Jacaranda Season

In praise of routine during a time of chaos

Dear Reader

There was no October newsletter, you may have noticed. I was exhausted. Also, what I like so much about October is the playfulness of Hallowe’en, and I just did not feel that this time.

My husband, who works in therapy for teenagers in rehab is fond of saying, routine is a protective factor.

I am leaning into routine. The routine of getting out a newsletter, the routine of tending to plants and animals and people in my home. The routine of following recipes. The routine of observing the seasons.

Noticing the intimacy of the everyday. As Søren Kierkegaard said, “the function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays”.

It’s been a year, hasn’t it?

ROUTINE

In the bliss of routine

-coffee, love, pond afternoons, poems -

we feel we will live

forever, until we know we feel it.

- Donald Hall.

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Intimacy These Days

- Jess Janz

How is the heaviness today / how is your coffee / what are you having for breakfast / here is a funny picture I thought you’d like / here is that sweater I said I might buy / haha look at this dog / this house / this article / this recipe / did I tell you about my dinner / did I tell you what my mother said / did I tell you the story about the time / how was your walk / how was your call with your sister / what show are you watching / what show should I watch / will I like it / will I feel something / have you felt anything lately / are you sleeping / are you eating / are you reading anything good / I don’t think anyone is washing their hair regularly / I don’t think anyone realizes the weight that they are carrying / how many sweatpants is too many sweatpants for one person to own / do you want to talk about it / should we try breathing exercises / should we try making bread / should we try becoming crafty / should we try unplugging it / should we try closing our eyes / should we try opening them

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Constantly

I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I am doing and why.

- Nina Simone.

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In a Time of Darkness

“What I remember of that summer is the feeling that doom wasn’t merely on its way; it had already arrived. (It had arrived, but then it evolved, and this present evil, four years later, is something else again.)

I knew I would revisit paintings by Caravaggio in Rome and Milan. At least he would tell me the truth about doom, and I would find in him the reprieve certain artists can offer us in dark times”.

Teju Cole’s piece in The New York Times on the healing turmoil of Caravaggio’s paintings. Interestingly, this was written in 2020, but it feels like now, doesn’t it?

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Messengers

I dreamed we had a poltergeist. I saw a teacup fly across the room and come back to rest near us.

Well, I don’t think I will drink from that cup.

-

This man, who is my enemy, sent me a note in my dream. It read “things are getting worse for me”.

Good.

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Sometimes, an important part of a spell is to bury all remnants of the spell. I was out walking one evening for this purpose. My husband was with me because I had hurt my back and couldn’t bend down to dig a little hole.

A middle-aged witch.

He walked quietly in good spirits. We passed a white feather on the ground.

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I dreamed someone whispered into my ear. I cannot remember who, but I know what they said to me.

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My sister shared with me that the house is dark and closed in. Like that house in Twin Peaks, she said. She went home and cried. 

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I see blue-banded bees in my lavender and fish fry in my pond. How magical.

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My husband, the therapist, watching someone being very chaotic in the traffic and muttering to himself, “your life needs some attention”.

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I got you. It’s all good. (I overhear my husband reassuring a youth worker colleague he is supervising who is sounding scared on the phone).

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I am flying over a patchwork quilt.

Travel is the perfect activity for me. It satisfies a need for adventure, as well as a need to flee. 

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I had a vivid dream where I suddenly recalled owning a second house.

“To be honest I can't even remember how many bedrooms it has”, I confessed to someone. I couldn't decide whether to leave our home, which badly needs some renovations, for this one which was almost new.

Perhaps there are easier paths to choose than the one I am on now.

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Regulate

This quote got a big response on my Instagram account.

Growing up with parents who can regulate their own emotions is a less talked about form of generational wealth.

From Genny Rumancik.

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Being Young in the 90s

The founder of the 90s Art School project, Matthew Atkatz is here talking about why these photos from the 90s are so different to today’s photos of being young and creative:

But the real shift in photography wasn’t just the advancement of digital cameras, it was the internet, and more specifically social media, which rewrote the rules on the way we take pictures, and the way we pose for them. 

This Instagram account is so joyful.

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A Visit to Helen Garner’s House

“Look,” Garner said, “we can go past my house, and go to the toilet. You can see my toilet,” she added, laughing.

The grass outside the house was soft with clover and miniature white daisies, her small front yard covered with the large leaves of violet plants not yet in bloom. The kitchen was slightly messy, and on her dining table was a copy of The New York Review of Books, open to a review of Jacqueline Rose’s “On Violence and on Violence Against Women,” with bits underlined in pen. (“Boys and men are taught that masculinity means an absurd omnipotence, mastery, comfort, and prowess. They fail—how could they not?—to live up to that ideal.”) Also on the table were pale-yellow daffodils, dark-yellow nasturtiums, and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The giant book’s cover creaked as I opened it, and inside was a note: it had been given to Garner by housemates on Falconer Street, in 1974, the year before she started “Monkey Grip.”

Garner took me out to the back yard, walked up to the chicken coop, and sweetly greeted the chickens. She let them out and gave them water and some weeds.

From Helen Sullivan’s “The Startling Candor of Helen Garner” in The New Yorker.

I love this image of her with her backyard hens, like me, with mine¹.

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Intelligence

“I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence”.

- Susan Sontag

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I am absolutely in opposition to all kinds of goals

Why Peanut Butter by Eileen Myles is such a good poem.

Aside from Myles's humor and the speaker's boldness of spirit, two things contribute to this poem's high velocity: short lines and associative logic. Though short lines always kinda slow down the poem for me, they make the poem look like it wants to be read quickly, and so after a few lines I stop analyzing breaks and start flying through the thing, noting only breaks that seem particularly meaningful. The overarching idea connecting all of these sentences is that all new things are actually old things.

The poem..

I am always hungry

& wanting to have

sex. This is a fact.

If you get right

down to it the new

unprocessed peanut

butter is no damn

good & you should

buy it in a jar as

always in the

largest supermarket

you know. And

I am an enemy

of change, as

you know. All

the things I

embrace as new

are in

fact old things,

re-released: swimming,

the sensation of

being dirty in

body and mind

summer as a

time to do

nothing and make

no money. Prayer

as a last re-

sort. Pleasure

as a means,

and then a

means again

with no ends

in sight. I am

absolutely in opposition

to all kinds of

goals. I have

no desire to know           

where this, anything

is getting me.

When the water

boils I get

a cup of tea.

Accidentally I

read all the

works of Proust.

It was summer

I was there

so was he. I

write because

I would like

to be used for

years after

my death. Not

only my body

will be compost

but the thoughts

I left during

my life. During

my life I was

a woman with

hazel eyes. Out

the window

is a crooked

silo. Parts

of your

body I think

of as stripes

which I have

learned to

love along. We

swim naked

in ponds &

I write be-

hind your

back. My thoughts

about you are

not exactly

forbidden, but

exalted because

they are useless,

not intended

to get you

because I have

you & you love

me. It’s more

like a playground

where I play

with my reflection

of you until

you come back

and into the

real you I

get to sink

my teeth. With

you I know how

to relax. &

so I work

behind your

back. Which

is lovely.

Nature

is out of control

you tell me &

that’s what’s so

good about

it. I’m immoderately

in love with you,

knocked out by

all your new

white hair

why shouldn’t

something

I have always

known be the

very best there

is. I love

you from my

childhood,

starting back

there when

one day was

just like the

rest, random

growth and

breezes, constant

love, a sand-

wich in the

middle of

day,

a tiny step

in the vastly

conventional

path of

the Sun. I

squint. I

wink. I

take the

ride.

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Crows

The neighbours across the road from me finally moved on from their strange, little, ramshackle house. I assume they went into a nursing home. As soon as they moved out all the birds they fed flew expectedly across the road to my bedroom patio and waited for a meal. Magpies, crows, butcherbirds, currawongs. A whole flock of assertive black and white birds. I wish I had had the chance to reassure the old couple that I would look after their birds for them.

There was an open house when the ramshackle place was put up for sale. Someone up the road tried to tell me about the contents of the house, but I cut them off because I had heard the gossip and knew the old couple must have been hoarders. Why would I want to see inside someone’s house, uninvited? They collected birds, I wanted to say.

Speaking of crows. The crows that feed at my house bring me nothing more interesting than old seed pods, I’m afraid, but check out these more imaginative crows in this BBC article. The murder of crows that help with a grieving ritual are something else!

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Ritual

If you’re up to it, here is Emma Beddington in The Guardian, searching for how to acknowledge the twenty-year anniversary of her mother’s death.

But it is true that we think about people we love dying and the day it happens, so surely it is better to mark the moment than to let it ambush you, maybe having to pull over when you’re driving because a particular Joni Mitchell track plays on the radio and you can’t see the road for tears. Isn’t that exactly where ritual helps? It gives the emotion a context and space for expression without frightening the horses (that’s me: I’m the horses). I have been thinking I might like that this year.

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Breasts in Art

A lovely little art wander by my friend, Rochelle Siemienowicz in Arts Hub.

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Breasts in Ceramics

No breastfeeding in the gallery unless you’re a virgin.

Nice tits.

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Single Motherhood

If you’re looking for more single motherhood in poetry and memoir writing you might like Na Mee and the little pieces she shares on her Instagram - tsu_namee

The folk legend is that I loved my son’s father so much that it made my skin softer, and it was true. Sometimes he ran out of breath, just looking at me, and then he always said uh oh, like our love was a problem, and this was also true. Then as quickly as the forest fire that lit when I met him, everything burned, and he was gone.

Our baby’s spine was still soft. I was laying on my parent’s living room floor thinking how I was going to pay for and enjoy and overcome everything by myself, thinking about ghosts and how I made homes with them, thinking how I was too clumsy of a person to take care of something as delicate and dangerous as a child, and in thinking these thoughts, I came undone.

I think I’m depressed, I said.

Why? my mom asked.

I rolled over. I changed jobs. I got a car that worked. Each night I set some of my dinner aside to make real baby food with an itty bitty food processor. I put my son in his bumbo seat and set him on the counter to babble next to me like you’re not supposed to. In the evening we walked, alone. I bought a baby carrier and I carried him in the back so he could see the world, but he wailed. I carried him in the front so he could only see me. He dreamt for hours, his face on my heart, the most braided thing I own.

His dad came back, cried by my bedside in a broken curl, like something the tide threw up. I touched the salt on him and I wanted my son to see the ocean. Maybe I could make it work, I said to a friend - it being a lie, it being locked in a cage and thrown overboard. I don’t want him to grow up without a father, I twisted.

But what if it’s worse, the friend said, fidgeting, her weight shifting on the chair. To have that kind of father… around?

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Politics Should Be About Big Brush Strokes on the Canvas

…yours is a massive and deeply historic problem. Your country was invaded and you were dispossessed of it and many of you were murdered on the way through. You need a political solution, not a legal one; a few rinky-dink legal words in the constitution is not the answer here. The answer is to deal with the history and the forces at hand.

I have always believed this is their country, they are right to claim the legitimacy of their occupation of it, and wanting to be in the colonial constitution of their colonial dispossessors was, I thought, a capitulation on that point.

Politics is not about dealing with little squares on the canvas, politics is about big brush strokes on the canvas. This is a massive historic problem, it was never going to be remedied by a narrow course of legalism.

- Paul Keating, former Prime Minister.

Australia fucked it up, of course, and is offering nothing to its true and original owners.

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Antidote

I love the original of this song, but Elisapie singing versions of famous songs in Inuktitut language is just the disruption I feel like at the moment.

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This Calm Dark Water Below

Here is artist and designer, Phoebe Paradise on Brisbane’s visual identity. It’s such a gorgeous little video about my hometown.

See the jacarandas, the brutalism, the Queenslander homes, the houses on stilts, the strangler figs, the post-wars… suburbia in the subtropics. All the stuff I so often reference in my own writing and photographs. I love her artwork - follow Phoebe Paradise here.

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Recommend

Go naked and be part of art in Spencer Tunick’s next nude installation in Brisbane. Register here. His installation photos are going to be created in various locations along and above the Brisbane River.

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Finally

Get some rest. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, “when we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago”.

Take it easy, the big finale to the year is coming².

1. Here is a little side note about Garner. When my husband first started dropping hints about wanting to marry me, I thought god no, I’d be his third wife and what kind of person gets married three times. And then, I remembered Garner was that kind of person, and so I thought maybe it was not the craziest thing.

2. And I love Christmas. So, expect a nice upbeat newsletter for a change from me for December.