Morbid Symptoms
by Declan Fry
They hold an Aboriginal flag between them, the young men. Their gaze is allied, interrogating. A determining gaze. Stare fixed toward the camera.
So: you try to meet it.
You stare back.
But—the mysterious part, the really inconceivable thing—
You find yourself failing.
Every time.
Something about the static of photography, its still-life, can make it hard to hold your ground.
It’s the way it unifies events, I think.
Joe Biden wins the election. Campaign platform: ‘Buy America’. Tax incentives encouraging manufacturing to reshore.
Even in defeat, Trumpism lives on.
It is one of the most memorable statements of Black Lives Matter, that photo. A memento, proof of the solidarity that existed between First Nations and Naarm’s African communities.
Among the concerted effort of protest and Covid-19’s dull virulence (its paranoias and temptations, its hatreds and fear and massed conflict), the image offers something hopeful.
One day, when the past speaks back to the present, it will have this to say.
So I study it. I hold its gaze.
And I hold onto it, too.
Behind the young men gathered in the photo, the Flemington-Kensington housing blocks shudder skyward.
Me and Michelle were there one night. Helping to rearrange and organise foods and supplies for the residents trapped by Covid and government fiat in July.
On arrival, impossible to miss: massed cops standing sentry at the bottom of the towers.
Inside the warehouse, volunteers and activists arrayed across the floor.
All the groceries reminded me of the occasional community food cupboards I’d seen on the street. Essentials could be made available to anyone who needed them. However telescoped, however straitened, an alternative, kinder reality seemed possible. Was possible.
(It happened, that night. We were there.)
And who else, that night at the warehouse, was there?
Mob.
Members of the Asian community.
Even Freddy—who I’d first seen shimmy into a Sampa the Great gig at Northside Records—even Freddy was there, his eternally conspicuous afro like a wave of familiarity.
Yeah. Think I’ve heard of you, bro, he said to me that night. Sean, yeah? Sean Atkinson?
As if we were all meant to be there.
Michelle and I left toward midnight.
Gliding past one of the corner-post sentries, I noticed the housing block flickering in and out of consciousness. The outlines of the sentries barely discernible beneath. Only a combination of shadow and government-financed light throwing them into relief. The intermittent strobe of faulty electricity.
As if they were about to disappear.
I’m reminded of the reports from residents. How they accumulated over time, coming in waves via Instagram. Asking for sanitation facilities and other repairs to be carried out as early as February.
They were ignored.
Over the stereo, the staccato jerk of Run the Jewels’ latest pulses through the open windows.
Look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar.
At the corner of Boundary Road and Alfred Street, stopped at the lights, Michelle and I watch a cop car as it sidles up to the curb. It hones in on a group navigating their way along the street from the warehouse. Relaxes, exhales. Brakes.
Reckon we should check it out? Michelle asks. It’s not exactly a question.
So we circle back around. Hoping to confirm if they’re okay.
But the group, the cop car—they’re gone.
As if they had never existed at all.
*
Michelle tells me that Uncle Alex can predict the weather.
When spiders spin webs high in the ceiling, he said, that’s when you know rain’s coming.
So...there’ll be rain. When webs—
—are high in the ceiling, yeah. That’s when you know.
Uncle Alex has been helping her. They’re working together on a project: an attempt to integrate the Wurundjeri seasons into a calendar. Connecting people with the underlying rhythms and seasons of country. She’s been working in consultation with Wurundjeri Elders, and Uncle Alex—generous, expansive, unassuming Uncle Alex—had embraced the idea.
We’d met Uncle at Yirramboi a few years back. Shouldering his way to us, eager and energetic. As if he already knew, already wanted to integrate Wurundjeri seasons, plants, animals into the worlds of those who would one day live through Covid-era Naarm and its suspended animation.
We want to decolonise the space, Michelle said.
One of the first things I noticed about Uncle at Yirramboi was his hair. Each strand, airborne. Animated by wind-up bird vigour. Like him. Some inner force causing them to stand on his head.
Seeking out higher forces, loftier energies.
Michelle arrived in Australia from New Zealand at the age of nine. She often spoke about the discrepancies between the two countries.
In New Zealand she had developed a sense, from childhood, of Maori presence: in school, in the curriculum, in her upbringing.
Coming to Meanjin from Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, culture shock awaited. But not the shock of Australia as a foreign country. The shock—the accusative unfamiliarity—of whiteness.
After Covid arrives, rearranging routine, most of my social interactions are distilled down to the telegrammatic and unavoidable.
I say hello.
I answer phones.
I return emails.
Emails return to me.
I return them back.
Michelle has suggested a quick break for lunch between meetings with Uncle, so we head to the Moroccan Soup Bar.
Above the register a laminated sign reads: Not trading in Trump’s currency of hate.
Three older women are gathered around the proprietor in the kitchen’s nestled interior.
We’ll still be here, doing the work, she announces.
The women nod, look indulgently toward her.
It’s what women have always done.
Yes, one of them says. Mopping up the mess, doing the work.
The woman next to her looks toward me. The glance of someone registering something indiscreet. The bystander—the man caught alone among a group of women saying something that could be viewed as undermining the male ego. And perhaps wanting to see if he will conspire. Or take offence. Or if he is even listening.
I remain silent, intent upon labels for various types of pickled vegetables.
Glancing up from her phone as I return outside, Michelle says,
Looks as though Biden will win.
Together, we read about how many votes Trump received.
It’s millions more than in 2016.
And it looks as though Trumpism will win, too. Trumpism re-endorsed.
By white people, if no one else.
Life changes permanently, and you make your adjustments later.
Then, later still—taking advantage of retrospective wisdom—you justify yourself as having always been there for the change.
Really, though, you’re just a visitor in your own life.
*
Before New Zealand, there was the Philippines. Michelle’s birthplace.
No number of seasons or calendars could contain the timelines, the multiple histories, inherited by that country. Shadow selves are inescapably present there. One of the country’s major tourist attractions is a shrine to Christianity (Portuguese introduction).
One of the most popular foods is lechon, whole roasted pig (Spain’s contribution).
Or Kaldereta, also from the Spaniards.
Lumpia, courtesy of seventeenth century Chinese settlers.
Spam, popularised during the Second World War, staple of American soldiers posted across the country.
There are other influences, too. Ambassadors of Black Power like Muhammad Ali have shopping malls named after them. You can visit the joint in Manila: crisp like an eighties postcard. Safely cocooned amidst palm trees and high rises.
Ali Mall.
Sucks that he visited Gertrude Street in Fitzroy and they didn’t memorialise it, Michelle says.
In 1917, the US government restricted all Asian immigration into the country and imposed literacy tests.
Even the Philippines, a former colony, was locked out.
Fiji’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, congratulates Biden before the result of the presidential election has officially been called. Slips in a plea for action on climate change.
Biden attracted an all-time record number of votes—more than 74 million, or nearly 51 percent.
Yet Trump’s total, of more than 70 million, was the second highest ever. The biggest turnout since 1900.
Still, you say: Biden won. Largest turnout. People voting with their feet.
Count them.
Count every vote.
Here is another ‘largest turnout’ from the months leading up to the election:
Some 17 million guns have been bought so far this year. The biggest number in US history.
Count them.
Count every vote.
There is a widening gulf in the US polity and no one knows what to name it.
Some want to just keep on calling it the United States.
You keep wanting to call things by their old names.
The old names don’t want to do their job anymore.
Like looking for a country on a map of the world and seeing it’s called the USSR and thinking for the rest of the nineties that it’s still called the USSR.
In 1924 immigration to the US was restricted again. Asian immigration remained banned. Isolationists stockpiled weapons.
The threat, as ever, came from without. The external, the unknown.
Foreigners were a virus.
Weapons, the antidote.
Michelle’s father worked as a taxi driver in Brisbane.
Her mother was a checkout operator. Still is.
During an unnervingly prolonged period of vote counting, Trump supporters assembled in large crowds outside vote counts in Phoenix, Arizona, and Detroit.
Some carried firearms.
A headline:
Kamala Harris makes history as first woman of color elected US vice-president.
The first woman and second person of colour to serve as vice-president.
Charles Curtis, Herbert Hoover’s VP, was a member of the Kaw Nation.
Another article is published. This time, Harris is described as the first person of colour to become vice-president.
Curtis is never mentioned.
As if it never happened.
In the New York Review of Books, Fintan O’Toole writes of Trump: When he declared an election that was still very much alive to be a dead thing, over and done with—‘Frankly we did win this election’—he made the United States a liminal space in which a supposedly epic moment in its history both happened and did not happen.
Trump recorded the highest ever vote by a Republican presidential candidate. Many Democrats called him a threat to democracy.
If this is true—if he is a threat to democracy—he is a threat which enjoys an unprecedented amount of democratic support.
Liberalism has seen a number of triumphs. Rarely have these been won without compromise. Even the New Deal had its price: a bargain with the segregationist South in which the Jim Crow system remained firmly in place.
Fintan O’Toole goes on to write: As a political force he has never been anything but an afterlife. One of the reasons there cannot be a postmortem on Trumpism is that Trumpism is postmortem.
In Oakland, where Kamala Harris was born in 1964, a cinema display reads:
EVERY VOTE MUST BE COUNTED.
Above the invocation, another headline:
THIS IS AMERICA.
Recalling Childish Gambino’s song.
It’s a song about many things.
At least 17 million, in fact.
There are whispers of disquiet across social media. And you can recognise it, can’t you? Go on, be honest: you can.
The way your scrolling finger slows, registering the sense of inquisition, of rancorous debate.
A car crash on the horizon.
All you can do is slow and watch.
Biden sells Trumpism like Trump sold Trumpism!
Sidle up to the curb.
Because Biden was, apparently, a party hack. Author of the 1994 crime bill. Another step toward the New Jim Crow.
And Trump was a confidence boy whispering sweet nothings. Gladhanding and unfurling kickbacks and favours. A laughably familiar story of corporate America and its government minders.
In 2012, Senator Lindsey Graham warned the Republican Party: We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.
I remember when Black Lives Matter was at its height. That September, Angela Davis was on the cover of Vanity Fair. (Just as Dark Emu and Me and White Supremacy and White Fragility and Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia and The Invention of the White Race and How to Be an Antiracist and White Rage and The History of White People and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and So You Want to Talk About Race? cascaded across every branch and algorithm of social media, propped adoringly in the front entrances of bookstores…before disappearing, a few weeks later, as if they had never been.)
Angela was getting around, truth be told. Earlier that month she had appeared in a quiz I played with Queensland mob in Footscray. We were staying together by keeping apart, in the Victorian government’s whimsical Covid-parlance. Met up online on weekends.
Question: Which famous activist and author wrote Women, Race & Class in 1981?
Answer: I grabbed The Women’s Press edition off the shelves.
From the cover Angela Davis glowers at you sceptically. Lips vaguely askance, hands gently clasping her contained energies.
Looking infinitely prepared for whatever novel bullshit the world might throw at her.
A vague rustle.
You can hear it, can’t you?
Someone next to you, falling.
Whoosh!
They’re down the Internet wormhole.
Michelle expels air from between her teeth in what sounds like it was originally intended as an intake of breath. Morse code of the triggered.
What are you watching?
Michelle swings the laptop toward me.
Somehow you recognise him before you realise who you’re trying to recognise. The disbelieving eyebrows, the craned neck, the sidelong stare.
Trump Biden debate, she says.
Naturally, Trump can’t believe a word Biden is saying. When has he ever believed a word anyone has been saying? (You sense that if someone were to repeat his own words back to him he wouldn’t believe them. Who is this guy? he’d say.)
His fingers are curled, thumb meeting the first finger. As though trying to grasp a very fine piece of thread. He glances sideways at Biden, eyes mirroring the lateral angles of his tie. The red stripes seeking out prey.
Are you willing, the moderator Chris Wallace asks, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups?
Somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem, Trump replies. This is a left-wing problem.
Almost everything I see is from the left wing. Not from the right wing.
Proud Boys—stand back and stand by.
Etc.
His lips are always veering backward as he speaks.
That, or collapsing inward. Deflated resignation: as if struggling to contain his disbelief at having to be questioned at all.
Michelle pauses the computer, looks at me.
With the computer stilled, the room seems to shudder back to life. Recovers its domestic angles, its pre-Trump peace.
The inebriated gaze, that sidelong stare: the temptation, normally, would be to say that Trump is drunk on power.
Except (eventually) the drunkard adapts.
So: a functioning powerholic, then.
Now that Trump is on pause worldwide we have become aware of things. How audibly quiet quiet is. How it settles around you like dust.
A powerholic, you say, sure, but functioning?
Well, yes. Or at least, not malfunctioning. That would suggest we didn’t know what to expect on January 20, 2017.
But we did.
Everything went according to plan.
Duterte is the same, she says. ‘The drug users bring it on themselves,’ he says. And if you’re concerned, you’re the problem. What are you fighting back for? What have you got to be afraid of?
Guilt by association.
Yeah.
It makes me think about deaths in custody.
Reckon we should check it out, government inquiries announce every few years.
So they circle back around. Hoping to confirm if we’re okay.
But the person—they’re gone.
As if they had never existed at all.
There’s a line about it, actually.
They say either mob are congenitally prone to criminality, or…
Well.
Either that—or we are being persecuted.
Those red stripes seeking out prey: what are they seeking now?
The moribund. The vulnerable.
A great variety of morbid symptoms.
*
A cascade of gums crosses the water, loping and unfurling. Bark trails in strips from the trunks, revealing the woody white scalp beneath. Branches flex and arch. A stray one extends and dips, like someone testing the water with their toe. Sighs across the stilled brown surface. The buds of golden wattle, soft dusty puffs tipped with yellow pollen, intersect with the spear grass rising from the banks.
Above us a magpie balances. Cocks its beak to the side in a hoiking c’mere gesture. Next door, a crow unrustles its wings, hoists its black volume skyward. Last of the sun projecting itself across the treetops. Whisper of hush and uplift.
sshssshssh.
Water coils and loops round rocks and waterlogged branches, curbing the stones. Stout lopsided w-shaped ripples. Like a child’s impression of birds.
As we wander down Merri Creek, Michelle takes pictures of the plants.
Click: the tumescent swell of morr fruit.
Click: lerps lined like igloos across a eucalyptus leaf.
When we capture something we remake it. That’s what Michelle tells me. We contribute to the plant’s existence by photographing it.
The sense of recognition.
I think of this as another kind of ecology. An artistic ecology.
Thanks to Uncle (his communications, owing to the vagaries of Covid-19, confined to the phone), Michelle is informed of how plants contribute to our environment as medicines and foods. How they share themselves among every other living organism.
It feels like a rebuttal of some of the ideas that underpin science. Of the incentive toward capture via classification, depiction, cataloguing.
Even writing.
For Michelle, the photography of plants acts as a kind of compass. Through it, she internalises a sense of place. An appreciation for things as they are.
All the fragile and evasive revelations on offer.
More than anything, in seeking Uncle Alex’s counsel, Michelle is learning from the Wurundjeri seasons.
They’re more accommodating, she says. They speak to the reality of where we are. Who we are.
Click.
Gathering the details. Holding them close.
I remember her accelerating disbelief every time we stopped by a lilly-pilly in Brunswick, or a eucalypt along the Merri. While I would stand and fiddle with a rogue line of lerps creeping along a leaf, ridged like ice. Or call time-out after spotting some morr fruit.
In every case, I would have to stop and sample. And try—futilely—to convince Michelle to do the same.
Give it a go.
But in the end they were spared, the lilly-pilly, the lerps, the morr.
Their stems loosely nodding in the wind, as though grateful.
With every step along the Merri, Michelle pauses, capturing another detail. We are engaged in a gradual accumulation. Memorialising. Commemorating.
A million anniversaries along the riverbank.
The other day Uncle Alex told Michelle about a simple way to distinguish native trees from introduced ones. The native trees, he said, hold on to their leaves (the evergreen eucalypts, stoic sandalwoods). They like to stay frugal.
Whereas the introduced would be relatively deshabille. Their lack of foliage like a foreign passport or detectable accent.
These were the Edgar Allan Poe trees, the Wuthering Heights numbers: all gothic angularity and thin, clamorous branches.
Like a shadow self, they asserted the dimensions of another country in the absence of their former residence.
They made themselves known.
Elders like Uncle drew you in. Seeing him, you felt surrounded by resonances, gestures, fullness of feeling. A gravitational pull. He had a way of making you want to live more. Kitting you out with extra spaces and senses. A life that somehow added to your own, making it more three-dimensional.
Some small upgrade on your portion of the earth.
Michelle sits by the piano after a late-night yarn (is there any other kind, toward midnight?).
She has been talking to Uncle.
Fingers search out chords. Press through the dark.
From the other room I hear it. The frequencies of a familiar song.
Maiden Voyage.
There is something otherworldly about that Herbie Hancock piece. The way the translucent reverberations of the opening chords hang and shimmer in the room—tum tuum, tum tuuuuum.
As Michelle loops back around to the opening motif I rifle through a stack of vinyl. Might be about ten years worth of plunder here. I’ve missed crate digging, too: in my mind’s eye I can see the record stores, massed and shouldering out space among the vintage clothes and alternative grocers of Smith Street in Fitzroy.
Where is it?
Searching for my copy of Maiden Voyage. Original, too (well la-di-da).
Outside, it begins to rain.
Hancock recorded Maiden Voyage for Blue Note Records in 1966. Said he wanted to capture the sense of mystery ‘which surrounds the sea and the living aquatic creatures which provide it with its vital essence.’
Endless renewing wave of brush drums. Minor sevenths like refracted coral .
A recognisable melody feels, somehow, like a fact you’ve always known.
Thirty-three years later, a Japanese duo named Pizzicato Five recorded ‘The World Without You’. Its opening chords strongly recall the glassy spaciousness and reverberations of Hancock’s piano in Maiden Voyage (I’ve heard it’s a sample).
And I can’t find Hancock.
So I put on Pizzicato Five instead.
Watching the window and the endless rain fall on Wurundjeri country as the song begins to play.
季節の移ろいを
I wanted to make you feel
あなたに伝えたくて
The season change through my eyes
I think about the narrator of the Pizzicato Five song. Sitting and writing her letter. Working at a remove from herself.
Uncle often said that he thought of writing as a second life. A way of maintaining solidarity with oneself.
When there is no one else to commune with, you commune with yourself.
And you can do the same, at a distance, with others.
So, Michelle says, months divided into four seasons. Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter. All inherited from Europe.
Right.
But what Uncle wants is to draw people back to those seasons that are actually relevant to Naarm’s climate and terrain. The seasonal variations in the ecosystem.
Today, the start of November, marks the start of Buarth Gurru. Grass flowering season.
We want to help people recognise the changes that local plants and animals are experiencing in relation to shifts in the climate and environment.
A more holistic approach to the passage of time.
Michelle takes me to the opening of her project on the Yarra that night. Shadows of visitors cast imprints upon the sculptures. Their lights flicker like ships at sea.
At first glance you barely notice them. The designs are too conjectural—shapes abstracted into unrecognition. Your only compass is the other visitors milling beside you. The whole space transformed into an outdoor gallery.
A neighbouring couple, their eyes upcast, duck for cover. His arm almost grazing yours; her skirt brushing your legs. One minute they were walking, unable to determine their location. No sense of direction. No idea how to adjust their bearings.
Then, as if crossing a threshold, they realise exactly what they are looking at. Their necks and eyes adjust. Pulling into semblance the disparate parts of an otherwise incomprehensible image.
As Michelle and I navigate our way through the park all of the silhouettes shift and transform around us. Each sculpture forms an anamorphic illusion: a distorted projection of an image that only becomes clear when the observer views it from a particular vantage point.
We are, all of us and always, setting out on maiden voyages of one kind or another.
The river we now refer to as the Yarra River is known as Birrarung in Wurundjeri. The river of mists and shadows. Uncle says it was once teeming with native wildlife. Can you imagine? All the shores lined with grasslands, creeks and falls joining the river.
The whole zone west of Melbourne’s CBD, once fertile wetland and lagoon.
Some days water wells up from cracks in the cement of the Melbourne Hoddle Grid and the council have to be called to damp it down.
After Maiden Voyage ends, I hear Michelle return to her computer desk. She has begun recording notes on the project in her email.
She sends them to herself, to be opened at a future date. Read by a future self.
On September 12, Herbie Hancock posts a picture on social media. He is wearing a facial mask. Emblazoned across its front, the word ‘VOTE’. The caption reads:
Mark your calendars—there are 52 days until Election Day 2020 on Nov 3rd.
On Saturday I draft an email. A reply to a publicist at Tax & Singh about a book review. I schedule it to send at a random time in the future.
Because if you know when something’s going to happen, it’s not really the future any more. It’s present with you all the time.
I’d rather be surprised.
Post-Covid, and things feel like they’re finally getting back to normal. Most of my social interactions have been distilled down to the epigrammatic and still unavoidable.
I say hello.
I answer phones.
I return emails.
Emails return to me.
I do not return them.
Arriving home following one of our daily walks along the Merri, I read aloud the latest email to Michelle.
Dear Sean Atkinson, I say. I hope this email finds you well. I…
‘I hope this email finds you well’—I hate that.
Yeah.
Actually, it’s found me despairing.
This email has found me hysterical and useless.
Sorry to hear you’ve found me. Please don’t tell anyone where I am.
Anyway. It goes on: My name is Maxine Figueroa. I am the publi…Well. You know that bit already…at Tax & Singh Press. I was wondering if you might be interested in reviewing the new Eva N. Sonos book, Biden, His Time: A New President, A New America. It is a gripping, life-changing portrait…
Thank you for finding me. Now please let me disappear again.
Yeah, well, I say, reclining in my chair, interlacing my fingers behind my head. Pretty much, ay.
Still, I think to myself later, isn’t it nice to see a presidential biography with a woman’s name attached for once? Finally, you think, what took them so long.
I mean—how about you?
What do you reckon?
When was the last time you saw that happen?
Standing on the bridge in December, the blue onrush of Merri Creek beneath my feet, two kids in backpacks huddled beside me. I watch them turn toward one another, commune. An audible recognition shared. I can’t see the video playing on their phone screen. But I can hear it.
The man in the cobra-stripe tie turning to his opponent, mouth wedged across his teeth.
So: you try to meet it.
You try to stare back.
Funny, isn’t it?
Something about the static of the present—its still life—can make it hard to hold your ground.
You find yourself failing.
Every time.
It’s the way it unifies events, I think.
Searching that unity for answers.
That’s the work of the viewer.
*
The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear (Gramsci).
*
He’s gone, but the ideas live on. What’s going to happen now?
What’s going to happen in 2024?
Constantly looking into the future.
Yet living as if it were already present.
Fiction by Declan Fry, who is a writer, poet, essayist, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, in 2020 he was engaged as a critic for The Age/Sydney Morning Herald and awarded the 2021 Peter Blazey Fellowship. His work has appeared in Meanjin, The Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings, Overland, Australian Book Review, and elsewhere.
Illustrations by Stephanie Ochona, who is a Filipino multidisciplinary illustrator and writer based on unceded Woi Wurrung land. Her creative work explores diaspora and belonging. She is currently completing her Masters in Design, Innovation and Technology at RMIT.
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