A Confrontation With Falling

The end of the year grants us the opportunity to look back and remember which celebrities have died. That’s the truth. We like our death filtered through the spectacle of obscene wealth and fame and obscured by the low resolution of paparazzi images. We hold death at the distance of Myth, in order to comprehend it. And then we have a party and get really messed up.

New Year’s Eve is by definition, a funeral ritual, the means by which we sublimate our fear of death. It is our little Armageddon, where we rehearse the end of time. Even the annual firework display, seems to anticipate some spectacle of devastation, enclosing whole bridges in fire and smoke. Perhaps this is why I am clinically terrified of New Year's Eve, and why I haven’t really enjoyed it since 1991, when I was allowed to stay up and watch Clive James on television talking about which celebrities died during the year. It was the only day, as far as I can remember, on which I was allowed to watch T.V., a novelty that I’m still excited about.

The other day in Portugal, thousands of octopuses enacted their own little Armageddon, by washing up dead along a stretch of beach some 5 miles long. “Authorities have warned the public not to eat them.” A volcano, in other news, is threatening villagers and chimpanzees in the Congo with ash and molten lava. In this slightly morbid mood, such news put me in mind of a strange little Werner Herzog documentary my family and I watched this Christmas Eve, instead of going to midnight mass. “Waiting for an Inevitable Disaster” is Herzog at his most mythic, trespassing through a deserted Caribbean island town in the shadow of a smoldering volcano. Donkeys and dogs have taken over the streets. The traffic lights continue to change, a television plays from an abandoned house, but the rest of the town is eerily empty, silent, like some sort of science fiction set. Every boat has left the harbour, but the water, so we are told, is full of snakes that fled the mountains and threw themselves into the sea, to drown.

In 1902 the same volcano, La Soufriere, emitted identical warning signs before it wiped out the entire population, bar one. The only survivor ironically, so Hertzog tells us, was a criminal, “the badest guy in the Town” who was protected from the blast by the walls of his solitary confinement cell. The lucky man spent the next miserable years of his life as a touring curiosity. Herzog discovers three similar characters in the present tense who have decided, out of poverty or madness or profound spiritual acceptance, to stay behind and face their inevitable death. One such man lies under a tree with a cat, at the base of the Volcano. “God takes us all to him, not just me” he tells Herzog. “Why should I be afraid?”

Profound spiritual acceptance is something I tried practicing this New Years Eve. It’s like when the plane wobbles 33 000 feet above the earth, and your heart skips its beat and you’re able to think, for the longest second, “here it is, my death, welcome.” This year I didn’t get messed up. I stood on a beach in Wilson’s Promontory and watched the sky blacken, watched the pink lightning pulse on the horizon. When it grew dark we drove home through the blackness, slowly enough to avoid wombats, but too fast to avoid the frogs, as the road steamed in the rain. Then we watched channel nine present the Sydney Fireworks, the two onscreen presenters like Emissaries from hell. Afterwards, we lit sparklers and some sort of animal made a noise like a horse breathing heavily in the bush beside us. Then we went to bed and dreamt and woke up in the new decade.

I'm doing a poetry reading on Monday night with some other people. Details here if you're interested.





and a review here and here.

"And yet I am living, I have even discovered that I care about life. The more I have sometimes found reasons for putting an end to it the more I have caught myself admiring some random square of parquet floor: it was really like silk, like the silk that would have been as beautiful as water. I liked this lucid pain, as though the entire universal drama of it had then passed through me and I was suddenly worth the trouble. But I liked it in the light of, how shall I say, of new things that I had never seen glow before."

Andre Breton- from Preface for a Reprint of the Manifesto of Surrealism (1929)

found photograph, dated 1910. paris

In late January 1910, following months of high rainfall, the Seine River flooded the French capital when water pushed upwards from overflowing sewers and subway tunnels, and seeped into basements through fully saturated soil.

Winter floods were a normal occurrence in Paris, but on January 21, the river began to rise more rapidly than normal. Over the course of the following week, thousands of Parisians evacuated their homes as water infiltrated buildings and streets throughout the city shutting down much of Paris' basic infrastructure. Police, firefighters, and soldiers moved through waterlogged streets in boats to rescue stranded residents from second story windows and to distribute aid. Refugees gathered in makeshift shelters in churches, schools, and government buildings. Although the water threatened to go over the tops of the quay walls that line the river, workmen were able to keep the Seine back with hastily built levees. Once water invaded the Gare d'Orsay rail terminal, its tracks soon sat under feet of water. To continue moving throughout the city, residents traveled by boat or across a series of wooden walkways built by government engineers and by Parisians themselves.

wikipedia

Last week we had our gumtree cut down. It was lifting up the house looking for water, and posing various dangers to the property and life of the neighbours. It had been around since Dad first bought the house 30 years ago. I feared for it in storms, but it was the best tree on the whole street and its death is, in some ways, a freshening of the grief we all felt when my father died. The photos of the whole process reminded me of a painting I made six months ago, of a lone man in a forest, a woodcutter perhaps.

Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba -- 'Memorial Project, Vietnam' 2001


I arrive in Venice again, sun burnt and half deaf. If you put your ear to my ear, you can hear the sea, which is appropriate since walking through Venice is like moving underwater, dreamlike, at half speed, almost silent anyway. People speak in whispers. The alleyways are empty, except for a few old women who float past. The sound of far cutlery, water moving for the coffin black boats. I have arrived carrying luggage up the marble steps of a drowned city, like Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba's underwater rickshaw drivers.

There is a conspiracy of graffiti in Venice, an illicit defiant conversation; names, accusations and best of all, misdirections, painted arrows pointing the wrong way the Venice's famous landmarks, the great age blackened piazza San Marco, the vaulted marble Rialto Bridge. I am reminded of the Czech ingenuity which resisted the invading Russian force in 1968 by painting out the street signs. Maps lost their value, local knowledge became a private conspiracy.

Similarly in Greece recently, the corner where a teenager was shot by police has become a site of collective outrage, a place where a myriad simmering dissatisfactions were crystallized by a single act of official violence. By popular consent both streets which run off that corner have have been renamed identically after the victim Alexis Grigoropoulos.


The Venetian sign writers might offer the most playful of these interventions, but there is nevertheless, in all these examples a kind of anarchic resistance, the seizure of names and signs by a local population otherwise divorced from their city by a larger occupying force. In Venice this resistance is endemic, even institutionalized, part of the very character of the place, since it is, after all, a labyrinth, a trap and the Venetian a trickster.

In Venice it is not uncommon to see the same person again and again throughout the city, each time fulfilling a a completely different role. The man who served you coffee in a little bakery ten minutes ago can be seen, for example, hawking stupid plastic gimmicks in the piazza or singing Sinatra in Italian an hour later in a gondola. Venice is is riddled with secret corridors, through which the few remaining inhabitants are forever running, frantically exchanging occupations.

Among the glass trinkets, the masks and the fake leather goods, Venice does a healthy trade in souvenir maps of the city. They are beautiful and impressive for their audacity and each is as dubious as the next. The true map of Venice cannot be read like any other. In order to reflect the city it must constantly misdirect you. It must neglect to mention certain streets and make an effort to misspell certain names. Ultimately, like the official map handed out at the tourist information centre, it should be made form a particularly volatile paper stock that disintegrates into a dozen pieces, which can, in turn, be reunited in any number of ways and still seem sensible, even if the city they describe is not the city of a moment ago.

The second series of mu cards will be available at any moment. Since I am very poor, these are them (more of less) and you can buy them if you want for $3 each or as a set of 8 for $20. (plus postage if you want me to post them to you.) Or you can go to the shops and buy something like this:














which literally doesn't mean anything.



all orders (and salutations) can be sent to: mrcurly__@hotmail.com


joy and revolution -

miles

Casimme is an island of white rock, out of which is made the stone masks for every festival; The Day of Perishing, The Week of the Hunted, The Seasons of Oblivion and Kindness. Each of these peculiar festivals require participants to wear upon their faces great slabs of carved rock, in rememberence of the sea. For the sea, which gave birth to the island is also a testament to our heaviness they will tell you. It is the sea, the great darkness, into which each would sink like stone, should he trespass beyond the city, since none among them has ever learned to swim.

All day the people of Casimme line the brink of the land, desiring what they cannot have. Some venture knee-deep into the white hurlf of water- the brave or the foolish, idiots, men jousting for the eye of a woman- these few are pounded like bits of plastic and are either saved at the last minute by a team of desperate hands or are swept out and lost from this world.

The people of Casimme have no boats. They fish with long rods from canyons of rock, from the bridges, in terror of the edge, ecststic as lovers. They distrust foreigners and refuse to learn from them, perhaps understandably, since they live each day exposed to the full force of the unknown. They are a boiling people, brown skinned, anxious and quick to laugh. They will never leave this pitiful rock to which their love has condemned them.

The second series of mu cards will be available at any moment. Since I am very poor, these are them (more of less) and you can buy them if you want for $3 each or as a set of 8 for $20. (plus postage if you want me to post them to you.) Or you can go to the shops and buy something like this:



which literally doesn't mean anything.



all orders can be sent to: mrcurly__@hotmail.com

joy and revolution -

miles

When they came to the door I was in the kitchen, weighing the evidence against a fly that was trapped behind part of the open window. I could use last months LeisureLand brochure and beat it to death. This sentence amused me the most. Or I could catch it using a plastic cup. That was the second option. All the cups here are plastic, so we don’t hurt ourselves, so we don’t suddenly fall into a spasm and jam a wine glass into our eye. That much I’ve surmised. Alternatively, I could stand here trying to coax the stupid thing down the little gap between the two panes of glass to freedom, and whatever natural, inauspicious death awaited it out there, in the never-ending heat. The coma of heat we’ve come to. The windows are still glass I notice. Another oversight to make note of. I keep a list and recite it whenever anyone comes to visit. Not that they come. Aeroplanes have plastic windows, if I remember correctly. Even if I manage to get it out, it’ll probably be eaten alive by a spider, in the nook of some storage facility. Are there spiders here? Come to think of it, there aren’t many flies either. I wonder what they do with them? A gentle and completely inconspicuous rain of insecticide washes the town every fortnight, making life intolerable for all insects, didn’t you know that Robert? So this, this rogue beast, is some entirely new species. I leave it to bang itself breathless and go to answer the door.

The thing which LeisureLand has to its advantage is this: no one can remember very well what came before. Children, grand children, half cousins, step nephews, all that, they’re the ones who arrive every year or two, to sit on our couches and remind us, or half remind us, of the old world. To be honest, it’s hard to say how long I’ve been here. It’s in everybody’s interest, this forgetfulness. It seems to make less and less sense out there anyway, from what I can judge.

I remember this, this futility, from a thousand years ago. My own grandfather used to make lewd jokes and smoke a pipe and drink two bottles of whiskey a day. Or three. We’d sit in the horror, (in photos we’re still sitting there) with our bad haircuts, our itchy looking clothes, out of some obligation on the sticky leather of those couches. Christmases, birthdays, Fathers days, then just Christmases, then nothing. Then nothing. Am I like that I wonder? We speak about my body. My most humiliating grievances seem to interest them very much. They even take a certain pleasure in the whole thing, I’ve decided, enquiring about my cantankerous bowels while they sip my lemonade. God. But I vowed not to become a bitter old man. Who are you again, I think as I tell them about the enormous trauma of just taking a shit.

They pull up in their golf buggies, every now and again, laughing and sweating and calming down as they approach the door. Visitors are obliged to swap their car for a golf buggy at the gate, they can do less damage that way. Every idiot can drive a golf buggy. The streets are full of them. Full of young, bright faced, slightly dreary people up close, saving money for a year or two by driving golf buggies in endless circles around LeisureLand. They get out and inspect things. They feed the dolphins with microphones attached to their heads, they pick us up when we fall over and take photos for the record so we don’t sue them. They delegate to the not so young people, the Porto Ricans mostly, or some similar Spanish speaking demographic, who come to do the real work, the cleaning up of things. The courteous business of spraying things down, of carrying things away.

We need certain assistances, but we are actively encouraged to retain our dignity and our sense of independence. I don’t know what would happen if they stopped coming. The food people, the ones who take us to the waters edge to gape at the trained animals. The gym team. The pain easement specialists. The appliers of sunscreen.

The resentment fades. No. The resentment changes. Its learns to resist. It becomes some new species of mood, circling in the nook of my heart.

I can gaze out the window, from here, toward the twenty metre wide environmental buffer zone and listen to the water being turned on and off, the gas being employed, the coronary system of secret energies hidden inside the walls of the buildings. The fridge throbs, but you cannot hear the highway. Not from here anyway. We live in a blaze of greenery. The neighbours can be called-to, if need be and that’s encouraged. Helping one anther fosters a sense of community. For more urgent requirements we carry an alarm system around our necks at all times, in case we cannot get up. For the moment this is my preferred method, since the apartments on both sides now are empty, have been empty for days. As in most villages, pre-loved homes become available from time to time.

But that was then. If I still speak like all is well in LeisureLand, it’s because I don’t remember much else now, and I want to hold onto it. At some point, you realise, you’re all alone in here, just you and your mind playing tricks. Your conjurers mind – pulling rabbits, chopping ladies in half, throwing knives while you wait in the empty auditorium for your heart to give way. An octopus has three hearts. I just remembered. And some sharks eat one another in the womb, before they’re even born. I don’t know why these statistics come into my head. The conjurer, as I’ve said, is more or less running the show.

The heat was 36, at least. I was in the kitchen, looking out through the buffer zone toward the highway. In five billion years, I thought, the earth will be swept by a tsunami of darkness. A stellar tide will pick it up and carry it for however long into the mouth of the sun, like an offering to some monster, where it will be swallowed up. Was it too early to have drink? A fly was caught between the two window panes and was going mad because the world looked so real. I didn’t hear them arrive. They arrived with the silence of two vipers, I might later say.

When they came to the door, the heat was 36. I could hear water gushing somewhere. Secretly. I opened the door. Two men were standing very close to one another, there on my doorstep wearing, I can’t remember exactly what they were wearing actually, but looking, let’s be honest, a little tattered. Things in leisure land don’t get tatty around the edges but blossom and grow, and the gentle ambience becomes all pervading. Would you like ice tea or lemonade, I offered, thinking quickly, but it won’t be necessary, they said, are you ready? What group is today again, I asked, a little anxiously, because the days must have begun to slip. You’ll see about that, and it seemed as if they were talking together, at exactly the same moment. You’ll need some good shoes though they said all at once, and, slipping past me into the apartment they began to look around for my shoes, to peer under my bed.

They sat me on the couch, so to speak. In any case I found myself sitting on the couch while these two men knelt and did up my shoelaces. The swift, economical gestures of men trained in such things.. Out on the street they had me by the arm, and they led me toward a golf buggy and gently touched my head like policemen do, in films I remember. All’s well now that we’re in the buggy I thought, though upon closer inspection this thought didn’t seem to hold much water. The two men were in the front, bouncing up and down a little on the pebbly track, and every now and again one of them would turn over his shoulder to look at me and smile brightly, flashing his teeth.

We came to a stop at the gate. The man in the booth smiled and said something I didn’t catch, to which I smiled back and we climbed out of the buggy with our ticket and walked over toward where the cars were parked, slowly because I am old and I have osteoporosis and high blood pressure and the two men understood this, were paid, no doubt, to understand this. It was bakingly hot. Teams of visitors were getting in and out of cars – troops of bright coloured children trailing after their parents through the maze of vehicles, playfully inflicting their obscure little cruelties on one another. And I half thought, well, this is a little adventure, as I let myself fall into the back seat of their car, some sort of Ford, I think, but new or newish and had the door closed gently on me by the two men.

How wide open the world was as we drove out of LeisureLand. We passed service stations and takeaway food places and the occasional small block of scrub, where a few horses were picking at the grass. How long had it been, since I’d seen all this stuff? We passed strange warehouses, and two-story office complexes with demarcated staff parking attached and a place called SexyLand in big pink letters. How brightly the coloured flags flapped above the car yards. And how insane it all seemed, how purposeful and exhausted and terrifying – these buildings and signs and roads and people driving, like us, through the bleak midst of it. I felt a rising wave of nausea pass, and a little tumour of fear put its spurs into the tissue of my stomach and clung. Recklessly I pressed the window down, and took in a burst of the world’s air. What the hell’s going on, I yelled out. Who approved this stupid exercise? One of the men turned to look at me. You have a long way to go, I thought I heard him say above the sound of wind, you should get some rest, and it was true, I felt exhausted all of a sudden, laying my head back against the upholstery in resignation and closing my eyes. The window rose of its own accord and I could hear the two men saying something to one another in the front. I couldn’t make anything out, but then, I remember, I was on my hands and knees, listening to a scratching sound, which seemed to be coming from beneath my bed, from a long corridor of darkness, where something was moving. In the dream I was pressing the emergency alarm around my neck again and again, uselessly, and then I began to crawl in after whatever it was. Too much darkness beneath ones bed, a faulty alarm, these were other things to put on the list of oversights I thought. A person could get trapped under their bed looking for their shoes, with no recourse to help. The scratching was getting louder.


When I woke we were driving through the night down a road lined by trees that continued further than you could discern into the darkness. The sound which the tyres made on the road was smooth, even soothing, it was a decent road though we were far from anywhere it seemed, but above this noise was a constant ticking, the staccato sound of insects – moths and little fruit flies (and something else like rain), hitting the windscreen in their thousands. It was discernibly colder than before. I rubbed the window clear and looked out into a whiteness that struck me like a page from an old encyclopaedia I had loved as a child. The world beyond the road was being gently and unrelentingly buried by a drifting hail of ice. Snow, of all things, I thought, realising that I had prepared, in my way, to never see such a thing again. I felt something in me weaken its grip. One of the men turned from the front and handed me a plastic cup, with a red plastic straw sticking out of it and a small packet of something, biscuits. Then the man produced a rough woollen blanket and, twisting in his seat, began pulling it up over my knees.

Maybe I dozed off again. The world doesn’t hold your attention like it does when you’re young. They’ve come to show me snow, I thought, these two bastards, and it made about as much sense as anything then, I supposed, as I watched the world falling softly through the foggy glass.

When I woke again, the car had stopped and the men were shaking me. A weak morning sun was coming up coldly behind them and snow was drifting into the car through the open door. They helped me climb free of the back seat, slowly, and I heard myself complaining about my bones, though I barely had time to stand there shivering, wrapped in the blanket before I felt them take me by the arms and lead me out into what I supposed had once been a field. Now everything was dazzlingly white. The ground sunk and crunched beneath our feet and steam came pouring out of us. A wind was rising and we bent into it, the three of us, squinting and breathing.

They led me through the haze for a long time and then we stopped. This is where we leave you, they said. I turned to them, standing behind me and it seemed then, through the squall, as if they were joined somehow, like Siamese twins, or like a snake born with two heads.

That’s your direction they said, pointing toward more nothingness, keep going that way. They smiled at me and turned and I saw them disappear into the sleet-mist just like that. I stood there like an idiot for a minute, getting frostbite no doubt and not knowing what to do. I looked again at the direction they had indicated, and then, since what choice did I have, I tightened the blanket around my face and stepped forward. The snow was being blown about in circles now and even if I’d chosen to turn back I wouldn’t have known which way to take. That’s how I began to walk, slowly, through every pain. Sometimes a man doesn’t come out of a snowstorm.

"I think [art] is a necessity, an interpretation of life that, probably left unto itself would seem devoid of meaning, totally insignificant, a monstrosity. Art on the other hand is something that comforts us, reassures us, tells us about life in terms what are extremely protective. It makes us think about life which otherwise would only amount to a heart that beat, a stomach that digests, lungs that breath, eyes that are filled with senseless images. I believe that art is the most successful attempt to instill in mankind the need to have a religious feeling."

Federico Fellini- from an interview in the film "I'm a Born Liar", directed by Damian Pettigrew.

the falling star project. spring - 2004

There is a something distinctly mystical, which accompanies the announcement of certain prestigious awards, such as those handed out this week in the fields of Literature and Peace.

If you run the fastest, you can rest fairly assured that you will be rewarded with the first prize, (the tragic case of the South African runner, Caster Semenya, being one prominent exception). Sporting events celebrate a measurable, physical, allocation of speed or strength – the human as animal.

The notion of Peace and the question of Literature on the other hand are irresolvable, and therefore rather more open to objection, as we have seen, particularly, in the case of Barry Obama vs All The Evil The Republicans Can Muster (which is a lot). Similarly there has been a bit of huffing about the Eurocentrism of the Nobel literature Prize, after Herta Muller, a little known German speaking Romanian was announced as this years winner.

In 1972, John Berger was awarded the Booker prize. In his speech, Berger dismissed as distasteful the competitiveness of such prizes, where the “deliberately publicised suspense” treated writers like race horses. The crude distinction between winners and losers is out of place in matters of literature, Berger argued. Literature attempts instead, surely, to complicate such reductionism wherever possible, to extend the human project beyond the merest survival instincts of the specious. Berger gave half his prize money to the Black Panthers.

Nevertheless, these prizes, and the Nobel Prize for Literature in particular, are fascinating for a number of reasons, not least the secretive, almost religious power, which, on such occasions is visibly exchanged.

Writers, as Roland Barthes noted, are the glamorous “spiritual representatives” of bourgeois society. This spiritual authority is bestowed through a complicated network of critical, social and historical interactions. Prizes such as the Nobel, conglomerate these processes in one dramatic and deliberately obscure gesture, like a slight of hand, like God’s pointing finger in the Sistine Chapel. In this single transfiguring moment, someone can be raised up from, lets be honest, resounding obscurity, to the position, henceforth, of master.

That such decisions take place secretly, in a country called Sweden, at a meeting attended by a select few people with stern elfish sounding names like Horace Engdahl and Knut Ahnlund, surely adds to the Award’s aura of mysticism. I am always reminded, when the Nobel prize is announced, of the Jewish fable of The Tzadikim Nistarim (The Hidden Righteous Ones) which describes a secret, scattered group of 36 people, unknown to one another, whose job it is to bear the sorrow of the world. When one dies, another is mysteriously appointed. I’m not sure if I’m referring to the chosen writers, or the judges themselves when I remember this, perhaps a mixture of both.

The process also calls to my mind, another similarly mysterious allocation of spiritual authority, the Papal Conclave, when The College of Cardinals gather in the Sistine chapel, to reckon on God’s newest ambassador. After each ballot is taken, the votes are burned and the smoke released into the Rome air. Added straw blackens the smoke, in order to indicate an inconclusive result, while the final plume of white smoke is accompanied by the chiming of bells. Upon his election the new Pope, chooses another name for himself, then dresses alone in the “Room of Tears.”

Something mysterious happens in all these examples, some alchemical, almost irreversible transference of power, and a sudden near infallibility comes to rest upon the shoulders of the newly chosen one. In the secular west, the bestowal of such an honour as the Nobel Prize is perhaps as close as we get to official holiness.

Of course, this is all nonsense, in some ways. The work of a Nobel Laureate isn’t miraculously changed overnight by some strange Swedish decree. And yet there are a good many people who believe that after undergoing a certain ritual clarification, a piece of bread can become, not just the metaphoric, but the actual body of Christ. True or not, there’s something mysterious going on, which I like.

Absence, as David Hare noted, tends these days to trump presence. The rise of the internet, (as banal as that sentence is), really has seen to it that our friends are further and further away. We have web dating, instead of bush dances in the town hall, Skype instead of talking to the old lady next door who wants to tell me how wicked men are, and can I help her reach a twisted tree branch which has come loose and will surely fall and kill all her dogs at once.

We have the pixels, which are little dots of bio-chemicals made in Africa by slaves I think, instead of ink which we used to make, not personally perhaps but nevertheless, by pounding hawthorn branches in the spring against a wine soaked river bank. We have emails instead of letters sent by ship across three months of nauseating sea. When we open an email, there is no longer the wafting smell or half-smell of salt and vomit and sunrise across more nothingness and water.

I know what every single girl I ever had a crush on in primary school is doing in 2 hour updates. I know when a vague thought floats across their Facebook, like a dreary cloud. I can see pictures of them passing out in bars on the other side of the world, before they’ve even woken up to it. I know the intimate habits of their pets. But none of us would actually recognise each other in the supermarket line.

Today, in the dying months of the decade, a general bodylessness prevails. Last night I spent hours examining pictures on the Internet of a family, who claimed that their six year old son was trapped inside the big silver hot air balloon that was hurtling perilously across America, live on television. The kid was never in there, of course. It was just a hoax intended to promote a reality television program that didn’t exist yet. Of course. The most overwhelming element to the whole story was just how deeply unsurprising it all was. How weary.

Don Delillo knows this weariness exactly, this tired treadmill of replication and disembodied hysteria disguised as news or culture. Ten years ago he wrote a beautiful little play called Valparaiso about a businessman named Michael Majeski who, headed for a town in Indiana called Valparaiso, boards the wrong plane, and ends up in a city of the same name, in Chile. The usual news outfits pounce, sensing the “human interest”, and soon Michael is forced to quit his job in order to dedicate himself more wholeheartedly to his new career as a full time celebrity, to the endless interviews, the reality programs, the feature film.

INTERVIEWER: But once you realised. You must have felt.

MICHAEL: What?

INTERVIEWER: I don’t know.

MICHAEL: Out of place, I guess. Displaced or misplaced. Somewhere else.

INTERVIEWER: But you were somewhere else. This is the point.

MICHAEL: I don’t mean in body only. Somewhere else in a deeper way. Somebody somewhere else… I felt remote. I felt a tremendous separation… From what. From everything. Physically safe. Physically fine. But cut off from everything around me. And from myself as well.

INTERVIEWER: As if what?

MICHAEL: Some stranger had crept inside, like surreptitiously, to eat my airline food. Or someone had been superimposed on me, a person with my outline and shoe size but slyly and fundamentally different.

Delillo can also be credited with inventing Big Brother host Gretel Killleen, two years before whatever demon executive decided to patent her in Australia. In Valparaiso she’s called Delfina Treadwell, a talkshow / reality program host whose sadistic purpose is to coax every last sweat-drop of confession from her studio guest. “Tell us how you suffer”, she says repeatedly, “we deeply need to know”. The general conviction being that life, if it isn’t registered by the mass media, doesn’t happen.

The absent or the virtual body is, so to speak, a 21st Century phenomenon, and it has always been Delillo’s natural territory. The previous century belonged more particularly to the tortured body, the body rendered as the field upon which dictatorial power expresses its will. This is the body to which the British writer Martin Amis has dedicated himself, with comparative vigour in a succession of calmly vicious novels and short stories.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about Amis, a writer whose exquisite prose style has been fashioned lovingly after Nabakov, yet who also has an evident and unnerving taste for cruelty. There are few serious writers capable of such humour, but his eloquence is, to my mind, often marred, especially in his essays by a kind of toxic meanness. One can perhaps discern a trace of the authors sympathy for cruelty in his nevertheless brilliant novel The House of Meetings. The narrator of this book is, after all, a murderer and a rapist. But these descriptions are complicated by the reality of the 20th century, since his crimes were committed as a Soviet War hero whilst fighting the Nazi’s, since he spent twenty years unfairly fighting for his life in a gulag, and since, after all, he is remorseful.

Against the barbaric winter of a Stalinist prison camp, the disease and cold and hunger, and the constant threat of violent attack, Amis renderers the body as a tremendous, exposed weight, which survival is forced to drag through the muddy snow. The body gives us away, it betrays us. His narrator wakes at night to the terrible sound of a room of starving men, chewing in their sleep. But the body is also an instrument, blunt and crude though it may be, of definite and substantial cruelty.
In another fantastic story, In the Palace of The End, Amis imagines the torture rooms of a certain unspecified Middle Eastern dictatorship. His narrator this time is one of the dictators many near-identical doubles. For the sake of verisimilitude of course, the doubles are obliged to suffer the replicated injuries of the King, buckled into chairs to have their one eye blown out, poisoned and kneecapped and variously shredded until, standing in the communal showers together, they resemble, “all red and raw, …a convocation of colossal penises.” They live in constant fear of the next assassination attempt, the dreaded toilet bomb in particular.

In this country, all bodies belong to the Dictator, either as objects on which power writes fear through torture, as sexual objects who must carry the rumour of the dictators sexual and thus complete power, or as doubles, designed and re-designed to stand in the way of death.
“I am wondering”, Amis’ narrator confessors, “as I always do at this time of day, why the body’s genius for pain so easily outsours its fitful talent for pleasure; wondering why the pretty trillings of the bedroom are so easily silenced by the impossible vociferation of the Interrogation Wing; and wondering why the spasms and archings of orgasm are so easily rendered inert and insensible by the climactic epilepsy of torture.”

The other night I was sitting, perhaps a little too close to the stage, in one of those vast and ornate caverns at the Arts Centre, watching a performance called Korper, (half dance piece, half play, half miracle) put on by the German dance company Sasha Waltz and Guests.
Korper consisted of a series of distinct acts, in which a dozen or so near naked performers variously interrogated the notion of the body, dissecting its parts for sale, exploring each inch of physical self, pulling out one another’s (mock) intestines, picking each other up by the fistful of skin, moving at underwater speed, or in a slow motion that outmatched those Matrix battle scenes. It was a performance which, particularly in its use of light and darkness, ached for an hour and a half on the other side of the sublime. Being German, Sasha Waltz has inherited the legacy of the Holocaust and you didn’t need to look too hard to notice references, beautiful and mournful at the same time, to mass graves, to bodies as fodder, as meat, as dust. At a certain point I realised my jaw was aching because my mouth had been open the whole time.

I have been thinking since then of the way in which a number of writers, Elaine Scarry and John Berger among them, have described literature as a sort of antidote to torture, a way of making the world again where torture unmakes it. In this same way, but even more so than literature because of its blood and liveness I suppose, contemporary dance such as Korper, offers an ethical testament to the human body. How, after seeing dancers such as these could you stomach for a second the justifications given for collateral damage, for example, or the idea of detention centres?

The filmmaker Federico Fellini, in a television interview, spoke about art in an incredibly physical way. “Left unto itself”, he said, life “would probably…seem devoid of meaning, totally insignificant, a monstrosity. Art on the other hand is something that comforts us, reassures us, tells us about life in terms that are extremely protective. It makes us think about life which otherwise would only amount to a heart that beats, a stomach that digests, lungs that breath, eyes that are filled with senseless images.

My father died on the morning of June 21, the winter solstice, 2007. I found this card yesterday, in an antique shop, two years later.

'The winter solstice occurs at the instant when the Sun's position in the sky is at its greatest angular distance on the other side of the equatorial plane from the observer's hemisphere.

'The Saami, indigenous people of Finland, Sweden and Norway worship Beiwe, the sun-goddess of fertility and sanity. She travels through the sky in a structure made of reindeer bones with her daughter, Beiwe-Neia, to herald back the greenery on which the reindeer feed. On the winter solstice, her worshipers sacrifice white female animals and cover their doorposts with butter so Beiwe can eat it and begin her journey once again.

'The Inti Raymi or Festival of the Sun was a religious ceremony of the Inca Empire in honor of the sun god Inti. It also marked the winter solstice and a new year in the Andes of the Southern Hemisphere. One ceremony performed by the Inca priests was the tying of the sun. In Machu Picchu there is still a large column of stone called an Intihuatana, meaning "hitching post of the sun" or literally for tying the sun. The ceremony to tie the sun to the stone was to prevent the sun from escaping.

'Mōdraniht was a Germanic feast. It was believed that dreams on this night foretold events in the upcoming year. By 730, it was thought by Bede to have been observed by the Anglo-Saxons on the eve of the winter solstice.

'Adapting the Egyptian Osiris Celebrations, the Babylonians held the annual renewal or new year celebration, the Zagmuk Festival. It lasted 10 days overlapping either the winter solstice or vernal equinox in its center peak. It was a festival held in observation of the sun god Marduk's battle over darkness. The Babylonians held both land and river parades. Sacaea, as Berossus referred to it, had festivals characterized with a subversion of order leading up to the new year. Masters and slaves interchanged, a mock king was crowned and masquerades clogged the streets.

'In ancient Latvia, Ziemassvētki, meaning winter festival, was celebrated as one of the two most important holidays. Ziemassvētki celebrated the birth of Dievs, the highest god of Latvian mythology. The two weeks before Ziemassvetki are called Veļu laiks, the "season of ghosts."'

- wikipedia

I electrocuted myself the other day. With a toaster. When you electrocute yourself, you feel it in the ends of your hair, which is unusual seeing as the end of your hair doesn’t feel like anything, usually. I’d like to say that my whole life flashed before my eyes, but the truth is, it didn’t, which was disappointing since I’ve been trying to figure out where I left my Chinese gangster sunglasses. Science breathed a sigh of continuing resignation. It’s possible, I read somewhere, to Hypnotise Away the Pain of Childbirth! Might it also be possible, I thought as I was flying backwards through the air, to “electrocute your way to a perfect memory!?” You can imagine the long lines at the nursing home toaster, forks all dully poised. “What are we doing again dear?”

Alas. I did remember though, a moment from my childhood at the zoo, when my father took me to discover tigers, (and how loud they roar). Tiger’s and electrocution are similar in that they can teach you to fly backwards. Landing is learnt somewhere else, near the butterflies I think. Being a butterfly is a constant near death experience.

I never learnt that landing trick properly, because a couple nights ago, I rolled up onto the bonnet of a white commodore, still sort of half connected to my bike, in a fairly unflattering posture of complete stupidity. A gang of butterflies hung about insulting my technique and four guys with eastern European accents got out and tried to force me to accept a large amount of money to repair the damage or keep me quiet, as is the traditional eastern European custom. It was all pretty painless, I admit, but it was the second near death experience in not very long, and so I was starting to worry, and to think about Charlie Kaufman’s recent film, his flawed, but strangely neglected masterpiece, Synecdoche New York.

In the film, Phillip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a fairly unappealingly nerve wracked theatre director who comes increasingly to be obsessed with death. Caden’s surname refers to Cotard’s Syndrome, a depressive, psychological state where a person comes to believe that they do not exist, or are, in fact, already dead. Caden is oppressed by a series of abject and mysterious ailments, which he struggles even to pronounce. He reads the newspaper obituaries with ritualistic zeal. Strange childlike diagrams are always playing on television, revealing his unknowable, quietly plotting internal organs to him, in hyper colour. Everything else is the pale, slightly sick colour of white skin in winter. And then something happens in the film; some twist of time, and the whole floor seems to tilt away from you, as if it were an ill-fitting lid over a great abyss.

After being awarded a lucrative ‘genius’ grant, Caden, stages an immense theatrical performance in his own bio-dome, a giant, elegant and abandoned warehouse in the middle of the city. The performance, which never seems to get past the rehearsal stage, grows increasingly complex, slowly subsuming the director's own life. Kauffman treads some fairly familiar post-modern ground in Synecdoche, confusing the real with the virtual in a series of meta-fictions, which become almost impossible to follow. But where others might stop, out of good taste perhaps, Kaufman keeps going and going. And going. The game stops being a game. You move through the point of ridiculousness, to the point of hilarity, to the point of something else, some holiness on the other side, which is real.

After I saw this film, I walked out into the underground car park, in a daze, unable to speak without thinking that what I was about to say had already been scripted for me by some unknowable force. There was the man whose job it was to walk past me, at that exact second with a green shopping bag. And the woman, whose role required her to turn and look strangely at me, as if I was some sort of deranged criminal. In the movie Waking Life, one of the characters talks about film as the recognition of life as a succession of holy moments. After watching Synecdoche New York, each holy moment after the next dawned on me, for hours. As Leunig said once, “It was a near life experience.”