From time to time the landlady comes knocking. She thinks to safeguard the house she believes she owns. It is destroyed from the inside out; the destruction is not yet visible and will be revealed.
All our ambitions, all our dreams, all our images of all our futures – these we have abandoned for a full gut and yet we remain hungry. Babies call for mash and for wine, scarcely knowing what food and drink might be.
I’ve seen plenty. We age like concrete, being thumped this way and that (this and that). Here are X-rays of my ribs following the car accident. Elsewhere are X-rays of my teeth, and of my right ankle, which I once broke in a fall. The X-rays. A few more injury records and I’ll own the elements for a composite of my entire body.
I’m shot, shot to pieces. I’m crawling through fire-ruined flatlands where once stood something. I am beaten and poisoned and dust-covered and tricked. I am pathetic. You don’t need divine vision to see that.
The passers-by allow a laugh now and then, sudden and brief enough to startle birds, but it’s only punctuation for this English in which tears are like magnifiers and the world is too large to describe, or beautiful as a road gilded by the setting sun. Soft and mammalian as a road, too, and a strange vengeful beast with a brain like a hornet on a windless day.
Those pursuing us are too fast, and they have too many disguises and hiding places.
Where is the substance of which we are made? From this age, and with my experience, all of it, the advice to my twenty-year-old self would still not be clear cut. There are times for which I would say, ‘Be more cautious,’ and, for others, ‘Be more impetuous.’ I am working my way back through my life, imagining it without the errors.
Sometimes I believe it would have been better to err quickly and get the consequences over with. Sometimes I wish that once I had commenced my erroneous route, I had followed it to its end, aware, slow as an auditor, as slowly as an old man on a correct journey, as one of those incredible men who lived a century as though just beginning, and learned something every day.
Praying has never really suited me, though there is comfort in chanting and repetition. There is comfort in the community of chanters and repeaters.
And these are the chants: anything our forebears squandered we have outdone. We have wasted our ancestry. We have worked under the wrong premises and for the wrong rewards. We have been enthralled by the logic of bankers and surfers and by the logic of those who see commonalities among children and who see only crowds. We have eaten and eaten and eaten, eaten like secret termites undermining, and eaten like a scouting locust, the sight of which tells the future. We are burning and humiliated. We are silent and we cannot stop weeping. The land is taken by feral beasts.
And we hang on to our hopes like walls grasping at dust motes.
Acknowledgements
The following pieces have been previously published, broadcast or exhibited:
‘War Against the Ungulates’ first published in Heat magazine (new series, No. 17). Also published in The Best Australian Stories 2008 (ed. Delia Falconer, Black Inc., 2008).
‘The Chinese Meal Uneaten’, Asia Literary Review, Autumn 2011.
‘In the Time It Takes to Finish a Sandwich, We Could Build Worlds’, Southerly: Mixed Messages, Vol. 77, No. 3, 2018.
‘Waltzing Matilda’ in Hardly Beach Weather (HarperCollins, 2002).
‘Theatre of Soak’, RealTime magazine.
‘Foreign Logics’ was commissioned by DA2 Digital Arts Development Agency as a collaborative installation with artist David Bickerstaff and exhibited at Lethaby Gallery (London), Institute of Contemporary Art (London) and several other galleries. Sections of ‘Foreign Logics’ appeared in an essay, ‘Taipei, Expectant’, in Harvard Review, Spring 2002.
‘Orangeade’, The Best Australian Stories 2002 (ed. Peter Craven, Black Inc., 2002).
‘The Monitors’, published as ‘Monitors’, Pub Fiction (ed. Leonie Stevens, Allen & Unwin, 1997).
‘Frogspeak’, broadcast as ‘Frogspeak: transplanted habitats at Homebush Bay’ on ABC Radio National’s Radio Eye arts and culture program.
The title ‘Fire in My Brain, That You’d Like to Put Out’ is taken from the song ‘Buddy’ by Peter Gutteridge, Snapper EP, first published by Flying Nun in 1988. I am grateful to the executor of Peter Gutteridge’s estate for permission to quote this.
Thanks to Kathryn Heyman, Jane Malone and Beth Yahp for feedback in the assembling of When I Saw the Animal. For writing space and time, thanks to Varuna, the Writers House, and to Simon and Rebecca Ehrlich. Thanks to the Three Weedy Writers for writerly camaraderie, and to my students at The Writing Workshop for being excellent audiences for early oral drafts of some of these pieces. Thanks to my publisher Madonna Duffy, production editor Felicity Dunning and all the team at UQP. Thanks to Josh Durham for the terrific cover. Thanks to creative editor Felicity Plunkett for helping me select, edit and order the pieces in this collection.
Thanks to all my family and especially to my daughter Pola for being generally fab.
First published 2018 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
uqp.com.au
[email protected]
Copyright © Bernard Cohen 2018
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Cover design by Josh Durham, Design by Committee
Cover photograph by Josh Durham/Bigstock
Author photograph by Mira Lemberg @mirabellaphotog
Typeset in Bembo Std 11/15pt by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane
This project is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
The University of Queensland Press is assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
ISBN 978 0 7022 6021 6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 6157 2 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 6158 9 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 6159 6 (kindle)
When I Saw the Animal Page 18