HEAT Series 2

Da Ponte, dear friend and collaborator, finder of words for me, this is the letter I shall never write and have always been addressing to you, my side of a conversation that has been in progress since we first began, always faintly to be heard under the music I found to fit your words, or rather, in the gap, which is not always silence, where words and music fail, and must always fail, to connnect; in our case an attempt to move between Italy and our more sober North as if there were no Alps to cross. 

I was re-reading Calvino. That is a pleasure of mine, re-reading. I like the surprising newness in familiarity. And very early on I came upon something that astonished me: the description of a railway station café and all its vapours, the smokiness, the befogged glass, the cloud of steam from the coffee machine; the regulars looking sideways at newcomers, the customers at the bar, the haloed lights, the odour of train that lingers after the trains have left.

Dodo / Okay, so we’re famous for all the wrong reasons, / Our ancestors shed their energy expense & settled / On Mauritius – selection did the rest & our wings / Pared back. Portuguese found us, forest dwelling.

When the pub became overcrowded with tossers from North Sydney, we’d head over to Spanky’s with a case of beer and settle in for the rest of the night. He had a huge plasma TV and a lethal sound system. He’d pass around joints like he was dealing out poker cards, even when we couldn’t afford to buy anything. He’d let us use his computer to surf porn sites and to download acid jazz. 

I haven’t really seen it, Caravaggio’s / Death of…but the saint holds his neck / with his right hand, his forehead / with the left / and it really is the dumbfoundedness of mourning.

Today my Auntie Lien and I are appearing on the television show of the famed psychologist Dr Phil. The Dr Phil episode we are appearing in is titled ‘What are you really mad at?’ and Dr Phil is asking Auntie Lien and me about how we deal with anger.

I think: the sugar’s hit the brain / when she’s finished / she slurps the rest of her tea / and says / ‘australians only believe in fark’ / ‘what?’ / ‘you know, fark – that’s all they say around here: / fark fark fark why do they have to say / that / all the time for?

Jola and Mirek are generous, hospitable, and the only remotely bourgeois people we will meet for the entire two months we are in Poland. After a forty-hour journey from Australia, a sumptuous meal and wine, the talk flowed, and I learnt my most enduring lessons about Poland. The Jewish question is vexed. The Polish Pope Jan Paweł II is sacrosanct; by extension the current German Pope Benedict XVI is highly regarded. And, as Mirek said, I have gay friends, but I do not want it rubbed in my face.

On a soft, sunlit morning in March 1959, just a few days before my twenty-fifth birthday, I stood at the rails of an Italian liner, the Fairsky, and after a five-weeks sea-voyage that had taken me via Singapore, Colombo, Bombay, Aden and Port Said, saw the Bay of Naples open before me, and utterly familiar in the distance the dark slopes and scooped-out cone of Vesuvius – all just as I had always imaged it, like the breaking of a dream.

Several years ago, a group of Canberra sex-workers applied to the Australia Council and were granted $6,280 to write a film script. The organization WISE (Workers In Sex Employment) was involved. A local writer ran some workshops, characters were developed, a plot outlined. But the project caused a stir, and resulted in a good deal of bad publicity, most of which used the argument that funding prostitutes to write a film script was a waste of public money.

When I met Pramoedya, whose work I had admired for fifteen years, in Jakarta in March 1998, two months before the overthrow of Soeharto’s thirty-two-year rule, he was as I had imagined: unassuming, nervous, fearless.

My whole life, I had woken in earnest and with an uncanny conceit about my place in the world. In the world, if people were distinguished by their night and morning sensibilities, I would be a ‘morning person’, by which I mean that I rarely hesitated about the importance of getting out of bed. 

Photographs / The past / a drink, a coolness / we thirst for. / The past / a drink, a poison / we thirst for.

With so many characters and storylines and 1,085 pages that put Gravity’s Rainbow (a mere 760 pages) to shame, where to begin? Why, with the mathematicians, of course…

What John Donne Would Say / Nowhere to purchase and nothing to defend, / nothing but malls as thin as morning dew / unrolling each morning each roller door anew / and burned by the glory of Commerce without End.