Word, world, white, light.
She listens to the words of the dead about the ways to be alive.
Underneath her the earth was cracking.
What made this all but black was the tiny comfort in the giant word.
The word which wraps her like tefillin.
The word that reminds of of where she’s been.
The word that can fall into flesh without one drop of blood being spilled
And find the glow that lives in the centre of every moving chest
And then finds the truth.
And the world still cracks whilst the word lives on.
Through those fractures comes a radiant light.
It is not a fire, it is not familiar.
It could be the mythological light that we hope to see.
But no. She doesn’t think so.
It is, it seems, the light for the end of the world.
Whose world?
The world of those who word.
She is nothing but a tourist on an aeroplane of ideas and ideals.
She thinks she knows nothing, but there is much in nothing.
It is in nothing that you find that light.
She heard the dead speak about the shades of white.
Shades of white? Her male companions ask their unadorned Rabbi.
And she stands silently knowing those shades of white,
That there are infinite shades of that white.
For it is white that contains all.
Not only colour but light.
It seduces the colour and brings it to ecstasy by transforming it all into light.
She stood there beside a dusty ping pong table floating in a sea of ancient bougainvillea,
Drinking from a glass filled with painful wine and the echo of someones lips,
Watching the flexing of these scholarly gorillas and a tantric dragonfly vibrating in the corner.
She stood there wondering how she learnt the language of pictures.
Who taught her?
She remembered it was there in the dry rivers of her knowing hands.
She was a puppet until then and will continue to be if she closes her eyes enough.
She remembers her cracked hands as a child.
Cracked like the cracking earth,
Radiating that same unfamiliar light onto the white pages of her days.
Those white pages that are so much more than white.
Those pulpy pages that have been cut from trees, grown from flesh.
The flesh of those who had their own pages.
Whose pages are forgotten after 100 years, but for those shining 100 are light.
Of joy and hate and sadness and hope.
She is sure that her 100 will be ordinarily forgotten,
And the raft of hope is growing smaller as she grows bigger.
But she wonders when she shrinks into her skin and into the world,
Will her raft become larger again, for hope of that light.
And that day only before, she meets a man who measures his life in cups of coffee,
Sitting in company of the rich, who are not rich enough to help him not die before his time.
She, still young and strong and able, looks his approaching light in the eye.
Janus
We spend much of our days dreaming about the realisation of a dream.
Much of the time, holding on to the mythologies we have mythologised through our lives,
be that self imposed or external.
A dream, after all, is all we have to move forward.
Enter Janus, the god who builds the doorways.
If each individuals decade has it’s own midnight, then every midnight we approach a new door. Every door comes with it’s own new landscape and set of joys and tragedies.
We have not been taught that the transformation that happens between each door is beautiful and important…and whilst it comes with loss, it comes with gain.
So I speak to you from about 10pm to 40, but I had been living in the space that occupies 6pm to 20.
I have come to tell those who may be interested, that I was being hurt by my own dream and did not see that the breathing and shape shifting world has no idea that it even exists.
I am bound to the addiction/pursuit that is to tell a story.
And I believed so deeply and so truly that it would be received in a certain way.
However, this belief entirely exists at 6pm to 20 and I did not let it grow and evolve beside me.
I sit here, on a mountain of work and love and art, irrelevant to the world and to most people, with another stone I laid down, a little higher and a little lower.
I did not succeed in provoking a response from anyone claiming to be interested previously, so you won’t hear me talking about it…not really to anyone.
There will be no water from no stone.
And the prophesy of it all- of constructing The Clown, may be that I already knew how it would all end. Perhaps that is the beauty of art- the fact that it speaks the things we can’t. It drags the truth out, kicking and screaming- and if we are lucky enough, the scream is beautiful and bright and alive enough that it just may reach a few people.
So at a different midnight, the one on the 30th of March 2023, I sat in my bed for those last tender moments that my work belonged to only me and spoke to Janus- that god of doorways, of war and peace, of beginnings and ends, and asked what for.
We cannot be satisfied. We cannot be finished, for when we are finished…we are finished.
So I had a thought, that we always are given what we need and not what we want.
And besides, what we want doesn’t matter.
So, to my dream.
To that childhood fantasy and to the gold I bury in the dirt, for being better off poor than hurt…
I await the next challenge…the next door.
And instead of dread, I feel excited for what story it may bring.
The Clown
I find myself here, somewhere left of the abyss, somewhat of a relic in the context of today, about to share that after 20 years I am finally releasing an album.
I have released music since I was 16 and not only thought, but believed (and what is art without the innocence of self-belief), that at the very least this was a milestone I would have already passed…but, as for dreams and ideas, the unexpected is the only thing one can count on.
The Clown. A collection of songs written mostly during the extensive Melbourne lockdowns, recorded lovingly, frustratedly and passionately by my almost husband Gideon Preiss, and tortured over by yours truly still on a life-long search for perfection. At some point I realised , whilst every day should probably be treated like the last, every work should be treated like the first. We are too ever-changing to put ceilings over possibility, and what a beautiful thing that is. I think maybe that is why art gives life to all things.
My small body of work tells 8 stories of broken dreams, with a wink from the clouds and the stars that there is hope yet. The album is about burying my gold in the dirt for preference of being poor than hurt.
In honour of a new chapter, I am taking inspiration from master Nick Cave and his brilliant Red Hand Files, and creating an archive of thoughts, poems, conversations, op-eds, art, music, projects, and filtering them in the world in a way that I am comfortable with…my work on my terms…etc.
More to come on The Clown in coming months, until then, until then.
About me, until now, in beat form.
Act 1.
In an attic in suburban Melbourne I got used to the words NO. People told me I had a hand to write, a voice to speak, paint in my veins, but no channel for music- no antenna for song. At 19 I discovered Billie and Nina and opened a new door inside my chest and heart. I decided I could do it because I could see it and knew it like it was my own personal God. Little me was punk as the inferno.
Act 2.
I climbed the mountain hard. I made so very many mistakes, wrote every day, taught myself to paint and film the world around the stories told in music. I allowed heartbreak in like a cool change on a hot day so I could feed the beast that was my work. I rolled down the mountain over and over, becoming familiar with the rocks at the bottom- dreaming of the clouds at the top. Band after gig after group after project, I caught a ride on a label, whose dream was ugly and short but bigger than mine. I fell asleep under the Hollywood sign until one day - perhaps somewhat consciously - I was deported forever back to the obscure and conservative land of Oz, where I took the remaining steps to the top of the mountain and jumped off voluntarily when I met a version of myself I didn’t know, all to start again.
Act 3.
I waited in legal purgatory and when I finally had my name back and something to share, after half a decade…until the world stopped and so did the art. We became one with our devices- half human, half glow, that dystopian prophesy about robot people finally starting. Unable to separate and socially abandoned without social media (say it out loud), the entire globe embarked on a silent, unwilling revolution. That’s when the cracks began to form in our ability to commit.. To an idea, an artist, a work, a collection, a full film, 10 minutes > 3 minutes > 1 minute? > wait…30 seconds? So people started dancing- not for freedom or ecstasy, like no one is watching - but for the seconds that no one holds, in a neon temple of frantic self obsession for fear of abandonment.
So in short- I got lost and closed my eyes.
Act 4.
When we woke up from our home comas, things looked different, didn’t they? Music wasn't music. Art isn’t art. Paint doesn’t matter. What is an album? What is a pen? What was that dream we had about being successful - was the dream nothing but a dream that was nothing but a dream? I found out that 80000 songs a day are given to us for nothing, fine art can be made by a child who understands this world better than me, perhaps I am a generator spewing collected thoughts by the collective unconscious…maybe I’m not…does it even matter? We are all exhausted and overwhelmed with too much to hold…I am too. I make and make and make and make. I can’t stop, won’t stop, but I am being swallowed by my own work because I am the only one that feeds it and I am the only thing it eats.
Heavy is the head that wears the paper crown that we made as children telling us that our worth is based on recognition and power.
Art.
What is it now? I don’t have even one weenie answer. I want to know. I can’t stop and want to know why. I want to tell you about my album, my books, paintings and poems, but I don’t. I wan’t to hear about your work, but I can’t. The internet doesn’t deserve artists. It doesn’t deserve us. We are too good for it. We are too strong and brave and tenacious for it. It’s an abuse of its station and power and promise. It is hurting the artist and the artist is done.
This is not a cry for help. This is not a cry for anything other than to shed the tears, mourning for what we thought would happen whilst waiting for what is to come…with bated breath.
Close the curtains, no applause, I am just a clown…but I know better than before…
The only way up is down.