Art and poetry

I had planned to spend more of today mark­ing but I was dis­trac­ted by yummy people and won­der­ful things.

Had brunch in town with marius_cale and then we went off to ACMI for the World without End screen gal­lery exhib­i­tion and the State of Play gamelab exhib­i­tion that ends on Wednesday.

World without End was mixed, but some beau­ti­ful pieces that had us both mes­mer­ised. Favour­ites included the five screen His­tory of a Day (Simon Car­roll & Martin Friedel, timelapse from sun­rises to sun­sets with storms and won­der­ful stuff); Train no 1 (Daniel Crooks, incred­ible sliced film, we spent a while trying to work out how it was done); A Viagem (Chris­tian Bous­tani, Por­tuguese animated/live action piece of Japan­ese screens mark­ing the Por­tuguese encounter in 1533, abso­lutely magical, made me tear up) and Too Dark for Night (Clare Langan, Ire­land, post-apo­ca­lyptic haunt­ing world of sand and light and aban­doned houses filling slowly with sand as the wind howls, a voice mut­ters in what sounds like Elvish – prob­ably Gaelic – and a lone figure walks into the dis­tance). Matt liked hold:vessel 1 (Lynette Wall­worth) as well, which I’d seen when the screen gal­lery first opened but it’s still beau­ti­ful, bowls you hold beneath light and feel as though you are hold­ing the pro­jec­ted galax­ies, fish, amoe­bae in your little bowl…

State of Play was a bunch of com­puter games with an agenda: I finally got to *play* Escape from Woomera rather than just read­ing about it, and we played a depress­ing game where we were an Indian girl grow­ing up without many pro­spects. We tried to choose all the right things to get her to grow up to be pres­id­ent but she ended up an office clerk with a hus­band and a couple of kids who kept get­ting arres­ted by the secret ser­vice for being an act­iv­ist. I do want to go back and play the ones I missed out on – I’d planned to go back but walk­ing Matt back to his bike, we ran into patch­workkid and blithespirit and I ended up join­ing them and a bunch of others for High Tea at Laurent. Ah well.

Then I went to Shelton Lea’s memorial at Trades Hall (thanks for the reminder, drzero). It was beau­ti­ful: lots of amaz­ing poetry by Shelton and by others read by good friends. I didn’t know Shelton well, but I admired and respec­ted him. He was always lovely to talk with and always free with a smile and advice. His poetry is incredible.

i dream of the soft slide of light

i dream of the soft slide of light
across the down of hair on your face,
of the one note samba of your eyes;
of the swell­ing gen­tle­ness of your lips,
and of the you that you com­monly call i.

i dream of giant butterflies
winging over sea
and washed rocks gleam­ing in the sun.
i dream of the dun skies, city spread
and you lying naked on a bed
dreaming,

oh god/ i dream of the seem­ing wonder of being alive
des­pite the dream­ings of death.
i dream of rose blooming,
of fate never moving from its pre­scribed path.
i dream of weeds flower­ing, breath­less, in autumn.

— shelton lea

woomera my gulag

woomera my gulag.
your atom bomb skies.
your black winds that shriv­elled the grasses
And black­fellers gonads.
frogs croak­s’re flattened and dry.
bird­song a weep­ing for what’s gone.
bleached salt flats fused into glass.
the air heavy with crit­ical mass
and fused with polit­ical lies.

and woomera my gulag for immig­rant souls
in your shell shocked desert surrounds.
the kadaitcha man floats through the ashes
without ever making a sound.
the stor­ies of place are no longer there.
as quick as a bomb slick
the poles are reversed
from what was to what’s not
and to slough people up in this place of despair
is perverse;
have we gone mad
they’re people like us mr gov­ern­ment man.

— shelton lea

It was good to see people there, cel­eb­rat­ing his life. It was good to listen and reflect. And someone there told me I was ‘astound­ing’ and that can’t be bad, can it?