Flying, mortality, perspective

A lightning fast trip to Sydney I did *not* have time for, given the terrible juggling of writing and reading deadlines I am trying to wrangle at the moment.

The plane flew in low over the suburbs, not along the coast as I'm more used to: all the little houses lined up, shuddering each time the planes fly over. Taxi to hotel, walk to dinner with colleagues (where I disgraced myself, I suspect, hogging 90% of the gorgonzola pannacotta on our shared tasting plate), walk back, sleep soundly, walk to campus, walk into the beautiful old quadrangle building

for an all day meeting, discussing the government cuts to the organisation's fundings, and cutbacks and suspensions of many of its most useful programs. A 30 minute lunch break — no time for a walk in the sun as I usually insist on in all-day meetings — then back into the air-conditioned, very claustrophobic room. The air-conditioning made a continuous low reverberation, like a car running, that made my brain seem to vibrate, all day. Then at 4, we jumped into cabs then back to the airport. No time, obviously, to catch up with Sydney friends, I'm sorry.

During our dinner I heard about a colleague who'd lost a child in traumatic circumstances several years ago, and the devastation that was still spreading rings around everything. It sat with me all through the meeting yesterday. And yesterday evening as we flew into Melbourne around 7.00pm the flight took us low over a little cemetery. Very small, but the little tombstones so distinctively small and grey in a landscape of houses like the Sydney ones. Cemeteries usually appear as grey blurs from the air, and on google maps, but we were very low, so you could see the miniature streetscapes. I think you fly over another cemetery as you fly into Adelaide. This one seemed particularly small: a little village of the dead under the bustle of folk itching to get out their mobile phones and reconnect with the world.

I drove straight to the school, for a meeting led by its extraordinary principal about a trip he leads to PNG every three years or so. They stay in villages (boys in the men's hut; girls in the women's), and work with communities, and also attempt an overnight 5 hour hike up Mt Wilhelm, comparable to the Kokoda trail (one guide per three students). This trip is not about tourism, or buying souvenirs, nor is it about testing yourself against the elements, it's about building a relationship between the school and this village, and with the students and staff who go.

If Joel goes, he will perhaps be seeing dawn on Mt Wilhelm the day his VCE results come out. Now there's a perspective.

Audio, video, Wagner: face, dream, Melancholia [SPOILER ALERT]

Last week, three immersion experiences: painting, experimental video-audio art, and cinema.

I am sitting for (I learn that "to" is also acceptable, though somewhat precious) a painter friend who is returning to portraiture after a few years painting in other genres. I sat for Kristin many years ago, and am once more enjoying the afternoons in her studio. We used to be neighbours and regular walking companions though we have fallen out of the habit somewhat in recent years. But we still are comfortable chatting away. I sit with my back to the garden.  Kristin alternates sitting and standing before her easel on the first day, which produces three drawings which I really like. The next day she starts with the oils, and things don't go so well. The third day is more promising, though I haven't yet looked to the other side of the easel to observe progress. I went back yesterday, and she thinks she will be done with one more sitting. Here are a few links to websites featuring her work: here and here. And at this site you can see what Kristin sees when she looks past me into her garden. It's a difficult, difficult art, moving and layering the paint so it produces ... not just a face, but my face. In previous years, when doing portraits, Kristin has used photographs, and indeed much of her recent work has been directly from or about photographs. But this time there is nothing mediating between her eye and the paint. It's never boring. I feel a bit like a cat, sitting still and watching someone working. It's actually rather lovely to sit still (or chat, or listen to the blackbirds in the garden — the Beresfords, they are called). And when there is nothing to say, there is always that still point behind Kristin's ear to look at, and to try and imagine what my face looks like, when I'm holding it still, without a mirror.

On Thursday, I went to another friend's collaborative video-audio installation/performance. A series of meditative video- and soundscapes: Alternate. A small group met in the foyer of the old Commonwealth Bank in Bourke St. Built in 1941, its stern marble was forbidding. Jessie came down to meet us, wearing her blue flannel dressing gown and carrying a little candle/lamp. Quietly she led us into the lift and up six floors, and then down four flights of stairs. We sensed the moving up and down, but also the ritual form of the journey, the stilling of the mind, even while our bodies were still moving. We removed shoes and bags, and then spent an hour in various rooms in the large studio, lying, or sitting, and watching, dreaming and meditating about the space and the sound of a dream. Or the idea of a dream represented in sound. We collected fragments of text from other people's dreams on tiny cards, and wove them into our own silent dreamings, as we puzzled over Alice's extraordinary vocal performances coming from the next room. In one room we watched a slowly-moving face, its features re-organised so the mouth sat above the eyes, which just ... was. Not speaking, just breathing slowly, rather like me being painted by Kristin, I suspect.

Then on Monday, Kristin and I went to see . Warned to sit at the back, in case of motion sickness produced by lots of handheld camera action, we didn't suffer, or feel too bad, or have to leave, as I have heard many have to. The first sequence is, as everyone agrees, mesmeric. One of the most astonishing cinematic sequences imaginable. Probably this is pirated but there is a clip on YouTube: (
[don't watch if you are going to see the movie: it would be so much better on big screen and with big speakers].



Kristin pointed out immediately the two sets of shadows in the formal garden shot, early in the film: the sun and the newly discovered planet Melancholia, seemingly on collision course with the earth, casting opposite shadows. It was strange sitting next to her, when I remembered she had painted a series of paintings of brides in formal gardens: white tulle and satin against rich dark green trees. Melancholia had the same strong visual quality. But as a two-part narrative, it also juxtaposed the stories of the two sisters, held together around the themes of depression, melancholia, ritual, and the proper way of doing things. There were also family narratives.

I loved the movie. The wedding gone wrong; the frustrations of a difficult family member; the relations of sisters; the portrait of depression and the character unable to simply snap out of it; the desire for appropriate ritual practice, whether for a wedding or the end of the world. The visual imagery is superb: the crush of a wedding gown in the car; the candlelit balloons floating up into the night sky; the small boy peering through a handmade loop of metal to measure the approach of the blue planet. Traumatic glimpses of family life: the disenchanted mother; the helplessly libidinous father; the resentful, wealthy husband. The tantalising absence of "the world", with only brief allusions to the village, the internet. The music. Wagner's Tristan overture is probably a cliche; but it is so fitting here I cannot imagine any other orchestral score could suffice.

And of course, the big blue planet, Melancholia. Luminous, lustrous, inexorable. From a distance, burning red. As it comes closer, it's moonlike: compelling, and mostly seen in full. It's not revolving around us, but heading towards us. Its light is soft and blue. Why would you not want to lie naked in its light?

The blue planet haunts most people who see this movie. Its devastating final moments are telling, in terms of the narrative development of the main characters. And then, stillness. No more Wagner. No more art. No more.

Broader, deeper meanings? Some will be frustrated by the film's blithe disregard of the usual disaster movie psychodramas; and of course, by its disregard of realist conventions. Some by its refusal to talk about what it is doing. But it is, all the same, bristling with communications. The endless filling up of a day, a life, with ... stuff: rituals, eating, drinking, bathing, and ceremony of various kinds. In such a world, a blue planet both gives meaning, and takes meaning away.

Is it a medievalist film? Clare and Louise on facebook are suggesting that, perhaps. There is the medievalism of Wagner, the apocalypticism, the Breughel painting; perhaps the medievalism of the great house's architecture. For me, though, the film is little concerned with time, or historicity or periodisation, or the kind of dialogism I associate with medievalism. It is more about the frailty of almost all human projections.