The University of Sydney Union is proud to
publish Hermes, Australia’s oldest literary journal.
Founded in 1886, Hermes is produ ce d by
s t u d e n t e d i to rs a n d s u b mi s s i o n s a re o p e n
to s t u de nt s, s taff and alu mni of t h e uni ve rsi t y.
Published by the
University of Sydney Union, 2014 .
IS SN 0 816 - 116X
2
A C
K
N
O
F
O
W
L E D
C
O
U
G
N
E M
E N T
T
Y
R
The Universit y of Sydn ey Unio n ackn owled ges the
Cadigal People of the Eora Nation as the traditional
owners of the land on which we are located. The USU
recognises that the land belonging to these peoples
was never ceded, given up, bought, or sold. We pay
our respects to the Aboriginal Elders both past and
present and extend this acknowledgement to any other
Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people here with us.
4
E
D
I
T O
R
S
Rebecca Allen
Whitney Duan
Celeste Moore
Eleanor Turner
D
E
S
I
G
Simon Macias
5
N
C
O
N
T
E
N
T
S
PREFACE 9
UNSAID \\ Feiya Zhang11
GRATITUDE IN TRAFFIC \\ Jeremy Page
36
OPENING THE SPACE BETWEEN SOUND AND SILENCE:
LIMINAL REFLECTIONS ON MUSIC \\ Goetz Richter
37
PORTRAIT, PAPER BAG AND HAND \\ Jun Ming
43
DRESS UNIFORM \\ Rico Craig
44
MEXICAN BREAKFASTS \\ Mira Schlosberg
12
FAULTS (EXPLOSIVE DECOMPRESSION) \\ Mackenzie Nix
14
ZWISHENRÄUME \\ Robin Eames
15
IN THE DEAD SEA, ISRAEL \\ Micaela Bro okman
20
THE HARD WAY \\ Kathryn McLeod
22
SLEIGHT OF HAND \\ Samantha Bowers
46
GIRLS \\ Micaela Bro okman27
THE SPEED OF THE SUBLIME (I) \\ Arielle Marshall
48
THROUGH BROKEN PERSPEX \\ Nicholas Fahy
28
THE SIX O’CLOCK TABLE \\ Evelyn Araluen Corr
49
CUPBOARDS \\ Katrina Kemp
29
THE SPEED OF THE SUBLIME (II) \\ Arielle Marshall
53
ANATOMY OF A CRIME SCENE \\ Mackenzie Nix
34
FROZEN \\ Katarzyna Aurora Sprengel
54
DETAINED \\ Jordan Roe35
DUSK \\ Madeleine Charters
55
6
YES \\ Rico Craig45
7
P
R
E
F
A
C
E
The liminal is an inherently unpredictable space, a state of
ambiguity, of grey areas and elastic edges. Its power lies not
only in this elusiveness, but the way in which such indefinability
allows for and – more importantly – inspires creativity.
It was this openness we hoped would ignite the imaginations
of our contributors this year, who have not only embraced
the theme but, together, have highlighted the multiplicity of
compelling meanings within this single idea. The transition
between graduating and beginning a career. The baby you
will never get to meet. Or the mother you will never know. The
unfinished conversation. The unfurling of a musical note. The daily
traffic jam. The darkening of the twilight sky.
Leave the world of the black and white behind, venture beyond
familiar borders, and join us in the space between.
Editors, Hermes 2014.
9
U n s a i d
F e i ya Z h a n g
To say the least is to say the most to you
is to say the most of what I dare not say
except in fleeting whispers and half-formed thoughts
that lie still-born in the depths of stars and thorns.
And to say the least is to preserve the fragile peace
is to keep the calm to co ol the pain beneath
but maybe not for certain though I dare not speak
to you of the memories sunken deep.
And so we direct our attention towards the distance
carefully counting down the minutes with our fingers
and then we direct our intentions towards the instance
when we leave and the conversation lingers.
11
Mexican Breakfasts
M e x i c a n
B r e a k f a s t s
Mira Schlosberg
Do you remember when we went to the Marrickville markets on Sunday
morning? The night before we had eaten veggie burgers at Lord of the
Fries in the city and then we went to the Take Back the Night rally, but
we were to o cold to participate in the march afterwards so we went
back to your house and watched the first episode of The L Word in bed.
You turned off the light but in the dark I could still feel the blue of your
bedsheets. We had kissed for the first time in that colour. I lost my virginity
in that colour. It was a nice shade of blue.
You told me you’d been feeling ‘more’. Not more strongly, just more. I was
happy because I’d been feeling the same. Falling asleep together under
your mosquito net and waking up to the bright white light of Sydney spring
shining through it, I was feeling a lot more.
I bought a kale and ginger juice and you got a watermelon one. We sat
on the curb to drink them. We watched people’s feet, their little cute dogs,
swinging bags of leeks and zucchini. This was before I stopped shaving my
legs but after I cut off all my hair. I was growing into myself. I was telling
myself the story of us as it was happening. This was the week you fought
with your mum and you were worried because she hadn’t called you back.
I was worried for you to o, but I could feel the sun on the back of my neck
where my long hair wasn’t anymore and your thigh against my thigh on
the curb and I was feeling more, and more was a go od feeling.
On the way to the markets we stopped to pet a cat without ears that
stuck its head through a gate. The air was already hot and the cicadas were
humming that huge hazy hum that gets everywhere.
Across from us there was a stall with a sign that said they were selling
MEXICAN BREAKFASTS. Sydney has shit Mexican fo od but I saw that
sign and wondered if it would be any go od anyway, and I wanted to
tell you I loved you but I was scared to and I thought it would make a
go od story later if I pointed that sign out to you instead. So I pointed
at the sign without lo oking at you, and I thought ‘I love you,’ and I said,
‘Lo ok. Mexican breakfasts.’
12
13
Z w i s c h e n r ä um e
Robin Eames
You are born in the tiny space between two adjoining walls in a north facing
Edwardian-era terrace house. The house belongs to an old couple who have
plans to retire in the winter; the old woman is a mathematician, and the old
man is a projectionist down at the local movie theatre. You do not know this
yet. You are an inch and a half long, and your first word is a sneeze. Your
senses are sharper than a human’s, but the only thing around you is dust.
For a week and a day your whole world is dust and silence, until you
discover a crack in the skirting board, and your world becomes that
much bigger.
You quickly discover that humans cannot see you. You are glad. They are
very frightening at first – they are so much bigger than you, and their voices
are loud and croaking, like monsters – but after a time you become used
to their presence. As you grow, you occupy yourself with small tasks,
like cleaning the rust off the old water pipes and chasing the pigeons out
of the rafters.
In the autumn of 1937 the old woman breaks her tiny hand-mirror, and
you manage to salvage a shard. You find a scrap of sandpaper to file down
the edges until they are smo oth, and then you settle down into a patch of
sunlight and inspect your reflection.
You are not like anything else that you know. You do not lo ok like a bird,
or a dragonfly, or one of the garden skinks that you are always sho oing
out of your sleeping place. You lo ok a little like a human, but your eyes are
M a c k e n z i e N i x \\ F a u l t s ( E x p l o s i v e D e c o m p r e s s i o n ) \\ p e n o n p a p e r
14
15
Z w i s c h e n r ä um e
Z w i s c h e n r ä um e
wide and catlike, and your ears are pointed, and your skin is dark blue-black
rather than brown or pink. You do not seem to fit into any of those strange
human-made categories – Male or Female, Man or Woman. You are between
the two. This makes perfect sense; for now, you see yourself as part of the
microcosm of the house and garden, where other insects and small creatures
organise themselves in ways that are unintelligible to humans. Though
later, you will learn that many humans also see themselves as somewhere
in between.
You tumble into your space between the walls, curl your arms around your
knees, and fall head first into your dreams.
In the evenings the old woman’s grandniece visits, bearing gifts of richly
scented muffins and cardboard packets of tea. Sometimes she brings her
daughter, and they sit in the fading sunlight beside the window and read
from brightly coloured pages. You hide in the light fittings, enthralled, and
listen to the stories. It occurs to you, later, that you do not have a name. Birds
and lizards have no need of names, but you are not a bird or a lizard.
You name yourself Huxley, after the fraying spine of a book on the old
woman’s shelf.
The old man dies in the waning summer of 1951. The wake is held in
the house, and that afternoon you see more humans than you have ever
seen in your life, all gathered around the scratched dining table, weeping
and offering tissues to one another and stealing canapés to hide in
their purses.
After the wake you brush away the food scraps, rescue lost canapés from
where they had rolled under the sofa, shake out the good tablecloth, and
then you begin the taxing process of washing the dishes – some of which
are bigger than you are. You are quiet – although the old woman still cannot
see you, you do not wish to disturb her. By the time dawn’s rosy trails creep
across the sky, the living room is gleaming and neat, as if nobody had ever
been here.
16
When you wake again you have doubled in size in the night. When you
try to stand, disoriented, you hit your head against a piece of jutting brick,
and bright blue blo od starts to slip into your vision. You cry out – and though
you do not know it, the old woman hears you, and thinks that perhaps it was
the distressed call of some small animal. Your shoulders brush against both
walls, and you cannot quite stand upright; instead you hunch over slightly,
still trailing droplets of vibrant blue. Your blo od falls into your eyes, and then
your mouth. It tastes like dust.
You feel your way towards the gap in the skirting board, limping, half bent
over. The bricks and flo orboards that were so familiar to you yesterday
suddenly seem alien: your hands are larger, and everything else is smaller
and stranger. There is a tiny patch of light spilling into the wall just ahead of
you, and as you slide through it for one heart-stopping moment you realise
that your shoulders are to o large, that you are stuck – and then a moment
later you are free. For the first time, you pull yourself up to your new, entire
height. You are at least three feet tall. Your bones ache.
There is a little fountain in the garden where the pigeons like to wash
their wings, and you manage to scramble up to perch on the edge of the
fountain bowl. The fountain is grimier than you remember, and the ceramic
is a little chipped. You dip your hands into the collected rainwater and wash
the blo od out of your eyes. In the wake of your fingers the water turns
bright blo od-blue, blo od spreading through the water like clouds filling an
empty sky.
17
Z w i s c h e n r ä um e
Z w i s c h e n r ä um e
You tip the bloodied water into the camellia plant, and then you fetch a
cloth from the house and scrub the fountain until the soft nacreous gleam of
the ceramic is visible once again. From the garden fence a pigeon squawks at
you, indignantly.
When you return to the house, you busy yourself with tidying away the
moving-boxes, and helping the old woman’s grandniece – now an old woman
herself – and her daughter to sort out their belongings. You stay for a little
over a week, and then you escape to the library again, and to the local
movie theatre, and to the park, and the river. Your body is still changing, and
occasionally you notice that your ears have smo othed over, or that the blue
is bleeding out of your skin to be replaced with a dark brown-black. The next
time you catch a glance of your reflection, your eyes are brown and round
and human. You are five and a half feet tall, and you no longer fit into any
of your old interstitial hidden places.
Your birthplace between the walls was not your only hiding place, but you still
feel its loss keenly. That night you sleep in one of the forgotten places beneath
the house, behind the old empty wine-rack, in a pile of torn-up curtain fabric.
The next morning you have grown a little more, but not so drastically as
during the previous night. You begin to measure your height against the notches
in the garden fence, and you find that you grow in fits and starts, an inch here,
and another handful of inches there. The old woman spends her days reading
and dozing in the sunlight, and you spend your days reading over her shoulder
and quietly making cups of tea and leaving them dotted around the house. The
old woman frowns sometimes, when she finds mugs of Earl Grey and Darjeeling
tucked into the bookshelf, but she drinks the offerings happily enough. The tea
does not go cold; you make sure of that.
You begin to eye the front doorway with a sort of nebulous longing, and
when the old woman dies in the night in the latter half of 1965, you pack up
your meagre treasures and venture into the outside world.
Winter comes, and your skin is not as hardy as it used to be. You borrow
a coat and a pair of trousers from the grandniece’s daughter, and you
slip outside into the streets, letting the breeze catch at your hair and your
eyelashes, and follow you into the library.
The rush of cold air catches the attention of the librarian, who glances
at the do orway. You wait for her gaze to pass over you, as it always does,
but instead her gaze catches and holds.
“Go od morning,” she says.
Your journey does not last long. You hide in gutters and in storm water
drains, in the hollows under huge oak trees, and in the rafters of the local
library. The library! – you had not dared to hope that the world might hold
such wonders as the library, but in the fortnight of your first absence from
the house, the library becomes your favourite refuge, and you spend many
long hours curled up in the window reading works written by your namesake.
On the last night of your adventure, you grow two whole feet in the night, and
wake up feeling rather dizzy.
18
19
M i c a e l a B r o o k m a n \\ I n t h e D e a d S e a , I s r a e l \\ p h o t o g r a p h ( f i l m )
THE HARD WAY
T h e
H a r d
W a y
K athryn McLeod
The Road Trip
Fuck, it was hot. It was the kind of summer day where you couldn’t talk about
how hot it was without coupling it with a profanity. In fact, it was the kind
of day where you couldn’t talk about much of anything but the weather.
The breeze was hot. Clothing felt like an encroachment. Uncovered skin
burnt instantly. And I was in my car with three friends hurtling down a
searing black asphalt road towards a mirage on the horizon. Somewhere
beyond was the coast, waiting.
The car was a 1993 Ford Falcon station wagon but the year was 2011.
I fondly called it ‘the barge’ because it creaked like a ship and had the
turning circle of one to o. Going uphill and along straight stretches we’d
have the windows open, letting in a hot breeze that wasn’t dissimilar to
riding in a fan-forced oven. On downhill sections of the road when my fo ot
was off the accelerator, the antiquated air conditioning would roar to life
and we’d cheer it on. The co ol air was intoxicating enough that I would try
buying a few extra seconds by keeping my fo ot off the pedal, but eventually
we’d lose to o much speed and there was no choice but to press on.
This is surely one of the reasons why it to ok so long to get to the coast
that day. It didn’t help that if there was a side of caution to err on, I would
err on it. I had only been driving on my own for two months and I was still
fraught with nerves, especially on unfamiliar roads. While the volume of our
music, the P plates and our wild hair screamed ‘epic road trip’, my driving
style whispered ‘grandmotherly’.
Accidents Happen
After years of thinking a Bachelor of Arts degree would lead to
unemployment and a lifetime of quiet desperation, I was comically surprised
after my graduation to receive a job offer from a government agency to
work full-time on an eight-week contract. I desperately needed a break
after finishing my Honours thesis, but the offer was to o lucrative to refuse,
and besides… it was only eight weeks.
Half a dozen extensions to my contract later and fourteen months on,
I really needed a break. While getting a job within a week of graduating
was initially amusing, as each successive contract was extended, I became
strangely appalled. I had done a much-mocked BA; where was all the
promised free time, the crushing poverty and the inevitable soul-searching
about whether or not to become a teacher?
I was suspended in an awkward twilight, existing in the space between
being an aimless student and developing a career. By day I had become a
young professional, upholding the Australian Public Service code of conduct,
wearing my hair in sensible buns and speaking almost exclusively in acronyms.
Outside of work, I still identified with my slacker university lifestyle.
The share-house I lived in had five people on the lease but there were
usually more strangers in the house than people I knew. Weekends were
spent drinking and recovering with Bec, my housemate, friend and partner
in hangovers. One of us would lie in the hammock and the other would sit
on the home-made swing and we’d talk, laugh, complain and eat copious
amount of potato products until the sun moved on or other housemates
interrupted our ritual.
After playing the accelerator-or-air-conditioner game for four hours,
we finally pulled into the quiet camping ground. Our site was on a grassy
area overlo oking the wide, unpatrolled beach. We were all to o delirious
with heat to do anything but kick off our shoes and run straight towards
the ocean.
I’d built up three weeks of annual leave at work, and I decided to blow it
all that summer. The timing was perfect; great bands were touring, Bec was
unemployed and our friend Matt was visiting from Vietnam after living there
for almost a year. He brought along his boyfriend Christophe, who we liked
immediately. Christophe exuded the kind of easy warmth of someone who
was perpetually high, which he was.
22
23
THE HARD WAY
We decided to put my newly acquired driving skills to use by road-tripping
to the coast for a camping holiday. It wasn’t so much a holiday to me but
an exercise in restoration. It was a time to get back to who I really was; an
unemployed slacker arts student just going through a temporary period of
accidental employment.
A Numbers Game
It was forty degrees that day as the four of us sto od barefo ot on the
boundary of beach and ocean, letting the waves roll in over our legs after
the long drive. Our shoes lay discarded and useless next to the car. It was
the second of February. We’d been there for roughly five minutes.
Did I remember to lock the car?
I turned to lo ok. The barge was off in the distance, staring at us benignly.
“I’m going to go put my swimmers on. I’ll be right back.”
The salty water evaporated on my feet despairingly quickly as I walked
back across the beach. It was uncomfortably hot. I began sprinting. The car
was only 250 metres away but the uphill return journey meant I was sinking
slightly with each stride, the sand contouring around my feet. Half-way up
the beach I realised I was in trouble. It wasn’t just hot, it was burning.
The car or the ocean? The car.
I kept moving, tears rolling down my cheeks. Patches of grass, half-buried
in sand became like islands for me to hop across. The searing pain forced
me to use a clump of grass like an emergency rest stop. I sat down and lifted
my feet and arms in the air, desperate for the sand not to touch exposed
skin. From afar, it might have lo oked like I suddenly had an irrepressible
urge to do yoga quite po orly.
THE HARD WAY
The car had been locked. Fuck.
Sobbing, I unlocked the driver’s side do or and sat sideways on the seat,
legs splayed out on the grass in front of me. I gingerly lifted my feet off the
ground and turned my legs outwards. A huge wet flap of skin swung from
my left fo ot. The right fo ot had an enormous blister that covered the entire
arch. Pockets of skin had lifted away underneath my toes. I could see liquid
under the transparent skin.
By the time my friends ambled back to the car, I had flagged down a
neighbouring camper and asked her to help me rig up a container with
ice and water. The container was only big enough for one fo ot to be
fully submerged at a time. It’s not the first or last time I have cursed my
size elevens.
The Trip
Four hundred and twenty-two kilometres later and roughly ten hours after
the accident, I arrived at the emergency ro om at 2am. I rated my pain an
eight. The nurses sat me in a wheelchair and rolled me into a starkly lit
consultation ro om where they gave me a hefty dose of Endone and cleaned
and bandaged my feet. Upon discharge, the doctor swanned in to check
the proceedings. The male nurse told him that I had second-degree contact
burns and that he’d suggested I see a chiropodist in the coming weeks to
have the damaged skin removed. The doctor raised his eyebrows, nodding
as though the idea was novel or cute, but he was satisfied and both the
nurse and I were free to go. I floated to a taxi and told the driver to take
me home.
Instinctually, I knew not to lo ok at my feet. Not yet. I plunged them back
into the sand and lurched desperately forward. I scrambled up the grass
and found myself by the car.
Everyone was gathered around the outdo or couches on the veranda
when I made my way into the yard. The day’s events had already been
recounted to our housemate Alasdair and his entourage. They all greeted
me like a war hero, and I lapped it up, swaying in a euphoric haze of
opiates with a shit-eating grin. I noticed a grasshopper on Bec’s shoulder
and calmly transferred it from her shirt to the garden. To say this was
24
25
THE HARD WAY
uncharacteristic is an understatement. I am amongst my friends famously
scared of all things that creep or crawl. They laughed at how high I was.
I laughed because we were all laughing. The roles had been reversed for
once; for Matt, Bec and Christophe it was usually weed; for Alasdair and
his crew, it was ecstasy.
“What did they give you?”
“Endone.”
“Oh shit. Do you have any more?”
“No.”
I surveyed Alasdair suspiciously and muttered that he was going to cut my
stomach open to get at the Endone. They cackled again, and Bec was kind
enough to lead me to bed.
Some things you just have to learn the hard way. Wear shoes at the
beach. If you care about being carefree, chances are you aren’t. Growing
up is hard to do. Roll with the punches. After spending the remainder of
my annual leave resentfully watching my friends have fun in the po ol, I of
course recovered just in time to go back to work. With another extension
to my contract, it was clear that I wasn’t just on the threshold between
university and working life; I’d already crossed it. Still, the waiting game was
already on for the next big break. I figured it couldn’t be worse.
Micaela Brookman
// G i r l s //
photograph
( d o ub l e e x p o s u r e f i l m )
26
27
Cu p b o a r d s
K atrina Kemp
T
h
r
o
u
g
B
r
o
k
e
n
P
e
r
s
p
e
h
x
Nicholas Fahy
Come the times when I remember her face,
I forget, only to relearn; how frail –
Lines drawn like blinds at dusk, beautifully pale,
Which bend and weave with youthful embrace,
A quiver of lips such makes the heart race,
To be read in gentle as sweet-messaged braille,
Waterlily cheeks drift with each exhale,
Dimpled, ever softly, with sincere grace.
Yet eyes are mysteries always misread,
For clarity remains shrouded in mist,
The deep passion in her most drawing stare
Is but my technicolour sight refracted;
To how many strokes am I the artist
Who drew her in these lines of sweet despair?
Arranging battleships on a calm ocean of dust under the bed, he glanced
up from the flo or when he heard his mother sigh. He liked to keep an eye
on her when no one else was at home.
Her ro om was spacious; huge to a five year old, with plenty of empty
carpet where he could spread out his discoveries, found during expeditions
into the secret spaces of the house. If she was awake, his mother didn’t
notice how he passed the time, so long as he was quiet.
She liked the house to be silent. Outside, louder than the unobtrusive
sounds made by playthings he brought to his vigil, he could hear cars
passing up on the road, and wondered where people went who did not
stay in their bed like his mother.
The child longed to go outside, to watch those cars going by, or to
squeeze the gaudy snapdragons in the flowerbeds and make their mouths
gape. He didn’t, because his mother had warned him to always stay inside
if she was asleep.
He watched for a moment and decided that she would so on be sleeping.
Not long before, she had been up as she did every day to go to the toilet
and fill her glass of water. She needed water for taking pills. Three brown,
glass bottles sat in a row on her bedside table. One by one she would open
each bottle, carefully tip out the right amount onto the table, then screw the
lid back on tightly. He wasn’t allowed to touch them, but when he sat beside
her during this ritual, they smelt awful.
She gathered them all up into one hand, and, after taking a quick sip from
her glass in the other, would clap the loaded palm to her mouth and toss
back her head, swallowing the lot. It was the most energetic thing he saw
her do all day.
28
29
cupboards
cupboards
She always propped up her pillow and sat against the bedhead for a
while, until the pills went down properly. Her eyelids would start to drop,
the big sigh would come, and she would lie back down. He knew then it was
sleeping time. He crept to the other side of the bed to check. Her face was
yellowish and puffy, and she had on a nasty green cardigan even though
it was hot.
He liked to climb right into that wardrobe and disappear behind the
dresses, sitting perfectly still in a little, tight ball until there was not a sound
from the coathangers overhead. He could imagine then that he and his
mother did not exist at all; that he was just something in a wardrobe in a
house empty of people.
“Mummy?” he said, but her greasy eyelids didn’t even flicker.
\
She couldn’t hear him when she was asleep. He knew because one day he
had climbed up on a sto ol to reach an interesting box in the hall cupboard.
When he pulled at it, other things on top had come crashing out, knocking
him to the flo or. He had waited, holding his breath, for her voice. What are
you doing? But not a sound came from her ro om. He breathed, and went to
lo ok. She had not even moved.
In that silent interval between her falling asleep and the three chimes
he knew marked the time before his brothers came home, he explored the
house and built a map in his mind of where all the best treasures were kept.
And there seemed to be no end of cupboards and drawers to explore
during those long, empty afterno ons.
\
Beside him, stacked on the flo or of the hanging space, were three
shoeboxes. He had noticed them before, but, intent on his game of nonexistence, he had not yet opened them. But this day, not in the mo od for
disappearing, he pulled out the boxes instead.
They weren’t heavy. He sho ok one, trying to guess, prolonging the
anticipation. No rattles, or rolling, just sliding, papery sounds. He to ok off
the lid, and there was his own face, a year or so younger, smiling back at
him. Underneath were more people he knew, his brothers, his grandparents,
all of them together in places he had vague memories of visiting. The zo o,
the Manly ferry, Nanna’s house. Mummy was never there.
In the next box, he could recognize his brothers, younger, before he was
there, in places he’d never seen. The photos at the bottom turned grey and
boring, showing his brothers as infants held up by his mother or father.
The last box was full of people he didn’t know. The photos were tiny
and almost brown. The men and women in them wore strange hats, and
appeared to be dressed up wherever they were, standing beside great big
cars rounded like beetles, or in front of city shops in gloves and overcoats.
Now he had started in the spare ro om. It had a wardrobe and a dressing
table like all the other bedro oms, as if one day someone would live there.
The furniture was full inside, as if somebody already did, or had. There
were clothes hanging up; rustling, long, satiny dresses, stiff with shimmering
beads or pearls sewn on, or softly velvet to rub against his cheek. He had
never seen anyone in dresses like these, except on television. Some were
even enshrined under jackets of plastic, as if they would be needed for a
special occasion.
He stirred the little people around in their musty prison, ready to put them
away again, when he found a lady. She was not dressed up at all, but wore
what lo oked like swimmers, though there was no beach in the picture. Her
pretty face, white against dark curls, laughed at the camera from the bough
of a tree. Showing off all her legs and pointing her toes, she had one arm up
behind her head, pushing up her hair, just like someone from the old movies
his father sometimes watched on the weekend. He kept the lady in the tree
with him while he carefully put all the boxes away.
30
31
cupboards
Suddenly, a voice reached him from down the hall. He snatched up his
lady. Mummy must be awake.
“Oh, Jamie,” she said as he ran in. “I have such a headache. Can you get
me the aspirin?”
He knew where to find them in the bathro om; she asked for them
frequently. He slapped his lady down on the bedside table, remembering to
take the water glass for refilling. His father had told him that he had to help
lo ok after Mummy, and that she needed water by her bed.
He returned to her smiling, pleased that he had not spilt any water on the
carpet, but she did not notice him come in. She was sitting up, lo oking at the
lady. He kept on smiling, waiting for her to thank him, but she lo oked up and
her eyes were full of tears.
cupboards
She lo oked at him, so sadly he almost cried to o.
“You’re a go od boy Jamie,” she said, reaching out for a hug.
He climbed up and snuggled under one arm. She laid her face on top of
his head; he could feel the tears wetting his hair. Her hand on his shoulder
was very cold, right through his t-shirt.
“Oh, lo ok at the time,” she said. “Come on, the other boys will be
home so on.”
He watched while she blew her nose and slowly got to her feet. She
lo oked at herself in the dressing table mirror and wiped her eyes again,
then bent down to open the bottom drawer.
“Here, give me that,” she said, holding out her hand for the photo.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, from far away, and a big tear
splashed right on the lady’s face.
Reluctantly, the boy passed over his lovely lady and saw her disappear
under the alarming tangle of elastic and lace his mother kept in her drawer.
“There’s a box, with all pictures inside, in the spare ro om. Who is
that lady?”
Jamie went to his ro om, not sure why his other mother had to be hidden
away. He could only imagine, not altogether incorrectly, that a first mother
brought you to your family, and then disappeared forever, never to be
known by her children.
His mother wiped it carefully, and held it further away as more tears fell,
spotting the ugly cardigan.
\
“It’s your mother of course,” she said, as if he should know, while she felt
under her pillow for a hanky.
“But aren’t you my mother?” he had to ask, his world suddenly awry.
“Well of course I am!” she sobbed.
Jamie did not understand, but did not dare ask anything else. When
mummy was upset, he’d been told not to bother her.
“Mummy, here’s your aspirin.”
32
In the months that remained before he started going to scho ol, his quiet
afterno ons continued. His mother slept, and he dared one day to open her
dressing table and steal away with the lovely lady, keeping her in a special
hiding place of his own. When he lo oked at her laughing face, so different
from his own mother’s, he knew that she was someone he had loved, almost
as much as the mother he knew.
Aggrieved, he would put her back, his mind full of the terrible fact that he
would never be able to find her.
33
Detained
Jordan Roe
A flying fox strays above this sunken cloister,
barely blacker than the strip of sky, vanishing
before it’s passed, along with all the smoke and sighs.
I asked Bobby was he speaking Zulu,
trying to test my expertise on clicks—
it was Ndebele.
We were playing Shithead,
while he murmured slow with mellow croaks
below the soft and stagnant hum of lights.
Two children burst through the flo odlit drizzle
flapping armfuls each of toilet paper
to stomp grey into the standing water.
We all turned to watch them jump hysterically
upon the frilly pulp; our wasting gazes snagged
on trampled slop dilating feebly in their wake—
twitching underneath—the echo-trails warbling
overflowed the brutal yard,
where mutterances slip
behind the purplish light, tobacco patterns blacken
into boundless platitudes and oblivion.
Drips on iron defy a Persian threnody suspended
by a scarce beshkan: a hollow polyrhythm.
Sky gapes dark and vacuous.
M a c k e n z i e N i x \\ A n a t o m y o f a C r i m e S c e n e \\ p e n o n p a p e r
34
Bobby clicked—shuffling.
35
Gratitude
i n T r a ff i c
J e r e m y Pa g e
O
p
the
e
n
space
sound
and
L
reflections
I’ve never received a call
from my boss
“just to say thanks
for all that money you made me
last quarter - it’s really
coming in handy”
I suppose it’s easier to be mad
encased in metal —
still —
some of our aggressions seem
misplaced; may be better
spent on causes other
than one another. But then there’s
the car payment, and we’re tired
I am
and it’s almost the weekend anyway.
(something about revolution)
36
m
n
g
b e t w e e n
Where’s my thank you wave
mother fucker
and yet
i
i
i
silence:
n
on
a
l
mu s i c
Goetz Richter
\
Music is an art of time and temporality. By virtue of sound it also unfolds
in space. While music may direct attention to the ephemeral nature of time,
it is space that enables music to sound and to be heard. The temporally
moving forms of sound produced by voices or instruments bring spaces
soundingly to life. Here we encounter a perplexity: Does music sound in
space or does a space resonate with the music which is played?
The possibility of inverting seemingly straightforward perceptions signals
questions. Space is where human beings find themselves. Such space is
not only confined to ro oms, halls or buildings. Nature, to o, provides us
with spaces: the clearing in the forest, the quarry in the mountains or the
sheltered dunes behind the beach – here, sounds can be made and music
can take place. When this occurs, the silence of nature blends with the
sounds of music. But contrary to the natural sound in such spaces, the manmade music remains outside the surrounding silence with its occasional
natural sounds. Natural space confirms to us that music requires bounded
space to sound as the openness of nature leads music to disappear in
the distance.
37
O p e n i n g t h e s pa c e b e t w e e n s o u n d a n d s i l e n c e
O p e n i n g t h e s pa c e b e t w e e n s o u n d a n d s i l e n c e
\\
\\\
The idea that spaces resonate is central to music and to these reflections.
Resonance presupposes a capacity for sounding out and for sounding
back. Resonance requires space and its defining dimensions for reflection.
Let us return to the question of what binds the two fundamental ontological
characteristics of music as temporal form and as resonant space by
considering the interaction between musician and listener. What occurs in
that space between these two? What characteristics does this space have?
We refer to a space as potentially resonant or as dull and even dead. When
we play music, space is filled with sound and comes to life. The sounds of
music do not only transform space; they transform the listeners who have
entered the space noisily and who need to fall silent to hear. In the musical
space the listener experiences a change in their being. This depends on
their attentiveness, the characteristics of the music and the power of the
musician. The change is often readily understo od as emotional – or even
spiritual. The reference to emotion here leads us to question why some
regard music as a language.
Philosophers debate whether and how music might communicate
emotion. What does the idea of music as a language of emotion imply?
It suggests that music is a medium through which emotions are transferred
to the human being who can be at any particular time in its possession
independently of music. However, how do emotions or feelings exist?
What is their mode of being? The view that music is a language of emotion
may conceal the ready assumptions that emotions are substantial, enduring
states of consciousness with properties that qualify their independent
existence. In such a conception, music itself takes the form of a trading
currency of feelings.
38
We may ordinarily believe that the musician and the listener are
separated by their distinct attention and activity. The musician makes music;
the listener simply listens. However, both musician and audience listen to
music. They differ insofar as they enter musical listening at different temporal
thresholds. When the music sounds, the musician has already heard it.
The musician is ahead of the listener in the audience: the musician’s listening
commences with the imagination of the music and anticipates the listening
of the audience. This immediate temporal independence is mediated by the
presence of resonance in space.
The audience responds to the music opening their consciousness to the
possibilities of further listening. The listener is ahead of the music-maker
in their expectation. This expectation provides a space for sustained and
engaged listening, in which the listener must engage their own imagination
and anticipate the music in their consciousness much like a musician.
To truly listen, the listener must become a musician through their attention
to the music.
Once music sounds, the musician listens as it resonates in space and
unfolds in time. The musician has a twofold, dialogical task: imagining
and anticipating the music, as well as listening to musical resonance.
39
O p e n i n g t h e s pa c e b e t w e e n s o u n d a n d s i l e n c e
O p e n i n g t h e s pa c e b e t w e e n s o u n d a n d s i l e n c e
\\\\
This dialogue of imagination and perception allows the musician to form an
ensemble with others and to reach a listening audience effectively.
The listening of the audience has similarly dialogical and developmental
characteristics – music suggests connections that in turn create expectations
and lead to anticipation. It inspires the imagination of the listener who
no longer merely receives the sounds made by the musician but instead
actively includes unfolding music in their own conscious life. This process
involves multiple spaces. Active timing and creative anticipation open the
spaces of attention towards concrete engagement with, and participation
in, music. It leads to listening in the man-made spaces where music sounds.
Such spaces would be silent or noisy were it not for musical imagination
to conceive temporal forms of sound. Where we fill spaces with sound,
we open at the same time a space between the silent imagination and
the audible sound. Making music and listening reveal to us how the active
formation of time opens up new realms of being, spaces of, and spaces
for, sound.
40
The intention to bring a phenomenon from the threshold of our immediate
experience into view inevitably imposes on us the requirement to retrace
our steps carefully. Only slow thinking and a repeated return to our concern
will advance our understanding. How is it possible that the complexity
of the musical experience constitutes a coherent, meaningful experience
altogether? How do musician and listener intuitively understand each other
and the music? We return to the question of music and emotion and with this
to the role space and time play in our experience of music.
As the musician anticipates musical listening such listening suggests
significance. This significance is always also felt. If we conceive music as
a language of emotion, an intuition of feeling would need to temporally
precede the anticipation of music for it to inform the musical utterance
properly. In the case of a re-creative musical performance, the musician
would have to pre-anticipate the feeling of the music suggested to them
by a preparatory, forensic study of the music. Whether we agree with the
view that music is a language of emotion or not, the relationship between
imagination and expression is determined by dialogical interactions very
similar to those exposed above in relation to listening itself. The imagination
of feeling suggests a musical anticipation. Upon articulation, the musical
idea develops its own dynamic dialogue within sounding space and
silent imagination. The listener’s experiential profile reflects this structured
anticipation with the difference that the initiative for any alteration to it
is retained by both the music and the musician. This may lead to outcomes
which provide ongoing challenges to the listener. In this dialogue emotion
itself develops and changes. It is intentionally and temporally formed like
music, animated, reflected and directed by the dialogue between the
intentionality of the musician and musical listening.
41
O p e n i n g t h e s pa c e b e t w e e n s o u n d a n d s i l e n c e
\\\\\
The complexity of this concern demands that we return once again to our
starting point. The view of music as a language of emotion has lead to
a perplexing position; music originally conceived as a language expressing
emotion is now seen as a path towards emotion. It seems that neither
music nor the musician can hold fast to emotion. Musical expression remains
incomplete, and in fact, open to transformation by the initiatives of music
itself, the intentionality of the musician and the response of the listener.
There is no given emotional content in music which simply runs off. Whatever
significant emotion might arise in and through music needs to be anticipated
before the music sounds. It finds itself transformed at once through the
manifold dialogues of musical making and listening. This transformation is
achieved because music is both temporal form and resounding in space.
Our reflections have arrived at a cadence: music is the sounding form
and the resonant space where listeners and musicians meet. Such a meeting
engages the imagination to complete suggestions initiated by music yet
immediately transformed by all. The superficial separation between
musicians making music on stage and audiences listening in silence does
not reveal readily that both are engaged in the same temporal task nor
that both share the same intentional space. Their combined listening, an act
of all-encompassing imagination, gathers musicians and listeners through
time within space. Music sublates difference by filling the space between
musician and listener with sound. Music opens the space between sound
and silence by bringing temporal form to spatial resonance.
Jun Ming
\\ P o r t r a i t, P a p e r B a g a n d H a n d \\
i n k o n pa p e r
42
Dress Uniform
Y e s
Rico Craig
Rico Craig
There is a woman screaming
from my balcony, naked
breasts quivering with rage.
Did I become heartless?
She has been tender; in bed we were
a heart-shaped question, her ribs a ripple
beneath my fingers, knees bent toward
the edge of peaceful half sleep. My euros
well spent. No longer. Now she yells
the taste of me from her mouth.
She has my keys in her hand, holding
them like a broken trophy, my uniform
in the other, slack and bodiless. Her lips
Yesterday evening, in front of Medici’s,
you returned to me; walking pale,
bent, a slipshod plait hanging from white
unruly hair. Nails crimping the plastic off
a pack of Lambert and Butler, your
picket lips puckering for a drag.
I remember you on the gutter edge,
hardly twenty, in Auburn, brawling
for a cigarette, kicking
a car that wouldn’t start,
throwing keys across the road.
spit the chalk of my name at a growing
crowd. I feel the sting of their hunger
rising from the street. She casts
Now your eyes are rheumy, trapdo ors
over the sump-hole you tended
so well. I hear you mutter
as you rest between each step.
my uniform at their mouths and I
imagine my chevrons trampled, torn.
The first rock is a surprise, through
Your gimcrack dress billows, green
and threadbare, a grandmother’s
cast-off. I watch your broken gait.
the window; they mean her no harm.
I hear their voices chanting the slogan
that follows me. Another rock, glass
You grin, to othless, gentle, a smoke
between your lips, happy as a child.
Did you?
on the carpet; I no longer have the will
to harm them. I hear the cheer from below
as she throws my keys from the balcony.
They must dazzle through the air; the last
brazen part of me. Now my hands are empty.
And shirtless I wait for fo otsteps from the hall.
44
45
SLEIGHT O F HAND
S l e i g h t
o f
H a n d
Samantha Bowers
You tricked me
into thinking you were real.
In idle moments, names
occurred, we wondered
if you’d tend to science
like your Daddy,
or make playmates
out of words, like me.
Or who you’d lo ok most like,
when you were bigger.
An hour before we met, I drank
two glasses of cold water, like they said,
and crossed my legs,
and squirmed until they called my name.
46
The gown sagged
like an elephant skin and billowed
at the back.
A woman buttered me
with aqua-tinted gel, then ran
a wand in arcs from rib to pubic bone.
You lay, a little
grey screen-ghost,
and didn’t move.
I thought it strange.
The woman frowned and turned a dial,
I knew before she said it –
the heartbeat on the screen
was mine, was
only mine, just
mine.
A solo throb
that I could cry to.
47
THE SIX O ’ CLOCK TA B LE
E v e ly n A r a l u e n C o r r
The table exists at six o’clock. At five-fifty-nine it is just furniture, unmarked
in time. But every day at six o’clock, she pours the tea and always sets an
extra place. When she has finished her Darjeeling or sencha or Assam, she
takes the empty cup to the sink and washes it as she did before.
The rest of the house is fuzzy around the edges. It’s almost as if it is fading
into the forest beyond the picket fence. She only sees it when she isn’t
really lo oking - when she steps out to collect the mail, or when she leaves
each morning and returns home in time to wait for the table to come into
presence. Last summer she helped carry it out to the lawn where it sto od
each day at every hour, come rain or shine, but this year she is only one
pair of hands when the sun comes out.
Nothing feels particularly real about the house except for this table at
twilight, in the place between afterno on and evening. Not even her presence
here is real. She was never invited to live here after he disappeared, but
when she walked through the garden that first night, that first six o’clock
with no tea on the table, no light in the lanterns, no voice calling to her
from the kitchen to make herself at home, she stepped into a void and the
house would not let her step out. It clung in the way it could not cling to him.
Do not leave me to o, it seemed to say.
The house demands answers, but there aren’t many that she can give.
Arielle Marshall
\\ T h e S p e e d o f t h e Sub l i m e ( I ) \\
photograph (film)
48
49
THE SIX O ’ CLOCK TA B LE
He went away.
THE SIX O ’ CLOCK TA B LE
So long as there is his absence to contemplate, she does not have to
There is really no other way of describing it.
Last summer he was here, he sat at this table at six o’clock and drank
tea and waxed philosophical and teased her about her hair. They read
bo oks and recited poetry. He told her about physics and mathematics and
geography. There are machines in his study that use radio waves to hear the
crackles of the past. He said there are strings that make up a solar system.
A cat in a box that does and does not exist. There are numbers that can split
an atom. Infinite universes where nothing will have changed but that they
meet an hour earlier each day.
She asks him if these other worlds can exist within each other, and he
tells her there is still so much they don’t know – but that is neither a yes
nor is it a no and now she has come to understand that they can exist at
the same time.
He was the first person she met when she moved to that town, a vague
face from a vague memory. They both had to remind each other of their
names. He was leaning across their shared fence in a dressing gown the
colour of midnight, asking after her mother, if she remembered their boat
trip one long lost July. She seemed older, but he didn’t.
consider her feelings for his presence. It is not that she forgets the tightness
of her chest and the to o-hotness of her skin when he smiled, or the way
his laugh could warm her even on those summer afterno ons where the rain
filled their cups before the tea could. It is that he is gone, he is gone at six
o’clock just as he is gone from every hour that he never was before.
There are possibilities, of course.
The first is that he could come back. This is the one she hopes for.
The one she dreams of. She has tried lo oking for him, tried lo oking for
his job or asking the owner of the shop where he bought his tea, but the
universe has whispered him out of the town and it will not let her be led to
him. So now she wraps herself up in a midnight dressing gown in a house
that she once only visited at six o’clock in the afterno on, her evening,
his morning, in that place between, because they were always between.
She hopes to be the flame that will lure the moth home. She thinks,
if I keep this place for you, if I set the table and pour the tea and clean the
cups, then you will know that there is a home somewhere, waiting, a house
that aches and grows blurred at the edges where it wants to sink into the
soil and leave her nothing but memory, an hour of crystallised stillness for
those who take their seat at the table.
When she moved in she discovered a library in his house with bo oks in
half a dozen languages on every conceivable subject. No bedro om, but a
study filled with things she cannot even begin to contemplate. She doesn’t
dare step in there for fear of shattering something that would suck her
down, down, into another world, another pocket of the universe. He could
be dead in that ro om for all she knew, but she did not know, so he was and
he wasn’t. She knew he had a job somewhere in town. The night shift, so her
supper was his breakfast. They were as different as night and day, because
those were the places they lived. The spaces they occupied. It was only at
that table that their geographies collided.
50
The second possibility is that he would never come back. She inspects
the delicate willow pattern on the tea cup she places out for him and
wonders how many times it can be filled and washed before it fades.
How many six o’clocks will pass with this absence. She has never had to
think to o far into the future, because this is not a place of futures. It’s a
strange town that seems to go backwards with every day. She is sure she
hasn’t aged since coming here, that her hair is the same length it always
was. She loses track of her family and friends outside its borders. She was
the last person to come here, and no one ever seems to leave.
51
THE SIX O ’ CLOCK TA B LE
Except him, of course.
She cannot decide if it is cruelty or kindness that the universe gives her
these possibilities. The cat could be alive or dead. He might be in his study,
or he might not be. The pain comes from being between.
Each day becomes so much like the last that place and time have
synthesised into one. Historical geography. The spatial and the temporal.
The time between leaving and returning to the house could be months.
It has been day all summer.
At five-fifty-nine, she turns on the record player, sets the table, and
pours the tea. The daily dance to bring home the strange man with no
bedro om but a radio that can listen to the past. When she has completed
this ceremony, she hears the garden gate swing, the click of the latch.
If she does not turn around, he is both there and he is not. She can sit
for a moment at this table and does not have to cho ose how this all ends.
And then it is six o’clock. The universe decides.
Arielle Marshall
\\ T h e S p e e d o f t h e Sub l i m e ( I i ) \\
photograph (film)
52
53
F r o z e n
K a t a Rz y n a Au r o r a S p r e n g e l
We started with nom de plumes,
writing manifestos for our trivial lives
and stealing altar wine from the local church.
Do you still remember our futile prayers to Emerson,
our restless fights for inspiration?
We used to get high every lazy weekend,
transforming ennui and loneliness
into graceful do om.
We used to flounder
in the lustre of the night’s madness.
Now we are frozen. Ageing:
spending afterno ons in
a quiet ro om,
writing polite letters to anonymous muses,
and waiting –
while pouring hot tea into china cups
that break each time
our old clumsy fingers haunt the kitchen.
Insomnia used to be a luxury, a confidant –
something that gave birth to the best epiphanies.
Now a sleepless night is nothing more than
a deaf confessor.
We will die sentimental,
perhaps while drinking our tea, waiting out the night
or fearing the sunsets like clueless children.
But when it happens, I just hope that
the sunset will seem a bit different,
somehow more
tangible.
54
Du
s
k
Madeleine Charters
Their beating coats echoed Escher
In concentric blind tracery;
Their canopy replaced the stucco
Relief
And fanned from the metal lanterns
Of harbour verandas.
Now petrified with fretting moths,
The city stops and quivers beneath
A mounting anticipation;
The living scaffold hardly breathes.
Come twilight,
Staid ro oms grow faint with their shadow
And the throbbing sky draws
The souls who cusp unto arches
Of windows lit
Electric blue.
The bridge lets fall its dark wire frame,
Now flo odlit ribs in bleached relief
Against the void of rising spirits.
An incandescent dusk.
55
C
O
N
T
R
I
B
U
T
O
R
S
Samantha Bowers is a former Fairfax journalist,
currently writing a bo ok and completing her
Master of Creative Writing.
Micaela Bro okman is a Sydney-based
photographer known for her narrative portraits
and lifestyle photography.
Madeleine Charters is in her third year of a
Bachelor of Arts degree.
Evelyn Araluen Corr writes essays on bo oks
about maps (but not atlases) and in her spare
time plots to overthrow capitalism.
Rico Craig writes poetry and prose. Recent
work has been published in Cordite,
Bluepepper, and is forthcoming in Meanjin.
Robin Eames is a third year student of History
and Gender Studies. They like cats, fairytale
monsters, and weird art.
56
57
Nicholas Fahy is a previous editor of Hermes.
He is a writer, publisher and photographer,
studying and working at the University of Sydney.
Jeremy Page has recently completed a Master
of Creative Writing and plans to begin a
poetry-related PhD in 2015.
Arielle Marshall is a second year Architecture
student with a penchant for philosophy.
Goetz Richter is a musician, philosopher and
Associate Professor in Violin and Chair of
the String Unit at the University of Sydney’s
Conservatorium of Music.
Katrina Kemp is a teacher working on a
Masters by research on teaching creative and
imaginative thinking. She is a 2002 graduate in
Special Education.
Kathryn McLeod is studying a Master of
Creative Writing, focusing on screenwriting,
journalism, and non-fiction.
Jordan Roe is a student of Australian Literature
and music composition, and a self-(un)employed
botanist and explorer.
Mira Schlosberg is gay as hell and likes cats
and stories.
Jun Ming is a second year student studying a
Bachelor of Design in Architecture.
Katarzyna Aurora Sprengel is half-Polish, halfAustralian and writes mainly poetry and fiction.
Mackenzie Nix is currently trapped in a
metaphorical prison of lineweights and project
deadlines in her second year of Architecture.
Feiya Zhang is so on to become a Science
graduate and ponders her next move. Writing
is her chosen form of therapy.
58
59