Fund Raising Flour

Indonesian is a comforting language, especially when you can't understand a word of it. The ceiling fan hums bass whilst farther away, little fast syllables of the Indonesian bubble forth from unseen lips, keeping rhythm. I've been trying to organise a fundraiser, because the charity decided not to pay for my flight to Kathmandu. So far I have a venue, one or two circus performers, a lot of moral support and about ten people who have said that they'll come and mean it. A few years ago, my then-girlfriend and I created an imaginary villain called Catman Magoo. He was the arch-nemesis of Rex Paine, the owner of the hardware store on High st, Thornbury. This was probably the most successful relationship, the most important, the one that the other relationships hate because I can't help comparing them. Why did it work so well for so long? Possibly because in spite of all the trouble we went through, she never seemed to sick of me, or my cheesy jokes.

Catman Magoo. Look him up, he's on Facebook.

So I can't afford to fly myself to Kathmandu, to work with these emancipated circus-freak kids, the ones I mentioned in a previous blog. Can't afford it? Here I am, in Bali, another fat white cash-cow, just now a little bit afraid to leave my room because of the feeling I get when I pretend to ignore the people who want to fleece me. In my defence, I cannot afford to be here either. I was offered a free ticket to Bali to see immediate and extended family, a family who stretch across the world. A chance to go to an opulent villa to see my cousin's wedding, and witness the bizarre spectacle of my mum's family, stoic academic types who love to dance like loons once they've had a bit to drink. I am aware of the hypocrisy of this last statement, yes. They've been looking after me, bless their sweaty socks. I've been spending almost no money, which is easy when you have $0.44 in your bank account. As I borrowed some cash from dad today, I said to him "I wish I felt more bad about this, but I'm having such a good time".

I wanted to say something about Bali, about Sanur, where I'm staying, but it's hard to talk about, hard to figure it out. The overweight tourists lying on beach lounges, skin cells in trauma. The fishermen with hemispherical hats and balaclavas, standing knee-deep in the sea, beautiful like a grove of sea-faring trees. The hordes of small vans, motorbikes and scooters that excitedly beep to each other in a continuous conversation about place and identity. Oh, the mess, noise, traffic and the endless buying and selling. Is this ok? I would love to be able to make eye contact with locals on the street without them trying their very hardest to sell me something. I've learned the phrase "nggak mao", which is fun to say, because not only does it sound like you're eating a peanut butter sandwich, but also stops the hard sell. On my first day, I bought a hat because I was getting heat-stroke. I had to bargain with the man for so long, not because I really wanted to get a good deal, but because I'd changed my mind and didn't want the hat any more. I gave up in the end, due to the hardwired belief that it is incredibly rude to just walk away from someone whilst they are still talking to you. I paid 120,000 rupiah, which I thought was cheap but turned out to be $12. It broke the next day. I no longer have a hardwired belief that it is incredibly rude to walk away from someone whilst they are talking to you. Thank you, Bali. Now I say "Nggak Mao" a lot, I think it means "no thank you" in a kind of street-savvy Indonesian, and even though Indonesian is not the first language here, it seems to work quite well. Is this ok? We lope around, large white things who mostly cannot speak the same language, wander around with big wads of cash, attempting to buy culture from people who are pretending to sell it.

It's not all bad, that's only certain areas, like the immediate vicinity of my homestay. I've met some nice locals, DJs, graphic designers. I learned how to surf at last, so now I don't have to lie to excited people whilst I'm in Europe. I can see how people lose themselves to surfing, give up everything that is not directly helping them to surf more. I am leaving Bali the day after tomorrow. I hope I have learned something from this place, something more than how to stand on a surfboard and how to avoid and ignore.

Brunswick Blues, Pt. 3. Why would an alien from Saturn come to Brunswick?

He didn’t know where it came from, thought maybe that if he ignored it, it would go away. Did it turn up recently, or had it always been there? It was becoming impossible to ignore, the dark grey blob that – just – hung around. He walked up the familiar street, past the same cracks weeds flowers, acutely aware – more acutely than ever – that it was following him.

“What do you want?” he asked, telepathically. He figured, since no-one could see it, it was probably best to communicate telepathically with it. It didn’t answer, didn’t react at all.

“You know, you’re making a lot of trouble with me and the girl. I think it’s me, she thinks it’s her, but really it’s you. Did you know that?”

No answer

He wondered if maybe it couldn’t hear him telepathically. Maybe it was stupid. Probably the way it communicated did not fit very well with his flawed human perception of space-time. He had heard that it came from Saturn, that it came around sometimes. Why would an alien from Saturn come to Brunswick, he wondered?

 

He stood still, just looking at the dark grey blob that no-one could see. He realized that there was an unspoken rule against standing still on a footpath for no apparent reason. He hoped that he would not get in trouble, didn’t want to upset anyone by interfering with the delicate cycle of predictability.

It moved, shifted slightly. It seemed like it had a mouth after all.

“So you have a mouth after all, you little rascal!”

No answer.

A soggy, weather-worn tennis ball fell from its amorphous maw, bounced uncertainly to his feet.

“You – you want to play?”

He raised the ball high, threw it in a way he imagined was similar to the way Odysseus or Achilles would have, and indeed the ball flew as though carried in an incorporeal flying shopping trolley by Athene of the flashing eyes. The blob did not seem to appreciate such pageantry, but dutifully ambled off in pursuit of the ball.

The sun broke through the wall of clouds just occasionally, just to remind everyone that it was still there. The sky was like a giant twin brother of his newfound friend. Except that nobody could see the blob, whereas just about everybody can see the sky. As this story progresses along, it would be nice to introduce more characters, such as the Man who Contained the Game. In this case, it would be good to give our man a name. We can name him, and then he can name his blob. I’ll call him Malmo, because I like the way it sounds, but if you, the reader, would prefer to call him something like Walter of Stevie, then feel free to replace every “Malmo” with a word of your choice. Other writers would find this idea monstrous.

            I’m not like that.

In fact, feel free to rewrite this book as much as you like. You’re probably better at drawing than me, too.

Malmo opened his eyes. It was still dark, so he closed them again. The next time he opened them, a morning sun hit him full in the face. He lay there for some time. It was quite hard to get out of bed today, it just didn’t seem like there was much point. In fact, Malmo realized, the reason it was hard to get out of bed was that the blob was sleeping on top of him. It must have come there during the night, for warmth.

“Come on, off you get lazy bones.”

It remained silent as usual, but he got the feeling it resented being accused of having bones.

He walked. The air was cold, but the sun was warm

LOST PETS MET IN A STORM (7)

[this is a cryptic crossword clue that I saw one Thursday.. I liked it so much that I wrote it down. If you do the cryptic crossword regularly then you should be able to figure it out. Unless, of course, you try too hard]

Suddenly, it has become hard to write again. The story was going really well, but then the wheels fell off.

Essentially, the problem was that I started to think that it was good. In fact, I thought it was really good, so I read it out to a bunch of people, and they agreed that it was really good, and now I feel like I cannot continue to be good at it. Like I’ve written one page of a novel and I’ve already passed the pinnacle of my writing career. It is important sometimes to write these feelings thoughts down, to expose them as ridiculous. Thoughtlings? We continue.

Malmo wandered past a particularly good Lebanese bakery. The sky above him and the ground below him, these things felt very real to him that day. The phrase “very real”, it occurred to him did not make sense, since something was either real or it was not. Or was it? There was no other way to succinctly describe this feeling, so the superlative would have to remain.

“Hi Malmo!” A car door opened and a girl with long sandy hair and fruckles. He could never remember her name, had forgotten it so many times now that it was not even worth asking anymore. In fact, she had no name, when people asked her name, she would say the first name that came into her head, to avoid having to describe her anomalous situation. This gave everyone the impression that they’d forgotten her name.

He knew her by accident. For the longest time, he thought that she was actually someone else. The fact that they both worked in a noodle restaurant in Fitzroy allowed the myth to be perpetuated. Since this was one of the few things he originally knew about the girl he thought she was, they never discovered the truth, at any rate not until the real one turned up.

Now he knew the girl with no name much better than the girl he originally thought she was. But he wouldn’t say that he was close friends with either of them. Both characters waited patiently while you read or listened to this last little history, and unless you have any questions, I’ll let them continue.
The blob waited patiently, too.

“Hi, Malmo!” The girl repeated. She had an impressive dusting of freckles.

Brunswick Blues, pt. 2 - The cracks are forming

If I go it will be trouble, if I stay it will be double. The light has changed, the shadows have moved, and I don’t know where it will end. Don’t worry about things you can’t change, worry about things you can. I can fix Penumbra [Penumbra was the Fringe show I was working on with two other friends, the debut performance for The Red Button. I’m not really happy with how it ended up, although I still feel like it had the potential to be an amazing show].

 

He wants her. She wants space. Space wants to be filled. Nature abhors a vacuum. He likes vacuums, although he’s never seen one. She doesn’t have an opinion about them, has other things on her mind. He keeps trying to remember the way it was before. She is just trying to work stuff out. The cracks are forming, that old familiar feeling, sinking. He remembers that they were so happy, but can’t remember why. Drunk on love? Perhaps. He wishes he could be more dramatic and fiery about the whole thing, instead of just withering, crumbling, sloshing. She is just trying to work it out. She doesn’t mean to be so distant, she’s just trying to keep it all together. He feels pressure in his tear ducts. The tears don’t come. Is it worth prolonging the inevitable, he wonders. He tries to think about it mathematically. How much time has been happy in this relationship, and what was the intensity of this happiness? How much time has been sad, and how deep was the sadness. Fear, sense of loss, confusion are some of the emotions that fall into “Sad Times”. The positive ones, of course, fall into “Happy Times”. How have the happy times and sad times been distributed? What about learning, growth? How much has the relationship helped him to grow and learn new lessons? There were many other variables to consider, and it would always be an extremely flawed model, but it showed him what he already knew.

That it was getting worse.

Back to Bom. What strange days these have been. I’ve played mandolin with a band, performed a spoken word cover of Billy Jean, scrumped sugar cane from the side of a highway. I’ve been trying to work out if things aren’t working between me and [let’s call her X], or if it’s just that I’m going through a lot in my head. Probably both, probably neither. Now I’m at Ballina airport, awaiting the plane that will fly me back to old Brunswick town.

As the lark flies, so will I.

Stark eyes, ocean sky.

Earth, air, fire, water, hope, glass, smiles, radio, fear, metal, magic. Love.

“There’s something not right about that place. And you know what I noticed? Sometimes people go out who never came in.” [overheard conversation between two people who were to become, much later, friends of mine]

Brunswick Blues(Old Thing) pt. 1 - Help me out, Lao Tzu

Warning, contains language and emotion

When people ask me where I lived in Melbourne, I generally answer with just one suburb, easier and less boring than listing suburb after suburb. I normally tell them that I lived in Brunswick, even though I spent just one of my 29 years in that place. The reason I tell them Brunswick is that my time there was probably the most interesting, action-packed and formative time of my life. I still find myself hanging off the coat-tails of that year, where I lived at Medium Arts Space, lived to see the bulldozers come to our door. They’d gotten the date wrong, come a few weeks early. The demolition men felt so disempowered and upset by this error that they drove over a hedge on their way out. Dumb Hedge!

The following entries are from 6 months of that time, a burst of creativity that contained some of my best and worst writing. Unfortunately a lot of those words focus around a single person, and once more I’m not sure how I feel about parading this stuff before the public eye. But, fuck it, I cannot put up a blog containing my old journals and not include this one. It begins, here.

Help me out, Lao Tzu

Good Morning Newcastle. It feels good to be writing again. This book was given to me by loveliest Saskia [this is probably the only name I won’t omit, because she’s a purely wonderful friend who gave me the that visual arts diary as a present, and this is the only mention she gets in the book], for the purpose of writing down my ideas, and indeed as I put down these words, ideas start coming to me.

 

But I also need a book which I can use to put down thoughts exorcise demons, organize my brain-head. For what, oh what, is happening to me? Everything was so good with [name omitted], it was the best! Now it seems to make me unhappy all of the time. And this idea that we were going to have a great time, the things she said we would do. I shouldn’t be surprised that they are not happening but it sticks in my teeth like gristle, it reminds me of [another ex-lover, name omitted], the thing that confuses me about it is that nothing is different. The same things that I would not even blink at, they make me feel weird now. Oh lordy, what to do. Give me some help, Lao Tzu.

[picture of Lao Tzu, with speech bubble ‘Young Ivan, chill the fuck out’]

sticky note

It's important to have a long walk home now and then. This is a heaven-sent truth. I was on one such walk this morning, awhile before the sun announced Satur-Day. I suppose it was still Frinight. I wonder how Freya and Saturn feel about being placed so close to each other, when the Vikings and the Romans had such a difficult relationship? At Flipside Circus we learn how to separate those kids with difficult relationships.

Yes, it's true, I was walking afore the gloam. And I thought of you, Skye, and your idea for our show, or at any rate, the blurb you wrote, because so far that's mostly all we have. And I was walking and tromping on the heads of daemons all the way home, and a comforting rhyming couplet popped into my head.

You and I, we've come too far to worry over the Fact,
That all along we keep making shows whilst we never had a clue how to Act.

I have tried to write it so that the rhythm works. The phrase 'Ionic Pentameter' pops into my head, alas                I have no idea what it means. I feel like I should, so I hold this phrase awkwardly, as though I was posing for a photoshoot, holding an antique shakuhachi, intensely conscious of the fact that I'm not holding it correctly. I just have no idea.

Anyway, this rhyming couplet, if you can get the rhythm working, then you can say it out loud, in a joyous way, in an expressive way. In a passionate way. Because after all, that is all you need to do.

I didn't expect to see the 'convergence' last night on my walk home, but there it was. The girl with large dark eyes told us all that we should go for a walk at 5 in the morning, and look at the convergence, a number of nice-sounding planets are somehow aligned in relation to us, bickering hairless monkeys that we are.

Well I was walking. And there they were. Three stars, way too bright, way too low in the sky. I searched in the darkness for a distant building that they could be attached to, a skyscraper out in the backwaters of West Brisbane perhaps. There was none. I looked at it for a while, this blazing triangle. Half worried that it was our turn for a comet-apocalypse, the universe finally deciding to wash its hands of Bruce Willis. But they weren't getting closer or brighter, they were just hanging there, too low in the sky, too bright. I didn't even need to rub my eyes, though, absolutely real it was.

I've just been offered a flight to Nepal, accommodation and food to boot, in exchange for teaching circus to skilled Indian kids who were victim to the Indian circus-trafficking industry that until very recently I had no idea about. If all goes according to plan, I'll be flying to Nepal in a little over a month.

It would be easy to look at those bright lights in the sky, that divine non sequitir, and feel "Oh! That's why these dramatic life-changing events are happening now! That's why that poem just popped into my head! Those planets are aligned, and the wisdom is ancient, and we are very small, and the forces and movements of the universe must surely buffet and guide us somewhat."

It would be just as easy to feel, "Yes, those lights are very bright. Relative to you, and your solipsistic egotistical perspective. Are you sure you're not just one more person getting carried away with shiny things, as humans have always done? Perhaps you want so much to validate this divine feeling, to justify it, that you rush to attribute real events and feelings to it."

I could go on about this spiritualist-scientist argument. This argument goes on in my head at all times, like a tv channel that I can switch to, or a fishbowl that I can stare at.

The trick is to feel both things at once, and feel harmony between them. That's the kicker, isn't it? A nice quote that I read was "Do not mistake the map for the territory". We are very good at making maps, but we could never deign to know the terrain completely.

Maybe if we take away the need for cause-and-effect. The planets converged, life-changing events transpired. Did one cause the other? Probably not, impossible to know, and also irrelevant. The convergence is important in my life now because it acts as a sticky-note, or bookmark, for this moment when I got asked to go to Nepal.

So now it's most definitely Saturday, and I should be getting ready to teach the kids at Flipside. Instead I'm trying to round up this thought-spew, thought-stew, find just the right garnish to present it as a tasty lunch. No time, you'll just have to help yourself.


Looking over this post a few hours later. I was going to edit it, but I'd like to just leave that moment there. The ground has lurched, and that familiar sick feeling has returned. I've just been by the Nepal people not to contact the London office for a few days, as there are funding issues to sort out. This could be absolutely nothing to worry about, or, the worst kind of euphemism for "it's looking unlikely that we'll be able to bring you over, but we'll just string you along for a while just in case".

Innocence, in a sense, inner scents

There is a silence and stillness just now, the river sings through the open window, but its tune is not heard through ears. Yesterday I got swept away on the idea of going to Nepal. It seems like there is a group of kids there who have been rescued from Indian circuses, where they were forced to do circus tricks, and now they have formed their own contemporary circus troupe. They are apparently highly skilled. They are looking for trainers, I put a hand up for it a couple of days ago, but I haven't heard anything yet. Just imagine.

It seems like opportunities float through the air like motes of dust. Tonight we danced around in a little room, as part of a devising process for a show called impermanent rainbows. We danced and laughed and celebrated the tragedy of failed relationships, something that was close to the bone for most of us. It was difficult to improvise with theatre people. I kept thinking I wasn't free enough, that I couldn't use my voice, that I was being too safe, and then about halfway through I remembered how to stop caring, and gradually found that secret place. They say that the clown lives in that place, even though it's not always funny.

Today I life modeled. At a High School, for the first time. It was a bit unusual, being nude there in front of the kids. A bit strange. There was a bit of chortling and chuckling but not as much as I'd expected. When I returned to the change room to get my clothes back on, I noticed that my bottom was very spotty. It's not usually spotty, I thought, should I go back and tell them? No, I thought, no. No no.

Why was it so spotty though? Can anyone answer me this? Maybe because I've been sitting down a lot lately. I feel like I've been going on long drives, but I can't actually think of any long drives that I've actually done since Easter. That was two weeks ago. Aha! I have been watching a lot of DVDs. I finally saw Chinatown, classic detective movie with Jack Nicholson.

So I have an idea for a story at the moment, which I quite like. Maybe I should weave some more stories into it. When I was in High School, my friend told me "The trick to getting an 'A' for creative writing essays is to write a few different stories that all meet up somehow at the end". At the time I was affronted that he should be trying to cheat a good story, or come up with a formula, but he made a good point. It's a tried and true way to make a plot seem more complex, it is used in countless books and movies. And maybe it's not a formula, but a technique, since it requires a bit of finesse to really pull it off. Maybe in my story that I want to write, I should include the parallel story of the Nepalese circus troupe. Perhaps I should write Salman Rushdie into the story as a character, and imply that he is writing a story about it. Did you know that Salman Rushdie had to fight to keep his eyes open? They literally tried to close themselves up completely over time, and he had to have some kind of intense medical procedure to counter this self-enforced blindness. Interesting fellow, Salman.

And, do you know I was at a party in a small town called Braybrook, or Braidwood. it's near Canberra. Anyway, a psychic there told me that I was a writer. I had been talking to her about circus stuff, and she said
"But you're a writer."
"Yes I am," I replied.
"I know this, because I'm a psychic."
"Oh," I stated. I was playing it cool.
"And that's how you will make your mark on the world, through your writing. Have you ever thought about keeping a blog?"

It turns out she was a published writer, but I can never remember her name for long enough to find any of her writing. I find out her name sometimes, from my friend Jo, but before long it vanishes again. It made me think about what it means to make a mark on the world, and whether that was what I wanted, whether I could indeed be satisfied if I never did somehow? A voice in my head, that sounds suspiciously like my father's, expounds something about the biological imperative, and that it's just a by-product of wanting to continue your genes into future generations. Does that mean that when you have children, the urge to make the mark on the world lessens? Not necessarily, I suppose some people just keep popping out puppies, and from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense to want more and more little gene-replicators out there, just in case some of them get eaten.

Anyways, that's how I first got the idea of keeping a blog. But I didn't like the idea at first because I find it strange typing into a computer, as I'm so used to writing with a pen and paper. I'm so much faster on the computer. I always lament that with the pen I write so slowly that by the time I get to the end of a sentence my mind has already lost interest, has raced far ahead. With a computer, I can follow the train of thought much more easily, but feel like this only serves to drag on my thought process, make it less creative.

There is a book of short stories by Asimov called Azazel. It's the only Asimov book I've heard of that's not even remotely science fiction. It tells about Isaac Asimov's friend George. George has summoned a demon, and he uses said demon's powers to try and help out his friends, but it always goes awry. Great stuff. One of George's friends is a writer who laments that he can't get ahead in life because he's always late for everything. Because he always just misses the train, and can never get a taxi, etc. George's demon, Azazel, says "oh yes, it's quite a simple matter to rearrange the pattern of nature so that your friend is on time for things."
Well, it turns out that George's friend the writer is much worse off, because it is in his time waiting for trains that he comes up with all of his best ideas and best prose. Now that the taxis line up on the side of the street when he approaches, he can't write anymore.

I'm rambling now, good night

Love Ivan