ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

LIST OF TERMINOLOGY

INTRODUCTION

SECTION I

FOLIO ONE: Journeys

“At Some Point Reality Needs to Become a Part Of …” (2013)

A Daze to Come True (2014)

A Literary Mitosis (On Form) (2014)

The Mission Man (2014)

An Apple on a String Swings in Front of Me (2014)

The Island (2015)

The Spirit of the Times (2013)

A Sentimental Cynic (2013)

‘Til Morning Came (2013)

“There’s a Road Train Going Nowhere” (2013)

“The Writer on Holiday” or Clockwork (2014)

A Train Ride to Russia in 2007 (2015)

Déjà Vu Delirium (2013)

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part I) (2013)

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part II) (2013)

Ghouls (2014)

End of the Weekend (2014)

Going Home (2014)

Tiers and Towers (2014)

THESIS ONE

Examining the Fictocritical Value of Journeys: The Author Meanders

SECTION II

FOLIO TWO: Family

Guise (2014)

Kwiat Dwóch Puszcz (2017)

Storm (2017)

Be the Tallest Poppy (2015)

Daj Mi Pić, Proszę Cię (2016)

Dickheads (2015)

THESIS TWO

My Family and other Fictions: Fictocriticism Creates New Subjectivities

SECTION III

FOLIO THREE: Education

(Scrapped) Book: A ‘Professional’ Educational(?) Overview (2016)

An Agitation (2016)

Hum, Amplitude, (Being a) Focal Point (2016)

‘Big’ Ideas (2016)

THESIS THREE

Fictocriticism as Innovative Pedagogy

SECTION IV

FOLIO FOUR: Technology

Preamble … (2013)

Busy Bees Buzz (2014)

Do the Evolution(ary Jig) (2015)

Coaxing the Ouroboros (2014)

Palahniuk’s Invisible Monsters (2015)

Technological Response: A Confession (2015)

Tunnel Vision: A Tribute to 2001: A Space Odyssey (2014)

(Constantly) Changing Headspaces: I’m Bored (2013)

… But My Friends are Unreliable, So Plans are Hard to Make (2014)

After all, the World Does Not Run on Time (2013)

Yet My Persistence and Insistence are Being Misconstrued as Haughty and Overbearing (2014)

Repetition (2014)

My Refrigerator: More Repetition (2014)

Solutionism (2017)

Canvas (2013)

P.S. Mutual Misunderstandings of Brotherhood (2014)

Idiocracy [Film] (2014)

Be Careful Though. There is such a Thing as Over-organisation (Regarding Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited) (2014)

Rushing the Order and Fate (2014)

The Flux of Repulsion or Expulsion (2014)

No. In Fact, I Do Not Need, I Do Not Want. (Mantra) (2014)

Two Cents (Everyone Has an Opinion) (2013)

‘Irony’, Alanis Morissette and Me (2015)

The Accumulation of Demons (2015)

Cattle Call (2015)

THESIS FOUR

Solutionism: Fictocriticism and the Digital World

CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the funding received from Central Queensland University through the UPRA Program that supported this research. I also respectfully acknowledge the expertise and guidance provided by Professor Stephen Muecke in the final stages of my PhD dissertation.

Some sections and fragments of this book have previously been published in TEXT Journal, Idiom 23, Stoned Crows & Other Australian Icons: Prose Poems & Microfiction, Colloquy and narratorAUSTRALIA.

Professional editor, John McAndrew, provided copyediting and proof-reading services of my PhD dissertation, according to the guidelines laid out in the University-endorsed national ‘Guidelines for Editing Research Theses’.

Various names and identifying details and characteristics of locations, people and institutions have been altered or invented for creative, legal and confidentiality reasons.

Book cover art/photograph “Pink Lake” courtesy of Liam Baster.

To Wally, for stoking the flame.

To Tris, for settling the embers.

To friends and family, for your care, conversation, content, humour

and patience.

To Andrea, for being a second conscience, and for just helping me

to be a better version of my self during much of this process.

To God, for not existing, therein providing me the independence

and freedom necessary to rely on more innate and tangible things.

To all the blurred, pivotal or indirect influences.

To the multitudinous chaotic selves manifested in these writings:

may this work bring you some closure and a sense of unified

peace and consolidation.

LIST OF TERMINOLOGY

Creative self: Originator of creative folio(s)

Analytical self: Writer of theses

Folio(s): The (creative) fictocritical work written by the creative self

Thesis/Theses: The theoretical analyses (of the creative work) written by the analytical self

Section(s): A thesis and its accompanying folio

INTRODUCTION

This book has been adapted from a doctoral dissertation submitted to CQUniversity in 2019, and conferred in the same year. The study containing the two separate elements of creative work and analytical exegesis, was positioned within the creative writing field of fictocriticism, and stems from earlier ‘experiments’ in autobiographical writing and experiences of travel and growing up in Australia as a first-generation Polish-Australian male. Touching upon episodes of diaspora, family, education, and questions of ‘self’ and ‘identity’ that have arisen as a young creative artist living in an increasingly digital age, the exegesis of this creative work is both intensely personal and clinically theoretical. The creative pieces are thinly veiled personal accounts which, in turn, provide a framework for various thematic constructions for a developing sense of self in relation to the experiences under discussion. The reason for structuring this dissertation in four theses is due to the flexible, yet “inimitable” (Gibbs 1) needs of the fictocritical genre and form and because the discussion demands some definable limitations.

Initially, this exploration was influenced by Josie Arnold’s “The PhD in Writing Accompanied by an Exegesis” (2005), where she discusses the dichotomy between traditionalist or conservative modes of constructing a PhD, versus the more creative types of work that challenge preconceived or traditional templates of the exegesis and artefact model. This is where my interest in experimentation comes to the fore, and it offers a space where unique conceptualisations of creative/critical ‘academic’ writing are disseminated and introduced to provide new literary insights. Arnold references Nelson, Deleuze and Scrivener and their desire to ‘catastrophise’ or rebel against the type of ‘straight-jacket’ that is “the traditional thetic/exegesis” (38). This is where fictocriticism comes strongly into the equation, offering as it does, a revolutionary, experimental and metacognitive way of researching and writing in the synthesis of new and original thinking.

To reiterate, and to properly prepare the reader for what is to come, I assert that fictocriticism deserves further academic attention and investigation, and what I believe to be the most interesting and/or challenging aspects at the cutting edge of the debate surrounding fictocriticism is its unclassifiable nature and its potential technological innovativeness. During the course of this explorative discussion, I canvas many different positions in the fictocritical debate, almost all of which are vastly interconnected (or vastly disconnected), depending on how they are examined. I contend that the central motifs, mission and contribution of this book is in its exploration of fictocriticism’s chameleonic nature and its growing (futuristic) tendency towards electronic mediums. The first three sections of this study intentionally and gradually synthesise these complex issues and build towards the overarching notion that four individual theses are needed to detail the separate folios of the emergent argument and to provide context for the creative writings. The fourth thesis coheres the various arguments.

Fictocriticism can be described as a hybrid-style of writing that is both fictional and critical, a genre of writing that is naturally theoretical, personal or personalised and professional, (Schlunke and Brewster 393). It has been considered a ‘buzzword’, on the fringe of mainstream literature, ‘meta’ and postmodern in nature and form, format and execution or delivery. It has also been referred to as “a refusal of any steady border between genres” (Trottier 1), a mode (or collage) of thought “gently flapping, between experience and interpretation” (Kerr and Nettelbeck 109), “a textual no-man’s land” (Dawson 139), “a writing of compounds and mutations, a hybrid writing which is not just any one thing, but not any one thing” (White et al. 10-11), an “inchoate category” (Schlunke and Brewster 393) that allows or permits one to really disperse oneself and the ‘I’.

This book involves two very distinct and different perspectives, each of which has a unique ‘voice’ and persona: the four-part creative component is recounted by a self-conscious creative informal self in four folios; while the four theoretical theses, which dissect the creative folios and explore the fictocritical strategies, are written with the more clinical and formal voice of a literary scientist, referred to as the analytical self. It was necessary to develop a sense of estrangement between these two personas, to split the author and researcher, (myself, Pawel Cholewa), into these two diverged voices. This is done to be consistent with, and to further the notion of fictocriticism being “double-voiced” (Kerr 93).

Double-voicedness is a key feature within the context of fictocriticism, and it requires some expounding. Double-voicedness is about subtext: the voice on top and the voice on the bottom, or the voices of the writer speaking side-by-side. They are the yin and yang of duality within the context of writing. One is generally creative, the other critical. One is about poeticism and storytelling, the other is about critique, social commentary, philosophy or concrete theory. They can be integrated, work in tandem, or contrast and reverberate off one another dichotomously. They are the tangible and the intangible, working with, against or through one another.

My separation between creative self and analytical self, in the folios and theses of this work, makes this literary technique and function very obvious and literal. This deliberate estrangement of personas, the development of a schism between creative self and analytical self, also enables the subtleties of double-voicedness to be better seen and more clearly recognised in the creative folios.

For obvious reasons, it is generally quite difficult to write about oneself. If my ‘self’ is going to be interesting, it has to be vulnerable to change. The analytical self in the theses, recorded in the third-person, is armour-plated in dealing with new emerging problems and innovations of fictocriticism. The creative self (or selves), most often in the state of confessing in the first-person, can be guarded at times, but change dramatically over the course of the work. The creative self is not safeguarded to the point that it is immobile. The point of this is to remove the armour carried around with us. The narrative arc, as well as the multitudinous perspectives in the writings, show this. Both diverged selves, just as my own complete persona, change through the process of this exploration. I am not the same researcher or creative writer as I was at the outset of my PhD in 2013, nor do I necessarily hold to the same views and opinions I held between the ages of 25 and 30 (2013–2017); these views and opinions are more so in the creative act of venting/catharsis.

To assist in comprehending the complexity and nature of these ‘selves’ and their (correlating) diverged sections, a brief list of the terminology used in this book, is provided prior to this introduction, on page 13. It may be easier to think of fictocriticism, not as a literary genre, but more as a way to process thought—“a strategy for writing” (Kerr and Nettelbeck 4). The majority of explanations of fictocriticism, my own attempts included, are inconclusive. They either overcomplicate the idea, or the language used to describe it is too figurative or metaphorical. Hazel Smith’s explanation in “The Erotics of Gossip: Fictocriticism, Performativity, Technology” (2009) is well-balanced in that sense and probably the best description found so far to explain the concept:

fictocriticism juxta-poses creative and academic writing environments, and breaks down their separation and autonomy. Fictocritics may, for example, insert, imply, or elucidate theoretical ideas within creative work without feeling the pressure to transform those ideas into entirely fictional or poetic texts. Such texts can take many different forms, but may often be experimental and discontinuous: for example, fictional or poetic sections are juxtaposed with theoretical interjections so that they reverberate with each other. Or, fictocritical critics may attempt to disrupt the formality of the academic essay with strategies such as crossing of genres, collage, non-linearity, wordplay, anecdote, or use of the first person. (1001-02)

The initial and primary appeal of fictocriticism was its resistance to having any kind of authority dictated over its form, a creative structure that aspires to the convenience of being inherently freeform (Gibbs 310): “There is no specific way to write fictocritically” (Naismith 24). Fictocriticism is referred to as a genre that is about “personal journey and storytelling” (Hancox and Muller 149) and that “the form is part of the message” (Flavell 186). It is an unorthodox writing technique because of the level of literary iconoclasm. To offer any deep level of critical explanation or attempting to cage the creative work within any kind of accepted writing parameter goes against the grain and meaning of its intention as a literary form of writing or ‘device’—a tool for the erratic construction and personalised investigation of journal-like ‘meaning’ (Flavell 29).

When fictocriticism appears in anthologies, articles, in the introductions of theses and the like, it is usually something that is explained fictocritically, which is typically personalised, abstracted and mixed in style, genre, form, etc. Yes, “ficto-criticism is indeed a slippery and contradictory category” (Flavell 126). But this is what makes it such an exuberant and stimulating mode. Furthermore, it is particularly useful in being able to construct a fragmentary narrative that is in part abstract, creative and autobiographical but then also a narrative(s) which features some critique regarding the explicit themes or issues addressed. Fictocriticism allows a writer to ebb, flow and move through and between these different primary voices to render a richer narrative.

A detailed review of the literature surrounding fictocriticism and its predecessors shows that there are terms that exist in other countries that have a suggestive fictocritical air about them. In Japan there is Shishōsetsu or the ‘I-novel’, a confessional form of writing that promoted transparency and textual interconnectivity between writer, narrator and narrative hero in early twentieth-century Japanese fiction (Layoun 158). Shishōsetsu encouraged authorial presence and ‘sincerity’, just as fictocriticism encourages authorial involvement and engagement in its ‘storytelling’ form (Layoun 159).

In the writing of Québecoise women there is fiction-theory or fiction-théorique, as seen in the works of Nicole Brossard—someone who “has had considerable impact on the development of creative-critical writing in English Canada”, having influence in the development of a “very specific creative-critical style” on the margins of Canadian culture (Flavell 215).

Paul Dawson, an Australian academic, in “A Place for the Space Between: Fictocriticism and the University” (2002), states that the North American version of fictocriticism would be called “confessional criticism” (145):

confessional criticism is … indebted to the post-structuralist critique of critical and philosophical modes of writing as metalanguages, and the subsequent rejection of the epistemological relationship between these modes and an unquestionable truth. If the disinterested and impersonal prose of academic writing can no longer provide access to knowledge, then the intellectual as political subject becomes the only enabling motivation of critical activity. (Dawson 145)

Essentially, both confessional criticism and fictocriticism aim to distance and liberate criticism from its “parasitical dependence on literature” (Dawson 146).

There is also “autocritique, the new belletrism, experimental critical writing, narrative criticism, and literary non-fiction” (Flavell 106). Autocritique is a complicated form of self-criticism—a “trendy ‘I’ that beams out at the reader from the ‘personal’ critical essay” (Flavell 274). The new belletrism is another conceptualisation of autobiographical criticism identifying “American ficto-critical moves as a return to an earlier form of the essay (before its appropriation as an academic genre and reincarnation as logical formal writing)” (Flavell 108). Experimental critical writing has been best summed up and expressed by Marianna Torgovnick:

When writers want to be read they have to be more flexible and take more chances than the standard scholarly style allows: often, they have to be more direct and more personal. In a very real way … I could not think myself as a writer until I risked exposing myself in my writing. I am not talking here, necessarily, about full-scale autobiographical writing—though I am not ruling it out either. But I am saying that writerly writing is personal writing, whether or not it is autobiographical. Even if it offers no facts from the writer’s life, or offers just hints of them here and there, it makes the reader know some things about the writer—a fundamental condition, it seems to me, of any real act of communication. (25-27)

Narrative criticism is a formula of narrativity used to tell a story (Walker 559). And literary non-fiction is “the inclusion of a personal voice into a book of non-fiction” (Flavell 26).

Other possible influences on fictocriticism include gonzo, travel writing, writing-between and beatnik novels, some of which continue to (re)appear and exist today. There is also evidence of the incorporation of experimental, personalised or fictive writing in academic disciplines such as:

cultural and literary studies, film studies, performance studies, law, history, philosophy, visual arts, and even beyond the humanities into some areas of the sciences. A View from the Divide: Creative Nonfiction on Health and Science (1999), for example, suggests that even the most purely scientific and objective disciplines are not immune to the ficto-critical turn. (Flavell 104-5)

In 2007, Denis Byrne’s Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia, an archaeological travelogue, told through stories in the first-person, was published. This further demonstrates the emergence of fictocriticism in different disciplines, bridging discourses and creating new approaches to writing in the way ‘straight’ informal theory or ‘normal’ fiction cannot do. Here is an example from Byrne’s book:

Standing at the window of the second-floor room in the National Museum where I was reading through piles of old reports and archaeological site records, I could see, looking across a stream of traffic and a dusty park, a corner of the Spanish wall and the confusion of rooftops and low facades that lay beyond it. There, in 1571, Miguel Lopez de Legazpi had laid out a gridiron of seventeen streets on the site of what had been the palisaded fort of Rajah Suleiman. The Rajah’s small brass cannons, while perfectly adequate under previous conditions, were little more than a joke to the Spanish, and they easily drove him out of his stronghold. Intramuros’s defenses were elaborated and modified over time to produce a system of immense stone walls complete with moat, seven gates, several bastions and ravelins, and a large fort in the northwest corner guarding the river mouth. (1-2)

All the foregoing discussion shows that a kind of fictocriticism can both fall into, under (and evade) a plethora of different categories, and at present there does not appear to be a unified, cohesive accepted understanding of the form.

Fictocriticism was first taken up in Australia in the 1990s, stemming from Canada (Flavell 3-4). “Anna Gibbs reminds us that [fictocriticism] appears well before this in the writing of mostly non-academic women responding to the new and ‘provocative’ texts emanating from France then later Canada from the 1970s onward” (147). Fictocriticism’s emergence in Australia is thought to have been prompted by way of “French feminist interest in a new kind of writing defiant of phallocentrism” (147). Some of this French feminist experimental writing is often referred to as écriture féminine (Hancox and Muller 148).

The first article to have the term ‘fictocriticism’ appear in it in Australia was Stephen Muecke and Noel King’s “On Ficto-Criticism” in 1991 in the Australian Book Review. Muecke and King’s tentative two-page article acts as a discussion—even a somewhat casual conversation—between the two academics, in curiously trying to decipher what type of writing much of Roland Barthes’ work, such as Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse (1977), and Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985) actually are. Muecke and King claim that Roland Barthes’ texts “simply cannot be called criticism, but [they] cannot, for that matter be called non-criticism either” (14). And that White Noise is “at once a quite traditional novel (in terms of structure) and yet one of the sharpest meditations on the postmodern available” (Muecke and King 13). Thus, they emphatically decide on the possibilities of fictocriticism as a postmodern way “to simply [tell] stories” (Muecke and King 13), and as a relief from heavy theory. They even disregard the need for systematically accurate referencing at the end of the article, claiming “No need for bio details—they’re in the text, but also we want readers to be a little uncertain about our reality” (Muecke and King 14). Overall, the article paints fictocriticism as providing a refreshingly non-convoluted, un-bureaucratic perspective on the possibilities of (academic) writing in a way that is still rich, provocative and engaging.

Helen Flavell’s important and unique 2004 doctoral thesis Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-Criticism provides a thorough description, explanation and history of the term. What is so good about Flavell’s work is that it is likely to be the first thesis to look at fictocriticism as a style/genre through a more theoretical lens: “Through my application of Deleuzian theory I encourage a productive use of the literary machine, extracting from the ficto-critical text its revolutionary force” (Flavell 40).

Elements of fictocriticism are also perhaps comparable to the idea of jouissance, which can be inferred from a reading of Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1973) and French feminism, in the discourse(s) of Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, for instance (Spivak 166). Jouissance has been interpreted or connected to concepts such as “bliss”, “fully-tasted pleasure”, “orgasm” and “perversion” (Gallop 566). And it is a mode or an amalgamation of these things—an excited and stimulated sensation in which a feeling and/or sentiment of sexuality can be interconnected with a blissful intelligence and engagement with the text, whether in the act of reading or writing. And so, an ecstatic jubilation would come under that mode also. Like fictocriticism (and a lot of metafictive devices), jouissance is simple enough, though something that one needs to actively engage with in order to understand and appreciate.

Due to the amount of purely fictocritical discussion(s) that needed to take place throughout the research process, much of the ‘higher’ theory has been expounded in the creative folios also. This, in many ways, is complementary to fictocriticism’s double-voiced and subtextual (Rubenstein 37) nature. Still, a deliberate methodology pervading this body of work is all about splitting my cognitive awareness into two parts: one as creative self, the other as analytical self.

Occasionally these two writing approaches (creative and theoretical) are quite challenging to separate as there is a large amount of overlap between the two. This experimental study contends that this is a strong characteristic of fictocriticism though, and there are a myriad of academics that discuss the potential of literary research to be developed in this manner too (Barrett 2004; Kroll 2004; Nelson 2004; Brewster 2005; Arnold 2005). That is a discussion for another time: however, it is a possible avenue for future research and innovation.

Also, I initially assumed that my very early research and work was fictocritical because a concrete and consistent explanation of it could not be located elsewhere. I found it difficult to understand the methodology properly without this concrete, unequivocal definition. It created a severe mental block in the work. Thus, at the end of 2017 a decision was made to alter my doctoral project into a literary ‘experiment’ which would produce an industrious, working definition of fictocriticism as a literary genre. In essence, my doctoral dissertation (and subsequently this book) construct a definition of fictocriticism itself through the creative writing experiments that would push the methodology’s boundaries. This process and feedback formed a renewed and re-focused line of research questioning that was definitive: What is fictocritical fiction? Is there a definition of it that is agreed on by all fictocritical academics? And which of my experimental pieces succeed or fail in this vein? Other similar questions then include: Does fictocriticism work well within both academic and creative writing practices? Does it work in a hybridised manner? Is it a methodology that can still be innovated? Has, or how has, fictocriticism changed over the years to become more concise and dynamic, regimented, or has it become more vague and obscure? By ‘doing’ fictocriticism, what problems does it solve? And do the ‘experiments’ in fictocriticism presented in the different (creative) folios of this book innovate upon the form successfully, and also show pathways for future research, or do they fail? This exploration, by its conclusion, aims to demonstrate which pieces succeed, which pieces fail, or which elements of pieces succeed fictocritically and which elements fail fictocritically. Also, if fictocriticism can be better categorised and synthesised, what boundaries and rules could sustain it as a legitimate form and methodology in academia in the future?

Questions that are left unanswered, or open to debate, but demonstrate the potential to take up this scholarly research baton and continue studies in fictocriticism and other hybridised forms of writing, also relate to the potential of academic writing/research to be developed in a different (more engaging) manner (Barrett 2004; Kroll 2004; Nelson 2004; Brewster 2005; Arnold 2005). They are possible avenues for future research and innovation. Autoethnography, for instance, has been taking up an innovative methodological-pedagogical approach for itself for years (Ellis and Bochner 2000; Holt 2003; Canagarajah 2012; Méndez 2013; Anae 2014); Theses One and Two of this text contend that autoethnography and fictocriticism are cut from a similar methodological cloth.

Fortunately, some of these broader questions and theoretical concerns have begun to be addressed. In 2017, a thorough theoretical exploration into fictocriticism entitled Fictocritical Strategies: Subverting Textual Practices of Meaning, Other, and Self-Formation was published by Gerrit Haas. This occurred more or less during the final stages of my doctoral work. Hence, it has been both gratifying and validating to find a relatively recent work with a similar theoretical focus, despite fictocriticism often seeming dormant or veiled in the literary fringes of academia.

It is, therefore, at least necessary to summarise some of Haas’ goals and intentions and how they may or may not relate to this study. Haas calls for “a systemic conceptualisation of fictocriticism that can hope to capture its various historical strands as well as possible forms to come without stifling its subversive potential … a defining general pattern at work” (12).

What this book calls for is the (re)discovery and categorisation of distinct fictocritical innovations and/or traits. Put excruciatingly simply, Haas seeks to locate an overall theoretical pattern in fictocriticism, whilst my book aims to find some of its ‘new’ distinct patterns. Both Haas and myself observe, dissect and scrutinise the same literary form from two different angles: Haas from the macro, and myself from the micro.

Haas and I are in total agreement about fictocriticism being capable of more than “marginal relevance” (16), feminism’s antecedence in fictocriticism, and we are carefully considerate and respectful of our reliance on Flavell and Muecke’s research and writing in this area (12). Haas merely grinds at the ‘genre’ in a different way:

In many ways the precise connection between these two aspects of fictocriticism—between genre-subversion and marginal/ised speaking positions, between the text-discursive and the wider discursive, between the fictional and the ethical, theory and criticism—is the main subject of this thesis. (Haas 9)

It is necessary to reference Haas’ work, and where my own experiences and experiment(s) enter into the discussion or forefront of the debate surrounding fictocriticism. It is clear we must both be on the right track. Haas’ book is purely theoretical, whereas mine is about innovations, primarily based in response to my own creative works. Haas’ primary text sources for his study are vastly different (Haas 49-51). Also, due to the predominantly creative focus and field of this book, and the reliance of the theoretical work/theses to reflect back on the creative work/folios in a symbiotic way, I have experienced certain spatial limitations, or to put it more positively, my theoretical focus, methodology and process has had to be fine-tuned, tempered. Hence, this book’s predominant focus and/or expectant anticipation of innovative ‘technologies’ or “electric fictocriticism”, as coined by Simon Robb (100), entering the changing medium of reading, writing, communion and the reader-writer relationship in this field. Haas only alludes to this in passing in order to focus more greatly on the “wider discursive and cultural applications” (22) at hand.

Haas does actually propose a list of “textual markers” (30) for fictocriticism, and a reasonable, though pattered and mechanical “working definition” (59) of fictocriticism in his book, though he does not believe these “characteristics” are especially relevant or absolute due to their inconsistency “across the spectrum of fictocritical texts, which take a diverse range of experimental forms” (30). Thus, he does not offer distinct innovative markers either, which this book does. Hence, his working definition and “textual markers” fall short of actually defining the genre as it exists today. These markers can be considered relevant, particularly in relation to identifying and classifying my work.

The four main folios in this text are made up of fragments, stories, experiences and snapshots from my life, and placed or positioned into these four folios of specific interest as a working schema from the perspective of a Polish-Australian millennial between the ages of 25-30. The year each piece was constructed appear in parentheses beside their corresponding title to reflect the narrator/protagonist’s age at the time of construction, and generally all occur during the second decade of the twenty-first century. The significance of these four areas are that they are the factors that have most vividly made up my sense of an identity. These four areas relate to me, but also largely to the contemporary landscape of today’s zeitgeist, and are themes that appear in fictocriticism often (Muecke 2008; Raine 2009; Hancox and Muller 2011; Morgan 2012; Robb 2013).

Thesis One, “Examining the Fictocritical Value of Journeys: The Author Meanders”, is about journeys. This thesis, and the corresponding folio, questions if it is possible to innovate upon fictocriticism or if it is the ‘ultimate’ innovative genre, suggesting that there is a paradox between the theory surrounding fictocriticism, suggesting how ‘freeform’ it is, and how non-freeform it still seems to be due to its lack of theoretical boundaries. The theme of journeys is used as a strategy to convey the methodology of fictocriticism overall, as an untapped way of writing both personally and theoretically, with a unified and engaging double-voice. Attempts at pushing the threshold and parameters in differing experimental creative works advocate for what fictocriticism could be, and ask if it can be reinvented into something more stable, yet still evolve into a mode of writing that is engaging, identifiable and prominent within the academy.

In this section’s folio, the tropes of travel provide a critical vehicle, focusing on the restlessness of the creative self’s need to travel both physically and metaphysically, and look at the creative self’s experiences within different zones (locations, contexts, environments) with differing comfort levels. Most of these journeys occur within Australia, though some take place in Europe, South America and North America, but these locations are rarely made explicit within the narrative. The motif of the horizon is often used as a symbol for restlessness and the creative self’s constant need for motion and momentum. The fictocritical theory used in this thesis prominently features Stephen Muecke and Noel King (1991), Donna Maree Hancox and Vivienne Muller (2011) and Hamish Morgan’s paper “What Can Fictocriticism Do?” (2012). Philosophies and approaches from Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), Roland Barthes (1975) and A Lover’s Discourse (1977) are considered too. Multiple-authored fictocritical works in The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (1998) are explored, as well as unique proto-fictocritical texts like Mark Z. Danielewski’s postmodern and metafictive writing in House of Leaves (2000), Stephen Muecke’s Joe in the Andamans: And other Fictocritical Stories (2008) and Josephine Rowe’s semi-autobiographical Tarcutta Wake (2012).

Folio Two is about family. This folio provides a (manufactured) context for my ‘self’ from the perspective of a first-generation Polish-Australian male, against the backdrop of a rather nationalistic and/or ‘authentic’ Polish (and migrant) heritage, background and legacy. The creative sequences in this folio aim to delve more deeply and metaphorically/symbolically into these issues and concept(ion)s, in a much more detailed and vivid way than could be established through a purely rational critical narrative. It articulates ‘skewed’ traditional Polish (and migrant) views, beliefs and attitudes and the conflict(s) created in a multi-generational family, via a constructed ‘persona’ called Lou. This thesis aims to find innovation in the contextualisation of fictocriticism. Most notably, in its antecedence in postmodernism and “metafictional strategies” (Waugh 22), its autobiographical characteristics in memoirs (Gaita 1999), anecdotes or use of the first-person (Smith 1001-02) and storytelling narratives (Muecke and King 14; Morgan 2012) primarily within the context of Polish and Australian landscapes, to provide a cultural context or diaspora in the history of some Polish/Australian (migrant) writing, and contextualising the author’s European-migrant ancestry and biased millennial voice, in a memoir-like narrative.

Folio One and Thesis One can be seen as diluting or bleeding into Folio Two and Thesis Two. They are both exegetical about my creative work (and comparing it to similar works) and they make their own distinct arguments. They (the folios and the theses) are alike and are about the nomad, who simultaneously cannot find his place at home with family, and who cannot escape himself abroad in the tangible and intangible pursuit of travel either. Hence, these sections remain inescapably hybridised in a way that I hope readers will not dislike.

Folio Three is about education and how the creative self was formally educated. It recalls specific experiences of being a Bachelor of Arts and Education (Secondary) undergraduate student at university from 2006 to 2010. The majority of the anecdotal, creative or abstract prose inserted into this folio relates to the narrator rebelling against some of his tertiary experiences, in a state of angst, hopefully creating a more compelling psychodrama within the narrative. It is where the idea of ‘purposeful purposelessness’ is most clearly introduced as a storytelling technique and narrative framework. The state of flux the creative self experiences in this folio stems from and identifies the same restlessness and exuberant anxiety, which arise from the culturally conflicted background of the first two folios, and which continue to pervade thematically into this folio and throughout this study overall. It utilises and adapts modes of fictocriticism inspired by Drusilla Modjeska’s The Orchard (1994) and other elemental fictocritical writings and theories by Anne Brewster, Katrina Schlunke, but primarily Anna Gibbs and her uninhibited enumerative, rhythmic, poetic and splicing approach to writing. Thesis Three uncovers some concrete and unambiguous traits of fictocriticism in its connections to education and pedagogy (Modjeska 1994; Brewster 2013), its similarities to more established academic modes like autoethnography (Walford 2004), its phraseology (Gibbs 311; Brewster 2013) and its observable need for a clear “narrative point” (Gibbs 2).

The title of Thesis Four, “Solutionism: Fictocriticism and the Digital World”, is derived from concepts by Evgeny Morozov (2012, 2013) and his wariness of technology. This sets a tone for this thesis’ corresponding folio and fictocriticism’s meandering inconclusive ways. The ‘experimental’ writing focuses on the disengagement contemporary society has with political news and information because of a preference for other, less intellectually challenging forms of entertainment offered by cable television, streaming movies, Netflix, digitised porn and the whole YouTube phenomenon. These ‘arguments’ also encompass the negative impacts of the Internet and social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Thesis Four investigates some of the precise adaptations and changes that have occurred in fictocritical writing over time, particularly in the new millennium, contextualising the methodology in a more modern, technological, or ‘robotic’ era. This thesis shows how some of the fragmentary and freeform writings of Anna Gibbs, Marion Campbell and Alison Bartlett for instance, located in The Space Between, later began to exist in other tangible, less ambiguous mediums and forms, and how the vision of early pioneering fictocritics such as Anna Gibbs, Drusilla Modjeska, Amanda Nettelbeck and Heather Kerr, gradually evolved from their vague, unencumbered, yet highly ‘meta’ fictocritical beginnings, to the more deliberate and industrious “electric fictocriticism” (Robb 100) of the twenty-first century.

All of these folios incorporate different experimental writing techniques, including first-person narrative, prose-poetry, flash fiction, travel writing, vignettes, stream of consciousness, memoir, autobiography, fiction, creative non-fiction, autoethnography, song lyrics, mantras/meditations, narcissistic critique, storytelling, double-voicedness and soliloquy. The folios also use different voices, personas or narrators depending on what the folio and thesis are trying to portray and uncover. Yet all of these approaches can tentatively fall under the methodological umbrella of fictocriticism as the genre has quite a broad (possibly limitless) scope, particularly for experimentation. Still, the folios arguably becomes progressively more fictocritical as the theses develop and sustain their arguments about fictocritical innovations and discoveries, and as the creative self uncovers subtextual layers and improves upon the necessary critique in the folios. In this ‘confused’ way the folios are not entirely elegant or aesthetically pleasing. They incorporate their own mistakes and inconsistencies throughout the narrative, just as Mark Z. Danielewski preserves his mistakes and crossings out throughout House of Leaves (114-15).

In these creative works, however, I at least attempt to (consistently) employ the fictocritical solution to the ‘failure’ of the formal omniscient and/or masterful position, the view from nowhere, because now it is more accepted that knowledge is situational and contextual. Again, this partly stems from the feminist influence of fictocriticism, with its emphasis on the personal being political. Other solutions (and innovations) will be examined within the context of this exploration’s theses, as I/we progress through them.

Regarding viewpoints, because of the massive variations in my creative pieces’ lengths and styles/forms (there are many), not every narrator or scene in every one of the creative works is permitted a concrete (physical) description. This is done to save space and time. After all, for the record, basically all of the narrators/personas are more or less ‘reflections’ (‘ghosts’) of the same being/author (me) anyway. Also, as indicated by Haas, one of the common fictocritical markers is “minimal characterisation and dialogue” (26), which I tend to agree with (overall). That is not to say that my creative works do not feature dialogue and character description at all. These traits feature very prominently in the folios on family and education in particular, but dialogue and character description are not the focus here, as there are many other bases to cover, and more importantly to ‘play’ with, in order to uncover the breadth of fictocriticism’s potential, and what possible innovations lay dormant within it.

Taking this broad approach further, occasionally some of the creative pieces are left ‘seemingly’ unfinished, to indicate where the creative self could (or does not) elaborate on a concept because it would make it less or more fictocritical. This makes aspects of the folio work open-ended. An argument against this approach could be that it demonstrates a lack of texture, and intellectual resources, in the writing. Though it is this book’s contention that the creative folios certainly did not need to be completely polished pieces of work. In fact, aesthetic and commercial sleekness was deliberately resisted so that the work would be more experimental. This became the plan and methodology following this study’s first draft. This restructuring or deconstructive process became part of this book’s reviewed and renewed goals. This would ensure that this ‘experiment’ in fictocriticism was more official. And in reviewing the creative self’s work the analytical self is then able to better take on the responsibilities of a literary scientist in the more theoretical theses.

The open-ended nature of the ‘experimental’ creative folios make it so the works cannot be considered pure memoir or autobiography as they are, in essence, abstract(ed) and fictionalised accounts. Though they contain obvious elements of these forms, particularly Folios One and Two, where pseudonyms and leeway are given to the expression and dramatisation of real people, places and events, the creative work(s) do not subscribe to any one genre exclusively. The creative works must be considered a fictocritical ‘experiment’ because of the blending of so many differing genres and forms. Most importantly, the folios must be fictocritical because, as a whole, they are essentially half-creative, half-critical.

Finally, by 2018-19 my literature review found that there are only a small number of theses devoted to a personally exploratory and/or specifically fictocritical, critical or ‘fictocritical-esque’ hybridised methodology. These include Monique Louise Trottier’s Masters thesis “If Truth be Told…” (2002), The Holocaust at Home: Representations and Implication of Second Generation Experience (2004), a North American doctoral dissertation by Susan Jacobowitz about the literary experiences, identities and representations of second generation Holocaust survivors (iv); Brent Jason Royster’s “The Construction of Self in the Contemporary Creative Writing Workshop: A Personal Journey” (2006), Jeanette Weeda-Zuidersma’s “Keeping Mum: Representations of Motherhood in Contemporary Australian Literature—a Fictocritical Exploration” (2007), “Between the City and the Bush: Suburbia in the Contemporary Australian Novel” (2008), a North American literary doctoral dissertation by Nathaniel David O’Reilly, Emily Naismith’s Honours thesis “Emily Coughs: A Fictocritical Exploration of the Self via Social Media” (2009), Danuta Raine’s “Essaying the Self: Ethnicity, Identity and the Fictocritical Essay” (2009), Jorge Villalobos’ “My Name Is/Mi Nombre es: Developing Internal Voices in a Quest of an Identity” (2012), Robin Hely’s “Project Neurocam: An Investigation” (2013), Lissi Athanasiou Krikelis’ “Postmodern Metafiction Revisited” (2014) and Ania Walwicz’s 2016 PhD “horse: a psychodramatic enactment of a fairytale”. As can be seen from these titles, they are similar to this work in that they are literary, often fictocritical, autobiographical, a form of storytelling and they explore personal(ised) themes, yet these themes or autobiographies are not simultaneously Polish-Australian, male or about the primary themes addressed in this study: journeys, family, education and technology.

The works listed above relate to specific aspects of these individual writers’ lives, ideas, beliefs, identities, philosophies and experiences that make them them (i.e., motherhood, love, religion, ancestry, social media and cystic fibrosis, a Mexican-American upbringing, and so forth). These documents are unique to these individual people, though none are like this exploration because none of them are me. None of them feature a crossover or dense tapestry of interests or experiences that specifically include a fusion of travel, education, a hybridised Polish-Australian background and living in the digital world. And that unique fusion, in the combination and sequence of four experimental folios, is one of the ways that make this experimental fictocritical exploration unique, amongst a set of existing ‘fictocritical-esque’, personalised and explorative works that are already marginal, fairly radical or unorthodox in their format and structure, and certainly relatively few in number.

From this point onwards, my cognitive self will be split in two: when referring to my ‘self’ or the multiplicity of my various ‘selves’ that feature in the creative folios, ‘I’ shall be referred to as the creative self; I will then shift to an alternate clinical persona known as the analytical self in the four theoretical theses, critiquing the creative self’s writings for their merit and fictocritical innovativeness. And when referring to my other, full, self, i.e., both my creative self and my analytical self together (i.e., the complete ‘Pawel Cholewa’), in moments where both intersect and are relevant/applicable, I will simply refer to my collective person as the author. This (somewhat) goes without saying, but not to worry! Context shall make this clear enough, to be sure.

Henceforth, until we (you, the reader) and ‘I’ reach the conclusion of this work, the creative self shall be methodically divorced from the analytical self.

SECTION I

FOLIO ONE: Journeys
“At Some Point Reality Needs to Become a Part Of …” (2013)

When I first moved to Rockhampton from Melbourne in the pursuit of my doctoral studies in 2013, I tried extremely hard to engage in the culture and lifestyle of a more rural part of Australia, a different part of the world to me, obviously, since I was coming from a much ‘cooler’ (both figuratively and literally) cosmopolitan city like Melbourne.

Here I was on the cusp of a great insight and discovery, and he was on the verge of divulging that unforgettable truth to me, and in his sixty-five years of wisdom and experience and rural understanding he would have finally been able to eloquently and concisely convey this epiphany in a way that was both relevant to him and to me. We could have adopted this and used it as a mantra; pseudo-intellectuals and wannabe academics would have quoted him for years, though if it just weren't for his incomprehensible state of intoxication, and the other intolerant gentleman he was with.

Bleary-eyed, inarticulate, stumbling and fumbling over words and blending, churning syllables so the dribble just ran from their throats, grunting and sighing, breathing and motioning in a vague proclamation and representation of broken ‘dialogue’.

And in between these moments of intermittent comprehension and the incoherent babbling drool of language, I sat there, eyes fixed, glued to the barstool, and listened. I listened and I sat there transfixed. I had no idea what especially I was trying to look and listen out for, but I felt that this was extremely important. This was communion, and a completely genuine integration with a new place, with a real emergence existing in a chasm within myself.

Everything I thought I heard him say, or everything I thought I heard him primordially express, or that I was perhaps projecting myself into, listening and looking through with rose-coloured glasses, was a wish and a hope to somehow hear the things I intrinsically wanted to hear. This only happened ‘yesterday’ and I'm still not sure, but the mantras and detail and relevance poured from him in torrents, like a rush of blood to my head: “You're a realist, not a purist”; “the most important thing in the world is to be able to express ourselves”, he would say, though his own voice would rise and fall as he choked, spluttered, burped and hiccupped over his own subdued and subverted sentimentality. “At some point reality needs to become a part of …” he said, and abruptly stopped before he could ever finish. And I waited for the closure of that patently grand statement that would not come, anti-climactically. But often closure does not come, we do not receive it, and some of us, like me, are left waiting, on pins and needles, for years to come, in a state of wonder, contemplating what could have been. Most likely nothing, and he probably was merely drunk, not knowing himself what he was actually saying. But you have to wonder about the potential meaning and honesty that could have been there, in that moment. I suppose often some things are better left unsaid, if only for the pure allure and mystery of the moment; that in itself, and for oneself, can become a source of prolonged marvelling and quiet solitary contemplation or re-hashing.

Maybe it’s because this moment and scene were so novel to me, and that is why it was so special. I don’t really know too much, though what I do know is that both of these men seemed intuitive (in a raw bucolic way that I hadn’t really come across before), one to the light, and the other to the dark. The other one had barely spoken, but he saw, cock-eyed though he was, the darkness in me almost instantly: “this is the kind of bloke who would shoot you in the leg and walk off!” he surmised, with a shrieking upward inflection of pitch and tone heralding out those last two words. And he was right, which frightens me, because I know I'm not exactly altruistic any more.

I'm here, this is now, it’s new, and yet it is part of something older, more mature, settled, stubborn and fixated than what I can really grasp or understand. It's subjective, but it has no context, so I have no ideas that I can really cement in anything. I'm simply meandering along in this new environment, drifting within a kind of dam until hopefully my foot can latch on to something, at which point I can start simulating and generating algae in a pool of water, a pond of my own.

These are the babbling truths and confronting conservative value systems that I need to start developing on my own, integrating with, appreciating and understanding if I'm to grow at all here from now on. The need to go off and analyse what a fool hasn’t been trying to say probably won’t serve any purpose but to further distance and isolate me from the truth I am trying so conscientiously to uncover.

And having gone off and walked, tangentially and diagonally across pathways in sober gardens, I have very little to no grounding as to what can possibly happen from this point onwards. Lost and disconnected I repeat my steps and try to adopt a humorous approach, chuckling at the same jokes and commentaries; the greenery and comedy of it all will save me as I keep pacing conservatively, never sitting mindfully, patiently or still enough to produce any grime of my own, and yet I’m infested with ‘this’ knowledge, and that I might ground myself, and refuse to take charge, in confidence.

A Daze to Come True (2014)

For I find myself just wanting to wander around, from place to place, not really doing much—ambling. If I had to choose or describe a vocation, it would be this. Observing things, not with a keen eye, or not the most important things, but merely the vague and the mundane, as they appear or as they come to me. I may turn down a street or an alleyway, into a random building, a café or a restaurant egged on by a gust of wind, a flutter that ushers me this way or that way. I don’t want to learn, to repeat history, to experience the most ecstatic, trying so hard to sap the best juice out of the best experience possible. This is exhausting. If I miss something, it doesn’t exist. If I don’t do something, it never happened. For once, I simply want the spectral gaze of my daze to come true.

A Literary Mitosis (On Form) (2014)

Why do I hyphenate and parenthesise and marginalise so much with a ‘/’ or brackets—with everything else I write coming with an ‘and/or’? Sooner or later a frustrated reader/reviewer will be driven to lecture or criticise me for this, so I will take it upon myself to beat them to the punch. I’m surprised I’ve evaded this issue for so long, particularly since it’s literally staring me in the face almost every single day in the form and format of what and how I write. I guess the most obvious criticism is that it shows a lack of control and mastery over language, an inability to decide on a word or make the right choice because, perhaps, I do not understand the full and proper connotations of every word I select and write with, and why should I? When so many words have apt and adequate synonyms and so many dictionaries define their definitions definitively, yet differently and minimally. So, I make the decision to choose both or either/or. For who am I to choose one word over another? So much of this rambling intellectualised jargon about ‘I’ and integrity and intuition and influence and (un)originality is about the inability to grasp and control everything and one’s expression, whether it is predetermined, (pre)influenced, fatalistic, prodigious, integral, philosophical, or/and so forth. So, I guess I’ve naturally or organically decided over time to use and utilise a form that looks and appears to be rigid when in fact it is loose and lucid at best. One thing says more than only one thing using these devices and interwoven formats. I want this writing to have connotations and implications and insinuations, saying more with less and expanding upon vocabulary and linguistics, using tools that shorten and sharpen and cut to ironically elaborate and engage and grasp, breaking and branching out onto or into more by making more out of clasping, fastening but also separating, distinguishing and dividing—a literary mitosis.

The Mission Man (2014)

Though it can also be a speedy transition; a mission of sorts. For I am, can be and have been the mission man, where things irregularly flow from one to the next.

In fact, there is no flow, so much as there is an immediate changeover. As much as I love the ‘in-between’, I attempt to eliminate as much of the time between the ‘in-between’ as I can, in order to be moving on to the next thing. The very next thing is always the thing to be most excited about. And as much as I wanted to come here, then and now, I am disgusted with this place in this moment. Not to mention, I’ve already been here. And I didn’t like it the first time. So why would I enjoy it the second? A persistent delusion of insanity and self-sabotage and the setting up of oneself to fail in the perpetual moment—the moment that is (unendingly) out of reach in the very near future. I was tired of being there so now I am here, and as soon as I am here I want to be there, right now. But I immediately destroy that precious ‘in-between’ as soon as I arrive in the constant and ongoing now-moment because I decide right away that the next thing will be better.

Unable to grapple with the overly ambient or vague concepts in ‘self-help’ books like Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, I—the mission man—liken or align myself more so with the notion of Jack Kerouac’s falling (failing, or flailing) star idea in On the Road: “I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop” (113).

Because, as the psychologist Daniel Kahneman indicates, there is a “conflict between your experiencing self and your remembering self” (238): the experiencing or “current self is the one experiencing life in real time” (236), the remembering self, on the other hand, has to make “all the big decisions. It is happy when you sit back and reflect on your life up to this point and feel content” (237). There is a serious imbalance between these two different selves and the reality that is formed in one’s mind about one’s life as a consequence of this imbalance (238). These two differing selves or perspectives have to be a well-balanced combination of one and the other. “You have to be happy in the flow of time while simultaneously creating memories you can look back on later” (McRaney 238-39).

Conversely, Tolle would argue that there is only the self that exists in the now, and that anything that has happened no longer exists, and anything that will happen does not exist yet, and so both past and future are seemingly irrelevant to one’s sense of contentedness and joy (in the now). I, the mission man, though, tend to lean towards a more Kerouacian approach. I feel helpless in my restless pursuits, endeavours and desires to travel and constantly move, neither fully satisfying oneself or the other, in my tenacious impulsivity.

The funny thing is this makes me stuck in an altogether different kind of ‘in-between’ anyway!

I’m walking, no, running—I am on a mission. There’s always something that needs to be arranged, organised, done—not felt.

The present-now-moment ‘stayers’ watch me, befuddled. “Why can’t he just relax?” they say or think to themselves.

“But I’ll stray from a straight line. I’ll just stray ‘til I’m gone” is what I think to myself in response to their glances, statements and questioning looks.

Like an eccentric ass, I roam and stumble on in a daze, as the figurative apple (of life) swings on a string in front of me.

An Apple on a String Swings in Front of Me (2014)

An apple on a string swings in front of me, dangling in suspense and freeing me from homogeny (a lie)? I look forward through the fence and see the grass is greener, but blurred in my insistent periphery is that laborious fruit compelling forth my effort and greed and corrupted desires, incorrect in all the right ways, to others.

The Island (2015)

Motions frustrated, the predictability of it now. The stagnation follows the same recourse over and over again. Before, now, then after. So obvious, like a mathematical pattern, perfect and (in)solvable in its eloquence.

Majesty. The initiation of social and flirtatious interactions are always perfect. To his friends he comes off as a professional, superficially only, really. The internalised monologue—the soliloquy stews on itself—outwardly, blaming everything else. He could pacify and nullify, reach out to change, became a gamer like the rest, ‘sarging’ with false pretences and smiles turned ‘true’, like the phantom of prowess and the cavalier in us all.

The blame could go further back, to varying circumstances, orbiting incessantly in the streams of imperceptible consciousness.

Staring at voluptuousness, enjoying it, and then turning back to the luminous phosphorescent screens of blankness and nihilism. Sigh and sigh again; he almost has a panic attack. The intuition is there, deep-seated, and probably wrong. Not knowing how to address addresses, then signing off charmingly, poetically, over-the-top in his formality.

Sculpting, perfecting, working at the self—that could help—or, otherwise, it’s all in the countenance, the personality, the self-sabotage or the self-aggrandising.

One intact, in the bag and on her way, while the other (lesser) sits on pins and needles, sick. So, he is sick, sickens himself, stooping lower and lower every day. A sickness, an unrelenting perversion to want and to need and to desire desire. But really the craving is quite neutral, natural, simplified. And, so, the sickness is a systematic perversion pervading and invading everybody else’s personal space.

Apologies.

But forgiveness comes, eventually, tainted by a pity and a need to justify spirituality in the eyes of the on(c)e true beholder. Once resolved, again, back to the screen, back to the phosphorescence, back to the addressing of addresses, of formalism and an awkward charmless countenance on pins and needles and desiring of desire ‘til nothing else remains. Retire, leave, exit the room.

Find comfort in the isolation which really is ultimately preferred but external pressures force a forcefulness onto everybody else: let’s break down and break apart these connectives and relationships one by one for the sake of a nothingness that saturates the heart and soul forming and creating and inspiring a restlessly racing beat on a drum, out of key, out of tune, out of time with the intuition that is needed to perform the actual task.

An analogy of the tactless man as an island:

The shore vainly folds over and under the veil

Wave upon wave sustained in the name of a tidal game

Now the stage is set for all to witness the journey, the whim

Destitute and resolute he flounders precisely and ‘wins’

The Spirit of the Times (2013)

zeitgeist

The amorous subject feels uncomfortably well adjusted to a collective state of stagnant (dis)reality from which he attempts to escape via an exalted and explosive cocktail of self-destruction and personal liberation.

1 We are a self-destructive generation and gradually face a state of deterioration that is completely subjective and totally ill-equipped for our little cluster. Whether we face war, booms, love, or the advances of technology, we all suffer endurably and unwontedly. We fiends must face the facts, but not before the next generation take over, and we vainly attempt to spill our irrelevant advice onto them, and they shelter themselves from it in their erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence.

2 My dreary eyes wonder and anticipate the future and all other future zeitgeist generations that are yet to come and yet to churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! It’s so damn cyclical! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory; for humankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.

3 We ponder in the grey morning in the heaving wooden cabin at the centre of a modern medieval city, having been followed by a bout of drunkenness and confetti brain cell celebrations, and ironic devastations. We sit there and drink stale beer and talk with excited tongues about the word zeitgeist. Time and ghost—a Germanic infusion—an intoxicating cocktail that ensnares and captivates our senses in the most compulsive and reactionary form of excitement. We stand at the edge of reason and jump straight into this fleeting, transitory, yet pivotal moment. We engage and commit to it completely.

4 We sink into a state of exhausted and exalted delirium in which we try to comprehend the bitterness of the sour morning in order to transcend our meagre mortal bodies and become captivated by our own excited notions. Wide-eyed and mad we collaboratively communicate with one another.

5 For we are absolutely and completely engulfed by the system of ethics, attitudes, and morality which we are symptomatically prescribed at an early age—we are nurtured to adhere and abide by certain principles and perspectives from the most impressionable and foetal age. It is the fatal syndrome and entrapment within a skewed field of vision in this postmodern era.

A Sentimental Cynic (2013)

The most frightening and simultaneously liberating thing I can imagine is the sensation derived from absolute and complete loneliness and isolation. I have experienced such a moment. Trapped in the void of my own imagination and excessive thoughtlessness, I found a critical and pivotal form of transcendental clarity. What if there was such a thing as eternity and it was accessible from the arch of the brow and the scope of the mind? And yet there I was, lying sprawled across the floor of a room—the physicality of the situation was real, lucid—and I realised that if I attempted to step outside its doors, I would float into an endless vacuum, and I would be totally alone and my actions would have absolutely no consequences, and I would become and enact my previous lives, up to and including the most recent, in which I had animalistic qualities that I now fail to adequately grasp. Yet I now have total familiarity and reciprocal appreciation for the potentiality of these possibilities. And I was immersed in silent contemplation, and there was so much peace and clarity in this isolation. I began to writhe violently on the floor and engaged in all the rigid-less and residually resonating bodily movements and behavioural motions that would either be deemed unfit, or unnecessary, or unreal or impractical in everyday life. There are actions like this. There are movements like this. The body has the subliminal and subconscious capacity to move of its own free will, and when it does it is devoid of any other responsibilities previously committed to the ego or by the ego, or vice versa, or to the confines of the earth and the upside-down topsy-turvy shelter of the ground beneath the souls of our feet.

The body is malleable and permeable and has the ability to be liberated by the mind’s insidious concentration—to become another organism: a seal, a lotus flower, a parasitical insect hovering over the treetops and mountaintops and yoghurt tops of the containers, tinned cans, atmospheres, ultraviolet rays streaming from the neon lights and hidden messages and fetishes and uncontrollable impulses that are contained and limited by reason, or, in other words, logical and systematic restriction of the wandering ghost of TIME and IT.

And, thus, I am aesthetically free in the centre of this room—this kitchen smouldering with crystalline clarity—in the centre of the universe in which my actions and bodily behaviours have no other consequences but are made primarily for the purpose that they are MADE and that is all. They serve no other function, and that is settling. For it is rare to behave in a way that does not dictate foresight or reminiscence or hindsight or nostalgia—it is rare to behave in such a way that simply fulfils the purpose of IS and DOES and nothing more. And I am satisfied and content in this room with walls and if I do choose to leave through THAT door in the corner, I will enter THAT vacuum of space, and that is my personal prerogative. That is my impulse—my choice.

Yet I notice that there is someone else physically present in here, and he is pouring orange juice, and he is pacing and marching powerfully. Power-marching and pouring juice—these are the fruitful juices of our quenched labour: self-sufficiently satisfying and reciprocating the vitamins and minerals evident in this fantastic room with a doorway that leads to infinite self-satisfaction and SPACE and TIME. The duality becomes clear: action and reaction—onward forward momentum and speed.

I peered out of the window in the room. The sky appeared to be moving, though it may have been the room itself. Or perhaps time is in a playful projection of sky and stars that occasionally dance around and explode into an image of ultimate infinity, and what some saints or mystics or believers might refer to as God, who was reincarnated in the night sky, stemming from a cluster and combination of bright shining mythical lights glaring and projecting their past tens of thousands of years into the future and into the current contemplative contempt-filled contemporary world. Stars—they are the real philosophers—the time travellers of future incomprehensible destinies that we simply cannot fathom—our potential is too unrefined to compete with such forces of grandeur that live and breathe and swell and implode in the restlessly racing night sky.

Yet my dreary eyes continue to wonder and anticipate the future and all other future generations yet to come and churn the minds, spirits, and bodies of thoughtful thoughtlessness, thinking tirelessly about all and everything. I wonder about these people, and what they’ll look like and what they’ll say about us! We are but another generation and we will not be the last. And we stand at a precipice of wonder and fear and glory, for humankind will always maintain a sense of self that can be best described as frivolously in love with life, regardless of the endless adversity that clouds our endeavours.

Yet we shelter ourselves and themselves and yourselves and all selves that are mimicked and mimed and translucent and adjacent to their own sense of self. This room—this cluster of collective experience and truth and ‘Dharma’ and IT and TIME—as insightful as it all may be, it cannot be enacted or produced in any artificial way. It is too unreal, too unorthodox, too strange and alien and foreign and unpredictable. Our collective selves cannot REALISE the now. It is too much of a frightening thought. As frightening as the ironic fear and timidness in which I initially approached the trajectory of this projection room. It is frightening and liberating. Simultaneously, of course. But it is reason and logic that will always be victorious. Those sinners have a firmer ‘understanding’ of the realities of perception and its rigidity as something that is ingrained and anchored and clawed into the now-frozen streams of our conscious mind. And, so, we continue to shelter our ‘selves’ in our erratic displays of angst and self-destructive peacocking portrayals of vulnerable yet violent independence—a continually restless battle between mind and matter and what actually matters in the mind.

‘Til Morning Came (2013)

There are certain times, points of the day, that instil a sparse consciousness—a recognition had many times before by many others over the course of human history. This is time, and these are times felt and to be felt by others, in obscurity or promiscuity, vanity, selflessness, or loneliness.

Last night I lay awake ‘til morning came, and the sun shone through the cracks of my drawn curtains, and I tried to ignore the slight rays. Throughout the night I kicked and churned and writhed around in bed, making an absolute mess of my doona covers, and the pillows, which I held tightly or kicked violently yet fervently, here and there. I scrunched them up and held them and punched them or pinned them down in a mangled jumble of ecstasy and softness, and pleasure. And eventually a romantic kind of calm ensued from this incensed love.

Over the course of the night and the hours that dragged by, I thought about my relationships with the various people in my life. I was sentimental, yet I pondered my interactions with these folk, these friends and family, these associates, these charming entities, in quite a detached way. I thought of ‘us’ as a whole, an organism and my place (with)in that organism, and what I actually mean, what my place is among all these collected perspectives?

A change definitely came about in me. I considered my regrets and played out the storylines and the narratives of how things would have been and could have been in some of my relationships if I’d known what I do now. I thought about how different the story would have turned out, how much closer I would have been with some that I am now estranged from, and how much more distant I could have been with the ones I am now closer to—the ones I do not need, respect or appreciate any more.

The tragedy in the matter is that it is almost impossible to reignite a flame with the people lost in plights of stupidity, or gradual, graduating, deteriorating detachment. And it is just as impossible to disconnect with the ones clamped to your lifeline or stuck like mosquitoes in the sap of a tree, oozing alongside you, until hardened and stuck in place by time, sort of like that determining scene in Jurassic Park (1993).

So, you cut yourself down and leave the broken forest, town or city from whence you came, and still that sap trails along with you, stuck to your side uncomfortably, lukewarm, despite the recognition you just do not have any fondness for it these days.

Last night my cynicism was nil.

Today I am tainted by the everyday monotony of my rambling groans, droning on as usual.

Last night I was affectionate to all. I considered the avenues and possibilities of love that I should direct outwardly. I thought about my dedications to one or the other. I considered putting my trepidations aside, and the doubt that is always there. I considered lying in bed with a multitude of partners and telling them truths, all true, but unique and individualised, personalised to all of those lovers, physical or not.

I considered kindness as a new form or brand of my personality—something that only really ever existed with traces of sarcasm that are way too ingrained to tolerate or are perhaps in the process of becoming so. I considered replacing my cold, hardened (now flabby) body with hope and a sense of fulfilment that others may intuitively recognise and take for themselves. I considered blossoming in the fecundating pool of dreariness and misery, closed off from others, looking upwards at the sky and the stars, and protected by further aggravation that others cannot see. I thought about changing superficially, and how that change might somehow lodge itself into deeper sensations, reviving them with the promise of goodness, genuine excitement and yearning.

I thought about reparations, justice, and community once again. I considered the importance of optimism and its effects on the self over time, time and time again.

I thought about these things—I considered them—I even believe in some of them now.

Normally there would be a ‘but’ in there somewhere, and even now I am searching for the problematique, but for now there is none. There is just relief.

Tears (im)practically came to my eyes as I contemplated the love I sincerely and genuinely do have to offer, but a hardened shell of contempt shields me from what I actually want. ‘Self-sabotage’ is my motto; I have nothing to gain from this but a resolute sterility that no one cares about, or that anyone wants to touch. Why bother then? It is more of an effort to hide behind this shield than to care and subsequently not have a care in the world.

Herein lies a ‘slice of (my) life’, influenced by not so much a feeling or a sensation but an attitude towards a betterness/bitterness, an attitude that can act as the driving force … an attitude that can, over time, be acted upon, fulfilling the ideals and desires I have released here.

Alter yourself, or enforce alterations, and the result will be an inevitable compromise of an attitude that could sanctify your spirit and the will to save yourself or myself (again); that is an important lesson I have learnt about myself.

Now run.

When looking into the essence or “quintessences” of human nature, perhaps experiencing enlightenment does not always necessarily have to stem from a “long” and “immense” period of time and derangement of the senses, as Rimbaud (9) insisted. The human response does not always have to be a passionate one, when confronted with ultimatums, the pinnacles, ‘fight or flight’ scenarios, radically menacing or dangerous environments and situations. How the individual reacts and copes when at the very precipice of fear or terror or anger or lust or revenge or whatever, is to find deep-seated internal precipice. And when something mundane, trivial or tedious does occur, what does that mean and what can we derive from it, symbolically and metaphorically, when one is reacting or feeling or thinking with a full heart and mind right then and there? I am not sure, but is that reversal of emotion and transcendental clarity an impossibility? In a sense, that is one of the things I am trying to realise here: the everyday, relatable or not, triggers of a soul/psyche in a consciously settled reality … in motion (walking, running, accommodating, associating, traversing, travelling).

“There’s a Road Train Going Nowhere” (2013)

When the following was written, I sporadically divided most of my time between Brisbane, Rockhampton and Melbourne, where I tended to do a lot of driving along Australia’s eastern coast and the National Highway. In doing so I frequently saw the turn-off for the town of Tarcutta in south-western New South Wales, on the M31, and I thought of Josephine Rowe. Every time I wondered if I should make the turn and try to vicariously see what she romantically saw in that rural area, inspiring her to write the short story, and the Tarcutta Wake anthology. Perhaps I’ll come across the same old broken-down and decrepit 1940s style automobile stuck in the branches of a dead (Snow Gum) tree, as is portrayed in a black and white photograph, on the cover of her book—an apt iconic portrayal (or perhaps a borrowed Americanised image). In any case, the image of the car in the tree conveys a rustic and quixotic type of imagery. I wanted to try and convey that same kind of imagery, if I could …

We begin to drive westward, departing from Townsville and into the night. A sense of energy, excitement and apprehension circulates within and around us. We grow silent, but why? Is it difficult to leave the comfort of the coast, perhaps? The coast made sense. It has always made sense. It is difficult letting go of that logic. Trees thinned, and ranges flattened into the secluded plains and scrublands that now grow more and more unfamiliar in their destitute simplicity. The echoes from the crashing surf and bustling city centre and the general roar of the population subsides and penetrates no longer. Our silence turns into contemplation, turns into meditation, turns into a respectful isolation, and still we continue to drive onwards, breaking free from the edges of the world as we drive further away from its fringes.

Music is playing. In fact, it has always been playing in the car, but we have only just realised that. We are waiting for something: something big, ominous, threatening perhaps. We’d all heard stories about road trains leading up to this journey, but none of us had ever actually seen one, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to tackle a road train within the insignificance, vulnerability and (dis)comfort of our automobile. The music grows louder, or maybe merely seems louder. A throbbing and cyclical bass line, and in the midst of a wailing and harmonious yet dissonant harmonica growls the vocal sensibilities of a young impassioned Peter Garrett, proclaiming: “There’s a road train going nowhere.” And coincidentally, right at this moment, the road train manifests itself. The great mammoth of Australian pride and industry, transportation and solidity looms out of the darkness. A beast foreboding, forbearing and ingraining itself into the earth around us, trembling, shaking, determined it growls rising up from the horizon before us. Lights. A dark shape lurching ever so carefully forward as we hurry or scuttle towards it. Eyes sparkling, lustrous and moon-shaped, our irises recede into the background of our minds. It is a giant, a titan of production and productivity. Rogue and nomadic in essence, it knowingly owns and rides that road.

Australia is one of the only continents or countries to have road trains in use. The only other countries that have and use them are Argentina, Mexico, the United States and Canada (as far as I know).

A monochromatic sheen coats its body, its armour. Too many wheels and too many metres long. Signposted in black and yellow, a fair warning is given to the oblivious, to the naïve and to the overly ambitious. A blackened, darkened cockpit. An anonymous driver never to be seen by others on the road, except for perhaps other drivers of other road trains and the ‘other’ of more metaphysical realms. These are the dominating species. They control the habitat of these barren roads. We must be respectful to them or perish.

Shrubbery flies in front of and behind us. A kangaroo leaps. Cicadas chatter and chime away somewhere and everywhere in the distance. But the ratios of the animalistic and natural world are all skewed and wrong in comparison to this towering object. So grand, so large, so overwhelmingly powerful it dominates the night sky creating a black hole of some sort unto itself. All the powers of the world seep into it. The night turns light by comparison. I think I can still see the sun gleaming somewhere off in the distance, but I can’t exactly pinpoint it—the road train is silhouetted by the powers of the world.

But where is the road train going? Is Garrett correct? Is it going nowhere? It’s certainly not stuck or stationary. It has motion and momentum and speed, yet it continues to drive into nothingness, into the outback of absurdity and delirium, into nowhere, in fact. It goes because it needs to go. It propels and projects itself. Its purpose is grander than what we are simply led to believe. Its journey and travels are both the means and the ends of its existence. Through universe and time and change it persists and endures as an icon of Australian industry and power.

Across the great red plains of the Australian outback the road spirals into the centre of an old prehistoric world now dried up. The road train conquers, controls, manoeuvres this road. These road behemoths were built to exist here together; an enforced harmony with our indigenous history and our industrial and multicultural present and future; an uneasy synchronisation, unified by the smoky black tires that the road train attaches itself to the road with, gliding, soaring further into the tranquil inverse universe that is the National Highway.

Very close now. We are right behind it. It shudders. No, we shudder at the prospect of having to somehow actually ‘pass’ this titan. No, no one will do it. Respect the giant. Leave it be. It owns the road. It owns the night. It owns itself. We will not overtake the road train this night.

After long absences from living in Australia, when I have lived in Poland for instance, the Australian landscape does change and look very different to me. It becomes fluorescent, like the brightness and contrast has been turned way up on a television screen or monitor. I find myself squinting a lot more due to the intensity of the sun reflecting against the burnished surfaces of Australian flora and fauna. Normally, when I am residing in Australia, the landscape of the bush seems quite barren, bleak, brown, light green and grey. But from a European or migrant perspective, and depending on which season a migrant is travelling from their country to Australia in, the landscape of Australia can appear quite different and distorted through compromised eyes.

The imagery employed by many Australian writers, including the contemporary Rowe, and going back to the beginnings of white Australian writers in the works of Lawson and Paterson, all tend to grapple with the conflict or contrast between the bush and the city, nature versus industry, an old world versus a new world.

The “bush” and the “city” were symbols that somewhat negated each other (Whitlock 197). “The city and the country were established as separate moral universes” (200). This conflict, and the Australian art and writing that has come about over the years highlighting it, creates “a staging point for immigrants; a haven for the drifter, the outcast, the man or woman with a past; a twilight zone of rootlessness and anomie” (194). “So we will never arrive at the “real” Australia. From the attempts of others to get there, we can learn as much about the travellers and the journey itself, but nothing about the destination. There is none” (Whitlock 25). This is highly relevant for me, and my endlessly dispersed selves.

“The Writer on Holiday” or Clockwork (2014)

Pure sentiment and a godliness that comes from the rejuvenation and reunion of soulful companions, a band of brothers separated by time in the form of years, and space in the form of long, cross-continental distances:

And yet, still and quietly, in sequential rushes of euphoria:

Tidal forces churn again

To flow aside the current trend

I walk for miles

I wonder through hazy trials

Change the course of modern men

To race against the clockwork bend

I run for miles

In exalted, exhausted strides

Now look for truth beyond the fair,

Where I alone become the heir

I walk for miles

I wonder through hazy isles

Rekindled vigour, an energy formed through bonds and heartfelt leaps of faith: bounding, cyclical, beautiful, ecstatic, genuine. A short-term breeze and a rather cool summer in which the warmth has been reduced and absorbed by men who have taken a break, a holiday from themselves, and instead embraced themselves and one another.

In Barthes’ Mythologies there is a chapter entitled “The Writer on Holiday” which states that a writer on holiday may stop working or physically writing, but that he never stops “at least producing” (30). The writing or the thoughts and processes continue to exist in the back of the mind. One doesn’t choose when inspiration comes—ideas and thoughts that often and sometimes happen to permeate and invade the conscious configuration of the self. The “writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop” (Barthes 30). The creative writer definitely takes their work home with them, and also away with them when they travel, where they inevitably suffer from a pestering doom, a conscience that is incessant and insatiable—an unrequited will.

In her piece “Hemingway’s Typewriter” Robyn Ferrell’s says, “The writer has a vocation, not a job, so that even while on holiday he is working, whether he is reading or taking notes or doing nothing. Indeed, to go on holiday is to work, for the writer, since all his experience is writing in potentia” (27).

There is a reinvigoration that occurs after a writer takes a holiday (from journeying). The physical writing is fresh, but it is never very far from the mind. Writing occurs and often changes or becomes different when self-discipline is removed from the context of the writer’s personal, emotional or social life.

A Train Ride to Russia in 2007 (2015)

Transient populations roll by and roll on, sideways, somewhat and partially slanted and always in the upper right corner of my eye, where the sun peaks in the morning and sheds its light through moving windows, pa(i)ned and streaked glass that glows with the coming of heat and clearer uncertainty. No longer arctic—the chill is suffocated by a distance and vaulting horizon, insurmountable and without permission, it glows and rises like the daze of the day(s) to come.

The reawakened eye explodes into new vision. After taking a pill, a minor slumber, and then I’m jolted into sudden awareness by the tittering tracks beneath the train, and behold, a sight; we’re heading east. The night has passed in a kind of sobriety when I contemplate the fact that now I have this new way of seeing things. The cabin/room comes to life, illuminated by a new-fangled light. I’m sitting up, while the others in the room are asleep in the same space, but the momentum of the train and the tracks and the grind and progressive swagger and sway projects us onwards.

A different headspace now: the one I was seeking, but I’m always surprised when it ignites, as it seems to come after a dreary, sleepy delirium of some sort. A dream from which I don’t think I will wake but then I do, and I’m in another dream inspired by a distorted kind of reality. My eyes now fully open and wandering, I stand up, reach for the door of the cabin and step out into the corridor where more light is shining through—I am looking left and right, and I shuffle my feet a little more steadily, carefully.

I muster up a modicum of grace as I sway to and fro, walking down the corridor towards the rear of the train. I can see from a few metres away, through the small circular porthole in the back door of this last train carriage that there are two fellows, still awake from the night just passed, in the breaking dawn of the day, sharing a cigarette and some conversation, discussing sweet nothings in the sincerity of the morning and the sleeplessness and tiredness that can make us honest sometimes, if only in grimly expression.

I step outside to greet them with my unusual stance, feeling rather peculiar with my new diluted vision. I’m hunched a little as they look at me and roll on with their stammering chat, the last of the beer and vodka, lukewarm and nearly empty in their hands as they take a small sip and a little toke now and then, both of which are going to have an infinitesimal effect in the aftermath of the night just now officially concluded with the heavy rise of a new sun over that vaulting horizon, demanding some kind of rigour and stamina from us ignoble folk who continue to defy convention as we travel towards a new and unknown (to us anyway) east. We believe we are pioneers as we stutter and stammer and take the journey for granted, but we (or I) definitely feel here in the moment, now, more so than I ever have before.

The pill, a sleeping tablet for insomniacs, produced in me a kind of effect that was so difficult to understand and comprehend at the time, a giddily distilled sense of experience, two-pronged in its psychological manifestation; I believed I was in a constant state of déjà vu, whilst experiencing and remembering life and what was going on around me concurrently.

One of the fellows outside, neither of whom I knew, asked me something about what they’d just been discussing, to which I retorted that I didn’t know or that I knew nothing, and proceeded to comment on his shoes, which I claimed I knew everything about.

I knew everything about them because he’d just told me about them after I’d asked him. But because the medication, was causing me to recall and experience in the now, simultaneously, I was confused about what was happening and what had already just happened. They both looked at me puzzled also, and I, still hunched and perplexed and amazed at my own ability to predict the … now, dismissed both of them with a wave of the hand that rudely motioned the smoke from their cigarette away from the small space between us. The wisp of cloud dissipated quickly, as did the conversation, and any mutual interest or understanding we had established.

I looked away, back towards the east. They stalled for a moment and after a short while continued on with their sweet nothings. All three of us out there on the rear balcony of the train were too delirious, either from the night, the booze, or our state of medicated or prophetic exhaustion, to care about courtesy or social sincerity at that point in time. No, it was more anti-social than anything. I knew I was waving at and into people’s personal space, dispersing the smoke between bodies, a hunchback in a world apart.

Nevertheless, the east shone with sudden clarity in the midst of this entire anti-climactic ruckus. The train curved left, and I was able to see the glow of the east with much more instilled potency. It was a new primordial world, where I couldn’t see beyond the horizon or even beyond the front of the train due to the compacted darkness and shadows of the land. There was no way of seeing the beyond. The world was covered in black and blue. The clickety clack was the only noise I paid attention to. I was remembering and experiencing this at the same time. The horizon stopped us from seeing into the future as we simultaneously moved towards it. All conversations stopped here before they began and were understood and comprehended before a singular utterance was made, or at least it felt this way to me. Everything was coming and going, moving forward and standing still, being seen and being ejected out from the horizon back towards us as we gazed in perplexity and fondness towards it, all in the motion of the moving tracks that we rocked and rolled and swayed over and over again. We existed in the abysmal infinity mirrors beneath our feet, caught in the motion of an unchanging and unremitting Doppler effect.

Déjà Vu Delirium (2013)

Dean Moriarty, in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), once said, “the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible” (191). What was it, though—this invisible “thing”? What was he saying? What was he thinking? The potential for the justification or explanation of this concept is manifold: the intrigue, the intuition, the naivety, stupidity or obliviousness. A benzedrine-fuelled madness stimulated his systematic conceptions of ‘time’ and ‘it’ and other tangible or intangible concepts. He was a fool, a holy man, a con artist, a goof and a kicker in the constant tireless and reckless pursuit of kicks. How can this statement be trusted then? What faith or divinity or reality can be accepted in this notion of all notions, if at all a notion? This grand statement of grandeur. “Look no further! The answer is here!” someone (I) sarcastically mimicked and mocked in the background of the dreary soulless landscape. Moriarty’s enthusiastic, yet vague comment in turn, and in all fairness, requires a similarly obscure answer.

Travelling tirelessly is an attempt to conquer something, anything, all things perhaps. In any case, the horizon itself is one thing that subscribes to many of these attributes and elements. Constantly unfolding and receding and revealing and reigniting sparks of energy as we propel ourselves forward into it or from it or alongside it. We struggle to surmount it, overcome it, know it, beat it, bear it, to encapsulate everything and gain the cumulative knowledge that both drives us and that we drive ourselves upon. To digress, in an attempt to gain a sense of transgression—to do so at any cost. Coast to coast, take my hand into your hand. And beat on racing forwards and onwards. Doubt. There is doubt. What will be the repercussions of reservation? What is the mirror to this story? What is the opposite of exalted exhaustion and moving for the sake of motion? Deep-seated fulfilment from experience, ownership of doubt, ownership of transcendence, in one way or another. To see and experience the world simultaneously. Well, that’s obvious … Stilnox (the sleeping tablet). Déjà vu delirium. Enough said. But no, this is something slightly different. The world is spherical. No doubt about it. Stop putting faith in the horizon then. Just because your natural vision and the horizon somehow together are barring you from what you want to see. You can’t own them simultaneously in some kind of naïve omniscient and omnipresent synchronisation. And so, hence, doubt. Consequences of reservation and doubt will follow on.

Mirror: invert the latitude linearity of the horizon and this regret will now proceed to pain and slay me and try me for many days to come. It will quiver and waver and defeat me as I progress or do not progress in my day-to-day, hour-to-hour, roll on and roll out and still continue to replicate fate and chance and the struggle to go on.

The opportunity was entirely there, and conscience got the better of me. That wicked demon that instils paranoia and fear and what is quite possibly wrong, on a fundamental level. What can I do now? What shall I do now? Conscience has caused me pain. Conscience has caused me regret. Conscience has ironically caused me mischievous wrong-doing of the worst kind.

Ride it out, wait, be patient, the nightmare will pass and blow over. There will be another time, another opportunity. But not like this one, not like this one (I mutter). This was the one, and it is over. And another lengthy chip has been struck and splintered away from the wooden, splayed fragmented character of my body, my being. A being or entity chipped away at until less solidity remains, until less remains, until nothing remains. Shame. It hurts me, but not because of the pain, but because there is now less of myself. A pain associated with a lacking of—of therein, of within, of nothing. Time and the timelessness of the sneaking conniving devil of regret and conscientiousness will inevitably and soulfully and meaningfully break me down. So here are the two options: you commit, fly, ride, stride in a desperate state of fluctuating mortality or morality in which the means is the end and nothing makes sense and the purposeful purposelessness of your journey is foolish but fulfilling; or you doubt, regret, let your conscience get the better of this damn thing, this situation, this mirror, this fluctuating principality that shreds at you in the dark corners of rooms and you suffer and think and ponder like a child, getting annoyed for not having leaped at these opportunities, even though the opportunities were so foolish and ridiculous to begin with. It’s silly and ironic to still think this way, and yet still be this way too—a counter intuitive paradox, yet human nature is synonymous with this type of (self) resentment and an unrighteous sense of crude entitlement; these things are worth saying too.

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part I) (2013)

Coast to coast infrequency, continentally settled or perhaps ‘submerged’, I play the role well, but not well enough to suppress the cravings and desires to leave and situate myself on mirrored coastal plains, snow-coated peaks, to swim in torrential rivers in great seeping valleys, engage depravity and isolation amongst the mass of alienating strangers and to feed my hunger and thirst, absorbing the (dis)comfort and solace made from and in the cusped hands of an inverted host.

The plan was to seek out, find and embrace redemption, to refuel the empty, twittering gauge, to reset the cycle, bring vibrancy back to my sagging face and bring lustre back into my drooping eyes; tired but restlessly racing underneath the same and similar skies of the day-to-day and day-by-day drone, I holler (ever so quietly)! The desire was real, sincere.

Instead, I (counter) intuitively fixate myself in the overly frequented corners, dark places and strobing, conniving lights of discotheques that were made in these watering holes and the artificial oases overseas for the abuse and suppression of personal growth. But these places merely highlight the familiarity and mediocrity of my own coast.

Stagnated and alone, I feel the quaking thunder and the waves swelling and crashing. They physically manifest themselves on the beach as well as in the depths of my brain, the pressure in my skull and the conflicted pains I feel in my mind; my obsessive compulsion, my paranoia, my fatigue, my cynicism, my angst, my jealousy and my spite all bubble to the surface, swelling and crashing in a cyclical rotation that reverses and contrasts the purity and beauty of the waves before my eyes. I sabotage myself, knowingly, consciously—the pattern or patent of my youth.

I lie dejected, finally, by the seaside in the paradise that I sought out. The experience has been violated. No more sincerity spills forth. My original pure intention is all but gone. Instead mere toxicity and chemistry and a sweat tainted by an egocentric and awkward fear courses through my veins and the drains of my silent delirium and the Incan(tantory) street. I dream of the other coast, my coast, the foreign yet familiar tones—herein lies, my quiet defeat, but I will celebrate at home, and to others, nonetheless. The coast to coast infrequency will ebb and flow again.

[A]n inner compulsion to move on—it was still not clear to him where to—troubled him. (Mann 12)

Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden. (Mann 19)

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice can relate to the darker side of ‘travel’, and the often superficial pretentiousness of it. We always feel compelled to convey the ‘travel’ experience to others as having been positive or revelatory, whereas this isn’t always the case. Instead we often subject ourselves to the grotesque depravity in dark places on the other side of the world whilst we formulate a fake romanticised version of what actually did or did not happen to ‘us’ over ‘there’.

Travel (for a youth) can be about pushing oneself to uncomfortable limits in order to ensure we have ventured as ‘far out’ as possible, but really all we do is destroy ourselves and forget our experiences. And all we remember is the regret and suffering and frustration, and the need for love and respect in the eyes of others to whom the exact same thing is happening (sometimes) when they are abroad. So, really it is a dishonest farce and façade that we tell ourselves and others to keep the perpetual ‘frequency’ going, to and from different coasts and shores and lands and continents.

Coast to Coast Infrequency (Part II) (2013)

Coastally and inwardly focused once again

Solitary journeys, an accentuated tic of time spread out

And attempts at deprecating and appreciating the self more

Not so much needing others, and then finding that others gravitate

And circulate more easily and at ease

Jarring attempts at stinted and jolted-stagnant communication

And dialogue still exists

Trying just as hard but for only half the time

A course, of course, of plenitude:

Pick and choose your moments … better

Is there a need to?

Coughing and scoffing followed by a disarming sincerity

And a smile that could actually change you

The niceties, vice-less and true …

A casual mantra along the lines of ‘being alone, and that being okay/fine’ could be applied here in an attempt to gain a psychological stability that stems from a simple desire to be alone and be comfortable with that. Sometimes there is no need to engage and be engaging with others in social settings all of the time—the tired and restless self with an act or need to portray energy and enthusiasm.

The imagery and ‘daze’ of the coast continue to be prevalent metaphors for a state of mind, being undone.

Ghouls (2014)

The coast seems quiet today, though. Deafened, silenced—no hum. Gentle murmurs, maybe. Nothing is happening. The population has been subdued or otherwise has subsided. Everyone looks mildly suspicious, but no one will venture to voice his or her concerns. It’s a weekend weakened, but it seems more like a weak end to the plain planetary cycle. Entire systems have shut down, but maybe this is all a result of the volume being turned down for my own selfish reasons or my own reasoning, unjustifiable dystopia, with eyes reddened and sore from the sensory exposure to my ghoulish thoughtless selves ramming themselves, against the grain, outside my bedroom wall, the night before.

End of the Weekend (2014)

Intense temporary bonds and relationships. Difficult to justify? A steep ascent as opposed to a gradual climb; a disappointed overworked air carries us through to the end of the weekend. Paradise sorrows—it is a tense, terse humiliation that we choose to embrace or to ignore. Others notice it more in us. But that could also easily be the dysfunctional, ill-equipped, undisciplined, stifling goggles that we wear. Stake your future on or in these reckoned experiences, forcing the soul to expand as the dust never seems to settle, and we ignore certain choice cuts, words, shabby looks or commentaries being made, whilst continuously shedding skin.

Going Home (2014)

Canyons of thought whisper through the stillness of their depths and predicate a secondary madness.

You need time to stop, and then more time to stop again, in order to then have the free time to actually think for a while—to process everything: homogeneity. The vagabond sits and stews, desperate to get away from the slow-paced cluttered group.

Something ‘funny’ happens and some fit, clucky middle-aged women come along asking me to take photographs of them. At least they’re not taking ‘selfies’. I like this generation. I don’t think too much truly fazes (or ever fazed) them. They belonged to that whole Fleetwood Mac era, after all.

Finally, a focus comes in like a stream, and all plans come together as I sit atop this mountain, sniffling, in the sun, momentarily happy because I can see where I am, and I like it. I can also literally see where I am going, headed back down the coast this time.

I am a boy. I grow up in the southeast. I travel from east to north to west, and now I’m headed back down those southern plains, to the end, to the finish. I am “hurtling towards it” they tell me.

This is what I came here for. The end is near. The directions and the internal compass are making some chronic and chronological sense for once. As you may know, my personal compass hasn’t always been on par with my intentions, directions, focus or attempts at control.

But now we are headed on course together. There will be a detox, there will be sanctity, and there will be closure and clarity and no more destruction. It is time to climb south, downwards, back, finally, before I die.

I may not necessarily uncover a “Key self” (Woolf 397) in these meandering motions, but I may complete a cycle at least, and close a chronological loop in the form of a written …

Tiers and Towers (2014)

To reach the ultimate and final tier—a Babylonian tower, where no one sits or stands. There are but two champions on the tier beneath the final one. One old and one young, and they stand and compete against each other, drawing in/on every single game, for years, until a true victor wins and can ascend to that final highest lonely tier-podium.

To reach the second last tier, one cannot climb there but rather one must walk through its gates and up the stairs hand in hand with a lover, a soul-partner. When one does so, the world is crushed and flattened so that the tiers fold, recess and the next become accessible.

As soon as one enters the second highest level one of the two champions takes you and handles you and throws you around absent-mindedly but in a professional manner, and you swerve and fold and fall and spin back and forth, becoming a pawn in these rolling games that are being played, but/though not being an actual player.

The sky here is always dark and overcast, smoky and steamy and stewing in ominous colours of dark grey and a hellish blood orange tinted with magentas, purples and maroons.

Our visit was not long. The place was nonsensical: the inaccessibility, the foolish champions, the brooding sky, the pointless matches and games.

Though, I have all but forgotten the lowest tiers. This tower is a high one (obviously, as it reaches the skies), and a fall would certainly shock and kill and neutralise. I can’t even recall how many levels and layers there were, and what kind of games and players belonged to those lower functioning and neutralised boundaries.

What keeps me here is an intrigue and a fascination. Still, it doesn’t hold me there long, but long enough to recognise a riddle being painfully played out ad infinitum.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.