Tag: Experience

Section 13

Featured Monica Carroll17 Comments

How do you work with confession, Writer?

Extract from fiction writer G. M. Untervants:

“I had this supervisor who was blind. He called himself blind, not vision-impaired, so he was OK with me saying the word ‘blind’. Frankly, it still makes me feel a little co-opted, like I’m going to get a social frowny no-no every time I say it; anyway, he’s blind.

He used to see. I never asked what happened. In fact, I tried to talk to him as little as possible. I tried hard to not talk to him, especially alone. He gave me the creeps. I know you’re not meant to say stuff like that but the truth is, he did. He was creepy like a fiddling uncle or someone who never washes with soap because they think natural body odours are, you know, ‘natural’.

One afternoon he turned up to the team project meeting. He had the blur of a liquid lunch and stank like a midday beer mat. He turned up but his pants didn’t. His withering legs dangled in faded boxers and if you looked, he was poking through. I saw it but not because I was trying to see. I was just sitting in this meeting and someone said, ‘Craig mate, where are your trousers?’ I turned and it was in my line of view. Craig wasn’t embarrassed or anything. He said, ‘It’s my goal to get through this week without wearing trousers.’

Eleanor, she’s the same level as me but has a different supervisor, she was horrified. I was too, but I already knew how creepy Craig was. So, Eleanor, after the meeting, she complains to HR. Fair enough, right? You shouldn’t have to see penis in a team project meeting. HR hired an ‘independent investigator’. It was a big deal. Everyone got asked questions and recorded on camera. Turns out, Eleanor got charged with harassment for complaining about Craig. I stopped buying guide dog raffle tickets at Christmas and left the public service.”

Untervants, G. M. 2023. Confessions of the Pubic Servants APS2 to APS6. Melbourne: Rough Edge Press

On the Fire Department

Featured Monica Carroll7 Comments

There’s always a reason.

“When talking about this, Brandi felt very ashamed, holding her stomach and almost doubled over with shame. She thought the first fire was ‘just gonna take care of it and forget about it … but it didn’t stop is all.’ She ‘thought she could leave it alone.’ She ‘doesn’t remember when the second one was.’ She connects her setting fires to times when she and Louie would get in arguments. They had a fight when she asked him to help pay her car insurance. She had been doing everything around the house and repairing all his vehicles. He responded ‘Why should I take care of your bills?’ Brandi says that she set fires ‘to get back at him … make the fire department look bad … he was on the fire department 30 years’” (Kinsler and Saxman 2007:91-2).

Seek the reasoning, find the reason, Writer.

Kinsler, P. J and A. Saxman, 2007. ‘Traumatized Offenders’ in Quina and Brown (Eds.) Trauma and Dissociation in Convicted Offenders, pp. 81-95

Quina, K. and L. S. Brown (Eds.) 2007. Trauma and Dissociation in Convicted Offenders. New York: Haworth Medical Press

Non-pecuniary Impacts

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“It is trite but true to say that the government should, in all its legal endeavours, be seen to uphold the law.

One of the fundamental ethical duties owed by a lawyer is the avoidance of any compromise to their integrity and professional independence. A lawyer must not act as the mere mouthpiece of their client. The actions of government lawyers take on extra significance because the government is a client which has powers and obligations that far exceed those of the normal citizen” (Holmes 2023:519).


You have obligations, Writer. They matter.

Holmes, Catherine 2023. Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme Vol.2 Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia

Writer’s block (ii)

Monica Carroll4 Comments

The experience of writer’s block, the experience of being powerless to write, coerces the writer to alter their bonds to the world and her things, including the bond between writer and self. This pursuit can initiate both understanding and frustration. Within each is the power to write.

Before breakthrough there must be blockage.

block

“So the days pass and nothing is done”

Monica Carroll3 Comments

Below, a quote from Conrad; three sentences in eight hours, all erased.

I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down to eight hours every day—and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of eight hours I write three sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair. There’s not a single word to send you. Not one! … sometimes it takes all my resolution and power of self-control to refrain from butting my head against the wall. I want to howl and foam at the mouth but I daren’t do it for fear of waking the baby and alarming my wife. … So the days pass and nothing is done. At night I sleep. In the morning I get up with the horror of that powerlessness I must face through a day of vain efforts.

Conrad, J. 1898. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad

Some notes on disgust

Monica Carroll7 Comments

Disgust is a fertile state from which we can explore body/knowledge intersections. From Deborah Durham’s 2011 article in Ethos, “…disgust is part of an array of sensations that are seen to be beyond reason and rationality. To ‘feel something in one’s gut’ or ‘know something in one’s gut’ is to know it surely and incontrovertibly: like gut-knowledge, disgust in American is both non-rational, yet also a form of knowledge.”

‘Non-rational knowledge’ seems an overly complicated, and morally-laden, description for an ordinary practice. Is there a way to heal the cleave between ‘feel’ and ‘know’ so that we can discuss a closer-to-whole beast of knowledge? Are there singular words and meanings we can use to replace the go-to divided choices that have become an unproductive formula?

Taking an anthropological turn away from the assumption of the individual sovereign self, can lead us to reach for intersubjective, inclusive paradigms like ‘atmosphere’, ‘quality’, ‘vibration’ and ‘empathy’. Yet these meanings of assembly and inclusive connection have not yet borne the resolution, beyond Cartesianism, that is recognisably possible.

In a phenomenological exploration of pain, Frederik Buytendijk characterises the state of being ‘in’ pain as a severing of the self from the world. Aurel Kolnai, in a phenomenology of disgust, says disgust extends the self into the world. Disgust is a bridge. To experience disgust entails a real or imagined intimacy with the object of disgust.

Kolnai’s use of ‘intimacy’ places us into a more productive register than ‘non-rational knowledge’. Firstly, intimacy itself is a knowledge, an understanding of the strongest kind. And, second, intimacy is an ‘active’ knowledge in contrast to the passivity of non-rational knowledge concepts such as ‘atmosphere’, etc.. Intimacy is a knowledge known in the atmosphere of experience.

Durham asks us to think of disgust as an act of embodied imagination in the company of an intimacy-distancing dynamic (both in and out, both near and far, both push and pull, etc.). Yet, imagination cannot be anything other than embodied. (E.g., what would a dis-embodied imagination entail? Arial maps? House plans? What could an unembodied imagination be? A ghost’s story? A trans-human unseeable vision?)

Imagine eating fresh human faeces. Warm, waxy on your lips. Your teeth slide into the dark, soft cigar. The smell of shit feels like a thick cloud attached to you from within. Are you experiencing ‘non-rational knowledge’? Do you have an array of sensations ‘beyond reason and rationality’?

I didn’t think so.

Doesn’t the power of ‘gut-knowledge’ demand the engagement of an appropriate gut-knowledge language? Would not that simple act alone indicate the deserved respect for the unspoken supremacy of our body, flesh; gut-intimate both delicate and undeniable?

 

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