Manikin/Homunculus

When I saw Manikin Pis in brussels I was terribly unimpressed because I realised that my grandfather had a replica in his garden when I was a child. Of course when I was a child I found it terribly funny and enjoying turning the tap on really hard so the little boy was gushing piss into the pond and damaging the lilly pads. Apparently when he had the statue/fountain installed I asked in front of numerous people 'why would anyone want a statue of a boy weeing?' What a philistine I was as a child! Ah, but now I have seen the thing itself, and still found it funny, and not even in a quaint European way, but just stupid. So, the little man - manikin or homunculus - continues to urinate, which somehow I find almost sad, as if he isn't ever able to expel all the liquid, as if he is just a urine conduit and nothing more. Imagine being defined by your bodily functions.

I haven't been able to sleep properly recently. I know I am stressed when I don't sleep and my skin is crazy. It is itchy and raw on my fingers. Recently I wore latex gloves to bed over my cream covered hands, in the hope that making them sweat would soften them. It is a funny idea. It didn't work. And when I don't sleep properly I have strange, shallow, almost real dreams. Perhaps it is just that I am unable to distinguish dream from reality sometimes. I still feel very strongly that Bert Newton is gay, due to a dream I had many years ago.

Seacock, Sea Blanket

I saw Aunty Ed's friend Mavis on Saturday, who will also be 90 next year. She is the one who did a striptease for her friends on her 80th birthday. She is a fantastic woman, and tall and strong looking. I drove one of Aunty Ed's friends home to View St, and she told me that she knew my father's parents, Bruce and Lulu. Hobart is funny like that. And driving around I felt strange and sad, realising that it is all past, has all passed, and that I can't have whatever I was there. When I went to Ireland I had no idea what I was leaving. I didn't know it would be the end (or the beginning of the end) of so many things. It makes some of my final conversations with SD seem rather prophetic now. I said to her that I was scared that I would lose everything, and that there would be no place for me when I came back. She assured that everyone loved me and of course I would be wanted. But then she became a Muslim and didn't want me.

At Salamanca I felt uneasy, and sure that I would see someone I didn't want to (MP or family) in that idyllic family atmosphere. There were rugged bearded men in polar fleeces and women with dreadlocks and brown jumpers. This is what I love about Tasmanian folk - their inability, or unwillingness to be like other people, to follow fashion, to live fast lives, to be flashy, to be truly wealthy, to be totally connected to the rest of the world(???). It is a different place. And on the boat I (again) looked at the water and thought about connection to place/land and wondered about my alienated connection to the idea of Tasmania. Is it something that we Tasmanian folk are quite obsessed by? Or do some of us leave and never look back?

Dad talked about seacocks (things like taps that let water in and out of boats), and I laughed, and then we met a man who had a leaking seacock on his boat. And Dad showed me the sea blanket he has bought, which is used for ocean racing. You can wrap yourself in it in wet clothes and it will dry you and keep you warm. I loved it, and I said over and over "really?' because I can't quite believe that such things can exist.

The Safcol Jetty

Very few people will understand this title. I am going to Hobart tomorrow for Aunty Ed's 90th birthday. I am splitting the time between my mother and my father. My father and I have arranged an almost clandestine meeting on a jetty near the Safcol fish place, and he will pick me up on the boat. After we made this arrangement I laughed and thought about the rift in my family, and all the strange and secret activities. Perhaps a slightly bitter laugh?

Other People's Lives

I have had a horrible alcohol depression in the last 2 days. Today I feel ok. As I walked in the back gate at work this morning I felt happy. Sometimes it is so intangible and fleeting, but it is there nonetheless. Perhaps part of this shitty feeling is due to wiping the weekend out from drinking so much on Friday night. And I went somewhere that doesn't make me happy. But it is fascinating. But at some strange person's flat at 7 or 8 in the morning I felt sad. I looked out the window into an amazing hard and windowed space and thought about what it means to live in the city. And these people, the people who were there just struck me as lost, sad, lonely and desperate. There was debauchery, drug use and drinking at 8am, and I lay down and fell asleep. Funny how often you realise what you don't want to be by seeing others do it. They seemed to be living a horrible night time existence, that is unsustainable and uncomforting. I suppose we often play at being the things we are not. There were silly girls who reminded me of ** (a mythical name these days) with their ridiculous and embarrassing frilliness and their on the floor girl-play. It reminded me of parties I went to with **, and she was such an idiot, and performing the cute girl for all the boys, and I hated it, but they loved it. I hated it because I was too serious to be cute, and I wanted to be liked but was never prepared to sacrifice anything for it. And now I am all grown up, and looking at these girls and feeling repulsed and slightly angered, and eventually they will probably be embarrassed by it too. And then there are the men who fuck them. I don't want to make a judgment, but gutfully, I feel that it is horrible and sleazy.

I don't know why sleaze is something so abhorrent (perhaps that is too strong a word?), when often it is indefinable and almost invisible. It seems to be a presence, or something that you sense, without seeing. This word can make us ladies so angry with men, because we often refuse to recognise it in ourselves. We posit ourselves as powerless victims of sleaze. I know I have participated in my fair share of sleaze, albeit obliquely. But is it something we are repulsed and embarrassed by because we are always on the verge of it? Are we all prone to sleaze, the way we are prone to indulgence, selfishness, violence? Is it something we are scared of because we only just keep it at bay?

And guilt. Which sometimes seems like a quaint and anachronistic feeling, but which creates a position of power. I was thinking about this on Sunday, as I looked out the window into the garden. Sometimes I think I feel guilt as a form of control. If I feel guilt, then I must have some control over the thing I feel guilty about. Does the presence of guilt somehow negate or at least slightly alleviate the sleaze. I know people who feel no guilt about being sleazy, and that is scary, because it means unrestrained desire.

I don't actually know what sleaze is, but sometimes I sense it in people (including myself). Perhaps we find it repugnant because of the quality of desperation it carries with it. And I'm not sure why desperation is something that scares us and disgusts us. I sensed it everywhere on Friday night, in all those half smiles and meaty stares. And who can resist the allure of cheap charm in the middle of the night? Who can say that it doesn't feel good to be desired (actually, I think I can, but then I'm really fucked up about that.....)?

Shatter Proof

Perhaps I am lucky, and like KH, shatter proof. It has been a strange and almost gratuitously intense few days. Today I feel flat (or lumpy, I don't know) and pushed backwards. Is it because I have such an intense desire to be loved and appreciated? I was talking to someone about falling in love, and suddenly I hated the idea, and felt terribly angry with myself, and other humans for wanting it. Today needs to pass me - who is stuck in the rejection reverie, and wondering what happens next. What does happen next? I keep thinking of some KH lyrics "I know I don't want you....I feel broken and miles away". Fantastically dramatic for this stupid situation, yet these kinds of things always appeal to the theatrical/tragic part of the self. Speaking of the 'tragic', I read a page of an Eagleton book about violence and theatre (I think) where he talked about Nietzsche's ideas about interpretations of history. Nietzsche was against a "bloodless historicism" in which we understand history as objective fact. I like that Foucault's historical work has always been very "bloody". I like the idea of "historicism" rather than "history", and it being a practice rather than a fact.

It is a slightly stinging loss, but not a brutal one. And I don't think I will cry beyond what I did at my desk in front of ** who was very kind. It could never have been right, and I know I was pretending to a large extent. But then, I am always open to suggestion....

When I feel sad often I wish for the warm and loving arms of my father. I sometimes wonder if I idolise him the way he does his own father. And is it an idolatry that is enabled by fear and lack (sounding a bit femmo here I think)? Or by my polarisation of both parents and subsequent refusal to see my father as anything but perfect, and my mother as anything but deeply flawed? I want to be deeply flawed, and I am, and yet I look towards perfection knowing it to be a fiction, yet creating it in my head to support some ancient fantasy. Do we as children first learn about 'perfection' and how to create it within our minds? No matter how vehemently you think you reject an idea, if it has always existed around you, and you are unmistakably informed by it. I remember SD used to have those days where she said "nothing is solid" and she felt scared by the instability of everything (and I do really mean everything). I sometines have those days, and I want to tell people about how my reality has momentarily changed, but it is like an insurmountable task/conversation, because I know that I can't put into language the things I need to say. I think earnestness is something we can't adequately speak and interpret.

It is possible that at this point I have stopped making sense.

** and I made a list last night to try to work out who we wanted to win the World Cup. We decided that Italy wins with cars, pasta/pizza and inventions/science, but France wins in terms of philosophy/critical theory, sexiness and wine. One of Italy's major detractors was that they have the Pope, albeit it in his own little half a kilometre squared country. It became a funny discussion. The Pope isn't Italian, and doesn't really live in Italy, but is surrounded by Italy. I think when AM and I discuss these things, we can always create an oblique and absurdly sensible philosophy about anything.

We couldn't decide on who we thought should win, but it didn't matter, because Italy won anyway, and this morning I had that ridiculous sense of inevitability that you can only have after an event (and it is almost as if you feel like you should have known, that you should have had foresight).

(This) Demise of a Blithe and Sibylline Spirit

I feel today as if I want to attack stupid people. And not stupid passive people, but actively, aggressively stupid people. It strikes me as sad and strange to have concerns that are well beyond your field of vision or reality. Personally, I believe in minding one's own business to an extent, because I don't want to be all heavy handed and American about things. The reason for this is because I don't presume that I am always right, properly informed or in authority. Some people are corrosively stupid, to the point of disliking intelligence. These are probably the people who think The Da Vinci Code is mind blowing and a great literary work (fucking philistines!) We all position ourselves with such particularity, and sit there feeling righteous. I know so many people who do the 'right thing' and don't question what the 'wrong thing' actually is or why they don't do it.

I was talking to ZP last night about the way we position ourselves politically/morally/ethically etc, and how we make a massive leap of faith when we decide that where we sit is the right position. Is violence ok? Is racism normal and quite acceptable? Why do we feel the need to care about other people? We exist in a rich, busy and telluric reverie, so involved in our own mud, that we forget the meta level, we forget to be critical, we forget that perhaps existence is a concept rather than a fact. And it seems stupid to me.

You can always take a moral highground when you choose not to think beyond the immediate. When you accept your own position with such sureity, you are inevitably missing the things that make the world work. You are also shutting off awareness of your own perceptions and judgments.

This isn't ever about restitution or moral arrogance, but about making sense and making pieces. I look askance at the people around me and wonder what they think. Do we all feel as if we have inherent understandings of certain things? AM showed me some Paul McCarthy live art; a very weird performance piece - him punching himself in the face wearing boxing gloves and making guttural and animalistic sounds. He pours paint (or tomato sauce, who knows?) into his gloves and continues to punch himself. He is naked and his penis is covered in a red goo. The first time I watched it I found it really funny, but there was also something about it that I found quite disturbing. AC watched it, and I commented on the fact that I had found it disturbing. He just found it funny. Perhaps he removed himself from the artistic level and only saw the ridiculous? Perhaps when I first watched it I was in a fragile mood? To me the very idea of perception/(and)interpretation is endemic to the instant response (or the gut response, or whatever you want to call it), and it turn to living itself.

Well Lit

Last night I drove past a lighting shop close to work. It was dark and the shop was ablaze (as you would expect) and to me, at that time, it seemed to be the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I was agog (I only used that word because I find it funny), enrapured! What is this obsession with light? It is aesthetic, but it is also healthful.

I am reading The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto again (Mario Vargas Llosa), which is definately the right thing to do. I am absorbed. Someone recently asked me how I know what to read, and I realised that it is something that just seems to happen. I follow a chain of links perhaps. I know I became interested in Simone Weil (not that I have properly read any of her work) through Chris Kraus. How did I discover Edmund White, or Peter Carey? Perhaps because they are seminal (especially in Edmund White's case....ha ha). I bought my first copy of Nights at the Circus ([Angela Carter] I now own at least 3 copies of it) at Fullers bookshop in Hobart in 1994. This was when I lived in Warwick St with Weej, in a revolting old house that nearly froze us to death. I read a lot of it in the kitchen there. I didn't ever smoke cigarettes during the day then.

What is the name of the lighting shop at the beginning of Sandy Bay Rd, opposite Byron St, the one that has been there since I was a child?

In that house I read a lot. I didn't really have much else to do, as we were so poor. There was something we really loved about being poor though, and it always made us laugh. Poor, drunk and dirty. A very Hobart existence. Funny how I couldn't do that now. And I don't think I could live in Dublin now. SM sent me a text while she was at Ri Ra (horrible club in Dublin) and reminded me of the time we were in there very drunk and were nearly locked in the toilet. We were talking and the club closed and no one realised we were still in the toilet. When we left we staggered around until we found a Spar or a Centra (equivalent of 7-11) to buy some shitty food. I heard someone speak with an Australian accent and before I knew it I had said 'fucking Australians' to this person. I don't know why. Perhaps I was angry? Perhaps it was some weird disidentification thing? But I so fervently held on to being Australian while I was there.

The world is, and should be well lit.