honest, he added, right? I laughed. Sorry, he said, I don't want to interrupt your music. No it's okay, I said, and it was.

We kept talking. Stupid stuff. The talk of two people who can hardly string a sentence together. I made some lame joke and a slow smile split his face in two. When he decided to get off I pointed him towards his tram, his suburb. He thanked me, said goodnight, and stumbled off in the opposite direction. There was a knock on the window. He was grinning, waving. Not sleazy. Just the biggest, goofiest, drunken smile you ever saw.

The paper crane co-operative

was formed by myself and my three best grade 5 friends in an old weatherboard schoolhouse in Brisbane. We had all just read the story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. If you haven't heard it, Sadako was a girl from Hiroshima. She was two when the bomb hit, and she died of leukemia at 12, from the radiation. A friend visited her in hospital and folded her a single golden crane in honour of a Japanese legend: if you fold one thousand paper cranes, you get a wish. Sadako folded 644 before she died. There's a statue of her now, in Hiroshima, and paper cranes have become symbolic of peace.


Which is kind of ironic, because the paper crane co-operative - formed in her honour - was anything but peaceful. It started with competitions: who can fold the biggest, who can fold the smallest, who can fold the most between morning tea and lunch, who can find the prettiest paper, who gets guardianship over the bulging burgeoning shopping bags - tears were shed, and after a particularly vicious exchange, 67 paper cranes were ceremonially burned in my fireplace one winter weekend. Peace was made the following Monday, but paper cranes were never mentioned again.


I still think of her, Sadako, sometimes, like when I had to google "how to fold a paper crane" once because, somehow, I had forgotten. Or just dumb questions like, if she could've started a facebook group and a thousand members joined, and each of them folded a crane on her behalf, would she have gotten that wish?

Israfel

okay, so I'm being a bit of a bowerbird (bowercrane?) at the moment, poaching other people's words and using them to glorify my own, but i've used up about half a year's worth of Original Thought in the last two weeks of uni and I got nothin left. Gimme a week or two; in the meantime, here's some words from Edgar Allen.

My introduction to Mr Poe occurred via an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. It's kinda hard to credit a guy you first saw returning from the dead through the Other Realm in the linen closet, exchanging wisecracks with a black cat and the future host of the American Biggest Loser, so even when a copy of his collected works appeared mysteriously on my bookshelf I ignored it for a bit. I don't know what prompted me to open it in the end, but as soon as I did I found this. It was before I even liked poetry that much, and even now I'm still minorly obsessed with it.


In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
"Whose heart-strings are a lute";
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.

Tottering above
In her highest noon,
The enamored moon
Blushes with love,
While, to listen, the red levin
(With the rapid Pleiads, even,
Which were seven,)
Pauses in Heaven.

And they say (the starry choir
And the other listening things)
That Israfel's fire
Is owing to that lyre
By which he sits and sings-
The trembling living wire
Of those unusual strings.

But the skies that angel trod,
Where deep thoughts are a duty-
Where Love's a grown-up God-
Where the Houri glances are
Imbued with all the beauty
Which we worship in a star.

Therefore thou art not wrong,
Israfel, who despisest
An unimpassioned song;
To thee the laurels belong,
Best bard, because the wisest!
Merrily live, and long!

The ecstasies above
With thy burning measures suit-
Thy grief, thy joy, thy hate, thy love,
With the fervor of thy lute-
Well may the stars be mute!

Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely- flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.

If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.


Nice one, E.A.

Togethercoloured Instants: Literary Orgasms Part One

The "translation and transformation of subjective experience into collective understanding" (to quote my darling alter-ego) through the medium of language is one thing, but to do it artistically is quite another.

Writers could argue forever, I guess, about the relative difficulties of portrayal (is it easier to write the mundane or the transcendental? A snail crawling up a wall or being high? Something everyone knows or almost no one knows? ETCETERA), and, indeed, of art itself. But it's late, and my uterus hurts, so maybe I'll talk about that some other time.

Personally I have immense respect for any writer who can pull off an orgasm without recourse to language LIKE come, climax, completion, satisfaction, flooding warmth, rapturous conclusion, transports of ecstasy, quivering pinnacle of desire etcetc. And so, I am starting a collection of literary orgasms for your delectation. I only have three so far; this is just a teaser. In the interests of absolute gender equality there's a Him, a Her, and a Them.

"Billy made a noise like a small, rusty hinge. He had just emptied his seminal vesicles into Valencia ..." - Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse 5


"... she broke like a pane of glass" - Pauline Reage, Story of O


"... until we shall attain the Springsmelling
intense large togethercoloured instant

the moment pleasantly frightful ..." - e.e. cummings


Like I said, that was just a teaser. Although after writing that bit just before, I think I might have to start a Quivering Pinnacles of Desire Collection posthaste.

Dearest Valerie,

It struck me the other day. The realisation. “Oh my saintly aunt,” I gasped, “the first person is dead!”

Don't panic, dear, I'm not a mad scientist with a battery of human guinea pigs tucked away in my labcoat. I was referring, of course, to the grammatical first person. What I am writing in at this very moment. Quite possibly that’s enough to make you reach for that little cross at the top of your screen, but bear with me.

So when I said dead, I meant dying, and by dying I mean falling into relative disuse. “That’s impossible,” I hear you splutter, “all language is predicated on the Self, the I, the translation and transformation of subjective experience into collective understanding! How can the I become obsolete?!!”

Honey, I know. It knocked my socks to Timbuctoo as well. But I think you'll find my reasoning is, as always, impeccable:

Cast your mind back to the goode olde dayes of the high and the low, the aristocracy and the peasants, slave-ownership and servantry. The days when you were born into a class and you lived in your class and you married in your class and everyone was fairly cheerful about it. Or so history tells us. History was written, after all, by those who weren't too busy scavenging scraps off the street to worry about preserving the past for posterity and so forth. But Valerie, dear, something happened. The Divine Right of Unequalness gave way to ideas of equality! Of common human experience! Of the unfairness of economic segregation! To the idea that all humans are born equal!

I hear you spluttering again. Do control yourself.

What happened, according to my newest favourite historian Lynn Hunt, was nothing less than a quantum shift in collective psychology during the eighteenth century. Two things occurred, or rather, they grew: individualism, and empathy.

Sorry to oversimplify here, but I'm impatient. Ms Hunt identifies, among countless other influences, two culprits for said quantum shift. The first was the popularisation of portraiture in art. Before that, depictions of masses of people with a religious bent had been all the rage. Being painted individually, Ms Hunt opines, reflected or encouraged the growth of individual subjectivity. The second was a boom in epistolary novels - novels written as a series of letters, like that naughty book Les Liaisons Dangereuses. These were written in the first person. When people read them they peeked into other people's lives and saw the differences, and also the similarities. Voila! Empathy! And these twin forces united to erode the barriers between men and other men (not women. Or slaves. Or gypsies, homosexuals, Jews, the disabled, the outcasts, the misfits, the left-handed, the savages who lived in far-away lands. But darling, we're getting there).

What has this to do with grammar, I hear you ask? Everything. Because now, in this postmodern chaos of all-equal billions of voices, there are too many I-s! No one wants to know any more! We're all the same: we know! We've heard it all before! Even our stories have been reduced to seven basic plots! And haven't you been noticing, lately, the burgeoning of the second person? It's frightful, darling, I really can't stand it. "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. " No it isn't, and no I won't! It's as if we have been reduced, in this clamouring hubbub of voices, to hitting poor souls over the head with our own experience by making them live it themselves! As if we can't be trusted to choose to share someone's experience; it has to be forced upon us!

And so, Valerie, I propose a solution: the fourth person. Little-used and little-understood, it is the perfect tool for achieving the destabilised self so popular with postmodern theorists. Observe:

"One is about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. One relaxes. One concentrates. One dispels every other thought. One lets the world around one fade. One decides it is best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room."

The first person is dead! Long live the fourth!

Incidentally, I saw a photo of a guinea-pig-on-a-spit the other day. It was obscenity with claws.

Too-roo my dear. I’m off to fetch my socks.

Love Penelope.

all my sitting-down muscles hurt and all my standing-up muscles have forgotten what to do

Moan as I might (do) about the end of semester, the ten thousand words due the same day, the sleepless nights and the disorientation - I walk into doors - I have to admit that part of me just loves it. When the library stays open til three in the morning and everyone scuffs around in pyjamas, wilting over textbooks. When rubbish bins overflow with Starbucks cups the size of slurpees, and impromptu games of night-soccer start on the lawns. Walking home because the trams have stopped, feeling like the only person in the city. Night air. The sudden bursts of euphoria where your brain feels like it's straining on a leash ten meters above you, when you could skip a thousand miles and write a thesis with your hands tied - and the inevitable swoop, when you could sleep for a week and might just vomit with tiredness -

and the way people start scribbling pithy little facebook-status-type comments all over the toilet cubicles, and you can spend twenty minutes in there, just reading.

Papavers

I was flicking through the dictionary the other day, en route to para-something, when I found papaverous. I thought it was a pretty cool word because it sounds like some kind of cannibalistic diet of higher-order Christians but in fact means: of or pertaining to the poppy; fig, soporific. I saw some at the markets a few days later and took them home with me. If you've never bought poppies before, they come as a bunch of buds on crazy-straw stems, covered all over in tiny black hairs. A few flowers might be flashing pearly petals and you get to thinking how nice they'll look when they're all out at once, so you buy them and dump them in a vase. Within a day or so a few more have shaken out their skirts; within three, most of the buds are hanging their heads like pendulums off a triffid-esque grandfather clock. Then they shrivel up, and the water turns to poppy-slime, and you only ever got about four flowers out of twenty buds. They're pretty much the ultimate fuck-you flower; I love them for that.