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RE:HEAT

There is no dialogue in these scenes. Instead, the narrator probes them like a film camera might, a big roving eye. Each belongs to the same world. Is it our world? I go back and forth on this. It seems like ours to begin with. It has a harbour and ships and rivers and rain. But then the details take on a dreamlike, off-kilter quality.

All surprises tell us something. They ‘crystal(ise) what it means to have a vulnerable body and fallible mind in a world of unpredictable and chaotic events,’ in the words of Christopher Miller. Cho’s audacious, dexterous, self-determining surprises remind us that this is the point – everything, from our cultural touchstones to our selves, is endlessly revisable, capable of broader, deeper, truer versions.

I picture Berger writing this at his home in Quincy in the Haute-Savoie region of France in 1998. My picture has him holding his head in his hands. Why did it occur to him, the notion of writing this letter in this way? What does he mean by this ‘deep past’ offering ‘meagre’ yet ‘massive’ support of resistance? He’s flirting freely here – even for him –with the mushy vagueness. And: what’s the secret of the stones?

I had qualms also as to whether to write about the indignities of Robert’s failing body and mind when he had always been so fastidious about his presentation to the world. But then I thought, ‘This is life – it’s tough.’ Robert had no such qualms when writing poems about his parents, and, to me, they’re his most emotional and moving works.

Prior to literacy, before self-consciousness and repression sets in at age five or so, I’m a thrilled witness to my kids’ entry into language as they get on a roll and talk like Ania…a kind of pure state marked by repetition, stutters and sudden flows.

The age of writing as confession is now evinced by the fact that there are more writers than readers, scribblers unable to keep reticent, acting in total cooperation with Zuckerberg and not with Gutenberg.

‘Re-reading ‘Karmic Traces’ reminds me of the possibility of the essay as a poem: a spell whose purpose is to make you want to go out and find the truth for yourself.’

In Marion Halligan’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night Some Travellers…’, the author describes a photograph of her baby daughter, Lucy, dressed in red. ‘There is a picture of Lucy sitting almost on the hearth, holding up an orange.’ Halligan calls the orange ‘…an object of admiration, of wonder.’ Her recollection of the still image is […]

‘I live to encounter phrases that have the power to undo me. Where these words go, or what I will do with them, is unknown.’

On ‘The Wall’ by David Brooks

In my twenties – living frugally so that I could write and travel, via a very-part-time day job – buying a literary magazine was a big thing; the early editions of HEAT I have on my bookshelf usually tell a story of writing obsessions at the time.

On ‘Sighs Too Deep for Words’ by Helen Garner

In her 1999 piece, ‘Sighs Too Deep for Words: On Being Bad At Reading the Bible’, Helen Garner stages more than one exchange with Tim Winton about their shared faith, asking him his thoughts on prayer and God.

This is an essay about the gigantic – women who seem permanently pitched skyward, whose articulations overpower, and have the capacity to rupture and then obliterate. It’s about the enormity and hot terror of self-expression, where words do not formulate slowly in mouths but instead ‘leap from lips’. This isn’t the stuff of sensible ambition – it’s loftiness and extravagance and total grandeur!

On ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’ by Jackson Mac Low

In ‘Sticky Bread Gets Sliced’, the space of the page becomes receptive, vibrant, like a ‘sticky decomposition web’ perhaps, where words, images, sounds lodge.

Šalamun’s charming randomness feels contemporary. I can hear the internet comedian’s sense of timing in the translation, the weird dry singsong of the call and response ‘did you have an uncle in the air force / I had an uncle in the air force’.

I’ve arrived late to Gillian Mears. Or exactly when I ought to have: standing in the morning rain at Adelaide Writers Week for a panel on biography, two days after a car wreck, not yet able to fully open my jaw.