Givenry.

 

 

Wouldn’t it be better to shrink the world to get a better look?   Everything is magnified nowadays, exposing that essentially,  it’s all about nothing avoiding nothing.  In the nano detail their was no devil, just a well funded void. Aisling Scanlon shaped the acquiescent river clay, a  storm was  brewing in her bean, a cold front from the right brain was approaching a calm high from the left.   Her  imagination fed the ski slopes of Atlantis with snowflakes of fishfood.   She skiied them on a couple of electric eels. ‘Just what was a women doing when molding the earth like this?’  Can this be the opposite of, or a remedy even, for the ever present fixation of fire…? As her hands sunk in, she pictured a brilliantly organic alien technology operated with strangely nimble tree frog like fingers intent on shrinking things to get a better look.

 

Aisling contemplated the role of a quiet little place in the world.  A place far from the rumblings of the 21st century, yet inextricably part of it.  A babe of modernity, complete with a fibre optic umbilical cord, until they really get this wireless thing down.  Where does the island of Tasmania stand?   At the nervous edge of western ontology?   The blasé eyewitness to the nebulous bruise of freedom?  Hah!  The modern state of mind, what a detoxifying mess she thought. Constantly coming down from the latest high or rising from the latest low.  A bountiful fed hope riding in on a tabloid teaspoon. It’s a long way from the glare of fame and other inventions.  Suppose we broke it down to a city/ country dichotomy.  Tasmania being essentially an island of country, more cow dung  than copper plate, mud floor than marble.  Not like the city, the vain city, so self-conscious and constantly rearranging the furniture,  petty development here, demolition there, a bit of reconstruction, ah yes, no doubt, the neurotic city.  The country, that old pie eating slob, on the other hand, takes it a lot easier and only has a haircut when it was absolutely necessary.  And this country, the east coast of Tasmania, the island that God forgot, but it’s on his to do list, waits for centuries between haircuts.

 

 

Its fringe brushes up to a beached forehead, bristling and strong. No history of genetic baldness here, you could scour the dishpans of the lost dimension of gargangatua with these kinds of fibres.  But this is not an accident, considering each haircut comes in form of a huge fire, (this is what Beck was talking about when he wrote his song ’Devil’s haircut’) thought Ariel, allowing the tune to annoy her pleasure receptors in a moment of cranial dyslexia.  This is the land that through an inglorious destiny became the chapel for the marriage of heaven and hell.  In this Vegas of the afterlife, the pastor, a vaudeville William Blake didn’t brush his hair, but it still looked better than Becks’.  To brace the sea there is a comb.

 

 

Surely heaven could never be the beautifully tropic islands of the Pacific and the Caribbean.  They lack the seasonal variety to truly activate the extremes of the senses. Ireland is too becoming, its gentle mystery all poetry.  The Greek islands are just too close to the rest of the real world, physically and metaphysically.  They are the initial museum of memories, a history to savior and gently interpret that when cooked over a medium stove are a complex and pleasing concoction. Iceland is where the fairy queen gets ice for her gin cocktails.  Sri Lanka is where the overlords drink tea. Madagascar was just too damn mysterious, home to the world’s largest vegetarian cult where meat eaters are secreted away and used as mulch, or so she’d heard.  Nova Scotia has way too many huts.

 

 

Tasmania on the other hand rests itself between the seasonal control of the red desert oven in continental Australia and the icy storage shelves of Antarctica below.  Seperated by 200 miles of ocean to the North and another 40 or so degrees of latitude to the south, the bushy little triangle in the southern hemisphere masquerades as the tender boat to the world, obliquely attached should escape prove necessary.  It is the perfect place to keep the fascinations of the afterworld.   On the packaging of earth sponge cake the storage instructions would say, keep the afterworld in a temperate place that is politically stable(i.e. boring) and far from predominant hostilities, bake until half cooked.

 

 

Variety gives Tasmania its beauty, vivid as hell, or heaven if you like.   Crisp air flowing up from the icepack on the swollen ankles of the planet colliding with the sun that has baked the pepper sprinkled Kangaroos of an Aboriginal Dreamtime celebration.  The temperature is known to drop by 30 degrees Celsius as the freezing southern air wedges out the heat where God baked some of the more remarkable species.  The clarity of this air can be brutal, occasionally giving way to a fog that provides a welcome sensory iconoclasm.  The duck billed platypus families spread their toes in the warmth where reason naps.

 

 

Aisling considered the dessert menu in the afterworld.  Fig sorbet served in a custard flan shaped like a map of Tasmania.  The place where the new metaphysical bureaucrats play out their ego games of envy, avarice and allegorical politicking.  The divine structures of ancient Greece and Rome were long gone, somehow the G-8 of spiritual powers now meet in Tasmania. Buddha, Jesus, Mohammad, Akira(representing the digital devotees), Einstein( the agnostic, skeptics and strict rationalists), Jim Jones representing those whose theology didn’t really work at all, Sid Vicious(the nihilists) and a nameless peasant (representing those who’ve died as a result of all the above, bickering). They all gathered here for a democracy of righteousness and ate only dessert, mmmmmmm……and who would have thought that.

 

 

A human Beauracracy would serve up black pudding and icecream?  Fairy floss and vinegar?  Aisling mused. This is after all the marriage of Heaven and Hell.  The dark side is  forgotten in the fair dusky light.  But the contrast makes it apparent, with its vast miseries Tasmania left a lingering omen.  Voiced perfectly by the Tasmanian devil, oh what a voice! Sounding like a miked up raven who has just polished off some Jack Daniels with broken granite ice cubes and expressing his disgust at catching his nuts on the undergrowth.  Convicts were beaten in the wind-etched cold, kept from the warming sun and sent away from their families with no chance of return.  Similar to the European and North American slave trade, but no fancy distraction of building a new empire.  Its purpose was specified only as a place of punishment and isolation.  While they were at it, the new wardens managed to kill every Aboriginal Tasmanian, an unfathomable travesty.

 

 

The injustice for the ‘immigrants’ was not altogether clarified, as it was in the northern hemisphere.  There were petty crimes of bread and laundry stealing that acted as conduits to agony. A desolate bleakness that was magnified(again causing pain, miniaturize please) by the  ‘dancing with tulips’ beauty of the island.  For those forsaken souls this was hell manifest.  When the male convicts became free, there were no women for them.  To solve this problem poor women were paid to come from the British Isles, this was the operation of the underworld and it happened literally under the world.  The fig leaf over the broccoli patch of the world.  The next time someone yelled from their car “show us your map of  Tassie” Aisling promised herself she’d make them meet their maker.

 

 

Contrary  to its not so recent history of suffering, Tasmania’s ancient topography leaked a superb freshness. Like the breakfast at the beginning of time.  Dodo eggs(easy over), thinly sliced T-rex rump(crispy), sautéed field mushrooms with the most organic tomatoes possible and orange juice squeezed by Eve and drip filtered by Jack slowly down the beanstalk, no pith.  Once again it was its size that made its liberation measurable. Like a miniature of eternity it had no vast plains to interpret or fables of renaissance to manufacture.  People came here to die and some of them woke up in paradise.  The Leprechaun of all amusing desire is  a big man in this land and would likely sleep for the entire winter after a breakfast like that.

 

 

As a clay sculptor, the faces of Aislings creations were so imperceptibly different that she considered having a biologist come in and speciate them.  Somewhere between mock resilience and the million hues of joyful rebellion was her standard response.  She was creating her own buried army of terracotta soldiers except her guys were about to perform a rococo opera.  They were all clones of some fantastic army of beauty.  Their tailors were of the same ilk, mirror ball mother of pearl bikinis and bloomers reflecting light back at a million angles. The bloomers in particular shimmered away like the still to be discovered, ultimately abstracted fish.  The specimen in evolutions breadbasket that escaped the trials of survival of the fittest, but still had bigger fish to fry, so to speak.  Pure starlight filtered through a dust storm of broken abalone shells, photographed with a thin slice of sashimi on the lens.  On this finely tuned brain action, the more robust of body signals started its loud motor.  Hunger ignited its internal combustion engine, the traffic light in her head turned green.

 

 

Coles bay is a tiny hamlet on the inner shores of Great Oyster bay on Tasmania’s eastern edge.  A name that brought immense pleasure to Aisling.  She mused about the Great Oyster army and the empire it gave birth to.  With their allies, the abalones, the oysters triumphed over the marauding barnacles, mussels and starfish.  Thus, stood Great Oyster bay.  To somehow amplify the supply of exotic seafood, tonight at mum and dad’s roast lamb and potatoes were on the timetable for ingestion.

 

“Did you know that Karl Marx was said to garner much inspiration form the turnips riots in Trier”  her father

quipped.  Paradigmatically the concept of fine and exotic foods being associated with decadence and indulgence in protestism filled her with an archaic empire building inspiration.  The somewhat tortured rigidity of  ambience being decadance.  Was it a  hangover from the days of not letting evil spirits near the soul?  Keeping the dastardly turnips at bay for example.  Saving the palate of the gastronomic virgins for the easy compliance of corporate icons was the modern manifestation.  Nothing wrong with hearty food, it was just the thought that one could be corrupted by the more delicate morsels that made Aisling laugh.  She named one of her pieces, “intercontinental ballistic turnip caretaker.” It was her reddest sculpture. 

 

 

Slow as a heat wave, incisive as cool breeze bearing down. Her eyes, like Australian opals, marbled with the pearl veins of the most delicate cut of beef, rose from their potato texture focus. Outside the great oysters bayed at the surf under a slither of a moon. She mopped up her gravy with some homemade rye bread her mother had conjured up with a few pumpkin and sesame seeds on top. “Thanks Mum.” She muffled.

 

 

The theory of ergot poisoning in the rye fields at the Salem witch trials were an illustration on the wall of a complete rationalist she thought.  Recently historians had expoused that the witches burned at the stake worked in areas where they were exposed to ergot mold, which is the active ingredient in LSD. From this we can assume that perhaps their wayward behaviour had its root in this inebriation rather than bed knobs and broomsticks.  This way after the fact type of analysis supported the notion that there is likely a logical explanation for every occurrence; her overstuffed neurons applauded this conclusion. Reality can be given an autopsy.  No witches, no demons and most importantly in modern referential circles, no politics, just natural biological reactions and immense blood sugar problems.  She gulped her parfait.  “The turnip riots, eh Dad?”   Her father delivered another reasonably watertight rambling and as she washed up Aisling mulled over why turnip fed cattle were so boisterous?

 

 

After dinner as on every night in Coles Bay Aisling walked the beach and shucked a rock oyster, washed it down with a slice of lemon and appeased the ensuing bitterness with a pregnant blueberry.  She was off to Hobart town tomorrow; an easy skip entered her gait. This night, her dreams were filled with sermons of the black sheep telling the flock to diversify their diets.  Outside the phosphorous laden water deflected a light show offered up by the piqued moon that by some miniscule proportion must have made them oysters grow.  If the moon is a balloon and we are a party to it, then pin the tail on a comet and smash your oyster piñata.

 

 

On the bus into Hobart Aisling gazed at the passing horizons in broken lines.  The early convicts spent three months on crowded boats getting to Tasmania to be cruelly imprisoned.  Leftover stew and water if they were lucky, maybe this is why they serve salted peanuts and pretzels on long crowded flights to London nowadays, an arcane reminder to our not too un-hideous past?  Mmmm… she redeemed that thought by following it up with the nuance that no one else would have possibly thought of that slim connection and slurped some coffee in an atavistic affirmation of her sanity.  The bus burped diesel as it took a right after Orford, leaving the east coast for good.

 

 

Hobart, that old whaling town.  It sits on the Derwent River like a shoeless man on a verandah.  It isn’t going anywhere too fast, that’s for sure, but it may get up for a beer now and then.  It showers when it wants to, isn’t given to dentistry, but whittles a damn fine toothpick.  And man does it have a fine fish tank!  Complete with the wreck of Joseph Conrad’s only command, the Otago.  Perfect, really that his boat should end up there, in the fish tank of the universal banjo guardian. “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it” Conrad was known to muse.  What a visionary thought Ashling, considering since his demise in the early 20th century mankind has spent an indordinate amount of its time trying to liberate itself from its own consciousness, knowingly and unknowingly. 

 

 

A Tolkinesque landscape gave to its nickname ‘Hobbit town.’  The sublime air and southern underglow sunsets can undermine the cynical perspective or sharpen it like a razorblade in a pyramid.  If prettiness is a cliché then Hobart is the most unoriginal area in the world.  A touch of genocide and the brush of the good life, this, my friends is the unscrambled egg.  From this little town it is possible to grasp perspective on the modern world while still in it.  It is unconsumed.  

 

 

No manifest destinies, just the confined chemistry of the human condition cast in the new world model.  As if the world is doing a headstand and the blood is rushing to its head.  Neatly crystallizing its perceptions then proceeding to  black out in the afternoon sun.  The unplanned siesta of forever gets its sombreros in Hobart town.  When it wakes its dreams are recalled as a sea of blue corn nachos escorting a mariachi regaled Joseph Conrad aboard a taco shell dancing and singing in the rain.  Water, the ultimate messenger, banished back and forth by the sun in an ongoing ritual of inexhaustible fertilization.  The wide eyes of capitalism took a couple of drops of existential visine and it becomes clear that, as Conrad would say, there is no such thing as altruism.

 

 

 

It is worth noting that in geophysical terms Tasmania is a new born baby, closer maybe, a baby with the calipers still around its head.  There is of course a mathematical ratio that is usually expressed in the analogy of its now midnight, then Tasmania as an island came about at 11.59p.m. And 59.999 seconds in relation to the dawn of time or something to that effect.  Give me the pregnancy comparison any day.  Tasmania as an island came about, in relation to the time of erection to the time of death at say 88 years, at the time of conception, that magical moment when sperm impregnates egg and a new being begins. 

 

 

Somehow the unquestionable beauracracy of science has robbed the world of much fun, kind of like the way lawyers have robbed people of much money.  Usurped by the value of ignorance.  When the next planet is inevitably found and identified it will probably be named something like Zircanastrophoantalede 89788zc after some preposterously dense theory that relates to its orbit and possible chemical composition.  All this when it is blatantly obvious that the vast majority of inhabitants of this planet would rather just call it Goofy, the last planet discovered was after all called Pluto. “Lets call the next planet Goofy” was one of Aislings favourite T-shirts.  Were she wearing it on the plains of what now is the Bass strait at the end of the last ice age around ten thousand years ago it would have been her favourite wet T-shirt.  The Bikies of Neolithica would have been well pleased.   This relatively recent separation of Tasmania from mainland Australia adds to its cosmic isolation, something brilliant is trapped on this island, but its not a biker club.

 

 

‘So who do you think is going to come up with the real juju?  You know a leap forward in, say, communication or trust?’

‘Well we know the internet is a pretty useful tool.’

‘It is, however, subject to the same principles as any other component of our modern world.  Let’s face it, if you’re not reasonable well off, it doesn’t really make that much difference.  We remain, I’m afraid the naïve soldiers of logic.  Able to invent grand electrically based triumphs over the hunter-gatherer ideal.  Yet, in all this time we still have the general social structure that was around when suspect berries were given to the least liked cave person to sample before deciding if the tribe was interested in indulging.  To this point there has been no ultimate guinea pig to resolve or rise above the natural order. You know, no subtle manipulator of spirit that falls into benevolent hands through organic process hitherto un benounced to us here folks and produces the next giant leap for mankind.  An innate trust that doesn’t push nor grovel in denial of brutality.  A vital realism that is moderate enough to sustain the use of force and satisfy it with blows of overpowering cerebral embellishment….er….mmmm…..”

 

 

Strong coffee was readily constricting the smaller veins in  Aislings’ head,  decorating a superstore of invention tools in the minds engine room.  The niacin in her vegemite toast on the other hand was busy opening the veins around her body; this flux was now at some sort of crescendo. ‘In a logical framework, the Yanks are the most likely to come up with something wild.  Say, reconstructing reality atom by atom, the forerunner to time travel and teleportation.  But for the reasons I was just on about, they are also less likely.  It’s like it has to be a freakish kind of accident.  This would put the Irish or the Chinese in the picture. Here in Ozland we have bizarre geographical and climatic factors that makes it a possibility.  Plus we have enough wigged out people.  You know it could be something as simple as feeding a Tassie Tiger on tomatoed herring fillets and ground uranium. Exposing him to extremely low frequency radio waves on the equinox, then getting him drunk on good champagne, before firing his stool sample in a kiln at 1200 degrees.  These bricks could somehow be the fuel of the manifestation of an uber reality that would have the chef in Escher’s’ kitchen making some dam fine cookies!’

 

 

‘No more coffee for you!’ Andreas Viduka had the incredulous look of someone who’d just stubbed his toe after winning the Olympic marathon. ’Then again, I suppose anything is possible.’  He scratched an unfamiliar part of his head.  Viduka was Aisling’s agent, gallery proprietor and fellow caffeine addict.  He named his gallery, “Seahorsehay” in tribute to his belief that pet fish should have a better diet. Addled tourists often mistook it for a Mexican restaurant.  When things were slow he’d fire up a few clay tortillas and put them in the window for kicks. ‘Lets go next door’ Viduka suggested.  They trundled out of the Lead Balloon coffee house, the waitress dropped a crumby one liner.  What is it with that theme?

 

 

Living by your artwork is a difficult process as any artist can attest.  Not to say it as hard as laying railway tracks or scouring a rubbish dump all day, but it is inconsistent at best and frivolous and ego riddled at worst.  Aisling still shucked oysters for money when she needed it.  Obviously you dream of the big sale or being discovered while shucking those oysters, but still they has to be shucked.  She gazed skyward, Viduka can sell my darlings she mimed. The fresh Tasmanian air sailed through her pulminary system like bowling balls in a fantastic three dimensional alley.  They hit home similtanaeously at the ends of her lungs in those funny things that look like broccolli heads, strike! Apparently the freshest air in the world was recorded on Tasmania’s west coast, keen to sample the best Aisling drew another deep breath only to exhale some more caffeine tarnished Co2.  She took a mint.

 

 MORE STUFF HERE!!!!

 

 

 “You’re going to Tokyo” Viduka allowed room for her to decline in his tone, unlikely as it was.  “Eh?”

“That man has invited us to dinner tonite with the look to invite you to Japan to make art, a lot of it.  This my dear girl is a big offer.”  Excitement filled the air, the only thing that can be added to fresh air without polluting it. ”Really?!” she exclaimed.  ”Really.”

 

 

At Muirs that evening they sat in the sushi section.  There was a  brilliance to Quazyl Tamahachi that reminded Aisling of the interior of those mother of pearl oyster shells that form in great oyster bay.  This man seemed to be so high up on the food chain that he knew the combination to the lock.  After he examined the sample of sashimi with a magnifying glass she was glimpsing a kind of fanatical genius.  As his glaze arose from the sashimi the intensity was that of a visionary.  Convictions beyond reason, yet not beyond rationality. Like a battle of infinity versus eternity.  It would take eternity to realize infinity, yet since eternity entails far more than mere numbers surely it has something left after counting infinity?  Her thousand yard stare was going 997.5 yards into his eyes and still seeing more distance to compute.

 

 

From his two and half yards away he hammered out some practised English . “we seek you artistic powers Aisling” their was no rigidity  in Tamahachis mannerisms, it was fluent, like a brilliant Italian puppet with the kinetics of the finest swiss watches and appeared to continue moving around in  his body when he wasn’t actually moving.  “Our organization in Japan consistantly eats the southern blue fin tuna from the waters around Tasmania.  It seems that your artwork reflects nearly magically the totems of our secret society.  I am inviting you to come and study in Japan and to make works in the likeliness of our esteemed elders.”

 

 

The words secret society lingered with Aisling, ‘esteemed elders.’  She was ready to enquire as to the societies nature, “we will pay five thousand dollars a piece, we have hundreds of elders”  As Tamahachi delivered the clincher he gave the look of Yoda holding in a sneeze.  Viduka gave a knowing smile, somehow he knew this would happen, this girl with the opalescent eyes just had the touch, her visions of totemic verisamilitude had payed off.  He glanced over at Aisling , she had another  long  distant stare going  that could stun a librarian.  This one was directed at her benefactors mouth, as he was no horse.  “ Its seems Aisling that you are the one.”  On hearing that phrase the sticky rice and seaweed  dancing in her digestive tract were joined by some sushimi and proceeded to adopt a more melodic mantra.  That aptly named Tasmanian beer, Cascade helped them downstream and the sound was that of a finely orchestrated Japanese rock garden soaking in a vintage autumnal midday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fade in…

There are no ghosts, life is solid, as is its end.  The moment thrashes the memory, but nostalga is a galant and knowing companion procurring  an effortless resilience.  The nemesis of ambiguity stalks every conclusion but there are no ghosts and life is solid.  I brink, therefore  I dam.  The dividing line is thinnest at the moment of decision, the thinner the line the better the vision.  Gentle repetition will befriend originality, the union of  blather and silence.  A sepia tone movie was playing in 8 mm on Aislings’ retina.  Her alcohol induced trans continental slumber was, at 30,00 feet channeling Leonardo da vincis’ unforfilled cinemagraphic ambitions.  Now there is a man that electricity came to late for, a bird in the sun is worth two in the ether.  A stray piece of airline food chipped away at her Italian marble eyes.  This untimely chisel carved some genuine post sleep annoyance, the offending muffin crumb balanced on her left breast like a mammoth contemplatiing the void.  Somewhere in Mauratania the word Bingo was gleefully proclaimed, Neil  Young  burnt his toast in Marin,

Fade away……

 

 

 

 

The dense sky  filled with even denser neon caligraphy. Hobart is to Tokyo as  braille is to a cheese grater, the cheese is thick  but somehow the megalopolis is thicker.  The form of this predictable novel owes less to the grater than to say, quesadillas and quantum physics.  Anaesthics administered on the stubbed toe of oblivion,  Lenny and Akira, of mice and Zen.  If John  Steinbeck was ever have taken a literary jaunt to this jewel of the east he would have been taken to believe in extraterrestials.  He could have done worse than to detox down in Hobbit town. God rest the soul of that man.

 

 

Twenty millions souls perched on the cutting edge of working science.  Luckily they aren’t all waiting for the ultimate tech toy.  A phone with a tv, personal computer, digital keys to house, car, bank accounts, camera, microwave oven, torch, pliers, scissors, airbags and gps satellite tracking, all no bigger than the average chewing gum chiclet and able to self destruct when in the hands of the enemy. And of course it is also a portable transporter that can burn calories, kinda like a segway with a treadmill and warp speed.  I think this is what I’m waiting on, the Japanese will get there, I’m convinced. For the time being they are certainly buying what they’ve got and what they’ve got is good.   This is the place, after all that sees robotic soccer as yardstick for progress.

 

 

As her plane descended into Tokyo almost slicing through the buildings and bridges Aisling was listening to a song written by an underground Hobart band of the eighties, the Phillisteins.  ‘Apeshit metal locusts eating a city’ may well have involved a vision of this stunning technosphere.  The sort of thing Issac Asimov sees in his breakfast cereal when he has a decent hangover.  In the most macarbe and subversive way this vision had materialized on September the 11th 2001 in New York city.   One hundred tonnes of titanium alloy drifted into Japan at about two hundred miles an hour, shaped more or less like a bird its feet created little eddies of air that keep engineers employed for hours.  Its carbon based fuel supply, the lynch pin of its existence was ready for extinction, literally and metaphorically.  The wing in ground effect kept the plane aloft that fraction longer, almost giving the flight personality by threatening to take off again. Her metal locust landed safely and appeared to be well fed.

 

 

This is the land that like no other that embraces technology.  Consumes it and lives for it, has legions of people perfecting it, theoretically and actually.  Giant upright ants tending an anthill that can not only withstand an earthaquake but, if it wants to can take off and fly to sweeter climes.  Diligent people autocratically shrinking the world and striving to make such things as nano submarines that can fire down some fatty build up while taking snapshots of your relatively enormous arteries.  The Japanese are famous for their snapshots and this could be the bizzarest form of tourism yet to hit the market.  All done to the mesmeric tones of George Harrisons’ “within you, without you.”

 

 

Someone here in the land of the rising sun had people dancing to stave off amageddon. Organic dance floors that recipricated the dance energy and stored it for power.  It works sort of like this, the floor is made of thousands of individual pads that are mounted on hydrolic struts that, when danced on generate pressure that in  turn generate enough electricity to light and sound the dance hall.  A human version of the mouse on the spinning wheel effect, probably a lot more fun though.  It produced some of the most rythmic electricity since that guy who wired all the floats at Carnaval in Rio with  gyro sensors that magnified the jelly rythms of human flesh and transformed them to microwaves. Shifts of energetic young people dancing for the grid all over the globe.  Finally someone was tapping that great unutilized resource, youthfull angst and unrealizable idealism.  The fleeting glimpse need not be a shard of onion glass.  Salvation lies in a garlic window frame…mmmmmm……….

 

 

A bulbous taxi cut through the rain, droplets flying up the windscreen.  A white noise cutting through the white noise, Aisling visualized the screen of an untuned TV , maybe it should have been ‘apeshit metal gorillas running through a city’  Her stream of consciousness was running into a dam of  absurdity.  Absurdity, the last frontier, she passed out.  Her semi conscious state was processing the concept of absurdity.  Grist for the mill of anti-establishmentism, “the lust of the goat is the bounty of God.”   What grazed history had brought her here for the purpose of art and its alturistic implications?  Convinced that art must, by definition be for the benefit of other people Aisling pusued it as an ideological child.  She rationalized that making of money through art was a direct consequence of the arbitrary nature of  currency.  An invention to regulate behaviour that had morphed into the modus operandi of the human machine,  but the actual pursual of aesthetics was driven by a desire to interpret the world in a progressive and essentially visonary light.  A bridge between the known and the unknown, that old chestnut.  Paradoxically the notion of the money she was in the position to make filled her with credibility she hadn’t dreamed of.   She’d have to unravel the mathematics to discover the virtues of this inherent absurdity.

 

Among the beautifully organized society of Japan she reflected on home. In a rough sea Tasmania lost its grasp on the larger northern isle, which at best had a tenuous grip on the rest of the world.  It swung in the wet winds free of contact to the larger picture.  A fermenting reality that recants to its founding in an allegorical weather pattern.  Yet it is about to be reconnected to the world through a huge electrical cable. As she Aisling Scanlon was about to connect to the Japanese psyche.  Terrorism had cut short the roccoco age, classicism was coming back, yet Aisling was determined to give it an enduring legacy, she thought as much anyhow.

 

 

Quazyl Tamahachi wandered the catacombs of the visual mandolin lighthouse.  Essentially the product of his visions.  A huge maze of semi submerged glass topped  corridors surrounding a  steeply inclining pyramid, the surfaces of which were deftly coloured and honeycombed in varying geometries.  surrounding the tops of the corridoors of glass were impressive gardens.    This is where he wished his new artist to place her sculptures.  A fitting tribute.  “I plan to win without winning” he exclaimed. “ The vision chronicle is forseen, obviously” He slurped some sea tea.       

 

 

A centimeter perfect sideways glance “What happened to Viduka?”   Aisling quipped. “ We are sorry, like you we have no idea what has happened.”  Since arriving she had learnt that Andreas had come undone, was no more, car crash, statistic.  She knew none of his relatives.  The shadows of the world of art were repositioning, she was too naïve to really know, too inspired to be uninspired.  She was told that not more than two days ago Viduka had run his Karman ghia into a lake, he was recovered, his car was not.  No suspicious circumstances, wet road, speeding was suspected.  Her world was now inflamed, her veins thick with the essence of reality, unable to read here Japanese counterparts she scoped for signs that she was being closed in on by darkness.  The intuition needed for this was anathamae to the world she knew.  Tears formed and she squinted a  psychedelic tribute to her friend who had brought her here, it became clear that she must stay on.