out of context screenshots of notes I've made on my computer:

5:59am

I wrote this poem and published it in the wom*ns edition of my university's newspaper, Honi Soit around this time last year. It's also where I got the title of this blog from. I found it again recently and thought I would share it here:


5:59am

this morning’s foul, bright breath leaves
a landscape on my bedroom wall;
lipped orange in tungsten glow. spores of sunlight
sew carcinogens, a
microcosmic waltz
across the stretch of my bare skin.

this body
is hardly evocative:
it lies
slackened and soft,
broad as a baleen whale. occupies,
bristles linen like the waves.

the time will come for stranger convulsions;
cereal and suitcases
laid out under my eyes.

until then,
remain
enveloped
in this morning's photon miasma

where
ribs softly undulate
and pores burst open like windows.



by Perri Roach

post-19th birthday pre-19th birthday thoughts

from Robert Grenier's poem Fall Winter Family Home

it is a drunken, fitful sleep which you wake from at 6am. your eyes crack open like prehistoric eggs. you fetch a glass of water from the bathroom & swallow it in round, hard gulps. each mouthful is cold and metallic. yellow street lamps glower at the musk grey sky. it is the day before your birthday. you have a headache. you say this to yourself in second person in your head without realising it. when you do realise, you are embarrassed. The floorboards in the hall squeak as you step over them-- through the window, a sliver of moon.

THOSE VIOLET ORCHIDS

with bulldog mouths.

their slobbering ovules

drench my fingers

in sticky pollen.

Robert Mapplethorpe, 1988

I smell the rain before I see it, and then when I do see it, I think to myself that it is like a mist of spores drifting to the ground in a wet, silvery haze. The woman sitting next to me at the bus shelter is watching a video on her phone. The earbud closest to me has begun to fray, and the wires stick out around her ear like static hairs. She is smiling slightly, so I assume it's a funny video. In the video, two men are yelling at each other. The camera flicks rapidly across the two men, their faces contorted in cartoonish fury, their mouths yammering open and shut silently like ventriloquist dummies. The woman breathes out a quiet laugh. Hah. The rain dances around my shoes, dampening my ankles.

From a buzzfeed quiz

Even though it is Autumn, the days are sticky and sky is the same static blue as a computer screen after a fatal error. Rain is still elusive, frustratingly so, only arriving at night after long, hot days. When it does come, the rain fizzes and crackles in the heat, bouncing off the pavement like rubber.

I'm trying to write but the words come just like the rain. Thin, electric wisps. Lists of words. Fragments of code. Tesseract, crepuscule, spangling, loam.

An incomplete mixtape of things:

1. I'm completely obsessed with Jane Rawson's novella Formaldehyde. The book is small, tightly written and dances along the delightful boundary between beautiful and disgusting. I finished reading it a few days ago but I've been carrying around in my bag in the hope that its wonderful strangeness will rub off on me. I firmly believe it should be on every bestseller's list in the country so that everyone else can be weirded out by it too.
2. This article about pores by Alesia Pullins which I think every pore owner should print out and stick on their bedroom wall.
3. I really really really love Margiela's ridiculously ugly DIY sock sweater, the instructions for which you can find here. I'll let you know how it goes when I inevitably try to make one and fuck it up really badly.
4. Valerie and her Week of Wonders, which you can find in full on youtube.

The rain has stopped and so have the words. For the sake of my creative writing course, I hope they both come again.

"Pressures of The Unspeakable" and other screams

A brief anecdotal prologue: 

About six months ago at an improv workshop, we were given the task of getting up, one by one, to entertain the class for one minute. If the audience decided they did not like what they were seeing, they were allowed to get up and walk out of the room. The goal was to keep the entire class seated. Towards the end of the exercise after everyone had had their turn, we had some extra time and were asked if anyone wanted to try again. I decided that it would be hilarious to see how quickly I could drive everyone from the room, and so I got up in front of the class and screamed at the top of my lungs. Within ten seconds, unsurprisingly, every single person had left the room. 

I like rock concerts because they are one of the few places where you can scream without raising alarm.

A revision of the above sentence: I like rock concerts because they are one of the few places where you scream without raising alarm.

(Are either of these sentences pleasant, well structured example of English? Probably not. I don't care.)

I think my initial use of the word "can" creates an inaccurate image of the act of screaming, because it carries the implication that one consciously and thoughtfully considers whether one "can" or "cannot" scream in the given circumstances before actually screaming. Aside from the performed scream, that isn't what screaming is like. Screaming is a reflex. It rises in your lungs like a surge of electricity, as if your nervous system has short circuited, energy ricocheting and spasming through every muscle in your body. Noise barrelling past your lips like a bullet train. Screams are both robotic and primal. You do not decide whether or not to scream. You scream. The spider runs across your lap and you scream. You hear incredibly good news and you scream. You enter a command into the computer and it follows it. The dog sees the cat across the road and she barks at him. You see your favourite musician and you find yourself screaming before you think about screaming.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHGHGHGHGHHhHHhhhh


Last week I went to see Grimes (aka Claire Boucher) and found myself screaming without thinking about it.

"I don't speak Mandarin," Grimes laughs, addressing the writhing mosh pit, "so, I'm going to sing the Russian Version!" The amoeba of the crowd roars in response, and I am a part of it-- an ecstatic, primal holler tunneling up my throat from somewhere deep within me. The effect is almost choral. A moment of utter bacchanalia. This is the ritual of the concert-- the performer says something, and the moment her sentence finishes, we scream in response. I'm reminded of studying Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power and the Nuremberg Rallies last year in performance studies. Canetti writes in Crowds and Power about the liminal state of being in a dense crowd, suggesting that in entering a crowd one temporarily loses the self and the fear of unknown things outside of the self.

"as soon as a man has surrendered himself to the crowd, he loses his fear of being touched" 

One loses individual ration and joins the nervous system of the crowd, cells pressed against cells, embodied and inter-corporeal. Canetti writes:

"The man pressed against him is the same as himself. He feels him as he feels himself. Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body."

Canetti then goes on to suggest that the frenzy of crowd mentality makes the collective actions and hysteria of the Nuremberg crowds understandable. The liminal experience of being a member of a crowd transgresses normative notions of appropriate behaviour and bodily contact. Because of this, we scream in the crowd, as part of the crowd, without even consciously intending to. 

My lecturer continued on to argue that crowd has not lost all ration or sanity-- they are simply caught up in the experience.  Anyway, the point is this: the scream I make is not my scream. It is the crowd's scream. My voice is one head of the hydra.

The music starts again and we scream along as the song plays.

The other day I listened to this episode of This American Life from 1996 and one particular story just before the fourth act piqued my curiosity (rewind to about 41:00.) About the Institute of Scream Studies. From the transcript of the episode:

Ira Glass: Well, this leads us to our next two stories here on our show. This is the work of two people who've immersed themselves in their own particular obsessions. And people at home can judge for themselves with what results.  

This first piece of work is one of the stranger things, I have to say, we've ever put on the show. A guy named Greg Whitehead has been collecting the sound of people screaming-- and their thoughts about the meaning of different kinds of screams-- for years all over the world. He sets up these special phone lines that people call into. He's set up a thing called The Institute of Scream Studies. 

Greg Whitehead: A scream is often treated as some kind of insurmountable, impenetrable obstacle, pure, white noise force, that is beyond analysis and unworthy of any kind of interpretation. But here at the institute, we hear the scream from entirely the other perspective-- the scream as an opening, as an entry point, as an access point. An entry into a vast interior landscape that has as its surface this highly nuanced, very individual, psycho-acoustic force to it. 

[SCREAMING]  

Greg Whitehead: There's also a scream line, the actual journey that the screamer takes into the interior landscape. And when we established the telephone answering machine here at the institute, we called it the "scream line," because that machine was going to circulate individual scream lines into--

Whitehead's work is only mentioned briefly in this initial episode, but is then spoken about several times in subsequent episodes, as This American Life sets up their own scream line and encourages listeners to ring in and scream, culminating in a full segment in the 1996 Halloween Episode.

According to his website, Whitehead established his first screamline in Australia, 1991, which culminated in a 1992 radio feature called "Pressures of the Unspeakable." Whitehead has both the radio show and the transcript on his website:

An excerpt from Pressures of the Unspeakable by Gregory Whitehead

Most of the screams on the tape blow the speakers, twisting the sound into a mangled, warbling static. It is alienating and strange to listen to, as Whitehead says on his website, "pure, unmanageable noise."

"The scream as animal energy ruptures signal clarity, exceeding the thresholds of communications technologies not designed to accommodate such vocal intensity."

The Whitehead's screambank has been has been recreated around the world a dozen times, including this Swiss Screambank.

The scream brings the body back to a primal place. The scream permeates the entire body, pushes the entire body into the most liminal, feral place possible. Screaming is considered improper and is reviled because it is inherently disturbing and inherently evocative. It is the ultimate disturbance of mind and body.

I'm thinking about Antonin Artaud's last work, the radio play To Have Done With the Judgement of God, (English transcript here) famously commissioned for French Radio, before being censored for being too profane and horrifying to listen to. It was never aired, and Artaud died little over a month later. The piece is performed by Artaud himself, a glossolalia of incoherent screaming and drums, a manifesto interspersed with shrieks and cries. He denounces America, recites a series of death rituals, denounces God and then gruesomely exalts shit as the only real evidence of life and death. The play ends with a description of God on an autopsy table as a dissected organ taken from the corpse of mankind.

an excerpt from "To Have Done With the Judgement of God"

There's even a staged version!

Screaming is a reflexive political act. You do not decide whether or not to scream, You scream. There's some other pressure, an unbearable, feral pressure, that decides for you.

aaAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

A brief anecdotal epilogue: My sister has just knocked on my door and told me to put on some fucking headphones. Apparently it sounds like someone is being murdered. This is entirely reasonable request and I definitely should have thought to do that before playing a tape of someone screaming.

So that is my epistle on screaming, from me to you. Does any of this make sense?? Is this rambling mixtape on the epistemology of screaming coherent?? I don't know. It is 11:40pm as I finish typing this and I feel like going out onto our veranda and howling at the moon.

A quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein which I have shamelessly stolen from Whitehead's website.

p.s. A poem of mine was published over on a wonderful Online Magazine called Scum Mag the other day! I'm absolutely elated and would be delighted if you would be so kind as to go and check it out here.

A perfume I saw in Lush the other day. The description reads: "Death & Decay. Let it transport you to a serene space where the fullness of beauty and its inevitable decay can be contemplated without fear."

The sun is hidden behind the clouds, and yet she still divulges her presence in subtle things-- the freckles on my sister's face, the flowers who strain their thin green necks towards the sky. I am sick of the sun and the summer, so I play Nina Simone and pretend it is autumn, swathing myself in sweaters and coats.

...

an excerpt:

"Today we are going to the funeral home. I am to read a poem at the service (thankfully, not one of my own) and so I powder my face, put on a pretty dress and try my best to conceal the blood-shot ellipse on my throat. The white powder makes the hickey feel more obvious than ever, like a ghost wearing a white sheet. I have never been good at make up. Online, it says to use a green concealer, and so I paint my throat with emerald eyeshadow, which is useless. It feels fucking absurd that I'm spending the hours before this funeral trying to cover up a hickey.

My throat paunches and contracts. The bloated, croaking vocal sac of a frog. Tiddalik."

...

another excerpt:

"I wore sneakers to my grandmother's funeral and I feel guilty about it."

...

Grief reconfigures the brain, re-informs memories, resets thought patterns and neural pathways. Grief is the chasm between is/was. Grief is painful unlearning/relearning. A brand new type of punctuation for everything you've ever written.

...

Poetry as a cemetery. A cemetery of faces, hands, gestures. A cemetery of clouds, colors of the sky, a graveyard of winds, branches, jasmine (the jasmine from Swidnik), the statue of a saint from Marseilles, a single poplar over the Black Sea, a graveyard of moments and hours, burnt offerings of words. Eternal rest be yours in words, eternal rest, eternal light of recollection.

—	Anna Kamienska (trans. Clare Cavanagh) in Industrious Amazement

Two Poems

crescents

someone has scalped the moon— disfigured! her face

has landed in my garden.

it is sprawled across my freshly cut lawn, translucent

and sticky as milk. my poor daisies lie crushed

underneath the weight of that freshly planted

easter island head. she’s an enigmatic monolith,

with her acne pocked cheeks and those eyes

still open; like two astronomic sunken whirlpools.

last night i lay down on her asteroid

dappled brow, just to see

what she was staring at. i saw the ragged skein

of her grinning jaw, still hinged on the stars.

These days

I wake up with my mouth open

like a baby bird. I take

my pills after breakfast

and always remember

to pluck

the hairs

between my eyebrows

like daisies.

Arrange them in a vase,

leave them on the windowsill.

(These were originally published in the University of Sydney arts literary journal, ARNA.)