Returning

I left China without her.
In my sleep, our time together came back as visions of earlier lives. I met her twice, once in this life and before, at an earlier time. This first meeting was so lost in the depths of my memory I could only see it as a vision.
I dreampt that we were monkeys on a tree together. I saw her on a branch stretching out ahead of me, we shared a mango. Neither of us could speak.
I left her in two ways, today, and in a previous life.
 I came back with an absence not just of one thing or another, but what seemed to me to be the complete loss of a world. I could not  easily return to my life in Australia; my body felt divided.
I came back from China in June, 2011 but this is the first time I have written about returning. It was the most important experience of my life and recreated me, requiring a question that was far more profound than I was prepared for.
The story of my life since then has been the of the reconstruction of a world. I hope that this will be the start of that story.

China Dream

I had a dream last night; this is it to the best of my recollection. I understand that it may seem deeply personal, but that does not matter, one may interpret it as they like, it is not mine any more. I had it about three days after I arrived, just after I had met the other teachers.

The Dream:

I spent some time in a house, then I was taken to the edge of the sea by persons who were partly Chinese, they praised me highly then threw me into the sea, first I was close to the rock pier that they threw me from, I could see other people in the water, they were able to wade, I was on a body board.
I sank a little bit, getting used to the buoyancy of the board, it was spongy and a bit thick, the water was a very murky green colour, not seeming healthy but it was ok. I wanted to paddle to different spots, and I tried a little, but then I found that I was being moved where I did not know. A voice, or something like a voice, told me, don’t worry, just trust me. I saw some patches on the water, they looked like pollution or blood, I couldn’t tell. I was looking over to where I could see other waves breaking, they were taking off on waves which might turn into tubes but they were very treacherous, that was where the great ones surfed. I was turned and I found myself on a wave, it was very fast and dimly lit, it seemed to be about to break on me, but it held off, and I was able to turn and ride it and I hit the lip and threw the biggest air I have ever experienced, higher than I ever felt possible. I could see the wave below me and the shore.
I landed on the shore and went onto the sand, like when I was a kid and I used to ride the waves right to the beach. I looked down and I saw a rainbow coloured disk, tiny, with coloured patterns of rectangles. I picked it up and looked at it, it was shiny, I then saw that there were many other larger squares of the coloured pieces. I picked them all up making sure not to leave any behind, I then picked up a small brown tie which was on the beach. I saw a pair of old trainers tucked behind a rock and thought about whether I should take them, they referred to leisure, and I reluctantly decided not to. I then walked up the path to the house again, it was filled with people I knew or did not know; there were some from Tasmania and elsewhere. I was looking in a window, I saw a friend there, she had her back to the window and she was talking intelligently to someone, I could see the corner of her lips. I saw other older friends talking.
Later I walked down a road, past the people, and I sensed that I could ask the dream anything, but I decided I didn't want to know, and closed my eyes. I wandered away from the house and went to another house where I was the only person there. It was old and stately, with a lot of wood, kind of like a Western/oriental house from Jakarta or Java. I then wandered outside into the clean street, I started up the track and I saw that it was the path toward Mount Wellington. As I looked into the valley, and realised I could look up, I became too sad, too grief stricken and I missed the mountain too much to look up at it again. I also missed the walks down toward the university, the green of the trees, I realised how much I have learnt from those times and those walks.
I then went back to the sea. I sat in the section where the water was murky and I could not tell how deep it was, I was told to trust and sank down into the water. It became black, and although I initially panicked I was told to trust so I did. I went down into the black and soon I found myself at the base of a massive cavern, I only call it a cavern but it was in fact endlessly dark, without being bad, just dark. Some monsters briefly appeared and I realised it was my subconscious projecting myself back to me, I wondered if sex would appear and it briefly did, but it was contrived.
I asked a person for help, and they sent a small child to me, a little Chinese girl. She took my hand and led me around. She took me into what was like a row of ceiling fans which got lower and lower, one of them seemed to cut a large part of my head off, it didn't actually, but it seemed that way, it made me duck a bit more as I was wandering through! Eventually the fans got so low I couldn't walk under them, but by then I was looking at them from the side. I got through safely overall, and I needed to humbly accept that, what was given to me as a guide, was a precocious child. This was a bit humiliating.

The Scent of my Room

Well because I know no Mandarin I will soon starve. I am in a section of town with a few westerners and a spaceship for a dormitory. American’s use the term: what is that in real money? But they are eating and I had to ask a Spanish woman to order me an espresso and an egg sandwich. I am happy though, Beijing smells a bit like Paris, it is busy but not aggressive, people and cars generally avoid each other. My room is extravagant. Apparently the Chinese insist that the foreign professor will be well cared for; even humbled a bit.
The strange thing is the smell; not the smell of Beijing but the smell of my room. Before I came across to China I had a strange, slightly prescient moment. I smelt my grandmother’s room. For me the scent is a combination of Elizabeth Arden, new carpet, and the heat of the day mixed with tea and a hint of coconut. Gran liked the perfume and my cousin would spray the perfume as she lay dying. The smell became a sign of what was occurring. It made the whole experience overwhelming and you were confronted with a room ballooning with a ‘beautiful’ scent but introducing what was actually Jean’s repose. She lay on the bed and you tried to sit around her without much to say and being unable to talk. Gran had a noble face; with hard lines fixed with a determined forehead. She was a strong woman and it was hard for us to see her on her deathbed.  We could hear her slow breathing even mixed with the TV news and a boiling kettle. Toward the end her breath began to rattle and rasp and there was an increasing time between. I would sit there and listen. As a breath ended, every time, not just the first time, but every time she breathed you anticipated that she would not breathe again. Every moment was an anxious wait for death. Soon she passed away.
As I was about to come to China I had a strange insight when I smelt the room again. I was preparing a meal in a house where Mum was staying with Kevin. Staring into a cupboard I turned and remembered the smell of Gran's room again as I was thinking about taking the trip to China. It was a sweet smell mixed with tension and a heightened sense of being alive and witnessing something. Given all of the relationships and events which this smell held for me I thought this instant signalled death, or something approaching a crisis. I was quite disturbed and took close notice. it made me very nervous as the day I was to leave to Beijing approached. These prescient moments are rare; they happen without warning. I began to think that, perhaps, the trip would be dramatic, and the choice to go might confront me; perhaps I would die. At least, by considering the possibility that death might come with the change, you take your choices seriously and carefully.
As I entered the room in the hotel where the foreign teachers stayed I smelt the scent again. It was in the office. It was the smell of new wood cupboards; slightly sweet with wood dust and varnish. The smell made me very uncomfortable and even now, as I sit in it, I am disturbed a little. However, I realise it was a predictive smell, something more like an anticipation, not good or bad per se, but I instantly recognised the room. I hardly feel at home though. Yet this scent, in its new place, is changing my memory; I can feel it shifting toward something new.
The room overlooks the tennis courts, soccer fields; I see pale apartments that are coloured like bones and skeletons. There is a ‘mist’ in Beijing which causes the night and the morning to be eerie. But I am alive and I arrived safely. Nothing was taken and the only thing that was damaged by the trip I did myself, as I attempted to lift up my heavy bag, the top ripped.
         Beijing is always busy, so even being there a short time can make one nervous. I was euphoric as I arrived and my escorts picked me up to take me to the university. The room is on the tenth floor of a huge building built for foreign students and Chinese students learning English who can afford the expense. I don’t know how long it will be before I will be able to enter the room thinking about it as an office rather than it reminding me of my Grandmother passing away. I think this will not take too long. I am not sure whether Jean’s death was a spiritual event or not, but the smell in the room has something of incense about it; but there are no gods to eat and enjoy it in Beijing.

Questions and Catharsis Channelled from Cocteau, via Motherboard.

I acknowledge that this post was originally written for Critical Mass as part of the Brisbane Festival.

20 September 2011

Written by: Cullan Joyce Date: 20 September 2011

Photo courtesy Brisbane Festival

This is a delayed post because I needed to take my time with this play. Normally, if I started this ‘review’ with the sentence: ‘The production was insignificant’, this would be taken as a criticism of a production. But it is not intended in this way.
Motherboard’s production of La Voix Humaine fell into the work and expressed the play so well that themes, questions, and feelings expressed violently in the original seemed to emerge onto the stage without impediment.
Jean Cocteau’s play La Voix Humaine examines what might be the last telephone call made between a woman and her former lover. His physical presence is removed by his use of a telephone to communicate. We encounter a woman waiting for a call from her former partner.
It is the absence of his face from her which is a source of her trauma and panic. She cannot be near him. The mediation of her lover by telephonic distance has reduced him to a mere voice, which still possesses a terrible power over the character. His absence allows him to potentially control or destroy everything of worth to her.
What we are drawn into is her attempt to maintain her own sanity, which has become obsessively linked to this capriciously absent lover: she loves him too much to accord him the blame for the break down of their love, but she cannot bear for him to leave her.
Her love for him, which previously preserved their relationship, has now begun to destroy her, and she flails about, unable to live or move beyond her room or her memories except to proceed to the roof to contemplate suicide. She has become completely powerless and yet she is without blame (though she desires to accept all blame).
The play ends—spoiler alert—with the character remaining in a limbo consisting of her memories and her anticipation of future calls by her lover; she waits perched on the roof, unable to move, unable to live without him, unable to take enough control of herself to die. She has turned into a wraith preserved by ghostly memories of their time together.
I left the theatre angry over the questions of relationships and the role that electronic mediation affects conversation. I was made to feel how Cocteau’s play expressed his idea of contemporary tragedy. The genius of La Voix Humaine is that its tragedy offers no grand or cataclysmic choice or resolution for the heroine. The production drew us into Cocteau’s nether world in which, despite the quantity of choices available for contemporary communication, the removal of the person causes a dislocated drift into the mnemonic desperation of the character portrayed by Erica Field.
Whatever might be said about the play being performed by one person, there are clearly two characters in it—one physically present to the audience and the other absent being visible through the conversations of the actor. We are entreated to imagine him using similar mechanisms to her—fantasy, opinion, we speculate on his motives. This makes the work of portrayal and production difficult and challenging for any production or audience. How can I portray two persons in one?
Erica was able to brilliantly express the strange amalgamation of the absent and the present characters in her performance. The staging was effective; moments such as the stripping of the bed and the placement of microphones were both powerful and subtle in turn. Dave Sleswick and Motherboard team deserve a great deal of praise, and Under the Radar needs to be commended for bringing them to us. The production team were able to express profoundly the tensions and pain within the character and the themes in the work.
This production enabled the play to speak again; it allowed its audience to feel the pain and the humanity of the players and the tragedy of the situation. The use of different media devices helped to keep the flow of the work moving, preventing any loss of momentum during the sections of tension or conflict.
However some things, I felt, did not add to the production’s overall success. A couple of details could have been left out of the production without this harming the significant power of their work; some projections were slightly misleading or distracting. Additionally, some of the music, to my mind, dulled moments of significant tension.
There is a Chinese saying which goes: when you are fishing, it does not matter if you miss the fish’s mouth by an inch or a mile, in neither case do you succeed in catching it. However, as this play hooked me, any criticisms are pretty insignificant really. It was the most fulfilling experience I have had in the festival so far.