Or, the good, the bad, and the perverse.

God help me, I find myself siding, albeit obliquely, with the conservatives and wowsers in a debate about art. The debate is over whether authorities were right to remove Nan Goldins’ photograph “Klara and Edda Belly Dancing“, showing two young girls dancing, one naked and one half-naked, from an exhibition in London. The link is to a censored version of the image, and I’m even uneasy about posting that, which gives you a pretty good idea of what I think, not of the picture as a picture, but of displaying it, and even of taking it in the first place.

The police seized the photograph on the grounds that it was possibly child pornography. They then decided that it wasn’t–too late to save the exhibition, which had been closed at the request of Sir Elton John, owner of the collection of which “Klara and Edda” was a part. Much of the debate around the picture, which has been exhibited before without incident, concerns whether it’s pornography or art.

I don’t think that’s the only question which needs to be asked, but when I do ask it of myself, I can’t in any way see the image as pornography. It wasn’t taken with pornographic intent. It’s actually a fascinating picture. Those who are defending it as art seem fond of calling it an image of “innocent play”, which is a naive catchphrase, and, I think, a censored reading of it, and of the stage of life we call childhood. Children’s play is by no means always innocent, either in the sense of being devoid of a sexual element or of violence, power play, manipulation and exploitation. We have no idea what is going through the minds, or through the bodies, of those two girls in the photo. We don’t know what fantasies are in their heads. Possibly none. But those who defend the image by saying that only a pervert would see something sexual in it are ignoring the fact that the place between one’s legs and the organ between one’s ears don’t suddenly become sexual at the age of 13. They have their moments virtually all through life. Speaking personally, by the time I was eight or so I was having sexual fantasies, some that I recognised as such, some that I didn’t recognise until I looked back later, although I instinctively felt they were thoughts I should keep to myself. I think the photo invites us to remember our own childhoods and re-connect with childhood sexuality and early fantasies that may have helped shape us. I get bittersweet nostalgic feelings from the picture, and uneasy but lovable memories of early sensual thoughts and events. So far, so good.

However, the image also makes me recall how embarrassed I was as a child by photos of me naked–particularly one my mother took when I was about 18 months old. In it I’m sitting naked on the bathroom scale, a look of manic glee on my face, legs bent back, looking for all the world like I’m humping the scale. My mother thought it was a cute, innocent picture. Even when I was very young I thought it was beyond the pale. I begged her to destroy the photo. I can’t remember whether she actually did. Apparently the parents of Klara and Edda gave permission for their photo to be exhibited. But were the girls themselves asked? And are children that young capable of giving informed consent for the public display of private images?

The picture challenges our taboos about the privacy of genitalia. I was about five when I learned that not everyone has the same ideas on that subject. Some hippies lived down the road from us, and I used to play with their kids. One hot day, the female hippie turned on the garden sprinklers for her sons and me to play under. She urged me to take off all my clothes, which I wasn’t happy about doing, since by then I’d been taught that nudity was strictly for the bathroom. But I’d also been taught to do as adults asked me, so I stripped. Then she brought out ochre paints and painted the three of us as “Aborigines”. I remember her painting a design on my genital area. I was mortified. I’m sure that she had no abusive intentions and saw the whole thing as an Eden-like, idyllic experience of play. I saw it as a violation of my privacy. The point is, we don’t know how a child sees her body. She doesn’t necessarily have the language to explain it to us. We don’t even begin to give her the language. We tell her the mechanics of sexual intercourse and reproduction, but we don’t say, “You know that tingly, excited feeling you get when you watch that TV show, or when you play with your cousin, or sometimes even when Mummy spanks you, well, that’s called being aroused.” We, the adults, own these secrets. Whether our reasons for not telling them to children are sound or not–and I don’t feel qualified to have an opinion on that–by not telling, don’t we delay a young person’s understanding of, and therefore conceptual ownership of, her own body, thus placing ourselves as trustees of children’s bodies? Therefore, shouldn’t we err on the side of caution in how we treat those bodies, not only physically but in all ways?

The puritans argue that such an image shouldn’t be displayed because, whether it’s art or not, some people will look at it and be turned on, and may be stimulated to commit crimes against children. I think they actually have a point. I hate censorship. I’m all for letting it all hang out every which way. But with the rule that all participants in the great hangout will be consenting persons of legal age. That aside, however, what intrigues me is why any of us who aren’t sexually interested in children still think we have a right to peek into all private worlds, whether the people in them are naked or clothed, child or adult, just because the images thus presented to us have artistic merit. The idea that porn=bad, art=good, is simplistic. Art can be exploitative, trashy or just plain godawful and still be art. Art doesn’t come with a built-in halo any more than children do. Art can deliver a range of experiences from the beatific to the vile, all of which can be interesting and in one way or another worthwhile. But it’s unfortunate if, in our lust for these experiences, we don’t question their real-world provenance.

I must be more than old-fashioned; I must be positively primitive. I’m not about to suggest that cameras steal souls, but don’t they steal something? I very rarely take photos of unsuspecting people. When I do, I feel like an intruder and a thief, as if I’m taking something I ought to be paying for. This is tied to the idea of ownership of the body and, by extension, images of the body. I have a strong visual memory and can often feel that I own something just by having a mental picture of it. Some childhood games have the quality of secret ceremonies, and an adult can’t always tell which ones. Anthropologists these days are careful not to make public images and records of things the people they study deem to be secret. Why shouldn’t we therefore respect the secrets of our own children? That they sometimes enact these secrets under our noses doesn’t mean much. We know how good they are at pretending we’re not there. And if it is true that to take photos without consent is to pilfer from the stock of the subject’s ownership of their physical self, it seems particularly rapacious to do this to children, who own almost nothing but their own bodies, and hardly even those. The bodies of children are forever being herded around, told what to eat, what to wear, how and where to sit and stand, ad nauseam. When they play, without our interference, they temporarily claim ownership of what is properly theirs. A photograph like “Klara and Edda” seems to assert the right of the adult gaze to go absolutely anywhere. I’m not sure it should have that right, which so easily reduces children to “seen and not heard”.

As a sort of tangential end to these thoughts, in Japan I found books by artists, such as Koitsukihime and Kayuli Hiina, who use ball-jointed dolls, posed in photographs, to candidly explore childhood, particularly girlhood. I found even some of those images confronting, since one can obviously go further into perverse imagery with a doll model than a real child–yet not one of those pictures was alien to me, and I found many of them moving in the degree that they matched secret memories of my own inner world. I like these artists’ work–if I’m reading it correctly–partly because it bravely shows that childhood is not unvisited by Eros and Thanatos, those two human embarrassments–though why they are embarrassing, I don’t know. I remember a lot of darkness and strangeness in childhood; a lot of anxiety, a lot of secrets, and a lot of conscious effort to wear a mask. It does no good to imagine a wall around childhood, wherein all is imagined to be innocent in an inhuman degree. Children grow up to be us. They are us. That is something one seems to be told by “Klara and Edda”. But because they are us, and not lambs or rabbits or fish in an aquarium, shouldn’t we treat them with all the courtesy due to human beings, which includes–in an ideal world I’ve conjured up–a respect for privacy?

So, should the image be exhibited? I think the permission of the original two models should be sought first–and perhaps it has already been obtained, but I haven’t been able to find that out.

I’ve rewritten this post three times, and I really want to sit down for about a day, hash these thoughts out and rewrite again. I’m struggling to explain gut feelings that even as an adult and a writer I have trouble articulating. If anyone can be bothered analysing my arguments here, you’re welcome to tell me if I’ve made errors of logic or contradicted myself.

While looking in the thesaurus for something else I came across the phrase “cul-de-lampe”. I liked the sound of it,  though I didn’t know what it meant, this “bottom of the lamp”, so I looked it up and found that it has two charming meanings. One is a kind of corbel supporting a vault, which I’m glad to know because I have a fetish for architectural jargon, and the other is a fleuron or printer’s ornament - those pretty little graphics, or, as this page of Quebec sayings puts it better (after explaining why bascule, the French word for see-saw, means to knock your arse against the ground) “an ornamental piece of non-literal type”. I’m mentioning it here because I think it’s a lovely little phrase and I’ve never seen it used, so perhaps someone will see it here and like it and find a spot for it. I shall certainly try. I notice I like three-syllable Frenchisms like this one, and “eau-de-nil” and “nom-de-guerre”, both of which I would have used in TEC if I had known them at the time. It’s a compact but elegant way of phrasing things that English grammar just doesn’t allow. Hooray for looting from other languages.

Stu and I are excited to say that we are now uncle and aunty. Stu’s sister Catherine gave birth by c-section to Khalil Imran Bishop Slamet last month (delay in announcement due to harassed parents not being able to decide on the order of his first names - a Bishop event would not be quite itself without an element of delay, as he will no doubt discover as he gets older).

Here he is:

With Catherine:

And dad, Roly, who has done this before and clearly knows something about snatching sleep from the jaws of being kept awake at all hours:

I’m sorry Stu and I won’t see more of him, but we might be back in Australia by the time he’s a toddler. At any rate, to Khalil, salaam aleikum and welcome to earth (sorry about the mess!). We look forward to meeting you!

…Or are you just not happy to see me?

Alice Cooper had a watch that turned into a lifeboat; now Aya Tsukioka has a skirt that turns into a vending machine. The Japanese fashion designer came up with the idea for the garment as a way for a woman walking alone to disguise herself from pursuers. The skirt incorporates a concealed sheet, printed with an image of a vending machine, that the wearer can hide behind. A deluxe model, seen in the picture, has a 4-sided version. So as long as those pursuers don’t round a corner, see the vending machine and decide to buy a beer…

It reminds me of the women, the name for which I’ve forgotten, so that I can’t look them up, who, in the 19th century I think it was,  used to commit thefts and afterwards, by means of ingeniously constructed garments, change their appearance in a twinkling of an eye.

Speaking of Japanese inventions, Nissan’s electric Pivo 2 concept car sets my little heart aflutter, not only because it’s adorable and enviro-friendly but because it can go sideways into parallel parking spots. I’ve obviously come a long way into middle age since my days of yearning for a black Trans Am with the fires of Hell spraypainted on the hood.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m writing about characters who live in a castle, but I’ve recently had three dreams about large houses.

The first one, a few nights ago, was supposedly my parents’ house. It was a huge rambling old place, very long, with difficult arrangements for getting to the upper rooms. (Structures in my dreams are often like that; there are rarely stairs, and more often ladders or poles or awkward climbing onto shelves and out windows.) It remained surprisingly consistent for a building in a dream as I went back and forth between its rooms for purposes I forget entirely, except that it grew in length so much that eventually there was a railway line, external to the building, connecting each room to the next.

Another night I dreamed of an actual castle. It was ruined, and I can’t remember much more than that, except that in the same dream there was another house, where I had left a small black cat without any food. The cat was very thin, but ok. In the same yard where I had left the cat, I had also left Condoleezza Rice. Condi was also fine and didn’t seem offended by my neglect.

Last night I dreamed about another house that was also supposedly my parents’. This time I had to show it to a hostile woman for some reason to do with valuation and taxes. The house was very large and the rooms ran the gamut from poky, grotty and poor to palatial. One of the latter was huge and full of tables laden with fancy glass dinner services, vases and other ware. The hostile woman, who had already showed some signs of warming admiration in previous rooms, became wildly enthused over the stuff on the tables. My mother appeared and started showing her around. The woman and my mother got along wonderfully and taxes were not mentioned again. The whole paradigm had changed, entirely getting rid of the initial tension and anxiety.

I’ve suddenly remembered a dream I had weeks ago where for some reason I visited two middle-aged lesbians in Broadmeadows, an outer suburb of Melbourne. Their house was much bigger on the inside than the outside and contained an immense formal reception room with an irregular oval ceiling whose biscuit-coloured plaster mouldings resembled close pleats all drawing towards a central medallion shaped like the opening of a cowrie shell, only closed, with tightly meshed teeth. So it was a sort of ceiling/sealing-vagina dentata. I have no idea why I dreamed of that.

A story told by a friend of ours about his attempt to buy a car in Thailand:

The Idiot

I’m at home today with a random virus, so this seems like a good time to upload pictures of Nikko, one of the main tourist attractions in the Tokyo region. “Nikko” literally means “Sunshine” - no, it’s nothing like that Sunshine, you Melburnians. Being slackers, we got there on the train around midday, which still gave us plenty of time to wander around looking at the colourful, indeed gaudy, shrines. Its location in the mountains made the weather a bit cooler than Tokyo - which, apart from the week of rain, was hot - and the forest around the shrines cooled things down further, so that sightseeing was pleasant. I’m afraid I either never knew, or have forgotten, what most of the photos below are actually of. Shrines and shrine-related stuff, you know?

The god of thunder (and rock ‘n’ roll), winner of the Mightiest Nipples in Heaven contest:

Not sure who these chaps are, but: “I will survive, I will survive…”

And dolphin- and elephant-shaped kneepads are so kawaaaiii!

The Three Wise Monkeys, carved over the door of the stable housing the sacred white horse, a gift from New Zealand, which wasn’t at home when we were there. A traditional belief holds that monkeys protect horses from disease:

Dry stone wall, with moss. All the outdoor walls were of dry stone construction, as far as I could see:

One of the most impressive sights was the trio of Buddhas in the aptly named Three Buddhas Hall. Unfortunately, photos weren’t allowed - probably to encourage postcard sales. However, thanks to the ever-trust Internet, you can see that the large, multi-armed, gilt bronze(?) Buddhas are kept behind a sturdy grille, presumably to stop them sneaking out at night and eating people. They had that sort of feeling about them, particularly the one on the left, which had the look of a wrathful Tibetan deity and upset a small boy who was there.

Leaving the Big Bad Buddha, we wandered down the hill and up the river a kilometre or so, looking for a certain path lined with Jizo statues. Jizo is a bodhisattva viewed as a special protector of children, women and travellers, who acts fearlessly to help those in need or distress. The river was very clear and blue. It looked very cold but so clean and inviting that I had to go and dip my feet in it (it was cold - but nice):

Crossing the river, we saw many dragonflies lying torpidly on the handrails of the bridge:

A little further on, we came to the path of Jizos - with hats and bibs, which, I have read, are offered as thanks by parents whose child has recovered from an illness, or, alternatively, by those who have lost a child and hope the god will protect it in the afterlife. Jizo is known as a helper of souls in hell and, in modern Japan, in his aspect as Mizuko Jizo, the guardian of stillborn, miscarried, aborted and unborn infants. About halfway down this page there’s an interesting explanation of Mizuko Jizo and the Japanese concept of early childhood, in which young children are regarded as half-otherworldly and “mysterious beings in a liminal world between the realm of humans and gods”. It was a lovely, secluded path on the mountainside above the river, and my personal highlight from our day at Nikko.

The Jizo path - like many a circle of English standing stones, they are said to be uncountable:

On a path above was this woodland cemetery:

And, nearby, an attractive little hydroelectric station:

We walked back along a stream which, because of the gradient of the road, gave the illusion of flowing uphill; another stream went across it on a tiny aqueduct. We caught a bus back to town and ate Indian at a restaurant near the station before we left. There was a big TV in the restaurant showing sumo wrestling. I wondered if there are any female sumo wrestlers. There are - and were, as early as the 1700s, but it was considered immoral, and tied to the sex industry (let your imagination run wild), unlike male sumo, which was honourable, of course, and female wrestling was banned in Japan in 1926. I can’t help thinking that some of Bangkok’s rotund mama-sans would make formidable sumo wrestlers…

In which I play some more with my Wacom:

The sky this morning reminds me of a dusty blue-and-white china jug: splotchy, dim blue clouds on a brownish-cream background. The buildings all look very blue and the distance is misty. I have been getting up early to write. Writing Horn is scary because I have very little idea about what’s going to happen. I can see ahead to a certain point, then it all gets vague, rather like this morning’s view. I’m completely incapable of saying, “Ok, this will happen.” I’m not always so utterly unable to plan, or at least make contingency plans, but this book feels like a foreign territory that I’m exploring without a map. And there are odd things in it that I can’t explain yet. There’s a tower room with windows that look out onto an orderly land of trees and lawn where it’s always (I’m fairly sure, though not positive) a spring day. One of the characters disappeared into it before the story begins. I know what the land signifies symbolically but not how and why it exists physically. Forage says (I think) that it is the “return path of the fractal”. Now, Forage in the book certainly doesn’t know what a fractal is, but the Forage who stands over my shoulder is obviously more au fait with mathematics. I unfortunately lost my ability to understand maths somewhere in high school. It got terribly hard one day, it seemed, and that was that. My math grades went from easy As to struggling Cs and Ds. Part of my problem is that I have a very concrete way of thinking. I can’t understand abstract explanations very well. No matter what the subject, I always need explanation in the form of concrete examples, or at least decent metaphors. So I understand the aspect of a fractal that shows up in pictures, namely that it’s “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be subdivided in parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole”.  But then I read that a fractal’s Hausdorff Dimension is greater than its topological dimension, and I find that I understand the explanation of a Hausdorff dimension exactly as much as I expected, which is to say, not at all. Sadly there’s no such thing as Advanced Math for Dummies.

While writing I’ve been thinking about geometric patterns in nature–spirals, in particular, since spirals are found at the largest and the smallest scales in nature–and of course, Forage’s horn is one. But a spiral doesn’t have a return path, unless you turn around and go back again, and I have no idea whether a fractal can have a return path, or what such a path would mean, mathematically or visually. Googling didn’t bring any enlightenment, though it did lead me to this interesting page, which I at least half understand - though if the whole Meaning of Life really is matter’s search for antimatter, I’m glad we conscious beings can embroider that backcloth with fancier meanings of our own–that we can dally, as opposed to quest, which is something I wanted to address (or indulge in) in this book.

At any rate, does “the return path of the fractal” make sense to anyone reading this? I should be very grateful for any help!

Kamakura

About an hour’s train ride out of Tokyo, for which you really want to bring a book unless you like looking at dormitory suburbs filled with Brutalist housing blocks, Kamakura was the 4th largest city in the world in 1250 AD, when it was the seat of the Shogunate. Today it is a pleasant town with many, many temples. Knowing that we would probably be satisfied with seeing three or four, Stu and I made no particular effort to get there early - which meant that I, at least, left with the feeling that I could have fitted in a little more, which was apparently how my great-great-grandmother always said one ought to leave a meal. I don’t know if that opinion extended to all enjoyments, though, and I rather think she would have chided us for being lazy sods. Anyway, we managed to miss the famous large Buddha, but we did see four temples, of which my favourite was the Tokei-ji, founded in 1285, formerly a refuge for women who wanted to divorce their husbands (they were only able to do so after staying at the Tokei-ji for three years). Unlike the other important temples we saw, it didn’t have particularly grand buildings. Instead, it had lovely overgrown grounds and a large, terraced, mossy cemetery with winding paths among trees; it certainly possessed a haunted feeling, and still enveloped one with the sense that here was a refuge, even though it hasn’t functioned in that capacity since 1873, when Japanese women won the right to sue for divorce in the law courts. At Tokei-ji I had the feeling, very sentimental I suppose, of meeting the Old Japan that I had badly wanted to meet. I don’t think I could have met her at a busy tourist attraction; I seem to need weeds and solitudes and spaces to find these spirits - spaces, I suppose, for my book-and-film-fed imagination to go time-travelling in.

Tokei-ji:

Kyudo practitioner at Engakuji, one of the five great Zen temples in Kamakura:

More Engakuji:

A wall of…beer? … at the Tsurugaoka Hachiman Shrine, a Shinto temple, and drummers near one of the gates:

And Kencho-ji, another of the five large Zen temples:

At Kencho-ji there was a meditation hall that was open to the public. Some people were meditating, others were sitting cross-legged and upright reading the temple’s info brochure. I guess there are many ways to the Way (and this Monkey is still no nearer to being any less of a fool…)