For Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander people, this piece contains references to people who have passed away.

Wake (pre-pandemic)

1.     I’m writing this from under a peachy floral doona on an island off the west coast of Canada. It’s a sunny day and I have a cold.

2.     When I first moved here, the epic rains comforted me; all that water was so safe. But the climate has changed and the summer rains stopped dramatically three years ago. It’s the same story over the whole globe but with different details: climate change, the Big CC. Without rain, it feels like I’m back home, except the foliage here is still green.

3.     Today on the peninsula of my birth, Australia’s own boot, there will be a funeral and a procession to the Port Victoria cemetery, where my godmother will be lowered into the ground.

4.     Aunty Raylene talked a lot about her people, the Narungga people, Aboriginal people. She talked while whisking custard for bread and butter pudding or filleting whiting on the back steps or drinking mugs of tea at the kitchen table. You whitefellas never understand, she’d say, shaking her head. You gotta go to funerals!

5.     I’m white, but from young she taught me to listen. Aunty Raylene’s funeral is today and I should be there, watching my shoes get covered in a thin layer of red dust at the cemetery.

6.     Her daughter sends me photos over Facebook. There is the one of Aunty Raylene in a solid green dress holding me as an infant at my baptism; one of us posing with the rabbit cake she made me from the Women’s Weekly Birthday Cake Book; one of when I’m around thirteen and she has her arms wrapped around me, her fingers resting so tenderly on my forearms that I well up when I look at it.

7.     Sometimes I wake with a tight stomach and wonder: What am I doing on the other side of the world?

Blue

8.     I'm not blue, I write in my notebook. Blue has so many connotations: depressed, dogs, redheads; I am none of these.

9.     Blue for me is in the cool of the Whyalla Hospital swimming pool; small, turquoise tiles on the bottom and a surface that glitters like a snow globe in the summer sun. The blue that comes through your eyelids when you lie on your back and float, eyes closed, clear sky above.

Melanin

10.  Imagine the south-eastern canine of Australia’s bite. There is a large white, wooden house sitting atop a mound surrounded by a lattice verandah. Beyond the mound is the Spencer Gulf and the epic waters of the Southern Ocean.

11.  On that verandah my mother’s sister, Mandy, sits in a rocking chair with a bundle in her arms. I am eight and look over her shoulder. Cradled in her arms is a sleeping newborn with wild, inch-long black hair. Aunty Mandy, always beautiful and close to laughter, peeks over the baby’s head and grins at me.

12.  My siblings and I, with our little heads of white hair, walk down to the petting cage. These are everywhere we go. They are framed on all sides, including above, with chicken wire and inside there are always a couple of kangaroos on dusty red earth. Often there are peacocks or budgies or cockatoos. We poke our fingers through the wire and the kangaroos come to sniff them.

13.  Imagine melanin like continents, pooling and drifting just under the surface of the skin.

14.  Imagine that while we are with the kangaroos or perhaps while we are distracted by the baby’s hair or perhaps another time altogether, the adults talk. They are concerned. It’s the melanin, pooling.

15.  Bruises, the officials say, and the implication is obvious. My mother, apparently, tells them to read their medical books again, because right there, in black and white, it explains that melanin pools. And because she is white and has a medical degree, the officials reluctantly agree that melanin is just melanin.

16.  So because of desolate, ironic luck, Aunty Mandy and her baby stay together. Ironic because Aunty Mandy, too, had melanin that pooled, and that’s what got her the white sister worth listening to. She had to lose her mother to keep her daughter.

17.  This is the culture we swim in; keep your eyes closed or the chlorine will get in.

18.  If only they knew back then, people say. But in the medical books when Aunty Mandy was born, the melanin was there, too.

19.  White eyes squeezed tight.

A Tell (in the kitchen)

20.  Friends are over and I’m at the stove, stirring curry. One joins me and peeks into the pot. My partner, Saturday, is at the kitchen table with another friend; he’s explaining recent learnings about the impact on his nervous system from being removed from his mother as an infant. My friend’s eyes move from the curry to him, and the words fall from her mouth in a strange kind of exasperation: But they didn’t know any better.

21.  Unprompted defensiveness is an interest of mine. I searched her face for clues about what would prompt such a strange statement – one that was both untrue and uncaring at once.

22.  Even she appeared shocked by what she’d said, like it was a call-and-response game in which she was just playing her part. The injured says: The traumas of my infanthood linger in my body. The listener replies: But they didn’t know any better.

23.  At the kitchen table, Saturday sighs. Yes, they did, he says in a defeated mumble.

A Tell (in the back garden)

24.  Previously, the summer before, a different person in the garden. Saturday is talking about the way his nervous system, like the nervous system of other adopted people he’s met, is jumpy. Whose fault is it? The person in the garden replies. Who are you trying to blame?

25.  Unprovoked defensives are defending something; manufactured binaries have purpose.

26.  The person in the garden was exasperated and acted as though Saturday had transgressed a social boundary, as though the unavoidable physical and emotional responses he lives with must be treated like the secret he was on the day of his birth. Even in middle age, he must not give any impression that what happened caused pain.

27.  But they didn’t know any better, the person in the back garden said, as though he was an expert on that kind of thing.

Quadra Island (pre-pandemic)

28.  The night Trump was elected I was on Quadra Island. It was dark, and Dionne drove me to the ferry. When the radio announcer said the predictions favoured Trump, the air in the car became ominous and we inhaled unhappily. It’s just a prediction, one of us said. I hope it’s wrong, said the other.

29.  At the terminal, we each wished the other (but really all of us) the best. There was an eerie clapping as the flagpole rattled in the wind and I sought the comfort of the small waiting room, but a red baseball cap was hanging on the wall, as though put there so the owner could find it. The wind, the rattling, the red cap, it all felt so menacing.

30.  Sometimes, all the way over here, I feel lost.

31.  But, the thing is, even down there I felt lost.

32.  On its journey between islands, the ferry passes over a deep valley in the Pacific Ocean where the Pacific and North American continental shelves are slowly colliding. The vessel was old, but that made it appear space-age in the darkness, lit up like the Millennium Falcon.

33.  As I watched the lights of the island ahead get larger and those behind fade to pinpricks, I was upset with myself because I’d always believed Trump would win and that belief made me feel complicit. It was the simplicity of him, his lack of complexity. And although I didn’t like it, I believed his strategy would work. In the early twenty-first century, irony is endemic; it’s the perfect milieu for a simpleton to neutralise the ironies we already swim in with even stranger and sadder ones.

34.  I wondered, as I crossed those waters, what impact believing he would win had on the outcome.

Logos and Mythos

35.  Imagine the Greek words logos for logic and mythos for myth. Two sides of one coin. Or perhaps two sides isn’t enough, maybe they are the sides of something more complex: the surface of the ocean or a planet.

36.  In the secular west you would be forgiven for thinking only logic matters. What, after all, is the benefit of myth?

37.  Think of the world as alive with both life and unknowns, Amitiv Ghosh says in The Great Derangement: "the energy that surrounds us, flowing under our feet and through wires in our walls, animating our vehicles and illuminating our rooms, is an all-encompassing presence that may have its own purposes about which we know nothing," he says.

Both

38.  Some people can manage only myth and no science; some only science and no myth; but for most of us, both is fine. Both is good.

39.  Although my father was a priest, I grew up in a house suspicious of myth. We were a science-only household.

40.  When Rose talked about the Little People up by Hummock Hill, it wasn’t seen as right.

Woodchip Patterns (pre-pandemic)

41.  Over here, on the other side of the globe, there is a green forest I walk though most days. Sometimes it feels like a vortex, because so many things make sense there.

42.  One day when walking I saw a small pile of fresh woodchips on the ground. When I stopped, I noticed there were woodchips falling from the sky. I looked up and there was a woodpecker in the tree above, tapping on the trunk, woodchips flying wildly all around it.

43.  There are patterns everywhere, I said to Saturday (who was known as Scott then). It’s only because we noticed the woodchips, that we noticed the woodpecker.

Puppy Patterns (pre-pandemic)

44.  Then there was a brief period when every time Saturday and I went to the forest we would see puppies. So many puppies! Another walk, more puppies!

45.  This is getting ridiculous, we said, how can there be so many puppies? And on that very walk, after we’d already said it was ridiculous, we met another three puppies.

46.  It’s like the woodchips, I said, looking around the forest for signs of what all these puppies meant.

47.   If the puppies are the woodchips, I thought, what is the woodpecker?

48.  I mentioned this to my friend, Holly, who kindly and sensitively directed me away from seeing some unknown meaning in all those puppies.

Consciousness (as purpose)

49.  Maybe consciousness has an unknown purpose, I wondered, like Ghosh wonders whether electricity has an unknown purpose.

50.  Some say Sheila Heti’s books are an exploration of the “feeling of consciousness.” In Motherhood, Heti uses tossing coins for the I Ching and visiting fortune-tellers as the scaffolding for a story about being the grandchild of Holocaust survivors deciding whether to birth a child; such a seemingly light structure holding all that moral and intellectual weight.

Citation (as form)

51.  The day Aunty Mandy told me to write, I was down by the ocean watching the water from a park bench. We talked on the phone for a long time. The blue sky was full of birds and I counted the different types as we spoke: an older bald eagle with its colours landing in a Douglas fir tree and a younger one circling over the ocean; three types of duck-like water fowl picking at seaweed; young seagulls squawking at their mothers; crows fussing in the rocks.

52.  You should write about us, Aunty Mandy said, and when I replied I wasn’t sure they were my stories to tell, she wasn’t impressed. You’re not one of those are you? she said. I laughed and laughed: You know I am! I said. You know I’m one of “them.”

Omission (as form)

53.  Omissions are as important as inclusions, I write in my notebook early one morning. I omit evidence that an infant separated from its birth parent creates indelible loss for that person because to offer it as one side of a debate feels grubby, like taking logic too far. It feels more rational to recount the time I was flipping through The Body Keeps Score by Bessel van der Kolkand noticed that Saturday had used a favoured concert ticket to mark the section on “Alexithymia: no words for feelings”; better to allow a pink ticket stub to wordlessly represent the pre-verbal brain.

Citation (as intimacy)

54.  Citation is a joy for Billy-Ray Belcourt and “intertextual intimacy” for Lauren Fournier. Michele Merritt uses autoethnographic essay to reference her own experiences in a way traditional scholarship can hardly allow.

55.  The summer that Saturday came “out of the fog,” I often thought about The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson as I walked in the forest: about partners with two identities and two lives, the before name and the after name, the mighty emotional and physical quests for a truth that is both personal and, at times, unbearably cultural.

56.  When I look at Saturday I am reminded that I cannot understand; I can only listen and see and believe and cite.

Form (Knausgård)

57.  Karl Ove Knausgård wrote a massive six volume autobiographical novel and turned the insignificant into the significant by writing it down. He said it was the form that allowed him to do it; instead of the move towards minimalism, he said he could only write if he included too much – too much detail, too many words, too many bodily transgressions.

58.  I tried to write about the puppies in the forest to make it more real. I wondered whether consciousness has a physicality to it that is unseen, like soundwaves.

Structuralism

59.  I once tried to apply Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theory of structuralism to dystopian novels. I made thematic and content matrixes. I wanted it to be mathematical. Lévi-Strauss isn't mathematical, my supervisor, Stephen Muecke, told me. Structuralism is too simple, he said, one-to-one is not enough, it must be many-to-many.

60.  Maybe that is why there are so many forms; genres sprouting up like puppies.

61.  But anyway, Stephen told me after reading this piece, I don’t think Levi-Strauss is doing you any good here. And later, after sending me a manuscript of The Hundreds by Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, he said: The authors have embraced a fictocritical style. And later still: You didn’t make it to a hundred. Trump is one-to-one; fictocritcism is many-to-many.

Mathematics

62.  I can't stop thinking about how patterns are mathematical. Electricity, tides, soundwaves, and snowflakes are all mathematical. The appearance of puppies and their movements around the forest are mathematical. All patterns are mathematical. Is consciousness also mathematical? I wondered.

63.  If it’s possible to see the patterns sound waves make with a piece of plywood and some woodchips, surely there would be a way to see the pattern consciousness makes, I thought when walking in the forest one day. And I got the feeling that the pattern that consciousness would make would be the same patterns that sound waves make, the same patterns that puppies make, the same patterns in flowers and in leaves.

Form (Ghosh)

64.  The old forms will not do for our times, Ghosh says. “I have come to recognise that the challenges that climate change poses for the contemporary writer derive ultimately from the grid of literary forms and conventions that came to shape the narrative imagination in precisely that period when the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere was rewriting the destiny of the earth,” he says.

65.  To express new ways of thinking (or to express the inexpressible!), we need new forms. And they are popping up, like puppies and woodchips and sound waves.

Form (up island)

66.  Back when Saturday was Scott, he told me about the old-growth hemlocks up island that are hundreds of years old but look like spindly little trees because they grow on thin skiffs of soil. The trees are being cleared to make way for windfarms, so his friend goes up to save them and turns them into bonsai.

Form (in the back garden)

67.  In the garden on a bright northern hemisphere summer afternoon, I talked to a friend about form.

68.  I had been trying to read the short stories of Jorge Louis Borges. I never understood Borges, but people I admire admired him, so I kept trying. To me, his stories feel like tricks, like Escher paintings. “Parlour games,” as Andrè Maurois describes them in the preface of Labyrinths. After which, he says, “the form is more important than the content.”

69.  At the time I read this, I was already confused about form because of a comment by Knausgård: “Everything has to submit to form,” he wrote in My Struggle, Book One. “If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers.”

70.  So when Aurora was snuggled up in an Australian winter and I was sitting on an Adirondack chair in the Canadian sun, we talked on the phone for a long time about form. What I remember boiled down to one thing Aurora told me: The glass is the form and the water is the content; this is how the content can change depending on the form it’s in.

71.  When my supervisor, Kylie Cardell, read this, she said it’s not just form that’s important. Genre matters, too, she said. You can hold water in a bucket, but you don’t drink from it.

Form (Wittgenstein)

72.  Ludwig Wittgenstein said that the world is “the facts in a logical space.” I’m trying to apply this idea to the puppies. I'm trying to apply it to that belief I had that Trump would win. If consciousness is mathematical patterns, then maybe the fact that I thought he would win contributed to the patterns that led to him winning.

73.  Despite thinking it would be a disaster – for humanity, for puppies, for the world – I nevertheless believed it would happen. We are on a cultural path towards structuralism, I thought. Overlaying one irony with a new irony is very one-to-one.

Woodshed (early pandemic)

74.  The night Trump was defeated Dionne came over. Because of the pandemic, we sat on the swing in the woodshed. It was cold and raining and we sipped from cans of beer as the count came in. I confessed to Dionne that I was trying to believe Trump would be defeated because of the very small possibility that my believing he would win last time contributed to the outcome.

75.  It's a long shot, I said, but it’s consequential enough that I’m taking it seriously. Just, you know, in case.

76.  Dionne is kind and logical. She said what I thought wouldn’t make any difference, as a kind and logical person would do.

77.  Still, I was willing just in case. And when I remembered Ghosh and the electricity I thought: Just as well. When I think about climate change I think: As weird as it may be to believe we can fix it, we have to. It’s our only hope.

Utopian turn (Belcourt)

78.  When I read Belcourt discussing a utopian turn, I felt comforted. Finally, I thought, somewhere to go.

79.  We can’t tackle climate change without hope, I say to Saturday because he has none and I feel like things might change if he did. How can I have hope when I was abandoned by my own mother? he replies. And I have to admit that I don’t know.

The Big B

80.  One day Aunty Raylene’s daughter, Monique, went to her mother. Monique was teary. What is it? Aunty Raylene asked. But Monique couldn’t speak because she was crying. What is it?! Aunty Raylene repeated. Monique choked a little. Is it the Big C? Aunty Raylene asked. (It was the Big C that took Aunty Raylene not long after). Monique still didn’t speak. Tell me! Aunty Raylene repeated. Is it the Big C?!

81.  Noooo, Monique finally cried. It’s the Big B!

82.  The Big B? Aunty Raylene said, mystified. What, she demanded, is the Big B?!

83.  B-b-baby … Monique whispered through her tears. It was number three and Monique wasn't sure she could cope with the surprise, for she was quite far along when she found out.

84.  After the first Big B, Monique said that when she took her baby to the supermarket in that little country town, she was afraid people would judge her and wonder if that baby could be hers.

85.  I hope she’s forgotten she felt that. I hope it’s in the wind circling around the Spencer Gulf and in the spinifex rolling across the dunes.

86.  And what about whitefellas? Did we forget or just close our eyes tight?

87.  If her fear is the woodchips, then whitefella business is the bird up there tapping on the tree.

Form (denial)

88.  I want to understand what it means to deny form. Saturday holds up a glass, but he is told there is no glass and for most of his life he believes this. Aunty Mandy didn’t know she was part of the Stolen Generation until she was past thirty. “Our adoptive parents didn’t talk about it,” she said once said to a journalist.

89.  The unprompted defences also come from the times and places Ghosh refers to, when climate change started and colonial expansion was peaking.

90.  On the one hand, the pull back: They didn’t know any better.

91.  On the other, the push forward: We must do better.

The inexpressible (Wittgenstein)

92.  “There is indeed the inexpressible,” Wittgenstein says. “This shows itself; it is the mystical.” Bertrand Russell says that, according to Wittgenstein, assuming the whole is logical without accounting for mysticism would be “a fiction, a mere delusion.” A fiction that cannot account for the world, like Ghosh saying the novel cannot account for climate change.

93.  White culture, colonial culture, patriarchal culture, climate-changing culture, the culture that layers irony upon irony: All have serious and life-threatening deficiencies. If the woodchips are scurvy, I thought, what is the woodpecker?

94.  Logic has a limited insight into how to understand the un-understandable (or how to express the inexpressible!). Yet the only people who seem to be attracted to mysticism are also the ones who would do away with logic in some sort of evangelical way. But neither of these will do when it comes to the big things, like the Big B or the Big C or the Big CC. For these, only both will do.

95.  No wonder literary forms are proliferating like puppies, like consciousness, like cool changes moving eastward across the Spencer Gulf.

Virus (mid-pandemic)

96.  I’m lying under a blue blanket with a cold. My head is full of what I need to write – Aunty Raylene’s funeral, the baby with the black hair, the patterns of the puppies, the forest as a vortex, electricity with an unknown purpose, Heti and form and consciousness, Aunty Mandy and her mother, Saturday and his mother, about walking in a rainforest when there has been no rain, and how in the severing of mysticism white culture wants to appropriate First Nations’ cultures – and I wonder about this virus in my throat and whether, like Ghosh’s electricity analogy, maybe this virus has a purpose beyond the obvious because here I am, again, using a virus as a reason to lie still and think.

97.  To occupy myself, I listen to a guided meditation that encourages listeners to “cultivate focus,” and I wonder if the purpose (“about which we know nothing”) of cold viruses is to cultivate focus.

98.  Because it’s stopped raining here, my shoes are covered in a layer of dusty, brown earth. I stop walking in the forest because watching the plants wither day after day is depressing. Instead, I walk along the ocean. The surface is covered in ripples that reflect the sunlight and make me squint. In the distance, the ferry to Quadra Island travels back and forth, altering its path slightly each time to account for the currents and tides.

99.  And every morning before I open my eyes, I notice a tightness in my stomach and wonder: What am I doing on the other side?