In June a friend asked me to write a poem featuring the word 'shawl' as one of five challenges, and I wrote this.

Talion

Let me explain the man
who appeared a month into the witchhunts,
while the fog was gathered on the barrows,
and you were in the hospice, engulfed in spasms.

I remember how he got everybody to reach for their shortwave radios
and the night became filled
with Morse clicks
and patriotic cantos

while the grasslands were swept of objects.

Jaw locked, you managed:
“how beautiful were its teeth before”
then merged again into turbulence.
I used your shawl
to swab the skerry of spittle from your chin
and admired from the window sill
the villagers assembling
a militia
on the paddocks below.

Then: a month of fires.

They prepared him a home
on the tallest mound,
rooms cut from blast rock and cedar,
where he sat with a flute of sherry
well fucked and plump
and commanding the hills and snow plains
all the way to the borderland shanties.

Posters of your delicate face
with the words
We Shall Avenge
fading on the roadsides
shuttereyed and pale.

The purple arc of dusk on the sierra
where they emptied the murdered
into canyons
and strung the raped by their throats, in trees
bald and bloated and eyeless.

O Girl, it’s darkness, and
I have run out of accustomed prayers.

The certainty that everything has already been written annuls us, or renders us phantasmal.

I've said too many times that it's been too long and that it would be a fresh start. I've promised change, I've painted frescos of radical rebirth. I've been boughed with good intentions, imbued with Sagittarian optimism. And no silence has been as extensive as this one. I almost let a year slip by! A year of my life! Discarded to mere memory! By design I should stand here prone and exposed, begging for absolution, constructing before you all a monumental stratagem of transformation.

But no.
I have almost killed this somnolent blog a couple of times through this year - quickly and painlessly, of course. This town I live in now hasn't exactly been forthcoming in inspiration, and my life (far more... adult? than I ever saw myself becoming) hasn't provided all that many quips and tales that I thought any of you would be all that interested in. I work for a government (I am not allowed to say which one, so guess)- I like my job, and think there is much to be interested in about it - but I don't think I've yet had a conversation about it with anyone outside the industry whose initial interest hasn't wavered within a few minutes. Thats cool, I understand it. I'm usually not interested in others' jobs either. But y'know, the reason I'm here in this town is the job, there aint no other reason. In this way its my life. And what a life. Just not so transferable into a blog. You can imagine.

But here I am, trying anew. No promises, but there is a new layout to distract you from the words. Pretty bears! So we'll see how this pans out. If nothing else, I will ensure there's a S.O.M.L.A on December eight. Maybe I'll start telling you about what I cook. Tonight it was Persian stew - lamb 'n' rhubarb, with rice. Recipe: Put the lamb in a pot with fried onion, pomegranate molasses, saffron and stock and slow cook that motherfucker. Some mint, parsley. Sit back with a Stones Alcoholic Ginger Beer (ch ch ch changes!) and watch some old episodes of the Wire, let the juices seep. Add rhubarb, watch it dissolve. Eat it. Shiiitchyeah. Bone fide Standard Line food blog, holmes.

So anyway, suddenly its summer nights here in the hill country and the cicadas are singing and I find myself adding iceblocks to everything and wearing wifebeaters. Most nights are spent up late, listening to J Tillman, engaging in hair removal, and combing Flickr for talent. Sometimes I bake bread in a machine, in my bathroom so that it doesn't annoy my housemate's boyfriend who sits up very straight as he writes essays at my dining table. Sometimes I fall asleep on a beanbag on my skinny balcony. Sometimes I engage my board game club friends in a German-designed board game with colourful playing pieces. I am the single one in the board game club but that's okay because most of the games are for maximum five players, so a lover'd just make board game club infeasible.

As for writing, lets just say I've been reading Borges, and when I sit down with fingers on keys I get lost immediately in the "feverish Library, whose random volumes constantly threaten to transmogrify into others so that they affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad and hallucinating deity". It's a fucker, that infinity.

Recrudesce

I have been back in Australia for just over three weeks, and back in Canberra for the last three days. I am living, temporarily, in a large hotel room which has two flat screen televisions, two floors, a stove and a balcony overlooking a verdant garden, all paid for on my behalf by the Australian tax-paying public. I arrive in the capital by Greyhound from Sydney, on Australia Day, and drag my suitcase along the pavement from the bus terminal, through the city centre, past the black, red and yellow flags of the ‘Invasion Day’ demonstration in Garema Place, and down the wide, silent, suburban streets which flank the tiny centre of Canberra towards the hotel. At the check out desk the three girls are in the office, blowing up green and gold balloons and inhaling the helium to make their voices squeak. One of them has a flag tattoo on her cheek. A peroxide blonde with dimples and small eyes comes out to serve me, and continues to giggle and snort as she searches for my booking, and the other two staff keep opening the shuttered window into the office, poking their head through, and squeaking at her, which makes her burst with laughter again and again. ‘Your room (giggle) isn’t (snort, giggle) ready yet (guffaw) – it’s still being (giggle) made up… (laugh induced tear)… it should be an hour – you can go wander around the shops and I’ll call you (snort, laughter) when it’s ready.’ I head to the weekly community market and sit in the sun and read Miranda July and eat Salvadorian papusas with beans, cheese and chilli. A shirtless man with scraggly hair selling poetry on crumpled foolscap mutters curses at cricketer Adam Gilchrist and the nation of Australia. I go buy a mapbook for my upcoming househunt challenge. The Jesters pie shop has either shut down or moved, one of the two. Two brown wild rabbits are eating grass in front of the ANU Law building. I go back to the hotel after three hours, and the girl looks embarrassed at having forgotten to call me. One of the wall mounted flat screens is a metre wide. There are some excited Brazilians in the rooms surrounding mine; they spend a lot of time in the hallway, commuting between each other’s rooms and shrieking. That night I meet Stephen and Kate for a monster movie involving the destruction of Manhattan.

The next morning I am navigating myself in the park, using my new map book, when a heavily cleavaged elderly woman approaches on her bicycle. Her aim is to help me, but when she realises that I pretty much know where I’m going she flips the conversation to a virtual game of word association – she asks me a question, then reacts to the answer with whatever comes into her mind, eg: (1) I say “Oslo”, and she responds with stories about: (a) a Norwegian she met on a cruise ship from London to Guyana and subsequently dated, (b) her days in Guyana in the 1960s and an incident with overheard gunshots when she returned in the 90s, (c) the only other time she’s heard gunshots, during a drive-by while she was drifting off to sleep in Johannesburg. My mentioning Perth, on the other hand, triggers discussion of Heath Ledger. She has a theory that he was gay, but hadn’t come to terms with it yet. ‘I was married to my husband for 20 years’ she tells me, ‘and it took another ten years after we divorced for me to realise that he was gay. Wasn’t till I saw him rubbing suncream on the back of our son, who he always said wasn’t his anyway. That triggered it, the suncream. Very Death In Venice.”’ She rides her bike around me in a clockwise direction, mumbling something about ancient pagan rituals (“Probably come in handy with your peace studies!” she says) and goes back the way she came, following the stormwater drains northwards.

In the car, Stephen, Kate and I head to Kambah pool, a swimming hole in a river past the satellite towns of Canberra, where we eat sandwiches and watermelon on towels in the shade of the banks and swim in the sand coloured waters. The gum trees are white and run up the valley edge. It’s gorgeous. Downriver a little there is a section of rapids and rock pools, and we leap across on boulders to the other side. A nearby car park is full to the brim, but there’s almost no one around at all, and we are confused, until we see a path with a stencilled sign on the cement: “NUDE BATHING AREA – 200M”. We follow it down, and on the way pass an ape-faced teenager who points his thumb down the path. ‘Those people are fuckin’ sickos’, he offers. Moments later, a rotund gentleman emerges from the bush with no pants and an open shirt. His cock wiggles. He stops just passed us to dress himself. On a bit further, we reach a clearing – sure enough, the rocks are scattered with nudists, men and women, their skin bright through the fronds and trunks. We do not go further, cautious of appearing like sightseers in our shorts and shirts. We turn around and head back to the car. On the drive home, we pass a BMX park named after Vikings, and one of the world’s three NASA Deep Space Communication Complexes.

Today, after an hour reading and sleeping under the statue of Mohandas Gandhi in Glebe Park, I am walking back to the hotel, when I hear words behind me, children’s words, the words of a four year old. It is a young boy, talking to his mother, who is pushing a pram and walking a few metres in front of the rest of the family. It is just us on the eucalyptus flanked avenue, I am just a little in front of them, and the air smells good and the sky is warm. I hear words from the boy and at first I just register them as the babble of a child, a child fielding probing but directionless queries at his parents, but then I hear them crisp and clear, and right there at my back. The words of the child go: ‘We don’t like them, do we mum, because they aren’t Ausssie?’
‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re not welcome’.
‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re not welcome’, he repeats after her.
‘Not welcome here at all’
‘If you’re not Aussie, you’re. Not. Welcome.’ His four year old squeak is tasting the words. His four year old mind is absorbing the very idea.
It’s that easy for my recent attempts to embrace the idea of living in suburban Australia to be undermined. That easy for the positive thoughts I’ve concentrated on since returning to Canberra to be sapped instantly. I am paralysed by disgust at this woman, at the whole idea of nationalism, at this country. I feel compelled to turn and hurl abuse. But I keep walking.
They go into a block of units, and push the pram through the gate. ‘I know where you live, you bigoted hatemonger’ I think. As I walk on, I place myself in scenarios involving violent campaigns of re-education, then downsize them to ones involving letters of careful, simple and passionate language, dropped through the mailbox. I dream of kidnapping children of racist parents and Pied Pipering them away to some kind of dynamic and multi-cultural Neverland. But none of these fantasy responses, nor anything else that afternoon, do anything, at all, to unjumble my head and lift, again, the heart.

State Of My Life Address

A. Today I have lived for exactly 27 years, or 9861 days. Twenty-seven is both a perfect cube and a decagonal number. It is the atomic number of cobalt, the number of books in the New Testament, and the number of moons of Uranus. Twenty-seven is also the age in which musicians Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, Robert Johnson, Brian Jones, and D. Boon (Minutemen) all died.

B. I am not a musician.

C. I live in Oslo, Kingdom of Norway, and have done since the beginning of August of this year. My time in Norway will finish in three days, at which point I will be leaving with most of my possessions on a bus to the south of Sweden. My home is a 25m2 one room (plus bathroom) apartment in a large complex of interlinked buildings with echoing corridors which smell of cooking, both good and bad. The buildings are positioned on the bank of the narrow Aker river, and wraps around a central courtyard with a playground and puddles made by a leak which recently have been mostly frozen. The complex incorporates student accommodation, a hostel, housing for immigrants and a Best Western Hotel. In the entrance to my building (#3) there is very often some rubbish or discarded furniture or household items, and there is some graffiti which reads "fuck da police". Right now there are some mandarin peels on the floor in the elevator; these were left by a French guy who I rode the elevator with and who was eating mandarin when I entered on the first floor. He said hello to me when I got on the elevator which is an incredibly rare event here - the Norwegians in the building rarely, if ever, say hello or even smile at people in the lift or hallways. Getting out of the elevator you must unlock the crimson coloured door to my hallway, and mine is the first apartment on the left, number 622. My door is also crimson. Inside, the walls are cream and the window and door frames a light wood. I have three windows which look out on a hospital and a tram line. Often you can watch tram inspectors stopping trams below my window and checking for tickets, dragging ticketless souls into a waiting bus where there are desks for the processing and awarding of fines. Inside the room there are two single beds, a desk, two chairs, a wooden stool, a coffee table, three lamps, a set of shelves, a small fridge, a cupboard, a set of coat hooks, a sink and two hot plates. My bed is infected with bedbugs, but as they have been there all semester without my noticing them, because my body not react to their bites, and because I am leaving in a few days, I am doing nothing about it. On the walls there are a series of old and new maps, including a Nazi German map of Europe (1940), a colonial era map of Africa (1922) and a map showing the location of Colombia's promising oil deposits (1939). There are also a number of illustrations by Marcel Dzama in two rows along one wall, a number of posteards, a badge reading "The Rock: Jesus", and an Efterklang poster. The room is pretty messy right now because the process of packing up stuff has begun (though not proceeded very far) plus I have in four large containers the orphaned household items formerly belonging to Sonja Litz, who left yesterday to Hong Kong. There is a heater in the room, but it doesn't really work, so a lot of the heat comes from the electrified bathroom tiles, which work perfectly. Norway right now is mostly covered by snow (so I understand) but Oslo is not. The roads are salted and there's neon Christmas decorations throughout the downtown and a little ice rink near the National Theatre crammed full of young kids and teetering Latino and Indian tourists. Today, the sun rose at 9.04am, and set at 3.14pm.

D. It has just turned 4.30pm, and I am currently sitting at my desk under the glow of a 60W globe, listening to Grizzly Bear's "Friend" record. I am pretty tired. I am wearing black rimmed glasses, a white shirt with red pinstripes, a maroon tie, a black cardigan, blue jeans, a silver ring, two Colombian bracelets of vegetable ivory, black socks and white & green K-Swiss sneakers which I bought in Sydney in June and already have already ripped at a number of places down each side, making them a particularly bad investment. The shirt and tie is on account of the semi-formal class dinner party I will be attending tonight to celebrate the end of exams. Beside my computer is a jar of 150 Norwegian kroner (A$30) in 1 kr and 50 øre coins which I have been collecting throughout the semester and intend to use tonight to pay my portion of the dinner, which is apparently going to be a selection of tapas.

E. Today I have eaten: 1 x raspberry tartlet, 1 x pesto, parma and mozzarella sandwich, and 1 x bowl of ICA "Crunchy" Muesli (with dehydrated strawberries and yoghurt clusters) and milk. Since arriving in Norway I have eaten this type of cereal almost every single morning, and I have kept every box (flattened) in order to know how many boxes I have bought and consumed. The grand total is 26. The tartlet and sandwich was from the United Bakery in Karl Johan's Gate, where they have a hot liquid chocolate fountain (with which to fill up brioches upon request) and a conveyor belt on the roof that pulls around little hanging carts, trays and boxes of scrolls and danishes, delivering them to the shop floor from the bake house in the floor below. I went there for lunch with AO and EK, and we sat and ate at a table on the street, where we weirded out Norwegians by smiling and saying hello to them as they walked past. I cannot report this year on my weight, as I have no access to scales, but I imagine its about the same as last year (70kgs) - perhaps a kilo or two less. I have some particular problems with my digestive system.

F. Yesterday was the last exam for my Master program - meaning that come January my full letters should read "BA(Hons), MIA". I do not have a job in which I am currently employed, though I am due to start working in February for the Australian Federal Government as a public servant at AusAID - the Australian Agency for International Development. This means that I will be moving back to Canberra, which is where I lived for most of the first half of my 27th year. Canberra is not a city I have grown fond of in any way, but I am thinking much more positively about the prospect of settling there than I was a few months ago. I think that for a few years I have been trying to create necessary change in my life by changing the place that I was in, rather than changing myself and my own outlook. I will try to do this in Canberra. For example - rather than sitting around thinking, procrastinating, using the internet, roaming aimlessly and such, I hope to read, write, cook, garden, build and create more. I will seek to be less distracted, more focused and unmixed in my attention. Rather than focusing my thoughts as much on human deficiencies I am going to explore the intricacies of the natural environment. I am going to seek, in both theory (through a forthcoming website) and practice (in my everyday actions and interactions), a more cohesive and symbiotic balance between community and solitude. If I can, I will not live in a suburb of Canberra, but in a cottage or small house slightly outside of the city, with a rural outlook. This may be tricky, particularly with the commute. I will probably buy a car and spend weekends bushwalking, camping, going for concerts in Sydney, skiing and exploring the eastern coastline. Absolutely essential to my vision is a bread machine and many, many books.

G. Recently, a number of people have said that I don't smile enough, or that I never laugh. That I am morose. This is probably increasingly true, and although I don't feel sad or grumpy most of the time, I am mindful of the impression I give people, and of the fact that I do take things too seriously and often find it hard to engage with people in a tender, relaxed, and loving way. I used to be a lot more filled with love and excitement for the world and its people, but these days, on the whole, I feel unable to connect with many things. There are individual people who I know that I love, and I know that were something terrible to happen to these certain people, I would be ripped apart. But I think that years, now, of moving and resettling and saying goodbye over and over to places and people; friends, family, lovers - all of this has led to my disconnecting my interior from the exterior, my self from community, my head from my heart. This is something I really want to undo. It is the thing I most feel I must try to change.

H. I am not a member of any organised religion, but I have felt more recently as though religion, or at least a part of it, is beginning to mean more to me and be more a part of me than it was in the past. By religion I follow Tolstoy in referring not to obedience to church dogma, not to submission to established authority, but simply to "the principle by which one lives". Part of the above process of personal change involves some fine-tuning, some recommitment and some reimagining of the principles by which I hope to live. I hope to engage more in and understand what may be called true human work - home and community building, agriculture, cooking. I hope to attend Quaker meetings in the new year and see if they hold anything of value for me. I hope to read and reread and become actively inspired by Henry David Thoreau and ideas of transcendentalism. I would usually refrain from providing hyperlinks in a State-of-my-life Address, however I must say that these two Curtis White articles in Orion magazine (along with two others of his in Harpers magazine) have been, very recently, massively influential in helping consolidate my thinking and outlook on belief and faith and care. I believe I am more of a pacifist than I was this time last year. I have a long way to go, however, before I can claim to act in any manner that may be thought of or described as religious.

I. I have a girlfriend; she is tall, Swedish, and perhaps the most caring, rational, hopeful and loving people I know. My love for her is both important and warming, and continues to grow, all the time. I wish I understood the way I experience love more than I do, and I wish that I could express and show it better. I look forward to learning more and more from her, about her, and about this love for what I hope will be a very, very long time. She was also the person I most recently kissed. I will see her in three days time.

J. I am very broke - particularly so because of the expense of life in Oslo. I have, over my time here, become more used to the idea of paying up to A$6.00 for a bottle of water. I owe a lot of money to my parents and a lot of money to the government of Australia. I hope, after February, never to have to borrow money ever again. I do not have a car, a boat, a horse, a dog or cat, and I have not read The Great Gatsby or Pride and Prejudice - I apologise to MMM and EK, respectively. I do not drink coffee or alcohol. I have a Facebook account, a Flickr account and a Gmail/Blogger account. I use the internet more than I should. I need a haircut.

K. Currently I am reading The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen, The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders, and Greil Marcus's The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice. The last movie I saw was The Dead Poet's Society (1989). The last gig I went to was The National and Hayden, here in Oslo, and it was absolutely incredible. Seeing me at that show would have surprised those people who think I don't smile. The last thing I bought was a black cardigan, from H&M. The last meal I cooked was burritos with red kidney beans.

L. I have been to 36 countries and one occupied territory: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Israel, Laos, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Senegal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States of America, Vietnam, the West Bank (Occupied Palestinian Territories). I have lived in Australia, Canada, Egypt and Norway. I speak English, a little Spanish, a little French, a dwindling amount of Arabic and a tiny collection of disconnected Scandinavian words.

M. I am a member of CISV (Building Global Friendships), an international peace education organisation which I've belonged to since I was 11 years old. CISV likes acronyms. I am currently a co-opted member of the IMC, in which I am part of the training and communication sub-committees. As of today I will responsible for doing the Mosaic website. I am also a director on the board of the Australian NA. In the last year I have participated in two international programs -APRW/JASPARC in NZ, where I did a training session for the JB; and an IPP in DK. Etc. Basically, its a cult.

N. This year I have attended lectures by three Nobel Peace Prize Laureates - Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams and His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, and in two days time I will be seeing a fourth (and fifth) when I attend CNN's interview with Al Gore and a representative from the IPCC in the Oslo City Hall, as part of this year's Nobel ceremony celebrations. I have studied often in the Nobel Institute library, visited the Nobel Museum in Stockholm and held a season pass to the Nobel Peace Center here in Oslo. These experiences have been: varied.

O. It's been a strange year, a bittersweet year. I've learnt a lot, I've felt lonely and even forgotten, I've hurt people I love and been hurt by people I love, I've made only a handful of new friends, and missed my old ones more than I usually do. I've found new clarity and focus in where I want to go and who I want to be, but I've simultaneously become more lost at sea than ever before. I feel scarred and bitter, and yet naive and hopeful. I have realised that the idea of 'place' has come to mean a lot less to me now than it once did, when it used to factor heavily in my writing and thoughts and dreams, and I think this has come from living in two separate cities with which I am not in love, nor have historical connection to. It's been a year without spring - autumn then winter segueing into a windy and wet intermission when it was often light but seldom warm, before returning again to autumn and dark, dark winter. Even love, which I have tried to allow myself to feel again, has, at once, soothed and confused me. I have spent a lot of time watching seabirds pass my windows, suspended in the grey skies. Here I am, I'm twenty seven, and I'm hovering in the thermals, feeling the updraft, hanging here, one of the luckiest people alive, and yet still: black eyed, selfish, and unable to decide where to perch next.

State of My Life Address 2006 (26 years).
State of My Life Address 2005 (25 years).

Simulated Roomscape

Today, it was grey and wet and dark by 4.30pm. In a desperate attempt to do anything but an essay on Proportionality, Just War and the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah Scuffle, I downloaded the newish Google SketchUp program, which is: Awesome.

Instead of 1000 words on jus ad bellum, then, we have a 3D model of my one-room (plus bathroom) apartment. In colour. Lets just say it took me some time.

So, if, dear reader, you find yourself wondering what hijinks I'm up to o'er here, rest assured that what with wretched weather, lack of disposable income and impending academic assessments I am more than likely sitting in my private 25m2 penitentiary, which, while in actuality a lot more dirty, messy and filled with kitchen utensils, pieces of paper, books, clothes, chairs, and, on the walls, posters and postcards, is otherwise roughly as these diagrams suggest:

(view from above)

(view from the doorway)

(view of the main area)

(just imagine that outside the wind is blowing water at the window at a 65 degree angle)