HEAT Series 3

I would like to talk about Australian literature’s relationship to time, and to wonder – a state in which the passing of time is suspended. It is natural to turn to Murray in this context – he is one of the great poets of wonder in our literature. He also liked to sermonise, about wonder and its enemies, and in this respect is also one of its keenest theorists.

In our circle of chairs, we read our books after eating: Nice Girls Don’t Get Rich for Varvara, and Chernobyl by Serhii Plokhy for me, P.D. James for Tanya, Jane Austen for Eloise. Maybe we should have swapped and learnt something, as Varvara, born in Ukraine, knew little detail about the nuclear catastrophe of 1986 and I knew little about twenty-first century capitalism.

wet lawn Sun. morning frozen sunlight thru beads of dew thru my sock / mary & rachel over from next door [their dad armfuls of tats apache seagull maltese cross & / mum always in her robe night-shifts at smith’s bags & bags of free chips] always / barefoot, even when it hailed so bad & all the storm-drains overflowed, eating icy-poles for breakfast showing me their bright blood-red tongues faces like KISS showbag masks

it was published 1803 / and we last had it in 1997 / if you want to try amazon you know where i stand / good luck

the younger girl is about 10 / walks around churning a rubiks cube / can solve it pretty quick / her dad is proud but says / shes just using a brute force algorithm / soon shell be ready for more sophisticated algorithms / itll be much faster / damn I think / maybe all i have is brute force

The fine for a surplus child was equivalent to the annual income of an average household, and for homes already cluttered with children, every child was more or less the same. Getting rid of one was the decision most likely to ensure more comfortable lives for everyone else while causing minimal harm – so Mr Decimo came to this conclusion, discerning the logic behind his mother’s choice, even though he’d never met her.

The light from the disinfection cylinder is beautiful. I go out to look at it every night; staying out on the balcony on Level 10 is banned, but the female guard knows I wouldn’t jump over the edge. Not me, not any one of us who live in Edificio Mayor, the main building. The ban is an anachronism, imposed on the first generation of immunes – although they weren’t ‘jumpers’; they just tried to escape.

I’d pitched almost horizontally onto a cold concrete edge four steps below, cracking the full plummeting weight of my being square onto my lower back. When I picked myself up and limped into the university clinic, the doctor marvelled at the fact that no matter how violent the accident, the bone upon which I had fallen – the os sacrum – was the one bone that refused to break.

Did you see that man in black socks flicking his feet out front? I asked Christine, who sat low at that wheel, beringed in kohl and silver, extra-long-armed, vestigially Bibaesque at eighty. She was often silent, Christine, which only added vehemence and force to her sallies when they arrived.

Within this handful of proper nouns, so much pathos, humour, mystery and pain. I saw maps unfold across the globe and traditions receding so far into the past they were barely decipherable. What to one culture may seem dizzyingly complicated is, to another, ordinary. Names may contain history’s greatest upheavals in all their pitilessness and terror, as well as one person’s whimsy, or life-saving choice.

She was lying to several different people for money. She didn’t ‘not come’ from money; her mother had some money and since her mother was dead Romy had some money. She was twenty-nine. ‘I’m twenty-two,’ she said. Not everybody had to be a revolutionary. If she were rich she would be good at it.

Define yet again this propensity to write journals – an ongoing conversation with oneself, the inner necessity to define to a certain extent one’s relationship with the events of one’s life…

How difficult it might be to abandoned and alone, at Easter, at Roma Trastevere Station, watching trains arriving and leaving without you to all sorts of exciting destinations; knowing everyone else was on their way up to the mountains, or off to the seaside; to visit with friends and family; to partake of festive wine and cured olives and fattened, delicately spiced, young lamb.

when I did bleed, some months later, I found that same / humiliation, the conversation I’d rehearsed, how to tell / my mother I was somehow now more grown, a mush / of words I could not say: instead I tried to hide it: and

To lean back and forth on the common room rocking horse, thinking that I was part of something, a motion if nothing else, that might eclipse my pure presence for a moment. Pure, as in not part of anything; hardly counted, hardly desired, and if desired then not fitting.

A museum of objects in my study that accompanied the long journey of writing still cast their wonderment through thoughts and imaginary possibilities; the many pictures on the walls and desk – a small print of a Rainbow Serpent, birds, art, photos of dust storms, haze, smoke, a young boxer, mythical landscapes in Asia – all had this responsibility.