Writing — Blog — Jessica White

A few weeks ago, after one of those days when it was so hot that fruit bats were dropping from the sky with dehydration and I was forced into the air conditioning of the State Library to write, I packed up my laptop and, wilting, caught the train to a friend’s house in Nundah. There, sitting on their balcony in the cooling evening, with the breezes picking up, trains shunting past, some greenbottle to hand, and a plethora of other friends who were fresh from the pool, we listened, mesmerised, to Sam Buckingham sing.

Sam had packed up and was travelling around the country on her Homeward Bound tour, playing gigs in people’s homes, which to me was a novel and wonderful idea, for there was something so beautiful and intimate about being sung to on a breezy summer night. I couldn’t hear the words to the songs, but the tunes had a lovely dip and sway, and there was plenty to capture my imagination when she described a song about two aliens on separate planets who know they really shouldn’t fall for each other because it’s too impractical but oh! they just can’t help it. You can listen to some of her songs here, here and here.

This girl has ‘Patience’ written on her wrist. I noticed it early (it was writing, after all), and when I spoke to her about it afterwards, she said she’d got it done to help her to keep going. I understood immediately. This is what artists do: we work like dogs for next to nothing, we don’t go out for dinner because we have to pay the dentist instead (to do yet more work after Harry the Butcher, the name my siblings and I gave to our childhood dentist, left H & I needing root canals, and did such a violent job on my sister’s wisdom teeth that she vomited all over the couch and poor H had to clean it up), we are broke, broke, and broke again, yet we turn down more work from our CEO because we have to write our next novel, we’re kept awake at night for hours trying to think how we’ll find the time to write that nonfiction book, how our bank balances will be redressed, when we might get that grant, when our super will stop looking less shoddy, when we can buy a car and be an adult. And then, in the times that we aren’t staring at the electricity bill in dismay, we’re crafting new sentences and worlds and songs and that, frankly, is the reason why I’m on this earth.

So the trying to support yourself bit is a little screwed, but my writing comes first, above all else, and Sam reminded me of this. If it doesn’t work one way, she told me, think: how else can you make it work, how else can you make money from your art? I also mentioned that because I’ve had so many deadlines, I wasn’t sure if I could make it that night, and then I watched her YouTube videos, and decided, stuff the deadlines, the music was too good to miss.

‘You need to prove yourself,’ she said, ‘then people will start paying attention’. She’d had to prove herself to me to get me there, and I needed to do the same with my writing. It was invaluable advice, especially when I’d been panicking that I was doubting the path I was on at all.

Keep an eye on Sam. She’s going places, and she’ll make it there, because she’s dedicated and determined. And plays a sweet and charming tune.

Meanwhile another friend was glued to his iPhone because the Warrumbungles had combusted and, bitterly, the next day his house was wiped out. Please could everyone at least try Meatless Mondays to bring the temperature down a notch or two?

In January, I had the good fortune to catsit Pierre, the prettiest feline known to man, while his owners moved to Melbourne and found somewhere to live. For the good part of a year they had been my neighbours, and Pierre often wandered into my flat and sat on my drafts as I wrote, or stretched out on my bed in the sun and sleep. If it was a summer afternoon and I was dozy with heat, I often curled up next to him and napped too. Unfortunately, over the year, the kitten owned by the neighbours on the other side of my neighbours grew into a feral tabby, festooned with a studded collar. One evening of catsitting, while Pierre was casually watching the world beyond my screen door, he suddenly hissed and arched. The tabby was on the other side of the door, wanting a fight. I scared it away and Pierre shot me a look of pure venom for not allowing him out the door and at the tabby.

It was a shock to see this sweet-natured creature, who was allowed to sit on my red velvet couch (at that point not even my sister's children were allowed on it), who slept on my feet or woke me up at 5am by touching his wet nose to my forehead, transformed into animal who was pissed off for me for trying to protect him. I became aware of how much cat-ness I projected onto him, and how alien we were to each other.

This slippage between the animal and the human is explored with sophistication and deftness in Eva Hornug’s Dog Boy. The novel opens with a four-year-old boy, Romochka, who discovers he has been abandoned by his mother and uncle in the depths of winter. He ventures outside for food and follows a dog, Mamochka, back to her lair in a basement. He suckles with her pups and grows into part of their pack, learning to utilise his senses as a dog might, by concentrating on smells; or how a dog’s teeth can be read the way a human mouth can; or by listening to the sounds of the pack as if they are words. Not only does Romochka become more like a dog, but the dogs themselves are imbued with human qualities, for example, ‘Mamochka treated [Ramochka] with disarming solicitude’ (22), which enables the reader to emapthise with them, as Romochka does. As the boy grows, he learns to think and survive as a dog, but is inevitably drawn back to the human world, dragging his pack with him, with painful consequences.

The story is told in third person and is largely focalised through Romochka. When he is captured by authorities, however, and handed to the doctors of a children’s centre, the lyricism of the story is lost, as the focalisation shifts to the doctors. If this move was designed to represent an abrupt shift back into the clinical human world, it worked, however I found the representation of the doctors to be two-dimensional and unsatisfying. In particular, the reports which the female doctor tabled on Romochka were bland, stilted, and contributed nothing to the text. It was a pity, because the story was otherwise rich, sensitive and sensual (even as it canvassed the distasteful). It is one of the cleverest pieces of writing I’ve read for a long time, making one question what it means to be human, and if the human condition — given the contrast between the cruelty of some of the people in the text and the kindness and protection of the dogs — is necessarily better than that of being an animal.

Similar themes were raised at a talk I attended in May at the University of Queensland Art Gallery. It was chaired by the admirable Dr Donna McDonald as part of Diversity Week, and was held in conjunction with the Animal/Human exhibition. Marvellously, the sliding doors of the entrance to this exhibition were imprinted with an image of a herd of cows, so that one had to wait for the herd to part as the doors opened.

Donna is a senior lecturer and convener of the Disability Studies Program at Griffith University. She had arranged for an Auslan interpreter, even if there was no one in the audience who read Auslan, as she was keen to raise awareness of the necessity of making public spaces accessible to all people at all times. The panel also included Sam Leach, one of the artists in the exhibition, and Mandy Paterson, Scientific Research Officer with the Qld RSPCA. According to the scrawl in my notebook, the discussion touched on how animals teach us to become familiar with the unfamiliar, the diverse and the different; how we negotiate relationships and connect with some animals, but not others (for example, connecting with cats, but detesting cockroaches); how the borders between animal and human can be disrupted, for example by a woman who was rolled by a crocodile up north and lived, and realised she wasn’t a person anymore, she was meat.

There was also, importantly, the observation that we can never enter into another consciousness, not even another human’s, and this I think is essential for understanding the relationships that many have with the disabled: people lack the imagination to conceive of the difficulties of another person’s life and, in doing so, they dismiss them as less-than-human, as something that needn’t be bothered with because it’s simply too much hard work.

This lack of empathy continues the long association between the disabled and animals. Deaf people, for example, were believed to be no better than animals because they couldn’t hear the word of God, and therefore they couldn’t have a soul or attain a state of grace. In World War Two the deaf were one of the groups rounded up by the Nazis and gassed because they were thought to be inferior. And neither are these attitudes confined to history, as witnessed by Campbell Newman’s recent refusal to put forth any funding for NDIS trials. His actions speak loudly, even to a deaf person: he believes the disabled aren’t worthy of the same care and education as their abled (for want of a better word) peers. Newman would do well, I think, to read Dog Boy, but then I don’t think he reads, because he canned the Premier’s Literary Awards.

During the drinks after the talk, Donna took me to see a piece by Patricia Piccinini which I had overlooked (I’d seen Piccinini’s other hyper real exhibit of a man holding a blob fish and, approaching it from behind I thought, ‘Geez that man must be pretty tired holding that thing all day,’ and then realised it wasn’t real). The exhibit, encased in a glass box, was of a newborn baby curled up, asleep, surrounded by three or four green frogs. The baby was so lifelike that my response was instinctive and visceral: I pressed a hand to my chest, suppressing an impulse to pick the child up and cradle it. For all the cultural hardwiring of Darwin’s survival of the fittest, we are really not so different from animals: we fight when threatened (as happened to me when attacked in London: I became, for a few seconds, an animal completely evicted of reason, being instead motivated by adrenalin and nothing else), and we nurture and look out for our own (although our esteemed Premier might not).

Pierre continually lost the fights against the tabby, and I was so upset that I retrieved my plant spray bottle from the cupboard, changed the nozzle from misty diffuser to thin and hard, and sprayed the feral cat whenever he came close, which sort of worked. Pierre is now he is very happily keeping his owners warm in the bitter Melbourne winter, but it took a while to stop hoping that he would appear at the gauze door as I wrote, miaowing insistently for entry.