jill/txt

[S]

There was an S on my boarding pass today. S for Search, S for Suspicious; I’m not sure what it stands for but when there’s an S on your boarding pass they’ll single you out and search you specially. A friendly check in man once explained that the airline automatically selects S passengers - if you buy your ticket less than n days before the flight, or pay with cash, or have a one-way ticket, you’ll get an S for sure. I suppose either there are other rules that covered me or they assign some Ses at random.

Once siphoned into a special searching space I was asked to sit while my shoes were x-rayed, my bags were perfunctorily searched and a metal-detecting wand passed along my body. I’ve been searched as closely in ordinary security checks. It wasn’t the searching that was bad. It was being stamped as Suspicious that made my adreneline rise till I felt guilty and angry though I still forced a smile that kept the security guards smiling too. When I got on the plane and showed the flight attendent my boarding pass I cringed to know that she too saw the S.

Most of the time I’m fortunate that I can pretend I’m a free citizen in an open and trusting society. Crossing borders, that illusion becomes very thin.

[dreams]

Sometimes my dreams stay with me in daylight. I dream of friends and family, of my lover and of people whose blogs I read but whom I’ve never met. They’re all themselves but different. I wander my dreams like K. searching for an exit but everywhere I go back-to-front versions of the people I like and love confront me, contradict me, confuse me.

When I finally wake up the relief that it was just a dream doesn’t stop me feeling awkward all day. Layers of dream wrap softly around reality. I look askance at people I meet whom I dreamt about last night. The dream was not real but my feelings during it last. It takes days to shake those emotions.

[border]

“No, there are no gifts from other people in my suitcase. Nobody gave me anything.” He looks at me, with a flirtatious smile, yet contrarily states, “Yes. They did.” I stare blankly at him, what does he mean? Flirting with him let me control the situation, or at least makes it more familiar, but I feel that control slipping as I say “No!” as I guiltily rack my mind, wondering whether I’ve forgotten something. Have they found something in my suitcase? What would it be? “There’s something in the suitcase somebody else gave you,” he repeats. Oh no, it’s what my parents and grandmother warned me about when I was a kid: someone’s slipped drugs in there and if this had been Singapore I’d be facing the death penalty. “If there is, somebody put it in there after I checked in,” I tell him. He laughs, strangely reverting to flirtation, winks at me and tells me I passed the test. I can board the plane. But not before my shoes set the metal detector off and a woman runs her hands down my arms, my breasts, my hips and from my crotch right down to my toes.

I have three seats to myself on the plane though. I stretch out at cross angles to our flight path and sleep through the miles. We arrive an hour early and there’s no line at immigration. The man ahead of me cheerfully slips his finger onto a small pad and smiles at an eyeball shaped camera. I don’t have to: I’m a citizen of a country in the Visa Waiver program. The immigration officer just grins at me, stamps my passport and welcomes me to America. I smile back and walk happily across the border.

[my baby]

My five am morning was starting to get to me. We sang and danced through the afternoon, but by eight Mary Poppins and I bore not a passing resemblence. Finally achieving bedtime I read her a story thinking of sleep, not the words I read. She listened while counting her money, silently placing each coin on the doona, stopping to interrupt my stream of sentences with a question: “Mummy, when was 1995?” I answered before thinking: “A year before you were born, honey.” Then it hit me. She’s younger than a coin. My baby, who can read and write, who can be such a pest and such a darling, is younger than a shiny, new coin.

I think she’s asleep now, after reading for a while. I’m going to go and kiss her cheek in the dark.

[en route]

Staying up though having decided it would be far more sensible to get to bed. Reloading the airline’s website until the “planned” time is joined by a timestamp only two minutes later than the time planned, one minute ago now, followed by a word in black capitals: DEPARTED. Gate B29. Imagining the soft harsh rush of an aeroplane forcing itself into the sky on its way through the night to me.

[New Year’s kisses]

In an hour’s time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, a woman in the crowd on the bank of the Yarra will lean to her lover to kiss him. His lips will brush her cheek not lips and his eyes avoid hers. Her new year will not be happy, not for many months yet.

In eleven hours’ time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, a woman standing in the snow will smile a forced smile and dutifully kiss her husband’s lips and the cheeks of his friends, knowing that this year she must make up her mind.

In eleven hours’ time, at midnight, just as the fireworks light up the sky, I’ll be standing in the garden of the house my girlfriend grew up in. I’ll kiss her cheek, and our children’s cheeks and our parents’ cheeks and I’ll be happy. For the last twenty-odd years I’ve celebrated more New Year’s Eves at her parents’ house than anywhere else. It’s a good way of celebrating.

I think, if I’m lucky, I might even get a true Happy New Year kiss, on the lips, wholehearted, quite soon. Not at midnight. But soon. This is going to be a good year.

Happy New Year! May your kisses be true.

[quartet in g minor]

They never played the string quartet in G Minor at the museum. It disturbed the tourists. The repeated anguish of the chords made busloads of Americans and Germans stay outside in the gardens, merrily walking down to see Grieg’s grave or to admire the flowers and the view rather than read of the grief in his life that flowed from the sounds of the quartet in G minor.

She first heard it on her second day as a museum guide. They told her to watch the short film of his life, screened every half hour, and she sat there with the tourists, feeling out of place in her national romantic guide’s costume. The filmmakers had permitted one of the less penetrating half minutes of the quartet to accompany the mandatory images of fjords and mountains. The tourists can take half a minute, with pretty pictures, just as they can take seeing the christening gown of Edvard and Nina’s baby daughter who died of menigitis on a visit home to Bergen. They wanted to show her to their families; she died. Music cut to half a minute, the christening gown of a child that died, safely inside a glass container: tourists can take that, contained grief, contained emotions.

She listens to the rest of it at home. The jagged chords of the first movement affect her the most. The second violin holds a single note, refusing to let go, while the first violin tries to escape in half tones and crooked angles to the frightened stability of the second violin. Impossible to sustain such tension, they fall into slow beauty that holds no less fear, then on to complex chords and harmonies, always spiralling through stages of grief, never letting go.

The biographies they gave her to study so she could explain his life to the tourists were circumspect and reserved. They all mentioned little Alexandra’s death, Edvard and Nina’s disappointment at never having other children and the death of Edvard’s parents. Some hinted at possible affairs, Nina’s probable miscarriages after losing her daughter, Edvard’s desertion of Nina, and the tormented months he spent at Lofthus writing the Quartet in G Minor, before their reconciliation. Mostly, the biographers kept a respectful distance.

There’s no distance in the Quartet in G Minor. When Grieg first played it for his publisher in Leipzig, tears ran down his face, washing the keys of his piano. She imagines sitting there, invisible beside the listening publisher, hearing and seeing grief so raw. Would she try to comfort him? Leave the room, as the busloads of American and German tourists do? Perhaps the only reason she can stand this emotion is that she plays the CD alone, in her room, lying flat on her bed, eyes closed, emotions in turmoil.

Once, at the end of the season, she was alone in the museum. There were no busloads of Americans and Germans, only a few lone tourists, and the other guides were outside or in the residence. Guiltily she turned off the easily accepted piano concerto that he wrote when he was happily living in Copenhagen with sweet-voiced Nina and little Alexandra, just a few months old and such a bouncing, healthy child. She slipped the almost unplayed CD of the string quartet in G minor into the CD-player. The music filled the museum with sounds infinitely richer than in her living room. As the chords escalate, tears run down her cheeks, washing the keys of the cash register as she longs for the calm moments of respite, mellow harmonies where violins, viola and cello speak languid legato, but they’re so brief, followed instantly by chopping chords and then finally, the restful but oh so melancholy end, no, it never ends, a pause, you think that the grief is over, but there’s more, fast, anxious tremolo, slowness, and no resolution at all in the end, just a harsh, sudden decision that this is enough. No more. It’s over.

(Biographical details are mostly from memory and might not be exact. And of course, there is more resolution in the second and third and fourth movements, for those who are ready to listen to them.)

[fremmedpolitiet]

One and a half hours waiting in line at fremmedpolitiet. A minute at the counter. Half of that was spent listening to a Norwegian who’d matter of factly by-passed the queue to complain loudly about some foreigners who were misusing her address and she couldn’t possibly stand in line, no, this was too important! They sent her elsewhere, took my passports, old and new, and told me to come back and pick it up on Friday. I wonder whether I can bribe them to mail it to me instead.

[automatic typing]

“I kiss you as we’re sitting on the sofa with the computer open beside us. I lean against you, pushing you down until you’re lying beneath me with your head resting gently on the keyboard of the laptop. I lift my eyes to see letters appearing on the screen, a scattered dozen as your head first touches the keys, then more, filling in the blanks, as you turn your head to see what I’m looking at.”

“What do the letters spell?”

“I don’t know. That would depend on what this story turns out to be about.”

[navlebeskuer]

In Norwegian a navlebeskuer is someone who’s so busy looking at their own navel they can’t see anything else. Today that’s me. But at least I’m looking through a breathtaking camera with a macrosetting that is clearly going to leave my old Nikon F401s gathering dust in the bottom of a drawer.

When I was seventeen or eighteen I would draw my hand again and again, almost daily, drawing my hand drawing. This weekend I’ve found myself repeating this discovery and creation of myself, but now with my new camera rather than with pencil and paper.

Drawing your own hand drawing is natural: it’s the first motif you see when you pick up your pencil and wonder what to draw. It’s harder to aim a camera at the hand pressing the shutter. A different technology provides different motifs. Lying on the sofa reading the manual and trying the various settings, your tummy is likely to be the subject of one of your first photos. This variation on the partial self-portrait appeals to me.

If I were to write a sentence to go with this photo it would go something like this: “Seven years after giving birth my belly button still doesn’t collect lint.” And if I were feeling like justifying being a navlebeskuer I would suggest that you have a look at Liz Miller’s Moles, which is an absolutely beautiful piece exploring the stories of bits of a body. She does do a lot more with her moles than I with my belly button, I’ll admit that freely.

[overheard]

Technology is hell, people, and this evening I found confirmation of this in a web-published transcription of a conversation overheard by someone else on the other side of the world:

Read the rest at Scribbling.net.

[almost erased]

I’ve been leafing through old boxes of photographs finding forgotten versions of myself.

1992: My second year at university and I’d chopped off my hair, as I do now and then, though inside me I always have long, chestnut hair that curls tight after rain. My boyfriend wanted to be a photographer (he became a cameraman though when he took this photo he did not know his future) and this afternoon (in early winter light?) he asked me to sit down by the tree behind Studentsenteret. The contact sheet is missing but I have three large prints of myself sitting there. In two of them I’m looking nervously, coyly at the camera, uncomfortable at being photographed. I like this one better. But what am I thinking of? What am I looking at? The grand villas across the street? A passer by?

If I am looking towards a dream I can’t have been very confident of achieving it. My dreams then were confused and unspecific, by the linear path of my life since then.

[lavender]

/Ségriès, June 30/
Row upon row of lavender, a sudden lake of blue in yellow fields of wheat. Lavender’s blue, lavender’s green, I knew that, but until I came to Provence I didn’t know that the blue and the green blur together until you see a field of bluegreen, two colours both separate and inseparable, the warp and the weft rather than blended light or paint. The wind blows, changing the blue against green, letting one dominate then the other, an invisible hand running along the long lines of bushes separating straight flexible stalks from fluorescent blue flowers.

[being lara croft]

This evening I was Lara Croft. It was brilliant: all I had to do was walk into the “Kickpuls” session at the gym and bam I was in the midst of a neatly choreographed rectangle of people kicking, punching, lunging and jumping to loud, angry music. “You’re poison! I want to hurt you just to hear you scream my name!” lets you fit in a double punch with a shuffle, a high backwards kick and a leaping double kick.

It was immensely satisfying and I’ve got to say my mirror image looked really cool. Especially that jumping high and doing a double kick in midair thing.

And now I think I’ll curl up in bed and watch one of those series where sexy young women beat up monsters, vampires, mutants or simply bad guys. There are so many of them nowadays I won’t even have to check the schedule.

[must stop]

Emails can be blocked, phone numbers deleted, photos burned, but my fingers keep typing in the URL of his blog before my mind has time to stop them.

I need a software equivalent of that horrible-tasting stuff they smear on your fingernails when you bite them till they bleed but even pain won’t stop you gnawing incessantly, in your sleep reading running playing working laughing you just keep biting and biting way past the quick and they’ll never grow back if you can’t stop biting biting biting.

Does anyone know how I can tell my browser to never let me visit a particular URL? Self-discipline is the obvious answer. A month in France away from a net connection was more successful, but I can’t live offline forever. I want inanimate support: a simple, clearcut, technological solution.

[language]

She falls in love with Pierre on her eighth day in Paris. They meet in cafés and in his garret apartment: he is the most romantic lover she has known, her most patient French tutor. But with each conversation, each night of love-making, the language becomes more her own. She is able to express herself more fully, more completely, but Pierre remains the same, as simple as the French she could speak and understand when they met.

Tonight, a little past midnight, they’ll come home to his garret after drinking with his simple friends. Afterwards she’ll pack her bag silently, calmly, and walk down the long, winding stairs, shutting the door behind her for the last time as she steps onto the empty street. The words he’ll yell through the window to her are the last she’ll ever hear him utter: You used me! You used me to learn French and then you threw me away!

She registers his switch from imparfait to passe composé with a slight, smug smile.

[peppermint tea]

This morning I walked through the wet grass in my tiny garden to pick a sprig of disobedient peppermint, growing everywhere but where I planted it. I took the peppermint back into the kitchen, put it into a chipped ceramic cup that was one of the wedding presents I salvaged from the divorce, and poured boiling water over it. Peppermint floats so beautifully in a spacious cup of hot water, and the water stays see-through clear as the smell rises to my nostrils. I carried my cup of peppermint tea into the garden and sat soaking up the sun, wriggling my toes in delight at the warmth. Peppermint tea tastes of summer and of autumn rain before the frost beats the last stalks of mint down into the wet earth.

The rose bush is huge and leering, half the buds rotten after so much rain, but the herbs are happy. The lavendar is just beginning to bloom, and the rosemary bush is celebrating its survival of an unwatered winter in the cellar by pushing out new little shoots. The oregano is a bright green bush of hair that hasn’t grown more than ten centimetres yet, and the thyme tickles my toes which poke out from the steps.

Most of the year I would much prefer a garden that had herbs growing in every month. But in June I’m happy here.

[save /dev/null]

Where, exactly, is /dev/null? I imagine it as a sort of void, a black hole of the system to which I can banish things, send thoughts into exile. I sent all my mail to /dev/null, this afternoon, due to a forgotten then. You see, if you write a mail filter that says that if such and such save /dev/null and forget the then that should come in between, well, you’re actually going to save every piece of mail you receive to /dev/null. Which is a term so poetic that I completely refuse to look it up and discover its true meaning. Devices, null, nothing, I’m sure I’m close enough.

I found it useful but disconcerting that even though it took me hours to realise that I’d made a mistake (0 emails in five hours is abnormal, it’s obvious) the email was resurrected. I caught the truant then, hammered it into place (with some assistence, I gratefully admit) and checked my mail. And it all arrived.

So where was that mail? Did it come back from /dev/null? Or did it never go there? Surely by rights something once banished should never return?

[untidy reactions]

I was eighteen the last time I was single. My girlfriends are all neatly coupled off now, but their reactions to my recently acquired single status speak volumes of what might lie underneath the clean surfaces of their lives.

and the one that I find the most hilarious of all:

[unknotting]

I was a burning knot of fury when I went to my Alexander technique lesson this morning. By the end of the class I was calm again, and everything felt so much more tangible. It’s like magic. And I don’t get RSI anymore.

[weekend]

The sound of my keystrokes is accompagnied by the voices of women laughing as they walk home, the distant closing of office doors and a soft drizzle of rain against the constant hum of cars and city. I think summer’s arrived with its quiet opening of time. I have a big pile of essays, websites, MA theses and weblogs to assess by the end of next week but the weekend’ll be full of novels read lazily, sprawled in the sun (or in case of rain, on my colourful new doona cover), of friends over for a dinner of ravioli and rocket, a movie, some beers and a long walk in the mountains. It’s a long weekend too, one of those Christian ones I can never remember what is for. We already did Assumption, so it’s not that. I can’t remember what Pinse is in English, apart from a Monday off work.

[dream]

I dreamt my thumbs were broken. They swelled up and hurt and I couldn’t decide which hospital to go to so wandered up and down a curving road until I woke up. Consulting dream dictionaries I find that this is highly ambiguous symbolism:

On the other hand,

I think I’ll go with the “abnormally large” (i.e. swollen interpretation, since it promises rapid and brilliant success. Though of course I knew what the dream was really about long before I looked up the dream dictionaries.

[heart]

Another wedding invitation: two names and a date. A tiny red confetti heart held safe inside laminated plastic that will last forever.

[]

If I simply look back at my writing here since I wondered what my other voices might be, I realise I have changed. My posts are much shorter than usual and they’re a lot more frequent. My sentences recently tend not to begin with the subject and continue with a verb, rather, they edge around to that center of meaning via adjectives and qualifiers. Perhaps I always wrote that way, though? Maybe voices can be found as much by looking back as by pushing forwards?

[2]

I wanted to explore my possible voices. My other voices, the ones that I don’t use here. That I don’t use at all. I’ve shied away from it, written regular posts, manic posts, boring posts, eager posts. I’ve toyed with the idea of buying a camera voice recorder phone so I can mix sounds and words and maybe images all in the same space, as Andrew suggested over coffee once. But I’ve not done anything. I’m scared, I think. What if my other voices are ugly? Hoarse? Inadequate? Screeching? Too challenging? Too powerful?

Perhaps I should try singing lessons.

[]

Which voices might be mine?

[hiding behind a blog]

Exhibitionism and mental masturbation? Nonsense. Blogging is about hiding. It’s about partial truths and a voice that is binding as well as freeing.

When my partner tells me he’s unsure about our relationship I write about protesters rallying for peace. When I don’t know whether we’re partners or not I write that I’m tired. When he leaves me I write about civilian casualties and how untrustworthy and partial reports of a war can be.

The only way I can blog that he left me is obliquely. I demote his name on my blogroll, link less frequently and wonder whether anyone notices. Today I mask my grief and anger with this academic reflection over a genre. I want to tell the world but this hurt exceeds the genre and voice I’ve created here.