Making these texts was a means to practising breakage as a creative strategy. Interpretative commentary, translation, genre innovation: all three break away from an ‘original’. They perform separation in a way that discloses the inherent susceptibility of the original to breakage — Jacques Derrida already showed this many times over. But these three events also divulge separation’s generativity. Unfaithfulness: instigator of the messiest of break-ups, yet what an unreal catalyst for novelty. Where any of these instruments — commentary, translation, innovation — breaks a text open, a topos dilates. The refusal to be faithful draws up space within which more writing effloresces.
Breaking out consists of two series of creative works of very different kinds, though of a piece:
1. Khorographs
Eight mixed-media prints featuring eight found poems that break up and arrange a dialogue between:
1. The English translation of Derrida’s Glas (1974; trans. 1986);
2. A selection of the critical commentary around Glas, which incessantly credits the work with achieving an absolute break with all genre traditions; and
3. The Jean Genet essay on which Glas is, in turn, a commentary, ‘What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet’ (1958; trans. 1985).
In the science of map-making, ‘topography’ denotes a place; ‘chorography’ denotes partial places, elements separated out from but sharing in a topos. From the plateaus, you see how crammed all topos is with a tendency to fragment into parts, and how making a whole is enabled by fragmentation. ‘Chorography’ can also slide slyly into relating to khora, i.e. vis-à-vis Plato vis-à-vis Derrida, the substance that enables all being to spring from Being. If writing has a khora — an elemental potentiality prior to all figuration — it must be breakage.
1. A strange inner space (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
2. Place poetics over her (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
3. I am to him all possible uses (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
4. It had the presence of a certainty (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
5. The mass of flesh (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
6. Candour (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
7. I am seeking the good metaphor (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
8. Taffs, peals (2017)
Washi tape and inkjet on archival paper
20 x 29.7 cm
2. Rash translations
Eight narrative poems resulting from a writing strategy that tests unfaithfulness as generative conduct. Derrida’s Glas is already a columned text, but its English-language version is embedded with a further column: the translators have left a fistful of selected terms in the French, enclosing them within square brackets, as though suturing a rift that runs the page from top to bottom. What do the translators’ selections say about Glas? Do they instead say something more interesting about the translators? This was always going to be their bind: you translate and thus stray from the beloved original, or you instead refuse to be unfaithful to the French on this word and that and watch your choices run away with the interpretation that they can’t help but impose on the text.2. Rash translations
I made up a persona to translate those French terms into story with me – a persona who, like me, spoke little French, and who would, therefore, feel licensed to more carelessly open the square brackets on facing pages 204 and 205. We made from those terms a plateau upon which to fabricate a topos and shapeshifted as required to make it right.
I was deep into the summer of my
Seventieth year before I was at last
Able to become a Japanese novelist.
Before that time, I had made do
With other kinds of labour and was
Happy enough with it. I knew
From very early in my life that I
Would become involved with buildings
And I contrived to always work and live
Inside buildings large enough for
Atriums vaults stained-glass
Windows. I have loved more than
Anything in life the combination of airy
Space and glass, I can’t explain
Why it so captivated me but even
The French doors adjoining my
Mother’s bedroom leading to her
Balcony – this was the place
I would return to, home early
In the day from some school
Excursion while my mother was still
At work and I would lie there
My bag lumped under my dreamy head
To watch the absurd spindly trees making
Something of themselves in
The shadows on the glass. I had always
Loved watching the glass and
The light and its mindless
Play across my long legs and perceiving
How time opens and closes day
After day, a bright shaft strokes up
The eiderdown now my hands folded
Over my son’s gentle folded hands
Perfectly still and thoughts turning
More and more towards memory, sensory
Acuity. Towards love, rash deliberation
Movement, the dangerous dance.
2.
I eat with my children, I eat
What they eat. We had a home but lived
More often than not on the verandahs
Of the community centre which were shaded
Broad and dark and overrun
With mice, some rabbit hutches. We all
Ate together. Afterwards
While the children sweated with other
People’s children in twilight game after
Game I would rock on the verandah with
Other children’s parents, swinging
In found furniture hearing the green
Garbage trucks vectoring the distant streets
Mechanisms winching musically,
Sadly – and I would watch the sky syphon off
Over the plaza. What is beauty when
It’s enough? The blue of the sky
Was a hyperobject, a combustion, it
Darkened in knots above us. Then as now
The shadows were bodies
Contorting the children’s ambit
into permitted zones and boundaries
The dark would round on them
Rounding them up closer. The lovely
Bodies turning inside the body
Of the knot, turning a great
Number of times inside the body
Of the knot. I needed them always
Closer and so I was pleased with night-time
Then as I am pleased
Now with the food they bring
With which to fill our night, eating with me
In the old place listening
Through flashing incisors
Of rabbits and rodents. We have
Enough. What is enough.
3.
I am only a fifteen-year-old student at
The Methodist College for Ladies, but even so
It is to me that my parents turn
For advice on nurturing the diminishing assembly
Of our indoor potted plants. We haven’t always
Nurtured indoor potted plants. At first
when my third-newest brother
Was born I spent time in the garden
With the outdoor-planted plants listening
To the noises from the Conservatorium
Next door and the noises
Must have planted a seed of their own
Because I predicted at that time
That I would go on to become
A prolific young conductor and later
In my middle age a tutor of classical woodwind
In a backyard lean-to that I would
Renovate for the purpose. And I was
Right. Now I find I can recall at will
The names and faces of particular pupils
Whose profound dedication brought me
A happiness both
Lasting and deep. I expected fulfilment
In life but not that it would come
So easily; nor now so reliably
From the arrival of a particular scent
That blows off the street below my window
At which time I step out onto my
Fourth-floor landing taking with me
The hot tea I always have ready
For the arrival of these very moments
In which I pause to make myself
An infinite present.
4.
At the beginning of every dry season
When my children were
Still young enough to be made to
Make time for it yet old enough
To derive from revenge
More pleasure than pity
I would take them in a silver car
Whose metal sides glinted like
Fish in the breeze as we wound our way
Down the mountainside from the little house in which
We lived like kings among the cathedral-
Like arches of the forest canopy,
Down to sit cross-legged before the
Salmon-coloured adobe building
In which I had given birth to and
Devotedly raised each of them
Despite the dreariness of the food
Shortages and erratic plumbing and
The fitful seaside stench, and
Where my then-lover had
For the first time – and many times thereafter
until the day of his untimely death
By the hand of a woman driven by tedium to
Madness – closed the glass doors of
The darkened living room behind
His retreating back and the
Retreating back of a woman who
Notwithstanding the dwindling food
Supplies and the faltering hot water
Had said tenderly in his ear that
She would remain with him and for his
Sake nurture a love of the fitful
Sea if only he would drive us out, out, out.
The heat on the crowns of our heads and
Heat on our legs as we picnicked on
The front lawn, rolling in the heat.
5.
It will appear strange to you that
In my part of the world we still
Have book-binding by hand as a
Common profession but less strange
Once you grasp that my part of the world
Is the mid-fifteenth century. You may even
Have heard already that my son became
A key figure in the development
Of the matrice denteé, a tool used
To impress leaves of vellum and,
Increasingly, sinuous paper. Credit goes
Partially to me – I pressed his clothes
(And washed, and repaired)
Obsessively even after the
Recession progressed into
Depression and there was no money
For washing powder or sewing
Supplies. He, resplendent and
Practically levitating in full-blown
Youth, would return from his entry-
Level white-collar day job to find me
Alone in the house affixing a shirt sleeve
Or embroidering a gym short, weeping
Into the fabric. But then
He would have to leave for his night job
Servicing other white-collar workers
And their friends in the red-light district
And I did not agree with it and I felt my mind
Falling out in pieces, my womb
Gritting, receding in step with the
Failed bureaucratic structures that
Regulated my part of the world, talking
with inscrutable agenda to outcasts
On trams, you, strangers.
6.
Yeasts are in the air, smelling
Beery. When I was a Qantas pilot
I quite easily caught some in
A jar and fed them daily with fresh water and flour
And thought nothing of it. In the second
Dream, I was a true graffiti artist on a
Council commission. I had a wall. The hardest
Part was that in two weeks’ time
I would have to paint the wall over
Again and that was the best
Part too. I drew a woman crouching
the back of her head and the back of her
Neck bent to fit below the roof
Her knees tucked asymmetrically
Into an armpit, almost dog-legging
Into her neck. By the time I finished
I had had the thought that
Because asymmetry is great on
The one hand and on the other not
Quite so much, you don’t too often see it
As a design principle in structures
Where leakage is a known
Threat. Ships, monuments, government
Buildings: none. Sea floors, rivers:
Plenty. Today I deposited in at least one bathroom
Of every state-sponsored cultural landmark
I visited in my role as dutiful cultural
Elite shreds and shreds of an
Unused ovum, each of which left me
Painfully but I acknowledge the relief
Of leakage after an intense spell
With rash. (My walk is now a habitual almost-crouch
Approximating a pseudo-scratch with the
Squeeze of one thigh against
The other. Even after antibiotics – two full
Courses – I can always feel when I stop
To think about it the furry creep of
Soft-headed bacteria butting from tip to tip
Of labia minora.) In the final dream
I moved into the council’s wall and it turned
Into the body of a child. I lived there for the rest
Of the time. Reaching my hands up
To where my hair should be I felt
Only gutter but I did very much like the mossy fuzz
On my fingertips. Whenever the gutter ran over
I delighted and laughed and whenever it was full
Like a river, I would play there with my boat.
7.
I’m beginning to meet frustration. I scratch
At the surface only and settle too easily
For the remains. I, newly appointed
Jacques Saintes-Maries fellow in the micro-
Scopy of Atomically Thin Materials,
See the doors on my research closing up
Before me. Can an object comprehend
What it is the object of. I want
To respond – and yes – to this question.
But the apparatus doesn’t yield, cold atomic
Foam spouting from the specimen smear
On the slide. Habitual lateness
Overcomes me, I fumble at the lab door
Every morning for the keys
In my pocket – is every single one of my gestures
Condemned to becoming
Metaphorical, the mind, too, turning
More and more to my mother’s
Bedside where my mother turns
Like a sea turning to pull me in. I
Was a child once there, and loved and I loved
My mother’s bed. The bed is the subject,
Object, we shared in its pronoun: Me
Her collarbones held still, I park
Toy cars along them, along her as
Though they were my own. She reads.
Lifts my top, me her body, to scratch at
My heat rash, mine, as though I were
Her own. My rosy fluster, own rash-flashing
Fingers, hand opening – her book opening
Closing, turning as my own thin surface
Turns, the object of which I am reading,
the object of which I am, reading,
comprehending
that of which I am the object.
8.
Freud said latency but he
Didn’t mean this long. Swimming
Another lap along the protracted
Verge of reason, she turns her head
And asks, quoting, in mono-
Syllables, between breaths: In what
Do a body and its person
Share? But I’m out
Of the pool dripping into a puddle
At my feet before I’m ready to give
An answer. Sweetheart, the question
For me – and I ask it every time it’s safe
To not think of my mother, every time
She is safe from the persistence
Of being thought; the question asked from within layers
Of gauzy love, a post-partum length of it
Like a trembling fractal, a textile diffuse
As a spawning puff of air, as a
Yacht-puffed bay buffeting a perfect
Ambivalence, strong-arming on the side of
One alone but equally on the side of
Two please, oh please – the question
For me is: by how many persons
Can a body be shared? Our rubber shoes
Slap slap while the public square bakes,
A fragrant tongue of grass
In flower, looped with concrete.
References
Derrida, Jacques (1986). Glas, tr. Leavey Jr, John P. & Rand, Richard (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press)
Genet, Jean (1988). ‘What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet’, in What remains of a Rembrandt torn into four equal pieces and flushed down the toilet (Madras & New York: Hanuman Books) pp. 10-47