The Voyage: Edited by Chandani Lokuge & David Morley

By Silkworms Ink Anthologies

Welcome to The Voyage, an innovative new anthology of writing by staff and postgraduates from both Monash in Australia and Warwick in England. We believe all writing, at its best, is creative writing. To that end we have drawn our distinguished contributors not only from English and Creative Writing but also from other departments in Humanities, from our Faculties of Science and Social Science, and from our Administration. What's more, we invited writers and scholars who have some practical connection with Warwick and Monash from both within and outside the academy.
We were open to all forms and genres: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction including scholarship and biography, drama and most other forms of creativity you might imagine. We were happy for our contributors to write on any theme but we think that the core of the book is what it means to journey. These might be imagined or remembered journeys, physical or metaphorical journeys, or journeys into knowledge or across time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Silkworms Ink
• Release date: Aug 24, 2011
• ISBN: 9781908644008

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome to The Voyage, an innovative new anthology of writing by staff and postgraduates from both Monash in Australia and Warwick in England. We believe all writing, at its best, is creative writing. To that end we have drawn our distinguished contributors not only from English and Creative Writing but also from other departments in Humanities, from our Faculties of Science and Social Science, and from our Administration. What's more, we invited writers and scholars who have some practical connection with Warwick and Monash from both within and outside the academy.

We were open to all forms and genres: poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction including scholarship and biography, drama and most other forms of creativity you might imagine. We were happy for our contributors to write on any theme but we think that the core of the book is what it means to journey. These might be imagined or remembered journeys, physical or metaphorical journeys, or journeys into knowledge or across time.

There are over ten thousand miles between the universities of Monash and Warwick. Our writers live and work on the opposite side of the planet to each other. This book has been a voyage in space and time zones. It is part of a larger project between our universities. We are developing creative and practical research and teaching links for the benefit of staff and students. We have carried out workshops in Australia and England and our postgraduates have developed a superb anthology of student writing, Verge 2011: The Unknowable, which will be launched at Melbourne Writers Festival.

We thank all our contributors and colleagues at Warwick and Monash Universities, our innovative publishers Silkworms Ink for their inventiveness and attention, and Melbourne Writers Festival for their support. We also thank the Monash-Warwick Strategic Funding Initiative for Joint Research and Education Programmes for financial support. We apologise for any errors or omissions that have occurred during the editing process: these are entirely our responsibility. The copyright of all the pieces in this book remain with the authors.

Chandani Lokuge, Monash University

David Morley, Warwick University

Cup

Peter Blegvad

Ullage is the amount a vessel lacks of being full as my old dictionary defines it. The amount of absence or emptiness in it. Oppressed by the glut of surplus objects, people are beginning to value ullage more than the vessel itself. As a concerned citizen, feeling I should do my bit, I joined a destruction-crew in a field heaped with bottles, cups, mugs, jugs, beakers, demi-johns and other such. A tap or two of the hammer and they burst with a crack, pop or tinkle, their ullage freed to supplement the gasses enveloping the planet.

Our team had been working since dawn with an hour’s break for lunch, and now the sun was setting. In the course of the day I’d smashed hundreds of vessels of various kinds with equal indifference, so why was I moved to spare this one? There was just something about it. A little terra-cotta cup. I looked around. The others were focused on their work, their hammers rising and falling, liberating ullage. Though it was against the rules, I put the cup in my pocket. Just as the whistle blew. The workday was over. We weren’t searched. I took the cup home undetected, hoping the absence it contained would not be missed.

A happy marriage of form and function, but that wasn’t it. It was the cup’s modesty, its humility which moved me. Somehow I identified with it, part of me did — that part which wanted to be small again, to be ‘bounded in a nutshell’, contained.

Erich Neumann, in his study of the feminine archetype, The Great Mother (1955), draws a diagram of the Goddess as a vast pot or beaker, vectors connecting her anatomy with a constellation of other objects — beings, substances and things. In a straight line ascending from her right breast we find bowl, cup, and at the top, grail. The grail I pictured was gaudy, bejewelled, ostentatious, vulgar. While the terra-cotta cup seemed to embody Christ’s injunction to become as little children.

Strange how anything, the humblest object, can be the agent of a person’s conversion.

In the days that followed, notices appeared. The cup had been missed after all. A reward was offered for its return. It was described as a disposable cup for water, found in India. Where in India? My enquiries had to be discrete, but I managed to discover the specific provenance of the cup: a workshop in rural Gujarat. I resolved to return it to its place of origin.

If we imagine the line from the Great Mother’s breast continuing upward beyond the grail it would eventually reach the ultimate in gaudy vessels: the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator at CERN outside Geneva, built at a cost of billions. Inside the LHC protons stream at near light-speed around a ring 27 kilometres in circumference before being directed by super-cooled magnets to smash into each other in a spectacular approximation of the conditions which obtained immediately subsequent to the Big Bang.

Inside the cup particles streamed at a more leisurely pace and collided or not, according to chance. After days of travel, the cup and I arrived at a village near Morbi in Rajkot district, Gujarat. In the abandoned workshop the kilns were cold. Nearby the earth had been excavated to a depth of 3 metres. At the bottom it was clay, red with iron oxide. Moist and still warm from the setting sun.

What can we hope to learn from the collision of particles inside the LHC? It may give us direct evidence of the Higgs Boson, a new matter which would push the boundaries of high-energy physics.

What could I learn from the ullage the cup contained? I curled myself around it at the bottom of the pit and waited for night to fall.

Detail from diagram in The Great Mother by Erich Neumann

Cinematic Mash-up: The Sublime Genre of the Internet

Lauren Bliss

All Your Base are Belong to Us

What a strange, intoxicating place the Internet has become. Where the early film theorist Jean Epstein spoke of the pleasures of being embroiled in the cinema, I find myself equally immersed in the screen of my computer. I confess, I am a cinema purist; I despise the practice of watching films outside the intensity and veracity of the cinema auditorium – but I am able to become, through the small size of my computer screen, absorbed in the erotic power of the Internet. There is something about the Internet’s infinite possibilities that is comparable to the sublime propensity of the cinema.

Jean-François Lyotard wrote in his famous 1973 article Acinema that avant-garde films can offer the sublime where there is a dispersal of sterile energy; sterile meaning pleasure for the sake of pleasure, discharge without need of invention or reproduction. The Internet, in its purest sense, is the absolute definition of this sublime experience. But what an unusual phenomenon it is: the usually discrete terms of audience and practitioner are now fluid, shaky, mobile. The Internet rips mainstream cinema open and queers its form – but now with the spectator in charge. With its proliferation of sharing technology, a new genre of video art has formed; one that is both fluid in its dialogue with cinema proper and distinct in its exchange with modern technological conventions.

This conversation between the Internet and cinema is enabled by the free exchange of films and the proliferation of artistic communities that, through websites like YouTube, share their work freely and directly with a global audience. The Internet breeds a language of its own but, rather than in the exclusive cliques and societies of art movements past, it occurs in a youthful culture paradoxically bound by anonymity and disconnection. As with experimental cinema, one must know where to look in order to find liberated and unchallenged movements; but unlike experimental cinema, subjects of the Internet are not so hard to find, as artists filter into largely indiscriminate searching platforms like Google – the only trick being in the words and phrases used to seek out all forms of bizarre, unadulterated pleasure (a talent possessed by a limited few people).

The early French impressionists (like Epstein) cherished the moving image camera’s ability to defamiliarise ordinary objects – those hundreds of films concerned only with the movements of cars, aeroplanes and merry-go-rounds – a practice still not lost on contemporary video artists, such as the Philadelphia-based Ryan Trecartin (user name WianTreetin) or Australian Wendy Vainity (who has been described as the Jackson Pollock of the Internet). These artists utilise the effects of unreliable technology to invoke delight out of frustration. Wendy’s video, kitty litter physics animation (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4Aw9OdyZ6s) is a revelation for the senses. Wendy provokes the repetitive, awkward slowness of technology; irritation is transformed into jouissance, what Lyotard would call a simulacrum. The video features footage of a poorly animated cat as it shifts clumsily around a fairly abstract looking litter box. The soundtrack is marked by stereotypical sound effects common to editing software, which is placed into a repetitive loop by Wendy; the video offers a gesture toward the shallow thrill for rupturing the limits of technology.

The Internet operates as a Utopian platform for all forms of moving-image art. The popularity of both downloading software and websites for critical discussions of film allows almost anyone with a computer to access almost anything. And then, in an act of sublime nihilism, the user destroys itself. In its purest form, this exists as the virus (a condition relatively unknown to users of Macintosh operating systems, but they will get their fill soon enough). Then we see this destruction through the act of hacking, where the socially inept invert the power of technology to watch the rapid destruction of all forms of structure. Why? For the lulz! But, when the cinema bleeds into the Internet we see this destruction in the form of the mash-up. Here, video practitioners mutate cinematic genres and adapt solid genre to the fluidity of the Internet.

Mash-ups have given rise to fabulous, sometimes humorous concoctions that violently deconstruct the productive power of mainstream cinema. One brilliant example of this is from user tomthenomad whose YouTube video, shawkwsank r4edemptions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAFq5QKgLRg&feature) mutates the sentimentality of the original feature The Shawshank Redemption in much the same way as Austrian artist Martin Arnold did to a 1940s Hollywood movie in Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy. Tomthenomad’s clip takes footage intended to be dramatic and affecting (including the moment when the protagonist Andy/Tim Robbins learns that he has been sentenced to prison for the rest of his life, or the warm exchange on the prison roof between ‘Red’/Morgan Freeman and Andy) and brutally mutilates it. Pixellated images of a pair of sunglasses dot the faces of both protagonists; clips are shortened to prevent the sequence releasing its dramatic climax; and a MIDI music file is transplanted onto the soundtrack. In 40 seconds, tomthenomad pulverises the excessive sentimentality of The Shawshank Redemption and intuitively illustrates Lyotard’s notion of the commodification of cinematic practice.

More complexly, in his Youtube video I-BE AREA (Pasta and Wendy M-PEGgy) (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR4sHDR-1XE), Ryan Trecartin combines computer technology and avant-garde practice to exploit both the sentimentality of the mainstream and the superficiality of computer graphics technology. Trecartin’s films are purposefully reduced so that we can only watch his work on our computer screens; cinema-scale projection blurs the image and the sound file is too weak for any enhanced system. Pasta and Wendy performs as if Trecartin has given his camera a strong dose of LSD – the schizophrenia of his videotext violently smashes together the genres of horror, daytime television, teen-film, documentary and home-shopping programs. A strange concoction that challenges audience expectations of what a teenage slumber party should look like. His work is a prescription for sterile pleasure – something I can experience for free, anywhere in the world through my computer.

For the Lulz

The Internet ruptures the economics of movement. How else would I be able to indulge in the experimental erotic film Carmilla from French writer and filmmaker Stéphane du Mesnildot, whilst enjoying music videos from the great 1980s Mexican pop group Flans, while witnessing the underground movements of hackers serving DDOS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) to reckless corporations? Perhaps the freshest realisation of the Internet in the cinema can be found in one of the most well-regarded avant-garde filmmakers of all time: Jean-Luc Godard, whose recent work Film Socialisme takes memes and viral videos in order to unpack not only the politics of class, but also the sterility of the Internet – its freedom from productivity and capability for complete indulgence. His use of the well-known video The Two Talking Cats (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3U0udLH974) best expresses the universality of the Internet, how it can potentially exceed cultural barriers and perform pleasure at its most enchanting and sublime.

There is a dark side to the Internet: its unlimited accessibility. It is, in this sense, the ultimate machine-human cyborg, complete with an unconscious that provokes and unsettles. To think that one can have access to the entire world. This is the reason why so many supposedly democratic governments have mobilised to try to restrict access to content. Just look at the case of Egypt or the Wikileaks phenomenon – where revolutions have spawned from its power! The Internet makes sure that no film will be censored, nothing left inaccessible. The problem is that this makes the Internet’s power seem like a infant let loose in a candy store – a technology that can give us whatever we want has made governments react like stern parents trying to control their rebellious children.

Fortunately, the power of the Internet is precisely that it cannot be controlled – there is always a way around censorship and tyranny. The Internet transforms the very notion of genre into something more fluid, less rigid; it opens up new ways of seeing and seizes its power by its mutated vocation for pleasure.

Copyright Lauren Bliss July 2011

Crystal

(Work in Progress from ‘The Girl is Also Well’)

Elleke Boehmer

The girl runs into the kitchen from the glittering outdoors and finds paper. She is wearing her big white cotton knickers and a cotton vest, her kit for humid summer days. The exercise book she uses for drawing lies open on the red gingham table-cloth on the kitchen table. But there is also scrap paper in a pile on the father’s desk, and more drawing paper in her bedroom, if she wants it.

The girl likes all paper, blank or printed. When she was small, smaller than she is now, she liked it so much she ate it, any paper lying about but especially the pages of the telephone directory. The telephone directory had a special sweetish taste, sharpened by the peppery flavour of the ink. When well mixed with spit, the paper went slick and pasty and could be squished through the gaps in her teeth, a feeling she very much liked.

To eat the telephone directory she first softened a page by sucking on a corner, then tore away tiny bits with her front teeth, savouring the taste, till the day she nibbled off a number the father needed and he stored the directory on a high shelf from then on, out of reach.

The girl grabs the exercise book off the table and the pencil lying beside it. She crouches down on the cool green tiles of the kitchen floor, the tiles that will later be covered by the father with the sticky orange linoleum the mother will say attracts every grain of passing dirt. Her head is slightly under the table, protected within its shadow, as if in a cave. Her forearms lie flush against the green tiles to soak in their coolness. Her fat sweaty knees make two fuzzy circles of condensation on the tiles. She spreads her left hand on the opened blank pages of the exercise book to steady it, as she has been taught at her Dutch kindergarten, and holds the pencil neat and tight in the hook of her right. She begins to write down her words.

The words came to her just then as she was skipping outside in the kitchen yard beside the windy-drier that looks like a daisy with its single green-painted stem. Wait for it; how did they go? Feet feet. No, that wasn’t it. Silver, silver, ah sold ah sold.

She has a head full of noises. Just-about-words, almost-words, nonsense sounds, they buzz in her ears all the time. A-ta-tuh-tuh, a-ta-tuh-tuh, as her legs skip the rope. Drah again drah again drah again, walking home from school, a sound that beats through her friend Linda’s chatter. Ffffff-fee as she and her Dad and her Mam drive down the long hill into town. Ffffff-ffeeee. And overriding the low humming almost-words are the big keynotes, ah no no no no ah no ah whrrreee, high pitched, shrieking, the noise that is everywhere when she lies in bed at night waiting for sleep; ah whrrreee and whaa-woe, whaa-woe, its undertone, that goes in time with her heartbeat.

These tones and pulses, she knows, come from inside her ears, but at the same time they encircle the everyday noises she can hear from her bed, sounds that come from her white-haired father who sits out there on the veranda, smoking and slapping at mosquitoes, now and again saying something to himself, gruff, like a swear word.

Godverdomme, Godverdomme.

But today the words that buzzed as she skipped gathered themselves for the first time into a shape. Step by step the words make a wobbly square, a column of rhymes, a stalagmite. Here, she has it now, she is writing it down.

My feet are made of silver

My hands are made of gold

My arms are made of crystal

And now I’m sold.

Just as it came to her.

She sits back on her heels and softly chants the shape through. Just right, yes, she has it, and each word spelt just so, even crystal. The y in crystal makes a sharp point, sharp like the shards of crystal you get when the cut-glass champagne flutes brought over to South Africa from Holland break during washing up, as they seem to do whenever they are used. She thinks of the fleck of glass in the eye of Hans, the boy bewitched by the Snow Queen, whose heart turned cold. His shard was like the y of crystal.

She chants the rhyme through again, louder than before but still softly. She doesn’t want to attract notice. There are Sunday visitors on the veranda with her parents, the visitors who occasionally come, as grey and wrinkled as her Dad, to relive the good days back in the Far East, wherever that is. It sounds like a place not on earth. Skipping, she can hear their ragged bursts of conversation and makes sure not to slap the rope too hard on the ground. It is not a good idea to attract the guests’ attention. If ever her presence is detected, the mother dispatches the guests to say hello. They come upon her crouched with her book and break out in exclamation.

What funny girl! What interesting talents ! Wat een wonder!

And their cries rouse the mother once again to drive her outside. Now Go and Play, Ella. Play some Outside Games, Go and Play Outside. What Weather in Africa, Go and Enjoy it, Go and Play.

She tears the page out of the exercise book and stores it in her bedroom under the mat beside her bed. Now she would like to lie flat on her stomach on the cool kitchen tiles and read something but she knows this is asking for trouble. So she goes outside again and finds the skipping rope coiled on the ground. It is in the shape of small letter a: a is a pretty, loosely knotted letter. She begins again to skip, the wooden handles whistling in her hands, the rope whirring, a white blur, zzzzzzzzzzz, and this time she has a whole rhyme to skip to, a wistful, mysterious rhyme, all her own.

Arms made of crystal, Arms made of crystal,

Sold, sold, now I’m sold.

Silver, gold, now, now, sold.

The rhyme sticks in her head all day, like songs do, Lo-co-mo-tion on the radio, Al-le-menschen on Mam’s Philips radiogram. The rhyme bounces in amongst the other things she hears, snatches of the visitors’ talk, the father beating his knee, telling his stories, till she’s sick of it, till she nearly ruins everything and hums it out loud, which is as good as saying, Look what I did! and quenching it for good.

In bed that night the rhyme’s still there, thumping lightly, arms, gold, now sold, now sold. She’s happy she kept it to herself because saying it over begins to sound like a secret lullaby. The words as they come pull her thoughts out thin and straight like hair through a comb. They drown out the sounds filtering in from outside, the whining of the veranda light, Dad’s talk, shouts, also the patter of the heavy roses against her window, tossed by the breeze, the low drumming that drifts most weekends from the township when the wind is in the right direction, the sound that arches over all the others, the thin ah whrrreee whaa-woe that must be the sound of the universe, the light of the stars boring through the darkness.

The words and numbers she swallowed when eating the telephone directory, she thinks, must have seeped into her blood and from there into her brain, so heavy is her head with sounds and letters, like a sponge with water.

So she turns on to her stomach, her face pressed into the pillow, away from the window where the yellow veranda light leaks in, the heads of the roses dance like the savage Indians in Mam’s Winnatoo stories, and she says her rhyme:

My feet are made of silver

My hands are made of gold

My arms, my arms, my arms are made of crystal

And now … and now ... and now

Godverdomme.

Drumming, whining. Godverdomme. Ah whrrreee. The darkness shrieking.

Ostrowski’s Superbus

Halina Boniszewska

‘Look, Mum!’ -- Oskar squealed. -- ‘Look at the tiny houses!’

‘Whaaa..?’

Anna strained to see through the grease and dirt of the Superbus window; but the light was harsh, so she closed her eyes to a