A Personal Inheritance of Artaud’s Failure — To Prove that ‘I’ Exist-ed

A Personal Inheritance of Artaud’s Failure — To Prove that ‘I’ Exist-ed

I was born in Sydney’s western suburbs at Blacktown Hospital from memory, after my mother’s nine year struggle to conceive again, after an accident, in which she fell down a steep flight of stairs. Upon her arrival at the bottom of three stories of concrete steps, she had miscarried and was diagnosed as having irreparable damage to her reproductive organs. Might an existential anguish and grief be activated as a result of being haunted by a mother’s prior dead foetus?

Was that the dead weight I carried in an infantile form, whilst conducting an improvisational acting exercise, exploring the Jungian, psychoanalytical, archetype of ‘the orphan’, with Ranters Theatre director Adriano Cortese?

Arms outstretched, I cried and then walked…

I was raised in the economically and socially ‘disadvantaged’ area of Mount Druitt —whose closest relation to a mountain is ironically a hill, Rooty Hill — the ‘Las Vegas of the West’. In fact this flat, barren, pastoral land is most (in)famous for its high school which I attended from 1983 to 1989.

In 1996 the entire class failed their Higher School Certificate and the tabloid, now known as the Telegraph Mirror, published their school year photograph on the front page. Realising that their children already had little in the way of prospects, let alone being splattered across a Rupert Murdoch-News Limited paper, in Australia’s biggest city — Sydney — the kids were mobilised, and filed a lawsuit for defamation within the New South Wales Supreme Court — and won. (See ABC’s Radio National website for their 2nd October 2005 story Class Act –No Longer Failures). In the ensuing media exposure, the community, including the surrounding local academic institutions, assisted in soliciting opportunities to aid their escape from this 1970’s ‘social experiment’ gone wrong.

Ridiculously, despite an economics teacher and personal friend Mr Butler’s protestations, I became a god-damned bank employee — in the delusional belief that a passion for economics and art might lead to an in-house graphic designer position — due to the organisation’s scope. Suffice to say I should have believed in the confidence he tried to instil in me and that I was indeed worthy of something more.

After an extended period of working with morons, numbers, dollars and statistics as a ‘personnel officer’ with a penchant for fraud (my ‘performance debut’ as ‘psychologically impaired employee’) and a dalliance in the sheer tedium of accounting — whose ‘Business Psychology’ subject was my only sole interest as a ‘platform’ to espouse ascetic views on family, cigarettes and alcohol — my life became about music and art.

During this transformation I was touched in a co-mingling of ‘true’ love, sex and death.

In 1999 with godspeed’s infinite desire, fear, hope and regret in our hearts, the musical entity known as ‘2 litre DOLBY’ — who I co-founded playing drums — re-located to Melbourne. We speeded towards a future that was “still bleak, uncertain and beautiful”, yet more ‘artistically creative’, and ‘political’. We fled the romantic ideals of haunting, hungry ghosts, broken-hearted lovers and the reconstruction of Sydney for the “best games ever” of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s 2000 Olympics, like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Christian Holy Bible.

The end result, once again, was inevitably, abject failure and alienation.

As far as music was concerned the heightened state of being, under the gaze of an-other-audience had become my fascination. And, so, the year of 2001 saw me embark on this, an-other, new found journey of ‘performance’.

In May 2001, just before my 29th birthday I undertook my first performance with the assistance of Carla, Matthew, Phillip and his then lover Natalie at Dario’s ‘happening’ called Spart at what was known as the ‘Northcote Bowling Club’ and became acquainted with a certain performer whose name was Gretel.

The performance This Monstrosity Called Life, inspired by the Anna Swir poem Poetry Reading in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things was generated from an exercise in foundational practices, facilitated by Kate Kennedy and adapted from ‘The Woolloomooloo Cuddle’ by Remy Charlip.

The live performer wore grey garments on a slightly raised platform.

Inspired by the ‘S:11’ protests commencing on September 11 the year prior — 2000 — at the Crown Casino’s World Economic Forum, a white tablecloth was painted as a crude flag, signifying United States of America’s imperialism and hung beyond the live performer. The pervasive ‘Stars and Stripes’ had become ‘The Union Jack, Southern Cross and Stripes’, precipitating a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the perpetual ‘War on Terror’ co-ordinated by the United States. Beside the flag, dressed in black, a guardian stood at attention, with feet apart, a grinning gold face and black gloved hands, clasped firmly behind the back in a tight grip.

Drizzle haunted the musical drone of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Dead Flag Blues’ began to distort and fall, as a wind affected, sub-sonic-hum in sound. Beyond, above in the night sky, dark clouds lie, illuminated, by the city lights.

As the live performer began, someone within the audience began sniggering. The snigger became a smug laughter. The smug laughter became arrogant and judgemental. From out of the audience came a figure of an imposing, threatening physicality and a maniacal grin. Suited in white, this ‘monolithic, capitalist’ — man-made-likeness-in-the-image-of-‘Lord-God’-from-the Christian-Holy-Bible — entered the space clutching a bag of ‘something’.

Approaching to peer down and survey the live performer, standing face to face, a bleeding heart was presented and crushed repeatedly into the live performer’s skull. Bleeding hearts began to be thrown and pelted in the direction of the live performer as it lay down.

The guardian of the flag, with the grinning gold face, now stood with one arm raised and with hands aflame, set fire to the sacred, symbolic cloth of a collective nationhood. The oppressive material began, begins, burning in flames. And a mother dressed in black, mourning loss, abhorring the sight and taste of once-a-living, now-dead flesh, rushes forth from the recoiling throng, who act as if they are witnesses to such perverse spectacles.

On her knees she begins contemplating these hearts. The tears she cries dissolves into the blood of these still bleeding, crushed hearts, separated from their bodies, they are now, clutched, held, close, evidently close — next to her still beating heart.

The performance has transformed into an apocalyptic hell on earth. And the mother grapples with the stray dogs of all the unwashed idealists, for these still bleeding hearts. The dogs run off and away with the still bleeding hearts in their wet, bloodied jaws, to the appalled mirth of the masterly communal owners.

I am a ship that has become unstuck from its moors.
I am crying, screaming desire, hope, fear ‘n’ regret.
Godspeed you!
Clichés.
Defeat.
Again.
And again.
Again and again.
This is a performance project of abject failure.

Describing this performance to supervisor Dr Barry Laing at our first meeting regarding this project, he told me how “Artaudian” it sounded.
To which I replied “I know, and I didn’t know who the fuck he was!”.

This is a performance project of abject failure.

A tradition of failure that my ‘friend’ and ‘prophet’, of whom I am a maddening ‘disciple’, Artaud, stands accused by Sontag herself in her essay, but yet is redeemed in her preceding discussion and quotation of Jean Cocteau – “the only work which succeeds is that which fails”(xix, Sontag).

Hell, Tim Etchells the director of one of my favourite performance groups ‘Forced Entertainment’ and Matthew Goulish — see above p4 — have dedicated an institute that exists as website to the documentation, study and theorisation of failure —www.institute-of-failure.com.

Fourteen months prior to the performance I was experiencing re-occurring dreams of a world ending, with me, in a shopping complex’s car park, at the base of a building. Trampled and crushed under the weight of the concrete above, that had suddenly collapsed with unimaginable force; I was dead like Freud’s father in my sleeping dreams.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the year 2000 was not brought in with a bang, but a whimper. No “millennium bug” struck. No apocalypse. No Rapid Eye Movement in the End Of The World As We Know It. As I counted down in the intimate company of musician friends, Leo, Georgina and Genevieve and stood out the front of Newman Street — lying around the corner from Sutherland Street, whose significance in my life was yet to play its fateful card and lies — in the north-west of ‘multi-cultural’ Brunswick.

No drama occurred except for someone — I assume intentionally with good humour — simply turning the streetlights off, and with a pause, turned them back on again. Our hearts were in our mouths, looking, agape with a wonder, awed, wide-eyed in darkness. Then when the light was summoned, with a sigh, we were gone.

Twelve months later, and five months prior to ‘that’ performance — and at this stage I have no idea what I am going to do with myself and the year, but be lost and improvise chances — I am in a car with Phil and Matt on New Year’s Eve at Lake Eildon — a place of significance, that I would return to nearly three years later.

Struck by the lack of water, the terrain had been transformed into Mars on Earth, albeit, with a museum dedicated to all the cans discarded recklessly, that littered the scattered landscape. Performing around a fire, camping under the stars with kangaroo claws, not afraid of our shadows echoing nature — this was a being-becoming–spiritual-sacred.

The sleep of reason.

Monsters.

Frankenstein.

Rosemary’s ‘despicable’ baby.

Sheathed like a butcher stained white, enveloped, in the life-removed-red of blood, flesh and bone realised a shamanic transformation of being- becoming…

Artaud’s To End The Judgement of God.

A witch.

Artaud’s daughters of the heart.

Like some modern day Joan of Arc.

Signalling through the flames … kill …

Hieroglyphic movement-s hypnotised into trance.

Transfixed Artaud with his Balinese Dance-r’s .

Past twelve o’clock.

Everyone’s passed out asleep after exploring, walking, drawing, eating, drinking and ‘tripping-man’ with mushroom tea.

Hippy.

Trying to maintain warmth against the cold, we huddle together, listening to the musical sounds of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Moya’ from their ‘Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada’ recording a passage, an ominous presence over the dark horizon, and bonnet’s surface, in through the windscreen, across plastic, dusty dashboards and filling aural interiors of ears.

It is the sound of futures waiting to happen.

Alpha.

Omega.

Beginning.
… …
End.

Future is.

…

…all…

All. … ALL …

A favourite piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall in Fitzroy North around the corner from where I live as I write this…

… – or it writes me….past…passed…pass…

Future still, bleak, uncertain and beautiful.

Nine months after this moment in time and four months after the aforementioned performance I am in the studio improvising with Kate Kennedy and some others.

Kate is struck by the quality of the dying afternoon light.

Sunsets with a strange unsettling wind, and clouds look portentous in their appearance and colour.

Black. Red. And grey.

Were they?

Lying in the bed of a trash compactor room, later that night, watching the documentary When We Were Kings about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s classic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight in Zaire on ABC television, text — now from this moment will be known as ‘tickertape’ irritatingly accompanying what is commonly referred to as ‘the news’ ad nauseum-infinitum — enters the frame across the top of the screen.

A plane.

And.

A building.

One.

Of the World Trade Centre Twin Tower’s in New York City.

Pulse quickening.
The thought.
A once “true” love in that city.
Channel change.
Struck with these images that reel out from the screen into the world full of others.
Hearts beat rapidly in throats.
Open mouths.
Agape.
Wander in and stare at each other.

We are all captured in the screen, with perverse grins in wonder.
And.
Disbelief.
Fascination fascinated.
The pleasure of destruction.
Hollywood’s myths becoming reality.
Is this the end we wanted?
To desire.
Will.
Now, this is shocking and awing.
The images of these poor fucks standing on the observation towers.
Helpless.
Hopeless.
Pondering fate.
Like them.
In praise?
Or blame?
Over and over again.
Wonder.
Like them.
How the fuck is this going to turn out?
Repeat.
Over and over again.
How the fuck can that fire be put out?
Repeat.
Over and over again and again.
What the fuck is going on?
Think.
Repeat repeat.
Repeat.
Thought.
Over and over again and again.
And again.
Cruel.
In ignorance.
And helplessness.

What fire brigade for god and love could possibly extinguish that burning hole eighty stories up in a one hundred story building?
Why the fuck do we need to build skyscrapers for?
My heart sunk when one of these phallic testaments to man began to sink, transforming, disappearing into a mushroom cloud.

New York City of dust.

Traces.

Of memory.

The confusion of those trying to comprehend exactly what was happening was…
Seduced into these destructive images, live, from thousands of kilometre’s away and across the other side of a world.
What was going on?
The Return of the Same.
The Fall.
A modern day fable.
A second coming.
A myth was being constructed before my very eyes.
Live.
On television.
History in the making.
The day the world was changing.
And things would never be the same.
In all lounge rooms.
For free.
Penny’s dropped like that first tower.
America’s empire.
All with it.
Now I felt like I knew what that re-occurring dream was, and that first, original performance.

Is this hell?
I think that is what it was.
When I began to cry.
Terror was truly instilled.
Being.
Condemned.
A repetition.
The same spectacular end.
One, they themselves, like us, had just witnessed.
Only we are safe.
Aren’t we?
A mirror of life’s being becoming death.
Oh the horror.
O!
A reporter.
Humanity.
Herbert Morrison’s plaintive words.
Cried the arrival.
The German zeppelin.
Hindenberg.
Burst into flames.
Over in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Near.
New York.
Spooked.
Telephone.
Calls.
Mothers.
Watching.
Those images.
Who is going to pay for this transgression?
Us.
Where did it start?
Like this?
Where did this begin?
And the end?
Call.
Name.
Sarah.
A problem.
Later.
Bombing.
Nothing to speak of in the always-already reduced to rubble of Afghanistan.
Words.
There.

She.

Is.

Still.

Breathing.

Air.

Vaporized.

Bodies.

A post-modern 9/11cannibal.
Post-9/11-modern human inhaling metal, glass and debris.

Attached to this function.

The sinthome of Lacanian theory.

A condensed cipher of libidinal attachment.

To the city.

So.

When it disappears.

It will be missed.

Such details.

Bearing witness.

To true love.

The next morning, up all night, not sleeping from watching this same, violent hypnotic, repetition, I tried to glean some kind of knowledge and understanding.
Some form of meaning from the event.
In a trance.
The shocked intimacy of trams.
Was it those people from the Crown Casino at the World Economic Forum S:11 protests last year?
The tension being felt within the presence of those who could be an-other; that is - against US.
The gaze judges.
If you see something report it.
The arrival of a Sri Lankan friend, Ieuan, some months later is palpable.
Was it a Hollywood blockbuster film?
Others don’t know.

Eve-n.

A hell.

A way.
Represent.
Body.

Middle-Eastern Futurists becoming Western technology —-— turning in on itself like a malignant cancer.
Or mobius strip.
The German composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen considers “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole entire cosmos”.
Is this just like the Matrix?.

A sign post.

But where is the map?

Welcome to the desert of the Real.


I was born in Sydney’s western suburbs at Blacktown Hospital from memory, after my mother’s nine year struggle to conceive again, after an accident, in which she fell down a steep flight of stairs. Upon her arrival at the bottom of three stories of concrete steps, she had miscarried and was diagnosed as having irreparable damage to her reproductive organs. Might an existential anguish and grief be activated as a result of being haunted by a mother’s prior dead foetus?

Was that the dead weight I carried in an infantile form, whilst conducting an improvisational acting exercise, exploring the Jungian, psychoanalytical, archetype of ‘the orphan’, with Ranters Theatre director Adriano Cortese?

Arms outstretched, I cried and then walked…

I was raised in the economically and socially ‘disadvantaged’ area of Mount Druitt —whose closest relation to a mountain is ironically a hill, Rooty Hill — the ‘Las Vegas of the West’. In fact this flat, barren, pastoral land is most (in)famous for its high school which I attended from 1983 to 1989.

In 1996 the entire class failed their Higher School Certificate and the tabloid, now known as the Telegraph Mirror, published their school year photograph on the front page. Realising that their children already had little in the way of prospects, let alone being splattered across a Rupert Murdoch-News Limited paper, in Australia’s biggest city — Sydney — the kids were mobilised, and filed a lawsuit for defamation within the New South Wales Supreme Court — and won. (See ABC’s Radio National website for their 2nd October 2005 story Class Act –No Longer Failures). In the ensuing media exposure, the community, including the surrounding local academic institutions, assisted in soliciting opportunities to aid their escape from this 1970’s ‘social experiment’ gone wrong.

Ridiculously, despite an economics teacher and personal friend Mr Butler’s protestations, I became a god-damned bank employee — in the delusional belief that a passion for economics and art might lead to an in-house graphic designer position — due to the organisation’s scope. Suffice to say I should have believed in the confidence he tried to instil in me and that I was indeed worthy of something more.

After an extended period of working with morons, numbers, dollars and statistics as a ‘personnel officer’ with a penchant for fraud (my ‘performance debut’ as ‘psychologically impaired employee’) and a dalliance in the sheer tedium of accounting — whose ‘Business Psychology’ subject was my only sole interest as a ‘platform’ to espouse ascetic views on family, cigarettes and alcohol — my life became about music and art.

During this transformation I was touched in a co-mingling of ‘true’ love, sex and death.

In 1999 with godspeed’s infinite desire, fear, hope and regret in our hearts, the musical entity known as ‘2 litre DOLBY’ — who I co-founded playing drums — re-located to Melbourne. We speeded towards a future that was “still bleak, uncertain and beautiful”, yet more ‘artistically creative’, and ‘political’. We fled the romantic ideals of haunting, hungry ghosts, broken-hearted lovers and the reconstruction of Sydney for the “best games ever” of Juan Antonio Samaranch’s 2000 Olympics, like the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse in the Christian Holy Bible.

The end result, once again, was inevitably, abject failure and alienation.

As far as music was concerned the heightened state of being, under the gaze of an-other-audience had become my fascination. And, so, the year of 2001 saw me embark on this, an-other, new found journey of ‘performance’.

In May 2001, just before my 29th birthday I undertook my first performance with the assistance of Carla, Matthew, Phillip and his then lover Natalie at Dario’s ‘happening’ called Spart at what was known as the ‘Northcote Bowling Club’ and became acquainted with a certain performer whose name was Gretel.

The performance This Monstrosity Called Life, inspired by the Anna Swir poem Poetry Reading in Czeslaw Milosz’s A Book of Luminous Things was generated from an exercise in foundational practices, facilitated by Kate Kennedy and adapted from ‘The Woolloomooloo Cuddle’ by Remy Charlip.

The live performer wore grey garments on a slightly raised platform.

Inspired by the ‘S:11’ protests commencing on September 11 the year prior — 2000 — at the Crown Casino’s World Economic Forum, a white tablecloth was painted as a crude flag, signifying United States of America’s imperialism and hung beyond the live performer. The pervasive ‘Stars and Stripes’ had become ‘The Union Jack, Southern Cross and Stripes’, precipitating a ‘Coalition of the Willing’ in the perpetual ‘War on Terror’ co-ordinated by the United States. Beside the flag, dressed in black, a guardian stood at attention, with feet apart, a grinning gold face and black gloved hands, clasped firmly behind the back in a tight grip.

Drizzle haunted the musical drone of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Dead Flag Blues’ began to distort and fall, as a wind affected, sub-sonic-hum in sound. Beyond, above in the night sky, dark clouds lie, illuminated, by the city lights.

As the live performer began, someone within the audience began sniggering. The snigger became a smug laughter. The smug laughter became arrogant and judgemental. From out of the audience came a figure of an imposing, threatening physicality and a maniacal grin. Suited in white, this ‘monolithic, capitalist’ — man-made-likeness-in-the-image-of-‘Lord-God’-from-the Christian-Holy-Bible — entered the space clutching a bag of ‘something’.

Approaching to peer down and survey the live performer, standing face to face, a bleeding heart was presented and crushed repeatedly into the live performer’s skull. Bleeding hearts began to be thrown and pelted in the direction of the live performer as it lay down.

The guardian of the flag, with the grinning gold face, now stood with one arm raised and with hands aflame, set fire to the sacred, symbolic cloth of a collective nationhood. The oppressive material began, begins, burning in flames. And a mother dressed in black, mourning loss, abhorring the sight and taste of once-a-living, now-dead flesh, rushes forth from the recoiling throng, who act as if they are witnesses to such perverse spectacles.

On her knees she begins contemplating these hearts. The tears she cries dissolves into the blood of these still bleeding, crushed hearts, separated from their bodies, they are now, clutched, held, close, evidently close — next to her still beating heart.

The performance has transformed into an apocalyptic hell on earth. And the mother grapples with the stray dogs of all the unwashed idealists, for these still bleeding hearts. The dogs run off and away with the still bleeding hearts in their wet, bloodied jaws, to the appalled mirth of the masterly communal owners.

I am a ship that has become unstuck from its moors.
I am crying, screaming desire, hope, fear ‘n’ regret.
Godspeed you!
Clichés.
Defeat.
Again.
And again.
Again and again.
This is a performance project of abject failure.

Describing this performance to supervisor Dr Barry Laing at our first meeting regarding this project, he told me how “Artaudian” it sounded.
To which I replied “I know, and I didn’t know who the fuck he was!”.

This is a performance project of abject failure.

A tradition of failure that my ‘friend’ and ‘prophet’, of whom I am a maddening ‘disciple’, Artaud, stands accused by Sontag herself in her essay, but yet is redeemed in her preceding discussion and quotation of Jean Cocteau – “the only work which succeeds is that which fails”(xix, Sontag).

Hell, Tim Etchells the director of one of my favourite performance groups ‘Forced Entertainment’ and Matthew Goulish — see above p4 — have dedicated an institute that exists as website to the documentation, study and theorisation of failure —www.institute-of-failure.com.

Fourteen months prior to the performance I was experiencing re-occurring dreams of a world ending, with me, in a shopping complex’s car park, at the base of a building. Trampled and crushed under the weight of the concrete above, that had suddenly collapsed with unimaginable force; I was dead like Freud’s father in my sleeping dreams.

On New Year’s Eve 1999, the year 2000 was not brought in with a bang, but a whimper. No “millennium bug” struck. No apocalypse. No Rapid Eye Movement in the End Of The World As We Know It. As I counted down in the intimate company of musician friends, Leo, Georgina and Genevieve and stood out the front of Newman Street — lying around the corner from Sutherland Street, whose significance in my life was yet to play its fateful card and lies — in the north-west of ‘multi-cultural’ Brunswick.

No drama occurred except for someone — I assume intentionally with good humour — simply turning the streetlights off, and with a pause, turned them back on again. Our hearts were in our mouths, looking, agape with a wonder, awed, wide-eyed in darkness. Then when the light was summoned, with a sigh, we were gone.

Twelve months later, and five months prior to ‘that’ performance — and at this stage I have no idea what I am going to do with myself and the year, but be lost and improvise chances — I am in a car with Phil and Matt on New Year’s Eve at Lake Eildon — a place of significance, that I would return to nearly three years later.

Struck by the lack of water, the terrain had been transformed into Mars on Earth, albeit, with a museum dedicated to all the cans discarded recklessly, that littered the scattered landscape. Performing around a fire, camping under the stars with kangaroo claws, not afraid of our shadows echoing nature — this was a being-becoming–spiritual-sacred.

The sleep of reason.

Monsters.

Frankenstein.

Rosemary’s ‘despicable’ baby.

Sheathed like a butcher stained white, enveloped, in the life-removed-red of blood, flesh and bone realised a shamanic transformation of being- becoming…

Artaud’s To End The Judgement of God.

A witch.

Artaud’s daughters of the heart.

Like some modern day Joan of Arc.

Signalling through the flames … kill …

Hieroglyphic movement-s hypnotised into trance.

Transfixed Artaud with his Balinese Dance-r’s .

Past twelve o’clock.

Everyone’s passed out asleep after exploring, walking, drawing, eating, drinking and ‘tripping-man’ with mushroom tea.

Hippy.

Trying to maintain warmth against the cold, we huddle together, listening to the musical sounds of ‘Godspeed You! Black Emperor’ and their ‘Moya’ from their ‘Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada’ recording a passage, an ominous presence over the dark horizon, and bonnet’s surface, in through the windscreen, across plastic, dusty dashboards and filling aural interiors of ears.

It is the sound of futures waiting to happen.

Alpha.

Omega.

Beginning.
… …
End.

Future is.

…

…all…

All. … ALL …

A favourite piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall in Fitzroy North around the corner from where I live as I write this…

… – or it writes me….past…passed…pass…

Future still, bleak, uncertain and beautiful.

Nine months after this moment in time and four months after the aforementioned performance I am in the studio improvising with Kate Kennedy and some others.

Kate is struck by the quality of the dying afternoon light.

Sunsets with a strange unsettling wind, and clouds look portentous in their appearance and colour.

Black. Red. And grey.

Were they?

Lying in the bed of a trash compactor room, later that night, watching the documentary When We Were Kings about Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s classic ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ fight in Zaire on ABC television, text — now from this moment will be known as ‘tickertape’ irritatingly accompanying what is commonly referred to as ‘the news’ ad nauseum-infinitum — enters the frame across the top of the screen.

A plane.

And.

A building.

One.

Of the World Trade Centre Twin Tower’s in New York City.

Pulse quickening.
The thought.
A once “true” love in that city.
Channel change.
Struck with these images that reel out from the screen into the world full of others.
Hearts beat rapidly in throats.
Open mouths.
Agape.
Wander in and stare at each other.

We are all captured in the screen, with perverse grins in wonder.
And.
Disbelief.
Fascination fascinated.
The pleasure of destruction.
Hollywood’s myths becoming reality.
Is this the end we wanted?
To desire.
Will.
Now, this is shocking and awing.
The images of these poor fucks standing on the observation towers.
Helpless.
Hopeless.
Pondering fate.
Like them.
In praise?
Or blame?
Over and over again.
Wonder.
Like them.
How the fuck is this going to turn out?
Repeat.
Over and over again.
How the fuck can that fire be put out?
Repeat.
Over and over again and again.
What the fuck is going on?
Think.
Repeat repeat.
Repeat.
Thought.
Over and over again and again.
And again.
Cruel.
In ignorance.
And helplessness.

What fire brigade for god and love could possibly extinguish that burning hole eighty stories up in a one hundred story building?
Why the fuck do we need to build skyscrapers for?
My heart sunk when one of these phallic testaments to man began to sink, transforming, disappearing into a mushroom cloud.

New York City of dust.

Traces.

Of memory.

The confusion of those trying to comprehend exactly what was happening was…
Seduced into these destructive images, live, from thousands of kilometre’s away and across the other side of a world.
What was going on?
The Return of the Same.
The Fall.
A modern day fable.
A second coming.
A myth was being constructed before my very eyes.
Live.
On television.
History in the making.
The day the world was changing.
And things would never be the same.
In all lounge rooms.
For free.
Penny’s dropped like that first tower.
America’s empire.
All with it.
Now I felt like I knew what that re-occurring dream was, and that first, original performance.

Is this hell?
I think that is what it was.
When I began to cry.
Terror was truly instilled.
Being.
Condemned.
A repetition.
The same spectacular end.
One, they themselves, like us, had just witnessed.
Only we are safe.
Aren’t we?
A mirror of life’s being becoming death.
Oh the horror.
O!
A reporter.
Humanity.
Herbert Morrison’s plaintive words.
Cried the arrival.
The German zeppelin.
Hindenberg.
Burst into flames.
Over in Lakehurst, New Jersey.
Near.
New York.
Spooked.
Telephone.
Calls.
Mothers.
Watching.
Those images.
Who is going to pay for this transgression?
Us.
Where did it start?
Like this?
Where did this begin?
And the end?
Call.
Name.
Sarah.
A problem.
Later.
Bombing.
Nothing to speak of in the always-already reduced to rubble of Afghanistan.
Words.
There.

She.

Is.

Still.

Breathing.

Air.

Vaporized.

Bodies.

A post-modern 9/11cannibal.
Post-9/11-modern human inhaling metal, glass and debris.

Attached to this function.

The sinthome of Lacanian theory.

A condensed cipher of libidinal attachment.

To the city.

So.

When it disappears.

It will be missed.

Such details.

Bearing witness.

To true love.

The next morning, up all night, not sleeping from watching this same, violent hypnotic, repetition, I tried to glean some kind of knowledge and understanding.
Some form of meaning from the event.
In a trance.
The shocked intimacy of trams.
Was it those people from the Crown Casino at the World Economic Forum S:11 protests last year?
The tension being felt within the presence of those who could be an-other; that is - against US.
The gaze judges.
If you see something report it.
The arrival of a Sri Lankan friend, Ieuan, some months later is palpable.
Was it a Hollywood blockbuster film?
Others don’t know.

Eve-n.

A hell.

A way.
Represent.
Body.

Middle-Eastern Futurists becoming Western technology —-— turning in on itself like a malignant cancer.
Or mobius strip.
The German composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen considers “the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole entire cosmos”.
Is this just like the Matrix?.

A sign post.

But where is the map?

Welcome to the desert of the Real.