An Infinite Expectation of the Dawn
It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look…
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The shop is in Collingwood, and though it is small—five by fifteen metres, maybe, connected to a gallery no bigger than a kitchen—it shows no sign as to how on earth it pays its rent. It is like a tree in the desert that draws water from somewhere underground. Along the walls run metal shelves of books with hyphens in their titles. All fonts are sans serif. All furniture is silver. We are sipping tea and wine, wishing we were drunk somewhere louder, or sober somewhere quieter. A projector is aimed at the far wall, on which Ash’s new short film is about to play.
We overhear, in snatches of chatter, accounts from various members of the cast and crew.
Wallace Stevens believed the thing that drove humanity to poetry—our insatiable desire for resemblance, for things to resemble other things—was also what drove us to invent the atom bomb, which had the power to make the world of the living resemble the world of the dead, and this, as well as anything, might help to explain how Ash has lived their life. Born into wealth, intelligence, irresponsible beauty, nevertheless they seem to possess somewhere inside of them a vision of their life which lacks all these things, and have worked hard to destroy them in order to make these lives, real and imagined, resemble one another. There they lie, on my couch or yours, in expensive, unwashed clothes. They will wash the breakfast dishes in thanks for letting them stay, but they have no practice washing dishes, and once they’ve left you or I will have to wash them all again. We love them; we fear for them; we mother them. They are probably—we murmur, as I wash and you dry—not on heroin. The worries and disasters of their life are real, but they are also reflections of a particular aesthetic ideal, and we witness them like pictures of violence in a museum.
The process of making this film has invigorated Ash like nothing else has; it has driven them to lengths none of us would ever have guessed they would bother to go. Here is a list of the sacrifices they have made for it—quickly, before the lights dim:
A hush! The lights have gone down. Passing cars cast bright beads of light across the walls, the bookshelves, our faces as we turn, one by one, to the front of the room. The film begins.
[__________!]
Thank you, says Ash. The film will now be burned.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Joel Keith lives and writes on unceded Wurundjeri land. Their work has appeared in Overland, Island, Cordite, The Suburban Review andBest of Australian Poems, and is forthcoming in the Sydney Review of Books. She edits Voiceworks, she placed third in the 2024 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and this morning she was startled by a bird.
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
Notes: The title of this story is borrowed from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The line ‘We sat in the aurora of a sunrise that was to put out all the stars’ is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘The Poet’.
We overhear, in snatches of chatter, accounts from various members of the cast and crew.
June: We filled fire extinguishers with paint and sprayed, on factory walls, stern messages from the disappointed mothers of weapons manufacturers, dressed in black.
Henry: We dressed as cows and chewed, like cud, pages of the New York Times in bucolic sunlight.
Penelope: We discoursed on the aesthetic devaluing of the senses—taste, smell, touch—associated with domestic labour, women’s labour. The reason, we speculated, that Mondrian’s grid paintings hung in museums, whereas a quilt sewn by one of our grandmothers would only ever hang in Salvo’s, was that one was allowed—one was supposed—to touch the quilt.
Wallace Stevens believed the thing that drove humanity to poetry—our insatiable desire for resemblance, for things to resemble other things—was also what drove us to invent the atom bomb, which had the power to make the world of the living resemble the world of the dead, and this, as well as anything, might help to explain how Ash has lived their life. Born into wealth, intelligence, irresponsible beauty, nevertheless they seem to possess somewhere inside of them a vision of their life which lacks all these things, and have worked hard to destroy them in order to make these lives, real and imagined, resemble one another. There they lie, on my couch or yours, in expensive, unwashed clothes. They will wash the breakfast dishes in thanks for letting them stay, but they have no practice washing dishes, and once they’ve left you or I will have to wash them all again. We love them; we fear for them; we mother them. They are probably—we murmur, as I wash and you dry—not on heroin. The worries and disasters of their life are real, but they are also reflections of a particular aesthetic ideal, and we witness them like pictures of violence in a museum.
Moose: We bathed naked in milk for political reasons.
Ralph: We sat in the aurora of a sunrise that was to put out all the stars.
Clover: We cursed our parents for never having taught us the names of birds: willie-wagtail, little grassbird, spotted pardalote, pied cormorant, buff-banded rail, olive-backed oriole, powerful owl, masked lapwing, welcome swallow, hoary-headed grebe.
The process of making this film has invigorated Ash like nothing else has; it has driven them to lengths none of us would ever have guessed they would bother to go. Here is a list of the sacrifices they have made for it—quickly, before the lights dim:
- Relationship with mother
- Relationship with father
- Possibility of being employed by governments
- Plans to someday read certain beloved translated books in the original (for example, Chilean Spanish)
- Memory of Australian prime ministers’ names before Bob Hawke
- Relationship with sister
- Hopes of lasting simple happiness, of the sort when, at the beach, one accepts, with relief and obscure regret, that one will not go in the water, but will stay on the sand, perhaps reading a book
- Money for camera rental
- Time (irretrievable)
Aisha: We shot twelve-hour stretches in bitter cold and were paid nothing. When we complained, we were paid in menthol cigarettes. When we refused to smoke them, we were lifted into the air with systems of pulleys and dropped in the Birrarung. We floated to Flinders Street Station and took the Mernda line home.
Sruthi: We ate expensive sandwiches in times of personal grief.
Gab: We found a nice clinic with trans doctors offering consultations. They congratulated us on the nobility and inventiveness with which we were suffering and referred us to the nearest publishing house. When we arrived, we saw it marked for demolition. We punched the walls with rage because the house is a symbol for the body that is our shelter and prison. We were contracted to carry out the demolition and continued punching, at non-union rates.
Saskia: We cycled bicycles.
Andrew: We were windswept. Swept, that is, by wind.
Heather: We were—
A hush! The lights have gone down. Passing cars cast bright beads of light across the walls, the bookshelves, our faces as we turn, one by one, to the front of the room. The film begins.
[__________!]
Thank you, says Ash. The film will now be burned.
Joel Keith lives and writes on unceded Wurundjeri land. Their work has appeared in Overland, Island, Cordite, The Suburban Review andBest of Australian Poems, and is forthcoming in the Sydney Review of Books. She edits Voiceworks, she placed third in the 2024 Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and this morning she was startled by a bird.
Notes: The title of this story is borrowed from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. The line ‘We sat in the aurora of a sunrise that was to put out all the stars’ is borrowed from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘The Poet’.