Fictiōneering
A Technique for Living
Justy Phillips, RMIT University, Melbourne
Let us circumnavigate this bodying wail,
drop the tiller to the floor. Into the silky, raw chamber of illuminating manganese. Wooden floorboards and fibro walls and vertical boards that hold this skiff afloat. While we kick and turn our arms in swimming machines that are gills that are words that are lungs. That blow the air that fills the sails that keeps this precious moment afloat. The giant cocoon of a blubbery Southern Right Whale. And still there is room for the bay. Room enough to inundate the swell, the lungs, the heart, the bark. Gallbladder, small intestines. Stomachfuls of gulping, icy, summer air. Miles and miles and miles of knotted line. Pinching gutless roof at one end. Defibrillating seabed at the other. And gravity’s kindness knows no bounds. What sign that this humble dwelling ever rode the open seas? Only its welcoming glass pane, held in perpetual lilt by our sky-blue, baby-blue, smaller-than-the-ocean, weathering. Front door. Etched with seventy-eight sailing vessels of varying degrees. An ode to the sea scouts who once met here in the swollen belly of this, our co-habiting hall. A Casuarina bird’s nest from Four Mile Creek. A place to sleep. A single high shelf leads the room in two in four in fifteen movements (movings) of Irish-linen wall. The Travels of Marco Polo and the Ocean’s Sweaty Face an invitation to view three speculative plates. Illustrated Icelandic volcanoes in mid eruption. Fumes spill over circular edges, threaten to inundate the weary. IN YOUR OWN TIME.
Capital letters in drop shadow red. Sits on hand-drawn graph paper behind tempered glass. Reflects our moving-with the seas as we walk past and past and past its fly-specked hospital-white frame. A porcelain Galah looking South-south-east. Stares in to the eyes of our black raven. Their imperceptible communiqué just another silent thread that wraps the hall from scout to scout,
as we sleep.
A betweening of night and day. [1] We make anew the unknowable journeys of future passages past, make-with their twists and turns: a middling of fictiō [2] and novella. [3] And nets and baits and soft flesh caught in salty hooks that pull and pull. The golden strands of Gulliver’s hair. Tethering ink-filled quills of feathered lures, to the potential of fictiōnal living.
MOTHER’S MILK. PATIENCE. GHOST WATER HOLE. MUCH SPOILED. HILL OF BLACK STONES. SISTER. SPRING. BATS FLYING AT NIGHT. An artist’s series of nine enamel camping mugs welcome weary travellers to country. MOORABBIN. DARGO. OUYEN. NOWA NOWA. BEREMBOKE. GEELENGLA. YANAC. Navy rim. Red lettering. Alerts visitors to the imminent risk of encounter. “You will never know what just happened?” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 213). [4] Everything is capitalized (CAPITALIZING). I had not noticed this until now. Maybe we are afraid of the small letters, you and I, their diminishing ‘x-height’ the foregrounding of a thousand small deaths. The prelude to an even smaller dying? Only one line of lowercase slips through the net. Your father’s wood-cut of the Tamar River dredger, ‘Ponrabble II’. It’s hull washed over in sugar pink. Golden chimney bellows fractal glow into the air above the river that flows and flows beneath your bedroom window. The choppy water awash with green. T. J Woodward 93’. The raven looks on from the sidelines. Its North-north-easterly stare pierces the dredge. The waves. The air. The porcelain Galah. Its idling body at rest on branch. IN YOUR OWN TIME. And still the raven dredges histories from this skiff of ribs and vital organ. Matted seaweed tugs the wait with lead laden
line. [5]
An offshore north-westerly brings with it the unsettling dead calm. Above the fireplace the mantel clock my brother bequeaths as not-quite-wedding present lies dormant with the house. I replace the batteries so as to buy us more time. LETTERS FROM ICELAND, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice give spine to the waves. Red letters on green cloth and the ashes from last night’s fire eddy back towards the northern hemisphere. As you walk through to the kitchen. What heat! What fire! Raging, still now. In the heart of this beast we call living. A pair of hand painted, flamboyant wooden dolls. This time from your brother not mine. These gifts that would hold us in the grips of time. We place a lump of Mexican pumice to the right of the one with the feathering head. Allow their crafted bodies to breathe the air of its imbibing. I turn my body towards the heat. Surtsey – that small rock-of-an-island off Iceland’s southern coast – is on fire once again. Plumes of ash and molten core erupt from its collectable souvenir, wrapping the high shelf, the thick, bed-sheet walls and onto the Tasmanian Oak flooring. Inundating scores of feeding barnacles.
Beyond the kitchen door,
the artist Raymond Arnold frames the wilderness for everyone to see. Epic strokes of ochre, tannin and ore. You were with him that day. Traversing slag heaps and mine shafts on the West coast. A perfect ovoid of granite holds those tentative hours back from the door. Its three glass panes splitting shafts of copper-gold-sulphur into the room.
Blood-red crocoite, as always, speaks alone. Cape Horn. Iron Blow. Razorback and Comet. These are the names of space-time mines in which men still enter the dark earth to drink in Raymond’s sweeping vessels of light. Along the short wall leading to the study, four paintings depict the near-death experiences of four strangers. A saturation of devotion and heartfelt thanks for death-defying acts of misadventure that so very nearly ended in death. Juanito and the bread truck, Pablo Ramirez, and the bone saw, Victor and the rogue bull.
Justy and the captive Polar Bear.
The mist moves in. Flattens particles of water into air. Barely visible now, Cherikoko Coiffure, a hand-painted street sign from Benin depicts different viewpoints of four braided African heads. North. South. East. West. Each crown illustrating a different bearing; obscuring the full face at every turn. As sea scouts run through the furrows of their hair, they cry, “What secrecy beholds this faceless compass from Benin?” A ceramic sheep sits atop MAY OATWAY FIRE ALARMS, a glass fronted floor cabinet replete with unplayed pianola scrolls and Betel pots, the appearing-disappearing sirens of anticipated loss. And quietly, as if to suggest his imitation a flaw, Nipper, the life-size papier maché Bull Terrier mutt, extends perpetual adoration. From the shore. Line. Each glance a ripple. Each ripple a line. That casts the world anew.
In graphite and red crayon,
MAYBE WE COULD TALK ABOUT THE WEATHER meets the eye of Marco Polo’s swirling dervish head on. Shuns IN YOUR OWN TIME for the score of dinosauria above. The lead dinosaur in this diorama is the placid, long-necked DIPLODOCUS and not, as some might expect, the more threatening and ultimately more devastating TRYANNOSAURUS. Your beloved Dipolodocus, I had one just like it, decked out in gun-metal grey. This inanimate plastic creature, the first, fictiōneeer of our living. [6] Seventeen thousand kilometers and seventeen years from here. Or was it seventeen thousand years and seventeen kilometers from now? This, the longest dinosaur on earth was already my constant companion, my weapon and the unknowable making felt of a fictiōnella yet to come. [7]
Notes
[1] In Inflexions 1 “How is Research-Creation,” Alanna Thain writes: “Betweeness: the question of movement is at the heart of any inquiry into research-creation, but a movement from one to another is not what is at stake here, but rather the question of what it means to sense the mobility of thought
itself” (Thain 2008: 2-3). Research-creation, writes Thain, seeks “to operate in the “reality of the excluded middle,” to linger in the indiscreet gap between them, to make resonant and mobile the eventness of their sensible connection.” (3) Research-creation is defined as a propositional and experimental mode of activity that occurs “at the constitutive level of both art practice and theoretical research” (Manning and Massumi, 2014: 89). I extend this definition of research-creation towards a hyphenated process of “speculative eventing” (Phillips 2015: 16).
[2] The term “fictioneer” (C19th) is commonly defined as a “writer or inventor of fiction” (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary 1993: 941). By activating the Latin root of fiction, fictiō, meaning “to make or produce” rather than the more common understanding of fiction as “the act of feigning or inventing imaginary events,” I focus on the relation producing force of fic or make, rather than the more commonly understood “making up” of fiction.
[3] Originating in Italy during the Middle Ages, the term ‘novella,’ from the Italian word ‘novelle,’ meaning ‘new’. In literary (quantitative) terms, the novella is commonly understood as fiction that is longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. Defined as “an imaginary story of limited length, intended to entertain, and describing an event in which the interest arises from the change in the fortunes of the leading characters or from behavior characteristic of them; an event concerned with real-life people in a real-life setting” (Trenkner 1957: XIII).
[4] In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose a concept of the ‘novella’ as three links: What happened? (the modality or expression), Secrecy (the form) and Body Posture (the content). The novella, they write, “plays upon a fundamental forgetting. It evolves in the element of “what happened” because it places us in relation with something unknowable and imperceptible…It may even be that nothing happened, but is precisely that nothing that makes us say, ‘Whatever could have happened to make me forget where I put my keys, or whether I mailed that letter, etc.? What little blood vessel in my brain could have ruptured? What is this nothing that makes something happen?’” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 214).
[5] “We are all made of lines,” write Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “we are not only referring to lines of writing. Lines of writing conjugate with other lines, life lines, lines of luck or misfortune, lines productive of the variation of the line of writing itself, lines that are between the lines of writing…the novella is defined by living lines, flesh lines” (Deleuze & Guattari 2004: 215).
[6] I define ‘fictiōneering’ (Phillips 2015) as a bringing into language the living experience of the event; as making new. Fictiōneering is a composing-with the “interval” (Manning 2012) of fictiō and novella – an interval I define as “experience in the making-already made felt” (Phillips 2015: 8). Beyond the novella, fictiōneering spins not from a single event but from what I have come to feel as the eventing of living experience. I propose fictiōneering as a composing-with the articulated betweenness of research and creation; a technique that opens a tentative new interval – a hybrid, formless creature that is neither fictiō nor novella, but perhaps a relational quality of its betweenness?
[7] Fictiōnella: a living archive or interstitial living organism of body, duration and event. If fictiōneering is a technique for composing-with the precarious act of living, I propose the ‘fictiōnella’ as its imperceptible, proliferating relation.
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.
Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2012.
Manning, Erin and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Phillips, Justy. Scoreography: Compose-with a hole in the heart! PhD Dissertation. RMIT University, Melbourne. 2015.
Trenkner, Sophie. The Greek Novella in the Classical Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957.
Thain, Alanna. “Affective Commotion: How is Research-Creation?” Inflexions 1 (May 2008): 1-12.
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 4th Edition, Volume. 1. Ed. Lesley Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
