"Negatively, the voice within criticizes, intuits, witnesses and
insists
that this broken discourse we call culture is not ultimately human."
Robin West
Caring for Justice
For two real people
(who might as well remain nameless).
Left Hanging
The boy who was hanged had a very interesting slant on death row.
After the hanging he returned to his hometown, the place where people
were the most sympathetic to him being a criminal. In certain respects
it can be quite simple. Good people do bad things and bad people do good
things. Etc.
Upon arrival he finished school and applied – successfully – for
his first job again. He spoke to friends, acquaintances, relatives and
strangers about many things in his living but, above all, mentioned to
no-one that he had lost his life.
Anaphora
The boy who was hanged, after the hanging, utilized anaphora as his
preferred mode of expression.
This is the rhetorical device of beginning successive sentences, lines,
etc., with the same word or phrase.
This is what he said.
This is why he said it.
This is because after being hanged one has to bear oneself back to where
one left off.
This is because it becomes most important to avoid repetition of what
preceded the anaphora.
Narrative ad infinitum
One can avoid the severest consequences of what has happened to one
by telling (and retelling)(ad infinitum) the story of what took place
and by telling (in various and infinite ways) stories based on the story
of what occurred.
So, the girl who bludgeoned to death her best friend's mother
can become a crime writer. She can discover the male flowers on the same
plant of herself and write under a pseudonym using a made-up man's
name. She might go even further and create a heteronym, an alter ego
with a distinct biography, perhaps modelled on the brother of a man who
exists. Then, when she has tired of this fellow, she can simply change
her name whilst inside feeling the kind of satisfaction she might gain
from killing a real man's brother.
Author(itative) Individual(ism)
Then, there are echoes and overflowings. There is harking back. Things
going out and things coming back in. Shadows cast forward to where what
casts it has not stepped.
The girl might have changed her own name to a new name before writing
using another name entirely.
The bits of what she writes may each have a different status. What she
writes may be full of diagonals and curved lines. What she writes might
relate to everything. What she knows. Perhaps it intuits what she doesn't.
Would you say she knows who she is? And who she isn't? Or only
precisely?
Somebody / Else
What effect is had by the creation of a new name?
What does it mean to become somebody else?
Is anybody who they are? Do they ever stay that way?
On the one hand we have the boy who was hanged who died and stayed the
same person and then went on to live his life as that person, to live
his life among those he knew and who continued to know him. On the other
we have the girl who murdered a childhood friend's mother, who
changed her name, who moved from her town to another, who forged another
life among new friends and acquaintances who knew her only by her new
name and life.
The first is a memory; the second has memories. Perhaps a memory exists
more certainly than the fact of having one.
New Earth; New Life
It takes a long time to find something that doesn't exist.
That didn't.
Flowers, apparently, are the first things by which human beings noticed
(created?) beauty.
Earth formation: Archean Period in the Precambrian Era: 2.5 to 4.6 billion
years ago.
First appearance of birds, flowers and fruit bearing plants: Jurassic
Period in the Mesozoic Era: 144 million to 208 million years ago.
Was beauty always there and simply noticed? Or is it necessary for the
beautiful thing to come into existence in order for beauty to exist in
the world? Is beauty an idea or a thing?
How beautiful is the flower really? And what of the ugly flower? The
girl who takes the back of an axe to the scalp of her girlfriend's
mother. Does she retain her beauty because outside of disintegration
beauty cannot be lost? Does she keep her beauty if she had a good reason
for cracking the skull? Or does she simply appear beautiful?
Was she ever beautiful? Can any fifteen year old girl be described as
ugly? Have you ever seen an ugly flower?
Hiding
It is we who hide the dead.
The living hide from us.
Solace hides reality. Reason hides what is unreasonable. We maintain
the dead. We follow them. The living elude us. Make us tread paths that
lead not to them. The woman's stories hint. Remind us of the girl
without showing her to us. The boy who decided to live his life has no
story. Life has no story. Just thousands of stories told about it. Thousands
of little attempts at the straight line around the struggle. His rope.
Both vertically and in the loop about his neck. His spine. The effect
of his body in making the rope straighter. More taut. The distance he
could now stretch in the story that someone else had written for him.
Simply, the distance. Closing it by beginning again exactly where he
left off.
The girl is writing her own stories. Increasing the possibilities. Stretching
the distance between who she was and who she is. All the stories being
about other people who don't exist. It can take a long time to
find something that doesn't exist. It takes a long time to lose
everyone else.
Distance hides the destination.
Distance reveals the journey.
Where They Started
Where anyone starts. At a spot. A spot in a fog. A none. Anonymous.
And then emerges. Always fully formed. She with her strong arms and hands
at an angle. Ready to pick up something and make it a weapon. To wield
the pen after the sword. He with the others already in pursuit. Him carting
around the invisible gallows all those years until it became gradually
less and less transparent. Solid enough for him to walk onto and put
his head into the noose. Through. She goes through the blade of the axe
to find the sharpness of the pen. Through murder to the fiction of the
crime. Through her death to create others. He moves his face forward
to feel the space made by the curve of the rope. He puts his head through
the loop in order not to touch the rope. Goes through their death to
find his own. Where anyone starts. Where dying begins.
What Vanishes?
And where do they end? Do they?
What vanishes?
The gallows dissolved around him. The paraphernalia of execution disappearing
into asphyxiation. Eight to thirteen minutes. A few minutes to almost
twenty. Until there is only him left. Not even the world could survive
his hanging. Wanting to breathe but can't.
And she disappears immediately before becoming famous. Years later.
Someone else becomes known in her place. Years behind. A past estranged.
A world that gave its place to another world. One that is imagined. Created
breath by imaginative breath.
Ritual of Permission
Doing what you want takes place beyond permission's jurisdiction.
You can murder. You can be murdered and refuse to die. Just don't
ask. Don't find out what is decorous behaviour. Revise the story
until it works for you. Revise at the level of the body, not at the level
of theory. Refuse to take part in the ritual of permission. Do not allow
others' study to take away your legitimacy. Be in trouble with
all laws. Even those of nature. If you want, be a chicken. Run around
squawking after your neck has been snapped. Like a cat with a transected
cord, take a few steps without assistance. Invent killers with strange
paths. Invent who they kill. Though the laws of publishing and bookselling
and gripping narrative require finding out whodunnit, let your murderers
get away with it. Survive any way you can. Kick and dance. You can give
yourself permission to do anything and good and evil will remain unaffected.
Will still not exist. Take a deep breath so you won't need to breathe
for the next fifteen seconds. The sensation is pleasant. Well-oiled.
So say the first-hand accounts of survivors. Hold the breath in your
own body. Constricts well. All of the air is yours. Take it. It's
your choice. Choose the most difficult thing you can possibly imagine.
Choice.
'The
long
drop.'
Copyright © M.T.C. Cronin,
2006.
M.T.C. Cronin lives near Brisbane
and has published a number of books in her native Australia. Her
Shearsman volume < More
or Less Than > 1-100, published in 2004, won the 2005 C
J Dennis award for poetry (one of the Victoria Premier’s
Literary Awards) and the Innovation Award in the Government of
South Australia’s
2006 Festival Awards. Other recent titles include Irrigations
(of the Human Heart) and The Flower,
The Thing. Shearsman Books
publish her latest collection Notebook of
Signs in April 2007.
