An interview and photo series sharing my hometown thoughts and visions with Sarah Kourim, founder of 'Muse the Label' in Melbourne.
January was like a real summer budding. With a meld of transport and accommodation choice proving how almost silly accessible a cross-country leg stretch can be in this little paradise of ours. So too, the convenience of the family car, the profundity of plane rides, the open arms of relatives and generous friends, and the liberation of a pack up-pack down life as one settles into a brief solo camping excursion. At the airport, ready to go home, we south-bound passengers were compliant with our masks on. Again confronted by the automated audio recording which plays intermittently as the luggage carousel spits out our bags, outlining the expectations for safety conscious travel. The subduedly toned woman imploring us, as ever, to keep our physical distance, call a health line immediately if symptoms arise, and please sign in with the tracer app when we can. The new way has been real for almost a full year now, and I’m starting to notice how automatic the systems, requirements, and obligations all feel. This precautionary rhythm is showing no hints of reverting. Signs and billboards are well integrated into our rhetoric and visual narrative - no longer shabby, knock-up signage to meet the urgent and changing state. Now, slick infographics crafted by in-house design teams, algorithmic wizards; with chat-bot response panels and rules for a complaint existence inside our hyper-sanitised, sick-sane world. I've been holding fast to those italicised travel logged words above for a distraction this week. To focus in on what lovely aspects still beckon us away from the repetition of a gloomy collective 2020 dialogue cycle. I want as best I can to pay homage to the fractions and filaments that make for a steady exploration - both inward and outwardly. Marlborough Sounds being my touchstone for a ‘sound’ mind this time around… In improvisation they teach a principle called "Yes, and.” It works by way of always being primed to accept whatever is coming, however offbeat and unforeseen it may be. When someone in a scene vocalises a statement, the recipient listener is encouraged to accept it as truth and remain curious in the unfurling of a new momentum. Although I do see the perils in reaching for this approach when it comes to the many and various questionable assertions being tossed in the air right now, I think there is virtue in the ephemeral aspect of it - the unspoken, energetic, storybook-narrative quality of living we are kind of remiss in acknowledging. With no guesses as to what's next for me personally, and for all of us globally, I'm thinking 'Yes, and' might be the most honest way of ensuring we still keep some humour and surprise in our mind's eye for where the grand plot line may lead. What a curious act we humans partake in at sea. Here we are upstanding, acquiescent in our anticipation for a flurried and foaming salty beating. Reclaiming our dignity in the champagne aftermath as we scramble for measly scraps of cloth, repositioning them virtuously before the procedure again begins. Such a joyous breed of flagellation, restoring the sane and sound mind through this relentless wearing down of the physical, leaving the soul lustrated in the soupy backwash of the earth. (Georgia O'Keefe with her rock collection, by John Loengard. A touchpoint image.) One of the big themes for me this year has been context. In the further rejig and alteration to ways of being - slight shifts and complete reconfigurations of approach - I felt a simultaneous experience of deliverance and restoration, loss & longing. Part of some things, exiled from others. The push-me-pull-you of a living ad-lib, non-linear approach to my 20’s with fragmented loyalties to many places, people, processes. Jung said ‘paradox does more justice to the unknowable than clarity does’, and as we are certainly in a moment of obscurity, I see now that context often acts as an immediate buffer to fortify our resolve and inoculate us against the frightful, the gaping, and the nebulous. Beyond the trivialities, disaster, despair and disappointment at large this year, there has still been much good that has surfaced. Apropos the narrative of now, many of us have been ushered in a return to memory and nostalgia as a form of consolation. I like to believe that keeping a journal is a form of time travel - it’s like talking to versions of myself that don’t exist anymore. Re-minding. And this year has been a much more collaborative effort in unpacking those things on the mind, given more chance to take a visit into those of others as we kept in good contact, both in the moment and now once again in my recalling of the conversational fragments all over again. I once heard that the German words for history and story are the same. So while I really love new chapters, and have hope in us possessing a more steady hold of this peculiar rhythm in 2021, I know I’ll be flicking back for a peek at old pages just for comfort every so often. Not so much physically, but in sentiment and feeling. Favourite lines, bits highlighted and dog eared, pages once skipped that need a refresh of my comprehension. Doubling down on the matter of context, I’ve pulled some defining thoughts and words imparted by friends in conversation, to now exist outside of their own and give a somewhat hazy and breviloquent sense of the year.. Or, if not to deliver some kind of coherent summary, perhaps just provide you with a little dash of levity in the recognition of our shared experience and muddled impressions of heart. Much love & thank you as always for your camaraderie in the mind field, Rosie x “I’m feeling philosophically cranky about it. I sort of have to keep telling myself it’s real.” “To max out all forms, to sniff out all corners, to be all ways and all things so as to not reach the end and wonder how it might have felt.” “It’s kind of like a moment of calling - what I think, who I am, my projects, everything is just amplified. My home is like an echo chamber almost.” “Here's to finding romance in the unexpected, the mundane, or even the solitary. There are indeed many hues to the colour of love.” “I always hope for more exploration.” “Us people driving in our linear fashion along the highways like absentminded hamsters in a wheel again.” “Slowly, you see life flourish again. I went from hearing tourists almost 24/7 to hear the birds, the rain... Now you can read better in the night, get to know better the silence.” “Yep, I don't like to brag, but look at me and my window, right?…” “If it was a play I could have written his part, I knew exactly what he would say and how he would say it.” “Letting myself slightly disappear in a slightly unproductive way.” “Post Restante. The joy of slow communication.” “That craft of looking for the right word in an ever changing world. To spend time trying to dress that runaway feeling.” “Books stacked are like a collateral of your current priorities. They sort of have patience for you, they wait patiently for you to be ready for them.” “Great sink-holes of melancholy.” “It was no compromise; I was fortified against resistance after a hearty walk in the brutal cold. This winter is not too mean, and characteristically fulfilling.” “To not be sure of any one thing is a beautiful thing.” “I lost momentum and now I’m kind of over it.” “Idiosyncrasies that would otherwise agitate endear here.” “Look at the sky, it’s like a cloud museum.” “There’s a lackadaisical element. Like a cognitive dissonance. I have a tortured relationship with it.” “Maybe there’s a breaking point of diminishing returns…Too many people know what’s going on that it just becomes a regurgitation of the same thing. It’s not satisfying. I think I polluted my mind looking into certain people or things more than I needed to - it’s about letting the fictional dream be that space, not trying to make sense of everything. Respecting it and letting it work it’s magic on us without trying to control.” “Today was the first day of no sleeves too. Felt a pinch naughty, risky, unexpected.” “Sometimes I feel like with some things I strip away the meaning if I put them into words.” “You can’t legislate against stupidity.” “I feel like I’m in the Camino of my spiritual life. There’s just an end of the day spaceyness, a beautiful surrender to it.” “Maybe we’re all just too neurotic, and that’s the secret.” “It’s like a fifth dimension!” “If the witch trials were now I would’ve been burned at the stake a long time ago.” “I often wonder - how thin is the gap where two people meet in the same moment? Like can you miss it?” “It’s like I don’t trust myself, like I might just float away if someone or something isn’t pinning me down.” “Creativity energy sort of gets shunted. Whether it’s by need for money, or for other obligations. But that is also sort of what’s needed for it’s vitality though isn’t it...that something to push against. Conformity is often the greatest fuel for creative thought.” “Radicchio, avocado and fennel - those are my main men.” “Did you get chicken pies?” “What. Of course not.” “But it’s lockdown, you’ve got to have chicken pies.” “I do love frittata because it’s like a really healthy pizza. Like a really decadent and orgasmic omelette.” “Thats why people read right? To emphatically experience a different reality. The imaginary process. It is as real as anything else - somebody created that, from something. It IS real.” “I milked it for meaning. But I’m not overthinking it.” “It’s all shared experience - No thought is an original thought so no doubt is an original doubt. That’s comforting to me. Someone’s walked it out before.” “If I’m gonna man up you have to man up. It’s the week of manning up!” “Love letters make you give form to your love. To make your feelings into a solid thing.” “You have to remind me, because I might forget. I won’t. But I might.” (Image: Todd Papageorge) It’s quiet again. Aside from the birds, sheep, cows, cicadas, and the occasional tourist van driving a dirt road down to the beach. It’s the heat that is so distinctly North Island to me. Rural and honest. A little isolated and unkempt but not far from all manner of metropolitan satisfaction. One afternoon I walked around in the garden to take a break from work. Plump beetroots busting out from the earth. Bushels of Coriander and Parsley and mint. Broccoli gone to seed, bloomed into tiny flower heads. A microscopic cauliflower beginning it’s growth, split from inside the bouquet of spiralling rubbery leaves. A lone and plentiful lemon tree waiting over there in the paddock through the chipped wooden gate behind the shed. I don’t own any togs at the moment, so I would just float in the shallows in my underwear with the park and the bay to myself in the evenings. Some days catching the final glimmer of a wet and clearing plush clouded sunset over the water, my butt atrophied from a day of sedentary working and driving back from the city. Other days more spacious, watching my toes emerge from the water a legs length from my bobbing head, and the undulations of the Coromandel turning a deeper purple in the hazy residue of daylight further beyond them. Not having a care in the world, or a thing I could think of that was lacking. Except maybe in flashing moments: company. Company with skin on, that I could see and touch and feel validated in my realness by being in the scene alongside. Company to hear and echo my exclamations of wonder, my squeals of delight. I talked on the phone to my friend Ilona about this as I walked through the sheep paddocks one afternoon. “I go into pariah mode too easily”, she said. An exiled person. “The days I feel alone and isolated and rejected it’s because I don’t have any intimacy, I just need one conversation to fix it for me. It’s co-regulation - feeling like ‘I do exist’ - otherwise there’s nothing to bounce off.” I wonder, can the very structure of a conversation be our reason for deep company even? The company of language. Words delivered right, peppered just to our liking? To be 'speaking the same one', on the same page. Kuru and I were talking over dinner a couple of nights later and a new dimension opened up as he shared of his heritage, and his conviction to be ongoing in living by way of te ao Māori. “Having a second language is having another world view. I only speak and know the words to say in English because of the Māori inside me. That’s shaping everything I say because of the poetry, the way it teaches me to see and know the world.” (Mātaranga Māori.) Later, albeit contradicting but amplifying the mystery of this resolve as we listened to a song and I asked ‘so what are these guys singing about?’ “I don’t really know what they’re saying. I don’t listen to the words. I just listen to the sound. The feeling..” Going full circle, perhaps that is all the Me in my undies floating in the ocean really ever needed to be sure of in that fracturing moment of tension between wanting to be alone and wanting to be with others: it’s never really about the substance of the company itself, but the way it filters through our very bones and fortifies us in our stance, our pace and our endurance as we clumsily trudge on forth all the same. Yesterday I got a little weepy after looking through photographs of earlier times. Before we lived in this now-world we’re stuck inside acting as if it’s normal. Times when standing close to a stranger in the supermarket line didn’t engender a complicated narrative of assumption and fear. Or when we didn’t really care if something we were about to eat fell on the floor for a second, and a handshake didn’t come with prerequisite concern for whether that person had travelled out of town or been needlessly socialised lately. The tune of this week has been plaintively humming with pandemic fatigue. Not so much due to my own reality - as I am fortunate to be living in one of the countries with freedoms to be, rebuild and to gather again - but for all of us now at fragmented stages. The solidarity we felt as a planet at the beginning of all this now seems to have faded and disbursed into many tiers of just too much. What’s worse - having never found or known some kind of peace despite tireless searching, or having found, known and lost it? The global events that have so threatened our understanding of life, fragility, and freedom in 2020 have all depended on breath. The bush fires in Australia - smoke enshrouding, forcing people indoors so they would not run risk of inhaling toxicity. Their quality of air and life through breath was completely compromised. Then corona virus - people on ventilators to assist breath, masks worn to cover up and limit the breath of the remaining public's. George Floyd’s final words that sparked a racial justice movement- “I can’t breathe.” Has me thinking about things we take for granted. Things not in plain sight but always giving way to a message - the breath of life, one breath and all that... (Image: Isamu Noguchi, Ala Moana Park, Hawaii, 1940.) It's been a little while since I've indulged a list of things post, so thought I'd share what has been circulating the mind during recent months. Sentiments that came up post lockdown that I've found to be helpful anchor points, resolutions, regulation since... Alive to sensation: relinquish facts, figures, invisible mandate. Walking. It is solved by walking: Solvitur ambulando. Collaboration over competition. Remain curious, engage in wider conversations: "be 'I' afraid." Motivations for learning: tend to transformation over self bolstering. Appearance: remember the root of the word - 'mere show.' Don't morph, magnetise. Of screens: master not slave. Just say it. Not recoiling from involvement, faster paced productivity - you can hold both in equipoise. Efficacious resolutions being free and of the natural earth - look there first. (Image: Buckminster Fuller, 1963) What The Godfather might tell us of oppressive systems of power. Connie Corleone was born in New York in 1922. A female, ushered into a family - we call it the family, not the organisation - which yielded illegitimate sway and control over the many nefarious undercurrents of the city in which they were denizens. For much of her youth, Connie stayed as non-partisan as her context could allow. Enveloped in privilege and grandeur, paying no particular mind to the origin of the resources that all the while endorsed her grounds for security. With years transpired and naivety imperilled, Connie found herself conflicted, riddled and rife with unrest in the years of her adult life. The mirage was exposed. Herself less shiny, her trust now barely lent. Haunted by, and embroiled in the furtive acts committed by one’s own. It was divulgence, betrayal, a loss of one’s habitually known self. The bottom falling out from underneath. The grasping for the treat but finding the base of the cylindrical jar does not exist. Just a depthless realm with no stable solution. So she did what she deemed necessary to make reparations - she turned on herself. Dismantling and marring the very life she had known, for one no less destructive. We soon meet Connie again. Astride her fourth decade, estranged from her offspring, and confronted by death. The threat of death taking form in that of her Mother’s - her one forceful comrade amid the delusions of a family so bound but so unknown to one another. Her peace is perturbed. It’s a reckoning sent to deliver her back to herself. Like when you dream you have lost a limb and wake to see it clear and restored in your woken vision. Clarity is reinstated, and no more time shall be squandered in oblivion to the gift of it. Kneeling before her brother, Michael Corleone - now Don of the lineage - she regards his dominant, seated presence. Her cavernous eyes behind forested lashes bespattered with wet tears, wearing a relinquished repose and in one final daze of pleading with him she says, “I hated you for so many years. I think that I did things to myself, to hurt myself, so that you'd know - that I could hurt you.” Today, such a looming family dynamic still exists among us. Brothers and sisters born of an 'organisation', which can just as easy turn on itself in defence of avarice, manipulation, and power. Oppressed by the strings of a puppeteer society, hurting themselves in desperation to be noticed by it. By the Don, The Man, the one who promises protection. In 2020 the threat of death was, akin to Connie’s story, made known. Taking form in that of viruses - plural. One unfamiliar and newly contagious, one systemic and long ignored. These viruses concerned bodies. They had preference, but they also did not. They reminded the brothers and sisters how they had been sabotaging their very own. How in the act of simultaneous defiance and compliance to the organisation, turning against themselves, they denied peace. Not only theirs, but that belonging to others. They had become innocent accomplices in committing a breed of organised crime. Double crossing and robbing themselves of the peace inherent to their being as they were subjugated to the conforming, carrying out orders to be held in good regard, to be told ‘you doin’ good, Son.’ To belong, to keep up, to play the part, to get one step closer to superior, unhurt-able, infallible, inviolable, blameless. A walking, talking irony. So they were locked away, sentenced to serve time inside. Suddenly distanced from the work they had been so faithfully espoused to, the tasks once seen as noble were becoming unmasked sophistry. They witnessed that bygone limb growing back. The gift of being awake and lucid, apt to change becoming force in the reparation of their worthiness. They felt an implicit stillness return as the metronome pacified itself with a new rhythm. Now there was no immediate reward or consequence, the decisions regarding oneself were less weighty, no longer prerequisite to public exposition for praise or condemnation outright. They saw the spell they had been under - hostage to the dualism of self-sabotage as a means of eliciting a state that cannot be earned. Either believing it vice or virtue, allowing it to pervade them and holding to it until permission for parole and freedom was granted only once they were on the inside. Superficially, we see peace can be taken and peace can be given, but is ultimately inherent when we come to sit in stillness with our own selves. Alone in our room. Not before the jury, the boss, even the ones we hold in highest significance - the ones we’ve been boot-licking in attempts to be granted such rest by. Our peace is still in jeopardy until we feel it and hold it - the real evidence - and defend its cause for and within ourselves. (Image: Ricki Soma, Screentest Portraits, 1949) “In order to understand the in-total reviews and reactions of a film or script, we need to understand the public sentiment, discourse and context at the time of its release.” I’m thinking maybe same applies to our own moment of watching - the personal viewing plate, and internal reaction. What grabs now may not have in a time before x,y, or z. Where we once zeroed in on a leaf traversing the pavement we are now preferential to hold fast the unassuming, taciturn face screening witness to something big about to go down. My cult classic film studies continue this week. After months of being so averse to visual storytelling, favouring plain typography, written sentiments and books I am suddenly stirred by 1970’s cinema. Particular to New York in all it’s grimy unrest. These films are knocking the romanticism out of me. The foreseeable storylines I once felt drawn to now seem vapid and par for the course, although those featuring underground gangster deliberations and bank heists don’t seem realistic in my realm of time either. Many of the slower, dialogue-centric ones hold no soundtrack or music to accompany their scripted scenes, which makes uncomfortable realism more of a deal. Their relatability stirring a more intellectual bent in me as opposed to just touching on sensationalised hype and emotion. My mind is repeatedly returning to a story Al Pacino, bearing his old age, told in a retrospective interview. Causing me to yet again become endeared to my current state - the dynamis and pivotal thickness of it. Seeing how the assurance I have a grasp on as an adult - “finally” - is still subject to change with additional and subsequent years. He shared in candour the truth of his personal experience behind the canonised scene showing his character at Connie’s wedding, with a then also fresh-faced, salad days Dianne Keaton. How during screen-tests Coppola had wanted him for the role while the studio vetoed such an idea, how he felt so unnerved and unwanted in the rehearsal, and how Dianne came in and you see in a fuzzy old clip the flutteriness, the crushing sense of affection and comradery they had upholding their cause. Coppola asked Dianne after the run throughs with quantities of Sicilian men which one she chose for Michael and she went on to say, unflinchingly, “Al.” I can almost feel the full body response as she said it. The heat that suffuses all of you with an experience of such fascination and urgency. A wake up, while trying to keep it cool, remain dignified, detached - “But you know, whatever. Whoever. What’s it to me really..” I’m compelled into a state of inordinate giddiness on her behalf. I see De Niro’s jesting, braggadocio test. The alpha male?, young and virile, self assured, and I run for cover in an imagined, insouciant Pacino just out of view. Who, despite, is still radiating buoyancy, reliability, a goofiness. Not holding too tight. He’s got the ness only he can prepossess. What gets me is they had no idea what their lives, and that connection, would become in time. Something never promised as obvious on all our parts, but made so manifest in having the archival evidence to lean into and project the notion. Theirs is an example witnessed, and time and time revisited, by an audience. The box of their past and the state of their younger self is continually being cracked open. Their changes, naivety, and “a-ha!” “if only we knew!” moments are on display in perpetuity. We are privy to the moment before. In the interview, Pacino goes on to tell with an ageless boyishness, “Dianne and I thought we were soo baaad, that they were going to call us up and say they’d got other actors for the job,” laughing into each other's shoulders the whole day to get through, “then we just went out that night and got really drunk.” Any other time this piece of information would have seemed trivial. But now, catching me at a nearing age, and with moments of ineptitude and connection of my own filling the gaps to bulk out such a picture, it bowls me over. I have that to look forward to. That. The freewheel of young love, and the hit of re-uptake as my mind is washed by its recall in old age. But simultaneously I see vignettes already belonging to my script flash and play back. Almost missing days of disinhibiting two-ship. That bodiless blurring but defining of self that morphs and transfigures into form complimented by a friend. An overwhelming safety. Coming in from the cold. Insurance - full paid. Walking on air, tracking the enshrouding infinite. It seems the romantic in me is again coming to…. Galvanised by the rouse. The tactics of the aforementioned ‘knockout’ are just imagined defeat. Ready for round two. (Image: Saul Steinberg, Masquerade series) The ironic value in my week of Audrey Hepburn movie binging. To be cultured. 'A modern woman.’ A feminist. Why are these picks masked as sustenance? Merely because of their vintage. As if it makes me edgy to recite a line and resurrect a scene from a 1960’s movie in a present context.... Even when the movie holds no moral relevance, or significance for today. Or does it? Not revolutionary now, but then quite wild and antithetical to the contemporary codes of female domestic propriety at the time, and thus transcends the (ostensibly) ‘happily-aproned stay-at-home wife.’ Isn’t this in a way it’s own manner of conforming to a stereotype without questioning it though? The plot of funny face got me. Every quarrel, reprehensible act, degradation of character, kink in the line, cured with a kiss or a song. ~ Twenty-four hours spent reading Durga Chew-Bose’s ‘Heart Museum’ essay was a joyride, a heady disappearing act into pages that conjured a buzzing of energy in my body and a restlessness in my mind - a ‘maybe I can write like this’ and a simultaneous ‘I’ll never write as good as this.’ An exactitude of feeling gumption and the handbrake engage all at once. A bind even articulated ad rem within her exorbitant pages as I thought it: “There’s strength in observing one’s miniaturisation. That you are insignificant and prone to, and God knows, dumb about a lot. Because doesn’t smallness prime us to eventually take up space? For instance the momentum gained from reading a great book. Smallness can make you feel extra porous. Extra ambitious.” Too Much & Not the Mood - it’s consuming, and elaborate. In parts so profoundly validating and recognisable. I found it prodigious, miraculous, impossible to climb out of once I’d gone in. Like you’ve quite literally walked inside the museum of her heart and mind and it’s stirred up all the extravagant memories and twinging lost cries of your own. |