Michael Farrell
Air
There’s a kangaroo in the hallway. Standing there, as if framed by blue paint. I don’t recognise the hall or the hue. I had just come out for some air. Now I don’t know how long I’ve been here or what genre will ensue. I’ve located desiccated coconut in my moustache. We’d been having what, if a more public affair, would be called refreshments. It seems I’ve stumbled into a dream or hallucination. The paint should really be pink, or green. I’m looking at the kangaroo to see if it seems aware of being in a hallway. That there’s no grass here. That a human being is staring at them. That there’s a line of obstructing boots. It was like being in a ballroom where there’s you and one other; there should be no embarrassment of approach. I’m thinking of D.H. Lawrence, sure that I could see more in a kangaroo’s eyes, but then again, what have I to offer? Lick my moustache: the era of pocket drops is gone. That was civilisation. The hall is crowded with ambience, insulating us at the same time as isolating us. The perspectives of the kangaroo whir. Moments—events—like this make me wonder if I’m elsewhere, too, looking at a bush turkey, or dropping lashes on the grave of Christophe Tarkos. Perhaps I am still in the other room, eating my third lamington. I do my old yoga of pretending to read the news. A flying fox lands on my shoulders, but quickly dematerialises. Shoulders know where you are, shoulders hold you in place. There is, clearly, something I have to work out, such as what the kangaroo wants, or what I want from it. The kangaroo is merely a visual enactment of a form of punctuation. I pretend it is one of a severed pair, e.g. Stein and Baudelaire. I write it as if it is in relation to the blue of the hallway, but the kangaroo is not in relation at all. It has been transferred, yet somehow not transferred, from another knowledge system. It’s my own thinking that strays. The kangaroo is post-readable; proved not by my own unparented and unshepherded grappling, but the refusal of those in the room. They would rather eat their friends than read kangaroos or Dante, than live on the breath of hallway painting. What kitsch! What bloodless renderings of countryside and kine! I hold the national pose. I keep my gaze—the gaze of a newly found icon—from book and roo perspective. In the room rumblings apparently continue as they talk and munch rolls over teatime, like a pipeline. Not even a cup of vinegar for the emu stand-in, for the post-yore unicorn. The kangaroo is opening the door and letting people in. They carry suitcases of seawater. Everything is filed: the refugees, the sacred animal, shouted quotations from Beckett and Radiohead. When was Tender Buttons written? What caused WWI? Call for actors who will determine our ability to manifest reality. The sacred animal is shaking. They are reading me as if I’m not present, they’re typing on a yellow typewriter ribbon. As if K or E were the total contraction of the encyclopedia. The kangaroo cannot speak to the book, but the books and paintings can speak to each other. (But they can only speak of themselves.) Even wearing a Macbeth cap I cannot speak to Shakespeare. So there is some reduction in the world’s noise. We have the kind of idea we want, but what are we doing with it? We merely guard it like a lawn. Kangaroo as convenient index for what has no past or future. The problem for narrative—for eros—is the absence of kangarooing in this mise-en-abîme-abîme-abîme. Put on boots or go back to the table: it’s all the same. The signifier says it has fallen out of the Kabbalah and everything else is collage. The kangaroo is a brand, a linocut imprinted on every square of earth— and everything is earth. You print something, there are visible and invisible lines running through it. If your eye could bound through all the light and dark it would be its own mob of sight. It would or could pretend to have seen reality. But that would mean stopping, and if you stop you end in a hall, even if you don’t yourself live in a house, or have a table or spend much time in, or thinking about, fields or space or arrangements in hallways.