by Eugen Bacon
Ariadne dreams of a new relativity
Pitch black. No water. The monster’s breath is cold and smells of carrion. Always in debt, once bankrupted, arrested and imprisoned. Now he’s in hiding. Though he roars and curses and says the universe is but a huge expletive, I’m not scared (been there before). Shh. Shh, I say. Think of the metaphysical implications of black holes, dark matter, the big bang and string theory. We could expand the Labyrinth with a slew of metaphors. Slay all the fake gods of Logos, purge their purgatories, destroy limbo and generate new galaxies where you could hear the light. Touch sound. Wring the neck of death. Galaxies where shooting stars surge and rush, swell and sing to the glory of the Minotaur.
* * *
My mother slipped me a note and pushed me into a screen. Pitch black. No water. And then lights. But the Minotaur was hiding and slept all day, curled between the Americans and some walking dead. When the cake boss roared and cursed, and demanded chicken and waffles, a governor put black holes, dark matter, on his face but forgot his pale hands. People said it was part of the jump, a labyrinth. The time team led by archaeologists to the big bang and string theory in a windswept island off the coast of a new galaxy rendered verdict that collided justice with reality. So I opened the note and it said, Total Bella, and I wondered if it was vengeance, a phenomenon or purgatory. I need a tip-line to the tattoo of us.
Allegretto ma non troppo
You’re an animal transmogrifying into a human after years of practice. A ritual starts with an early morning shave—the mirror, shaving kit on the shelf, razor, aerosol shaving cream. No after shave. At the basin, your head bows into lukewarm water. You wash your face with hot water from the tap and rich soap suds. Spray a handful of foam from the can, and with fingertips lather your throat carefully. Brush it over your chin, daub it over the upper lip. You lather your cheeks, and wonder why men talk to themselves at this point in movies. Leaning into the mirror, you steer the razor up and down your throat. Close. The razor nicks.
* * *
In times of deep suspicion, you put technology first in an age of the explorer despite swimming with big fish. Your ritual starts with witching for something in the parts of an ocean where the converging plates of lithosphere collide. Recurrent earthquakes lather you carefully with vibrations connected to a world of movies filled with sediment and underwater vent. The gases explode you to the front of a mirror that refuses to follow protocol and shows you in a light that’s up and down and shocking, really—and she said?
Call me scar
Words tumble like clowns falling out of a hearse, and we’re back to the old circus with all its lions and acrobats, says the wizard in the mirror, steeple-crown hat askew. I look like death warmed up. Nuit blanche. I ought to do my tax. My youngest turns eighteen today! Tick tock. Tick. Tock. Old people are supposed to be wise, writes Ursula Le Guin—please don’t pronounce her name [lœ:gwin]. And they are allowed to be cute. Quaint. Feisty. Spry, she adds. The day’s looking up. Rise. Move. I used to be an aerialist. Walked on my hands. Hung from hoops and swings. Until a fixed doubles trapeze act catapulted me from cloud swing to stratus, cumulus congestus, cirrostratus, cirrocumulus, cumulonimbus. Thunderhead. Squall. Lightning. Ka-BOOM. In rehabilitation I learned that every clown face is a variation of three basic types: whiteface, auguste and character. I put my energy into becoming me: a scarred comic harlequin. Now I stroll around the circus arena come tax time. Pause. A stop-act for the lions. Call me Scar.
* * *
I’ve met him. Tick. Tock. He casts a big shadow with comments that cartwheel in black clouds of leaping frogs heading to the river. Ticky-tock-tock. My question—supposed to be wise—tumbles forty minutes in a back road, then: what’s the deal with the river? He looks like death warming up, his teeth darkly stained by chromogenic bacteria that no paste could erase, not from that crowded dentition, no. Lemony Snicket, he says, you ask all the wrong questions. If you can’t see it, you can’t say it. You seek to tackle the issue of clowns falling out of a hearse, and that’s a series of unfortunate events.
Dark energy
A thwack. You sink into yourself. An explosion of elementary particles. You are a supernova shooting through air and stars. A baryonic ball of bleeding energy scattering matter in the void. Your heart beats out of place like wind gusting on a high plain. Pulse hovers on a knife edge. You wriggle out of your body. Crawl through gaseous clouds to a rocky alcove they call emergency. Climb the lookout they call a chair. Fall into antigravity. Whizz through a constellation of voices eying your soul from the back of beyond. When you come to, Nurse Adani tells you not to touch your stitches. Or it will scar. You take your eyes off her badge. Stare at her face as though through a telescope. This is what a black hole looks like in a spark chamber.
* * *
Cusp. It’s a noun. A fold or flap of a cardiac valve, but something is about to change. You become an ocean smothered with grief, swelling and wailing as you escape the ordinary, lurching between scars and poverty beneath a dawn-tinted moon lit in such terrible taste. A supernova hurtles across your tide, no ending in sight.
The metaphysicist at the waterfront police station
The name is Man Ray, after the photographer. I was born in the air the day Akhenaton offered his first rayograph to the sun. I’m not a psychopath. I just strike transparent surfaces and bounce off them. Reflect, refract, diffuse, disperse. It’s risky business all that cutting. Tiring not to think in a straight line. Scary to travel sideways. No sense of direction and therefore not an aficionado of Descartes. I’d say I’m closer to Pascal: I’m agoraphobic and prone to panic attacks. As for the scars, well, a few too many wavefront collisions. And no, I don’t drink. Nor do I smoke.
* * *
Your name is Petula, after the color of spring. You were born with a high decibel roar in a world of smoke that twirled faultless into the horizon. Everyone knew the plan, but you made it by a bee’s eyelash. Your wholly shaken mother was out of her tree. You crawled out of sync to her breast, as she dispersed names in her delirium. Clarabo. Clarey. Cloggywogs. What now? Reflection. Refraction. Diffusion. Dispersion. It’s a risky business. Listening filled you with bile and all goodwill toward humanity soaked itself in leaves whose sound was a whisper of insects. Later you’d say you’re closer to Gladiola: detached, no phobia of hurting people. And yes, you love belligerence. And homicide for profit.
Tears
Forget doomsday, pestilence, carnage, the mess of history, climate change and the nihilistic lure of post-apocalyptic catastrophes. Tears are a premonition of closing bookshops, prefiguring empty shelves, the impoverishment of writers, the total collapse of language and the incursions of dust and daylight. According to Madame Sossostris’s retail forecast, it’s sunlight and happiness on February 10th and we must burn the peacock feathers so that rainbow smoke smothers you and the many years of us.
* * *
In the years since we parted, first you were a thunderstorm, your lightning an electric whip. Then you were light rain, soaking but harmless. The day you became a tugging wind and all I needed was a long sleeve, I knew that soon you would be mist, distant in the horizon, like a premonition of closing bookshops. Empty shelves, it makes no difference being there. The silver and gold bracelet on the chiffonier—in a moment of irony, you gave me that? Oh, and the Sat Nav in my car, it serves me better than a thousand yous. If you knock quietly and open my door through your tears, I might give you a coin and an old shirt, or call the cops to a strange ghost. I carry a new sunlight full of rainbows in my belly. She will never be a memory of you.
Fear of sand
So many sandcastles collapsing at the ocean’s edge as the day melts in the virtual time of lost childhoods. You shiver. Drop by drop an old wound weeps in your heart. The bitter taste of geranium in your mouth; its acrid scent lingers in the air. So many hallucinations in real time even as you gouge out ghostly images from your eyes, silence eerie voices in your ears an
d drown unspeakable fears in the rising tide. What follows is no unpredictable speculation, but the certainty of premonition: the Sandman is coming tonight.
* * *
The sandcastle inside the collapsing beehive is a buzz hole full of licorice and it is black with hallucinations of lost childhood. Sigh by sigh, your blood spikes to stagger your heartbeat, as bees drink the extract of sweet root and you dip a finger in their bile. Must you grow wings before you stop licking the salt and sugar, both ghostly and aromatic, how so bitter yet so sweet? You try not to sleep, just dip a finger, dip a finger, what sort of fool says licorice, let’s do it? Enough, enough. We keep watch in the castle but the day breaks and the sun rises low with a ditty of sand people effusive in their hugs and one of them is you.
Waterlogged
It’s raining nicely between the floorboards—and by Jove we need water. But it’s a sad story that you have inscribed on the woven floor-spread made of wool and animal hair in the mid-nineties in Baluchistan, Pakistan and well before you and all others met in folklore and further cultural revisions of yore. Well after, it’s raining ropes. I could go up or down. Look where the line is fraying. Pick up where It’s raining nicely, except the floorboards are water-logged. Way to go . . . Remember how we fought over “groupuscules”? Who speaks and acts? What for?
* * *
She is swimming between floorboards—it doesn’t make sense but, by Jove, it feels grave. Above her head is a carpet that is not an environmental antiphon and a wonky table that will never be a solid hold for the slippery slope of relationship ores—they resurface with no regard of how grade, concentration and occurrence directly affect the cost of mining the edge she needs to restrain the fraying lines of what remains. Waterlogged. It’s a national emergency that will slip door after door after door out of the apartment into a library on the beach and it’s full of books that howl there’s no global crisis.
Blood and tears (if not too contentious)
We learn the taste of blood and tears in the womb. Whether it is the same salt I can’t tell, though I suspect Samuel Becket would have answered in the positive. Now how timely that this week an exhibition titled “The Model Citizen” should open at our Institute’s Gallery as the Australian Federal Government confirms that it will remove all refugee children from Nauru. These persistent issues of who is and is not Australian are creatively explored in what promises to be a compelling event curated by academics and artists, including Alexander Pope, a biomedical animator and poet who combines cinema, poetry and science to reveal the microscopic worlds inside our bodies. His work on blood and tears sits firmly within the accepted conception of model citizenship and marries scientific praxis with the arts. Not only is Pope our Institute’s Chancellor and Head of Research, he is also chair of the Academy of the Humanities. Herewith, an excerpt from his latest work:
Vice with such giant strides comes on amain,
Invention strives to be before in vain;
Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong,
Some rising genius sins up to my song.
—Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Dialogue II
* * *
Curiocity was a metropolis that escaped the lunch time routine. Animated osteos, plumbers, electricians, baristas, forecasters, novelists, hairdressers, and all, closed shop soon as the clock struck twelve. Buggy services, tickets and information booths sprung up every which way to guide folk to the next blood sale. No lock-in contracts or demands for passholders only, anyone was welcome who was keen to chase with giant strides in the direction of liquid plasma or solid red blood or white blood cells or platelets, or a mottled mass of all the above, consumed, inhaled, injected or drip-fed. Curiofolk religiously adored the Greek physician Galen who married philosophy with anatomy to understand that arteries carried blood. Everyone accepted the concept of Karl Landsteiner, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1930 for his findings on ABO blood types, but they quite couldn’t get it that he never became emperor of the universe. Leukocytes! yelled a hawker. Amino acids! yelled another, as three buggies collided at a T-junction where stunned traffic lights, mesmerized by the blood rush, had stalled. By two o’clock, everyone was back at their day job, model citizens with eyes open—perusing bones, drains, cables, espressos, heatwaves, excerpts and wigs. No one ever asked the government or rumored with the black market about where, oh, where, the fresh, sublime human blood came from.
A desperate vitality
No wind. No stars. No moon. Bodies of trees clustered close to the window of my fiction room mark the whims of weather, not the cycle of seasons. Oppressive heat. The stink of burning rubber. A night to match my mood. The fall when I saw the body being fished out from the creek . . . The friend who’d led me there had designs on my purse and so walked me away from the scene. We went to the pub. Had a beer. Failed to rekindle the conversation. And now Igor Stravinsky has just stolen my thunder. In the first of his Harvard lectures, he writes: “the meaning of poetics is the study of work to be done. The verb poiein from which the word is derived means nothing else but to do or make.” That was one year I was conceived.
* * *
Unfinished poems cartwheel in the stars on a windless night. The morning sun sighs out a name that is a testament to the fiction of life in a cycle of seasons. Nyambuli—it means daughter of the goat. But she is a child of the gods who write weekend notes, and a muse of the gods who rekindle Mondays to Fridays. She is true to her name in timidity, curiosity, uncertainty—despite occasional fits of temper when she morphs into a faun. Her world is full of myths and lore, no wind, no stars, no moon. Just a pentagram of spells. She roams, a free spirit, each experience reborn. And the gods accept.
Endgame without ending
You too, once thought you were on top of your game. After the Titans of the University were defeated, you shared a hot desk on Mount Olympus with astronomists and astrophysicists who, unlike you, conducted their collaborative research behind the closed doors of their laboratories. Every third Friday of the month you would meet at the Pantheon, the space where all the vigorous discussions among the scientists and chief administrators took place. Then one fateful morning you packed your meager pack of books and moved to the foot of Mount Parnassus (the handful of linguists and historians and philosophers had long disappeared). Having embraced the principle of heterogeneity inscribed within the very ethos of Parnassus, you devoted yourself to a theater of dreams, visions, mirrors, smokescreens and metaphors where images replace imitations that generate specular emotional responses in a constant act of decreation to reveal the core of an encounter of the self with the other. Endgame without ending?
* * *
In terms of overall structure, he is a Titan who needs such attentiveness. The flow of logic in his paragraphs . . . the sentences are too long. You lose yourself in the detail, seek ethos in compatible typeface but get distracted fixing taglines. He’s not a type family you understand. Variants of original typeface bring emphasis and distinction while keeping a cohesive look. But that’s not him. There’s a difference in his lines, a vigorousness in the extensions and letterforms. He’s not meant for comfortable reading—what is the hierarchy of information! He’s inscribed in colors and textures, sizes and spacing, exaggerated in triangles and points. You want to go back, you cannot go back, how a single moment caught the both of you one fateful night on a hot desk that walked into a come-we-stay. But paradox or conundrum, he is a patient one. It’s a metaphor of imbalance, heterogeneity in bedding. Puppy eyes mid typeface compressed into ravenous lion font. Non-connecting scripts demand coffee on the go. The pen moist in your fingers anticipates a pure taste of text. He prefers casual scripts: maybe do it in the bus on the way to the library! The contraception of literature is an endgame inscribed in your pocket.
acknowledgments
A big thank you to the distinguished members of the Prose Poetry Project run by the University of Canberra,
led by Professor Paul Hetherington, and the enchantment of words shared in a safe but addictive environment that emboldened the linguistics and audaciousness of our speculative compositions.
about the authors
Dominique Hecq, MA, Dip Ed, PhD, worked as Research Leader in her capacity as Associate Professor in Writing at Swinburne University of Technology after teaching at a number of universities in Australia and overseas. She has a background in Literature as well as French and Germanic languages, with qualifications in translating. Hecq writes across disciplines, and sometimes across tongues. Her creative works comprise one novel, three collections of short stories, ten books of poetry and two one-act plays. She co-edited Female Sexuality: The Early Psychoanalytic Controversies (1998; 2015) and Creative Writing with Critical Theory: Inhabitation (2018), edited The Creativity Market: Creative Writing in the 21st Century (2013) and wrote the widely acclaimed Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing (2015). Kaosmos (2020) and Tracks (2020) are her most recent publications in English. Among her multiple awards for fiction, poetry and translation, Hecq is a recipient of the 2018 International Best Poets Prize administered by the International Poetry Translation and Research Centre in conjunction with the International Academy of Arts and Letters.
Eugen Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is African Australian, a computer scientist mentally re-engineered into creative writing. She’s the author of Claiming T-Mo (Meerkat Press) and Writing Speculative Fiction (Macmillan). Her work has won, been shortlisted, longlisted or commended in national and international awards, including the Bridport Prize, Copyright Agency Prize, Australian Shadows Awards, Ditmar Awards and Nommo Award for Speculative Fiction by Africans. Eugen is a recipient of the Katharine Susannah Prichard (KSP) Emerging Writer-in-Residence 2021. Her creative work has appeared in literary and speculative fiction publications worldwide, including Award Winning Australian Writing, Aurealis, Bards and Sages, Meniscus, TEXT Journal, Unsung Stories, British Science Fiction Association’s Vector Magazine and through Routledge in New Writing. In 2020 she released The Road to Woop Woop and Other Stories (Meerkat Press), Hadithi & The State of Black Speculative Fiction (Luna Press Publishing), Ivory’s Story (NewCon Press) and Black Moon (IFWG).