Naomi Bulger: messages in bottles

_May 17, 1926. As McArdle rode his mare out through the morning fog, he turned his eyes away from his well defined and self-sufficient farm and looked inward, instead, to the places were there were still mysteries.

McArdle’s lids were closed as he allowed the mare to amble slowly that particular late-autumn morning, but his eyes were very much awake.

They were searching inside his mind, darting left and right, spinning in their sockets, seeking out the hotspots of emotion, the green and verdant ideas, even the dark places furthest hidden where waited the angry jealousies of which he was most ashamed.

He rode on the border, the very cliff’s edge between What Seems and What Is:

_To McArdle's right, sun rose through fog-pockets over well-managed fields.

To his left, darkness oozed and crept and whispered through the time-forgotten bush, a thousand rustling Somethings still clinging to night while the day yawned and stretched.

Straight ahead, yellow light glowing in the windows of the manager's house, warm with Mrs Anderson’s breakfast sizzling on the stove.

But inside and behind, mysteries. A vast and shadow-filled landscape-of-the-mind that, if ever it were unfolded, would spread and smother the breadth of this continent in its arteries and thoughts, as well as half of Antarctica and a goodly portion of Asia, then stretch and extend its eastern edges, slowly, island by island, towards the shores of Argentina.

_ Eventually, if left to its own devices, McArdle’s mind turned inside out would wrap itself over the entire globe. All its edges would meet and merge and smother the land until nothing of Earth would appear as it once was.

Space travellers would find in their journeys through our galaxy not a blue planet but a red-and-purple one, filled with blood and a visible pulse, electric thoughts sparking emotions and ideas across the surface with such startling frequency and force that our world would appear beset by deadly and impregnable storms.

Text: McArdle's Mind, a fragment from a story I've been writing about a man who gets so lost in the world of his own thoughts that he becomes trapped, unable to return to the 'physical' world of action and community and time.

Images: gorgeous, ghostly bush photos by Irene Suchocki of Eye Poetry, who kindly gave me permission to use them here. Irene's blog is linked above, and you can buy the stunning photographs at her print shop.

_
Disclaimer: this post started off as a private email to my good friend Deborah of Bright and Precious. Now I guess you could call it an open letter because, for my humiliation to be true, it must be shared. Right?

Background: I’m off to DPCON12 tomorrow, the Digital Parents Conference about which, now that I am taking notice, I see half the blogging world is talking. I’m lucky to be going, because I'm benefitting from a last minute change. The program looks incredible, there are several speakers and delegates I’ve admired from blogland, and I know I will learn a ton.

The actual email: So at first I was thinking “Yay, a conference. I get to sit with my friend Deb and meet nice people and learn heaps of stuff. Fun!”

But now I’ve made the mistake of looking online at what other people are saying, and their nerves are catching. Like what to wear, and being shy, and networking, and blog sponsorships, and blah blah blah. I've only been blogging for a year and I'm still learning how it all works. I know nothing about this community, I’m not a member of Digital Parents, I don’t blog about parenting and, for another three months, I’m not even a parent!

Plus, I’m the dodgy ring-in. Like, someone could ask “When did you book your ticket?” and I’d have to reply, “Oh, I didn’t really know this conference existed until my friend who was going told me someone else was giving away their ticket.” All these serious bloggers have spent months preparing, and saving, and seeking (and gaining) sponsors, and I just float in off someone else’s coat-tails. I feel like a cheapskate fraud.

I can't seem to stop trawling the Internet for what all these clever people are saying and planning and wearing. It's getting in the way of me doing actual writing work that earns me actual money (something I should be working even harder at today since I won't be able to earn any money tomorrow). I am like the dorky kid in class who can't tear their eyes away from the cool group, and gets told off by the teacher for inattention.

Then there’s my blog-anxiety. For the past couple of weeks I’ve been so incredibly busy that I’ve barely been updating my blog at all and, when I have, it’s been pretty basic. So tomorrow, if I meet anyone and they decide to look at my blog, they’ll see a freaking post on starlings. Starlings?? Deb, what was I thinking? These men and women blog about serious issues in their lives, and they do it with depth and humour and insight and vulnerability. I, on the other hand, bring you a video that most of the world saw last October, and a handbag with a picture of a bird on it.

_Result: I will be the DPCON12 delegate sitting by myself in a corner during cup-of-tea breaks, pretending to be engrossed in something extremely important on my iPhone, but actually just hanging my head in shame.

Have you ever felt this sense of inferiority and illegitimacy? How did you manage it? Have you ever been to a blogging conference? Any tips to help me survive?

Tell me this short video doesn't bring tears to your eyes, and warm your heart. Isn't it amazing? And isn't Tom adorable? All those creative ideas!

I have a new Facebook page and it's all about celebrating creative people. Writers, film-makers, artists, musicians, photographers, chefs... it's about the ancient arts of storytelling and imagination in old and new ways.

For every like I receive on the page, I'll donate $1 to the Sydney Story Factory, helping kids like Tom. Now there's a good cause you can support without spending a cent!

Will you come and join my community? Like my Facebook page here. Use this as a chance to show off what you've been working on: your latest book, your photography, a short film you've made, your Etsy shop... And then please tell your friends. Let's send me broke supporting this great charity!

Yours truly,
Naomi

Hooray for creative people: writers, journalists, designers, photographers; who take the initiative to showcase their creative work on their own terms.

Journalist Brittney Kleyn, for example, garnered her creative friends and produced a zine from her holidays in Europe. Called Around the World in 80 Pages, it's a celebration of travel, discovery, journey and destination.

It's not a travel guide, but it does document the weird, wacky and wonderful discoveries made by Brittney and her friends. Think designers in London, librarians in Berlin, and baristas in Spain. Right up my alley!

I can't wait to read this zine but, more than that, I applaud what Brittney has to say about taking her burgeoning career into her own hands.

I've got mail, actually. Two lovely surprise packages arrived for me in the post this week. It's amazing how much getting mail can make you smile.

On Monday, mail arrived from blogger Katherine of Through My Looking Glass. Such a nice surprise to find a pretty green envelope in my postbox, it had been forwarded on to Melbourne from my old address in Adelaide. 

Katherine sent me a little packet of paper mementos from the Finders Keepers markets in Sydney, and guitar lessons. Yes, guitar lessons, for disadvantaged kids in Vanuatu, from the Oxfam Unwrapped project. I was so incredibly touched by her thoughtfulness.

_Then today when I walked the dog to pick up the mail I discovered a little parcel from a sweet girl in Germany, Astrid. Astrid found me through my blog last year and invited me to be her pen pal. So I ordered dumplings for lunch and opened her latest envelope to explore its contents at leisure.

I'm a lucky lass. What arrived for you in the mail lately? Anything good?

_
I feel as though I have been miniaturised. Deposited into a spinning top and whirled around in sickening, ever-building rainbow chaos until at last I have been spewed in glorious technicolor out with a thud. In other words, have just finished reading Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter.

Like the book's main narrator, journalist Jack Walser, I am undone. Walser literally runs away with the circus, seduced by its surreal and sensual world and, in particular, by the circus' star, aerialiste Sophie Fevvers (who may or may not be part woman, part swan). Walser experiences a devastating but also liberating loss of memory and indeed self while stranded in Siberia. As memories of his former life come back to him in increasing flashes, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, he does not recognise them as such. To Walser they are not memories, but visions.

In a way, that was how I felt while I was reading Nights at the Circus. While inside its world, the world outside - my world of work and moving house and friends and love and summer - was like viewing somebody else's dream. Then I'd be called out of the story. I would fold the page (yes, I am one of those readers) and put the book down. But it would take me a little while to truly re-enter this space, so lost was I in the circus.

Do you know the sensation I'm trying to describe? Do books ever do this to you? As a child reader, such full immersion into a story and its characters was a common experience for me. I think that was why I loved reading quite so much. Today, again like Walser, I am more of a skeptic. We are both journalists, I guess. It is not so easy for me to suspend my reality. Perhaps after making a profession of writing for 15 years, I can't switch off the editor in me. Or the student in me, seated at the feet of better writers and studying their techniques. Either way, I don't nearly as often lose myself inside a narrative these days. So this was a prodigious treat.

__  
Let me take you there. While the circus travelled by train through the wilds of Russia, there came a "thunderous boom."

   And, as if at the command of the biggest drum-roll in the entire history of the circus, the dining car rose up in the air.
   For a split second, everything levitated -- lamps, tables, tablecloths. The waiters rose, and the plates rose from their arms. Sybil was lifted up, as was the chunk of canned pineapple on which her jaws were just about to close. The feet of the dark girl and the fair girl in the doorway were propelled upwards from the rising floor. Then, before shock or consternation could cross their faces, the whole lot fell down again and, with a rending crash, flew apart in a multitude of fragments.
   The train immediately ceased to be a train and turned into so many splinters of wood, so much twisted metal, so many screams and cries, while the forest on either side of the devastated track burst aflame, ignited by the burning logs cast far and wide from the fire-box of the now demolished engine...

   Then, amongst the ruins of the 'wagon salon', I beheld a great wonder. For the tigers were all gone into the mirrors… as if Nature disapproved of them for their unnatural dancing, they had frozen into their own reflections and been shattered, too, when the mirrors broke. As if that burning energy you glimpsed between the bars of their pelts had convulsed in a great response to the energy released in fire around us and, in exploding, they scattered their appearances upon the glass in which they had been breeding sterile reduplications. On one broken fragment of mirror, a paw with the claws out; on another, a snarl. When I picked up a section of flank, the glass burned my fingers and I dropped it.

(All the images on this post are illustrations from Nights at the Circus, done by arts student Merle Hunt on her blog The Blackbird and the Lemon Curd. Quite lovely, huh?)

_
A mystery was not what Lucy expected to find at the bottom of the ocean.

It started on holidays: a dizzying dance of cocktails by the swimming pool overpriced resort food drunken nights at local bars salty sex in anonymous hotel rooms avenues of palm trees camel rides on acres of white sand rainforest walks and the world famous Great Barrier Reef.

This particular day started with clouds and two fat travel-sickness tablets, and whorled around her head as time stopped then spun and rain stung her cheeks while she leaned over the crashing boat and vomited the two useless tablets to the fish until suddenly, time became normal and they had reached the reef and the sun was out.

Busy throwing up, Lucy had missed the dive briefing and had to make do with some basic tips: breathe, kick your legs and look at fish. Clear your middle ear every few feet down. And never, not for a second, hold your breath. Lucy staggered, still sick-weak, the crushing weight of the cylinders on her shoulders threatening to pull her backwards, fumbling with the unfamiliar mask, cumbersome regulator and ridiculous fins, and changed her mind. This was not such a good idea, she would go back inside. Then the assistant let go of Lucy’s hand, gave her a push, and the ocean closed in.

Quiet.

Soft.

Still.

Slow.

Nothing but Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

She could hear the regular thump of the ocean’s heart and felt it in her skin as though she was floating through the very ventricles of the sea. It was extraordinary that here, immersed in one of the natural wonders of the world, Lucy closed her eyes and felt she loved it without needing to see it and later when she surfaced, grieved the loss of that heartbeat like the tearing trauma of a second birth.

Lucy moon-walked through the thick water while the others swam, appearing on the tourist video later as a slim, sloping, laughable figure in black, always last in the group, ludicrous pink fins flailing, arms groping forward like a blind man but eyes wide open now, like dinner plates behind the mask, and red hair pouring upwards, the only part of Lucy at home in the sea.

Nobody knew that here inside the ocean, mixed in with her terror, her constant struggle to remember not to hold her breath and a consistent dread that her lungs would burst or collapse or both, Lucy felt truly happy.

She felt it because all she could hear was her own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean. It was the most perfect music Lucy had ever known.

The catamaran carried them to a second part of the outer reef, and suddenly it was sea-sickness again. Half an hour of the nauseating rise and crash of the waves, petrol fumes, the stifling, constricting stomach and the familiar lean over the sides. Then the heavy cylinders, the clumsy fin-walk, the fear perspiring into her wetsuit, panic and regret, splash.

And the beautiful silence. Lucy’s own breathing and the heartbeat of the ocean.

On the second dive, Lucy made a conscious effort to look around. She wanted to see and remember the rainbow schools of fish, the ancient turtle, the bashful shark. Lucy put her hand inside a giant clam and stroked its rich velvet before it slowly closed. She floated softly still while a groper twice her width nudged around her hands for treats. The group of divers entered a sandy-floored coral room by a window, one by one, and a hundred thousand tiny blue fish covered them like brilliant pieces of sky. When Lucy moved her hand through the swarm, it parted then merged again in effortless mathematical precision.

Then the heartbeat stopped.

One moment Lucy was playing patterns with the sky-fish and in the next, the ocean held its breath. Lucy was so distressed she almost held hers, but remembered the warnings just in time. She waited, frantic. The others had swum on out of the coral room and around a corner, and Lucy was alone in the unbeating ocean. She spun in the water, searching behind herself and in front for the source of the silent ocean, but it was not until she looked up and saw the legs and goggles of the snorkellers close above her that she realised with relief that the heartbeat had not stopped, she had simply floated too close to the surface and lost its rhythm.

Urgently, Lucy swam deeper, easing air from her tanks to help her sink and forgetting to unblock her ears until she felt the pain. She stopped then, and clumsily swallowed through her regulator. She was still alone, but the heartbeat was back in her skin, her own breathing was a soothing sound, and Lucy was happy again. She followed after the rest of the group.

Lucy swam on quickly now, past another giant clam, a turtle resting under a rock, sweet, apricot anemones, nervous clown fish, a small child, forests of coral…

The child was maybe three or four years old, and it was building a sandcastle. It sat naked on the ocean floor, piling sticky wet sand on sticky wet sand and pressing rocks and shells and pieces of coral into the sides, while remnants of the blue-sky swarm shot in and out of the clumsy sand walls and stroked the child’s tight brown curls. When Lucy swam past, the child waved, and she waved back. She tried to smile but her cheekbones pushed her mask up and it flooded with water so she had to stop smiling or not see.

Then the group leader returned from around the next corner and beckoned to her and she nodded then pointed to the child but there was nobody there, just the remnants of the sloppy sandcastle, so she swam on.

Quite a mystery.