Poetry

The Blind Girl

Lindsay — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:34:12 +0200

Two Rainbows (for eternal hope in the heart)

Lindsay — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 05:56:13 +0200

For all those who carry hope in their hearts, may you find your pot of gold (whatever that might be).

Best foot forward

Lindsay — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:36:48 +0200

Selkie

Lindsay — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 12:00:36 +0200

Selkies (or silkies) are part of the folklore of coastal North Scotland and Ireland. Selkies are seals that can shed their skin to reveal a human form which allows them to take lovers from from the land.

Ghost in gum tree, Adelaide Parklands, dusk

doll_yoko — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:00:14 +0200

Some nights, the roo

doll_yoko — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 04:35:18 +0200

Two solitary campers in the dunes at Antechamber Bay, our first night on the island. The moon is brightful overhead when I'm ripped from my dreams by the presence and weight of a kangaroo on me. A giant roo, so heavy, squashing. I lie with stillness for a long time. When I eventually drag myself up out of my canvas cocoon I can't see him, he's dissolved into the sheltering scrub. Disappointed, relieved, I burrow back into sleep. In the morning Robyn reports her encounter with a wombat when she ventured out for a midnight jish. But this was no wombat sitting on me, it was kangaroo. Something about that heavy tail, those thumper bumper feet, the sweet grassy breath.

The story of the scary teddy bear in the Flinders sidles into memory. A friend told as a child not to go to a certain gorge because it was home to a menacing giant teddy bear. Years later the forbidden gully offers up some remains. The bone men identify them as megafauna, like a dipro-doton or that giant wombat, can't remember what exactly, anyway, something big and furry with huge eyes, like a scary teddy bear.

At Snake Lagoon a few nights later I'm woken by someone crawling into my swag behind me. Alert, not alarmed. Maybe it's Robyn, maybe her tent's collapsed. Yet peeling myself up from the layers of bag and swag, I can't see anyone. Now I'm spooked, and jumpy when a possum races up and starts drinking as I'm jishing, snarling when I try to shoo it away. Later that night I wake again, cocoon drenched with dew. Lie awake for hours until the first sun dries out the nest, returning some sleep.

******

Chinese New Year three years earlier, another full moon, I'm heading to the supermarket at dusk. As I'm walking past the court house, the one with the nipple, I notice an Aboriginal guy coming my way. An clean-shaven older man, missing some teeth, very dark, wearing a red cap. He looks really familiar, resembles the peacemaker Uncle from the ancient salt lake where I'd slept so well in the sandy riverbed around the time of that Woomera business.

Where us raggedy mob were told by this Uncle, 'See that old hill over there, you can look at her from here and love her, appreciate her beauty, but you can't go there, you can't see her closer than this.'
Now my gaze connects with that of the man, and we begin stepping through a small ritual of recognition.

Hi! How have you been? How's everything, how's everyone over there? and so on.

We pull away from the warmth of bodies greeting, and it's about now that I realize that I don't recognise this guy, I've never seen him before, yep, he's a total stranger. Maybe he's coming to the same conclusion, who knows. But a connection's been established, and he's explaining that its his friend's birthday and he's buying some port to take back to the hostel to celebrate. He's hungry, and I share some dosh with him for Chinese food, and he asks if I want to sit down with him for a while. His name is John, I can't catch his last name, and he's a Larrakea man, from the Top End.

We find a bench in that little mall between the Hilton and the Court house and straight up he tells me, “We know stories about this place.”

Gesturing to Victoria Square, he says this was a place for ceremony but now it's all blocked off. Indeed it's surrounded by cyclone fencing and populated by tents, for yet another bike race or shitty Clipsal event.

We've got stories about this place, you should listen to me.

This was an important place for men, and back there – he's gesturing with his head and I'm figuring he's talking about back of the river – that was a special place for women.

The men would dance naked. And the women would dance naked.

We've got stories for this place. I know the stories about this place. And for the island.

He starts singing, giant spirit beings that travel through the country, from north to south, and then west, shaping the features of the land as they move through it.

The men were chasing a kangaroo, he jumped away, and that's how Kangaroo Island was formed.

For each story fragment he tells me, he sings the song for it in language. The song is similar each time, a refrain, repeated. Just the name of the animal changes.

Crow. Eagle. Kangaroo.

I'm trying to change my ears into radar, to capture each sound, to remember. The giant kangaroo is jumping, and wherever it lands, the imprints from its feet and tail create salt lakes.

He's singing and he's talking and he's telling me emphatically – you should be writing this down, you should be recording this, he keeps miming the movement of pen on paper.

We know stories about this place.

I'm wishing Steve could be here because he's a culture man, a Narungga man, also Kuarna and Ngarrindjeri man; a performer, passionate about country and culture. He's already got receptive ears, knows how to listen, and feel words, take utterances deep inside, flow them out again. I've seen him do this.

John repeats that I should record these stories, and I'm explaining I have a camera but they're all back home, round the corner. I don't even have a pen on me. We borrow one from a taxi driver and exchange details. He says he'll be at St Lukes dormitory for a while.

The stranger leaves me with a present - three fine plastic bracelets – red, yellow, black [the Aboriginal colours, the symbolic colours of indigenous pride] – 'to remember'.

******

A year later I'm at that same court house in Vic Square, inside this time, with my friend and her son, up the back of a large court room. The only other people are way down the front, a judge on a kind of stage, and a couple of lawyers, it's their game clearly. The tight fraternity of the law, Adelaide-style. Living by the courts I see the daily drifts, the lawyers and paralegals with their wheelies, cops with warrant batches and bumtown leather satchells, the odd government stiff silk flown in by the A-G's department for dirty deeds not done cheap – yes, I remember you well Mr Charles Gunst QC in the Adelaide Family Court and your Bahktiari bullshit. Friday night pissups at the Crown and Sceptre, beards and bellies and laughing blondes. Our legal neighbours in the courtyard of Mitchell Chambers, they only know the words to American Pie, but they sure sing 'em with gusto, repeatedly. If you live in Port Adelaide I guess you watch boats and docklife, in Surflen Street it's lawyers you see sailing by.

My friend is here to bear witness to the sentencing in a hit and run case. A friend of hers, a cousin, was runover, killed crossing West Terrace. He wasn't charged up, he'd been off the grog for a while, and no yarndi neither. He was just crossing the road. The driver must have been aware that he's run this man down, cos he chucked a U-ey, returning to the impact point, then turned again, and sped off. Driver was drunk, driving without a license. Had a mate with him, also smashed. Apparently he drove to his uncle's place. Hung there for a couple of hours, then reported the accident to the cops.

Thirteen people have died around West Terrace since the City Council moved the blackfellas out of the Square, my friend tells me back then. Rapes, murders and crossing the road. But, outa sight, outa mind.

Due to a 'procedural error', the cops never charged the young bloke for driving unlicensed. I'm not sure if he got done for drunk driving. But now is the day of reckoning, on some charge of driving without due care, and leaving the scene of an accident. The guy hasn't bothered fronting up today, phoned in sick the lawyer reckons. Or did the dog eat his homework? No matter, the judge and the lawyers confer, it's all pretty matey, and they never look back at their audience. Who knows if they know we are there.

The no-show gets off, no conviction, no jail time, no fine, no nothing.

Sweet! Give the man a medal!

We leave the court. No-one says anything. I'm gutted, so I can only imagine how my friends must feel. The man's son is already lost, devastated by the death. I lamely ask my friend if there's anything I can do, write a letter or something, take it to the media.

Leave it she says, just leave it alone, let it be.

******

The second night on the island we sleep at Wreckers Beach, and again have a camp site to ourselves. In the morning I set off to get water, making a diversion along the ridge to check out if there's a whale, even though it's the wrong season. There are no other happy campers around this remote beach so I'm surprised to see someone sitting on the shoreline, looking out to sea. The figure is wearing a dark hooded cloak, and sits so very still, a heavy melancholy immediately infects me. I stand watching, then feel a bit like a pervert so I resume my mission to wrench water from those Ligurian bees. Returning via the ridge I see the figure is no longer there, but there's a trail on the wet sand. Moving closer to the soft edge of the dunes my gaze follows the sand smear, coming to rest on a supine figure halfway up the beach. Clearly no longer human, but without glasses I'm a mole.

I'm on the beach. Up close but not too personal with a huge fur seal. She's slumped over seaweed, enormous and lethargic. I'm concerned that she's so far from the shoreline and her head's pointing completely in the wrong direction. Maybe she's dying, how good can it be to be so far from the water and her crew? And the tide's going out. The seal is a fat brown mirror of my ignorance, and I realise that a swag is almost as pretentious as a four-wheel drive, only it's cheaper to run.

Later I find a fisherman, and he tells me not to worry, it's a seal thing, she's probably been swimming and fish feasting for three days; now she's bone tired and needs to rest.

******

Last night I dream I'm in the sea and there's a shark, and giant parrot fish. I have to save two kids but I can't find them. I wake to the radio news, a boy in Esperance just had his leg bitten off by a Great White. A black bird is pecking away outside my bedroom door, and I recall the Bobo bird that visited mum's garden daily in the months before she died. Every time I opened the back door, that homely speckled bird would fly in from the Secret Passage down the side of the house, and hang about. Simon saw her too, but we don't think mum ever did, as she was locked up in Glenside most of that time, with all the responsibilities that being a 2000 year old Sybyl entails.

After the funeral we never saw that Bobo bird again, but there was this annoying chabooba of a blowfly that flew into the living room just before the wake and stayed for three days. I thought it could be mum, transformed into a fly on the wall, enjoying her final tea party and checking we were doing everything right. Si wasn't convinced, but then, he's always been more skeptical about ghosts and fairies, shapeshifting and farsight and all that stuff.

Which leads into another story, my encounter with a malevolent ghost in my Uncle's place in the Bronx back in '88.

Sandals for Perseus

Lindsay — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:05:12 +0200

Pokémon Masters vs Pakman

doll_yoko — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 08:09:52 +0200

Collect, train, battle.

In a Japanese franchised fantasy game, players capture cute wild creatures called Pokémon, and train them to become members of powerful fighting teams. If a Pokémon cannot escape the confines of the multi-function Poké Ball, it is considered owned by the Trainer. Volition goes out the window, and it must now obey all commands.

The interior of the spherical Poké Ball is designed to make the enslaved Pokémon feel comfortable, but there are no guarantees that this will happen. It's a world of tough luck and tough love.

Pokémon Trainers desire that their team of fighting Pocket Monsters beat all others. Thus the superlative Trainer will become the Pokémon Master.

Losing myself in games with textual others has long been a favoured altered reality experience. My immaterial body was born in a place of the dead in 1994. Late one night my fiendish friend and I— sharing a keyboard, crappy dial-up connection and inhabiting one generic avatar—engaged with a dyslexic vampire named the_Unborne.

We were in a morgue in an online world.

LambdaMOO—the Mother of all MOOs.

Life, in all its real virtuality, became amplified, splendid in its splinterings. Far from being second life, it was first and thirsty life, queer and unquenchable.

LambdaMOO catapulted me back to sensations firs experienced in pre-teen pastimes of make believe and “let's pretend”. Games like Nightclubs, where 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye spiced our mise-en-scene. We take turns in playing the dancer on a makeshift stage, wearing a silver satin flock dress, gauzy veil, and very little else. The stripper hoochy koochies her customer, her yearning trick. And then we switch.

Reading Coldness and Cruelty (Deleuze meets Sacher-Masoch) inspired my crafting of the Puppet Mistress, aka Gashgirl. A persona who would engage with the quirky, erotic fantasies of strangers, improvising pleasure scenarios on secret micro-stages.

The poet Laure writes to Bataille as she is dying: The poetic work is sacred in that it is the creation of a topical event, 'communication' experienced as nakedness. It is self-violation. Baring, communication to others of a reason for living, and this reason for living 'shifts.'

Social relations in the Realm of the Puppet Mistress were more Last Tango in Paris than One Night in Paris. Whilst real life identities would remain anonymous behind the screens, players could log their online interactions, for auto-replay. Occasionally, intimate revels in forever puppet peepshows would materialise as words in more public realms. Kind of porn, and kind of art. And definitely fun.

“Every child player wins a prize!” promise the laughing clowns, mouths wide open.

The Pokémon Master is driven by his competitive desire. He is the face of capital, with a capital C, determined to exploit the living labour of the subjugated pokemon—his flexible fighting flunky workforce. By contrast, although clearly no angel, the Puppet Mistress was driven by desire for connection rather than acquisition. She could succeed only through creative communication and co-operation. It takes at least two to last-tango, to mutually generate play that both replicates and mutates.

Irigarary's words resonate: Exchange? Everything is exchanged, yet there are no transactions. Between us, there are no proprietors, no purchasers, no determinable objects, no prices. Our bodies are nourished by our mutual pleasure, our abundance is inexhaustible: it knows neither want nor plenty.

I suspect that if the Puppet Mistress ascribed to a political position, it would be a flavour of Autonomist Marxism. She, I, always did have a soft spot for anarchic Italians.

Anarchia. Without ruler. A belief in the common good of humanity, in the possibilities of self-organisation. Worlds away from the neo-conned nightmares, from the society of control, and control orders.

Which brings me to Pac-Man.....

Pac-Man was a Japanese video arcade game which quickly became a worldwide phenomenon following its launch in 1980.
In this game, the player guides the dot-eating pac-man through a maze, avoiding the touch of four hungry ghosts. Translated from the Japanese, the ghost names are Chaser, Ambusher, Fickle, and Stupid.

When Pac-Man gets the chance to eat energising glowing dots, it gets the ability to eat ghosts. The ghosts turn blue and end up in a ghost pen while they regenerate.

And so it goes, level after level, a game of pursuit and evasion, of consumption and transformation.

But I want to speak tonight of another Pak man, and another set of spooks...

My point of departure is the judgement by Justice Adams handed down on the
fifth of November 2007, in the New South Wales Supreme Court.

It's a lengthy document, some 22,000 words.

Reading this stuff is how I squander my online time now, far from the pleasures of the Puppet Quarters. I should be working on my thesis but somehow these courtroom transcripts, police interviews and legal judgements are so much more riveting than the books on informational capitalism and political philosophy stacking up.

Both offer pathways into understanding, or at least reflecting upon, the machinations of power. The legal stuff is more engaging because I suppose it reveals clearly the nature of my homeland, that sunburnt country of dispossessed (again) aboriginals, obedient working families, dole bludgers, corporate crims, hordes of refugees, and other riff raff.

There's no time for detail, or fancy word play. Rapid gleanings, and the vague hope it will be the start of something. Writing as an archeology of the present. Or perhaps prophesy - picking through the entrails to forecast the future. Whatever, it's hard for me to read this stuff without feeling a mix of emotions and physical sensations. Reading the varying accounts of the protagonists reminds me of Kurosawa's film RAN, where a rape and murder is recounted from the perspectives of all involved.

The judgement is divided into sections, the sub-headings like acts of a play:

Act 1. ASIO officers meet the accused

Act 2. The accused is taken to his home

Act 3. The veracity of B15 and the accused

Act 4. The legal effect of the ASIO officers’ conduct

Act 5. The interview of 7 November 2003 with AFP

Act 6. The admissibility of the interviews of 7 and 12 November

Act 7. The interview of 12 November 2003

<
Act 8. The meeting with AFP officers at the accused’s home

Act 9. The interview of 9 January 2004

Tonight there is only time to speak of the first 2 Acts. And the judge's decision.

Izhar Ul-Haque is a young medical student living with his family in Sydney. In early 2003 he trains in Pakistan with Lashkar-e-Taiba, an organisation supporting the independence of Kashmir. After three weeks he decides it's not for him and heads home. Returning to Australia, Ul-Haque is questioned by customs and allowed re-entry. It is not until late 2003 that Lashkar-e-Taiba becomes a proscribed terrorist organisation under Australian law. It is his family connection with terrorism suspect Faheem Lodhi that brings him to the fresh attention of the government.

On the evening of 6 November 2003 ASIO officers accost him at the Blacktown Railway Station:

The accused, Ul-Haque, says: “As I was walking to the car park, two men approached me and one of them said, "I'm an ASIO officer" and showed me a badge. I was really shocked. Mr [B15] said, "You're in serious trouble", and he was just a few breaths away from me. He said, "We are doing a very serious terrorism related investigation and we require your full cooperation and it's in your own benefit to talk to us."

I was really frightened. I didn't know what was happening.

On his orders I got into the car and they said, "We are taking you somewhere to have a private discussion." At that time really I didn't know where I was being taken. In my mind a lot of things were going on, you know, am I being taken to a secret location or some secret ASIO interrogation rooms. I didn't know what was going to happen to me, and then they took me to a park near[by].

In his account, ASIO Agent B15 recalls drawing a figure ‘Y’ in the gravel with his foot. He says to Ul-Haque:
‘This is a Y. We are here.’ At that point I was gesturing towards the intersection of the ‘Y’.

‘We’ve got two choices. We can go down the difficult path or a less difficult path. The difficult path would mean that we stand here putting these questions to you like this, having you tell us things which we know to be untrue, and having to demonstrate to you that we know these things are untrue before you give us a truthful answer. Or, we can take a less difficult path which would involve you co-operating and proving truthful answers to our questions.

Interestingly B15 notes that neither he nor Agent B16 took any notes during the 40 minutes conversation.

The agents then announced that Ul-Haque's family home was being raided.

On the way to the house they declare that this issue has gone to the highest levels of government.
“If you don't cooperate, we have other sources of extracting information,” they tell Ul-Haque.

The Judge asks Ul-Haque if he believed he had any choice in talking to the agents.

He answers: "Not really, no.... I believed I was under arrest and that if I did not comply with whatever they asked me that they will either use physical violence or take me to a more sinister place to interrogate me or, you know, do something to my family or deport me."

The judge asks Agent B15 :
"And was there a reason given for taking him to a park rather than taking him to an office where the matter could be formally dealt with, where it might have been tape-recorded, where there would have been records about the time that he was taken into – well, if not custody, into your company and the time and an official recording as to when it ended?"

B15: I don’t recall, your Honour.”

Recollection is a strange bird.

In the transcripts the judge's frustration and disbelief is palpable. Later the media would report his judgement as being “scathing” and “damming”.

The judge says: "The very mode of questioning was intimidating. It is scarcely surprising that he hung his head. A later report by B15 says that [the accused] did not know what they were talking about. This is reminiscent of Kafka."

Act Two takes place in the family home, although Izhar Ul-Haque's teenage brother Izaz is still hanging about alone at the Blacktown train station in Izhar's car he couldn't drive.

When Ul-Haque arrives with three ASIO officers between twenty-five and thirty officers were in the process of executing the search warrant. Ul-Haque reports being shocked and frightened at the “immense nature of the operation”. During the next few hours the ASIO agents take him again to the train station car park and question him.

They then take him home, and question him in his parents' bedroom. The agents keep him in a state of incommunicado, insisting that other family members keep out. An AFP officer is present during this extensive interrogation which continues until 3.45am, in time to prepare for morning prayers.

There is much more to this story, but we will end here. And so I wont even begin to go into the agents' attempts to recruit the young medical student as an informant.

The Judge concludes that by assuming unlawful powers of direction, control and detention Agents “B15 and B16 committed the criminal offences of false imprisonment and kidnapping...”

The Judge is really pissed off, saying “It was a gross interference by the agents of the state with the accused’s legal rights as a citizen."

So the conclusion is that all the records of interview are inadmissible. And the result of this is that the case does not proceeed to trial, because there is no evidence. Of anything.

And so ends, for now, the latest version of Pak Man.

In this game there were three spooks, but if you recall, in the original there were four:

Chaser.

Ambusher.

Fickle.

And Stupid.

Hole in the Sky

Lindsay — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:44:20 +0100

The Moon and the Church

Lindsay — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 10:36:57 +0200