The Surrealism Found in Trauma

Using Insights from Guy Madden

I watched an interview with the Canadian Film Director Guy Madden in which he spoke of his "neurological" style of film producing. This is explained in more detail in other sections of this blog, but it is generally that his films at some level are a more accurate representation of how we actually perceive memory rather than the linear approach you might get in prose or other more traditional styles of film making.

I decided to try writing in a similar style. I closed my eyes, and went back to memories of me being electrocuted when I was probably about 8 years old. I was like a private eye, hiding behind posts and buildings watching for where the memory would take me rather than takign the role of actually directing the memory in a more forced manner. I was particularly aware of the emotional resonance of the trauma I experience and fascinated by the way that rather than becoming a victim of this tortuous dynamic, I instead dissociated.

Dissociation is often the way people, particularly children deal with events that exceed their capacity to handle. It is like blocking the emotion, so it doesn't overwhelm or as some put it, the person isn't "over-exposed" which can lead to a fragmentation of the self. It is inherently surreal as a person detaches from the self, inducing an altered state of consciousness as a protection from the traumatic material.

This "adaptive" mechanism is one I employed on a number of occassions when I was growing up. I had learned to somehow not speak about what seemed to me atrocities, as there was very little empathy or understanding. My parents were distracted by the need to contain their own internal conflicts. Dissociating, or not 'being there' was a great relief to me at times. I recall after an emotionally charged event, that I'd open my eyes in the bath and hold my breath as long as possible. The warm water would silence the outside world, nobody could see me, I couldn't see myself, the warmth deeply absorbed into my head.

The Tea Timer

Memories exist in spaces, a void, smelling flesh, my own. Brother plugs in the tea timer, the look of panic in my aunties eyes, she sees it the next day. She looks at my black lumpy fingers. They taunt me, fingers have been invaded. They hurt and are burnt. Sparks fly in my head. Parents keen to go out and ignore my pain. I'm thrown across the room, black lumps, electrical current, hideous movements in my inner organs, black splinters, pain, no one cares, alone, hurt, shut down.

I could have died, I might have died. Orange carpet, so much orange carpet, that's all there is. Orange carpet – stains, I can see stains, shapes, pictures that aren't there, I drift, I'm in the carpet, I'm down inside looking up at the bottom of the bed, it looks too big, too menacing, I want to grow up, to be taller, to not care, strength, my little limbs.

Shortness of breath, nowhere to scream, it garbles inside my lungs. The window. Dad's hair is so black, his eyes don't match when they look at me. I'm his son, but I'm not there, I am the carpet, the faded orange. They look over me, I am dead, I feel dead, they are getting changed. I am different. Pants, slacks, mum's looking through dresses. My fingers have black lumps, my insides are shaking, I'm dead, I'm shaking, Mum's shoes. My brother killed me, he wanted me dead.

My eyes have tears, my dad puts his belt through loops in slacks. They look handsome. I'm not alive, I'm somewhere I thought didn't exist, on the other side, I am stung, old cream Bakelite, clock, strange deco chrome, wired underneath, I can see them, I touched them, my brother plugged it in. I'm thrown back, I hit the wall, I'm alone in this. My fingers numb, my insides hot, I can't breathe. Mum smells different, I'm losing the floor. There is no carpet, I'm sinking beneath the floor where I shouldn't be. I'm different now and no –one can see. They are frustrated as they are late. I am different, I am not me. Maybe that's why they can't see me, they are ready to go to dinner. Mum puts on lipstick. Dad threads his belt. I'm crying, my tears, feel warm. They should notice. I'm changed. I'm not me. The carpet, fibres, like massive trees – what dirt and creatures live in here?

Top image: www.thebody.com/content/art2526.html

Electrical image: http://www.qualityinformationpublishers.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=598

"...from the honeycomb of his memory he built a house for the swarm of his thoughts" (Walter Benjamin on Proust)

Surrealism is What Lies Within All of Us

Dreaming

I’m standing on a small concrete island just large enough to cover my feet. Around me man made streams weave their way chaotically with water speeding gushing snaking for as far as I can see. Out of nowhere a friend I haven’t seen for 20 years, a fundamentalist Christian. I was in love with him in my middle teen years, one of several I was obsessed by. His hair cut in a way that mirrors his suburban identity and Bible belt upbringing, his smile beautiful at the sight of me.

He is wearing a denim jacket done up half way. I become transfixed by the small yellow red flame that is growing in size coming from inside his jacket. As it grows time is stretched… a minute becomes many and his walk slows right down so he looks like he’s hardly moving. The flame starts licking around his torso and I am deeply moved by its beauty, the elegant way it gently moves, the passionate way its taking hold. I want to stay here forever, this moment is intensely moving.

Time startles me as it snaps back to its normal pace, and I become aware of the consequences of ignoring the flame as my friend hasn’t noticed it. I silently gesture to him as I would a friend who has spinach between his teeth. He nonchalantly moves his hand over the flame which is head height now and it is snuffed.

This dream is intensely surreal, and deeply engaging on many levels. It allows me to dine on its rich imagery or perhaps float away on the art of introspective interpretations. It could provide me with elegant insights into parts of my unconscious I don’t know exist.

We all dream every night, we rarely remember them as they fade quickly and most are forgotten before we wake. Most dreams are surreal and can be seen by some as gifts from the unconscious; the rare invitation to look at what’s hiding underneath. We all have surrealist moments every night that come from a very deep place from where most of us have lost the keys.

Memory

Memories are also surreal in nature. Guy Madden’s films seem to mirror the way we actual remember quite accurately. We’ve all been taught to enjoy the linear way books, stories and most music are presented. This however is not how we really think and feel.

Memories are largely influenced and encoded with embedded emotional material. We often recall something when it has a strong emotional resonance. When I bring up an early memory of my mother, I experience a quick flash of a photo I’ve seen and feel a warmth and happiness, a strange shape is then in front of me, some colours, anxiety, then a flash to a distorted view of her finger pointing in anger, swollen with pallid horror and a crunching noise watching her gnarled knuckles. This is if I allow myself to enter the layers just hiding beneath the surface.

Memories are rarely accurate representations of exactly what happened. They are layered very deeply under emotion, other similar events and themes that are encoded in a similar space. When thinking of an early image of a parent, it is very difficult to get an accurate and clear image of a face. If you spend time closing your eyes and focus on this image, it will distort, mutate and become something else very quickly. You may in fact get images stored in your memory from photos you’ve seen rather than a memory of the actual moment.

So memory itself, the thing that the self is built around is a surrealist feast!

A Recent "Cut Up"

Night of the Penguin

I turn around and see that my cousins and a couple of friends were years older in school uniforms walking towards me. I realized that I was either in the past or they had moved into the future. Walking through a seedy place, dark, dusty, post-industrial attractive and robust. They leave and then I’m walking alone. Invisible steam hissing, majestic cavernous rusting machines explode biting fragments of Bakelite. Gargoyles imbedded on the outside of ancient rooms.

This marked the beginning of my integration of this potentially disabling biochemical relapse into sanity. Left with this seemingly irresolvable dilemma, byproducts of a childhood torture flake off, powerlessly floating… so many moments of silent abuse – one after the other – looking with longing eyes… hacking away until the heavy stupid limb breaks off and snaps. I felt powerless to prevent this cruelty although I knew there may have been a way if I have intercepted.

I was electric with emotion… my elation was only equaled by my hopes. Falling deeply in love with the idea that someone is desperately and hideously screaming a dualistic cry out for freedom.

Just as I was coming to terms with the futility of getting close to God – the God of justice, I then attempt a curious sense of emptiness knowing this had happened. I wanted to help him… I guess I don’t.

By the Christian Church lay eroded stone figures and faces. Under a damp grey canopy protruded the gutted corpse of a penguin, hardened flippers at right angles to its stiff body. The minced clotted inner organs outside the skin next to it in the packet sold on the black market. Wealthy Eastern European men secretly use Penguin pellets as suppositories hoping to deeply feel the tiredness which can be seen milky in Eskimo eyes.

At times of massive insecurity as I have just experienced, I become obsessed by male flesh while God still talked and flirted with him.

I walked away from them and saw older well spoken people and others including some in 50’s airline stewardess uniforms attempting to walk up a very steep incline – a path without steps. The older people climb up and applaud at the top, full of surreptitious wisdom of experts in a myriad of esoteric topics of total irrelevance. This makes up for their reality which is devoid of any intellectual experience, just full of ritualistic love making.

The destructive relationships in adulthood are a split and it is extremely unlikely I am ever going to change – I am a sculpture on standby.

I climb horrendous piles of iconic research articles –and I struggle to hold onto rocks and with much effort make it to the top. I assume He has the power to divinely intervene and change this, especially given my precious external and internal realities which are incessantly peripheral today.

1st journal cut up experiment using

random pages from years of journal writing dating from the 80’s

Industrial landscape: http://greatvisualtruths.blogspot.com

Gothic Church pic: St. Francis Xavier Roman Catholic church on 6th avenue N.Y http://meanderthal.typepad.com

The Wonderous Escape Found in Sureal Language

"Language is a Virus from Outer Space" (William Burroughs)

Pic: William Burroughs - a literary hero of mine

A beautiful example of a William Burroughs cut up method using film

The Backdrop:

The Seamless Horror of Fundamentalism

Surrealism and the discovery of the deleriously compelling disortion of language was for me such a blissful way to try to individuate and survive. Mt.Eliza south of Melbourne Victoria, on the Mornington Peninsula, the hilly dreamscape of banal childhood dreams where every room has a view of the sea. Women would judge each other through oversized sunglasses as they forced thin lipped smiles waving through the windows of their new Mercedes. Like some strange dream, their hair cloned replicas of each others', perfectly formed shapes dancing elegantly on their hardened faces. Control, conformity, balality, tedium.

I was finding it increasingly difficult to draw breath in this thinly veneered blanched pathos ridden art and culture around me. In my adolescent mind, I either surrendered to the culture surrounding me, and atrophy, or I found a benign subversion which I could indulge in that would fly under everyone's radar screen. It fascinates me that what started as a way of psychologically staying alive has taken on a life of its own inside of me. I've grown up with neuronal pathways and emotional growth forming through the perverse and darkness of what lies underground.

One of the saddest things that occurred to our family was my mother's hideous discovery of the black and white reductionist 'answers' of fundamentalist Christianity. I was an early teen at this point. Her spiritual quest had gone from creative mysticism to a dead end where the family then was led reluctantly to psychologically gnarled meetings with groups of parochial insecure devotees. We started with Baptist, then gradually devolving further into Evangelical and finally to the pitiful nadir of Pentecostalism. Endless Sunday mornings were spent rehearsing smiles on the way to an orgy of right wing conservative sermons and homophobic attitudes thinly cloaked by the righteousness rantings about their disturbing perception of Jesus.

The Spiral into Ex-gay Ministry

In the midst of listening to endless sermons about sinners and the horrors of the mincing predators called homosexuals, I was slowly becoming more aware of my sexuality. I was becoming the thing that I'd been taught to hate. These internal conflicts were excruciating and would eventually lead me in my 20's leading an ex-gay ministry. Lucky for everyone particularly me, I realized the extreme and deluded nature of this damaging nightmarish psychological torture the Church had created and liberated myself.

The Strangely Out of Touch Words from a Sadly Deluded Exodus

The following is an extract from Exodus International website. A warning that anyone who has a rational evidence based attitude towards homosexuality may find this offensive:

"EXODUS is a Christian organization dedicated to equipping and uniting agencies and individuals to effectively communicate the message of freedom from homosexuality, as well as how to effectively convey support and understanding to individuals facing the reality of a homosexual loved one.

EXODUS upholds heterosexuality as God's creative intent for humanity, and subsequently views homosexual expression as outside of God's will. EXODUS cites homosexual tendencies as one of many disorders that beset fallen humanity. Choosing to resolve these tendencies through homosexual behavior, taking on a homosexual identity, and involvement in the homosexual lifestyle is considered destructive, as it distorts God's intent for the individual and is thus sinful."

Options for Survivors of Ex-Gay Ministries

Anyone unfortunate enough to have been exposed to these destructive groups would benefit from visiting:

http://www.freedom2b.org/ This a supportive community of people who have survived these groups and found the evidence based realities.

I deeply regret having spent time with the insidious organisation called Exodus and have since done my best since to educate people about the destructive influences these organisations have on too many innocent people. The only positive thing I feel it gave to it's group members was a forum to meet other guys and women. I know several couples who's long term same sex relationships were forged through the disgusting miasma of Exodus.

With the psychological tortures of fundamentalist Christianity, my parents tearing each other apart, my Dad coming out as gay and my own internal conflicts between being gay and a fundamentalist were all the backdrop for the discovery of my ultimate respite.... words!

The Insatiable Chaos & Joys of Manipulating of Words

The well known Laurie Anderson
One of the most incredible performance artists and master of manipulating words with technology into sublime art http://www.laurieanderson.com/

"An example of the way in which Anderson transforms an everyday occurrence into something strange can be found with the song “Language is a Virus.” Dedicated to the Beat writer William Burroughs who coined the phrase “language is a virus from outer space,” Anderson’s song scrutinizes everyday examples of language-use from pain cries to performances to overdubbed Japanese films. Remarking in an interview that “it’s a strange thing for an author to say that language is a disease communicable by the mouth,” Anderson’s song relates a similar terror of communication." www.pbs.org

One of Laurie Anderson's earlier haunting pieces
Walking and Falling

"A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts." http://acjournal.org/holdings/vol6/iss3/responses/attias/virus.html

Pic above: virus similar to lymphocytic choreomeningitis

A Surreal Friendship

I developed a friendship with a guy of my own age called Simon. He came from a background of English parents who were obsessed with glorifying their memories of England and complaining about life in Australia. It amused us greatly listening to the rantings about the land they idealised. They eventually left Australia with a sense of great relief. Within a short period of time they returned speaking romantically of the virtues and joys of living in Australia.

Simon was an introverted sullen soul who connected and understood the darkness that I was experiencing at the core of my soul. It resonated with him in a way he didn't want to explore. Music and words were the perfect way of ventilating the bile that was accumulating in my system. Given my myriad of distressing background influences, surrealism was a blissful platform on which to gain some comfort, humour and allow myself to escape the stultifying conformist requirements of fundamentalism.

We'd spend hours and hours writing poems, stories, word games and disturbing cartoons. The manipulation of words became one of my great joys. The game of each thinking of a word and writing it down secretly and putting them together was a source of amazing amusement.

Word fun

glossy pigeon beak
hyperventilating camel poo
fluffy toenails
grinding dolly
pecked out priest
meaningful prunes
artificial chicken toes
religious blow up doll
reverberating strumpet
shaved emotion
serious pygmy pubes
enticing car accident
imperial ring worms
pulsating witch doctor

Above: image from one of Tony Oursler's brilliant video installations
His use of words is an extraordinary complement to his highly original and beautiful installations

Below is one of his installations from the Metro Pictures Booth at the Armory Fair in New York City

http://www.tonyoursler.com/

We'd co-write and independently write unusual and at times dark tales

One amusing tale I wrote about a curious sounding man Rimbald

Insomnia

Rimbald awoke to a gentle thud. He politely dismissed the noise as being an inherent part of a chaotic dimension of a dream although he had no recollection of a dream in his mind. His eyes remained shut to maintain his ebbing body to gently pull his mind into the vortex of sleep.

A terrifying second later, electrical impulses shocked his body into a fully awake state. His leg was heavier and decidedly warmer than the the rest of his body. It must have fallen to sleep with no blood supply. He moved it to a new position in the bed to reintroduce blood supply to its hungry channels. An intense sickly feeling overcame Rimbald as he had no feeling in his leg, yet the other leg sensed soft fur caressing it. This felt like a dream but new it was real due to the nauseous feeling intensifying, as his leg seemed to drag behind the rest of his body.

He switched on the bed side lamp, threw the covers back and almost vomited. A bloated furry form was attached to his leg. The pungent odour almost stung his nostrils and stuck to the sides of his esophagus. In his dazed state he noticed the ears of a rabbit attached to the ball of fur. It seemed to be gently moving like a boat on a slow turbulent sea. Rimbald tried to shake it off his leg, but from the thigh down was paralyzed. He could see it sinking deeper and deeper into his leg.

All his energy had left him, leaving his mind awake only able to contemplate the concepts before him. His struggling body used the small amount of energy to pull himself away from the aberrant vision before him. With this, the lower half separated from the rest of his body with flaccid skin hanging like tattered blinds. Blood was not to be seen, only a soft rubbery red gel lying in contorted shapes on the sheets. The grey fur of the ballooning dead rabbit was now matted with entwined veins and thick drying blood.

Rimbald having a good sense of humour laughed it off and went back to sleep.

An Angora bunny

Why These Mountains? Why This Sky? This Long Road? (Laurie Anderson)

"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside." William Burroughs

What compels me about the absurd, avant-garde and surreal? Why do I find the predictable, explainable and formulaic in Hollywood and art so overwhelmingly banal?

I decided to unlock memories of my past and track some of the things that have shaped this incredible interest of mine in that which really makes very little sense of all.

Below, I've started reflecting a little on what I've gained so far from this bizarre passion of mine.


The Genius of David Lynch

The film 'Eraser Head' was one of many alternative films I saw late night at the Valhalla Cinema in Melbourne. I went to see it many times as it confronted me with sound scapes, images and interactions that were disturbing, amusing and left me each time with different feelings that I couldn't articulate. After Lynch made his short films, he spent about 5 years creating this absolute classic which he has been quoted as saying he still enjoys watching it to this day and is proud of the end result. This film etched itself into my mailable brain and became a bench mark for other films. I've had very few friends who I've taken to this film who actually enjoyed it. The wonderful thing for me is that it definitely it seemed to evoke a strong response in all of these people.

In retrospect this film had particular resonance given what was happening for me in my late teenage life. Some of these extremely distressing dynamics were with my father coming out as gay, the emotionally violent way my parents navigated their separation and divorce, our families hideous decline into fundamentalist Christianity and my own conflicts with being gay and the fear that my coming out would be the end for my mother. The lead character Henry constantly looked troubled as he was trying to make sense of what was happening around him. I had no idea at the time, but was I in fact seeing a mirror of myself in Henry? An expression I was hiding, but laying in the darkness of my unconscious? (pic Henry in Eraserhead)

Watching David Lynch being interviewed is poetry. As the inevitable questions arise asking him to explain what parts of his films mean... the anxiety ridden desperation for certainty, logic, structure, and understanding... his fingers start moving like massive spiders legs as it is upside down scrambling for a foothold. He is hovering over a feeling, an intuitive moment, a moving shadow, a sound that people can't hear. (pic Poster ad for David Lynch's Short Films)

There are no explanations, there is no safety. People either shut down, and walk out of his films, dissociate, allow their minds to glaze over, or if they are willing, start feeling things they can't describe, experiencing murmurs from the soul that are usually silent.

"But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has." Quote from David Lynch (pic on left David Lynch)

As I watched parts of Inland Empires, I felt discomfort, strange darkened echoes from somewhere inside of me. Questions... am I even open to them? What disturbs me so much when I see a frozen image of someone who's face contorts? The part where a man walks into a darkened room with a table of Polish men, and he can feel the fact that a woman is there, someone who was there, but faded before he arrived.,... it has stayed with me ever since. What resonance does this have for me? (pic above scene from Inland Empires)

The Connection to the Unconscious


"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious" Jean Cocteau

We are not privy to much of our unconscious, in fact most turn their attention fearing what really lies beneath. The fear of what the soul, or self is really like. How often have all of us been scared of the shadows that we can feel but not want to give form to.

"In my writing I am acting as a map maker, an explorer of psychic areas, a cosmonaut of inner space, and I see no point in exploring areas that have already been thoroughly surveyed." (William Burroughs)

Carl Jung a psychologist who thought very deeply about the human condition around the time of Freud said:

"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. It is far better take things as they come along with patience and equanimity."

What is it we fear the most about darkness? What is it we fear about ourselves? For me, to truly open up to the absurd, the unexplained, the shadows and at times the disturbing is to get a little closer to parts of myself that I am driven to hide from. Even then I know I'll never get close. I was desperately afraid of the dark as a little boy, it was the space where the unexpected, the ethereal, the menacing would take flight around my bed. Even though I consciously want to explore the darkness vicariously through the brilliance of certain artists and authors... I wonder if this is really the case.... do I really want to connect to it? The guardians that I created in childhood to protect me from pain, panic, and the unknown... the light on when I was asleep... they still exist inside of me. On one level protecting me, and at the same time, depriving me of the deeper levels that lie within.

Surrealist art, film, poetry, prose, sound, music, performance and other forms of art, are one way that I've found that get me just that little closer.

"The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place; from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web." Salvador Dali

A Truly Unique and Brilliant Artist of Film - Guy Madden

As seen in an earlier blog entry, Guy Madden is a modern day film making genius. He uses influences from silent film, and brilliantly marries this with what he terms a "neurological" way of seeing a film. This is where it seeks to move away from the usual formulaic linear style of stories in cinema we've been brought up with He tries to more accurately emulate the way we really think and imagine. When reflecting and imagining a memory, we don't go from the beginning right to the very end with it tapering like a perfect stool. We jump to some emotionally potent parts, repeat various aspects, skip to the end and we might weave our way back again. His films do this with silent film-like theatrical fervor and made delectable by the overwhelming campness in many moments in his films.

His film which you can see on You Tube "Fuse Boys" can be seen on a humorous camp level, or can be seen as an intense portrayal of an old gay man desperately longing for young muscular male flesh, but is excluded although the shirtless protagonists are merely an arm length away.

I found this particularly painful to watch, which surprised me as I thought I'd savour the camp sensibility and feel nothing else. I wondered why, and thought it may offer me a mirror into that which I don't want to explore or accept in myself as I rapidly progress towards my middle age. I consciously don't seem to have a problem with aging, but has this piece of surrealist film offered me a glimpse into my unconscious fears? If this is the case, it is another wonderful gift.

One of my favourite Madden short films which I have seen probably way too many times follows. It speaks for itself:

"Sissy Boy Slap Party" by Guy Madden

Street Poets & The Pram Factory

The Effect of the Avant-garde on a Suburban Boy's Soul

A key part to me developing a deep soul-like connection with the avant-garde was my regular exposure to performance art and alternative music in the 70's in Carlton Victoria. At this time, it was a university town and Melbourne Uni seemed to be pulsating with experimentation. It was also a suburb of first and second generation Italians. Spending time with some of these families my father knew also introduced me to alternative ways of looking at the world. I would leave the beige banality of our suburban landscape and enter worlds that transcended anything I'd ever seen before and excitedly enter the underbelly of what was a very creative inner suburb of Melbourne.

Carlton in the 70's

My trips to Carlton Some school holiday times were unique opportunities for me to spend one on one times with my father. The time spent cocooned in the Walnut wood, old leather and grandiosity of his old Bentley was sublime for me. The only time we could really connect. We'd step out of the silent beauty of the car into a space where my father spent his day busily detaching from the self and running from his resentment at being where his soul was disseminated.
Pic above, Dad in his old Bentley which more like a member of the family

His dirty, dusty bleak business was devoid of colour. Sometimes though, yellow faded patches could be seen on certain machines, curling old paint ready to flake. The yard filled with mounds of sand, stones, tractors, trucks and men yelling and speaking of things I couldn't comprehend. The moment would come when my father would disappear into a conversation with one of his
Greek or Italian customers inevitably haggling over cash. I would without announcement leave this alien place.

His business sprawled uncomfortably surrounded by old Victorian semi-detached houses with first generation Italians.
Mercifully for me, was right next door to the centre of Melbourne's alternative creative heart, the Pram Factory.

Pram Factory - Lygon St.
Carlton, Inner city Melbourne

The infamous Pram Factory

At night, radical performances tantalized those who came to watch. My parents often laughing about a plays where the actors were naked and would walk through the audience. My mother was slightly confronted when one bent over to pick something up in front of her on one occasion.

I could only dream of what this might have been like, but I spent as much time as I
could walking through the space during the day. Rehearsals for plays that made no sense, people moving and speaking in ways that were disturbing, and deeply compelling. My senses always alive watching people wearing amazing clothes, a woman walking with a hessian bag with holes cut in for her arms, others with materials that I'd never seen before anywhere near a person. The place was crackling with creative energy none of which I could make sense of. I would talk to people, stand on the side watching and would drink and absorb everything I could. I felt alive, and as though I was in some forbidden space that I shouldn't be in. It was so far removed from anything in my home town. (photo: Genesis P-Oridge from Throbbing Gristle)

Spontaneous Performances in Back Alleys & "Street Poetry"

Street Poetry - Click 4 larger image
I'd walk through the back streets of Carlton and randomly confront a performance artist somehow defying everything I'd ever known of what art should be. I would walk down an alley way and see people sitting around watching some form of avant-garde performance. I would watch these for hours. I had given up trying to understand. I knew there was another plane that others were connected to, so I just relaxed my brain and would flow intuitively with whatever I would be next confronted with. Street poets would recite their obscure and heart felt words in alleyways where onlookers would seem entranced. I would collect poorly photocopied tracts of poems and read them out to friends at home. A couple laughed and wanted to hear more, and others spent much less time with me.

Example of Street Poetry

PYROX PURGATORIO

Skinny Puppy

The people heaters' are burning me;
every heater they tell me to test
swells the blaze outside
into a swelter inside.
I have nothing but skin to discard
-take it off-
and feel the steel that ribs this world.
polish your knuckles on nuts,
breathe bromine,
piston your palm back and forth
then beeline with the other machines for lunch

You could:
"Collect the series"
"Print your own poetry"
"Contact Tom"

A line of a poem I lost that always captured my attention: "waxen doll face... such distaste" A friend and I made a homage to this poem by cutting a dolls finger off and sewing it hideously onto the other hand showing 6 fingers.




Integrating the Surreal

At the age of 14, my head swimming with absurd free flowing words and images, I wrote a "poem" and handed it to my conservative English Literature teacher who constantly espoused the virtues of classical literature. It was ostensibly to amuse myself with his reaction to a piece of writing which made no sense at all and was not a well written poem. In retrospect, it may also have been an attempt to bring my two worlds together, as on one level I was fragmenting.

Metabolic sea clouds present former bunk.
She takes the menstrual grass and sprinkles her clothes
Why does our nose eat 5 too wait for the pigeons
on her alter and wine down her frown on sly conservative junk

Meditate, formulate, oh depressing value truck
My God, why I wait for glinting, or sapling conform, confirm, perform, condom, vomit - chuck, spew and chew.

Era of lives wasting world, oh windy caress
Spit and stand on damned horse, nose or funt
Somatic dialogues paint Cindy's lost drums
Weird people standing, will you eat toe nails?

Away despite growing pushers and the high cost of living
Seven broken vibrating harpoons eat blossom antigone brake

His generous response written in red: A feeling for language certainly but too obscure for my limited comprehension Paul

Early Electronic, Absurd & Disturbing Music

My times in Carlton also was where my passion for avant-garde music came alive. I would tune my transistor radio into the recently started 3RRR and PBS FM and listen to music that was bizarre, harsh, unstructured and opened up doors inside of me that I didn't know existed. I would then go to Missing Link Records and spend my pocket money. There was a dark shop in an old Mall down one of Melbourne's side streets with a guy from Berlin that I'd spend hours talking to about music coming out of Germany such as Klaus Shultze & other experimental underground electronic groups.


This was the time when electronic music was new and much of it experimental. It was creating sounds that had never been heard before. At school, taking tapes of Kraftwerk Radioactivity - alien sounds, repetitious noises, deadpan German voices. People were starting to feel uncomfortable around me knowing I was reflecting worlds they had no reference points for.
Pic above: Early image from Kraftwerk

My mind was growing with obsessions with unstructured bizarre sounds, machine-like repetitions, voices treated beyond recognition by metal boxes that were a profound mystery to me.

Right pic: The Residents album cover

Video of One of Melbourne's "Little Bands" Primitive Calculators in the Classic "I Can't Stop it!" (Early electronic distorted bliss)

DAF , SPK & Kraftwerk Album Covers

My Musical Obsessions

Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Foetus, Melbourne's "Little Bands" including Primitive Calculators & Whirlywirld, Skinny Puppy, SPK, Deutsch-Amerikanische Freundschaft, The Klinic, Nurse with Wound, Half Japanese, The Residents, Laurie Anderson, Sonic Youth. At times dark voices with demented sounds of metal colliding, screams and noises droning in the background. I couldn't get enough of this new sound and was experiencing the most amazing heady mix of darkness, absurdity, humour, intensity... feeling as though I was witness to a frontier, a new way of feeling music... sublime discordant surreal, angry, dark, funny, disgusting and so invigorating.

Pic top right - Cabaret Voltaire single cover - Control Addict

Video of Cabaret Voltaire's Sluggin' for Jesus
(One of my favourites given its endless repetition
with disturbing electronic surgical and vocal interventions)

"Initially a three piece, Richard H. Kirk, Stephen Mallinder and Chris Watson began by playing around with recorded sounds manipulated by basic reel-to-reel tape recorders in Sheffield in 1973. Way ahead of their time, these ideas culminated in 1975, when the three staged their first performance of these sound experiments and assumed the name Cabaret Voltaire, taken from the name of the club started in Zurich by the principals of the Dada art movement during the First World War. As part of the confrontational energy of punk, itself inspired by the Dada and Situationist art movements, the early titles of the records didn’t mince words - ‘Baader Meinhof’ and ‘Do The Mussolini (Headkick)’ were indicators that were bound to lead to a certain notoriety. To the press they appeared to be immersed in a world of paranoia fed by conspiracy theories, political control and the use of drugs to both liberate and inhibit the individual." http://www.mutelibtech.com/cv/

The Early Days of Nick Cave

Local boy Nick Cave had just gone from his Boys Next Door classic suicidal meanderings to the startling Birthday Party and would psychotically scream and convulse with deranged intensity on stage. The sounds he would make with his fiendish voice would discordantly compete with the screeching guitars and other instruments. Each time I listened to the grating chaos on vinyl I'd be in heaven.

Lyrics from The Birthday Party are an orgy of surreal verbosity - below are some extracts:

"Big Jesus Trash Can"

Big-Jesus soul-mates Trash-Can
fucking rotten business this
both feet in the Bad-Bootstiff in the crypt, babay, like a rock
rock-rock-rock
Big-Jesus soul-mates Trash-Can
and he pumped me fulla Trash at least it smelt like Trash
and he's got greasy hair wears a suit of Gold
but god gave me Sex appealright right

"The Dim Locator"

fog fished and filtered is filling my case book, of
friends who fall foul of my files trip and BreakNeck
are stacked in the woodshed for further good use
there's some certain people who shouldn't start fires

Pic above Nick Cave

Nick Cave Live at the Hacienda 1982

The Divine Cathy!

Friday evenings, I'd often spend surrounded by the experimental sounds from ABC FM's 'Acousica Nova'. I would often reel with the sounds of 'sound poetry', nose flutes, strange disordered shouts from esoteric European artists. An evening I will never forget... I heard from the speakers a woman making the most extraordinary sounds with her voice, intwined with screams, crying, cumming (I think), and some real words making an appearance such as: "parole" meaning spoken word. The announcer Jaroslav Kovaricek used his deep sexy European accented voice: "That was Visage for Magnetic Tape Based on the Voice of Cathy Berberian with Electronic Sounds" by Luciano Berio. As I was listening, I laughed so hard I rolled around the loungeroom floor. My mother obviously disturbed by the lack of control being demonstrated by me and the woman screaming from the speakers, came in and smacked me saying it seemed as though I was going mad. In years to come my father smirked and said: "Well it's probably because you were!"

Pic above: Luciano Berio & Cathy Berberian

Tormenting My Mother

I taped it, and wore it out tormenting my mother with the unbelievable sounds she would make. I bought the album and like Devo's "Are We Not Men" I wore them both out. I eventually bought the CD as well of course. A regular right of passage for any new friend would be to listen to some of Cathy and if they could cope, they'd generally stay good friends. I have listened to this piece so much I could severely traumatise an audience and do a drag show accurately lip synching every sound and verbal convulsion she would make. She tends to polarise people, from those who would be horrified to those who would laugh and some who would see some artistic merit. There have been very few of the latter!

This composition that has been such an important part of my life was made in the early 60's. Cathy was married to Luciano Berio and had the most beautiful operetic voice which she used in other of his compositions. In Visage the avant-garde electronic sounds were composed by Berio.

Melbourne's Surrealist Festival

For a few years, Melbourne had an annual Surrealist Festival. It was a stimulating, disturbing, and engaging creative experience. On one of the days, the Presenter came out each time to announce the next performance minus one piece of clothing until he was completely naked. As a performer was putting various parts of his body through a massive opaque piece of material, a plate was passed around the audience. I was handed this plate and on it was a rubber shark and crushed up cake. I passed to a guy next to me who was pretending to hang himself with a cut off noose. The best thing for me was that no-one was explaining why.


Video of the Exquisite Nature of the Absurd
by The Residents - Third Reich N'Roll

The Residents - Third Reich N'Roll

The birth of my surrealist passion

This will be an adult peering into childhood through deeply personal opaque doors, defenses, emotion and neurological chaos to attempt to explore my early and mid childhood and capture where this passion for the avant-garde first developed.

Le Pere Ubu - Dora Maar

Early childhood, my mother obsessed with finding "the answer" a spiritual quest to make sense of that which inherently must always be a mystery.

Little boy watching and feeling thick indefinable energy from groups that would sit around the table, when I was supposed to sleep... hearing strange voices, wrong languages, closed eyes all peering into darkened spaces. A woman coming into our lounge with black hair straight and severed in the middle curtaining either side of her ears. Her eyes wider than I'd ever seen, she sees things nobody else does.

(Images are all Odilon Redon)

Childhood Occult Influences

The feeling at night was that spirits, demons, past lives, haunting invisible creatures were surrounding me. Books on the occult on coffee tables, French poetry written by my mothers ex boyfriend in faded dogeared parchments expressing things I could never see.... A book I'd steal myself to read with silent anticipation - Odilon Redon. Without a frame to perceive these things with, my exploration was wondrous, knowing I was trespassing in the adult world of darkness only they were meant to witness. Unbearable images of an eye as a hot air balloon, spider with a human head, disembodied head with undersized wings hovering over a yacht.

Friends would stare through me when I would talk about these things. I left it to ferment inside of me. I knew it should all be so scary, but it would caress me.

My mothers black etchings - Indian ink over white china clay. Her grip on an almost invisible pin would amaze me as she scratched the surface of the black square. She'd walk away leaving a landscape of a very old castle and hills, swirling with incongruence - things don't ever look like this, even at night. Images and questions swam in my head when trying to sleep.

Nightmares & Ambivalence

Nightmares electrical sparks in the brain waking me hot and clammy. The light on would send me back to sleep. I never wondered why the things that would haunt my dreams and torment me, would be the things I couldn't wait to see again in books and images during the day.




My father silently watched my mothers quest for existentialist certainty whilst he drowned in his family's expectations. The brilliant pianist was buried under dust, dirt, trucks and needing the accepting smile of his brother and dying father. Selling hardware and building supplies, a world away from ivory keys and emotions ploughing through notes. Sounds becoming images, unexpressed emptiness and desire Rachmaninoff dirge dark places no one could see.

My Father's Gothic Piano Performances

The lounge room ceiling was lifted to make room for an ancient hand carved oak mantle piece that dominated every sense. Bevelled crystal edges of mirrors, 3 Indians cross armed stood either side of the fireplace. Over sized ancient dark wooded Scottish swirls, a long forgotten family crest, strange compartments and secret places.

In this room, my father speaks to me just above a whisper. He tells me... Rachmaninoff composed this piece imagining he was in a coma, and awoke, not the smiling compassionate faces of his family in a sterile hospital, but to darkness, fermented air and having no room to move or breathe. Shock turns to horror as he realises he is in his grave buried listening to the dirt being shovelled on top of the coffin sealing his fate. Looking up at the wood of the baby grand and watching my father's fingers roll over the keys, and his feet fiendishly randomly pressing the brass pedals. My face was cold and pale with terror, and yet a tentative smile would creep slowly through my lips. "Play it again! Play it again!"

My Relationship and Integration of Redon Today:

As an adult, some of these images are still very much alive for me. It is wonderful to have the advantage of being able to in retrospect intellectually frame what then were raw emotional and almost spiritual experiences. I have since learned that Odilon Redon was one of the 'Symbolists' in the late 1800s who were passionate about presenting images and words that go beyond the classicism and realism of their generation.

As the modern day David Lynch does with his films, particularly his latest "Inland Empires", there is a wondrous exploration of what lies between wakefulness and dreaming. The ability and desire to sink beneath consciousness to what lies below.. the intuitive, the unconscious. The joys and horrors of connecting to what our minds are keeping from us. Our deepest fears, desires, what's 'really going on' inside of us. Symbolists are considered by some to be the precursors to the modernism and surrealism that was soon to come.

This 'symbolist' image of the eye balloon has gently haunted me throughout my life. It is the image that now graces my arm after contemplating a tattoo for the last 15 years.

Redon Features in recent Avant Garde Film

Guy Madden, one of the worlds most original and unique film directors has made a film based on this image which is full of evocative imagery and intense atmospheres. He attempts to create films which more accurately reflect the true 'neurological' way we process memory, thoughts and feelings.

A Wonderful Short Film by Guy Madden

"The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Towards Infinity"