Light Blue is the web site of creative writer and journalist, Urszula Dawkins. My latest project is called WHAT SHE WANTS – a limited-edition artists’ book I’m making with revered Australian book artist, Peter Lyssiotis. It combines a series of beautiful abstracted cityscapes with a lyrical text of queer desire, and has been funded by Arts Victoria and a bunch of generous supporters through our successful Pozible campaign. We’re currently printing the book and expect it to be completed around September of 2012.
First day with the typesetter today – and a first draft layout! Over the past few weeks Peter and I have been playing with fonts, formats, page layout; refining stories, thinking about the cover. We’ve settled (for now) on a size for the book: 29 x 38cm. It’s BIG – I think of it as taking something intimate and letting it be large, giving it a space in the world that (real, complex) desire rarely gets. Here are a couple of snapshots of pages… join us in this project and help build an alternative global economy of creative exchange, by supporting us at whatshewants.pozible.com.au
One of the first images Peter sent me as an idea for the book – the beginning of a ‘stage’ upon which the action of my stories would take place.
whatshewants.pozible.com.au
Where did the project WHAT SHE WANTS start? I was on an artist residency in Marrickville Sydney, staying in the old caretaker’s apartment upstairs at the Petersham Town Hall. Every morning I got up and walked or cycled along miles of winding rat-races beside train lines and dusty canals, all over the inner west. Then I sat down to write, to a soundtrack of daytime ballroom dancing classes downstairs and deafening planes overhead. I wondered what I was doing. I read a lot. I transcribed inspiring quotes from Hélène Cixous and Rilke onto strips of drawing paper left by the last resident, and blutacked them to the walls. Although, in retrospect, I did write, in that month I never felt like I was getting anywhere. In the evenings I permitted myself to go to yoga class or hang out with friends.
I was focused on a non-fiction project about places, yearning, belonging, wandering. In Marrickville, if you long to be somewhere else, the longing will exert itself over and over, every few minutes, in the heavy bellies of those drifting-down or up-thrusting, screaming jets. I was stuck where I was, but wrote about the need to walk, about walking as the only solution to any conundrum. One morning, I walked to the airport with only the planes above to guide me there.
But as I struggled, in the back of my mind and seemingly out of reach was a more visceral body of work – my stories of queer desire, which range from the subtle to the intensely erotic, and have been published in anthologies and journals, but never in a single work. ‘Erotic writing’ isn’t just about body parts and hot scenes for me – I think sex and desire are where we play out some of our most profound experiences and discover deep truths about the irresolvable contradictions and complexities of living as emotional, loving, desiring creatures.
Probably to the sound of a wobbling Hammond-organ-version of ‘Somewhere My Love’, I found myself formulating a plan to publish this erotic writing in a context that would really honour it – there are few outlets for erotic writing, and fewer for queer erotic writing. (This thought was a welcome distraction from the ‘real’ work I was wrestling so fiercely with.) I mentioned the idea one evening to my friends Amanda Third and Dimitris Vardoulakis. Dimitris asked me whether he could send a sample of my work to his friend Peter Lyssiotis. Peter is an Australian book artist and photomonteur whose work has been exhibited on several continents and is regularly acquired by state and university libraries all over the country for their special and rare books collections. My interest was piqued, though I was also slightly terrified…
Why would Peter, a straight man and an artist with a CV almost as long as my manuscript, be interested in my work? And if he was interested in my work, would it be for the right reasons? I did it though – emailed Dimitris several stories, which he printed out and posted to Peter; because Peter prefers to see words in a form he can touch. I heard nothing for several weeks and figured it was a nice idea that wasn’t going to happen. But then Peter emailed me – or got his son to – and we arranged to meet.
Here is one of the stories I sent him in that very first parcel [WARNING: CONTAINS SEXY BITS!]
And here is the web site where I first saw Peter’s work
My friend Karen Celestan reminded me the other day of swimming in Lake Superior, which remains at a fridge-like 5ºC all year round and supports no aquatic life to speak of. Karen was one of four of us, women writers in residence, at Norcroft Writers Retreat, in Lutsen, Minnesota, in 2002. Our individual writing sheds were scattered around a patch of incredible green forest, away from the main house, on the shores of the mother of all lakes.
I used to take a break from writing each day at around mid-morning and ‘slip into the lake feet first’. It was VERY cold. This is a section of a story I wrote during those weeks:
There is only one thing to do: slip into the lake feet first. Her skin opens to take me; the surface spreads to meet mine. The chill reaches in past fat-layers. I get in up to my neck.
After 30 seconds my whole body is numb or in pain, and my heart is beating ice, frantic. I taste the slippery lack of salt. When I clamber out I’m not in control of my limbs. My movements are not the way my brain wants them. I know then the deception of this water: that you think you can still function. Even climbing back up 12 inches of rock my fingers cramp and can’t find their grip. I squelch onto a slab, shaking, glistening spheres of water still stuck to me.
The dead roll around in the depths; just rocking on the bedrock this way and that. They sink lovingly, cleansed of everything. The boats that shed them have long broken up against the shoals, or splintered on rocks so the planks of their making sprayed as easily as mist into the air. Broken glass sinks, to be lathed with the bodies in the deep till each shard becomes softened, casting coloured shade.
I love the sterility of her core; barely a weed waves in the depths. I can slip into her lubricated clasp, and something colourless fills me. That is why the lake attracts: I understand its promise. Slick and unencumbered , the lake never renegs. Nothing ruffles it. Not the breeze. While the forest lets everything compost at the surface, the lake takes the body and commits it to the deep.
We’re barred from the mountains by big airport windows; they rest in blue-grey light, the full moon is risen above them, and the snow coats them thickly. At the other end of the departure hall, the mountains are very near, and the plane waits for us on grey tarmac. In between are soft-drinks and sandwiches, plastic chairs, and departing travellers with boarding passes and heavy coats draped over carry-on. There are no real goodbyes, because we are all on the same flight; but we’re scattered throughout the plane, all picking our bags up in different places, all going to different places.
And in the sky, there are fjords, deep grey-blue, and mountains, black-white, and clouds right up to their edges, and only above the clouds is the sun a fiery gold blob, and the higher we get, the higher the sun, until there is only cloud and sun and golden reflection, and I pull the shade down because I know enough, have seen enough. There is now only the transfer of being from this state to the next; the luggage on a cart in Tromsø, the passport control or the mysterious absence of passport control. And a day to myself in a new city, before the return across the planet, to home. Meanwhile, the windows are speckled with pinpoints of ice.
Flying south: Van Mijenfjorden, with Akselöya like a knife-blade across the fjord
Off the boat in the morning, 9am. The dock is unfamiliar; my last step outside is in near-darkness, and at the adjoining wharf a huge truck appears to be tipping refuse out into a small bulk carrier, shipping out Longyearbyen’s garbage. As daylight arrives, there are hugs all round, goodbyes to the crew, and lots of schlepping of gear along the slippery gangways and across to the bus. It seems sudden, and final.
Back at Mary-Ann’s Polarrigg, it’s a day for getting back to the email, getting my head round what’s got to happen next. All around me people are making their plans, talking with their partners on Skype; it’s all about connection.
The mountains are familiar now: tall and white-washed, their shape delineated by the black tips of rock, the black ledges, the black pebble beaches. The snow is a foot deep at the side of the road and on either side of the path to the bridge.
Janet talks to me about that sense of lost-and-foundness that we all carry, whether it is as artists, or as artists with this particular Fernweh – the longing for what’s far – and the longing to create a place where we belong. Outside, at only 4pm, the twilight is turning into pale, greaseproof paper against the outlines of everything caked in snow; snow which has become thick and compressed and creamy, and which is blinding, not because it is bright, but because it completely erases detail. It reflects so perfectly that there is no shadow at all to suggest line or form, not even a hint of change in tone from one spot to another. The mountains dissolve upwards into the snow’s full, possessive sky.
I have not photographed the iced-over, snowed-over creek or the giant, prickly folds of the hills behind us – I am ready to fly away and digest everything. And at the same time a voice says ‘go out and do it, before it is too late’. Each moment is another moment that I do not grasp any more of this place, a moment in which it is already ended.
I remember sounds: the thrunch of thick snow compacted by my boots, over and over and over, resounding in the shell of my goretex hood, so loud it’s as though my ears are on my heel. The thin, dolphin whistle of ice talking to ice, in a tiny bay so calm that Laurie comes back with video footage that looks like a single still frame. She wonders whether the camera has frozen.
I have not been frozen here: it has been a place of tumultuous change, strongly perceptible, day by day. No slow, glacial grind towards change and decay, no gradual wind-shearing erosion, but instead something like climbing a staircase: each day I felt the shift from yesterday, the relationship of myself to this place shifting. When I go from here, I wonder what will be left inside me: whether it will be black, ice-blue or searing white, or a dirty mix of everything, loose or conglomerate, like the rocks at Erikbreen.
Mary-Ann's Polarrigg - the lounge, with work-in-progress...
Mary-Ann's Polarrigg - the breakfast room. Yep, that's a seal-skin on the table
Stranded on the shore opposite Longyearbyen lie a ruined few huts and an ark-like wooden boat, at ‘Advent City’ – our final landing. Another windblown stretch where perhaps the curve of the mountain to the sea is simply another convex arc defined by snow…filling in furrows, smoothing out cracks and irregularities to form the perfect arc. Sticking out from the white blur are rusted posts and bits of wood, a green, unlettered sign, and the bulky boat that looks not so much wrecked as never-floated, sitting heavily on the shore, all timber, undrifting driftwood. The spot where Rebeca decides to shoot is adjacent to a bank of deep snow: there is a clearly defined ridge above, and then the rising bank of mountains, their speckled monochrome so absolute and so familiar now.
She straps me into a leather flag-harness and hands me a large, Mexican flag on a pole, and I march up to take my place on the ridge. But the ridge, as I approach it, becomes a confusing blank: it is snow against snow and the mountains and their black occasional rocks no longer create a distinguising background. My brief is to walk along the ridge while she films, but when I step towards what I think might be the right place, I find myself thigh-deep in snow; and I’m not sure whether, if I walk along the line we see from below, there may be only snow to stand on. So I step back, and navigate by the careful plod of my weighted foot, watching for yellow grassheads poking through the snow. Nothing exists but my footfall. Rebeca whistles loudly against the wind when I enter her frame, when I reach the centre point, and when I leave the frame, stage left. I gouge deep scores in the snow with the flagpole, to mark each spot.
On the cry of ‘action’ I walk towards the centre of frame, with a look of patriotic purpose, not on my face as it’s hidden, but in the bearing of my entire, trudging body. Upright but not military, determined but not posturing – as Rebeca says, “claiming polar territory for Mexico”. The flagpole is almost torn from my hands by the wind, despite the harness. I’m breathless and aware of little else, but with one ear always turned towards R’s voice, waiting for a command.
Along the shore, Chao-Ming is pacing out a measured area and placing long red marker poles in the snow, to match the dimensions of his family’s apartment in Taiwan; Saul is trying to build an igloo from large blocks of snow; Wendy and Laurie are rolling balls of snow down the hillside, and Barbara is keeping watch with her rifle. Janet has been photographing but is now doing nothing, just absorbing the place for one last time before the ship returns. When Rebeca has finished test-filming me she takes control of the harness and flag, and I operate the camera while she performs the final take.
And when we do return, the dusk is thick like smoke and the Longyearbyen lights are blinking yellow across the fjord, below the old mining structures. As the Zodiac climbs sideways across crumpled waves a big helicopter comes out, grey on grey, to surveille the ship, our landing place, and the scatter of bodies still on shore. It blinks its lights, ominous, circling, and tilts away again into the gathering dark.
Rebeca Méndez, El Norte, 2011. Still Frame. Single Channel Video. Duration: 3 mins. 40 secs. Captured in high definition video at Advent City, Spitsbergen, Svalbard.
One minute it has been crisp and clear, the next it’s snowing hard, the wind searing. The seas have been flowing and cold, or rising and falling like easy breath, or surging in all directions, white tripe-like webs of foam creasing and blurring between thickening whitecaps busy with the sound of their own voices.
We sleep, we tire, we eat, we dress for action. We go off in the Zodiac in groups: now we are in the arctic. We walk in the arctic for an hour or two or three and then are shipped back to our bunks. We take off the layers, dismiss the arctic and view it from the distance of the deck again.
Our forays into this terrifying country are brief and we prepare well, and our ship is comfortable, but we do not really move from one to the other. Instead, we are in the constant tension of ocean haven and land’s terror. We are exhausted from it, or preparing mentally and physically for it. It is always out there, and when we are in it we are grappling with the mighty bow and arrow of our need to be there, photographing it as though we are alone, and building the enormous myth of our presence there, as though we are not simply a tour group, traipsing in heavy clothes from one promontory to the next.
I walk the cold edges of these islands, never entering the interior. It is impossible, it is all glacier and bog and pointed rock. The sea smoothes the stones by the shore but they remain treacherous; it is an edge which is not completely frozen, a place that at least allows my footsteps.
The cold edge is the edge between ship and land, the constant dipping to and fro. I want to stand with my feet in one place sometimes, day after day. This constant preparation and struggle reminds me of not belonging, of always working at being somewhere, at getting there or at staying there, anywhere.
My hands are broken from writing, from hauling myslef onto my bunk against the listing boat, from not doing my yoga, from not eating what I usually eat, from not sleeping how I usually sleep. The brown but drinkable water, the smelly clothes, the last night in this bunk, which has been perfect but has got so hot the last couple of days. We turned off the heating completely last night, and it was still warm enough to sleep naked; like a Perth summer night when the westerly hasn’t come, just without the mozzie net.
The Russian town of Barentsburg, seemingly lost in time, though a mere 30 kilometres from Longyearbyen – we’re nearly ‘home’. A coal-mining town run for the purpose of staking a claim, by Norwegian accounts at least, it produces enough coal to generate the power to run the town and the mine, and little more. Once thriving, with a couple of thousand residents, now it’s down to a few hundred; the old buildings are sinking into the permafrost or falling apart, quietly.
We walk up a long slope covered in snow and black coal dust, and along a long dirty road past ramshackle sheds, in one of which we can hear the sound of pigs. At the end of that road and in the distance is a fire in the snow, a rubbish dump maybe, the flames shooting up golden up in the twilight. The fjord is magnificent, the mountains on the other side shining under piles of pretty cloud, and the sun glowing somewhere out in the ocean. In the centre of the town, Soviet-era buildings with muralled walls stand in yellow brick between multicoloured, old-style houses. A chapel, a sports field under snow, and a few people walking home from work in the dusk. The local bar is brightly lit and lined with warm yellow wood, the swimming centre is tiled and mosaiced and ornate, with the Olympic rings over the front doors. I baulk at our voyeurism, drawing the line at indoor spaces, the places where the locals are living their lives. But at the pool a man beckons to me as I wait in the foyer; I follow warily as he leads me through a women’s bathroom with fixed hairdryers, the kind that swing out on a long arm and cover your head; and through another room to the swimming pool. It is tiled in spectacular pictures of walruses and bears… I try to thank him but ‘Ukraine’ is the only word he says to me.
It’s getting dark when the last of us walk down to the railway line, where everything is now lit in bright tungsten, and the entrance to the coal mine is near. Everything is metal, wood and dirt, the narrow rail tracks disappearing into a black tunnel. We walk past a few guys welding something, and a few more who are smoking in the frosty air, and back to the wharf down the endless wooden steps, where the snow lies deep enough to hide the steps themselves. Down, down, down, steps and boardwalk, steps and more steps, winding down the steep hillside until we are back at the ship, berthed at the broad and windswept dock.
Like Longyearbyen, and like Ny Ålesund, just across the fjord from Barentsburg lies...wilderness
Barentsburg is built on a steep hillside, climbed via the long zigzagged slope of the access roads, or up a daunting series of staircases directly above the dock.
If you build directly on the permafrost, the heat of the building eventually melts the ground it stands on, and it sinks - like the green and yellow building left of centre in this photo.
