Saturday, February 2, 2013

Notes # 243


Wow, what those little burnt offerings do to me. Why I return beats me, except that they still exist and nearly didn't, just like me. Anyone who has been swimming in A WineDark Sea over the years will know the story of my notes that survived the fire: an unpleasant incident where I set fire to fifteen years' worth of personal diaries to appease a jealous fiance who would have preferred to marry a clean-slate girl. The thing is the fire's remnants are rather beautiful artifacts. The stuff written in them is the standard agonised navel-gazing formative stuff that when you read later are boring as shit, tawdry and excruciatingly embarrassing. But as artifacts, they are beautiful. Precious ... taonga, as Merc said once.


Romancing the Medicine Wheel ... I think I was referring to the wolves in this quote above and how they disappeared from Europe and the Americas due to people's fear. Cue the twenty first century and replace wolves with folk you don't know.

 I still love the Nepalese books, hand made of cloth paper with beautiful designs on the hard cover. My pen bounces over fibre strands, making the writing shaggy with texture. At that stage I loved my fine Artlines. These days any Uniball or Bic will do but I still buy these books to write stuff in.


Once upon a roadkill I found a kookaburra and a picture to sticky tape its poor old tail feathers to.


A dream ... the same dream I still have from time to time. I break into a house that isn't mine. The inside of the house is gutted by fire but there is a complete bookshelf of the most amazing books. I know I'm in danger so I can't sit and relax to read (there are no chairs anyway). On the table are candelabras burning four, five six candles.

 

The day I was tattooed for the first time, she turned up at my house with a milk crate full of her equipment and set to work on me. I was romancing Stormboy's father-to-be at the time and she tattooed him too. We spent a summer's afternoon in a sweaty fugue of pain and endorphins. She was really beautiful and getting tattooed was horny, given the hormones and natural painkillers coursing through our bodies. Later we went for a swim at Muttonbird to cool off. All the colour dropped out of my tattoo and she had to come back and do it again. My foot has been retouched again since. Getting your foot tattooed, that drumming of needle on bone, it really hurts.

 

Several pages of the diary look like this. After I'd set fire to the whole stack and stoked them for several hours, I went to bed exhausted and quite traumatised. My fiance got out the hose, bled the text into flaking charcoal. He could have been coming from honourable intentions, but for hiding the remaining diaries from me because he wanted to read the rest in private. Days later I realised what he'd done when he started quizzing me. I found his stash of my diaries, took them out to the rubbish truck as it went by, threw them in. 

This is one of the few books that survived. For some reason I kept it and wrapped it in a silk scarf. As I opened it tonight, pieces of it fell into my lap, pieces that I brushed away like cigarette ash.

The hose-soaked page above is detailing a tarot reading with a man sitting resident in a local crystal shop. I still think about that reading sometimes. He talked about a straight-backed woman with a red plait down her back going to market with her produce. "This is you," he said. "But not yet. Now you're stuck with the same thing that will play out over several seven year cycles." Even though he claimed to be a gypsy and smelt like cum (no, really) and used cards that he claimed were his grandmother's and probably weren't, even though he was leery ... I know now this old bloke's words have repaid me more than the twenty bucks I gave him seventeen years ago.

14 comments:

  1. The sea does not give up it's secrets easily, nor I guess does fire. What remains after fire?
    New tats that fade from the sea I now leave, if the surf is good i go, the colour sucks out, what remains of the colour?
    ;-)

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  2. Most people who have been through fires or floods will say (eventually, maybe) that they carry everything they need with them. The rest of us can hang comfortably onto our shit, yes?

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  3. The remnants as artifacts have a real beauty. I think sometimes fragments are better than full stories because we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. I always remember being taught mask work by an Italian teacher I loved. She would give us instructions for our improvisations in her broken English and we, the class, would look at each other wondering what she was really looking for. I did some of my best work for her. The gaps helped me find space for my own imagination.

    Having said that I am most confounded by your intensly jealous fiance. I recognise that jealous, underconfident characteristic in a much younger me but still wonder "how could he?"

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    1. That is a lovely observation Mr Hat, about the gaps informing us. Who was it (Lao Tsu?) who wrote about negative spaces being full of as much information as positive spaces.
      And yes, just jealous, underconfidant ... sociopathic ...

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  4. Fear of betrayal, ghastly altogether. Almost as ghastly as betrayal itself, and the fallout of course.

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    1. Are you talking his fear Ciaran? In any case, all of us move on. It's quite interesting and not without a little bit of fun.

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    2. Oh yeah, fear and jealousy.. I was talking about his and mine and one other persons I know whose sense of betrayal must have weighed more than the universe.. :-)

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    3. That was a while ago though. I'm not sure I could muster much jealousy these days, and fear of betrayal? Not a skerrick..

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  5. Looking back, it seems so ridiculous ... the whole thing. I too have been a fearful, jealous maniac.

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  6. Ridiculous is a good word for it..

    I'm back in grey rainy miserable Ireland.
    Thirty two hours door to door

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  7. Haha, I had almost forgot about Sausage Fingers.

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