Chris,

Thanks for all the Patrick White excerpts, so interesting with all that correspondence between the body and the body of the world, and thanks too for your own text here. A sort of lovely weaving, and I have to say I "get this" much better than I do the "queer abstract machine." It's something about the nature of abstract thought about human experience that I have a sort of resistance to, I think. I have heard about these fish, somewhere, on some nature show. It never rains fish here, but we have the miraculous appearance of toads, in the spring, hundreds of them, the size of the tip of your small finger, leaping through the grass for a day or two and then disappearing. I particularly like the energy of these fish that seem to take over the landscape and the way that you and the cowboy be/come
these fish, as if the landscape became incarnate.

Best,


Rebecca

Rebecca Seiferle
www.thedrunkenboat.com
-------Original Message-------
From: Chris Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 04/20/03 07:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: More queer Australian landscape

>
> Rebecca, I Haven't ignored your comments replying to my queer abstract
machine post. I did think to make a reply but instead thought the
following extracts from Patrick White, _Flaws in the Glass_ pp 50-52
(Penguin 1983) and additional comment would be more interesting.


Again landscape played a major part in my life, the splendid sweep, the
cairnes and monoliths of the Monaro replaced by dead-level plains with
their skeleton trees, clouds of galah and budgerigar, a formation of
creaking pelican, soil white and cracked with drought till transformed
by rain into black porridge, giving way to an inland sea, on which was
laid, in a final act of conjuring, an emerald carpet patterned with
flowers. At Walgett I experienced every possible seasonal change and
corresponding change in myself.


The most frightening part of the expedition was changing train at
Narrabri by starlight. After that it was plain sailing through the dawn,
an endlessness of dust and mirage, with wild melons embroidering the
edges of the railway track. A dinner of tough mutton and floury gravy at
Burren Junction. Then Walgett, always later than schedule.


So again I preferred the landscape. It answered my needs. More passive
then the Monaro, it was also more sensual, sympathetic towards human
flesh. Perhaps because a rare commodity, water played a leading part in
my developing sexuality. I was always throwing off my clothes to bathe,
either at the artesian bore during a pause from mustering, the water
ejaculating warm and sulphurous out of the earth, or in the river
flowing between the trunks of great flesh-coloured gums, to a
screeching, flick-knife commentary by yellow crested cockatoos, or at
night in the hollow below the homestead if a good season had turned it
into a lagoon. Here I was joined by the men who worked about the place,
whose company I enjoyed without quite becoming their equal.

The way to the lagoon was stony. I once found a pair of old high-heeled
shoes amongst the junk dumped in the bathroom. I wore them, tottering
across the stones till reaching the acquiescent mud, the tepid water of
the lagoon. My companions turned the shoes into a ribald joke,
acceptable because it was something we could share. We continued joking,
to hold more serious thought at bay, while we plunged, turning on our
backs after surfacing, spouting water, exposing our sex, lolling or
erect, diving again to swim beneath the archways made by open legs, ribs
and flanks slithering against other forms in the fishy school, as a
flamingo moon rose above the ashen crowns of surrounding trees.


        ********************

I live not a twenty minute walk from where Patrick White changed trains
during the most frightening part of his journey. (Explains why I am into
gothic.) The wild melons growing in summer over the plains are
called paddy melons. I once told some of my Sydney professional
colleagues how it rains fish out here on the black soil plains in the
violent late summer, late afternoon thunderstorms. They refused to
believe me. No bullshit, fair dinkum, it rains little fish, about a
quarter to half an inch long, sucked up from the waterholes with the
strong updraft to be dropped again into puddles and waterholes,
squiggling and drying out in the small and medium sized puddles to
become fish emulsion fertilizer and surviving in the larger lagoons to
again be sucked up and fall with the rain down onto the plains. Bobby
cod, they are called, and that is how these fish spread across the
plains. I must go, a cowboy has left a note for me to meet him in the
beat across the road from where I live. We leave our felt tip truths on
toilet walls. That is how we meet. There is nothing as sensual, as
erotic as making love to a cowboy in the swishing black mud as the late
afternoon summer storms belt heavy rain down onto our wet bodies.

Chris Jones.
>