Of the Progress of the Soul

            by John Kinsella

When the government of Western Australia uses its shock troops — the police, of course, but also the Main Roads and their private contractors — against the people and the environment, they are not swayed from their purpose by protest, even where that protest succeeds to some extent. They are working through military solutions to their problems of opposition, and ‘outflank’ those who are concerned with the destruction of natural habitat. If one front is under pressure, open up another.

While a large amount of protest energy has rightfully been focussed on the Beeliar atrocity, the government has been determinedly destroying native vegetation and habitat as well elsewhere. The extreme and gratuitous removal of trees along the York-Quairading Road is one example, but such acts on an even larger scale have been happening along the Great Eastern Highway between Southern Cross and Kalgoorlie for many months.

And recently we've been seeing the wholesale removal of tall marri trees (in wondrous bloom at the moment) from along the Toodyay Road north of Gidgegannup (especially at intersections), and also the removal of vegetation alongside and between the double lanes of the dual carriageway of the Great Eastern Highway in the Eastern Hills between Glen Forrest and Mundaring. The trees are/will be gone for good. While the 'upgrades' are being implemented for 'safety', it's obvious to many that all opportunities are taken to destroy as much vegetation as possible in the process. We see the same with 'fencing' on private land — the fencers often destroy vegetation on the 'long paddock' side of the fence with impunity, and there's a recent case locally of bush from a nature reserve being cleared in the process of fencing private land.

These actions slip ‘under the radar’, which is why we need to entirely rethink the way protest is used to resist these destructions. Global fascism has almost completely absorbed deforestation of the planet into its pattern of abuses. As global politics lurches further to the right, the right concomitantly define their existence through an attack at least twofold.

Not only do they attack people who show compassion towards their natural environment, compassion towards cultural and spiritual difference, compassion towards those who see things in ways different from their own (if this sounds like a paradox, it is!), but they attack especially through ‘developing’ the planet such that all life and all topography are a ‘resource’ that must be put into action to prevent a shift in values away from self-affirming materialism.

It’s as if ‘nature’ is a threat to the consumer-unit of self, family, and chosen social group. Nation itself becomes an extension of this philosophy of confirming that one exists — existence defined through usage, through consuming.

It strikes me that what I term ‘temporariness’ is evidenced in more than one way here. Not only through human verification of place through presence — even if only ‘passing through’ or having a non-permanent interaction with a social geography — but also in the impact that humans have who claim place as their permanent homes (whether they have negotiated those rights with, say, indigenous custodians or not).

They have an impact on natural environment by reversing, or maybe more accurately unbalancing, the equation: the removal of ‘ancient’ trees to make those trees ‘temporary’, and to make those people who control that place (through the police, the Main Roads, the machinery of government, the party etc) the legitimate ‘permanent’ presence.

So, the ancient becomes the temporary, and the state replaces this with itself as the ‘permanent’, validating its presence by creating a sense of precedence (a concept of terra nullius has served Australian governments here). ‘Temporariness’ becomes the natural world that isn’t sanctioned by the post-Enlightenment greed of personal subjectivity expressed in controlled social groups (controlled by force of arms and force of social pressure).

I wish to extend this argument in a number of directions. First, I reference an email discussion I had with an old and very dear friend over the last few days — a fine poet and a man of great moral fibre — who refused to believe that I could completely be the anarchist (pacifist) I am. Here’s my reply:

I won't contribute to a system I see as corrupt, bigoted and oppressive. The ‘majority rules’ is just not fair or just. What's more, an individual cannot represent the concerns of many individuals. It’s deep-seated with me. I haven’t voted for over twenty years and refuse to. They even make voting compulsory — state control. Obviously, I infinitely prefer a ‘Green’ to a ‘One Nation’ (candidate), but I ultimately see the system as wrong and won’t play their game. I make my input in other ways. I feel every person has direct responsibility and it’s because of the state in its various manifestations that we’re seeing the rise of global fascism. I am committed to a fair and just world in which social responsibility is shared and the environment is respected not just as an extension of human values but in its own right. Same with ‘animal rights’. And same with the rights to spiritual belief. I also believe in the rights of cultural difference and cultural co-existence, and oppose all forms of bigotry. But I feel I can better express this as a writer and speaker and in how I live and conduct my life (to the best of my ability), than by participating in the machinery of government, which is largely, if not always, hypocritical. Obviously one intersects and crosses over with government constantly, and one has to ‘work’ with those contexts — it’s what I term ‘umbrella anarchism’ — but in the ways we can (while managing to feed our families), it strikes me that all non-violent resistance is a positive and generative thing/position.

P.S. I should add that I am constantly speaking out and being active against the ‘one nations’ of the world. One doesn’t have to do the party thing to resist the overtly evil (and they are). I do so every day of my life and have done since I was twenty (many a sign of the Australian Nationalists Movement was removed by me from Perth streets in the 80s etc etc etc).

I include this here because it’s a statement of permanence and temporariness. I have lived in Western Australia (mainly in rural areas) for much of my life, along with lengthy stints in other countries, and still consider myself ‘temporary’.

I do, however, have an insight of ‘permanence’ due to family association, early childhood experience, and a deep commitment to the land itself. But I claim this only in the context of acknowledging indigenous permanence and ongoing custodianship. Aside from the fact that I recognise no government anywhere, I do recognise totemic relationships with place and knowledges of country that extend across millennia of observing said country and the impact (and sharing) humans have had on that place.

My temporariness, like that of all non-indigenes, can be enriched and cross-referenced with this ‘permanence’, and through this be enriched and expanded without occupying/territorialising (even more) indigenous space. On these grounds alone, I could never lend my (even) tacit approval to government through voting for it (in any manifestation): government claims permanence when it is temporary, and in doing so deletes totemic permanence.

Second: a tangent. All presence in place is measured more accurately or more relevantly, through tangents. I have recently been laying out the groundwork (non-invasive and non-colonising of natural habitat, I hope — every word we use has an implication... what structures am I building here and what do they occlude or delete?) for a collaborative work with a fellow poet, referencing John Donne’s work.

In doing so, I consulted an old Penguin edition we have at Jam Tree Gully (one of four or five Donne collections here), and was surprised and pleased to find it was a copy Tracy had bought as a gift for me back in 1994 when we were ‘on the bones of our arses’.

I was still an alcoholic and addict then, and we were hugely in debt due to the chaos of my life. Tracy had found this copy in a university second-hand bookshop, and it’s a minor miracle we still have it — I tended to sell or hock everything back then to get the next bottle of sherry or whatever. The contradictions with my politics played a major part in my being eventually able to stop, and move on.

Anyway, this edition is annotated in my scrawling hand in patches here and there. I find myself reading marginal comments around the poem ‘The Harbinger to the Progress’ (‘The Second Anniversary') — ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’. Here are the comments: ‘May Yagan colonise the soul — ‘thief, murderer’ [as called by the ‘Settlers’ of the Swan River Colony], [is actually] honourer and representative of HIS PEOPLE. This comment probably connects to ‘(a third)’ which I have encircled in the first line of the Donne poem:

Two souls move here, and mine (a third) must move

Paces of admiration and of love;

On the next page I have written: ‘I never liked Dante’s Paradise — maybe I am a victim of what I assume of others’. This hermeticism is followed by the comment: ‘Oh, the repraise. The dynamics of — of — Natural Born Killers.’ This comment is next to the final couplet of the poem:

Those acts, those songs shall still content them best

Which praise those awful powers that make them blessed.

Which brings me to my theme and the tangential interconnectedness of things. The permanence of the Donne text and the temporariness of my hand-written comments in a volume breaking at the spine, a residue of terrible days (for us), with the pages even stained and bearing a strand of rollie tobacco twenty-three years later (I haven’t smoked for twenty-two years), the linking of a pure afterlife (and getting there, one might add, ‘lightning moves but slow’), ironically to the adulterated (and, of course, ‘passionate’) materiality of the here and now, to highlight the tactile pleasures of living life, of letting death be death, is the engine in many ways behind the very Western subjectivity. A state-sanctioned subjectivity that has led to such materialistic greed, to such a ‘selfie’ socialising of the self — policing of the individual by socially connected individuals (who have long since consigned individuality to digital groupthink).

The ironies of Donne cascade through the centuries to become the greed of a science not of knowledge but of self-gain (often camouflaged in a patriotic/nationalistic false collectivity). The reference to Oliver Stone’s exploitative movie (of violent imagery to stimulate viewers as they witness manifestations of the anti-social, whatever role the corporate state has had in creating the conditions for such an extremely violent ‘response’) Natural Born Killers, which Tracy and I had seen at the cinema at the time, is more than a pop-cultural reference of degradation and (violent) breakdown of modern Western (consumer American) subjectivity; it is a parallel to the prosodic devices being deployed in Donne’s personal conquest of the soul.

This harbinger brings me back to the government and Main Roads and private companies extending their destructions into the realm of the soul, into a model of well-being of progress to tame a world to one end and one end only: praise of a God who gives and takes and who expects us to use ‘his’ world to his ends, which are an extension of their right-wing politics.

The religious right is strongly present in Australia as much as America (even if this is denied) and strongly indicated through racism and bigotry; but more than that, there’s a colonially inherited God-model of nation that, even if Godless for some now, is about forces outside the quotidian directing and determining what is right.

If you doubt this, check the demographics of right-wing parties in Australia, and their connections to and origins in mergings of individual, God and state.

As the NSW school curriculum (HSC) switches back to a world of imperialism by concentrating on texts through which its implementers might hope the crimes of the contemporary are reduced to allegory and tangential metaphorical allusion, we find ‘The Bard’, whose universal meanings (no denying those) are read by conservatives for gesture rather than the complexity of historical/linguistic context (try instead, as a counter-example and for a more nuanced approach, reading John Kerrigan on Shakespeare) — in other words, deeply political texts are sold as vaguely human and universal (they actually were pinpointed)...

We also find Jane Austen. Her privilege was backgrounded by slavery (despite her implicit objections to slavery in Mansfield Park and Emma, her family’s wealth and social privilege were deeply implicated in the profits from slavery — see ‘Austen and Antigua’ for a rudimentary, somewhat unwittingly empire-centric and wishful outline of the issues: it is important to note that many existing slaves in the British West Indies weren’t emancipated till 1834!). She created texts that critique women’s economic dependence on social and economic structures that thrive through enslaving women within the society and an empire that grew through slavery elsewhere (that strand of tobacco? sugar plantations...). This is a Jane Austen who nonetheless uses irony in doses absorbable by a (very) slowly changing middle (and upper) class, creating entertainments that again universalise messages about the oppression of women and also the sass, wit and genius of individual women... entertainments that can be now used to reflect themes that are political-lite, but not offensive to the conservatives of now... 

And finally, Dickens, whose undoings of British oppressions of the poor are far enough removed from the now to allow analogy that is toothless (the poor of other social orbits are distanced more and more... the corrections that a Dickens brings to British oppressions serves the purveyors of progress with a white neo-liberal royalist Westminsterism) in terms of the horrors of now.

Among these champions of British letters (sold as ‘English’ literature): very little of colonialism as evil, very little of environmental destruction, very little of the rights of different spiritual approaches to life (in essence), and very little about governments’ ability to destroy all life on the planet. Which brings us back to the trees lost on Great Eastern Highway and the stretched resources of protest and the military metaphor of many fronts at once.

Going back to the Donne — Penguin English Poets edition (ed. A. J. Smith) — I find a quote in Tracy’s hand on the half-title. Her gift to me. These lines from 'A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning':

Ours two souls therefore, which are one

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to aery thinness beat.

And I remember now, through the haze: it was a gift when I was taking myself away to Cocos, away from the scene I was feeding myself to, that was eating me... away to find another way through, and a way back to Tracy (which is obviously what happened in the end!).

Donne’s metaphors of the tactile (of exploration and science and guild craft), so apt for the modern, also incorporate (I use this word carefully) the failure of the modern. Knowledge misused, knowledge extending the many empires of human ingenuity, their oppressions.

Even poetry written in (in some ways) radical exception to a crushing status quo (religious in Donne’s case — state oppression of Catholics), ends up feeding the apparatus of the state once it manages to meet the ‘needs’ of the consumer through creating a verisimilitude of paradise on earth. A treeless paradise populated with humans and electronic devices.

And even then, only the right devices, and most frighteningly in the age of the Far Right as centre, the right humans. Around the time of giving me this book, Tracy was continuing to write her novel Vamp, a reversioning of the gothic in the now of the early 90s, a gothic in Fremantle, Western Australia... and those lines from Donne (‘like gold to aery thinnesse beat’) title Vamp’s first chapter, and take us into a world of a feminism constrained by a machine that still only paid lip service, and still does.

Tracy’s novel proffers a violent reaction, yet shows it is no solution. The gothic is constantly reinvented and can easily became a tool of cautionary entertainment that in the end lapses entirely into entertainment — I shudder to think how the ironies and parodies of Austen’s Northanger Abbey will be zombified (oh, the money to be made from genre-jamming — mash-ups — to feed the zeitgeist of the zombie era!) for a generation of new Australian voters under the NSW HSC reading regime! (Teachers, resist! use it in conjunction with contemporary texts that challenge the problems of how and why we read! It’s only useful if shown as having parallels to texts that parody the literary conventions of the now — and the neo-liberals are churning out films and novels that do just this... Nicole Kidman, with her placation of right-wing America while selling herself as a ‘serious’ actor, is one of its figureheads).

Tracy’s Vamp, I think, is all about how and why we read genre text, and the ends to which their ironies can serve the state, no matter how risqué they seem. When it came out, Vamp messed with all these conventions and was genuinely radical. It never aimed to please nor to make its criticism polite or popular.

So, as Tracy, Tim and I travel the roads of the wheatbelt or head down to Perth, our (old now) mode of transport contributing to the problem, we observe the militarism of elected governments, the corruption that comes through their being sanctioned by an electorate that signs off on responsibility. All of us: stop driving now, get out, confront the workers who have been duped into this damage, and try and discuss it with them. Offer alternative ways of making a living, work together to provide it. Step outside centralised government and the system that makes you think you have a choice (or that your vote will prevent the more evil ‘representatives’ getting into power), and work together for other modes of living, sharing, and supporting the biosphere.

It’s possible, if enough of us click, if enough of us try. Small groups. Then those small groups interacting with other small groups. Living networks of communication to increase tolerance and understanding and to make the local relevant. Know your locality, gain knowledge of neighbouring and distant localities. Let temporariness and permanence peacefully commune.

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Temporariness (2): Photography

            by John Kinsella

I drag and drop my terms from a previous investigation of presence into this ‘new’ one, or into this present one. The multiplicities of polysituatedness, the echoes, murmurs and stains of temporariness. Here for a relatively short time, but not briefly, as I have been before, I am present ‘in company’. My company is more than my own, and as I age, I age with someone else. Tracy and I share much of origins in common. Ancestry, locality, the same television programmes as children, and decades together. We etch-o-sketch each other’s spatial and temporal presences. We overlap. And here, in Tübingen, we overlap in our temporariness. Both of us record our presence and observations of the town and environs in our own way — directly, indirectly — but we are also observed by others alone and together. We do not know what these observations, maybe recordings, mean, but they are there. We are background to the State’s (attempted, at least) observations of all who pass through, and we are in dozens of photographs taken by visitors and residents. The old town is a town that is photographed. The machine is used to capture, but each face or back-of-the-head caught by the machine escapes the function of the machine. Mostly, photographers won’t notice the detail till later. And even then, they might well look around the ‘distractions’, the incidentals in the photos, to see what they want to see. One might be photoshopped out of existence, out of the time marked at the bottom of the image. I have Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project on my lap, opened to the section on photography. I am recollecting and tracing because I want to show a poem is not a photograph. Not for me. Is it really for any poet? It might be referred to as such by a critic, as an insult, or maybe as an act of détournement by the poet, or as a commentary on how a photo sees and is seen as opposed to a poem. A sequence of poems: Photographs on... or Snapshots of... Already the title ironises or at least ‘sets up’ the way we frame the poems that follow. All that is seen in the moment. But then, the still photograph in the next frame. Or run together through a slideshow, a different kind of movement, a disrupting film. Benjamin: ‘Symptom, it would seem, of a profound displacement: painting must submit to being measured by the standard of photography: ‘We will be in agreement with public in admiring... the fine artist who... has appeared this year with a painting capable of holding its own, in point of delicacy, with daguerrian prints.’ This assessment of Meissonnier from Auguste Galimard's Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1850, p. 95, cited in Benjamin, p. 685). This is followed by ‘Photography in verse’ — synonym for description in verse. Edouard Fournier, Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris (Paris, 1864, pp. 14-15, in Benjamin, p. 685). And, of course, one must reference the referencing of this by saying The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann; Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1999, p. 685). Whose reference system is this? I track my journey and you can follow, too. Scrutiny, gate-keeping, appropriate behaviour. See me as others might see me. See us as others would see us. But let’s go back a few pages, altering the sequence (dipping in?), and read: ‘One of the — often unspoken — objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine. This the sentiment of Delacroix in particular’ (op. cit. p. 678). Why do I go here? Well, the strands of belonging and unbelonging take me to the photo Tracy is taking — I am there again, NOW — of me on the Neckar Island outside, across the river from the Hölderlin tower. Not outside, really, but almost opposite. At a slight angle, to avoid getting others in the shot — dogs and their walkers, people discussing their problems. We are in the alleyway of plane trees, 

JK photographed by Tracy Ryan; Hölderlin tower behind

the same trees Hölderlin  would have looked onto out across the river, in their youth. The island. I feel most connected to both my aloneness and my sharing of life-space on islands. It was absence of family on Cocos; with family on La Réunion; with family again here, on this small river-island. The ancient trees have been tagged with graffiti. Between the old town keeping an eye on, and the new town eyeing off? Both, really. Crocuses are out. There are no four seasons anymore, not even here, and the prompts to emergence are conflicted.

Tracy takes all the photos of our presences beyond Jam Tree Gully. She carries the camera. She embraced digital photography very early on not in praise of technology — she shares my doubts, objections and often refusals — but because this way she could get around the issue of animal products in the manufacture of film and developing of photographs. I think of this as she snaps my photo. As a child, I did all I could to avoid being photographed. There are quite a few childhood photographs of me, but fewer than there would have been. Seeing myself disturbed me as much as hearing myself on cassettes. Early cassette-players. All these devices to show we’ve been, to carry our timbres to others, to say we have trodden here as well, maybe (slightly) before. The markers of presence. The painting marks the presence of the painter more than the subject. Does the photo mark the presence of the photographer in the same way? Our temporariness here has stretched to breaking-point; we risk becoming familiar. That familiarity of the outsider who stays and stays and sees what is uncomfortable even when not looking. It’s easy to see the overt badness: the hatred of refugees by some, the violent moments on a back street, the racist graffiti, the brutal presence of the past under the utopias of early modern architecture. It’s also easy to see the good (I don’t use scare quotes): people living as people, welcoming refugees, the anti-racism, and a strong environmental consciousness. As I would arrange good and bad. As I would picture the qualities of each. But the liminal comes into focus over time, and one realises the Green emphasis is also mixed with capitalism, that the head of the Greens in the state is proud of his Mercedes and wants the state to be used as a dumping-ground for radioactive waste. The blurring. The state party system adapts to the emphasis of place, and beneath all the good and bad is a commercial drive, a desire for goods. Telephones, cameras, computers. They might be used to undermine the capitalist enterprise, but they reinforce it more than they undermine. The violent ones, those from the circles of Dante’s Inferno, worship goods to remake the world in the image they ascribe to some other force but which is really a reflection of self-desire and often self-hatred. I think this while being photographed opposite (almost) ‘Hölderlin’s tower’ (it wasn’t his tower, it was the carpenter Zimmer’s and his family’s) and thinking of the industry that has grown around his supposed madness, his fall, his ‘lesser’ late poems which I think burst out of their formulaics to be masterpieces of subterfuge, mocking the very fame he had obsessed over when young. He was not insane. His tower glows. An edifice. Graffiti approaches along the walkway. It will be tagged.  

This end to Benjamin’s Photography section does something for me and maybe this text as well: ‘Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel can perhaps be considered a “critique of the snapshot”, insofar as in this piece the two aspects of shock — its technological function in the mechanism and its sterilizing function in the experience — both come into play.’ (Benjamin, p. 692) This notation to brutality (the consequences of a Sunday stroll?), to Cocteau’s critique of the bourgeoisie reinvented in the gallery of the book, or the accumulation of notes towards the book, does not accord with the moment of being photographed in front of Hölderlin’s tower. (There was no violence; however, behind the façade of any pleasant moment within the State is the knowledge that the pleasantness comes at a cost to the world somewhere else.) But it does accord with the ecology of presence around it, and of which we make ourselves part.  There is no beauty in ‘history’. The dialectic rejects it. I do not ‘watch the birdie’ when Tracy ‘snaps’ me. I am there, and she is in front of me, and I look at her obscured by the machine. But I see past the machine to Tracy. I know she is there, and that she will look at the picture later. I know it is part of a narrative she is making where a narrative is, but is also diffused and lost. That narrative isn’t fixed, and its purpose will change over time. I am happy to be part of it: a recording, of course, but also an act of temporariness against the hauntings of temporariness. Not to say we have been, but to say we are. Not to own presence, but acknowledge it. Tracy’s brother Sean, who died when he was eighteen, was a photographer and was going to study to be a ‘professional photographer’. I am told that as a child he liked the tricks of the camera, all it could do in terms of changing our perceptions of what actually was and is. The person standing on the palm of a hand, the warping of perspective. But there is no change to reality, just a play on the way we see. He was interested in temporariness, he died young, but marked his places in so many ways. Not damaging, but imprinting over so many other previous imprints, and in the imprint of presence continuous. In Tracy’s ‘snaps’ are her brother’s imprints. In a world where negatives are a fading memory, his negative develops the island without damaging the trees, a negative made positive in a place so far from where he lived and died. The ‘other side of the world’ (a place he never left), but here all the awareness of the indelible nature of ‘history’ and its images would have pressed on him also.

Psychogeography of a Temporary Locality 1

Note: What follows is my first contribution to a collaborative book of micro-essays I am doing with Russell West-Pavlov. 

I have been here before. That was in 1999. I wrote a sequence of poems on the war in the Balkans. Those poems claimed Hölderlin was not mad. I am here now. Writing this. This visit is less temporary than the last, which was for a conference and only lasted a week. This one is around eleven weeks. Eleven times longer, at least. Duration and exposure. And this time I am with Tracy, and Tim who is thirteen, and so when I was here last time not part of the ‘messages home’ I sent every day. That home then was Cambridge, but Cambridge inflected through the Western Australian wheatbelt. Two different environments. And by environments I do not mean that which Lefebvre mocks as an ambiguous and non-defined space. What did he know about space, caught up in his urban ‘second nature’? Environment in the way I meant it, and mean it, is agency of the non-human as much as the human. The fens, caught, managed, made, turned into the vegetable garden of Britain, were and are still environment. I watched birds; I walked through the fens. I saw reclamation projects taking place, the growing of Wicken Fen again, beyond tourist curio to hard-core nature reserve. And what potlatch is still disinterred from the peaty ground of the fens. And now, as I build a multi-dimensional model of a damaged place, a place where Nazism is still close to the surface, where the polymorphous perversity of a Romantic god-poet, and forest reserves where the great crested newt struggles to breed, and the memorials of loss and butchery sit alongside the naming of the fuchsia and the spirit of a pastor who spoke for years against Nazism and was killed by it, where Cemetery X holds the body-parts of those experimented on, where bats move from attic to cellar to evade wood-preservative poison, where outdoor theatres can only open after a specific summer date and then only show silent movies to help protect that very bat, where deer antlers over doorways are warped cathode and anode to an organic-vegan alternative movement in which all nature is nature and environment is clear and definable. And now, writing in ambiguity, I search for the concrete. And that, and this, is inflected through where we came from by road and ferry and road and ferry and road — West Cork in Ireland via Cambridge. And always the mental space, the spatial configuration and underpinnings of Jam Tree Gully. Where late storms will stir fire memories, the absolute fear of excoriation and conflagration, the easterly and northerly driven firestorms of the Australian wheatbelt summer. The place where temporariness is our absence, and where we’re always expected back, whether we belong or don’t. Here, now, attempting to collate vocabulary, parse sentences in a language Celan broke into fragments, which others have reconstituted, I listen to Tim gather it to him with critical consciousness like rainwater off our Jam Tree Gully roof. It’s not a romantic image – that rainwater gathers the dust and the bird-droppings and all else deposited across the corrugated roof-planes, gathers the pristine and the contaminated from its functional open and occupied space, made invisible as it collects in the great 90 000-litre tank, is pumped into the house, issues forth visible again from the taps. As is language. No Bauhaus moment. And Tracy, shifting from language to language with ease. ‘Flies through the air with the greatest of ease.’ I cannot use anyone else’s words here to support my argument. I offer no quote, no external authority. But I know that enough days have passed for the sound of the Great Tits singing on the bare trees, and the sight of the Schloss with its collection of antiquities, with its animals carved from animal, a lost animal, a great animal, are familiar enough to place a lacuna in temporary. It’s there I will go, and it’s there I will retreat.

           John Kinsella