Speaking of, spent the day at the State Library. I had a little time around 9 just to sit in the sun, while trying to recover from my epic bus travel sickness which has stuck around all day, before venturing in with Roze for some productivity. Shocking. I got some ideas down for my piece and read two anthologies on closed reserve that Mandy had recommended. It was thoroughly depressing. Everything involved a death, or breakdown of some sort. Is there no way to be "real" without being utterly morbid? 'Boner Mcpharlin's moll' by Tim Winton, was beautifully done - a soft tension that builds and unfurls steadily over years. It touches keenly on isolation and breakdown, and just proved to be quite powerful in the end. I also read a novella entitled 'Jesus wants me for a sunbeam' by Peter Goldsworthy, which was just unsettling as the three year old daughter of a perfect family prone to sticking their head in the sand is diagnosed with leukemia. What they decide to do when her time is up is twisted. The kids and the desolation just reminded me of Children of Earth and it's just too soon! I'm not ready! Sigh. When I finally left just before three it was with the same kind of unsettling feeling I had when I read Ecstasy by Irvine Welsh.
I stopped by Myer to check out a dress I had quite liked in the catalogue - Grace & Hart, called 'book of miracles' - and ran into Em, which was quite a nice surprise. We had a quick amble about, tried some chocolate tea which was surprisingly nice, before going our separate ways again. Dinner at Roze's tomorrow, always fun.
Oh, I meant to say, that Peter Goldsworthy novella I mentioned before had quite the brilliant afterword. I kinda want to staple it to someone's forehead...
The best stories are often deceptively simple, they speak to us, to our unconscious, in ways that cannot immediately be grasped, but we feel the fit, even as we are horrified, or awed. Stories about the death of children are not new, of course - they are among the oldest, their common tune one of the most easily played for effect. Dickens killed more babies than a minor diphtheria epidemic, and even Oscar Wilde's famous comment that anyone who could read the death of Little Nell without laughing 'had a heart of stone' is surely a defence against his own suppressed sentimentality. Wilde may or may not have convinced himself, but he has helped to convince us: a Dickensian rendering - a rending - of the death of a child is impossible in today's fictional world. "The blood of the children flowed in the streets...like the blood of the children," Pablo Neruda wrote in a famous attack on the use of artistic effects, such as simile and metaphor, to describe the unspeakable. Tell it plainly, I assume he was saying. Tell it as it is - at least when speaking of real deaths, real events.
But in the world of fiction?
Fiction is a different way of seeing - even its most plain-talking stories operate at a more mythic, universal level. It aims to tell the truth, yes - but in essence, in symbol, a deeper emotional language that illuminates the particulars.
After Dickens and Wilde - and Hollywood - stories must pluck at our emotions more subtly.
The story has an odd logic - but I hope it is a logic which still locks us in, subtly, and carries us, disbelief suspended, from comforting and loving suburban beginnings into a zone not so much twilight as midnight.
Like crabs in slow heated water, we find ourselves - I hope - being boiled alive, without noticing how we got there.
Where are we?
Among ancient instincts of sacrifice, and the dark comfort that the dying find in taking others with them, if given the chance, in their pyramids, on their funeral pyres, in their Berlin bunkers. In a world of repressed or sublimated spirituality. In a plce where the logic of love has carried us further than it had any right to do. Perhaps.
-- Peter Goldsworthy, Afterword: Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, Griffen Press:Aus, 1999, p.89-91
Music: Grapevine fires - Death Cab For Cutie
Mood: Productive
No comments:
Post a Comment