Dacitas de la Formación Pisque – Miembro Casitahua

January, 1998

I’m sitting here at a tiny blue screen framed by a broad window in a flat-roofed fifties bungalow. A dusty curved road strolls down to the giggling green sea. There’s a wooden boat with a red sail on the water. A salty man and a woman in thongs walked it past on a trailer moments, or was it days, ago. It’s bobbing its answer to their encumbered gait, now; not too late for the passage of a smile. A triumvirate of middle-aged Greek women float in the channel like cloves of garlic cackling oily Christmas tales between swells. Caravans huddle together in the park on the foreshore. A pelican on the bridge of a tanker steers the hulk through the heads, its own wings too soon less sure of flight. There are whale bones on the beach; ribs, a wreck of breath, splitting the breeze with howling, pushing, breaking the waves. A boat. My heart. This cage of … memory where the whale has swum. Me in the belly of the whale – unseeing, unknowing – and yet I swim: memory in me treading water, beached, bleached, like a daguerreotype.

Dear E,

Hello. I’m hoping you may re-member me – I went missing, dis-appeared, for a while – from a series of encounters in 1993 and 1994. London, Paris, and the south of France. You introduced me to Philippe Gaulier, Monika Pagneux, Theatre de Complicite, Pantheatre and Anzu Furukawa. You spoke, whispered to me, casually. I found myself asking the ‘Does a Little Tyranny need a Bigger Lie’ question – whining sometimes, persistent – but not before you suggested, heuristically, cumulatively, that ‘Lies’ might be understood as critical fictions, illusion, artifice, transgression, pretence, pretension, insolence, stupidity, and re-presentations. Contrary, for example, to the ‘Little Tyranny’ of capital T ‘Truth’ and capital E ‘Emotion’ in certain kinds of theatre, dance and psychological discourse. You sung of discursive tyrannies – capital R ‘Real’ in performance – but unilaterally, depending on the angle of vision or the ‘place’ from which one looks, ‘tyrannies’ of all kinds: ‘musical’ tyrannies, spatial ones, political correctness, habitude, prostheses, ‘hip’, Democracy, Physical Theatre even, diplomacy, the words ‘I love you’, politeness, surface, psychological depth, and anxiety.

The whale belches the vagaries of Hijikata’s claim that anxiety is like the kid who pisses his pants before the race has begun ...

I was a tourist. Now I am a missive ...

There was a stampede in heaven – or was it Hades – and the sixteen hooves of the horses of the horsemen of an apocalypse, a domestic one, weak, and sad, in a tiny room with a pane onto a grey wall ... these sixteen hooves I met with my four, in time. Call them; Love, Faith, Honour, Forgiveness. My four hooves, and me my only defender, and the only betrayal my own if I fail to meet the others at the gates of my heart; to turn them away. And I am the Unicorn. You are here inside the walls – not out there where night approaches – cracking fire, flintstone under foot. Me my defender. You my heart. The night ablaze all around. Me my defender. You my heart. As the flickering shadows keep time with destruction. Me my defender. You my heart. And Grace between us. Grace.

Love. Faith. Honour. Forgiveness. You inside the walls? Here? Already here? Awake. It is the sweet smell of me feathered and ghosted on your thighs. I will visit you there, again and again, sleeping safe in my heart.

Gaulier grumbled, ‘You can’t cheat with your humanity’. It is a question of liberty: we glimpsed it as freedom with limits. I say ‘we’, but I’m covering for you.

Terra Incognita – land unknown.

Terra Nullius – empty land.

Terra Australis

... poems on a Melbourne Tram, 1995 Dreaming place … You can’t change it. No matter you rich man, No matter you king. You can’t change it.

– Bill Niedge

More than repair,

Everything is in need of mercy … – Peter Bukowski

Warm regards

B

Dear B,

To travel from Australia to Europe full of the illusions and critical fictions of the willful force of a desire which would announce Europe as the site of learning and inquiry whiffs of a very familiar ‘Cultural Cringe’. Where’s your culture?

E

In sepia tones I remember how in Western Australia in 1990 I learned that South African Nationalists sent a working party to WA in 1947 to study State legislation. They borrowed half a dozen or so of our laws enacting the good will of a white supremacist Australia and promptly returned to include them in draft legislation for an Apartheid South African State in 1948. Apartheid’s ‘un-Australian’. We wave the flag for sanctions. But don’t trust me. I’m a liar.

E,

... I have a vision! I see a City: tall buildings, lights on every street corner – bright lights – towers and beacons, pathways and factories. Billowing smoke! Industry. Coal and iron and steel. Prodigious machinery... Yes, we’ll build a city ... here! ... But, there are natives in the bushes, eyes peering from the darkness, all around – sniggering, playing didgeridoos! You! Scout around in front, I’ll come up behind. Round them up. Drive them into the river!!! The river ... ahhh, here, at the bend, we’ll build a Great City ... and for you, a white house, with white, carved posts at the verandah overlooking the water. And there, a blue boat tied with a rope to a jetty. A bright blue boat, tugging at its rope...here at the bend ... drive them into the river!!! We’ll build a city, a Great Nation and ... Oh, yes, there’ll be joy and laughter like a …babbling brook. And tea and biscuits for everybody before bedtime. You! Take the oars. I’ll stand at the prow. We’ll course this great river ... row on, I say, onward! Here a mill, there a store-house. Row on ... love your work!

I’m a yes-sayer. Positive. Never said no in my life except to say, ‘Yes. No, really – I love your work’. I’m positive.

I’m HIV positive. Trust me.

B

Dearest E,

You have taken me from this ‘site’ – my experience of Australia – to London, Paris and back again. There is in this movement a ‘circle’, a collocatory set of encounters in ignorance, inspiration (the whale breathes in), revelation, and insights ruptured by time and questioning place. I am in-formed by this circle. The circle is de-scribed by me, inscribed in me. The question of ‘place’, the site from which one looks, sees or enquires and the site/s by and via which the travelling ‘Self’ is interrogated in turn, is enacted in the pedagogy and dramaturgy that flows from this experience – and this writing which constitutes part of its praxis.

‘Selves’ conspire – multiple. The world dances, turns. There is movement. Monika Pagneux sang, ‘Everything is music’. I believed her. Gaulier complained, ‘Belief is not necessary. Believe nothing’.

In the studio I’ve been walking, walking, walking. Breaking up the ‘I’ that walks.

A tale breaks the surface, the bulb flashes. Burns. Smoke clears revealing a murder of crows throat singing in protest on the opposite shore.

... Lllllllllrrrrrraaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk … Ohhhhhh, I have memories of the CIRCUS! where, rushed by a clown with a bucket full of water, I fell through the wooden seating in terror only to open my eyes to spiraling confetti in colours I had not yet imagined. I remember the rhythms of work and the smell of my leather satchel, and I remember play, and the words of poets sent from lovers before they ever loved me. I remember – when the warm winds come swirling in – I remember a place with a heart. People, and images, and words that were blessings ...

E, you were already here! I’ve been trying to ‘take place’, ‘make an appearance’: conjuring concepts of ‘Presence’ and its shadow, ‘Absence’ – positions mirrored in the Occidental/Oriental divide. I’ve been marking marginalities, plotting peripheries and diagnosing dis-appearances as if you were elsewhere. As if you were other. The eulogy of ‘The Other’. The Return of the Same.

Flash. I strike a match in the putrid darkness. Flames – initiation by fire. Understanding comes.

I attempt to draw the other towards me, all the while holding firm in my own contradictory discourse of ‘opening’, and yet not knowing really what it is to stand in relationship with another:1 _{to love, to be}

in love. I’ve been waiting for you, as if when you arrived, so would I. But, really, I’ve been waiting for ‘me’ – and I simply haven’t known what would shake the foundations of my solitude: the fixed, lonely foot in me; the clenched jaw, the tight chest, the taut buttocks – the ‘masks’ with which I have divided myself. Ohhh, I’ve been crying and crying and crying as if to give voice to my pain would somehow bring compassion down upon me. From where, I don’t know ... More than repair everything is in need of mercy. But you are here, already here.

B

Dear B,

I’ve seen you walking in a landscape with tears. Anzu