Rogue Intensities Read online

  ROGUE INTENSITIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Angela Rockel was born in Aotearoa New Zealand and has lived all her adult life in rural Tasmania. She is interested in finding language for a conversation in landscape, community, history and family, towards a politics of the imagination.

  ROGUE INTENSITIES

  ANGELA ROCKEL

  First published in 2019 by

  UWA Publishing

  Crawley, Western Australia 6009

  www.uwap.uwa.edu.au

  UWAP is an imprint of UWA Publishing,

  a division of The University of Western Australia.

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.

  Copyright © Angela Rockel 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  ISBN: 978-1-76080-099-4

  Cover design by Upside Creative

  Cover image by Angela Rockel

  Typeset by Lasertype

  Printed by McPherson’s Printing Group

  This project is supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund

  Before all else, I want to acknowledge the Melukerdee People of the South East Nation, traditional owners on and from and about whose land this book was written.

  Thanks, always, to Terry for bringing me here.

  And thanks to Kathleen Mary Fallon for nagging.

  Contents

  Riddle

  Year 1

  January Fire

  February Owl

  March Room

  April Táin Bó Fráich

  May Metamorphoses

  June Char

  July Foreigner

  August Black cockatoos

  September Caduceus

  October Steam

  November Awakened

  December Souls

  Year 2

  January Damage

  February The turn

  March Donna donna

  April Red

  May Even now

  June Intervals

  July Seed

  August Text

  September Pass

  October Thou

  November Brew

  December Birth day

  Year 3

  January Philyra

  February Trill

  March Fruit

  April On the ground

  May Warm

  June Under foot

  July Page

  August Gods

  September Span

  October Manifold

  November El Niño

  December Joy and sorrow cake

  Year 4

  January Counsel

  February Hunted

  March The shaky isles

  April Tracks

  May Run

  June Currencies

  July Brightness

  August–September River

  October Morning

  November Strike-slip, slow-slip, transform fault

  December Talking backwards

  Year 5

  January Six swans

  February Presently

  March If I cried out

  April Worship

  May Beste, best, beast

  June Sun return

  July Stones ring

  August Winter

  September How I tell the hill

  October All souls

  November Both

  December Field

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Riddle

  Rogue intensities roam the streets of the ordinary.

  Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects1

  There’s a memory I carry as a series of sensations, wordless, all through my childhood:

  I’m looking at something that fills my visual field. It’s a surface, squarish, textured and undulating, patterned with lines. Around its edge it separates into projections – I discover that I can move the thing, turn it and find another side, a different texture.

  Eventually words attach themselves to this experience – surface, line, projections, move – but it’s twenty years or more before I put them together – an adult hand, my infant hand reaching to hold a finger.

  Another memory – this one with words in it:

  Bright colours, their soft edges on a flat field that can be moved, turned to show more. A yellow animal, a blue animal and words connect them. My sister knows the words, the same each time. I lean against her, feel her voice in the bones of my face and chest.

  In time I learn book and page and read, and that sitting, being held, being told, looking at words and pictures is part of story. But being read to brings both comfort and danger – stories are full of violence, misunderstanding, betrayal. Malevolence and damage ride in on the bodily conviction of a voice. Rustem and Sohrab, father and son, manipulated, unknowing, fight in the dust between the camps of their opposing armies. Grendel and his mother erupt from their den beneath the lake. Relentless, my sister reads on as the Happy Prince gives away even his eyes.

  I want to read for myself, to find out whether or not stories will be more intelligible if I have control of the book. Impatiently I pursue the skill, though words and their fixed meanings don’t match my world and leave me feeling mysteriously askew; my moon and sun travel backwards in these stories’ skies. Stories are interlocking collections of fixities that move inexorably to their conclusions; they are artefacts, found items, inscrutable, finished. Stories are, as words seem to be, closed.

  Then, when I am about seven, my mother gives me a prayer book filled with the wild laments and praise-songs of the Old Testament:

  My dwelling is plucked up and removed from me like a shepherd’s tent; like a weaver I have rolled up my life; he cuts me off from the loom.

  Deep is calling on deep in the roar of waters; your torrents and all your waves swept over me.

  Poetry shows me that fixity can be turned, unfolded; these voices speak a response, have their say about the stories they are caught in. I begin to recognise that while language has created the world view into which I am born – where experience is prescribed from outside by a monstrously capricious He – it also offers possibilities of resistance and change.

  Divinities and the cultures they ratify are modes of (un) consciousness at play in language. Consciousness widens with attempts in language to encompass styles of thought that are adequate to experience. Rainer Maria Rilke describes this as a process of stretching by which the gods work things out, take counsel: der Gott beraten sein – from rat, read, riddle (‘As once the wingèd energy of delight’).2

  But it’s a risky thing, to offer advice to a culture or a god, to seek a way to work with those inhuman voltages. Exhilarated as I was by the opening-out achieved by poetry, as a reading child I didn’t yet understand that the attempt to confront and reorganise received consciousness is costly, undertaken out of necessity. Anne Carson speaks about this cost in an essay on the poet Stesichoros. She says:

  Born about 650 BC on the north coast of Sicily in a city called Himera, he lived among refugees…A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen…

  What is an adjective? Nouns name the world. Verbs activate the names. Adjectives…are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They are the latches of being…In the world of the Homeric epic, being is stable and particularity is set in tradition…Into the still surface of this code Stesichoros was born. [He] began to undo the latches… All the substances of the world went floating up…To Helen of Troy…was attached an adjectival tradition of whoredom already old by the time Homer used it. When Stesichoros unlatched her epithet from Helen there flowed out such a light as may have blinded him for a moment…3

  Temporarily or permanently, writing can be disabling. Escaping ‘the still surface of the code’, the writer must tolerate exile and bewilderment within what theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a ‘foreign language within language’:

  The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the ‘tone,’ the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people to come.4

  But first this ‘foreign language’ summons a self to come. As a young woman I wrote to make a song in the bleak standard English that was my inheritance as a mid-twentieth century New Zealander; I knew that this was possible because of the work of Janet Frame and others who wrote a particularity of place unlatched from its epithets in a syntax that stammered and sang. But in learning to do this for myself, I had to meet and come to terms with the existence of a non-standard cast of internal characters or modes who could make this local music, with whom I had till then been unfamiliar. I had to endure understanding that I didn’t know myself, and I was panicked at times by what I learned.

  The process of writing brings change, both freeing and frightening; it sends me out to practise a riddling conversation with the world that steps towards me each day, each night. Sensations – ‘rogue intensities’ as Kathleen Stewart calls them – bring me into a new relation, through thought and narrative and song, with ‘all the lived, yet unassimilated, impacts of things, all the fragments of experience’ that would otherwise be ‘left hanging’,5 in the absence of this habit of attunement, of p
aying attention through writing. This journal is part of that conversation, here in Tasmania with its history of cruelties and dispossessions, resistances and recoveries, in which things continue to unlatch from what I know about them and, looming close, emerge in all their strangeness. I touch, I turn things over, I wonder about them. I answer.

  Year 1

  JANUARY

  Fire

  Defenceless, illumined,

  when the house burns to its foundations,

  what I notice is how small it was.

  As a girl in the early 1930s, my mother-in-law lived through wildfires that burned across Tasmania. Her family home, just down the road from where I live, was among those lost; for days afterwards, she couldn’t see or speak. The huge fires of February 1967 missed this place but burned on either side. Not long after I moved to Tasmania, a builder said to me: This is fire country – houses stand until they burn. In November 1981 the old wooden farmhouse we lived in did burn down, though not in a bushfire: a spark from the chimney caught in an eddy of the sea breeze blowing up the valley and landed in hay stacked in a lean-to. It taught me about the speed at which fire can work – the whole building alight in minutes and burning fiercely enough to melt glass and collapse the aluminium kettle over the front of the stove like a Dali clock. If you survive it, wildfire is an unforgettable meeting with the contingency of things – here, then gone – and with unexpected balloonings and shrinkings of the mental and emotional space occupied by what remains and what is lost.

  If you haven’t lived through intense fire weather, it’s hard to imagine the strength of the wind, the furnace-heat, the way smoke reduces visibility so that you can’t tell if the fire front is metres or kilometres away, the speed at which flames can leap ahead of themselves through the detonating forest canopy. Looking into the green and blue and gold distances in the days that come before it, If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t know, as an old friend used to say. Fire has changed the way I see the landscape; we all hold our breath at this time of year, when eucalypts begin to exhale a blue shimmer of volatile oils that will explode in the spark from a dropped match, the lens of a broken bottle, the heat of a car exhaust, a lightning strike. Sclerophyll forests like these are communities of disturbance – they can’t regenerate without it and fire’s their disturbance of choice, the perfect tool to crack a hard seed-case and settle the germ in a bed of fertile ash.

  In the first weeks of the new year, forests and farming districts and towns burned to the north and east of here, and on the mainland it seemed that all the eastern seaboard was alight. These fires that devastate whole landscapes come in a perfect storm of high temperature, low humidity, strong wind and heavy fuel load, especially after good rains when growing eucalypts shed bark and pile it up around themselves in bonfire heaps. On the mainland, the interval between these storms is decreasing. Here in eastern Tasmania, climate modelling offers a mixed prognosis. Bad luck – many more days of high temperatures in summer; good luck – more rain; bad luck – this rain will arrive as downpours that will increase erosion. The currently high-rainfall west coast of the island will receive much less summer rain and that could be the end of fire-sensitive wet sclerophyll forest and rainforest and an extension of range for dry sclerophyll communities. Realisation is dawning that current fire-management practices aren’t working. Indigenous methods, disrupted and disregarded here and on many parts of the mainland since colonisation, will need to be employed once more, both to decrease the risk of catastrophic wildfire and to safeguard and increase remaining biodiversity.

  From my desk I look out into the canopy of a quince tree. Its leaves have been damaged by pear slugs and the skeletonised patches have scorched russet in the heatwave that preceded and accompanied the fires. Through and over and around the quince grow the long branches of a young English oak, distorted by nightly use as a possum runway and food source. The trees are part of a deciduous thicket we began to plant thirty years ago – plum, linden, chestnut, apple, pear, medlar and hazel, with bird-sown hawthorn and elder seedlings coming up here and there – fenced from the cattle and sheltered by a macrocarpa windbreak. Most are food plants, it’s true, but all satisfy a longing for the shade and light of a broadleaf forest. So far, this from-elsewhere idea of a garden, an encampment of heart and mind and body, is surviving quite well. Nothing has died in the heat, though green leaves on the north-westerly side of the linden and red chestnut baked brown in the hot wind and the foliage of the elder has paled and drooped. And in the hazel bushes, all through the glaring days, like an emblem of survival, a silvereye sat panting on her nest, a marvellous airy hammock of moss and cattle hair and rootlets and strands of orange plastic baling twine suspended below the leaves and twigs of an outer limb.

  We’ve been lucky, so far. It’s cool again now and the windbreak is loud in a westerly wind that lifts high and cold from the mountains across the river; the leaves of the quince and oak move a little in the breeze that gets through the windbreak’s shelter. Parrots – green rosellas – sidle foot-over-foot along the branches of an apple, stealing unripe fruit for the pips, leaving the ground littered with chunks of bitten and discarded pulp. A long skein of cloud winds across from a cyclone in the Indian Ocean – the monsoon has begun at last, and for the moment, here in the south, its damp air shields us from heat blasting down out of the mainland desert. It’s not rain-bearing cloud, though, and with weeks to go before the days shorten and the ground begins to cool, it’s a provisional reprieve. A lick of burning air could still flick down from the red centre and take us out. It may be that even here on the edge of change, catastrophe will come to make us reimagine how to be in this landscape. But I guess every life is a series of camps in fire country where all our ideas about the world burn down again and again or we burn ourselves, trying to save them. In our need for shelter, we have the habit of rebuilding, till death when the walls can stay down.

  FEBRUARY

  Owl

  Round eye out of feather and fur, their tracks are all over me – map and compass bearings, my belly the night sky

  Our farm sits on the ridge of a kind of peninsula or promontory that runs roughly north–south, bounded by a river to the west and to the east by a bay that’s part of a complex of waterways sheltered by islands that shadow the coastline. After invasion and colonisation, the eastern slopes of the ridge were mostly cleared and farmed, while the steeper western slopes, although logged last century and extensively burned in 1967, are now largely reforested. In the drier places, eucalypts grow – mainly stringybark and blue gum – and the cypress-like native cherry that’s parasitic on their roots; on the southern slopes of gullies and where the soil is better, silver wattle, pomaderris, daisy tree, white gum. An understorey of varnished wattle, pea flowers, prickly coprosma, shrubby helichrysum and goodenia, with bracken and blackberry and grasses in the more open places. In October and November the intense blue haze of love creeper appears from nowhere, with yellow hibbertia, pink heath, and purple, green, white and blue ground orchids.

  In the 1960s, for a nominal price, an uncle gave my husband a block of this regrowth forest, just along the ridge to the south of the farm. Stony and steep, it was judged to be nearly worthless (the uncle had bought it for a bag of potatoes). In the days before chainsaws, a local contractor worked over it with an axe, cutting the smaller timber for furnace wood to sell to fruit-processing factories in the area. After the 1967 fires burned through it, my husband and his father sowed grass seed in the ashes of the less steep parts, up near the road. At that time they were dairy farming, and as the block has a permanent spring, in winter, when the cows were not in milk, T used to walk them along the road and turn them in to graze the rough pasture. Since he stopped dairying in the 1970s after his father died, the block has been left to grow as forest once more.

  Now that the bushes and young trees of the understorey aren’t chewed or trampled by cattle, there’s cover for all sorts of creatures. There is food and nesting for thornbills and wrens and ringtail possums and pademelons – the little local wallabies that have grazed fine lawns and kept open spaces where some grass has persisted. There are insect grubs and other invertebrates for bandicoots; bull ants and jack jumpers for echidnas; plenty of food and cover for root-eaters and fungi-eaters like potoroo and bettong, and for rats and mice, local and introduced. Nest-holes in mature trees for parrots and owls and cockatoos and bats and brushtail possums. Birds – insect-eaters and honeyeaters – forage their specialised feeding strata from ground level to the top of the canopy. And the predators that follow all these creatures are there too – antechinus and quoll and devils and feral cats and raptors.