Intimate Antipathies Read online

Under her watch, my classmates and I – all wannabe writers smuggled into higher learning by the University of Western Sydney’s special program for unexceptional students – began our journey into the murk of fiction-making by allowing dreams to dominate our waking life. Our dreams became a means of unravelling and restructuring consciousness: we were told to treat them like works of fiction – experiments in style and voice – to see in the ordinary madness of our evening’s fevers all the details of the daylight world transposed, disguised, deformed and renewed. We were taught that dreams can be revised and rewritten even as they occur, and that whatever enigmatic apparatus of the unconscious governs the generation of dream-images, it can be an organ easily flattered – it blooms and spreads into a wild expanse of colours, scents and feelings under the faintest attention. Certain cheeses and spices can help enhance the length and lucidity of dreams, and make them more malleable. Drugs too, of course, though these – along with the more mundane enhancements like nicotine patches worn to bed – were not recommended by Dr Angel. Alarm clocks set for midnight catch an unwary unconscious offguard – a notebook and pen by the bedside are essential for documenting involuntary invocations before the blinding forgetfulness of morning.

  Patient with our stubborn stupidities and our lack of culture, Dr Angel (compulsively scratching at her head as she lectured) gave literary supplements to the creative dream praxis with unit readers stacked to bursting with Baudelaire, Benjamin, Freud, and Stein – incomprehensible reading for students who had until this point in their lives barely broken the spine of a book. No easy task to explain Hélène Cixous’ Dream I Tell You to barely literate girls and boys with the empty hills of Werrington and the long blue skies stretching out for miles outside the cramped classroom’s windows. Cixous said to us, ‘What a delight to head off with high hopes to night’s court, without any knowledge of what may happen! Where shall I be taken tonight! Into which country? Into which country of countries?’ What did it mean to write of the subtle pleasures of night’s court in the form of a long love letter to another famous Frenchie, when the unfiltered fullness of an Australian afternoon sun pushed the campus air-conditioners into a weaponised drone? Looking back at Dream I Tell You from the hindsight of another time, is it any wonder a young student might baulk at such unwavering, unapologetic self-indulgence? Who would celebrate Cixous if her writing were to emerge here and now? Isolated poets and poetry readers might still go for that sort of luxuriousness, but who else in today’s climate would stand for such navel-gazing? The level of enthusiasm with which Cixous writes would rule her out of most discussions in this ever-tightening atmosphere of neoliberal pragmatism, and the all-powerful influence of the online consensus-lords would likely find her frivolities an apolitical nonsense – though they’d hardly admit that to themselves.

  Dr Angel, a survivor from an epoch less intellectually demoralised, persisted with us despite our cynicism and the cold indifference accumulating in our institutional surroundings, though she was often flushed red with the frustration of being at the outer limits of what could be explained at all. To us, majors in a subject the university was already making moves to abandon, the readings were obtuse. But then, the seriousness of being dreamy did hold a high appeal for the flighty, flaky sorts who typically make up creative-writing courses. Like Baudelaire, my dream-soaked undergraduate peers and I all had our heads in the clouds, searching absentmindedly for the miracle of a perfect imagining – one in which the ever-changing web of consciousness that writing weaves into existence might reveal itself uniquely – and be captured with our own names on the covers.

  3.

  For an author to dream of his works going to press, is a dream of caution; he will have much trouble in placing them before the public.’

  GUSTAVUS HINDMAN MILLER

  At first I was reluctant to follow Dr Angel’s command to begin recording dreams – they’d always been trouble for me, and for my lapsed-Catholic family. The whole lot of us had prophetic ‘visions’ – we were cursed with the satanic habit of prophesying as we tossed and turned. From an early age, Mum and I would, over tea and Weet-Bix, look through a large book titled 1001 Dreams Interpreted, and indulge in the diabolical ritual of its occult analyses. On the cover of the book, which I still have here on the shelf – tranquilised by the weight of a children’s Bible – is a crystal ball with images of random nouns (a tiger, a clip-art mouth, the Great Pyramid of Giza), adrift in the dark ether contained by the fortune teller’s globe. ‘To dream of sharks,’ the book warns, ‘portends familial discord,’ whereas ‘to see someone riding a bicycle’ speaks of ‘a desire to achieve greater balance in one’s domestic and professional spheres.’ It is an odd book and a blunt but useful tool, working the way fortune cards do: pricking out the threads of a narrative upon which the customer might lay their intuitions and imaginings. Ours was the behaviour of another century: the days before cable news came to town and the internet made most information instant. My mother was often fretful that the lost child she’d seen crying in her dream might be hidden in a backstreet nearby – still waiting for rescue – or that the murdered woman’s body she’d spied drifting bloated down the green waters of the Georges River would go too long unnoticed to bring justice to the killer. Occasionally there was evidence that she had glimpsed an actual reality – for want of a better phrase. None of us doubted this mystical gift – or the hauntings we suffered weekly in our home. Sometimes these visitations turned violent – disruptive – and talismans (a ceramic evil eye, a gnostic gemstone) were placed about the house to keep the spirits content. My brother had the most mundane prophetic visions imaginable – occasionally glimpsing in advance the serial numbers and barcodes on shipping deliveries at the frozen-goods warehouse he worked for – a truly useless Nostradamus.

  For myself, dreams were an exhausting kind of allergy that made daylight hours an effervescent bramble of thorny irritation. I was afflicted with what I have heard others call night terrors, dreams in which I lay paralysed in fright, as faceless shadow men pressed their ink-black faces against the bedroom window, their sucking lipless mouths threatening to steal me into an infernal plain so fearful, I would wake screaming and shuddering in shock and sweat, the flat, impassive eyeless glare of these devils still glowing etherblack inside my mind like bloodied vapour in the air.

  These nightmare beings so filled me with a horror of sleeping that I was forced to devise a kind of mystic ritual against the night. I’d lie in bed and picture one of the demon beings hovering in the air, then I would encase him in a makeshift prison: a golden orb the size of a coffin, or a concrete tomb without windows or doors. Around that I would place another larger confinement, an immense silver dome, or some solid hemisphere of forged iron. From here I would increase the scale, the planet that this original confinement was located on would need itself to be fully contained, and that planetary encasing would then in turn need to be trapped in some colossal, intergalactic holding. Each prison would require another, greater prison, and this process would need to be endlessly repeated, prisons within prisons, interdimensional tombs inside the eyes of giants swallowed by solar storms of unfathomable ice and stone within an atom of another dimension, a solid bronze egg frozen in a diamond case larger than the immeasurable sun, and on and on, until the sky outside, in the real world, would begin to lighten, and I could pass to sleep in the safe hours between dawn and breakfast, where demons have no foothold on our earth. Should I, at any time during this generative ritual of ever-increasing imaginative feats, accidentally recall the original spectre of the demon creature in my mind’s eye, then the whole exercise would fail, and I would scramble to place the escaped spirit back into a new and original restraint, or else face the villain’s redoubled wrath.

  I performed this complex ritual every night for many years, and I have long suspected that this activity is the reason I was drawn to the idea of writing – seduced by the promise of the redemptive recursions to be found in mental interiors. It was only once I wa
s old enough to read unassisted that I was able to replace this tiresome practice of mental capture with the act of training my eyes on the tight hermetic lines made by sentences in the pages of books. I wandered around in the daylight, tired from my mental ablutions, in an abstracted daze – head full of the dramas of night.

  Perhaps for this reason, and for the odd way I stared blankly into a void when we sat at the dinner table, my mother took me to see a psychiatrist in Liverpool. His name, as I recall it slotted on his office door, was Dr Redoyavitch. He had a short cropped, reddish beard – not unlike my stepfather’s – and a wicker basket beside his desk. There were action figures stacked inside – a little Yoda, a vascular He-man, assorted professional wrestlers in their brightly coloured tights. From the games I made of these idols, Redoyavitch diagnosed me as a troubled child. I told him about my recurrent night terrors too: sometimes an enormous eye with a golden iris crashes in through the bedroom window, at other times a malignant shade burning like a black candle takes over my body – and under the influence of such recurring themes I’d lose control, could not breathe, would sweat in the sheets until I was too slippery for sleep. The doctor made notes about all this, then later dumped me as a patient and took in my mother – about whom he wrote a doctoral thesis.

  Suspecting no good could come from the revival of those belligerent dreams – long since annihilated by puberty and all its excesses – I nevertheless did as Dr Angel instructed. With the high tide of post-structuralism ebbing away from the universities and creative speculation giving way to unadulterated commercialism, these lessons in dreaming staked us to something solid: Dr Angel grounded us in the deep and fecund world of imagination. My impoverished, unlettered head suddenly became, thanks to her reprogramming, a nightly avalanche of alternative ontologies – worlds within worlds all as intricate and complex as the material reality they took as their inspiration. They became the high point of existence. As Cixous suggests, the meridians of emotion in everyday life are mere footnotes to the fullest range of feeling in dream states, with their mindbending terrors and ecstasies. There – in the revisions of the dream-breath – peoples, languages, voices, faces, cities, circumstances, gods and intimacies seemingly unthinkable to conscious labour – surge with all the ferocity of life’s infinite wellspring. All universes conceivable to the human mind pass before our eyeless gaze. What this excess presented to us as young writers was an inexhaustibly royal road to forging fictions in the real world. Nothing else was necessary; the realer materials of life became a redundant source of inspiration in the light of dream’s infinitudes. Lest this read like hyperbole – I will prove it through experiment.

  4.

  To see writing, denotes that you will be upbraided for your careless conduct and a lawsuit may cause you embarrassment.

  GUSTAVUS HIND MANMILLER

  Presently, I gather up the novel closest to hand – Gerald Murnane’s A History of Books – and proceed to the couch. It is mid-afternoon and my neighbour is imitating a dog; his barking is distinct through the cramped walls of our house on the hill. On the couch now, I observe that the white curtain on our front door lends a funereal glow to my mother, who is asleep on a chair, her figure framed by my feet on the armrest. Nothing is moving but spores of dust, drifting around us both like luminous satellites in this odd tableau of the living room. It is hot, and the neighbour continues to improve on his dog impressions. Only thirty pages into A History of Books I put it down – open on my chest like a broken fan. The strange image provoked by Murnane’s paragraph about a paragraph – narrators without names, without faces, recurring clauses – repeat in a numbing choral murmur as the book slides down my chest and onto my throat: already I’m at the gates of sleep.

  The book presses awkwardly against my flesh and, with arms at my side, I think of something which will carry consciousness away. Here it comes: I am climbing up to the summit of a cliff somewhere on a cool spring afternoon. A hand-hold of weed growing from a crack in a smooth rock near a lighthouse helps me to make the final steps upwards – reveals the coastal vista. Being there with family – brother, wife, one of my fathers: putting our different hands up on the steel fence to look out over the view. The long, trembling, ink-blue water to the east stretches into a cuticle-white horizon. I wonder if there is something to the strained feeling of anticipation when looking down the cliff at the sea against the outcrops rimmed round the shore. Waves in collision recede to foam. The strangely alien beach vegetation and its dry shrubs bristle at our feet in the altitude’s breeze. The lighthouse is a sandstone ruin, the great grey bricks are piled at the round base like spilt entrails, and the hollow remains are fenced to keep the tourists from climbing through the cracks. A wooden signpost complete with pictures of ghostly families, centuries dead, tells us the lighthouse was built incorrectly – without consulting the maritime authorities – its deceptive light leading ships to wreck on the jagged coastline. The keeper’s son fell from the cliff in 1896. A daughter accidentally shot. Another’s throat slit from ‘ear to ear’. I pretend I am looking for a whale, away from my family, not mesmerised by history, sea or sky but by expectation – an almost imperceptible sense of impending disappointment, as if the constant ebb and rush of the waves is always holding back its drowned and swallowed secrets. A long way out, the surface breaks with froth, and a hint of finned black immensity rolls above the water. The sight of that salty mammalian hide reminds me of a dream I had before my wedding night: alone in a boat on a green-grey evening – lopping over the rolling waters with the clank of oars in their sockets and my body slick with sea-spray and sweat. From underneath came the surge of a colossal black whale, its enormous head rising beside me like a sudden tidal eclipse. The open maw was lined with waxen teeth, and a tongueless throat leading into its cavernous pink gut began to suck in the sea, while the sound of a gargantuan gurgling rang, until the vision ended with my waking. Later, talking with a friend on the green lawn of Sydney University’s campus with the midday sun on our pale skin like hot grease, she told me that whales signified feminine destructive energy. Now, back at the lighthouse, the (real) whale does not resurface. I can’t be sure it was ever there, and at the height of this uncertainty, the dream loses its colour, and then sinks into an infinite darkness.

  5.

  To dream of old books, is a warning to shun evil in any form.

  GUSTAVUS HIND MANMILLER

  From the black depths of one dream’s dissolution another has arisen, revealing itself to me in a foggy order, beginning with a climb up a staircase beneath Haymarket Library. At its summit I find myself standing in a room of the library where the walls glow a Martian red. About me, filling the square shape of the room, is a crowd of young people facing a stage upon which, beneath a great stained-glass window, a celebrated man, whose face I cannot quite make out, is speaking with sonorous tones into a microphone. The crowd of young people are frozen in rapture, grinning in wonder at the figure on the stage as he speaks. I too wish to be rapt, and strain to hear from the back of room what words of wisdom this storyteller is speaking, but just as I begin to focus on his speech, a poet from Parramatta named Peter, whose hair is long and whose fingers are covered in biker rings, accosts me at the threshold of the crowd. His face, like the walls and shelves around us in the small, square room, is bathed in the strange red light, and his eyes are wide open, but he alone seems unabsorbed by the talk of the man upon the stage. To my great astonishment, Peter the poet begins excitedly, loudly, to explain that he has discovered, through sheer force of logic, the absolute truth. ‘The universe cannot be,’ Peter earnestly entreats me, his ringed fingers wriggling in excitement as he speaks, ‘the result of anything external to it, since anything which can affect the contents of our universe in even the most infinitesimal way must logically correspond to a component of it, which implies that only that which is within the given horizons of our reality can observe it, since observation is itself an act of determination, and if that is the case, as logic asserts i
t must surely be, then the universe we inhabit is, in every dimension and in the final analysis, a matter of the purest self-definition. That is to say, it is a place of absolute freedom, indeed, it is the very essence of freedom, the only possible manifestation of freedom, since it lies irrefutably unrestrained by any logically permissible external agency!’

  Peter the poet speaks so loudly and the proximity of his mouth to my face is such that it proves impossible to hear the words of the famous figure who is speechifying on the stage. I look around for support from someone nearby in the crowd, thinking they too must find the poet’s exhortations the height of rudeness, but so entranced are all about us with pleasure at whatever it is they are hearing that no one seems to notice the poet’s shrill incivility. I try politely to push my way through the throng to escape him as he continues talking, but he follows along, saying, ‘It will perhaps, at first, seem to you that I have overdetermined the power of logic in subjugating the universe itself to such a constraint, but it is untenable to suppose that the universe itself is a place of chaos and irrationality. A simple thought experiment might easily reveal this is so. Our reality, in which logical formulation is possible, is one in which language, which is itself a form of logic, is born from the sheer power of our universe’s natural law. Language is the nature of the universe, a place of tautological self-definition in action.’

  I snake onward towards the stage. The young people around me are all so tall I soon get lost between their shoulders as I shove politely forward. Disoriented, I emerge from the crowd on the far side of the room, near the shelves and adjacent to the stage. There, I discover the source of the red glow in the room is a blindingly bright fire, slowly spreading from book to book like a molten serpent slithering across their spines. I turn to the young people closest to me, wondering how they have failed to comprehend the intense heat and the golden-red glow of the burning books. I grab at a young woman beside me with one hand, pointing wordlessly at the blaze with the other like a character in a child’s cartoon who has seen a ghost and yet cannot bring himself to speak. But the young woman will not be turned.